Granville Automatic Interview
Doug Burke:
Elizabeth Elkins and Vanessa Olivarez are the lead songwriters of the alternative country-rock band Granville Automatic. They bring incredible pedigree to their partnership. They have been writing songs that have been recorded by a wide range of Nashville artists including Billy Currington, Sugarland, Kira Isabella, Aaron Goodvin, Wanda Jackson, and Angaleena Presley. Prior to teaming up, Elizabeth was the Grand Prize winner of the Yoko Ono sponsored international John Lennon Songwriting Contest, and Vanessa made it to the final 12 on the second season of American Idol. They just released their fourth full album, Tiny Televisions, and they are here on Backstory Song to discuss the songs from that album and some of their earlier Granville Automatic work.
Welcome to Backstory Song. I'm your host, Doug Burke. And I am thrilled and honored today to have the two female leaders of the duet, Granville Automatic, here with me, Elizabeth Elkins and Vanessa Olivarez.
Vanessa Olivarez:
Aah, thank you so much.
Doug Burke:
Elizabeth, you were the grand prize winner of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest. And Vanessa, on season two of American Idol, you made it to number 12, which is really impressive. I've watched your performances there, and I have to commend you for the alacrity with which you dealt with Simon Cowell.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Aah, well, I appreciate that. Going back old school.
Doug Burke:
You two, I love your work. I am so thrilled to have you on the show because your music is based and rooted in history. Every song on the new album, Tiny Televisions, is rooted in a historical story. It's inspired by backstory, so I'm really excited to hear the backstories of the songs, not just musically, but also the historical nature of it. And let's start with the name of the band, which is almost like part of history.
Elizabeth Elkins:
It is. People like to ask us what's the Granville Automatic, and we get a lot of guesses. Some people guess a gun, some people guess a car, but it's actually an old typewriter. It's the turn of the 20th-century typewriter, the very first automated typewriter ever made.
Doug Burke:
And so you two have written a new book, Hidden History of Music Row. Music Row is in Nashville, Tennessee, which is where a lot of your history that inspires your songs is based on. So tell us about the book.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Well, the book was an unexpected twist in our career. We've written a lot of concept records, many of which have to do with stories from history. We put out an album in 2018 called Radio Hymns, and that record was all about Nashville's lost history. There was an article that ran in a publication that caught an editor's eye at the History Press in Charleston. He contacted us, and one of his writers, Brian Allison, who's written some great Nashville history books and said, "What do you think about these two songwriters writing a history of Music Row?" A little known secrets of history of Music Row. We got the phone call, and we thought, "Well, we never thought we'd be writing a book." And then we said, "Well, we got to do it." We took about a year and researched the history of what is now Music Row, from about 1720 all the way up to today.
Doug Burke:
You can find that in Amazon Kindle store near you?
Elizabeth Elkins:
You can find it anywhere, any of the online booksellers have it, and I believe a lot of the national book chains actually have physical copies as well.
Doug Burke:
And I think you can buy a signed copy on your website, which is what?
Elizabeth Elkins:
Yeah, you can buy a signed copy, which we always prefer, ordering it from us. granvilleautomatic.com/book will take you to the page to order a book.
Doug Burke:
The first song we want to talk about is Tiny Television. This is a dark song.
Vanessa Olivarez:
It sure is. The guitar was actually one of our favorite songwriters in Nashville, his name is Matt Nolen. He'd come in, we discussed. Elizabeth ran through just a ton of different ideas, and the one that caught my ear the most, I looked at Matt and Elizabeth and said, "We need to write a song called Tiny Televisions." I was like, that's an amazing title and such a cool story, very eerie. And it does have this feeling of dread throughout the whole song, and I think that the guitar, as you said, creates that necessary tension.
Doug Burke:
But what's the song about?
Elizabeth Elkins:
Well, the song is about a building on 17th Avenue on Music Row in Nashville. It's a building known as the Little Sisters Home for the Poor. It was built around the turn of the 20th century by a group of French nuns. And it was, for about half a century, a place where folks who had nowhere else to go in their old age would go there and the nuns would take care of them. They had a chapel in the building. Around the middle of the century, with the advent of Welfare and Medicare, Medicaid, all that stuff, those all started disappearing across the country, and so this becomes a series of nursing homes. We have a friend who's a developer, and he told us when he went into that building, when they were selling it, they were going to turn it into a major music company, BMG. He walked in, and at this point, it had become just a very rundown building and a rundown space. He recalls walking into this chapel and seeing a bunch of folks in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, sitting and lying around the chapel, watching tiny televisions. He said it reminded him of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He said it was a really tragic and crazy scene. When he told us that story when we were researching the book, that image just really stood out to us, so we knew that had to be a song. And the irony of the fact that once that became BMG Music, and later Sony Music, number one parties were held there all the time, big music industry events. For me, that song is a lot like the story of Nashville. These spaces really have everything from tragedy to triumph in cyclical repetition. But I think both of us agree that's probably our favorite ramble song ever. We love that guitar riff Matt came up with. When we went in the studio, we knew production-wise we wanted a Pink Floyd vibe, sort of a time vibe on it. I come from a rock and roll past and I get to bring in a little rock energy on that one, and I certainly love Vanessa's vocal on that. It's just outstanding. I think it really is our favorite song probably that we've ever done.
