Interview with Nancy Pontius

Hi Nancy,

Thanks for granting me this interview! First of all, I would like to ask you about the beginning of your path as a musician. How and when did you start singing and making music? What instrument(s) did you first pick up?

Hello Maurizio. Thank you for this opportunity. I remember when I found you on Last.fm over a decade ago. We had a lot of fun on there. There were a lot of independent musicians on there.

I started learning piano as a kid. I always sang because my mother always sang and came from a very musical family. I used to cringe when she would sing loudly in the grocery store, but now I am so glad she did it. We also camped a lot in the 60s and 70s with family friends and she and her friends played guitar and sang around the campfire, so did all the kids. They sang a lot of folk back then, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, etc. My mother’s mother, my grandmother was a great musician, a pianist. She went to Indiana University at age 16. Her father actually had died in the pandemic in 1918 being a doctor in WW1. He died in France while caring for others. Her mother took in boarders in Bloomington. They lived across the street from Hoagy Carmichael and they were family friends. My grandma was a few grades behind him. You know, he wrote some great songs. Well, it was the Depression and my grandma could not afford the rehearsal fees for music school. So she went into English and French. Later she taught French and English. She did sit in for some bands during her time there. It has always been a great music school.

I should have stayed with piano because I could actually read music for piano. Many years later when I took up guitar, I never really learned to play well. It was mostly for putting songs together. My friend John Munoz actually gave me my first guitar and gave me a little lesson on basic chords so I could learn to put songs together. I had all these songs in my head and in previous bands would have to sing them out while others put them together with instruments.

Before all that, when I was a teen, I was in a lot of musical theater plays. It was a group called the Southern Arizona Light Opera Company.  I was a late grower and often played people’s kid sisters and such. I was learning a lot of dance then and took voice lessons from a great teacher, Rosemary Henderson. She taught me operatic singing but also jazz and blues. She really wanted me to go into music. I almost did go to Indiana university for music, but ended up at UCLA for theater. Then a very tragic event happened while I was there in Los Angeles. I won’t go into it but I dropped out a while and lived in Venice Beach there. There I was in a band, Cheshire Moon. The main musician was Kevin Maxwell but he had been changing his name so many times that I am not sure what his name is now. He was a gifted songwriter and he would help write out songs I had in my head. This was when I was 19 or so.

Then I went back to school in Arizona in Creative Writing. Around then was when my friend gave me the guitar. I started to write some songs.

Later on in my 20s, early 90s, I joined Barely Bipedal. It was a good time for independent musicians putting out cassette tapes. They would get around. I still could not play guitar very well. I just liked to put songs together. But also there were many songwriters in Barely Bipedal and we sang in multiple harmonies. I heavily relied on other musicians to fill out my own songs, in Barely Bipedal, and later Project Bluebird. People were kind about it. I was primarily a vocalist but had these songs in my head. I also used to be in a drum group. We used to play in the park and at street fairs. For a time I also helped someone make ceramic drums. They have a very nice sound.

Could you tell us a bit about Barely Bipedal? Who were the members and how did you fall in with them?

Barely Bipedal was originally Jon Mount and James Jordan. They both had come out of punk bands and then were playing folk, country and gospel with an experimental edge. Then I ran into Jon. I had been away awhile. He and I knew each other back in grade school. He asked me to come sing with them. Then others joined, Eric Baldoni, Eric Royer, Kira Geddes, and a guy named Pig Boy. We did a lot of recordings on cassette tapes which were distributed through Toxic Ranch Records. We played in laundry mats, soup kitchens, fundraisers, peace fairs and a lot of backyard punk shows. There is a recent recording now on Bandcamp with James and Jon, the original Barely Bipedal actually [https://compactdiscrecords.bandcamp.com/album/all-summer-been-lightnin].

I would also like to ask you about your collaborative project ‘Project Bluebird/Earth Folk’. It’s always good to see people working together and joining their talents to create something really authentic. How and when did the project start and how did it develop along the years? Why did you originally choose to call it ‘Project Bluebird’?

