Driving with my dad somewhere outside of Louisville back around 1970, we passed a snapping turtle on the side of a sleepy spur of highway. He stopped, I picked it up—it wasn’t a large one, but then, neither was I—and carried it back down to the roadside pond it must have wandered out of. Picking up a snapping turtle is both scary and thrilling; as long as you hold it right, its powerful beak can’t quite reach you. I remembered that scene for the first time in many years while listening to the third single from S.G. Goodman’s mesmerizing new album, Planting by the Signs.
“Snapping Turtle” opens on a scene a lot like the one it made me remember, except that the young farm girl is driving by herself “long before the legal age” and she’s not the first one to have found the turtle; it’s surrounded by some “low down kids” taking turns whacking it with a stick. I remember kids like that, too, so I appreciate full well why she asks for a turn, turns the stick on the kids with “the wrath of God himself”, and places the rescued creature in the back of her truck. Planting by the Signs is full of this kind of unexpected physical and emotional reversal: equal parts scary and thrilling.
A ferocious-looking snapping turtle (image by Josh Bovender) graces the cover of Planting by the Signs, with its powerful claws, razor-sharp beak, and tough shell well represented. However, you can also glimpse the soft vulnerability of the rest of the body, pinned vertically to a yellow background, far from the concealing mud where snappers are most at home, lurking until suitable prey blunders within reach of their jaws. “Oh, small town is where my mind gets stuck,” Goodman sings about the far western Kentucky bottomland where she grew up and where her extended family still lives.
Like all of the best folk music, these songs plumb emotional depths. However, as we know from the title of S.G. Goodman’s last album, they also have teeth and they’re not afraid to stick a beating on the world—or the audience—they live off, suffer from, and love.
Planting by the Signs is shot through with flora and fauna, but its vision makes no hard divisions between indoors and outdoors, animal and human, or nature and culture. It’s rooted equally, writes Goodman about the album, in the close-on deaths of her “little dog” Howard, companion of 13 years, and her longtime neighbor, mentor, and father figure Michael Harmon. Both losses appear in key songs on the album—the latter especially in “Michael Told Me” and the former especially in the epic closer, “Heaven Song“.
They resonate throughout the record, at times elegiacally, at times with irreverent humor, at times angrily, and always as irresolvably ambivalent as everything in S.G. Goodman’s understanding of the world, the South, Kentucky, and her hometown of Hickman, along the Mississippi River in the southwesternmost county in the state. It’s a region as redolent of the Delta (unlike the Appalachian East, the area around Hickman is almost a third African American) as it is of the bluegrass state, even as it belongs to neither of them.
In a 2022 profile for The Bitter Southerner by Silas House, Kentucky’s first openly gay poet laureate, from the foothills of Appalachia, visits S.G. Goodman, who has publicly struggled with coming out in the deeply religious and conservative community that raised her, in her home in Murray, about an hour’s drive east of Hickman. “A magnificent stuffed bobcat is perched atop the piano in her living room,” he observes. “She runs her hand down its back as if it needs comforting, expressing her remorse at having shot it as a 14-year-old. ‘I was deer hunting, and it was coming right for me. I still feel bad about it.'”
Like the songs on Planting by the Signs, the memories stored in that bobcat pack an emotional wallop. And they do so because Goodman can live at once within a world in which shooting a wildcat is something that could happen in the course of your day and a world in which an award-winning novelist comes to interview you in a house where its body graces your grand piano—and stubbornly refuse to concede that these worlds should or could ever be disentangled.
Planting by the Signs takes its title not from the animals or the deaths that lurk within its depths, but from a long-running series of articles in Foxfire magazine, a quarterly begun in 1966 to record the traditional lifestyle, crafts, and skills of southern Appalachia collected initially by students in North Georgia. First published in 1972, the compilations that became the Foxfire books were essential resources in the back-to-the-land movement in the early 1970s. I remember those books in my house, too, growing up; my teenage older sister swore by them, right around when she decided to take up the dulcimer and immerse herself in everything Kentucky, an outlier in my Louisville family whose minds mainly were elsewhere.
