balm. and Yarn release new albums

Like many musical projects, balm. emerged out of necessity and a bit of ingenuity.

In 2019, Asheville-based artist Rachel Waterhouse was touring across North America, billing shows as solo versions of her indie rock band Sister Ivy. Her sets consisted of a mix of traditional singer-songwriter tunes and others that made use of her Loop Station, a piece of hardware that allows her to repeat vocal and instrumental sounds to create an alluring sonic effect.

All was going well until she broke her dominant right hand at Burning Man.

“I still had some shows booked up in Oregon, so I went to Oregon with a cast on my hand and played exclusively Loop Station sets with just my left hand,” she says. “That’s when it really clicked that I could do just a Loop Station project and really focus on these repeated phrases, build an atmospheric vibe and then taper it back off.”

On that tour and in its aftermath, Waterhouse “started to feel the project just keep inching its way away from the Sister Ivy material.” Wanting to honor the decidedly different sound with a name antithetical to that of her other project — a term of endearment for poison ivy — she chose the name balm.

The solo project’s debut album, how is your heart?, was released in June, the result of three years of work. Waterhouse wrote and produced the collection of six vocally lush songs, each of which clocks in at an average of six minutes. Listening to their methodical, measured builds, the longer-than-usual timeline feels appropriate.

“I did it all on my own budget, and so everything was very slow moving,” she says. “I didn’t assign any deadlines to myself — which, in hindsight, maybe I could have.”

Pulling Waterhouse in this distinct sonic direction is the appeal of doing everything on her own and not being beholden to collaborators’ schedules for rehearsals. While the solo endeavor places all of the pressure on her, she finds the repetition of a loop oddly soothing. And rather than getting caught up in theoretical queries that drive her Sister Ivy decisions — ranging from how she approaches solos to when she implements time signature changes — she’s able to explore more energetic notions.

“How much can I really sink into the emotion of this song? How much can I let go right now? How much can I emote? How much can I feel? How much can I ask my audience members to feel into their own parallel experiences?” she says. “It becomes kind of a transcendent thing where it’s not as much about the theory anymore. It’s almost a therapeutic practice.”

The responses she’s heard from those who’ve experienced balm.’s songs live suggests that her looped creations have stirred similar emotions in listeners. That mutually beneficial exchange makes sense, considering that Waterhouse purged a great deal of heartbreak and feelings of loss and depression in the lyrics of how is your heart?

“It’s very vulnerable, and when you can connect with audiences from a place of vulnerability, you can entice them to be vulnerable as well with themselves,” she says. “And I think that’s a good exercise for all of us — stripping away the facades we put on ourselves and just being raw sometimes is superhelpful.”

While Waterhouse is excited to see where balm. will go and strives to write about more optimistic things moving forward, Sister Ivy is still very much active. In mid-June, the band launched an Indiegogo campaign for its second album, Be Your Own Hero, whose vibe is tilting in a largely positive direction, thanks in part to the catharsis she’s experiencing through her solo project.

“I’ve been very ‘sad girl makes sad music’ for a long time,” Waterhouse says. “There is a bit of the hopeful starting to come out, and there is a bit of the outward-looking. I think that my focus has been changing, finally, from dealing with my own problems and being very internally focused to looking out and really wanting to call in a better world.”

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Teamwork/dream work

Listening to Yarn’s rollocking new album, Born, Blessed, Grateful & Alive, you wouldn’t know that, not that long ago, frontman Blake Christiana thought his group may be permanently tangled and not worth unraveling. 

“I was mad at my own band — but it was nobody in the band,” he says. “I was probably just pissed about myself.”

Formed in 2007, the prolific alt-country outfit put out over 10 albums in a dozen years, including the two-volume singles collection, Lucky 13. But toward the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was time for a change.

“I just started getting tired of what was happening with us,” says Christiana, who splits his time between Brevard and Raleigh. “We were on the road, and it felt like a hamster wheel kind of a thing — that cliché about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. And that’s just what I was doing.”

Looking to break out of his rut, Christiana booked a solo show with a goal of performing mostly new songs and recording it as a live album. He set his sights on The Down Home in Johnson City, Tenn., where one of his musical heroes, Townes Van Zandt, cut an album in 1985. That the venue opened in 1976 — the year Christiana was born — also felt like a sign that his destiny awaited within its walls.

“I just found all these little coincidences,” he says.

Short on material, Christiana began writing frantically and rediscovered his love for the craft. And though he originally envisioned performing alone with his acoustic guitar, he began imagining additional parts and wound up assembling a band consisting of Big Daddy Love guitarist Joey Recchio, original Steel Wheels bassist Brian Dickell, organist Bill Stevens and backing vocalist Heather Hannah.

As a warmup for The Down Home gig, the musicians converged at an Airbnb in Roanoke, Va., spent two days drinking and practicing, then played a show at a venue called The Spot on Kirk. Among the selected songs were “Something’s Gotta Change,” “Play Freebird” and “Wake Up,” which would make their way onto Born, Blessed, Grateful & Alive.

Christiana describes that performance as a turning point. “It sounded great, it was so fun and the rooms were full — they’re small rooms, mind you. I’m no Taylor Swift, but it’s good enough for me,” he recalls. “The gratitude exceeded my expectations without a doubt, and I felt alive again.”

Still unsure what to do with Yarn, which had a few tour dates to finish, Christiana parted ways with his longtime guitarist, Rod Hohl, and recruited friends who are frontmen in their own bands — including Recchio, Joel Timmons (Sol Driven Train) and Mike Sivilli (Dangermuffin) — to join him along with Yarn’s drummer Robert Bonhomme and bassist Rick Bugel for the remaining gigs.

The joy they experienced at those revolving-guest shows convinced Christiana and his rhythm section to record the new songs for a proper studio album. Having connected with keyboardist/producer Damian Calcagne at a benefit show, Christiana began making trips to his new friend’s New Jersey studio for a few days of tracking each time. Returning to North Carolina in the interim, his renewed passion produced even more songs — enough for Born, Blessed, Grateful & Alive and another forthcoming LP.

Joined by Hannah, Calcagne and Sivilli, as well as Mike Robinson (Railroad Earth), Andy Falco (Infamous Stringdusters), Johnny Grubb (Railroad Earth) and Elliott Peck (Midnight North), Yarn’s remaining trio fleshed out songs such as album standout “Heart So Hard,” featuring a rip-roaring Telecaster solo from Falco, and “I Want You,” whose cadence resembles any number of John Prine classics.

“Over the last 2 1/2 years, it’s just been a hundred miles an hour, but a stress-free hundred miles an hour and an exciting hundred miles an hour,” Christiana says. “I’m happy again, and I’m trying to evolve as a human.”

Spending as much time as possible in Transylvania County likewise helps him wind down from what he calls the “overly socialized” nature of tour life. Christiana’s wife, Mandy, is from Brevard, and being there helps him connect with his roots in a special way.

“I grew up in Schenectady, N.Y., and in the summertime we’d go up to Lake George in the Adirondacks. That was probably my first inspiration into music, because my dad would sit around the campfire with his buddies and play old country tunes and old rock ’n’ roll tunes,” he says. “And being in Brevard, it kind of has that feel. There’s no natural lakes — it’s just the mountains here. But it’s definitely a creatively inspiring location.”

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