Charlie Rauh
on lyrical music, sibling collaboration, and the unexpected gifts of remote session work
Working as a classroom musician at a school for infants and toddlers was just supposed to be a side gig for Charlie Rauh. It was flexible, didn’t interfere with touring, and provided a steady income while he was first getting established in New York City. It ended up playing a pivotal role in his approach to music.
“For the first 10 or 15 minutes of every class, I play music while they just take in the space. In around 2015, I started writing some solo guitar music that I really liked, and I wanted to see how they would respond. Sometimes, they would crawl over and just sit down like an audience. Being around infants and seeing how they react to music is really inspiring.”
When Charlie started sharing his work with others for feedback, there was a common response. “They would say it sounded like lullabies or children’s music – with sort of a strange spin on it. I really took to that.”
“It’s music that is meant for people who are not musicians.”
With its roots in folk songs, lullabies, literature, and hymns, Charlie Rauh’s music feels familiar, yet rare. Spacious and strikingly intimate. To an observer, he moves effortlessly between an array of musical spaces, from studio sessions and outdoor chamber music performances to collaborative records and solo acoustic guitar compositions.
“I make music that is meant for people who are not musicians. It’s not highly intellectualized. Anyone can walk into a space where this music is happening and be a part of that.”
Charlie is drawn to lullabies and hymns because they are short, inviting, and easy-to-remember. They’re accessible. “When I go on tour, I always end up being this amateur anthropologist and look into the cultures of the places that I travel through and ask people what songs they were sung to as children and what folk songs they learned to sing. All of that is a big influence on the solo guitar music I write.”
“The way she exalts the ordinary is so incredible to me.”
In addition to hymns and lullabies, Charlie finds a wealth of inspiration from literature. In the August of 2020, Charlie released The Bluebell, a collection of solo acoustic guitar inspired by the poetry of Emily Brontë and her younger sister Anne.
“Ever since I was a child, I’ve been a fan of Emily Dickinson. When I went to tour her home in Amherst as an adult, I learned Emily Dickinson was a big fan of Emily Brontë, so I started reading Emily’s poems. Everything about her poems is just phenomenal. The imagery and simplicity. They’re often about what people would consider a pretty nondescript or insignificant setting, like what she sees on a walk. But the way she exalts the ordinary is so incredible to me. It’s a very distilled form of creativity where everything she comes into contact with is amazing to her. There’s so much wonder.”
The Bluebell alternates songs inspired by an Emily poem and songs inspired by an Anne poem. Scholars consider Emily and Anne to be the closest of all the Brontës, yet personality-wise were quite different. Charlie was drawn to exploring both what connected and separated them.
“There’s a sort of urgency to Anne and her writing. She was often trying to come to terms with different things that she was struggling with in her own life. Anne had a reputation of being more reserved and sort of kept to herself. Emily was known for being this outspoken, easily frustrated, intense personality, but I feel like they saw the same intensity in each other and expressed it in different ways.”
“It’s just a matter of how we’re going to interpret it.”
Charlie’s latest record, The Silent Current from Within, was released in March 2021 by Destiny Records. The first and last track of the record, which takes its name from a line in Anne Brontë’s poem, “If This Be All,” are inspired by that work. The other songs are influenced by other writers, including poet Anne Carson and Charlie’s sister Christina Rauh Fishburne. “I write a lot of music based on my sister’s fiction writing.”
On both The Bluebell and The Silent Current From Within, Charlie enlisted the help of his siblings to further expand on the projects. For The Silent Current From Within, his brother, Chris Rauh, wrote a folktale to accompany the record, and Christina drew a map illustrating the landscape of the story. On The Bluebell, Chris wrote miniature poems for each of the songs, which Christina accompanied with watercolor paintings.
“When we were kids, I guess none of us were particularly good at other things. We never played sports or anything like that. We just made things up as children and invented scenarios and other worlds, so it’s fun to come together as adults and up the ante. When I collaborate with my siblings, there’s a certain understanding from the outset. We already know we’re on the same page, and it’s just a matter of how we’re going to interpret it.”