According to S.G. Goodman, ‘planting by the signs’, covered in the original 1972 volume, “is an ancient practice, where it’s believed that because the moon affects water, that during certain phases of the moon, there are more suited conditions to do things than others. For me, what’s weird is that it wasn’t talked about so plainly growing up, but my family actually held a lot of these beliefs. We just didn’t say, like, ‘These are the ancient beliefs of planting by the signs.’ I was really just intrigued by this belief system, the fact that I’ve heard it circling around me all my life, and was really interested in its origins.”
Rather than “a ‘true’ concept album,” she describes Planting by the Signs more as a collection of “hints I’ve included to a concept that is bigger than ourselves,” stories that will call us back to an embodied existence within nature and that we can carry into an unknowable future.
S.G. Goodman’s family came from sharecroppers, and she was raised on a farm “hard on bottom land where only crops should grow”, as she puts it in the brooding, sublime “Snapping Turtle“—neither the Appalachian hills of Greil Marcus’ old, weird America nor the central Kentucky of bluegrass fame, but the unclaimed, unsung farmland east of the Mississippi and west of just about everything else. Planting by the Signs aims both to reclaim the traditions Goodman grew up in and to record the pain of that same life.
In a 2022 podcast, she recalls being “totally traumatized by corn” as a girl working the acre planted by her father for her to harvest and sell to pay for school supplies: “It’s terrible, I hated it. … It tears up your hands and your face.” It’s a world hard enough to have led her to open her first solo album with a suicide note (“Space and Time“) whose plaintive refrain almost sobs, “I never wanna leave this world / without saying I love you,” in words that encompass family, enemies, god and congregation, and the space and time that bind them.
I don’t know if I’d say there’s less anger on the new album than on 2022’s stellar Teeth Marks. Still, there’s more humor, more nature, more determination to weave everything together into something she can live with—even when that living includes a stuffed wildcat on the piano and the heavy weight of the loss of two close friends and companions.
Since at least the days of Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, Kentucky has punched above its weight in roots folk and alt-country (not to mention punk, postpunk, and indie), leaving the glitzier pop veins to Nashville. S.G. Goodman borrows storytelling and wry humor from Muhlenberg County’s own John Prine (no matter that he was Chicago-raised) and darkness from Louisville native Will Oldham’s Bonnie “Prince” Billy (who contributes vocals on “Nature’s Child“, passing by enduring elders like Freakwater along the way.
She grew up on Top 40 country-pop and spent six and a half months in Nashville, but it’s also easy to hear her father’s love of classic rock in this music. S.G. Goodman sings mostly originals, and is highly selective in the songs she covers, including Townes van Zandt (“Lungs“), Waylon Jennings, Prine’s “All the Best“, and union activist Florence Reese’s “Which Side Are You On“, written in 1931 during a violent struggle between miners and mine owners known as the Harlan County War, and popularized by Pete Seeger.
Reese borrowed the tune for her song from a traditional Baptist hymn. Those hymns, and other church songs, Goodman recalls, were her primary musical training, absorbed through a body attending church three times a week and the source, she suggests, of the signature tremolo in her singing voice.
That quaver also has a lot of mournful mid-1970s Neil Young in it, too, especially On the Beach. Listen to Young’s unhurriedness, a drug-fueled refusal to rush the song that Goodman naturalizes into Planting by the Signs, everything in its own time, like the way she sings “Oooo oh yippee yo yippee yee,” refusing to speed up the lazily lolloping guitar or her gently flowing voice. However, while Young’s voice is wracked by fast living and the weariness of fame, S.G. Goodman’s tuneful tremor packs warmth and solidarity into a fatigue earned from birth.
