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Listen: Mark Erelli aims for the perfect love song on 'Kindhearted Woman'
This is an exclusive song premiere, part of WBUR's effort to highlight New England musicians.
Over his 14 albums, acclaimed Boston singer-songwriter Mark Erelli has written songs about love and life from nearly every imaginable perspective. But he’s made an annual tradition of writing about his own love for his wife.
This annual musical gift started about a decade ago when Erelli joined some of his cohorts for a songwriting retreat at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. The couple had young kids and adding another five days away on top of his tour schedule felt like “a big ask.”
“So I thought, ‘I have to write her a love song,’” recalled Erelli. “And it became a tradition to try to write the perfect one. And I think I did it several times, but the problem is that we keep changing and the relationship keeps changing and evolving.”
That evolution has resulted in “Kindhearted Woman,” which will be part of Erelli’s upcoming LP “Spring Green.” It’s a song of gratitude, with a chorus in which Erelli croons “I’m lucky to have a kindhearted woman in my life” over a laid-back, country-folk waltz partially inspired by Neil Young’s 2000 acoustic record “Silver & Gold.”
“Spring Green” is Erelli’s first studio record since 2023’s “Lay Your Darkness Down,” which was written both before and after Erelli was diagnosed with the degenerative eye condition retinitis pigmentosa. “Spring Green” explores what it’s like to live and try to flourish during both global and personal turmoil.
Its celebration of community is reflected in how it was created. Erelli’s Barnstar! bandmate Zachariah Hickman co-produced the record, and many of the songs were co-written with Erelli’s peers in the vibrant Boston folk scene. At last summer’s retreat, he worked on “Kindhearted Woman” with master mandolinist and songwriter Sean Staples.
“One of the things that I love about Sean’s writing is that he's a stickler for simplicity,” said Erelli. “There's never going to be an overly flowery or overly complicated metaphor when something more simple and direct would suffice, and for this particular song, I wanted it to be guileless and direct, with nothing up its sleeve.”
The two hadn’t seen each other in some time, so during the campfire collaboration, “every verse that I contributed was directly a result of that conversation. It was just two friends catching up and talking about where they were in their lives,” said Staples. When Erelli mentioned how his wife had a community garden plot, it became the lyric: “Just a glimpse of her in our garden/ All we’ve planted growin’ wild and tall/ And I’m humbled by the harvest we gather each fall.”
"I don't want the listener to hear the song and see me. I want them to see their own lives in the song. I don't want to be bigger than the song."
Mark Erelli
While the song may have had very personal origins, Erelli said that his goal is for any listener to find something in it that they can relate to.
“I don't want the listener to hear the song and see me,” he said. “I want them to see their own lives in the song. I don't want to be bigger than the song.”
“Even though the lyrics came from a specific story, I think they're beautifully generalizable,” added Staples. Quoting the chorus — “Days when I wake up in worry/ Wondering how much it shows/ There ain’t no need for a story/ She already knows” — he said, “that idea that there’s a give and take in love, where you try to hide things, and ultimately the person that loves you knows you better than you realize that they do. That is making the personal more generalizable.”
The record was made in a rapid three-day session with most parts recorded live. “Kindhearted Woman” was fleshed out with a gentle but stirring band sound that featured Staples, the pedal steel of Rich Hinman and the acoustic guitar of Andrew Stern. “Andrew can play anything, and he was content to just state the melody and then restate it up an octave,” said Erelli.
At the end, as Erelli brings in some soul music-inspired wailing, “it needs a little bit of an instrumental foil to that vocalizing, and that's where Rich comes in,” said Erelli.
The thoughtful intentions behind the record didn’t end when the session was finished. The album won’t be on Spotify at all, and for the first month following its March 6 release, it will only be available on Bandcamp, with Erelli personally fulfilling all the orders.
Erelli decided to ditch Spotify after reading Liz Pelly’s book “Mood Machine.” “I was shocked and sickened, not just as an independent musician, but almost more as a music fan,” Erelli said. “I have spent my entire life deeply appreciating and deeply listening to music. And Spotify as a platform is actively undermining the very notion of music as something that is worthy of just paying attention to.”
“I really want to kind of get back to and hew a lot closer to a human-centered approach to music,” said Erelli. “That's what excites and inspires me and makes me feel supported. … I’ve never met someone after a show who said they came because they heard me on Spotify.”
Mark Erelli celebrates the release of “Spring Green” on March 20 at the Spire Center in Plymouth and March 21 at Arrow Street Arts in Cambridge.
