An Interview with Becca Mancari: Welcome Here
We are getting pretty excited to be back at Fort Adams in a few weeks and wanted to connect with some artists playing can’t-miss sets. Becca Mancari will be performing two of those sets: once as a solo artist and once as part of Bermuda Triangle, the group she’s in with Jesse Lafser and Brittany Howard. Becca released Good Woman last year, and it continues to be an album that I go back to again and again; there is such incredible songwriting and beautiful, restrained playing on that record. If you haven’t had the pleasure yet, give it some spins. We got to chat with Becca about where she is now in relation to those songs, her excitement and anticipation in shifting to a new phase of her career, and ongoing thoughts about how we might cultivate a truly inclusive musical community. Read on, friends.
RLR: We last talked right as Good Woman was released. And I love talking to people when they’ve been able to take their songs on the road, because they often find little corners or unanticipated aspects of the songs and the songs evolve and breathe. So I’m wondering if that’s true for you, and what you’ve found.
BM: The thing about right now for me is I am already working towards the next record. So we’ve been incorporating new songs into the sets that are not on Good Woman. But in terms of the songs that are on that record, I’ve always thought of “Kitchen Dancing” as my little dark horse song. It has more of storyline format [and] the other songs are a little vague, so I’ve been really enjoying doing that song. It’s piano-driven on the record, and we don’t have any keys live, so it’s been fun to hash that song out and make it feel really intimate. Probably that song has made me excited about playing it over and over again.
RLR: It seems like there are two schools of thought about bringing out new stuff on the road: don’t ever do it and on the other hand people who feel like it’s an essential part of the process. Where do you fall, and what does playing new stuff do for you?
BM: It’s so nerve wracking for me right now because I’m in this weird place now–when I first released music, nobody cared. Nobody knew who I was and I could do anything, and I knew that I could, and it was very freeing and exciting. Of course, I wanted people to like it, but I was just like, “It will hit or it won’t.” Now, enough people are listening that I think it’s that age-old second record blues, where it’s like, “God dang it, am I going to be able to do it the right way?”
I also get bored and I have to play new songs. And my band does too; they’ve been with me so long, and they just crave creativity. I’m the worst, though, we’ll be at a show, and I’ll say “All right, guys, we’re playing that new song,” because I like keeping them on their toes. But we’re a better band when we invent on the spot. They have got mad at me a couple times. [Laughs]
BM: Well, I’ve always operated with a very strong core of people playing with me; and it’s interesting because that’s about to change. It’s hard, but it’s also this transition time where I’m testing myself too. Some of the guys, I’ve known since I was 19. That’s a long time. And just because of life, and marriage, and moving on, I’m going to enter into the hired-band world. And that’s going to be really different–kind of exciting, in a way, because it’s my creative thing, so there will be less argument. It’s always hard, because I’m a solo artist, but it was like a band environment for the last year. My drummer is staying with me, though, and my girlfriend calls him my son; she says, “He’s going to be with you forever.” And I love him, so that’s good.
RLR: Over the past year, you’ve had runs with your band but also a slew of solo dates. How do you approach the songs solo and how is that lift different for you?
BM: It’s definitely something that’s new for me, but also old, because that’s how I started years and years ago–it was just me and a guitar. So I recently went on a tour with Joseph. I had been touring as a duo, but I had been having my own internal battle of: Are these songs good? Are the new songs good? Are you able to stand up alone by yourself and create something that people want to pay money for and hear? My girlfriend said, “Becca, you have have to believe it for yourself, and then people will too.” And it’s been amazing.
I’m doing a couple of Shovels & Rope shows just by myself. And I’m getting into the pedal world and I’ve been having so much fun creating sounds on my own. It’s such a powerful thing. I was playing with my friend Alynda from Hurray for the Riff Raff a couple days ago and she was talking to me about how she want to get into programming her own drum machine. I do that for Bermuda Triangle, it’s my job to run the drum machine, and it’s this whole other world: creating sound by yourself and then having the backdrop for people to come in and play is pretty amazing and is something a lot of us have forgotten how to do, because we’ve had bands for so long.
RLR: At Newport, you have a set for yourself and a set with Bermuda Triangle. Can you talk about you approach each of those projects?
BM: This is the first time I’ll be on a Bermuda Triangle tour and not literally flying to go to my own tour. And when I go from that to that, it’s very difficult. There’s a level of excitement that’s there, and, obviously, I’m still winning over people. That’s just the way that it is now. But there’s nothing like playing your own music and having creative liberty to say: this is what I want.
When you’re in a band, even though it’s just three of us, we definitely are different in the way we think about music, but at our core, we have the same belief in the art of it, and that’s why it works for the three of us. But it’s just so much fun and I am so ready and excited for that day. We come as a crew, it’s like a party bus, and the shows are supposed to be fun. So I’ll get to do my moody thing in the morning and then I get to play with my friends.