That same wariness of pop-rock rhythms equally encompasses the stormy drones of Louisville post-rock icons Slint, whose Spiderland packs coiled intensity all the more terrifying in its refusal ever to surface. In Murray, where S.G. Goodman moved to attend college in 2007 and still lives, she found bandmembers in an indie scene strongly influenced by the Velvet Underground, Pavement, and post-rock, doubtless including Slint and the bands they went on to play with, including Will Oldham’s Palace Brothers, Tortoise, and others.
It’s the backbone of “Snapping Turtle“; Goodman may not bury her voice or her lyrics in the mix the way Brian McMahon did, but she refuses to modulate her range, sweeten her delivery, or break the trance of memory. “Heat Lightning” similarly revises McMahon’s monologues, in the voices of elders Clyde Charles, Mary Overbey, and Myrtle Turner over a moody instrumental outro.
There was a period, S.G. Goodman recounts, during the prolonged immersion in the church that initially sheltered her from needing to deal with the expectations of a heterosexual world and eventually refused to accept her out of those same expectations, when she gravitated to Calvinism and the question of predetermination. Planting by the signs feels like a more deeply realized form of the same need for order in the world, but without a loss of agency or freedom.
One form of ordering is pruning, which S.G. Goodman describes as “a major theme in Planting by the Signs, but as an actual act, to prune – you have the potential of killing the thing that you’re pruning or giving it new form momentarily for it to grow back even stronger and more healthy.”
On the album’s penultimate, title song, the ancient practices of acting according to nature’s steady rhythms become a metaphor for nurturing love by planting and cutting back to make it stronger: “Planting our love according to the signs.” Sung with bandmate and co-producer Matthew Rowan, the song both charts Michael’s and Howard’s deaths (“The sun is sinking / in the cold dark night”) and traces their role in healing the two-year rupture with Rowan that Michael had assured Goodman would happen, the subject of the moving, country-spanning single “Michael Told Me“.
“Trace my hands across constellations,” the pair duets, “On your skin in the night / Star gazing ’til the afternoon / When the time is right.” Guest Eddy Dunlap’s gently twanging steel guitar reminds us that country music is always about dealing with loss; S.G. Goodman’s country opens up love to a broader meaning than the familiar failed romance and plants it resolutely back into a natural order that manages to spring forth even on tour somewhere around Los Angeles.
There’s certainly room in Goodman’s vision for more conventional pop, too; she opens the album with a pair of classic singles, another part of her “goal of expanding my approach with more modern elements than I used in previous recordings”. “Satellite” builds a winning mid-tempo trot out of a simple drumbeat and some pared-down but booming guitar chords (co-written with Matt Rowan).
The contrast between “wishing on a satellite” (“What happens when as a society we look to screens for guidance and not the natural world”) makes for a familiar structure underpinned by a yearning guitar and an equally familiar assertion of country over city: “Kingdom come, kingdom come / Talking shit and having fun.” It’s the only time on the album that S.G. Goodman resolves tension into a lecture, but that lecture poses a thesis that ties together the rooted tracks that follow, a global crisis looming over the local knots.
“Fire Sign“, as the title resonates with Firefox, lays out the wisdom of “the old folks” without fully letting go of the other half of the vision, “who’ll put the fire out.” Although younger folk will likely hear in ‘Firefox’ the not-for-profit Internet browser, the project’s title refers to “a local form of bioluminescence caused by fungi on decaying wood.” It’s a curious revisiting of Adele‘s 2010 hit song “Rolling in the Deep“, which opens on the image of “a fire starting in my heart.”
The chorus of “Fire Sign” repurposes Adele’s vengeful regret (“We could have had it all”) as a willing embrace of task and tradition: “Living like a fire sign / An old story keeper.” The two songs’ paired black-and-white videos alternate the band in the studio with infrared footage of deer, possums, raccoons, coyotes, foxes, and owls.
Where “Satellite” shows only the nocturnal deer captured by video technology in an unnatural, weirdly horror-movie vibe of glowing white eyes, “Fire Sign” brackets the infrared with daytime footage of deer grazing, as if asserting the coming shift from warning to the decision of “living like a fire sign” rather than “living like the sun don’t shine / On the same dog’s ass everyday.” Like many earworms, “Satellite” and “Fire Sign” are at once syrupy and irresistible.
