Durham’s own Skylar Gudasz is back with a new record called Country. It’s a word that can mean different things to different people, and Gudasz explores those threads throughout the record.
Country was recorded in Pittsboro with collaborator and producer Ari Picker at his Goth Construction Studios.
Gudasz will be celebrating the album’s release Friday night at the Haw River Ballroom in Saxapahaw and recently caught up with WUNC’s Brian Burns to talk about the process for recording it and how she’s been celebrating.
This is an excerpt of an edited transcript of that conversation. You can hear the full interview by clicking the LISTEN button at the top of this post.
The word “Country” can mean a lot of different things. Why was that the right title for this record?
"When I first started writing this record, it came from an old beater guitar of my brother’s that I found in my closet. The first song that I started playing is the song that became “Fire Country.” The word “country” was in that song, but I had a few other fragments floating around that used the word “country” because it was around a lot at the time. It was during the 2020 elections and the pandemic, so the word was just around. So, when I first started, I thought “I can’t use that in this song” but then thought “well what if that was the title of the record?” It’s not a country record, but once I made that decision the rest of the songs lined up in a queue. It really came to mean so many different things. This ungovernable wildness, and this swagger, and the ways in which “country” represents not necessarily a nation, but land and relationship with nature."
The song “Outlaw” really knocked me out the first time I heard it. Tell us about the backstory on that one.
"During the summer of 2020 there were a lot of moments of resistance going on in the country, and that’s what a lot of that song is about. There are these places of moral righteousness that aren’t necessarily reflected in the laws of a country, but that doesn’t make them wrong, in some ways it makes them more right."
Skylar Gudasz' new record, Country, is available now.