Doug Burke:
This one verse in the song that's really kind of a snapshot of the 1960s, referencing JFK, Vietnam, MLK, but not so overt. You have to actually pay attention to understand that that's what it's about.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Yeah, that's my favorite part of the song. That's the bridge where we really do get these snapshots of the images that might have been on those televisions, and how those huge, big life-changing events that were going on at that time, maybe they didn't even register for the person watching it. I tried to create the feeling of the first time I saw, actually, Pink Floyd's The Wall. I remember watching that as a teenager, and it just created this weird chaos. And I think there were so many big events at that time period, and that's what we hoped to get in that bridge. So I'm glad you like that part.
Doug Burke:
"Painting pentagrams, hearing ghosts of conversations," what does that mean?
Elizabeth Elkins:
The building is now owned by Vanderbilt University, and Vanderbilt University Press is there. Interviewing a woman that worked there, she said, "Oh, we all heard about one of the old dormitory buildings outside, there was a homeless guy living in the attic, and he would paint pentagrams every night." So that's actually from a true story.
Doug Burke:
I love the opening line. This is true of so many of your songs, but it just grabs you, "They say suicide is the only way home tonight." I mean, you just know where this song is going.
Vanessa Olivarez:
Yes, and that's also very true. The fourth-floor window was often the chosen spot to commit suicide. People used to jump out the fourth story window all the time, and we thought that was just a very stark image to open the song with.
Doug Burke:
"Lithium and cigarettes and deadbolts on the door." Lithium, is that still used?
Vanessa Olivarez:
I believe it is still used today. In fact, I had an old friend of mine whose mother was in a home and was given lithium just because of her mental state, so I do believe they still use lithium today.
Doug Burke:
A heavy song. Heavy song, but a great song.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Thank you very much.
Doug Burke:
The next song I want to talk about is Ice Cream.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Yeah. A lot of these songs on this new album, actually, about half of them were songs that might have made Radio Hymns, the album before it, but didn't make it because they just weren't done at the time or they didn't really fit what we were doing with that album. And Ice Cream is one of those. It's this idea we've had for a while, and it's a story of a woman named Sarah Estell. Sarah Estell was one of the very first business owners in Nashville that was African American. And she, before the Civil War, owned an ice cream shop downtown. She was very popular because her ice cream was so great. She was the life of many parties because even the politicians and the church elders and all the upper-class business people in Nashville wanted her ice cream at the party. We knew we wanted to have some story about really how dark that image is. That she's bringing joy and happiness through food to people that are, for the most part, holding anyone like her as slaves at the time. The interesting part of Sarah's history is that she actually owned her husband, who was also an African American man. The idea for her owning her husband to prevent him from being sold into slavery, I think is a very powerful image. We tried to capture some of that just dissonance between being the life of the party and her food being loved so much, but yet she had to own her husband to keep him close.
Doug Burke:
Part of listening to your records and seeing you guys perform in your videos and live, which is really compelling, especially when you do the historical storytelling in between songs, is the harmonies which typically come in on the choruses, which they do in this song. I just love the way you guys melt. It's like an organic thing.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Well, and I'll be honest with you, it's actually not me that does the main harmonies. And I'm going to turn your question over to Vanessa because Vanessa is an absolute harmony genius. But another very big part of Granville Automatic is a woman named Bethany Dick-Olds, and Bethany has been playing fiddle and mandolin and singing harmony with us for the entire history of the band. But Vanessa can tell you more about all the harmonies.
Vanessa Olivarez:
Yeah, I mean, that's what I was going to say is just that Bethany is a really giant part of what we do. Bethany's voice is just absolutely stellar. She's got all the beautiful high harmonies and are mostly her. Yeah, I put a lot of thought into how we construct the harmonies, how we put them together. And a lot of it, honestly, is spur of the moment. I do think a lot of it out, but I do also allow for the creative process to inspire me while we're recording, because oftentimes, my best ideas just come to me as we're singing. I mean, I do love ... I think that's my favorite part of the recording process is creating those harmonies with Bethany.
Doug Burke:
I feel like this chorus has that organic ending in that way when you start with the ooh oohs. I always ask songwriters, did you write that down, or did it just come to you? Was this an organic thing that happened in the song? Because it's not written on your lyric sheet to start going ooh, ooh, ooh.
Vanessa Olivarez:
No, it definitely was just a background vocal idea that came to me, not written in. Oftentimes, I'll hear an instrumental part in my head that I would like to recreate with vocals instead, and if a part is missing in my head, I'll say, "Well, why don't we just do ahhs or oohs and sing that line, instead of making it a pedal steel?" But the pedal steel also does mirror those oohs and ahhs that you're talking about in the bridge. So I wanted to make sure that the instrumentation really matched the vocal line, mirrored it just to hint at it just a little bit.
