SPOTLIGHT: On ‘Right On,’ Humbird Weaves Modern-Day Midwestern Fairy Tales

EDITOR’S NOTE: Humbird is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for April 2024. Read more about her and her new album, Right On, coming April 12 on Nettwerk, all month long.

Some people meditate. Others might phone a friend, practice yoga, or take a bath. But when Siri Undlin needs a little self-care, she writes fairy tales. “It’s like a form of mental health practice for me if I’m feeling dark and moody,” she says.

The Minnesotan singer-songwriter who records under the moniker Humbird — which includes a rotating group of musicians orbiting around her — penned a particularly stirring one that she later reimagined as a song for her latest album, Right On, out April 12 on Nettwerk. Contrary to the eeriness of the lyrics, “Ghost on the Porch” packs the same jaunty punch of rootsy rock and roll as the rest of the album, as Undlin sings, clear-throated:

What of my children, what of my garden, what of the life that I have built?
Storm or not, I will not leave, save death should come himself
‘It is him, it is him,’ she spoke with a pale face
He rides this way with wicked speed, your breath he means to take
In and out, in and out my lungs billow strong and proud
Yet another man who so intends to sink me in the ground

“I just feel like in the folk and Americana canon, talking about whiskey and the road, a lot of people have done it, and a lot of people have done it really well, but I don’t think we need another song like that,” she says. “But that feeling of needing to run, through the frame of this person experiencing a ghost that looks exactly like them, standing on their porch telling them to run away ’cause death is on its way. There’s so much more momentum as I experience it in a narrative that’s fantastical like that.”

Right On is Undlin’s third record as Humbird and her loudest yet. Where her sound was quiet and contemplative, it now rages and simmers. She wrote most of it from the journals she kept while touring, and it shows. These are true-blue road songs, observations of a changing world seen through the windows of a van, many of which had already been played live several times before they were recorded. Undlin describes them as weathered, fitting given the kind of scrappy energy that permeates the album from the opening title track. “Right On” is a simple nod of encouragement to keep trying even when you feel like quitting, a positive mantra to kick off an album about persevering in the face of what can feel like apocalyptic times.

Undlin’s own ability to persevere has been bolstered over the winding road that led her to a life as a touring musician, beginning with singing hymns in a Lutheran church where her mother was the pastor, during her pre-teen stint playing in a Celtic music group, then in art school, and later as a Watson Fellow studying music and anthropology in the islands of Ireland and Scandinavia. “It was actually through studying folklore and shadowing storytellers and witnessing the effect that it would have on a group of gathered people when a story was in the air or a song was floating that I was like, ‘Oh hang on, I don’t want to be in a classroom dissecting this,’” she recalls. “It was that research that totally changed the trajectory of my life. I thought I was going to grad school.”

Midwestern Roots

No matter how much time she spends traveling, Undlin’s path has always led her back home to the Midwest, the place where she feels most like herself. “I feel a sense of responsibility to this place. I was born here, it’s a complicated place,” she says. “I could leave, but then I’d be just another person in a big city. Whereas here, I have roots and therefore obligations to what happens in the future. I feel very much part of what happens next, so I value that a lot.”

Right On is innately inspired by this region. Undlin knows its northern flora and fauna, rivers and bluffs, vast farmland, and highways deep in her bones. She recorded the album in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, with her trusty friend and producer Shane Leonard at the helm.

Humbird’s Siri Undlin (photo by Juliet Farmer)

“I think these songs are very much rooted in the Midwest landscape,” she says. “It only made sense to record them here.” Leonard’s studio has become a haven for Undlin, and the two have a shared language and understanding around songcraft. This time, he suggested they record live to tape and try to capture some of that character built up over months of playing the songs on stages. For Undlin and her band, which includes Pat Keen and Pete Quirsfeld, it was a rewarding challenge. They had just a few takes to get each song right, resulting in a raw, live-wire sound that bursts out of her.

