Portrait in Yes Weekly
Third East of Nashville Songwriters in the Round By Colin Cutler
Sunday July 17, 6-8pm, three songwriters from the region will share their songs and the stories behind them in an intimate writers-in-the-round setting at the Green Bean on Elm in Greensboro, NC. Charlottesville’s Night Teacher will join Reidsville’s Walking Medicine and Greensboro’s Justin Reid in the third installment of the East of Nashville Songwriters Series, which has so far featured acts such as David Childers, Momma Molasses, Emanuel Wynter, and Matty Sheets. All three of July’s acts come from artistic families—Jenny Kimmel of Walking Medicine grew up going to Galax with her family, and her sister Ivy Sheppard (of the South Carolina Broadcasters) contributed to her recently-released debut album; Justin Reid grew up making music in the church and occasionally tours with his sister Nikki Morgan; Lilly Bechtel of Night Teacher grew up in theater and musical theater, thanks to her artistic mother. But in the last couple years, each has forged their own path, with debut albums released or in production, influenced by the parallel trails they’ve blazed in other parts of their life.
(Read the full article in Yes Weekly here.)
For Night Teacher’s Lilly Bechtel, this will be her first solo performance in more than a year. She looks forward to that exploration, and it hearkens back to her childhood. “I grew up singing around the house at 2 or 3 and always preferred that mode of communication. I guess I was cursed from the beginning.” With an artistic mother, she grew up in theater and musical theater. “Until I hit my teens: then I didn’t want anyone to look at me performing and I dove deeply into writing.” It wasn’t until her early 20s that she started performing live again, first with Ladyship in Brooklyn, then in the open mic scene in Barcelona while she lived there for a year.
“In all these things going on around the world, I’ve turned to the written word. I’ve got shelves and shelves of journals.” Bechtel also was a freelance journalist and has an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College—she graduated via Zoom in 2020, has “The Shape of Grief” published in Poetry, and has another poem coming out in Barrow Street Journal this fall. She’s more comfortable calling herself a writer than a musician, but her collaboration with Matt Wyatt has helped fill out the words and also given them deeper space to work with.
“Our project is very much a hybrid, with influences from Sylvan Esso and Fiona Apple’s last album. Both are artists with a lot of funk and depth and weight and ethereal beauty and feminine. The sense of the angelic female singer with the instruments and electronic effects giving it an anchoring bit of depth and darkness.” The album they are currently working on further explores those interactions: “Matt will provide a little bit of a drum line before I approach the words, and it’s very much a back-and-forth. I didn’t think about my songwriting as much at first, and want to challenge myself more in how the words and ideas work in a song—there will be poetry and prose poems carried in the music. But there will also be a dark humor and sass that is part of me, but hasn’t always come out in my music.”
In her songwriting, she covers everything from relationships to current events and themes of racial and environmental justice and feminism. “There’s a theme in a lot of my love-on-the-rocks songs about being dishonest or being bound by someone’s expectation of you and going along with it, and the mockery it can make of your own sense of self.”
“August 12th” gives a journalistic witness’s eye view on the events in Charlottesville in 2017. “I sat out on the porch and wrote it as it was unfolding.” Her lyrics also speak to the overlap of environmental issues and feminism—“I think ‘Endangered Dream’ fuses those most obviously, the ways we covet and want to own and control what we find beautiful.”
