"Tumbleweed Woman" - An Interview with Grace Askew

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"Tumbleweed Woman" - An Interview with Grace Askew

The American singer-songwriter and self-proclaimed "road dog" talks life on the road, relocating to New Mexico and finding inspiration in the most unlikely of places. Strap in tight and put your Stetson on, we’re going cross country...

Words by David J Constable

'It's the road-dog life...'

If Grace Askew’s life were a book, it would read like some great Western adventure or Louis L’Amour page-turner, a frontier drama detailing epic road journeys and encounters with true-life characters. “The soundtrack to those miles became some of my sound’s biggest influences,” says the Memphis-born musician. “I’d travel across the country and watch the landscape skim past, listening to Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Blaze Foley, Tom Waits, Karen Dalton, Guy Clark... I’d read about their lives and the things that inspired them, and then I’d look to create the same circumstances.”

The singer-songwriter has spent much of her life traversing American states, living out of her truck − a Ford F350 King Ranch she calls “Wanda”. She has performed in theatres, breweries, roller-rinks, desert festivals and “too many dive bars to mention,” producing three albums and numerous singles.

In 2013, she featured on the fourth season of NBC’s The Voice and has won several major honours, including the International Songwriting Content and John Lennon Songwriting Contest. She hosts her own weekly podcast called Daring to Suck, and if that wasn’t enough, in December 2019, she finished a two-year challenge to write and perform one song a day − 730 songs in as many days. She streamed social media performances, which generated modelling and brand contracts and, at the time of writing, is 126 days into another self-imposed song-a-day challenge. This isn’t someone to retire to her rocking chair and count her blessings, cowgirl boots up. Grace is a doer, a go-getter, a vagabond of the highway. Above all, she’s an artist. “I’m a hustler, too!” she tells me. “It’s what you’ve gotta do. Every artist is a walking brand these days, It's the hustle, and we as humans crave adventure. I know that I do. It feeds a part of me.”

Growing up in Memphis’ Davies Plantation area, Grace was the middle sibling of three. “We were outside kids, running in the woods and swimming at a nearby motel pool,” she tells me. Despite the virtual set-up, which has become the norm in recent months, conversation flows easily, and I can see Grace’s joy at talking about her childhood. “I've had plenty of years of a love-hate relationship with the town where I was born. I grew up by the highway, falling asleep to the hum of the semis barreling down the Interstate, dreaming of all the places I might visit one day. And the smell of honeysuckle every hot summer.” Later, she attended Loyola University in New Orleans but quickly discovered that she missed Memphis. “It was only once I’d left my hometown that I fell in love with it.”

Grace in her Ford F350 "Wanda"

Photo by Heath Herring

Dropping out of school, Grace spent a year in New Orleans before returning home. She began to see Memphis through new eyes, renting a small apartment in the heart of Midtown. “I reconnected with home and rediscovered Elvis, Johnny Cash, Ann Peebles and Howlin’ Wolf. I was hooked and started my full-time singer-songwriting career aged 19, bouncing around Midtown dive bars.” By her early 20s, she had taken to the backroads and small towns of the Midwest and Southern states. “I was living that Americana life before I knew what it was all about, which meant tapping into many different parts of the country. That helped me discover who I am and my own version of Americana.”

When you listen to her music, the influences are apparent. Her sound is heavy on the blues with doses of rock and country, probably best described as “Americana”, a term Grace is not overly fond of. She is a confessional songwriter, demonstrating the same curious eye as Joni Mitchell, Lucinda Williams and the UK’s own Laura Marling. Lyrics speak of life on the highway − booze, drugs, darkness − the travelling musician’s loneliness, the tortured artist in pursuit of inspiration. I think here of Mitchell’s Coyote, an on-theroad tale written while travelling with Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue in the 1970s: a prisoner of the white lines of the freeway… [read into white lines what you will]

“I would go in search of destruction, ya know,” she says, “purposely picking out the seediest motels and becoming fascinated by the neon-glowing stories of truck stops. It’s the road dog life − or “Tumbleweed Woman” life, as I’ve deemed it.”

She continues, “The roads are long, and travel can take days. You find things to occupy your mind, though. I have the landscape, and there’s always a gas station or truck stop somewhere. When we can get back to travel and touring, things are going to be different. I have a young son now, so he and my husband will be there with me. A few years ago, it was just me and the open road. I’d jump in “Wanda” and set off, me and the tarmac for miles.”

