Eliza Gilkyson calls her newest record, Songs From the River Wind, a “love letter to the Old West.” It’s a love that began with her father, Terry Gilkyson, a folk singer, composer and lyricist who wrote the popular song “The Bare Necessities” for the 1967 Disney film The Jungle Book.
“Everything that I love in this world — from the beauty of the natural world to the historical grandeur of the Old West and the appreciation and great pleasure of making music and writing songs — comes from my dad, Terry Gilkyson,” Eliza tells me about her father who died in 1999. “Whatever goals and joys I have reached in my life are because I stand on his shoulders. He was funny, magical, musical and rather androgynous. He was also complicated and uneven. But he sits at my foundation, for better or worse. I will always be grateful.”
Terry and his group the Easy Riders recorded original and traditional folk songs with a western flavor in the 1950s, and Eliza says he would have loved the Rifters, a Southwest band that sang backup harmonies on Songs From the River Wind.
“There’s a joy in this record and a sort of bittersweetness that I think we all feel when we come home,” says Eliza, who decided to sell her Austin, Texas, home during the pandemic and live full-time in her adobe house in Taos, New Mexico. “You can’t recreate your past, but you can remember and feel the people and events, the lives and loves lost that make up your history. This record is the story of my wanderings that led me down a windswept trail to a place that I could finally call home.”
Eliza and her husband Robert Jensen moved full-time to Taos during the pandemic. The new album’s songs, such as “Wind River and You,” “Colorado Trail,” “Hill Behind This Town,” “Before the Great River Was Tamed” and “At the Foot of the Mountain,” are full of geographic references. “I had no idea that the door to my past would open for me just by living in New Mexico again,” Gilkyson says. “There are so many memories flooding in of the years when I wandered the West as a traveling musician and even farther back to my childhood adventures in Wyoming and New Mexico. I was overwhelmed with the recollections of the iconic characters and loved ones — now gone — who influenced me early on and the sweeping landscape that had always been my sanctuary. I wanted to make a record that captured this feeling.
Gilkyson says two songs on the new album, “The Farthest End” and “Charlie Moore,” are among the best ones she has written throughout her career. “The Farthest End” is a portrait of a cowboy she knew years ago in Wyoming, and “Charlie Moore” is about an iconic western mountain man who grew up with the Shoshone tribe and met Gilkyson when she visited a ranch as a child.
“Both songs tell good stories and leave listeners enough room for their own imagination without me getting in the way too much,” she remarks.
Another song Gilkyson considers as one of her best is “Reunion” on 2018’s Secularia album.
. “The record is a collection of my secular hymns from over the years,” she says. “The Tosca String Quartet played on it. It is an emotional ride for me — the story of 26 migrant Nigerian teenage girls trying to cross over to Italy in a rubber raft that did not make it from Libya. It was a real tragedy and was in the news for barely a day. I wanted to give them a proper eulogy.”
Gilkyson was one of many performers on the bill in late May at the 50th Annual Kerrville Folk Festival in Kerrville, Texas. I ask her what were the best and most influential concerts she attended.
“I remember hearing Ian and Sylvia in the mid-’60s at the Ash Grove (a defunct Los Angeles club) on Melrose Avenue and thinking that would be my life and direction someday,” Gilkyson recalls. “I saw Jose Feliciano at the Golden Bear (a defunct club in Huntington Beach, California) before he was discovered. Peter Tork of the future Monkees was the dishwasher there, and he would let my sister and me in through the back door, because we were underage and he knew who our dad was. It was really an electric feeling being that close to the artists and feeling the music just pouring out of them. I always loved that communal club vibe, like we are going somewhere together, and this is the human experience I want to tap into. I also saw Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles and was taken by the early rock concerts, but the intimacy of the folk clubs really got me.”
Gilkyson’s first two albums — 1987’s Pilgrims and 1989’s Legends of Rainmaker — were in the folk-pop vein, and her brother, Tony Gilkyson, a member of Lone Justice and X, played acoustic guitar on her second record. I ask Eliza what are the three best albums she has ever listened to.
“Wow, I guess Choices by George Jones, just the singing on that record,” she responds. “I also love that old Nashville country production — a lot of instruments fading in and out and perfectly orchestrated. And then that voice!”
Gilkyson’s other two “best” albums are Mark Knopfler’s Shangri-La and Tracker.
“I can’t get enough of that guy — his guitar, his tone, his voice, his songwriting,” she exclaims. “Top of the heap in my book!”