Nebraska resident Hope Dunbar is living proof that there are classic Americana and roots songwriters tucked away in small town America, far from the bohemian enclaves of East Nashville and Austin. Her latest album, SWEETHEARTLAND, is an outstanding compilation of songs. It is impressive how these songs came to life: her only real opportunity to write is when her husband is at work and the children at school. She has successfully navigated the pressures of home life while keeping her artistic vocation alive and kicking. We spoke with the upbeat Hope recently via Zoom to get the back story to the album and her passion as a songwriter.
How are things in Seward County, Nebraska?
Things are good. I live in a small town called Utica. We have eight hundred people and we are actually called a village. We don’t have a lot of villages in the United States but Nebraska is very rural, a lot of farms and a lot of ranches in the west, so eight hundred people for Nebraska is a pretty medium-size town.
Are the inhabitants aware of a singer songwriter in their neighbourhood and could they identify themselves in some of your songs?
When people are working hard and raising crops and children, and working with machinery, they do not pay much attention to the woman on the corner house who is writing songs. It gives me a lot of anonymity and the space to write songs. My neighbours don’t typically come to my music shows. I always say I take the village with me wherever I go because. I get a lot of inspiration from it, but they are not necessarily always tuning in to what I write. When they do, some may see themselves in a song but not on a general basis.
You’re not originally from Nebraska?
No. I’m originally from the West Coast in California. I went to university in the Midwest near Chicago and that is where I met my husband John, who was from that area. So, we have spent most of our lives in the middle of the United States.
What music were you listening to growing up?
Like most kids I was listening to what my mum and dad and my older brothers were listening to. My mom and dad introduced me to everyone from Simon & Garfunkel to The Mamas and The Papas to The Kingston Trio and Ray Charles. My brothers were into The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen. I also had an exchange student who was from the Czech Republic. She introduced the whole family to every Queen record.
How did your involvement in music get under way?
My early music education was very classically based, with traditional piano lessons as a child. I then really fell in love with singing and choir. I started doing voice lessons around junior high and into high school and I was very much interested in developing as a classical singer and soloist. In college I was doing lyric soprano and voice training and light opera. The song writing did not come until much later.
What kick started that desire to write?
It came from a desire to revisit music. I had taken a break from music for a long time and did not have a lot of music active in my life at that time, with the exception of being a listener. I took a long break after university, then I had the children and I was looking for an outlet and an ability to bring music into my life again. It began by doing folk harmony songs with another friend of mine. When the children were playing, we’d get our instruments out and sing songs together. It developed organically into wanting to try and write a song, which had never really crossed my mind beforehand. That first day when I wrote, it just really clicked something in my brain and I became a little obsessed with song writing from that time on.
Did you have the opportunity to perform at that time?
At the time I guess the answer is yes. We were playing at the Farmers Market and we were playing at the local library, playing to ladies who wanted to hear some folk songs. As I developed I did very small performances for a few years until there was a very cool venue in Nebraska, which was bringing in some major singer songwriters. This venue was a major part of my musical development, as they were bringing in people who were considered nationally under the radar but were working as touring musicians. They were playing amazing music that you would not find on popular radio. This introduced me to artists like Jeffrey Foucault, Amy Speace and Mark Erelli. Those artists were so inspiring. My first goal as a songwriter was to open up for one of the shows. When Mark Erelli comes back, I’m going to be the opener for him, when Krista Detor comes back, it’s going to be me opening the show. I worked really hard to get those opening slots for a few years.
Your recently released album SWEETHEARTLAND is somewhat more forceful and fuller in comparison to your last album THREE BLACK CROWS?
That was my intention. I wanted to build on from what I did on THREE BLACK CROWS and really just expand my musical universe. I think when you’re touring alone as a solo singer songwriter, you have to make a record that matches what the live show will be. I used that to inform how THREE BLACK CROWS developed. With this record I felt the most important thing was that I wanted to do right by the songs, make the sound bigger, make it more aggressive and more confident. Also, the studio is also a magical place. It gives you the opportunity to create the musical world that you want to live in. And importantly, it creates the musical world that the songs should live in. I gave myself permission to create that world, even if it does not match up exactly as how I might interpret the songs when I hop up on stage to perform them.
I gathered that the touring experience after the release of THREE BLACK CROWS did not sit particularly well with you?
