SPOTLIGHT: Caleb Klauder & Reeb Willms Put ‘Gold in Your Pocket’ with Love and Collective Joy

EDITOR’S NOTE: Caleb Klauder & Reeb Willms are No Depression’s Spotlight artists for Nov. 2024. Learn more about them and their new album, Gold in Your Pocket (out Nov.15 on Free Dirt Records), and look for more all month long.

Before he ever saw her, Caleb Klauder heard Reeb Willms sing. It was some decade and change ago at a music festival in Idaho, and Klauder had ventured off from a jam session for a drink. Behind him, he heard an incredible voice that compelled him to turn around and see where it was coming from. Their meeting more than 500 miles away from home in Idaho, you might say, was kismet.

Beyond their shared love of playing music, both originally hail from Washington—she from the dry high desert, east of the Cascade Mountains, he from the dank forests and maritime shores of the San Juan Islands in the west. The two began collaborating not long after that fateful night, and Willms joined Klauder in his adopted city of Portland, OR, as a member of his longtime local outfit Foghorn Stringband and in a home the two shared together (until a couple years ago when they relocated to Orcas Island, near Klauder’s hometown). Her timeless, pure vocals and acoustic guitar picking fit right in with the old-time string band dedicated to traditional music.

Willms and Klauder also found their sweet spot together as a duo and with Klauder’s long-running backburner project, a country band where he experiments with playing his original songs. In both outfits, they’re free to try their hands at a vibrant array of genres and sounds, from bluegrass to modern folk, sharing in harmonies like some of the greats—Rawlings and Welch, Harris and Parsons—and letting the power of their earthen vocals fit to the song.

“I’m kind of new to songwriting, but when I have sat down to write songs, I just feel like our world needs joy and love. That’s really important for us to connect to that as humans. And the style of music we play, by nature it’s social music,” Willms says. “That feels super important in this time, too, that people gather in person and have a common experience, musical or if there’s dancing, all the better.”

The country band’s third album, the honky tonkin’ stunner Gold in Your Pocket (out this week on Free Dirt Records), feels cosmically timed with an anniversary of sorts. Reeb and Willms have just finished playing together at Blackpot Festival & Cookoff in Eunice, Louisiana, the site of their first official time sharing a stage. Reeb brought Willms on stage for a couple songs so they could hear her voice; 14 years later, they’re still harmonizing together. 

Gold in Your Pocket is a mix of mostly original songs by Klauder and Willms, with a handful of thoughtfully chosen covers thrown in (including a lovely rendition of fellow Pacific Northwesterner Dean Johnson’s “Faraway Skies”), and represents the band’s first time recording outside Portland. It’s also their first experience recording across multiple sessions and studios, each within just a couple of days. They started at Nashville’s Tractor Shed, spurred by a connection bassist Mike Bub had with engineer Mark Howard.

“In our minds we had to have an album’s worth of songs before we could even start recording,” Klauder says. “For me, it took off all this pressure… We can just put down what we have and focus on that.” Willms adds, “We weren’t even thinking about recording a new album at the time.”

In Nashville, the group was also joined by legendary guitarist and producer Chris Scruggs, who popped in to play a bit and offer an objective co-producing ear. “It’s one of those things with country music, you’re supposed to go record in Nashville. And I don’t think we quite had our foot in the door of where to go or how to make that happen,” Klauder says. “I got more mature about it and relaxed myself, let myself step away. And that was a big boy move. I feel like we’ve assembled an all-star band right now… That really took it to a different level and allowed me in that producer role to relax and trust everybody.”

After this fruitful session, which yielded a half dozen songs or so, the band met for the second time about nine months later at bandmate and fiddle player Joel Savoy’s studio, Valcour Records back in Eunice. This second outing allowed them to complete the full record, but it also brought to the surface a nagging issue for Willms that had been bubbling up for some time. There was something wrong with her voice.

“Singing stopped feeling easy and agile and started to feel physically really difficult, and I wasn’t able to do what I normally could,” she says. Willms doesn’t remember exactly when the symptoms began, but she started noticing her voice would grow tired more quickly after singing, rehearsing or performing, so much so that she would struggle to talk to show-goers after a set. The problem seeped into all aspects of Willms’ singing, from projecting in her lower register to keeping in tune, to generally having sufficient control of her instrument. At the session in Eunice, getting through a full take of a song was challenging and discouraging, but mostly, it scared the hell out of her: “It’s really unnerving on bad days because I’m like, ‘is this even a viable thing to continue doing? Or is this not gonna work?’” Her intrusive thoughts worked overtime. “Can I keep being a musician? This is my profession.”