Doug Burke:
So you're thinking, "This is a great place for a pedal steel, and I want it to sound like this." You sing the line, and then you're like, "That's a great line, I'll just use that," and then match the pedal steel to it. Is that how that happened?
Vanessa Olivarez:
No. The vocals came first, for sure. The idea for the aahs in my head came first, but I wanted the pedal steel to match that in the bridge.
Doug Burke:
And it matches to, "Give me the steel of a gun." I love that line.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Yeah, I think Vanessa is so good. And I think she hit her stride weirdly on our second record, An Army Without Music. She started pulling in these really almost Simon and Garfunkel-ly, oohs and ahhs and complicated harmonies that I think really have become a trademark in a lot of our songs. She is just a harmony genius. I personally am terrible at it, but she just can hear these parts. Credit to her on a lot of the arrangements for the other instruments too. She hears that stuff, and she'll guide whoever's playing with some ideas and parts, and it really comes together as a whole. We started self producing our albums on Radio Hymns, and I think part of it is just her extreme gift with vocals.
Doug Burke:
I love your arrangements, and I very much like the way songs start. They all start in a unique way. This one has a beautiful solo guitar with piano and then a shimmering symbol.
Elizabeth Elkins:
When we're doing the production, we do try to think of how the song sets up. And that's a pretty important part of the arrangement, for sure.
Doug Burke:
And then the finish is sort of the flip of that.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Oh, gosh, I'd have to think about the end of these songs. I think once you produce them, you don't think about it too much because you're moving on to the next song at that point. But yeah, I think that's important too. You think about whether a song has a fade. There's a song on that record called Getaway Car that originally was intended to have a really long '70s vibe fade at the end of it, that didn't end up happening. I think you think about it in the moment, and there's a million ways to start a song and a million ways to end a song.
Doug Burke:
Tiny Television just falls off a cliff.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Rock and roll ending right there.
Doug Burke:
Was that a rock and roll ending, to just stop?
Elizabeth Elkins:
Obviously there's a lot on rock records, I think it depends. I think it was intentional in the way then it goes into the really pretty intro on Ice Cream was part of the flow of the record.
Doug Burke:
Hell's Half Acre also has this interesting organ and acoustic guitar opening. You flow into these beautiful mandolin. Are there strings on this song? I thought I heard strings, seriously.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Well, yeah, there's mandolin, and Bethany may have layered some fiddle parts. Do you remember, Vanessa?
Vanessa Olivarez:
I do think that there are strings on Hell's. Actually, Hell's is my favorite song on the album, personally. It took me a minute to get there, but I like the concept and I like the metaphor that we used. But I do think there are strings on that song. I do believe there are.
Doug Burke:
So what is Hell's Half Acre?
Elizabeth Elkins:
Hell's Half Acre was the neighborhood that surround Capitol Hill in Nashville. And if you've been to Nashville, the Capitol literally sits on a really high hill overlooking downtown. Until the 1950s, when they started building the interstates, that neighborhood was something that looked more like Society Hill in Philadelphia, but it was also very rundown for about 80% of it. It was a really vibrant neighborhood, but also a crime ridden neighborhood. We really tried to recreate the feeling of what must have happened when you lose that, and why that neighborhood was destroyed and the streets were renamed. I think Vanessa can maybe talk about it more, but this concept of just progress rolling you over and burying your history.
Vanessa Olivarez:
I guess that's what happens when things get old. It's just so symbolic of a failing relationship when a place isn't as new and exciting to you as it once was, just like people can also be new and exciting to you in the beginning. The song says, "In the beginning, when there are stars in your eyes, you tend to overlook a lot of the issues and the problems that are so blatantly there." I loved capturing that metaphor and really using it in the song because it feels so similar to me. I often think of land and buildings as having emotions and feelings, and to me, an abandoned property like that would probably feel pretty sad, like it's just been left behind.
Doug Burke:
"But now it's all covered in rhinestones, all covered in lies." Rhinestones is a fake diamond, I guess, type of lie.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Yeah, Nashville gets associated with rhinestones. I mean, that's a big part of the Nashville glam and the opry. And I think this idea that Nashville moved forward for progress, a lot built on the country music industry is that now this is just a shiny new development or a new field or a new park, or whatever they've turned it into. And you forget so quickly the beauty of what was there originally.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, it was beautiful and then it became completely dilapidated and the red light district and crime ridden. And no one thought to save the buildings.
Elizabeth Elkins:
They didn't. And I think you see this replicated across the country. St. Louis is a great example. If you know where the arch is in St. Louis, well, that area used to be the historic riverfront, I mean, acres and acres and acres of land taken down by, at the time, FDR. President Roosevelt made the decision to plow that under. But we've lost a lot of the history that connects St. Louis to the river and to a long history with the French and the United States. But in the name of progress, the neighborhood had fallen into disrepair, it was crime ridden, so let's plow it under and put an arch there. I mean, that's what we've done all over the country. And I think this song really is almost a big picture idea for the way we look at history so often. I agree with Vanessa. I think we nailed the metaphor. We wrote this with a gentleman by the name of Paul Jefferson. There's some really cool chord changes and stuff in there that I would have never thought of, and so having Paul really make those choices, I think, gave this song a bigger, darker element.
