Silver City Amy Helm

• 1 Love Supreme 03:43
• 2 Money On 7 04:07
• 3 Baby Come Back 03:17
• 4 If I Was King 04:04
• 5 Silver City 03:12
• 6 Hwy 81 04:35
• 7 Dear Louisiana 03:21
• 8 Amen Anyway 04:13
• 9 Mt. Guardian 03:17
• 10 Alameda 04:08
• Total Runtime 37:57

Info for Silver City

When creating her fourth album, the soulful and reflective Silver City, Amy Helm was guided by her North Star: women’s voices. “Women whispering, singing, shouting their stories - speaking the truth. I wanted to dig into that inherited narrative and reach for what I could.” The epistolary anthology is a collection of conversations that travel through time, exploring and celebrating womanhood in all its complexities. Silver City blends the folk twang of Helm’s childhood with gospel and soul, drawing inspiration from varied stories: the life of Helm’s great-grandmother, the story of a young fan struggling with substance abuse, Helm’s own life as a single mother and hard-touring singer.

The album was recorded at Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock, New York, with two core groups of musicians, both anchored by producer Josh Kaufman. Helm notes that this project brought out a different approach in her vocals. “Every time I've made a record, I’ve tried to give my strongest performance,” she says. “This time, I wasn’t thinking about the performance. I was rooted in the stories.”

Silver City began with a story that didn’t end up making the album. Helm wrote “Young Katie” to a young fan of hers who died of an overdose. “I began the song as sort of a letter to her,” she says, “and it just started to flow; the words weren’t even coming from me. And then the rest of the songs started to come through.” Helm says. The songs on this record are like letters, written to younger versions of Helm, or to other women she’s known. She continues, “‘Young Katie’ didn't fit conversationally with the rest of them, but it was the muse for this album.”

One crucial moment is “If I Was King,” a partly fictionalized narrative about Helm’s great-grandmother. “Her story was lost to the family,” she says. “They were dirt poor sharecroppers and she started having kids when she was 14. She had married this fire-and-brimstone preacher, who banished her from home and from her children.” Amy, wishing to hear her voice and story, wrote “If I Was King” as a rumination on the ways women have long been told by someone else how to live their lives. It was after finishing this song that she began to see this album as a series of letters: “All of these songs were me speaking to somebody—either reaching out and asking questions, or asking them to reach back to me.”

Several songs address the realities of her immediate family. “‘Silver City’ was painful to write, about the grief of divorce,” she says. “I don't think I could have written that song til I was way on the other side of it. I have a really healthy, lovely blended family and my ex-husband is a really dear friend of mine now. It's a very cool thing that we all worked hard at, and that I’m really proud of.”

“Mount Guardian” is a close examination of single parenting. “I was by myself for upwards of 10 years,” says Helm, “running myself ragged on the road, getting home at three in the morning and grabbing a box of mac and cheese from the gas station for the next night's dinner, waking up at seven and doing it again. I felt victorious any time I got my kids to school on time with lunch in hand. When I look back on that now, it was such a beautiful time, but also hectic and intense. I think, ‘How the hell did I even do that?’ Honestly, I think this whole record is about different ways that I’ve tried to keep pressing on.”

Elsewhere on Silver City, Helm opens up her lens to consider trauma, loss, and human frailty. “The song ‘Amen, Anyway’ is about a lot of things,” she says, “but it's very much about being paralyzed with the fear of not being good enough and lacking faith in ourselves. It’s also about being surrounded by people who handle that with drugs and alcohol—it's about losing people to that.”

With Silver City, Amy Helm shares the lessons she’s gathered from a remarkable life as an artist, mother, daughter, woman, as someone who has worked, evolved, and persevered. “No one talks about the beauty of age,” she says. “Shame and fear are so common to so many of us, and to get through that and feel ourselves change is the most

beautiful thing about getting older. It's incredible to look back at things and celebrate how we’ve survived.” With this album, Helm embraces this strength of transformation through her powerful, story-rooted performances.

These stories, complex and real, show Amy as she is. Reflected in the illustration on the Silver City cover art, Amy is surrounded by the messes her kids make, her cast-off high-heeled boots, and a crooked crown, but she’s also where she should be: on her throne, gazing into the future.

Amy Helm

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 48 kHz, 24-bit. The provided 96 kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Amy Helm
Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Amy Helm’s third album, What the Flood Leaves Behind, is her most autobiographical yet, both in content and creation. Released in June of 2021 via Renew Records/BMG, these 10 songs represent a gathering of ideas and experiences, friends and collaborators. Yet, the album also marks a landing — a pause for the traveling musician and mother of two young boys who was seeking clarity in her calling and career.

After making multiple albums and performing in far-flung places, Helm returned home to Woodstock’s Levon Helm Studios just before the pandemic to record What the Flood Leaves Behind and reclaim a sense of self.

“Going back to the place where I learned so much about how to express music, how to hold myself in music, how to listen to music,” she begins, “it was humbling in a funny way. I could see clearly where I came from and where I am now in my life. I was singing from a different place now and for a different reason.”

An impressive group of friends and collaborators joins Helm on What the Flood Leaves Behind. With musical polyglot Josh Kaufman (whose credits range from Taylor Swift’s Folklore to the Grammy-nominated Bonny Light Horseman) producing and contributing on piano, guitar, and mandolin, the record brings Helm’s powerful, emotive vocals to the forefront of the album.

“We tried to make it about her voice and about the musicians responding to her and not the other way around,” explains Kaufman. “I wanted her to feel like she had that freedom to be herself on the recordings and she just filled up the whole room. Her singing was coming from this deeply rooted place of family and music and wanting to convey a beauty.”

In fact, Helm considers Levon Helm Studios itself to be “the tuning fork” for the record — an ethereal, elemental component that helped her and musicians Phil Cook (keys, harmonica), Michael Libramento (bass, organ, percussion), Tony Mason (drums), Daniel Littleton (guitar), Stuart Bogie (saxophone), Jordan McLean (trumpet), and her son Lee Collins (congas) summon courage and comfort.

The songs themselves reflect Helm’s inner strength and personal growth. Some might even sound familiar: “Cotton and the Cane" is a pensive homage to those who raised her, whom she calls, “the village of brilliant and talented people who were also wrestling with the grips of addiction.” A fan favorite that previously took on many styles when performed live, the song is now buoyed by her soaring soprano atop a whirring Wurlitzer. “Are We Running Out of Love,” a freak-folk drone in the hands of Swedish guitarist and songwriter Daniel Norgren, becomes an acoustic, urgent plea. Additionally, the album features collaborations with a number of prominent and prolific songwriters in roots music like Elizabeth Ziman (Elizabeth and The Catapult), Mary Gauthier, Erin Rae, and more.

But it’s “Verse 23,” the song from which the album title is derived, that encapsulates What the Flood Leaves Behind. Written by M.C. Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger) specifically for Helm, the song opens gently as she beckons, “Turn to Verse 23, read the words on the page.” It’s a Psalm of David that declares, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

From there, the vivid, narrative verses swell, building up to a chorus with deep resonance for Helm. She repeats back the lyrics: What the flood leaves behind is what we've got to make. “I like that reckoning,” she says, “of the good and the bad and everything in between.”

Throughout the record, Helm sings stories of life’s relentlessness. But like she extrapolates from “Verse 23,” the most productive, and often the most healing response, is to create. As a result, What the Flood Leaves Behind serves as a defiant form of self-expression, as Helm steps fully into her own light.

This album contains no booklet.