When I get on the phone with Tennessee-born, Kentucky-raised singer, songwriter and guitarist S. G. Goodman, she’s in New York doing press for her new album Teeth Marks, out June 3 via Verve Forecast. She tells me she likes visiting the city, but we talked about some of our shared experiences as fellow native Tennesseans, which include hanging out at the legendary Boyette’s Dining Room in Tiptonville, Tenn., near Reelfoot Lake. As she reminds me, Boyette’s fried catfish and old-school onion rings are nonpareil.
Goodman is an artist of this particular moment. She’s a Southerner who lives in the small college town of Murray, Ky., where she began her career in earnest. She’s queer and politically progressive, and her songwriting looks at how history and the landscape she grew up in sit in a complex relationship with the idea of pragmatic change in the South. Goodman was born in 1988 in Union City, Tenn., and grew up in nearby Hickman, Ky. She sang in church throughout her youth, and started her career leading a band, The Savage Radley, which she says was simply a vehicle for her songwriting. After signing with Verve Forecast in Nov. 2019, she released her debut album under her own name, Old Time Feeling, in 2020.
With nods to post-punk, Southern-fried gospel-soul and the skewed guitar pop exemplified by The Replacements, Pavement and Big Star, Old Time Feeling is a singular debut by a master songwriter and bandleader. The title track features a timeless post-punk guitar riff and another guitar figure that provides melodic thrills. In the song, Goodman pointedly says the old-time feeling isn’t what we’re living in right now. Like the rest of the album, it’s spiritually uplifting, and brilliant rock ’n’ roll.
Earlier this year, country singer Tyler Childers performed a cover of Goodman’s Old Time Feeling song “Space and Time” in a livestream for Healing Appalachia. Like Goodman, he delivered it in a high, carefully modulated voice that carries the weight of both insurgent punk and Southern church singing. Childers’ superb cover is evidence of the high quality of Goodman’s songwriting, and the songs she devised for Teeth Marks bear witness to her talent. Written with Matt Rowan, “Work Until I Die” is minimalist post-punk about being trapped in the rhythm of work forever. It’s a rueful examination of the joys of being a working stiff.
The record is out on Friday, and Goodman and her band will celebrate the release Saturday at Third Man Records. Goodman, who was slightly under the weather on a beautiful afternoon in New York, comes across in conversation as sharp — and funny — as you would expect from such a canny songwriter.
Growing up in Western Kentucky, you were near the edge of the blues landscape that stretches down to Mississippi. How did growing up in that region influence your music?
I just love going down to [Clarksdale, Mississippi] to Red’s [Lounge] and eating hot ham and cheese from Abe’s Bar-B-Q at the crossroads. That’s the only thing I’ve ever done at the crossroads. I never sold my soul, but I ate a good hot ham and cheese. That’s why I’m still so bad on the guitar.
I’ve read some interviews where you talk about the process of songwriting. You’ve said really interesting things about not getting too attached to things until they really start working. How do you view songwriting?
I’m a big believer in editing, maybe to a fault. It’s kind of hard to decide when a song is done. The only way I’ve learned how to put down the pen is to ask myself the question, “Have I said everything I wanted to say or needed to say?” It’s not necessarily hard to make that call, but you know, I don’t even try to claim to be some sort of songwriting factory. I love doing co-writes and stuff, and [with] that kind of mentality I can really churn something out. But when it comes to writing songs that are personal to me, I’m OK if a song takes years and years to ever come about. I just really believe in the idea that a song is gonna go about its business. I just put my faith in that, and I don’t push it.
“Dead Soldiers,” on your new album, is complex, and maybe a little ambiguous.
That’s a great example of letting a song reveal what it’s supposed to be over time. The title “Dead Soldiers” was not the first thing I wrote for that song. The first thing that came to me about that song was the very first line, which is “He poured gasoline on the flowers.” I didn’t know that that song was gonna have any sort of dead-soldier theme or what that even meant until I was cleaning up a house show with an older man in Statesville, North Carolina, and I knew that this song was going to be written about my experience witnessing a friend struggle with alcoholism.
I was kinda hung up on how to write about that without it having to explicitly say something in a cheesy way about struggling with addiction. When I was cleaning up this house show with this gentleman, every time he would put a spent bottle in the garbage bag, he would say, “Another dead soldier.” I had never heard an empty bottle be referred to as that before that moment. I thought it was pretty interesting, and I ran upstairs and got this little notebook I carry, and over the next months it opened up another world for me. Without letting the song sit for a while and waiting for life to reveal what everything else should be about, impatience might have taken the song.
Teeth Marks seems a shade more produced than Old Time Feeling. How did you approach recording your new album?
I kind of like to beat a song to death and demo it out and sit with it in my own way for a while before I go into the studio. Because of the pandemic, I wasn’t able to do that with Teeth Marks. All of the creative direction, I was having to interpret that to others just from my head. There were lots of moments I would have to point to on-the-phone recordings that I’d done on my own, to try to get everybody on the same page as to what I was trying to accomplish sonically. So that ate up a lot of time. I spent probably a third of the time recording Old Time Feeling than I did with Teeth Marks, because we came in there [for Old Time Feeling] and were so prepared for what I wanted to accomplish. With Teeth Marks it wasn’t possible, so a lot of things that happened I had to give up to studio magic, and really lean on [the band’s] patience as to whether or not they were the type of musicians that could do a take 10 times to meet my expectations.