Doug Burke:
Who plays the mandolin on this?
Elizabeth Elkins:
That's Bethany. Bethany is sort of the silent third member of Granville.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful contribution. Monsters in the Stars.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Yeah, this is my mom's favorite song on the record. Every time she hears it, she'll text me or say, "I just really like that song." It's something we tackled on this record that we hadn't on ... Well, we had to some degree on other records. It's really trying to widen the perspectives that we wrote from. And in this case, it's from the perspective of a Native American, a Cherokee who was a part of the Trail of Tears which crossed what is now Woodland Street Bridge in Nashville on their way to Oklahoma. So we really wanted to catch this moment where this Native American is looking down at the Cumberland River and seeing Nashville growing around this place. She is heading on to, obviously, many more tragic months of walking, but headed to Oklahoma away from her homeland. This is a song we wrote with one of the most legendary writers in Nashville, Mr. Tom Douglas. We went to his house and wrote it. He had a beautiful melody that, really, I think is a stunning chorus in particular. Yeah, I think this is a really straightforward pop song in a way. But again, for me, because I can compliment Vanessa, she was at 110% on the vocals on this record. It's just a great vocal.
Doug Burke:
Why does your mom like this song?
Elizabeth Elkins:
Probably the melody. My mom probably likes it for the melody. And I think my entire family is really appreciative of history, and I think my mom has always been interested in the story of the Native Americans. I don't know. I've never really asked her. She's always said it was a pretty melody and had so much emotion in it. They live in the mountains of Northeast Alabama, which that area didn't even become a state till 1830s, '40s, '50s when all these treaties start expiring and Americans started pushing West. You really have a sense of the Native influence in that part of the world. It's almost like they're ghost, kind of standing there going, "Great. Thanks for kicking us out. What are you doing now?" That could be a part of why she relates to it.
Doug Burke:
I had heard of the Trail of Tears, but I had never really studied it, and so I did for this song. I'd heard that Andrew Jackson was a bad dude, but I really think he was a really, really bad dude after reading about this story, about what he did to ... And I didn't know that it started in Nashville, that it was 16,000 Cherokees that were relocated.
Elizabeth Elkins:
It started at Lake Nickajack, which is near Chattanooga, on Nashville side of Chattanooga. Jackson was a big part of why it happened. He's a very complicated figure. A lot of good things out of the Jackson years and a lot of really terrible things out of the Jackson years. But yes, he is the one that officially ordered the march west, and officially broke a heck of a lot of treaties. He's someone if you haven't read a lot about, really complicated, fascinating character. But he also ties into one of our other songs, which is You Can Go To Hell, I'm Going to Texas, which is Davy Crockett who basically told Jackson, "You can go to hell, I'm going to Texas." It was their fight over the Trail of Tears that essentially got Crockett to the Alamo, so it's all tied in. And that's one thing I love about these songs is when those stories cross over each other.
Doug Burke:
I love the line, "I heard the winds, a devil in the places we will go." Just ...
Elizabeth Elkins:
That's just those tornadoes out in Oklahoma was the actual inspiration. Coming from the hills of North Carolina and Tennessee and North Georgia and North Alabama to a place that's just so different, and a place, to me thinking about it, has these just horrible tornadoes all the time. I don't know. It's just a line thrown in there that seemed to ... Like, "Where are we going?" "Oh, that's what you know about it." It just seemed like maybe someone would have said that. I don't know.
Doug Burke:
Any particular parts of this song that you love the most? Because it's really just full of metaphors.
Vanessa Olivarez:
Honestly, my favorite is the broken down third verse, "On a highway bridge, on some dark nights, sleeping with the dogs," just really stands out to me. And just that third verse has a lot of emotion in it, to me. I also really just enjoyed singing it, and credit to Tom Douglas for that. The melody is really beautiful.
Doug Burke:
Well, I think, Vanessa, you have an amazing ability to capture emotion, both lyrically and reflect that into the music. And so much of your music is driven by emotion, so you take these wonderful stories and turn them into these emotional vignettes.
Vanessa Olivarez:
Thank you so much. I had a vocal issue probably about six years ago that lasted for a couple years, and really, I had to adapt and alter the way that I sang. Everything I knew about singing had to be completely relearned and reestablished. I honestly think that that's really when I learned to use emotion in my voice. I think part of the vocal issue was honestly a little bit of a boon, because it really did help me learn to use my voice in a very different way. It's never been quite the same, but when it returned to almost full force, I was able to use it in a completely new and different way that I'd never been able to do before. Sometimes tragedy can also bring really wonderful things.
Doug Burke:
Well, you start this song with a whisper voice that is not common in your songs. And I like that, because the Trail of Tears is something that is hard to talk about.