Since then, Willms has been on a journey that’s led her to multiple vocal coaches, ENTs, and most recently, a speech pathologist specialist. Each have tried to arm her with the tools to heal Muscle Tension Dysphonia, a condition that causes the muscles surrounding the vocal chords to clench and strain. Its origin remains a mystery to Willms, and though she’s seen some minor improvements, she’s still seeking understanding of the root cause, and maybe most crucially, compassion for herself. “The hard part for me is that every show that we play I have an opportunity to share myself musically and my biggest fear is that people walk away not being impacted because the symptoms cause me to struggle physically with my sound,” says Willms. Moments of frustration have led her to research treatments for dystonic conditions like hers that go beyond just the symptom level, including a revelation about the effects of storing anxiety or emotional trauma in the body. It is something she hopes to explore more on her road to recovery.

“We played at the Ryman a year and a half ago; that was our first time playing there and it was really exciting. All the history and all our musical heroes had played there, and I just was really worried about the show ‘cause what if this is a horrible night for me vocally?” she says. “And you would think that would be a time when you would get anxious, and it would be worse. But then that night I walked out on the stage and I had one of my best nights of singing.” Perhaps the spirits of some of those heroes who came before were looking out for Willms that night.

Still, Willms’ vocals sound as beautifully warm and grounded as ever on Gold in Your Pocket. A standout track of hers, “Same Little Heart,” is an achingly pretty ode to coming-of-age in a rural farming community, as is her cover of Paul Burch’s “Last of My Kind,” a song loaded with personal history for Willms, that she’d been eager to record: “I was in a phase of my life where I barely sung in front of people and I was a super shy person on stage and singing,” she says of her introduction to the tune as a young girl. “I was thinking the other day I’ve been singing ‘Last of My Kind’ the whole time I’ve been singing in public. It’s been this song that’s been a part of my repertoire for a long time and every show we play where I sing it, people come up and say, ‘What was that song?’ It really touches people.”

“All About Love,” also penned and sung by Willms with harmonies from Klauder, is a signature song for the band. It’s a jaunty, uplifting message of love that feels like a salve for dark times. “All we want to do is sing of love/And how we always meant to say/Those things we never said/But it’s never too late,” Willms sings alongside Rusty Blake’s swoony pedal steel and Savoy’s rich fiddle.

Klauder’s songs on Gold in Your Pocket also favor an uplifting approach to delivering a sometimes-sad message, using buoyant melodies and fiery, foot-stomping arrangements. “Shame, Shame, Shame” and “Chained by Desire,” though sonically jubilant, tie in themes of jealousy, resentment, and dishonesty.

But no song captures this contrast more than the infectiously rhythmic album opener “He’s Gone,” to which grief was the entry point. Written whip-fast amid a bout of pandemic quarantining, it’s a song that revealed itself to Klauder bit by bit through the songwriting process. It evolved from what he initially interpreted as a fun story of a racehorse, to what he discovered was actually a deeply emotional tribute to his best friend’s late father, Duff, a pivotal presence in his life from an early age. “He never broke his stride doing everything with pride/He’s a legend that needed no folklore,” sings Klauder at an energetic clip.

Klauder chokes up recalling the memorial service for Duff, where the eulogies uncannily echoed Klauder’s lyrics. “In my mind, listening to people say the words of the song, it was crazy. Then we started performing it a little bit and people would sing along with it right away. I was like, ‘What is happening?’ It was an important song to me personally,” he says. “But then as you sing it, people just are joyful right away.” Like the best kind of country song that perfectly toes the line between bitter and sweet, it is the best kind of remembrance, a celebration of a person’s most special qualities even after they’re gone. This is what draws Klauder and Willms to playing country songs, or what they refer to as “our soul music.”

“Think of all the old roots and tradition of this music,” Willms says. “Old time songs and bluegrass songs always have a cheery melody and rhythm, but they can be about the most depressing topics. I think that’s so cool that you can have this emotional juxtaposition.”

This same dynamic also seeps into one of the album’s most exuberant moments, its title track, which tells a love story about standing by someone as they struggle through a difficult time. It’s a familiar sentiment given Willms’ vocal healing and Klauder’s devoted support of her, and it is what fuels them as they prepare for their next recording session this fall back at Savoy’s studio. They’ll put a few new songs to tape and see where it leads them, all the while spreading that infectious spirit to packed dancefloors across their southeast US tour dates this fall:

If you try when you’re weary, to raise up your chin

You can lean on me darlin’ and gently settle in

I’ll be gold in your pocket, I’ll be water in your well

I’ll be sunshine in your daydream, I’ll be your victory bell

“We were playing last night [at Blackpot] for a big, rowdy crowd, couples dancing and two-stepping,” Klauder recalled, remembering the unbridled bliss in the room. “Everyone was so happy and joyful and bouncy no matter what subject we were singing [about]. That part is what I live for.”