Because his music is often inspired by literature, Charlie still thinks of his music as inherently lyrical, even though there may not be literal words within the framework of a piece. “I’ve borrowed this idea from hymns of having a simple melody that’s easy to insert yourself into, but I make it a little more abstract by not repeating it and not having lyrics that are vocalized. There’s an intention of the lyric being embedded within the music itself.”
“I feel like I can write music that expresses an idea fairly easily, but I can't really find a way of writing words that do. This is one of the reasons why most of my music is inspired by poetry. That’s kind of what I really want to do – I wish I was a writer. Since I don’t seem to have that skill set, I write music that sounds like what I think a poem would look like if I wrote it.”
“It’s a way to be kept on my toes and to always be growing as a musician.”
Charlie is also an active session musician, collaborating with musicians including Oz Fritz (Tom Waits), Ken Coomer (Wilco/Uncle Tupelo), and Charles Newman (Magnetic Fields).
“I love doing session work. When I was a teenager, I really wanted to be a studio musician. I read a lot of stuff about the studio musicians in the sixties and seventies, like The Wrecking Crew and folks who played on the Beach Boys records. I always thought it was so cool that there were people whose job is to show up at a studio and just be told to do something creative and make this amazing sound.”
Charlie says his composition and improvisation skills are greatly informed by his session work. “A lot of the time when I'm working on something, it'll give me ideas like, ‘Oh, I never would've thought to approach a song this way,’ because a lot of the people that hire me are really amazing, creative people. They have ideas that I would never come up with, so it always sparks my own creativity to think in different ways. It’s also really fun to be directed by somebody who appreciates what you do, but they have an idea of how to utilize what you do. To me, it’s a way to be kept on my toes and to always be growing as a musician.”
During the pandemic, Charlie set up a recording space in his apartment, so he would be equipped for remote session work.
“I love playing other styles of music that are very different from what I write. I love the challenge of it. And when I'm doing it remotely, I can make it sound exactly the way I want it to sound. That's something that can be pretty frustrating when you're playing live – depending on who's behind the soundboard, sometimes no matter how ‘on’ you are, it can sound like shit. When you're recording, it's nice to have that control to present an idea the way you think it should sound.”
“The starting point is going to be even more personal in a lot of ways than it would be if we were actually in person.”
Even though there were always musicians who had recording studios in their home, Charlie thinks remote session work will continue to be a norm in the industry.
“It’s a way to bring in more work for sure, but it’s also a way to be creative in a really specific way – getting to work in your own space on your own time. I think a lot of producers that need to hire musicians are sort of on that wavelength too where they're like, ‘If we sign musicians we like, we can let them record their part in their own way.’ Producers can always tell us to do different things, but the starting point is going to be even more personal in a lot of ways than it would be if we were actually in person.”
Charlie adds that remote session work also gives musicians the opportunity to introduce more fringe ideas that would’ve normally gotten shut down pretty early on traditional studio settings.
“When you’re in-person, everyone is on the clock, and so if they don't like it immediately in the first 10 seconds, they’ll stop you. And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. It makes total sense for a workflow in an in-person session. But it's fun to do remote work because I can fully realize an idea and send that first. Then they have no reason not to listen to the whole thing. I feel like a lot of those more fringe ideas that got accepted are now on records that are currently being released. I have a feeling that some of them might not have made the cut if we had been in-person.”
Charlie has done a few in-person studio sessions this year, which he’s thankful for.
“Being in the same room with people, there's no replacement for that. There never will be. But I really hope that I can keep doing remote recording work for people and do a good job providing something that people enjoy, while also having some wiggle room to introduce ideas that are a little more left-of-center.”
Charlie is currently working on a new solo album of music for acoustic guitar, vocals, and sound design inspired by the poetry of Phillis Wheatley. The new project, which combines a variety of musical influences from Hildegard Von Bingen to SZA, is due out in 2022 on Destiny Records.
Visit Charlie’s website to learn more about his work and upcoming gigs. His most recent record, The Silent Current From Within, can be purchased on the Destiny Records Bandcamp.