Vanessa Olivarez:
Yeah, I like the lyrics so much, it almost felt like it needed to be more spoken than sang. I think that was my approach in the beginning.
Doug Burke:
Are there any lessons for today that you're trying to communicate in this song?
Elizabeth Elkins:
I think for us the lesson in almost all our songs is that these stories need to be remembered, and they need to be talked about. We're obviously at a time in American history where things are really divided 50/50 on so many issues, but I think history has so much to teach us. I had to be personally careful on social media because people post so many things that are just historically wrong. I think the more you can read and the more you can understand what's come before us, the terrible things that have come before us, the ways we as a country or as people or as a world have learned from those is super important. There's the adage of course, history is destined to repeat itself, and it's so true, because over the last few weeks, I've been reminded how much Americans simply don't know their history. As songwriters, we just hope that these are triggers for people to think more about it. People may not know much about the Trail of Tears. There's talk of there being a national trail system and a national park based around it, which I think would be really important. But people need to understand that these stories are out there. And on our civil war record, we told perspectives, union, confederate, horse, furniture, child, adult, male, female, this is all human emotion, and we all feel things very much in the same way. I think for me, the songs are about ... If this song comes across as interesting to you, find out a little bit more about it, think about it, remember it when you're driving around. I think that's what we've always hoped to do, just get people thinking.
Doug Burke:
Well you certainly made me think, even in this interview. I mean, you said Andrew Jackson is a complicated character, and I was disparaging about the guy. Tell me about why he was complicated.
Elizabeth Elkins:
I think we have a tendency to put a modern lens on any historic figure. It's difficult to do that when they weren't living today, and when the world was a different place and a different time periods. I think there are good and bad arguments for Jackson. But I think my rule as a musician since I started playing music when I was 17 years old, and I played in a series of punk rock bands and country bands, is I'm very careful with anything that might be political when it comes to bands. The only thing I'll say about Andrew Jackson is I think there are several incredible books written about Jackson. And I think he's someone that it's worth reading about and understanding his motivations and understanding why there was some evil in what he did, and why there was some good in what he did. We're in the city that is Jackson's home. I mean, the Hermitage is here, and we have a Boulevard called Old Hickory Boulevard. I just feel that people are quick to make assumptions about characters without reading a lot about them. I've probably read six to eight books on Andrew Jackson. Another person, Teddy Roosevelt, I've probably read 14 books on Teddy Roosevelt. There's a lot of evil in Teddy Roosevelt, and there's a lot of good in Teddy Roosevelt. So I think you can draw that line. Even to a figure like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. there are good things and there are bad things about him. I just think it's important to be educated and to try to understand what's come before you and try to understand these very complicated parts of American history that have brought us to a bit of a political crossroads lately.
Doug Burke:
It's very interesting. For me, I learn more about Nashville, the history of Tennessee, the history of this part of the world, not just from the Civil War era or before that when the Trail of Tears occurred, right through modern times. I guess this is covered a little bit in your History of Music Row.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that book begins with a French fur trader named Timothy Demonbreun, super complicated guy. He left Montreal and became the French lieutenant governor of the Illinois Territory. He ended up being involved in the American Revolution. He at various times sided with the French, the natives, the Spanish, and the Americans, and the English. He had at least two wives, maybe four or five, tons of illegitimate children. He owned slaves. He was, for many years, celebrated as the Grand Old Man of Nashville, the first white settler. A lot of those things aren't true, some of them are. And again, here we have a complicated story of a man who we tend to judge by today's standards, when one could argue he was living hour to hour on the frontier to survive and making choices for those reasons, so complicated folks. It starts with his story. You drive up Demonbreun Street to get to Music Row today. The book then goes into the antebellum plantations, one of which became Belmont University, which is at the head of Music Row today. The very complicated story of Adelicia Acklen, who inherited more money than anyone else in the Confederacy when her notorious slave trader husband, Isaac Franklin, died. That money went on to found Belmont University, so that's a complicated story. Then it goes up to a time when everyone in Nashville hated the Germans. Vanessa wrote an incredible chapter on the house that fell down, about a family of German immigrants right before World War 1 who were ostracized from the community. Before that, it talks about the many freed slave camps that were on the land that's now Music Row. And then it goes up to the beginnings of the music industry and the explosion into the 1990s internationally of the money and fame that came with people like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain and Billy Ray Cyrus. And then it talks about all these places we're losing today on Music Row, as Nashville pre pandemic was transforming and booming at a rate that I don't think any city could keep up with. It covers several centuries.
Doug Burke:
One of the songs is called Goodnight House, which is about a very specific place, actually in Kentucky, I believe, not even in Tennessee, right?
