the ugly hug

Carolina Chauffe is the creative guide behind the ever evolving project, hemlock. Growing up in Lafayette, Louisiana, Chauffe has been untethered to one place, letting opportunities decide where they move next as they plant roots from Louisiana to Texas, the Pacific Northwest and Chicago, spooling connections in every direction that their presence and spirit touches.

Earlier this year, hemlock released the six-track mini-album, Amen!, off of Hannah Read’s [Lomelda] label Double Yolk Record House. It’s a touching piece of work, a contusion of the heart, as Chauffe and friends create a simple, yet indescribably intense record of placement, connections and the spirit of being. 

I recently caught up with Chauffe as they house-sit for Lindsey Verrill [Little Mazarn] in Austin, Texas. Having done the classic layered questioning before in a past interview with hemlock, I wanted to try something new this time around. Only preparing one question, what followed became a stream of consciousness, retelling the story of not only how Amen! came to be, but how Chauffe’s patient and stunning observational process creates a clear focus of the artistry and bonds that connect their world. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Shea Roney: I felt an emotional connection to Amen! before I even got a chance to listen to it because of the stunning album artwork by Church Goin Mule. In the bottom corner, it reads, “I didn’t know where I was headed – only forward! What a miracle to keep going, keep asking and to keep finding out! Amen!” So my question is, what defines a miracle to you in your life? 

Carolina Chauffe: That’s such a beautiful question. In a moment of such dissonance globally, it can seem harder and harder to keep a grasp on magic. You’re also catching me in a very tender moment, where I’ve just come to a brief resting place between tours, and today is the first day that I can even begin to process this past week’s miracles. It’s all hitting me now with how relevant and intense this question is. 

On a good day, the question is answered with another question; what’s not a miracle? 

This album is a miracle to me. It was, in many ways, a gift of a lot of time and energy and collaboration with some of my heroes, especially  in a year where I promised myself I would lean more into collaboration. I think that community is a miracle. To lean into the trust that someone or something or somewhere will always catch you, and to be proven time and time again that that is true. In a lot of ways, a miracle is also a testament to human goodness as well. So I believe it’s equal parts faith and magic and reciprocity and trust. But there’s a difference between man made miracles, which need a conscious amount of intention and a lot of courage and hard work. And then there’s the miracles that are just links that appear from the ether and reinforce that you’re on the right path. I think that for me, making music and just continuing on living requires both of those miracles to meet each other and get really well acquainted, almost blurring the lines between where one ends and the other begins. 

Amen! came from that kind of perfect storm. Taking the general upheaval of my life and all of the silver linings that followed from getting out of a partnership and leaving Chicago where I lived for three years. It was so hard, but it was true. I think that can often be the form a miracle takes as well. It was the choice I needed to make.

At the time I was leaving Chicago, moving via tour with Merce Lemon down south and heading back over to Austin, Lindsey caught me in this nest that I return to over and over again, letting me stay in this shed that her and her dad built together in the backyard.

Tommy Read offered to record the album in Silsbee, Texas. We had never met before, but he was going off of the good word of Lindsey and Hannah. All I knew was that we had four days on the calendar blocked out, and I didn’t know what it was gonna be, but I knew what shape I wanted it to take – I had trust in that. I played through the songs the eve before recording, and Tommy was like, ‘those are the ones that we’re gonna do’, and the track list made itself.  That was miraculous in its own way, trusting the album to make itself with the help of a lot of really tender hearts.

Amen! also bridged my transformation geographically, as a couple of the songs are from Chicago right before I left, and the other couple are from living in Lindsey’s shed. A couple of the others came from a tour that I was on last summer with one of my best friends, Clara [Lady Queen Paradise], who is one of the deepest and most intense inspirations in my life.

That connection is miraculous as well. In 2018, Clara was on a double solo tour with Ode (playing under the project ‘bella’) as they came through Louisiana. I was coming back from a road trip and we decided to stop at a house show happening at this spot called Burger Mansion in Baton Rouge. I didn’t know who was on the bill, so we showed up and it happened to be Clara and Ode. I’ve never seen anyone do a double solo tour before. It was not something that I knew could happen. They came all the way down from Providence, Rhode Island to Louisiana in their car with one shared guitar and it blew my mind. My first tour ever ended up being a double solo tour the next year. A year from that date I had taken that dream and taken that vision, and just ran with it, but they were the one who materialized it. I had never observed it before and it obviously changed my life, because I’m still doing it. Flash forward five years later, Clara and I ended up going on tour, and almost to the date, we were doing our own double solo tour. The songs “Eleanor” and “Prayer” were written on a day off between shows. I was just sitting and riffing on my friend’s porch in Portland. 