A true encapsulation of this is “Blueberry Bog,” a song about staving off end-times worries by looking for the silver linings in a deteriorating society. “I’m not waiting for a savior, but I’m doing okay,” she sings through whip-fast percussion and a bright guitar groove. “It is this weirdly jovial song about really freaking out about the kind of macrocosmic elements that we all are gonna have to figure out how to navigate together,” Undlin says. “There’s sort of an anarchist spirit in that song that I love and that feels really joyful.”

“Cornfields and Roadkill” is a similar call to action, offered up through a cacophonous jumble of fuzzy chords and drums. Undlin paints the dystopian scene of monocrops and carcasses referenced in the song’s title, one that has haunted her across the country:

Still thinking about that oak tree
There on the edge of that property
On land stolen, bought, and tilled
Two hundred years and that tree is still
Holding up the canopy of a forest cut for currency

“It’s pretty dire. It’s not a gentle scene and I think any touring musician would agree. You see a lot of the places that have been forgotten or left behind or totally extracted from, and you talk with people along the way, and I just wanted to be honest. I love this place and that song is in many ways an ode to the Midwest,” she says, but adds, “This is what so much of this place has become, but it doesn’t have to be.”

Undlin quells this anxiety through storytelling, sometimes using mysticism as a lens through which to explore heavier, more earthly topics like climate change and social justice. She learned this growing up in the church, and though organized religion is no longer a part of her life, the lessons she took from its texts and her sort of atypically positive experience of it linger.

“Ultimately I grew up with an awareness that a spiritual community or a religion is as complicated as we are as humans. It’s just nuance,” she says. “But I think that informs the way I metabolize certain events, and especially when there’s violence coming from Christian churches and people who are essentially sitting in pews and becoming weaponized against their fellow human. It’s so infuriating because I have read the Bible, I was in church every Sunday, and there’s this feeling of like, are we reading the same book?”

This frustration is channeled in “Child of Violence,” one of Right On’s thematically darkest tunes about the pervasiveness of white supremacy. A swirling psych-rock arrangement is the backdrop for Undlin’s fiery pleas to stop perpetuating the cycles of brainwashing and hate under the guise of faith.

“I grew up in a church that was like, ‘Love your neighbor, be kind, let’s analyze this text and see what Jesus is literally saying, not what some politician wants you to think he’s saying.’ It taught me how to read closely, how to think. It was very much in the tradition of social activism,” she says.

Undlin’s understanding of biblical stories — different kinds of fairy tales, in a way — as a mechanism for making sense of the human condition can be heard, too, on “Seven Veils,” which borrows its title and concept from the story of Salome. “Seven veils between the smooth touch of honesty,” she sings, the veil imagery representative of a great need to dig deeper, to keep pulling aside the veils to get to the truth of the thing.

“In my family, talking about those stories critically and coming at them from different angles, it applies to the biblical canon, but also just stories in general and appreciating that they can be a liberating tool and they can be an oppressive tool. You have to sit with them and chew on them,” she says. “But the metaphors and the instruction we find in there are these little seeds that someone from the past cared enough to bury in a story and save for us.”

Creating Community

A foundational appreciation for the importance of community feels, to Undlin, like a Midwestern thing as much as a church thing, and it is what drives and grounds Humbird. “I feel like when music is really steeped in a specific place, it sounds weirder and much more interesting. There’s kind of this hive mind that can happen in places with a lot of artist infrastructure where everyone’s coming out with the same thing because it’s like you’re in the same soup or something. When you’re in a city like Minneapolis or so many other smaller places, there are communities there and what they’re doing is really specific,” she says.

Right On is a distillation of this philosophy, a record crafted around Undlin’s love of the place that brought it to life. “Wherever you are, it changes you, and it changes what you make and how you think,” she says. “But making space to be aware of how you’re being changed by where you are, that’s big stuff.”