Elizabeth Elkins:
Right. Goodnight House is a story from our Civil War album, An Army Without Music, which came out, I believe, in 2015. It's the story from the Battle of Perryville, Kentucky, which is about two hours north of Nashville. But this was a story that just stood out as really encapsulating the horror of that war. It was Robert E. Lee who said, "A war so terrible, if it weren't, I might get used to it." I'm paraphrasing. It sums that up, where there was a terrible battle, a very quick, decisive battle in October of 1862. The Union Army was victorious, but there were many, many men who lay wounded and dying. And the general called on anyone in the town who could help save them, and there was a retired doctor he found. They were looking for somewhere to set up basically a makeshift hospital. There was a farm nearby owned by the Goodnights, and Mr. Goodnight offered up his barn. And all through the night, he played his fiddle, and he offered the soldiers whiskey to get them through having these amputations and these surgeries without any sort of morphine or anything. It, I think, is almost a look at just the horrors of war, I think is that song. We wrote that song when we were doing an artist residency in Seaside, Florida, and it was a song that finally came together. It's a real simple song. It's just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, I think. It's definitely one of my favorites. And again, with the harmonies, we did that record in Brooklyn, New York. I'll let Vanessa talk about that, because I think when I listened back to that, I feel like, again, the vocal approach really makes that song.
Vanessa Olivarez:
I actually really can't stand listening to the album vocally. For me, it was really, really an awful time. That's when my voice sort of disappeared, and that was at the peak of it. Singing in that album, I just have horrible memories about just trying to do anything and everything I could to try to get myself out of my own way and out of my head. I just have terrible memories about it. But that song turned out fine, and the video is beautiful. And Jeremy Ezell, who sing background vocals on that record and played guitar and did many, many other things, also sort of a Granville honorary member. He really just did a beautiful job with the background vocals. He's an excellent singer and songwriter in his own right, and just has got this beautiful tone that so easily matches with just about anyone. But anyways, it was a weird time period for me. But Goodnight House is probably my favorite, I guess, on the record, I think.
Doug Burke:
The chorus is one of the most overtly church hymnal parts of your songwriting that I listened to, or is that off the mark?
Elizabeth Elkins:
I mean, the song starts with, "I used to read the Bible before I tired of Mark Twain." I think there's a regret. There's this person who's singing it, and it's an unknown. I assume it could be the farmer that's singing it. It's this idea of what he's seeing before him, and the pain and the horror and the terror of the Civil War battle. He's kind of saying, "Well, God wasn't here for us." So I think there's a letting go of belief in good in that song, and the chorus is sort of saying goodbye, "Goodnight boys of Kentucky." It's just letting go. And it is supposed to sound like him, intentionally, and I think the harmonies were layered that way for a reason. It's almost a "God won't save us now" kind of vibe. I think with the video, we had an amazing video director named Scott Lansing, a friend of ours from Atlanta. We did that video in the mountains in North Carolina, and he really wanted to capture that letting go, that separation from faith and God that can happen when things turn tragic. That video touches on it, not only as a battle, but it touches on it with money and love and power. I think, intentionally, it's supposed to sound somewhat spiritual.
Doug Burke:
It's a very emotional video, I think. I love it when Vanessa has the tear roll down her cheek, and then-
Elizabeth Elkins:
She did that like on cue, I thought, "Wow."
Doug Burke:
Oh, really?
Elizabeth Elkins:
The director is like, "Could you cry, Vanessa?"
Doug Burke:
It wasn't eye drop? She did that, really? She felt-
Elizabeth Elkins:
No. She has the skills. She did that. Yes, she mustered that tear on her own.
Doug Burke:
Well, you've done a lot of stage performing, right? Vanessa. How did you tap into that?
Vanessa Olivarez:
Well, I've done a lot of theater. I mean, mostly my background has been in musical theater. I got to do Hairspray in Toronto, which was awesome, for like a year. So with the background in theater and the acting background, it's certainly not too much of a challenge for me to channel that part of myself and figure out how to cry on cue.
Doug Burke:
It was beautiful. And then it emotionally shifts in the video and it does turn into these couples kissing by the fire and fireworks, somewhat of a contrast to the song in that respect.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Yeah, intentionally. And also, I was acting in that video too. I'm pretending like I'm playing that piano part, which is more complicated than I can really play. It is written on piano, but Matt Keating in New York played piano on that, much better piano player than I am.
Doug Burke:
You had me fooled. I thought you were playing it.
Elizabeth Elkins:
No. I could play it enough that it would sound like the song, but it wouldn't be quite as fancy as the choices Matt made. He's a classically trained piano player. I am a self taught piano player. Yes, intentionally, it took a very different turn. The end of the video really gets into this, like I said, the inner workings of people's relationships and how things can go wrong, and how love can feel like a war sometimes too. Again, Scott Lansing vision on that video, so much fun. I mean, he had it planned out, and he had the drone shots, back when drones were just starting to be popular. He had the fireworks. He did a really, really cool job with that. He did our video for another song called Never on a Sunday, off our first album as well. He's doing a lot of award-winning documentaries now. Scott's a cool dude. I think he did a modern take on that song that really makes you think about it differently. And again, our goal is always just to make people think.