I love that record and I love everything about it, but I was surprised that the work promoting it just kept going and going. They didn’t give me a crown of glory and serve me and my meals in bed on a tray when I was touring it. I had an image in my mind that I wouldn’t have to grind as much, but as you know, the truth of a working musician is that you have to keep grinding.
Tell me about Prompt Queens, which I understand you developed to regenerate your appetite for writing songs after touring THREE BLACK CROWS?
Prompt Queens is a podcast that I started with my sister-in-law Emily Dunbar. We started it after THREE BLACK CROWS, when I was feeling a little discouraged. We had a desire to start a podcast for a while and this seemed to be the perfect time. She and I would give each other prompts each week and we would write a song during the week on our own, and we would only play them to each other when we started the show. We would therefore be introducing the other person to new music that they had never heard before. In each episode we have a conversation about how this song came about and what was the thought process behind the song. The whole idea, which was invigorating, was to be a model for this tricky and difficult road that is song writing. Sometimes it comes easy and sometimes it comes hard. We wanted to reveal to the audience that the well never runs dry and the best thing that you can do for yourself is to keep writing.
Did any of the material from those sessions end up on SWEETHEARTLAND?
Yes, the title track and the song Dog Like You. I also wrote the song The Road Is when I joined another writing group in the middle of Prompt Queens, where I was also writing songs on a weekly deadline.
Had SWEETHEARTLAND been completed pre-pandemic?
Yes. I sat on this record. It was finished before the pandemic but it took me a year basically just to decide when the time was right to release it. I wanted to honour and celebrate this record in a very public way and hired a publicist to reach out and get the music to as many places and new listeners as possible, including people like yourselves.
I have to ask you about the lines: ‘She was a bottle blond in a mini skirt, she was mutton dressed as lamb in a One Direction tee-shirt’ from the song What Were You Thinking?
I actually read the phrase ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ in a book. It was so funny. I had never heard that phrase before. It was a woman judging the appearance of another woman who was dressed younger than she should have been. I kept that line in my mind for a while trying to find the right place to use it.
Tell me about the lines on Woman Like Me: ‘Call me a rose whose first bloom is gone, but a woman like me sings the prettiest songs.’
I hope that when someone hears that line, they think that a rose in its first bloom is very beautiful and a rose that continues to bloom is also as beautiful. That song is about the woman who has lived life and is questioning her value and her significance having perhaps lost some of her identity in the work she was called to do or the place where she is living. It’s a song that some people find to be terribly sad when they hear it, other people hear it and find it to be terribly hopeful. When I wrote it, I was intending it to be hopeful. I didn’t particularly think about this when I wrote it but what I love about that song is that it grows and changes through the years as I have sung it. I feel that it will always be a relevant song to sing even twenty years from now and I am thankful for that.
You headed to Nashville to record the album?
Yes, I recorded the album in Nashville using two producers. One was Zach Smith, who is part of the duo Smooth Hound Smith and the order was Jesse Thompson, who co-produced the record. I had met Zach at a song writing conference in Colorado and he and I just hit it off as friends. He is fun, creative and has a great spirit and lots of energy. He’s also way more rock ‘n’ roll than I am. His band Smooth Hound Smith is much cooler than I am. So, when I started thinking about how I wanted a bigger sound and a bit more rock ‘n’ roll on this record, I immediately thought that this was a project that I really wanted to do with Zach.
Do you envisage opportunities to tour the album in the near future?
Things are slowly moving on and we are starting to add some dates to my calendar. For example, I am going to Kansas City this weekend to play in an outdoor show and I am really looking forward to adding more dates into the future. I don’t know what the summer holds. I have a family and one of my sons is graduating from high school and starting university in the fall, so that is a conflict of how many dates I want to be on the road while preparing him to go off to college. I hate to reply with a muddy answer, but it’s all a bit up in the air at the moment.
And on the recording front, are you working on another album and what musical direction will you go the next time around?
I’m very thankful and also in celebration mode about SWEETHEARTLAND but I’m also thinking about the next record. I’m looking forward to seeing where that takes me. I write quite a bit, so the songs have been piling up. I have the material for the next record which I am already imagining. What I would like to do in a perfect world is split the difference and find the middle ground between THREE BLACK CROWSand SWEETHEARTLAND. I’m a story-based writer but there are still notes and colours that I left out of SWEETHEARTLAND on purpose. For the next record, I would like to revisit some of those themes and tones that you might have heard more on THREE BLACK CROWS.
Interview by Declan Culliton