RLR: Bermuda Triangle has released just three songs, so I imagine developing a set list is pretty exciting. Can you talk about how you and Brittany and Jesse think about developing a set list together?
BM: It’s always so last minute what we’re going to do. And honestly, the last song we released, Jesse was in the studio, and the song was going to be on her record. We sing on each other’s stuff–I just released a version of “Golden” with the girls on it, but it’s under my name. So, she was just like, “You know, it sounds so good, and it doesn’t fit for my record, so I want to give the song to [Bermuda Triangle].” And who knows? We still don’t know if we’ll ever put out a real, physical copy of things. It’s very much about the moment. It’s from a genuine place, because it comes out of the moment. And we have fans now–we have a song called “Bermuda Triangle” and people love it and they ask us when they can get it. So I don’t know. Maybe we’ll do it; we’ll see.
BM: What I love about this band, and what makes sense to me is that it’s not about perfectionism, it’s about this really true, creative joy, and it’s really connecting with people. When you’re open about where you’re at, it makes people feel very empowered, and loved. We always have people come up and say, “I cried my eyes out the whole show, I laughed, I had the best time.” And we’re like, “Cool, same with us!” And that’s the whole point.
RLR: In our last conversation, we talked a good bit about representation in Americana music and it was right around the time that Rolling Stone published a really great piece on the subject. And the Americana Awards nominations come out this year and there’s one person of color in the nominated categories. Where are you now with all of this, and what do you think needs to happen to actually make the supposedly big tent of Americana music really reflect the actual diversity and variety of people and music?
BM: It’s such an interesting place to be in my life, in the world, and just being a human, the question is really being put to us right now: what does it mean to be a human? What does it mean to be a feminist? That doesn’t feel like the right word for me right now. I’m learning a lot and I don’t know if you’ve read anything by James Baldwin?
RLR: Yes, totally
BM: OK. So I’ve been reading a lot of stuff by him and there’s this book The Last Interviews and there are two that are so interesting to me: one is with this African-American writer who is grilling him really hard on representation there and there was another one with a queer writer who was asking him about the gay community and was grilling him too! And it was this constant grill on him, and it was so beautiful the way he responded. It was very powerful to me as someone who is a person of color and is queer and how I identify and reconcile these things. One of his answers was: “What about a world where we are human? And you won’t ask this question of me, but [also] this is not the question I ask myself everyday.” And that is just so beyond where the world is, and that’s why he was so special and rare.
Something that has been really important to me has been Alynda telling me: reclaim your Puerto Rican heritage; it was taken from you. And my brother, my nineteen year-old beautiful brother, who is an incredible artist and is going to school for that, he has been very passionate about going back to Puerto Rico, has been saying, “You need to embrace your heritage. You are Puerto Rican; look at you, your body is Puerto Rican, your look is, it’s in you.” And we didn’t get that pride [growing up] because we were raised that it would be easier to be white; and my mom, you know, had a really hard childhood. She was called dirty, she was called spic; she was in a migrant family. She just wanted us to be safe and to be OK, and she literally lost her heritage. And that’s happened to a lot of Puerto Ricans and a lot of people in color in general.
I feel like for me, even with my music, there’s this whole other world that I didn’t think I could be a part of. And I got so lucky recently–I played Summerfest and got to see Janelle Monáe. It just shook me. She had this similar mentality as James Baldwin. She’s a queer woman of color and she was so affirming to the crowd and so welcoming to everyone: pointing out people in the crowd and being like: “You’re welcome here.” That, to me, is the next level of enlightenment and the revolution of music and the power we have as artists.
RLR: Artists get asked a lot today about the role of artists in these horrific times and it sounds like what you’re gesturing to with Janelle Monáe is this role of calling people in; this role of invitation
BM: Oh, yeah. … Especially the freaks! That’s my family! That’s who I travel with. [Laughs]
RLR: So, last question, and it’s a little random. Langhorne Slim was doing this thing on twitter for a while where he’d just name a song and call it the best song ever. No explanation about why or anything. And a few minutes later or a day later, there’d be a different best song ever. So, that’s the question: what’s the best song ever for you, right now?
BM: This is an old song, but I’ve been listening to it a lot: “Fruits of My Labor,” by Lucinda Williams. It’s kind of mind-blowing.
Good Woman was one of my favorite albums of 2017 and I am so very excited to see Becca perform at Newport. She’s performing on the Museum Stage on Sunday and then will also be with Bermuda Triangle. These are must-see sets for me. Come along and you’ll see why.
Photo Credit: Zachary Gray