Carling Berkhout
on finding her voice, losing Instagram followers, and collaborating as a solo artist
Despite releasing a full-length record last year under Carling & Will, Carling Berkhout says the pandemic has left her feeling less like a musician than she ever had before. But that pause has also brought in a fresh perspective.
“There’s been this realization of, okay, here are all of these serious musicians who aren't touring right now and who are just sitting in their bedrooms and writing songs too. That has leveled the playing field in a sense.”
Many know Carling as a banjoist. I first became acquainted with her on Instagram, where she’d post videos of herself playing fiddle tunes on melodic clawhammer banjo, often on the grassy lawns of the Bennington College campus or in her dorm room. Since graduating from college, releasing a full-length record, collaborating with other musicians, and getting hired full-time as a copywriter, Carling’s focus is now on original songwriting paired with acoustic and electric guitar. As Carling explains, that path hasn’t always been direct.
You started playing banjo in high school. What drew you to the instrument?
I think what it came down to was that nobody else played the banjo. I grew up with my dad’s musical taste, so I was exposed to a lot of sixties folk, basically Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Woodstock scene. My mother also played cello in a symphony, and I went to a lot of those performances when I was young. I remember in high school, we watched Oh Brother Where Art Thou after we read The Odyssey in English class. Everybody made fun of the music, but I was like, ‘Oh man, I didn't really know this existed.’ So I started listening to a lot of John Hartford and his fiddle recordings.
When you were first learning, were there other people in the community near you who were also playing oldtime?
The only other person I knew who played this music was Will Mosheim, my best friend/ex-boyfriend/longtime collaborator. He played in a local bluegrass band, and his parents were family friends with my parents. My dad told Will that he was giving me a banjo for my birthday and asked if Will would teach me. So I started taking lessons from him and that eventually led to us playing together and forming our duo, Carling & Will.
Our full-length record, Soon Comes Night, came out right in the middle of the pandemic. It was supposed to come out in May, and we had a tour booked the entire month of May and a little bit into June. Obviously that got canceled, and we ended up delaying the album until June. There were so many hurdles along the way to even making that record that it just felt natural to release it into one massive hurdle again. We wrote many of those tunes through some struggle and just trying to get by. A lot of the music was written either before we broke up or during it. In some ways, I think the world wasn't meant to be at ease when we put out that album.
Was there ever a question when you broke up that the duo was also going to break up?
That was definitely on the table at one point. We broke up in 2017, and we didn't play together for about a year. But then in a weird fluke, one of our songs on our EP that we had released in 2016 [“Sally Ann-Guitar Version”] happened to be selected for a playlist by Spotify. Everything sort of blew up. All of a sudden, that track had a million plays and there were people asking for our music. We were like, ‘Alright, we have to figure our shit out, and be able to record these songs, and release that music.’
It’s interesting, things have just sort of happened with our music because of the way we've been pushed in one direction or another. It’s kind of fun when you realize you don’t have much control over your life because the universe has control over you.
How has the pandemic affected how you approach music?
It’s changed a lot. With a really pessimistic attitude, I feel much less like a musician than I have previously, simply because I think playing gigs and playing with other people really strengthens your craft and your technique. So in terms of my banjo playing, it's kind of sucking. To be a little bit more optimistic, the pandemic has led me to need some sort of creative outlet, so I’ve been writing a lot of songs. As much as I love banjo, chords and lyrics have always come first for me.
There reached a point in my musical trajectory of playing oldtime tunes, where I was like, ‘This is really fun, and I like furthering my technique in this way, but playing tunes on the banjo that have already been written isn’t necessarily doing it for me.’ I wanted to be creating and writing my own stuff, so I started writing tunes and songs. I really like writing lyrics, but for whatever reason, the banjo and lyrics never really existed as a thing for me. I have to pick up the guitar to tap into that.
I also didn't really want to go out and perform as a solo artist or perform my music that way for a number of reasons. One is that I wasn’t really comfortable doing so. I felt like I had a lot less practice in that than I did getting up on a stage and playing the banjo with one or two people beside me. During the pandemic, I’ve been able to work on fine tuning this solo album I want to release. I’ve been spending time practicing guitar, which I've been wanting to get better at for about eight years. It was one of those things that was just existing in a gutter, and I couldn't get past some of the fundamentals. I’ve been able to really force myself into practicing technique and in that way, figuring out what I want my actual solo sound to be, which is an important project for me.
I first became aware of you through the Instagram banjo community. Do you have a specific mindset in how you approach Instagram?
I ended up in the banjo community through the use of #clawhammer maybe six or seven years ago. It was probably the first community that I felt a part of in terms of banjo. Since then, it’s turned a bit into something I feel I need to do rather than something I want to do, but perhaps that's all social media and marketing these days.
I think the Instagram account is tangential from what I want to be doing now, and it seems like the audience that I have on there is expecting a certain thing. And that certain thing is me playing old time tunes. I still try to post a video about once a month, but I do want to make a slow transition over to being able to publish the music I'm working on and getting support for the things that might not fall within that genre or category that a lot of my followers want to see.
How does that expectation from your followers factor into what you post?
There was this time, maybe two years ago, where if I posted on Instagram and the post didn't have a banjo in it, I would lose something like 40 followers. I recently posted a cover of one of Justin Bieber’s new songs from his record Justice, which I actually really like. I'm trying to be more open-minded when it comes to pop music. I think there's a lot of musicians who are very quick to look past pop music, and I'm trying not to be that jaded. So, I posted this Justin Bieber cover on my story, and God, did people hate it. *laughs* I lost a huge chunk of followers, which at this point I could care less about, but it is funny to see what is just a little too much outside their banjo comfort zone.
