AMY HELM has quietly become one of the most treasured multi-generational live musicians and best kept secrets as a singer, songwriter and performer. Her critically acclaimed album, “Silver City,” draws inspiration from varied stories of womanhood in all of its complexities: a young fan struggling with substance abuse, a rural ancestor who was married off, a teen reeling from her first heartache and Helm’s own life as a single mother and hard-touring singer. The songs blend the folk twang of Helm’s childhood with gospel and soul.
Amy carries a storied “musician’s musician” reputation. The grammy-award-winning producer and daughter of Levon Helm has an extensive musical pedigree. Amy embodies an authentic live musical tradition in her solo work and with the Helm Family Midnight Ramble, which carries on her father’s legacy.
About Amy
Photo © Ebru Yildiz, 2021
When creating her fourth album, the soulful and reflective Silver City, Amy Helm was guided by her North Star: women’s voices. “Women whispering, singing, shouting their stories - speaking the truth. I wanted to dig into that inherited narrative and reach for what I could.” The epistolary anthology is a collection of conversations that travel through time, exploring and celebrating womanhood in all its complexities. Silver City blends the folk twang of Helm’s childhood with gospel and soul, drawing inspiration from varied stories: the life of Helm’s great-grandmother, the story of a young fan struggling with substance abuse, Helm’s own life as a single mother and hard-touring singer.
The album was recorded at Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock, New York, with two core groups of musicians, both anchored by producer Josh Kaufman. Helm notes that this project brought out a different approach in her vocals. “Every time I've made a record, I’ve tried to give my strongest performance,” she says. “This time, I wasn’t thinking about the performance. I was rooted in the stories.”
Silver City began with a story that didn’t end up making the album. Helm wrote “Young Katie” to a young fan of hers who died of an overdose. “I began the song as sort of a letter to her,” she says, “and it just started to flow; the words weren’t even coming from me. And then the rest of the songs started to come through.” Helm says. The songs on this record are like letters, written to younger versions of Helm, or to other women she’s known. She continues, “‘Young Katie’ didn't fit conversationally with the rest of them, but it was the muse for this album.”
One crucial moment is “If I Was King,” a partly fictionalized narrative about Helm’s great-grandmother. “Her story was lost to the family,” she says. “They were dirt poor sharecroppers and she started having kids when she was 14. She had married this fire-and-brimstone preacher, who banished her from home and from her children.” Amy, wishing to hear her voice and story, wrote “If I Was King” as a rumination on the ways women have long been told by someone else how to live their lives. It was after finishing this song that she began to see this album as a series of letters: “All of these songs were me speaking to somebody—either reaching out and asking questions, or asking them to reach back to me.”
Several songs address the realities of her immediate family. “‘Silver City’ was painful to write, about the grief of divorce,” she says. “I don't think I could have written that song til I was way on the other side of it. I have a really healthy, lovely blended family and my ex-husband is a really dear friend of mine now. It's a very cool thing that we all worked hard at, and that I’m really proud of.”
“Mount Guardian” is a close examination of single parenting. “I was by myself for upwards of 10 years,” says Helm, “running myself ragged on the road, getting home at three in the morning and grabbing a box of mac and cheese from the gas station for the next night's dinner, waking up at seven and doing it again. I felt victorious any time I got my kids to school on time with lunch in hand. When I look back on that now, it was such a beautiful time, but also hectic and intense. I think, ‘How the hell did I even do that?’ Honestly, I think this whole record is about different ways that I’ve tried to keep pressing on.”
Elsewhere on Silver City, Helm opens up her lens to consider trauma, loss, and human frailty. “The song ‘Amen, Anyway’ is about a lot of things,” she says, “but it's very much about being paralyzed with the fear of not being good enough and lacking faith in ourselves. It’s also about being surrounded by people who handle that with drugs and
alcohol—it's about losing people to that.”
With Silver City, Amy Helm shares the lessons she’s gathered from a remarkable life as an artist, mother, daughter, woman, as someone who has worked, evolved, and persevered. “No one talks about the beauty of age,” she says. “Shame and fear are so common to so many of us, and to get through that and feel ourselves change is the most
beautiful thing about getting older. It's incredible to look back at things and celebrate how we’ve survived.” With this album, Helm embraces this strength of transformation through her powerful, story-rooted performances.
These stories, complex and real, show Amy as she is. Reflected in the illustration on the Silver City cover art, Amy is surrounded by the messes her kids make, her cast-off high-heeled boots, and a crooked crown, but she’s also where she should be: on her throne, gazing into the future.