When I ask about any favourite places on the road, I’m expecting answers that reflect pivotal moments in her professional life − a recording studio or perhaps the location of a memorable gig − but no. “Truck stops,” she tells me, her eyes dancing, her sotto Southern voice bursting into life. “You see all life there. Real people, real characters, ya know! I’m actually pretty comfortable at a truck stop,” she says, laughing.

Grace photographed in New Mexico, United States

Photo by Tristan Lain

Observations of the American country and topography inform her work. Lyrics about uptown sunrises (Providence Road), rough country take me away… (Rough Country), and, more to the point, the eighth track on Denim & Diesel, Ain’t Comin’ Home. I suggest that Ain’t Comin’ Home sounds like a threat as if she’s comforted, perhaps even better suited, to the road. She semi-agrees. “There was a time when I thought that. I sort trouble, the hardliving life. With age and experience, though, I learnt to take better care of myself. That is a priority if I wish to guard and protect my Muse and better serve the writing. The vast spaciousness of America somehow imparts more creative clarity. My craft is what matters, and I must protect that. My demons are very far down now, and I have a home, finally. We are living the dream in New Mexico, waking up and falling asleep to the Sandia Mountains in our backyard and the smell of burning piñon in the chimneys down in the valley.”

I ask if the road has changed her and if such extensive travel and hard-living resulted in who she is as a person and an artist today? “We are all affected by the society that we’re in, and as it happens, I’ve passed through many. They leave their mark on me and my lyrics. The road has taught me so much; it’s the school of hard knocks. Above all, it’s about grafting and staying true to your art; an audience can tell if you’re not authentic. The result is that “Tumbleweed Woman” life, something gritty − rough and raw and janky.”

Other things impact her craft, like family. After a solid decade of hardliving and playing on the road, Grace is three years sober, married and the mother of two-year-old Wolf. “Being a mother is a different kind of strength; it’s tough as hell to balance a career and family, so I have a newly held admiration for working mothers and mothers in general. And my husband helps me tremendously too, from balancing my artistic brain to protecting me from the industry’s sneaky people.” So is she comfortable now, rooted? Dare I say, settled? “My roots will always proudly be in the Delta, but the red dirt of New Mexico that I now call home has never felt better. I was coming out here twice a year for ten years, and now I live here. I find it a wild but freeing place, and that helps my creativity.”

Having never been, I’m intrigued to discover what makes New Mexico so freeing, so special. Isn’t it ghost towns, dusty saloons and visitor shops flogging Navajo trinkets… tumbleweed ‘tumbling’ down empty streets? “It’s alive out here, and the music scene is different, night and day compared with Memphis and Nashville. It’s a community. The people have a listening culture and really appreciate artists. I made a home of those purple mountains and that red dirt feel of an on-the-road life, and New Mexico has all of that. There’s still that adventure spirit within me, the need to hit the road. Touring feeds that part of my soul.”

So, as we emerge bemused and befuddled from the COVID pandemic, rubbing our eyes and out of the other side of what surely must be the strangest and most challenging of years for artists and the self-employed, is she desperate for a return to the road, to jump back behind the wheel of Wanda? “Oh, for sure!” she beams, “the road is my path; I know that’s where I belong and where my life will take me… and my family too this time! And what else can we expect from her in the coming months? “Collaborations, I hope, and more songs, more photoshoots, a songwriting retreat, my own music festival, and I plan to help new and emerging singer-songwriters, that's important to me − it’s tough out there, and we all need a helping hand, right?”

For now, though, there’s a new house in Santa Fe that needs some attention, a baby and a husband too, and there's still a few hundred days remaining in Grace’s second song-a-day challenge. There are just a few places to start right there.

Grace's latest record, Denim & Diesel, is available on iTunes. Her podcast, Daring to Suck, is available to download on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You can follow her at @graceaskew

David J Constable is a writer, editor and CELTA-qualified teacher of English to speakers of other languages. He is also the founder of Ghost Dance. Born in Maidstone, Kent and educated in both the UK and USA, he had led a nomadic life, living in London, Kansas City, Bangkok, Lucca and now Kent on the English coast. Follow him at @davidjconstable