Capturing Amen! felt like a miraculous return to the South for me. It felt important to be recording in Silsbee, which is actually the midpoint between Austin and Lafayette. There’s the connection between everywhere I’ve lived in my life within these songs. There are songs influenced from the Pacific Northwest, from Chicago, from the deep South – it includes and melds so many different places and times – past selves, present selves and future selves.

The only person that I knew in a true way before recording was Lindsey, but we all got to know each other through the making of this very precious and sacred feeling together. We mutually believed in each other so deeply, and that is absolutely priceless. I’d met Kyle Duggar, who plays drums on Amen!, only in passing a few times, but he came to make a record with me in full blind trust. No one knew the songs. I hardly knew the songs. We just played through them a few times each and captured them as they were, and it was exactly what it was supposed to be. The energy of the room was so special and playful and intentional. I felt really in touch with the miracle of trust from every angle of that whole recording session, because so many of us were just meeting for the first time, and we made something so intensely beautiful and straight to the point. Whatever the point is.

While recording, we would look out the window to this field of mules that was outside the studio. I’ve always been such a fan of Church Goin Mule, but at this point, it felt like a very obvious connection and sign that I need to reach out to her. When I asked Mule about collaborating for that beautiful painting that is the cover, I was going to initially commission a new original work, but that ended up falling through because we both ran short on time and energy, – but it really didn’t even matter to me because I knew what piece I wanted. Once the album was recorded, it was just obviously the cover – I finally had consciously put them in the same space. The sentence ends in the bottom right corner with the word “Amen”, and the record ends with the word “Amen” – they just seemed to be married to each other. It’s like the miracle of kinship. 

I met Mule years ago in my hometown of Lafayette while she was doing a residency at a gallery. I remember being so stunned by her work. I was probably still in high school, so that’s just another through line to the origin point of inspiration, stretching onward almost half a decade to the point of finally being able to collaborate. I actually just got to see Mule for the first time in so many years this past week. She showed up with a bundle of sketches from the time that we were gonna collaborate on an original commission for the album cover. It was this manila envelope full of sketched mules and phrases that I could tell she jotted down as she was listening through my songs for the first time. I cried.

That was the case for recording with Hannah and Lindsey and having collaboration with Mule for the visual art. All these ties that I had open for so long were now tying themselves into a nice little bow. Lots of full circle moments; miracle moments.

Clara texted me recently and said, “home is something you carry with you.” I think that’s a miracle too. I think it’s true and it takes a lot of people to carry one person’s home. When you’re like me and sleeping in a different bed most nights, it doesn’t feel like a sole weight to bear. It’s shared among many pairs of shoulders. That’s utterly miraculous.

I always wanted a pair of red converse high tops when I was a kid, and I never was able to get a pair. I just played a show in New Orleans at this record store’s last show before they closed (long live White Roach Records!) and they were selling these red chucks there. And I was like, ‘okay, you know, the universe has spoken’ [lifting their foot to show off the new chucks].

The connections that people have had to this record, whether it’s feeling pulled towards the visual art or feeling pulled towards the music, it just never gets any less awe inspiring to me the ways that people can receive the work that I am sharing. I’d be sharing it whether or not anyone listens. And the fact that it does resonate, not only with friends, but on the far ends of that spectrum, total strangers and also my heroes, is such a source of faith and hope for me. It makes me feel like I am where I am meant to be.

I was just in Fayetteville for a weekend playing Old Friends Fest. That whole weekend, we had maybe five drops of rain. I was out of service for three days, and when I re-entered civilization, I had all these texts like, ‘are you okay?’ Apparently there were tornadoes all around the festival, and we were just out on our own little plane ten miles off the gravel road. There’s some miraculous force field that can protect you from the woes of man and the woes of the earth sometimes. But I mean, when the woes do hit you, it just takes the miracle of community to pull you back out.

I’m just thinking about when you say the word miracle, to me the vision that I see in my mind immediately jumps to a sun glint on water. It’s a meeting of elements that creates a perfect image or feeling. All these places where the elements combine to bring observance to what was already there in a different shape, that emphasizes the magic and the wonder and the awe of it all. At the heart of a miracle is collaboration between something, whether that be forces, people, elements, or a combination – miracles take active observation; they require observance. There’s so much to observe right now around us, some of it so heartbreaking and impossible to process consciously. But then there’s also the opposite of that; the weekend at the festival with tornadoes all around us where all we could see was beautiful lightning, or the backyard shed that still has your quilt in it after you return months later. I don’t know. If I didn’t believe in a miracle I wouldn’t be here, right?