Do you ever see yourself stepping away from social media entirely, or will it always serve a purpose?
I am a big fan of social platforms only because I've met so many people through them who are really good friends today. That way of connecting is important for me, especially having lived in rural areas most of my life. For the purpose of connection, I think I will always use it. Whether I will take myself so seriously all the time, I'm not sure. Maybe next year I'll start posting pictures of my breakfast, there will be no banjo, and everything will be fine.
You graduated from Bennington College with a degree in creative writing. Was that connected with your songwriting?
They were pretty separate when I was at Bennington College. I specifically studied fiction, and my thesis was a collection of short stories. It didn’t overlap with songwriting, but everybody would tell me that I should make them overlap. There seemed to be a general understanding where it's like, ‘Oh, if you study creative writing and a little bit of music, why don't you just like put the two together?’
However, I do want to say that my favorite part of writing short fiction is the word choice and being able to focus on a hundred words and make sure that every single word is exactly what you mean. I will also always be focused on the sonic side of writing and how things sound when you read them aloud.
Do you have specific songwriting influences?
Oh, definitely. A lot of my music, especially within this sphere, has been influenced by Elliott Smith, both his lyrics and his use of chords. I’ve been trying to examine more of the theory behind what he does and what makes a specific song so powerful, but also so insanely sad. I had recently stumbled across this video of a guy who was talking about Phoebe Bridgers and how she's been influenced by Elliott Smith and how they both use the five of five chord. Apparently, wherever the five of five chord exists within the song will also happen to be the most heartbreaking line. That was fascinating to me – this idea of being able to alter the listener’s emotional experience by placing specific chords behind those words or lines.
Also, Big Thief and Adrianne Lenker. Listening to her solo album has been really influential when it comes to paying attention to the way she sings each song, the emphasis that she places on words, and how that emphasis is related to the emotion.
I don't consider myself a singer, and in the past, I've hated my voice. I'm now at a place of trying to slowly get better at it and just stare it down head on. A lot of that has been figuring out how to sing the words the way that I mean them rather than being focused on how other people hear them.
That's a really interesting thing: singing the words the way you mean them versus how people hear them. Are you approaching music from a place that isn’t centering the listener?
I think my songwriting got better or at least meant more to me when I started writing songs for myself, which is so obvious, like a ‘yeah, no shit’ kind of thing. But when I sat down to write songs, saying, ‘Okay, I need to write this thing because these are the emotions I'm feeling,’ or, ‘I need to write this because I think it's going to be a bop in my own head,’ that has made songwriting so much easier.
This is in sharp contrast to all of the years previous where I was writing songs and feeling other people's judgment before I even wrote it down. I was writing lyrics that I thought would be perceived in a certain way. I was singing in a way that other musicians who I liked at the time were singing. I think that I was trying to be a specific musician rather than just doing what I felt was my own artistic technique in one way or another.
What do you think helped flip that approach for you?
I think I was scared that once I wrote my own songs, I would be forced into performing them, and it would be something that I wasn't incredibly excited about. Being able to sit in my bedroom and write music like every other musician out there during the pandemic...there was something humbling about it.
There’s also maybe a general approach of not caring as much. I used to be really shy and was often the youngest person in the room. I often felt like I was still growing into who I was, and everybody else around me already knew who they were. I think at some point, I was able to be like, this is the music I write, and this is who I am. And that's just how it's going to be.
Do you anticipate that leveling of the playing field becoming not so level once touring starts up again?
Yeah, I’ve thought about this a lot. Before the pandemic really hit, I was considering playing music full-time. Since then, I’ve decided that's not the route I want to take. I’m working a nine-to-five job now, which is also something that I never saw myself doing. It turns out that I like being able to pay my bills, and I enjoy my job. It also allows me the freedom to sit down and write songs at the end of the day. I'm definitely not as stressed as I was before. Routine and stability can be really good.
Do you prefer working alone or in a band when it comes to music?
I prefer writing and creating alone and then bringing it to a larger group because I function really well off of having an initial idea, the melody or lyrics, and then bringing it to other people for feedback and collaboration. That's a big part of the creative process for me, which might go back to my time being in creative writing workshops at Bennington. With that, you sit in your room alone and you write the story, and then you bring the story to a large group of people. They nitpick everything about it, but all of a sudden it's better. I don't think I would ever be satisfied if I created this whole record in my room, recorded it, and then put it out into the world never having somebody else provide feedback or even incorporating some of their ideas into it.
Sometimes, it can be hard for me to not take negative feedback personally, especially because I am a really picky person. The thing about the banjo is that I was able to practice a tune over and over again, and eventually be like, ‘Oh, that's perfect. I got it exactly how I want.’ And I've never felt that way with my songs because I've never been happy with my singing voice. It's a frustrating process to always feel like, ‘Okay, this is good enough’. Knowing what needs to be better, but not really being able to get there is tricky because I always feel like my goals are reach goals that I can never quite hit. Settling on songs when you know you've reached your maximum capacity and ability, that’s a hard feeling.
Do you feel like this settling is a thing you just have to reckon with as a musician?
It feels much less permanent than it used to because I've been able to see improvements over the years. Not only has my guitar playing improved, but so have my vocals and songwriting. No matter what, I’m sure 10 years from now I'll look back at the music I'm making and be like, ‘Oh man, I could've done it so much better.’ But that's just the nature of creating art. It’s going to happen with any medium. Hopefully there will be a time where I do settle for something, and I'll be pleased with the improvement.”
Visit Carling’s website to learn more about her work and buy her records, www.carlingberkhout.com.
