The third time’s a charm, they say, but when you’re talking about Newport Folk Festival appearances, the first two were probably pretty magical, too.
Richmond-based folk band Palmyra recently announced that it will be performing at the standard-bearing festival at Fort Adams State Park for a third consecutive year. It’s just one indication of the momentum the trio has built since forming a creative partnership while studying at James Madison University, moving to Boston after graduating during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, then making their way back to Virginia, where all three members — mandolinist and guitarist Sasha Landon, guitarist and banjo player, Teddy Chipouras, and bassist Mānoa Bell — grew up.
Palmyra’s first two Newport Folk sets took place on a special stage where audience members lined up to pedal bicycles and generated the electricity needed to run the stage’s PA system. Those bike-powered performances were the brainchild of another Virginia group with Harrisonburg origins, Illiterate Light, whom the members of Palmyra are quick to credit with providing a formative boost. “Those guys, Jeff [Gorman] and Jake [Cochran], have been kind of like mentors for us since we started,” Chipouras says. “We’ve always said we’re just following the Illiterate Light model of the music business, and it’s working.”
The trio, which has extensive touring experience despite first hitting the road in April 2021, is set to play its biggest headlining show yet in Richmond, where its members have been living since the fall of 2022. Those who head to the Broadberry on Friday, March 1 will see a band whose onstage bond is a tight as any you’ll find — a three-person machine that was fine-tuned during lockdown livestreams. In those early days, there was plenty of playing around a single microphone. Sasha Landon calls this acoustically demanding approach a time-honored tradition in the worlds of folk, old-time and bluegrass — “the perfect exercise of ‘Can we all listen to each other and be as keyed in in this moment as we can?’”
Ahead of a quickly approaching milestone moment at the Broadberry, Style Weekly spoke with the members of Palmyra about their path away from and back to Virginia, their approach to touring and the status of their forthcoming debut album.
Style Weekly: What has performing at the Newport Folk Fest meant to the band?
Mānoa Bell: That has, both years we’ve been there, been the highlight of the year … We did a tour last November and every show there was someone wearing a shirt of ours that had seen us at Newport Folk Festival. But we also feel that momentum creatively and inspirationally. The incredible artists that you get to see at that festival and interact with — it gives you a lot of validation, I think. “Yes, this thing that I’m pouring my soul and time into is resulting in something that feels fulfilling.” Whatever other factors that you might look at [for growth], if it’s social media numbers or whatever, that weekend when you’re there, you’re like, “This is fulfilling me as a human being.”
Judging by streaming numbers, it certainly seems like your songs are resonating with audiences.
Teddy Chipouras: I think “Happy Pills” — the streaming numbers accurately reflect how it’s received. It’s normally the song we play last at our sets because people are the most stoked about it. It’s also a really fun song for us to play and always has been. A lot of times, if we play a song too many times, it can get really exhausting and we kind of dread playing it, because we play so many shows every year, but that one, for the most part, every night, we have so much fun playing it live, and I think that’s what comes across in the recording.
You’ve amassed quite a collection of performance videos. What attracts you to that format?
Sasha Landon: We’re a band formed of the pandemic and of the lockdown. We all moved to Boston together in 2020, and we spent so much of that time writing, recording and waiting to play shows. We would do these live streams every week from our basement to try to find an outlet to play our songs for people, so we got really used to playing just in front of a camera and not for anyone, or for people that we couldn’t see … People do such great work here in Richmond. Hourglass Sessions — our buds Tyler and Dillon really crush it over there — and Sunroom Sessions … We love those live videos. They’ve been so essential and important to us. We did the sessions at Sill & Glade [Cabin] in Mount Solon, Virginia, and those, because of the way algorithms work, got our music in front of a bunch of new people.
MB: I think a large part of that too, is that we are a live band. We talk sometimes about making narrative music videos and stuff, and [it’s] not off the table, but playing live is how we became friends and [it’s] the core of what we do. So having someone film us do what we do every day anyways is really easy for us and makes a lot of sense.
What brought you back to Virginia?
SL: Floyd’s the old-time capital of the world, and when we were in Boston, we were a little homesick, and we were also trying to get better at playing the kind of music we wanted to play … Floyd was beautiful and seemed like a place that made sense for us to go, and there was music we were stoked about there. But then once we moved there, we spent the whole year away from home on the road. We found that the place that we had the most friends every time we visited was Richmond. We had friends here from college, bands we played with. We had people that would come out and see us that we didn’t know, which felt really cool, so Richmond felt like somewhere that would be easy for all of us to call home, where we wouldn’t be far away from everyone when we went home after being on the road.
