Noah Wall apologized for her scratchy-sounding voice. “I sang all weekend,” Wall told Town Talk host Bill Harris Monday. “I’m exhausted – in the best way.”
Wall, lead singer and fiddle player for The Barefoot Movement, is just back from performing at MerleFest, a popular bluegrass-and-more festival in western North Carolina.
The band will perform at AmericanaFest in Nashville next, then come back to North Carolina for gigs in Holly Springs on Oct. 8 and then at the Kirby Theater in Roxboro on Oct. 9.
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The Barefoot Movement may have had a heavy bluegrass influence when it first formed more than a decade ago, but today it’s considered to have an “Americana” sound.
That label can include many types of music, from Celtic to Jimi Hendrix, and everything in between. Wall said she likes to think of Americana as any kind of music that incorporates roots music in the sound it produces.
Their new album is called “Pressing Onward,” and music fans may recognize the names of its producers – Chuck Plotkin and Hank Linderman – from their work with such groups as Chicago, The Eagles, Bob Dylan and The Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen.
The new album is the third full-length album that The Barefoot Movement has released. Their sound has evolved, Wall noted, since their first album, which was released a decade ago. Listeners will detect the addition of drums on the new album. And there are no instrumentals as there have been on previous albums.
Wall, the group’s primary songwriter, is joined by husband Tommy Norris on mandolin and Katie Blomarz on stand-up bass. “I’m very proud of the sound we got on ‘Pressing Onward,’ she said.
“When I put together the album sequence, it kind of gave me chills,” she said. Although the songs were pre-COVID-19, the coincidence of releasing the album amid the pandemic was not lost on her. “It is so pertinent,” Wall said, because a lot of the songs just tell the story of how to press onward, despite challenges.
Working with legendary producers like Plotkin and Linderman was special and Wall said one of her takeaways was an oft-used phrase of Plotkin, with regard to choosing songs for the album: If the answer to the question “Does it bear repeated listening?” is yes, then we’d done something right, she recalled.
Wall and Norris recently moved back to Granville County to be near family; Blomarz is still in Nashville, where she and her fiancé (also a bass player) are “livin’ the Nashville thing” and playing their music with a lot of different people. Just as so many other professions have done in the past 18 months or so, they have adjusted the way they practice and share music and, so far, it’s working. They will either arrive at a venue a day or so early to practice together, or Blomarz will fly to North Carolina and hop in the van to travel with Wall and Norris to the next performance.
The band is trying out different guitarists and drummers for the next little bit while they continue to produce and perform music across the country. Concert bookings have been sporadic, coming in fits and starts. But that’s ok, Wall said.
There’s a new music video set for filming, which will feature some Oxford images, she added.
And there are songs to write.
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