It’s a relief to be grounded back in the darker, folkier world of “I Can See the Devil“, “Snapping Turtle“, “Michael Told Me“, and “Solitaire“, the slowed down, twisting stories that showcase Goodman’s elemental voice, heightened by a production (by Goodman, Drew Vandenberg, and Rowan) that leaves in the “squeaks”, “voices”, and “actual human noises” of the recording process. Cracked and tremulous yet a deeply sonorous balm, S.G. Goodman’s voice makes a perfect vehicle that is both of its time and space (“Spoonbread, butter, and some Karo”), wise beyond its years, and out of time in the way of all transcendent folk music.
It’s the world the Band strove for, and sometimes reached, especially when Richard Manuel took over the vocals on songs like his and Bob Dylan‘s “Tears of Rage” or Robbie Robertson’s “Rockin’ Chair“. It may be a trap to think about authenticity in music, but if anyone has invoked, earned, and struggled to keep that label, it’s Goodman.
Two other standout songs, “I’m in Love” and “Heaven Song“, capture Dylan in two of my favorite personae. The lapidary, playful “I’m in Love” reminds me of those rare songs when Dylan let himself slip out of irony, cynicism, and bitterness, and live in the moment: “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (John Wesley Harding), “Buckets of Rain” (Blood on the Track), “Po’ Boy” (“Love and Theft”) have the grace to know when a song just has to be.
“I’m in Love” has another easily loping rhythm, and S.G. Goodman’s voice does wonders without needing to bow or soar; it just breaks more or less to wring every bittersweet pleasure out of the bemused horror of being dumb in love. Just in case we thought she’s fixing Firefox in some mythic past, she knowingly rhymes, “The moon is right now for cutting my hair” with “I’m checking out Wal-Mart collections of underwear”, achieving, blowing up, and just waving away the synthesis the album’s opening songs had cried for.
The official video includes a brief studio outtake where Goodman repeats the lines “I’ve been trespassing on my neighbors / Swimming naked in their pools,” adding with a snort “buck naked” and “My wife thinks I’m funny,” a subtle reminder that love as a lesbian (and not only) in rural western Kentucky, is something to take even less for granted than usual.
“Heaven Song”, the nine-minute album closer, plays like a cross between Dylan’s “Desolation Row” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” sung by a standup comic with a deadpan delivery and the power and range of a pop diva. “At some point in my light trip,” she recalls, “I started singing the line ‘Maybe if I see it, then I’ll want it.'”
Like Dylan’s or Young’s best drug-inspired lyrics, S.G. Goodman says the song came to her on a mushroom trip, in particular the chorus, answering the question implicit in the title: “And maybe if I see it / then I’ll want it.” It starts as a road song, gaining heft from the absent presence of both Michael and Howard in the opening lines. Since Heaven is her destination and since it’s imbued with death, the song also recalls the paradox of “Space and Time”—a track about both committing suicide and choosing life.
The journey moves from the Malibu next door to Heaven’s Gate (although I could swear at least once I’ve heard that “Heaven’s” as “Hell’s”), picking up allegorical hitchhikers along the way: starting with Love, moving through Faith, Hope, Sin, and Jesus before picking up Death the night her dog Howard dies, followed by the twin brothers Real and Authenticity, and finally opening the passenger door to the Universe.
It’s a vision as intimately expansive as the album’s as a whole, its details as finely observed as its existential questions are pressing, fully earning the starburst knocking at heaven’s door at its climax. There’s no answer at the gate, only a return to the smalltown lines it started with: “Maybe if I see it / I’ll want it” and “Bought an old Malibu from the guy next door.” In today’s world, I guess, those are the signs we plant by. With a voice like this singing lyrics like these, despite the poor condition of the road, it’s a trip I’ll be repeating, whether working through the pain of the past or trying to imagine a viable path into an uncertain future.