Project Bluebird partially started out on that old site StumbleUpon. In the early years it was a great site, a good global community. We felt a sense of bringing down the borders, at least intellectually, for a little while there. And the algorithms were at first in our hands, before they streamlined it and sold out to eBay and only gave the algorithms to paying customers. But before that we could do a lot of activism, and we could support independent artists. And it was a lot of sharing of philosophy, art, music, inspiration, science, wonder, in a spirit of global friendship, all this during the Bush era. But that changed quickly, as most things do. But during that earlier time I was communicating with people around the world and we wrote some songs together. I also got involved with some of Mad Pride (Creatively Maladjusted here) and I wrote songs with people in Mad Pride some. Then some friends added onto some songs. Again, the songs were a lot better when people added on. I was very grateful for their help. Some songs are solo but really they were better when others added on. And it was more collaboration and a variety of styles. Also some musicians who were in Barely Bipedal added on to some. There are many I don’t have online that I would have liked to redo. For a while Project Bluebird got around the internet. Then when I was not so well, I took it down offline numerous times and tried to change the name. I am leaving what I have up now for good, sort of as back up because I tend to lose things in this digital age. So there are some on YouTube [see video below] and SoundCloud [https://soundcloud.com/user-361366447]. 

The name Project Bluebird came out of a series of synchronicities. Also bluebirds are beautiful. But I like Earth Folk too because all the writers are from all over the earth. And it is sort of folk music and we are all folks.

I loved your drum piece dedicated to Leonard Peltier I found on YouTube, simple and yet so evocative! How does music connect with activism in your view?

I know you think some music really has a ‘healing quality’. Does that apply to most music as a general concept or do you think some kind of music might be particularly helpful in the most difficult times?

Thank you about the drum piece. I really need to work on staying with the basic heartbeat. That is actually the hardest one to play with other drummers. I remember an elder drummer trying to teach me this and I am still learning. I tend to like to fly off. But really I need to come back to the earth heartbeat. Anyone in a drum group playing that beat has to keep it all together. Well, it seems simple on the surface but it is really the most challenging.

As for activism, Barely Bipedal was very intertwined with activism. James wrote a song during the second Gulf War that got around, “I’m Iraq in my mind (I just can’t Kuwait).

In the second generation Bush years many of us in Project Bluebird had been writing in response. A lot of those songs I would record very quickly and poorly and post them right away. A lot of them needed to be re-recorded.

Now mostly what is left online are the better recordings. And even then, some of my solo ones need some work. But I am just leaving them there before I lose them all.

Yes about healing music. I do really benefit from healers doing music. It can be all kinds of music and it can be protest at the same time, and there many facets to healing, sometimes outrage, catharsis, sometimes relaxing the limbic system so one can respond instead of reacting in a way that is not helpful. Right now I am appreciating Esperanza Spalding, “12 Little Spells” you can hear most of this album on YouTube. Some try to compare her to Bjork but really she is in her own category. There is a lot of jazz and soul, poetry, and art that heals in her work, just beautiful. My words don’t do her justice. She is a bass player. Also, well, Joy Harjo, our Poet Laureate here, she was my professor in college and is still an inspiration. Her poetry is wise guidance and she also puts poems to music and sings and plays saxophone. She is a real healer. I think Poet laureates are more important than politicians right now really. All the poets, musicians, artists...healers. Oh, you know, I really like that healing tone music too, like singing bowls etc., there is so much grief right now, we need the healing. 

Well, thanks again! Is there anything else you want to add?

I want to thank my friend Daniel Brudno for helping me with this music project. None of this could have been accomplished without him. He is also a musician and has studied flamenco. I was sick a lot and he helped me with everything, sort of as my manager and helped with getting everything together. I am forever grateful to Dan.

I don't know what I am by Earth Folk: