Interview: S.G. Goodman
By the time we get to talking about her guitar — the big, red 1969 hollow body Guild Starfire IV that she plays almost exclusively — S.G. Goodman is already loading up her amps to make the drive from her home in Murray, Kentucky, over to Nashville to perform at AmericanaFest. Days before, the singer/songwriter played at Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion, and after Nashville, she’s on to the Bourbon and Beyond Festival. (“In Louisville or Lexington,” she says. “You can tell how much I look at my schedule.”) Then it’s back to Nashville for another showcase at AmericanaFest just three days before she kicks off her tour at The Grey Eagle on Tuesday, Sept. 20.
Goodman works hard. So do a lot of musicians now that live music is back — you make hay when the sun shines. But talking to Goodman, listening to her lug her amps while fielding a phone interview, it begins to fall into place how much she’s put into a career that hasn’t allowed much time for rest since the 2020 release of her acclaimed debut album, Old Time Feeling.
Now with her second album, Teeth Marks, on the shelves, Goodman is returning to headline the stage that saw her opening for Madison Cunningham exactly 11 months prior. So when did she find time for another album in there?
SG Goodman: “The album, by the time you saw me at The Grey Eagle last time, was done. I wrote most of those songs either years before the pandemic, or during 2020, and I got in the studio early 2021. So I really pushed myself to have new material when the world opened back up. And luckily, I was able to accomplish that — and, luckily, it didn't kill me in the process.”
The material on Teeth Marks expands on Goodman’s meditations on home, neighbors, lovers, and life’s intricacies that made Old Time Feeling such an intimate, often tender introduction. She still delivers those songs in a remarkable voice that wavers between soft mournful breaks and high clear ethereal threads. But the new record also sets off into new territory of faster-paced rock grooves on songs like “All My Love Coming Back to Me” and “Work Until I Die.”
“I love being a songwriter and singing intimate tunes, but at the end of the day, you're also an entertainer and people kind of like to rock out at concerts, right? And I like to as well. So I did make a conscious decision to try to push myself with this album to have some more up-tempo songs, but not have that take away from the lyrics.”
Goodman’s lyrics often celebrate small observations, juxtaposed against big themes: “I think of you and your unswept floor, and how my shadow’s hue once loved to darken your door,” she sings on “Heart Swell.” On “Teeth Marks,” she offers a glimpse into a secluded, shared space: “When you left the bed after you bit my arm, a little souvenir where your teeth left marks.” The phrases sound like secret exchanges or even inside jokes, and she lets those small details ripple — like the tremolo in her voice and guitar — into the kind of slight nudges that can make listeners change their vantage point. Her songwriting approach, she says, is shaped greatly by her writing mentor: author and North Carolina native Dale Ray Phillips.
“He always told me and his other students, ‘You have a flashlight and you're in charge of what you shine that on for the reader.’ But one of the most important things he taught me is, ‘You need to write a scene. You're telling a story.’ So I think it’s [about] creating a scene and letting the people enter your world in a way that's tangible to them. If you don't do that, then how are they ever going to get in your world?”
At times, Goodman chooses to shine that flashlight on struggles of poverty, addiction, lack of services, and mental health care that are rampant in the South. You can hear the lamentation in her voice in the a capella, Appalachia-tinged “You Were Someone I Loved.”
It’s not the first, or likely the last, time she’s tread this ground. On Old Time Feeling’s “The Way I Talk,” she seethes about systems that crush rural farmers: “A tale as old as time to turn the poor against the poor.” On Teeth Marks, it’s right there in the title of the song “Work Until I Die,” a stomping grievance on an inescapable structure of predatory capitalism.
“It's kind of like writing this commentary on what I witness in the world, and I guess I would say that whatever I put out, that will be continuing. I can't say what my next material will be like but those are things that I feel I'm always noticing — something close to my heart, something I find important. It's always been meaningful and impactful to me.”
She also takes it on herself to challenge the way southerners are often regarded by society at large, rejecting the notion to lump an entire region and population into one stigma, and holding up progressive southerners that the country and organized political engines have often turned their backs on.
“I would say that [progressives have] always been present in the South and southerners have been aware of that. It's other people that seem to feel differently about who is actually residing in the South and who is doing good work or not. I feel like maybe, with certain attention that [political] races in the South have gotten in the last several years — and we're all still looking at Georgia — I think it's not the South that's waking up to itself; it's the rest of the country that's waking up to the South.”
Goodman still calls the area of Kentucky where she grew up and gathered many of these stories “home.” Aside from life on the road, she hasn’t lived more than an hour away from where she was born. That’s where she got her musical start, cutting demos with her bandmates, playing under the name The Savage Radley, and hitting the road for any gig she could find.
“I managed a juice bar here in Murray, and my shift started at 6 a.m., and as long as I could travel and get back between the hours of 4 p.m.-6 a.m., I could [travel] as far as I wanted. We played any place that would let us, and I've kind of cut my teeth playing in little bars or really noisy college bars. At that point, my only goal was: if I could make that bar go quiet for a minute, then I’ve done my job. That was kind of the way I tested to see if people resonated with my material.”
It was way back then, when she was around 18, that she found the Guild Starfire 4, the guitar that is as much a part of her stage presence as her suit and her untamable hair. And the way she tells it, in her hands, it could make for a pretty good song.
“I bought it off a man in California, and then years later, because that one's so old and honestly a little bit delicate, I started looking for a replacement to carry out on the road instead and leave that one at home. I found a ’78 walnut Starfire IV, and I don't like it as much. It sounds alright but it's not…you know, I played that red guitar for years and years and got used to it in every way, and it's my baby. And I guess I just kind of thought to myself, ‘I don't really have any business carrying this old guitar out on the road with me,’ but it’s kind of a shame to keep it in a closet.”
So the ’69 Starfire stays with her, despite her preference that it be set up in an alternate tuning and despite its predilection to not stay in that tuning.
“The one bad thing about that guitar, and most guitars of that era: they're not really meant to be tuned down a full step all the time. And it's really difficult not only on the guitar but on everybody else around me because it won't stay in tune hardly. So it's kind of a wild ride what I'm doing.”
If we’re lucky, Goodman will continue to clue us in on where that ride takes her and what she sees on the way.
IF YOU GO
Who: S.G. Goodman with Le Ren
When: Tuesday, Sept. 20, 8 p.m.
Where: The Grey Eagle, 185 Clingman Ave., thegreyeagle.com
Tickets: $15
(Photos by Ryan Hartley)