What does life on the road look like for the band these days?
MB: The technical side is we drive a Dodge Grand Caravan minivan, the three of us. You get way better gas mileage than a Ford Econoline. But I would say life on the road has changed this last year, now that we’re all in Richmond, compared to years prior, in that we’re doing a lot of weekender, four-night [runs]. We try to make the drives and the routing make sense [so] we’re not gone for too many nights in a row. When we first started, we’d be gone for two weeks straight … I think the longest time we were gone for was five or six weeks, and though that time really shaped us and our bond together, we have the luxury now to try to keep it to, at the longest, seven nights out. And we’re pretty regional; we stick around the East Coast. We’ll make it farther out as we get opportunities that allow us to afford to drive that far, [but] we don’t need to drive to Los Angeles tomorrow. That’s OK. We’ll get there when we get there.
What drew you to old-time music initially?
MB: We all came to it differently, but a unifying strand, maybe, is [that] a lot of the musicians that we share common love for come from that tradition, or are in that tradition or are adjacent to it. With folk music, and the roots of it in old-time, we would trace back the chronology of “We love this band, and this band listened to them, and they listened to them,” and it always ends up at some guy on a porch. We needed to go experience that in Floyd for sure. We wanted to be on the porch.
SL: And we didn’t really even get to. We all love the Avett Brothers, and they’re not pickers but they are pickers. And none of us, I would say, are pickers. We’re not. We didn’t grow up in that world. We grew up loving old singer-songwriter folk, Americana, that kind of stuff, but not the fiddling stuff. Like what Mānoa was saying, so [many] of the people that we love take things from that music, so we wanted to learn a little bit about it.
What are you most looking forward to about this Broadberry show?
MB: The show at the Broadberry is definitely the biggest Richmond show we’ve done. We played at the Broadberry opening for Illiterate Light, but we’ve never headlined in that space. WNRN is presenting it, which is super-generous of them. We’re a little terrified, but we played at the Camel as a headliner. Everything else we’ve done in Richmond we were supporting someone. It’s twice the size of any room we’ve ever played before headlining, so we hope people show up.
TC: For that Broadberry show, we’re super-excited to have our friends Jobi Riccio, who is an amazing singer-songwriter from Nashville, and Dissimilar South, a band we’ve played with a bunch of times now, from Durham — two of our favorite artists.
SL: That show’s going to be really fun. Mānoa lived in Nashville for a minute when Teddy and I were in Floyd and went to this queer folk showcase. Sara [Gougeon] in Nashville puts on these queer folk shows and a queer folk fest, and we took some inspiration from that and some of their advice and put one on in Roanoke and Jobi played that one as well … Though this show at the Broadberry isn’t our queer folk show that we’re putting on, it also is.
How did you first connect with Illiterate Light?
MB: We were all in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and we were just fans of theirs. We were going to shows [thinking], “This is just the coolest band ever.” So when we decided to become a band, we were like, “Well we gotta talk to these people.” So we become friends through music in that way.
TC: Another fun fact of that relationship is we were all in a songwriting class together at JMU, and Jeff and Jake were guest speakers a couple times in that class and we idolized them. They would come in, and we would be taking notes on everything they were saying.
What do you remember from those classes with Illiterate Light?
TC: They would bring in some of their demos to play, and I remember in the second semester they brought in “I Want to Leave America,” which is on their first full-length album, and I was like, “This is so good.” That song made such a big impact on me.
MB: Not from the class as much specifically, but advice they gave us really early on: “Anything real is going to come from the road.” Their point being [to] go out there and play for people. Don’t just sit around and wait for something to happen on the Internet, or whatever that is. You’re going to get better as friends, as musicians, [and] you’re going to write more songs.
What’s on the horizon for the rest of 2024?
MB: We’ve got a bunch of tour dates and we’ve got this album. We’re still working on it. It needs to be mixed, it needs to be mastered, so we’re not sure what the release date is on it yet. This year feels, more so than years prior, like this is the thing that we do. We’re settled in this. We figured out a way to tour that isn’t killing us. We’re growing an audience slowly, and it doesn’t feel as frantic, and that’s been such a blessing.
Palmyra will perform at the Broadberry on Friday, March 1. Jobi Riccio and Dissimilar South will also perform. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at thebroadberry.com. For more information, visit palmyratheband.com.