Doug Burke:
Well, this one made me think, because we are in this era where we are this divided nation, and I think people on both sides need to say goodbye to some thoughts and put them to sleep so that we can find a unified center of peacefulness. That's my own evangelizing, which I don't usually do on this podcast at all. I like to stay out of it, but it really ... "Goodnight old Kentucky, long may use sleep. Goodnight boys of Kentucky. I know where we'll meet."
Elizabeth Elkins:
And you're right, it's always tough to talk politics and religion. Maybe I'll just start a podcast called Politics and Religion, and everybody be angry at each other by the end of the 30 minutes. But for me, I think what we need more as a country right now is the ability for both sides to have an open dialogue where each sides listen. I think there's too much on either side of, "We're right and you must be like us." And I think that's dangerous. Historically, that's extraordinarily dangerous. That's just my personal opinion. I'm sure Vanessa has a different one. But for me, it's just a question of, maybe neither side is right in everything, and we have to be able to talk about it and have educated, interesting debates and discussions, and I feel like that's lost a lot lately.
Doug Burke:
Well, that's a perfect segue to your next song, You Can Go To Hell, I'm Going to Texas.
Elizabeth Elkins:
Yeah, exactly. Vanessa can tell you where this all came from.
Vanessa Olivarez:
My dad and I are in Texas, we wanted to get a commemorative Texas tattoo, and had been trying to figure out what to get for a really long time, and it still hasn't happened. But I found this quote by Davy Crockett, because I was like, "I don't want the typical stamp of Texas or made in Texas brand," or something like that. I found this quote by Davy Crockett that said, "You may all go to hell, I'm going to Texas," and I was like, "Perfect, that's the one." I told Elizabeth, and we were like, "Man, is this a song? Because if it's not a song, then we need to write it as a song." Fortunately, our friend, Ted Russell Kamp, also thought it would be an excellent concept and title for a song, so we wrote it together. And he's actually releasing it, I believe, next month. I'm adding some vocals to his version tomorrow.
Doug Burke:
Oh, fantastic. It is your most played song on Spotify. I don't know if you knew that. The algorithms have picked that one as the audience's favorite.
Elizabeth Elkins:
That probably is an audience favorite. We've been playing it for probably half the life of the band, and finally recorded it and put it out as a single last year. But it's a song that, in particular, we tour in Texas a lot. Vanessa is from Texas. We love playing out there. In fact, our last two shows right before the pandemic shutdown were with the SteelDrivers in Houston and Dallas, and they were just really fun, incredible shows, great audiences. Yeah, that probably is our fan favorite, that song. It's total joy to get to play with those guys. SteelDrivers have such a great audience who are open to new music. They're so supportive of us. We've done maybe eight, 10 shows with them over the last three or four years. Hopefully, we'll be doing more when live shows return hopefully in the next six months.
Doug Burke:
Okay. You Can Go To Hell, I'm Going to Texas, this is about Davy Crockett? Another historical figure.
Elizabeth Elkins:
It is. It's a famous quote by Davy Crockett. Crockett was a representative from the state of Tennessee, and he lost his third reelection bid to Congress. And a lot of that is because of what we were just talking about, his argument with Jackson about whether or not to remove the Indians from their native lands and send them West. He was really hurt that the people of Tennessee did not vote him back in for a third term. And in his concession speech, he famously said, "You may all go to hell, I'm going to Texas." Little did he know he was headed out to his death at the Alamo. But there were a lot of people across Tennessee and Kentucky and the South that also went to Texas. There are numerous cabins that have GTT carved in them, that says, "Gone to Texas." It was a thing to do there for a little bit. Yeah, we wrote it really from Crockett's perspective. It's got a really singalong fun chorus, we usually get the audience singing along by the second chorus. We also think it applies to our lives too. We both love Texas a lot.
Doug Burke:
Vanessa, you were born in Sugar Land, if I'm correct? And that's deep in the heart of Texas, is it not? Or is that suburb of-
Vanessa Olivarez:
Yeah, I was born in Houston. There are many different little pockets of Houston, Sugar Land is one of those. Family is from there, so I go visit whenever I can.
Doug Burke:
I didn't realize that Houston is the third largest city in America, which is pretty stunning. I didn't realize how vast it was.
Vanessa Olivarez:
Yeah, it's huge. It's got great people. Houston's got an amazing group of people. Everybody who I've ever met from Houston is always nice and friendly, and I just can't understand how, because it's so damn hot there. I'd be grumpy.
Doug Burke:
Have you ever told anybody, "You can go to hell, I'm going to Texas."?
Vanessa Olivarez:
No, not exactly. I haven't had to.
Doug Burke:
It's not in your nature to do that?
Vanessa Olivarez:
No, not totally. I'm pretty nice, in general, till somebody pisses me off too much.
Doug Burke:
You guys have this really unique songwriting chemistry, have you ever written a song where you said, "This is perfect for this voice."? And if so, what song have you written? And what voice would you like to record that song?
Elizabeth Elkins:
Well, that's a layered question for us because as a songwriting pair, we write, obviously, anything Granville Automatic does, but we also write for other artists, and that's been a goal. As professional songwriters, we've had major country artists and artists in different genres record our songs. As professional writers, you think of a lot. We've both probably written 1000 songs each over the last three to four years, and you're always thinking about, is this a song that Willie Nelson would sing? Is this a song Garth Brooks would sing? Is this a song Linda Ronstadt could have sung? I think that's a tough question for us because we are always looking on the commercial side for, "Here's a song we really want Kenny Chesney to cut," or, "We really want ..." On an artistic, creative side, I've never sat down and written a song and thought, "Oh, I really want this person to sing it." But I mean, if we're talking about Granville Automatic songs, for me, on our first album there's a song called Blood and Gold, and I personally would love for Willie Nelson to record that song. It's a song about the history of the horse and the American West and the mustangs. To me, it's a perfect song for Willie. Vanessa, I'm curious for your thoughts on Doug's question.
Vanessa Olivarez:
Again, I'm with Elizabeth, I don't really think when I'm writing something, "Oh, man, I'd love for so and so to cut it." Typically, I'm either writing a song to cut for one of my projects, or I just happen to write a song that I think, "Oh, you know what, maybe this would fit this person," if it's not right for my band. But Elizabeth and I operate on a couple of different levels in terms of songwriting. I think there's always a very clear cut destination in terms of, are we writing for ourselves? Or are we writing for other people? And when we're writing for other people, we're typically co-writing with another artist, and we're writing for them. Or we know for certain, Kenny Chesney is looking right now, or Brad Paisley is looking, or Lady Antebellum is looking, why don't we shoot for something that they would cut today? I mean, I think because there are so many different layers to what we do, that thought process does come into play on occasion, but only intentionally.
Doug Burke:
When did you start writing songs? And why did you start writing songs?
Elizabeth Elkins:
I started writing songs, gosh, when I was probably 16. I started, like many songwriters, writing bad poetry, probably as an early teenager. I think I just got fascinated about the time I really just started getting fascinated with other musicians and certain artists and songwriters. Rather than wanting to go see them and be in the front row, I wanted to write songs like they did. I wanted to write songs that moved people, so I started writing songs, and they were just terrible. They were really bad. And then I got into a punk rock band and wrote rock songs for a long, long time. For me, it was late teen years when I first wrote a song.
Vanessa Olivarez:
I started writing when I was probably like five years old, just in my room.
Doug Burke:
Wow.
Vanessa Olivarez:
I would always just make up my own songs. My mom said I would just walk around the house making up my own songs all the time. And then I guess when I was maybe 10-ish, 11-ish, I started ... Do you remember back in the day when there were cassette tapes? It was a single version of a cassette tapes that an artist would release. And basically, one side would be the actual single, and a lot of times for the other side, particularly in like r&b and pop, they would have an instrumental version of that song. So I started putting in my tape on the instrumental side of whatever song I was listening to and would make up my own songs to that track. I was top lining, basically, without knowing it, at the age of like 10. And then I guess when I was maybe 14 or 15 is when I got together with a guitar player for the first time and learned like, "Oh, this is a thing." I can actually do this for real. I would say, seriously started writing, probably more when I was like 14 or 15.
Doug Burke:
Do you remember where you were the first time you heard one of your songs on the radio?
Vanessa Olivarez:
Oh, wow. I don't. I'm trying to think, because probably my first song ever on the radio was in Canada. I had a top 10 single in Canada.
Doug Burke:
But that was after American Idol?
Vanessa Olivarez:
Yeah, that was post Idol. Before that, I didn't really have any radio success or anything. Yeah, Canada was probably the first time I've ever heard myself on the radio, and it was cool. I mean, it works very differently, radio, in Canada than it does here. I wish it worked more like it does in Canada here, honestly.
Doug Burke:
What are the differences?
Vanessa Olivarez:
It's not necessarily easier to get your songs played, but DJs have a little bit more control in terms of ... I mean, I know this is the way it used to work, in terms of what they were allowed to play. When I did a radio tour for my single, we actually went and knocked on doors and went into different studios across Canada and asked them to play our song. And would sit down and hang out with them for a minute, and they could decide whether or not they wanted to put it in rotation or not. It just feels a little bit more grassroots and a little bit more the way that it should feel, I think, in Canada, in terms of radio and radio promotion.
Doug Burke:
Well, I have to thank you both. This has been a real treat and a thrill and an honor to have Elizabeth Elkins and Vanessa Olivarez on our show from Granville Automatic. We can't wait for COVID to be over so we can see you live, performing your new record, Tiny Televisions. Is there anything you would like to add for our audience.
Elizabeth Elkins:
No. I mean, Doug, thank you for having us. Like you said earlier, we do have the book out. You can find it on Amazon. You can find it on our website, granvilleautomatic.com, and you can buy all the CDs and the book from us directly. We'll sign them for you, and you can order them on our website.
Doug Burke:
I'd like to thank my recording engineer in the recording booth, DJ Wyatt Schmidt. You can listen to his music out there. Yeah, thank you, Wyatt. We really appreciate what you do for us. And our social media director, MC Owens, for helping promote these great songwriters on our show.
