The Hudson River Music Festival in New York is a revival of a traditional event conceived by folk music legend Pete Seeger and his wife, Toshi, who put together the Hudson River Revival to give music fans a chance to appreciate the river while also organizing efforts to clean it up. “Participation—that’s what’s gonna save the human race,” Seeger once said, a credo on the festival’s website that drives the vibe of this year’s event on 21st June at Croton Point Park (30 miles north of New York City). The lineup thus features a stellar roster of musicians who aren’t shy about singing out for truth and social justice.
The festival is headlined by Jesse Welles, the Arkansas-based troubadour who has skyrocketed to national stardom over the past couple of years thanks to his talent for “singing the news” in catchy, no-holds-barred fashion. Welles will be preceded on the main stage by a supergroup trio of guitarists in Warren Haynes, Grahame Lesh and Daniel Donato; outspoken country rock and Americana star Margo Price; plus Cimafunk and Chaparral. There’s also a second Rainbow Stage billed as celebrating “musical heritage and community”, featuring folk artists like the Ebony Hillbillies, the Guthrie Family Singers (granddaughters of music legend Woody Guthrie), and Leah Song.
PopMatters recently had a chance to connect with Leah Song, who’s been one of the 21st century’s leading voices at the intersection of art and activism alongside her sister, Chloe, in their group, Rising Appalachia. She also tours as the Leah Song Project and has a new EP out titled My Hope Lies Down in the Mississippi, recorded as a duo with Rising Appalachia bandmate Duncan Wickel. The conversation ranged from her unique path as an artist motivated by education, activism, and community solidarity; to finding catharsis in a world that’s trending in the opposite direction. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
PopMatters: How great is it to be asked to play at a festival like this that honors the intersection of music and activism, which has been such a driving force in your own career? What format will you be playing in?
Leah Song: It’s such a pleasure to be invited and to be kind of a keeper of some of these old songs and old, old folk traditions and also a carrier of some of the new ones. I always feel really inspired to be at the intersection of music, change-making, and folklore, so, of course, this is very relevant to all of that. I will be coming as a duo, with me, the Leah Song Project, and my wonderful bandmate and dear friend Duncan Wickle (who is the fiddle and cello player). I think we represent a combination of a stripped-back representation of the Rising Appalachia sound, and also a lot of the old Appalachian folklore and some old Irish folklore. So there’s a lot of storytelling and song-catching in our duo set.
PopMatters: Okay, and it’s a compelling lineup with Jesse Wells, Warren Haynes, Graham Lesh, Daniel Donato, Margo Price. Have you met any of these other performers before?
Leah Song: We’ve been on a couple of bills with Margo Price and Warren Haynes, but we are not in close musical camaraderie with either of them, although certainly big, big appreciators and supporters of their work. I love a lot of what Margo Price is doing with her music for certain.
PopMatters: Margo sure has been inspiring for how outspoken she’s been on social issues in recent years, as have you with Rising Appalachia. In a 2022 interview on the Upful Life podcast, you had a quote that resonated when you said, “The activist culture needs the dance party, so bad. The kind of bliss-seeking, live-your-best-life culture needs these conversations around impact and social justice, and they both miss the boat a little bit, and Rising Appalachia has been straddling these worlds.” Now it’s four years later, things are trending even further in the wrong direction, but Rising Appalachia’s new song “Lady Liberty” (released in 2025) seems to fit that mold.
Leah Song: Yeah, I feel like there’s a really important intersection between catharsis and calls to action. And I think what we’re finding now is that society at large is so overwhelmed. There’s so much divisiveness. There’s so much exhaustion, and I think that’s sort of the tools of the overlord, for lack of a better way to say it, you know. I think that’s part of the divide-and-conquer strategy: to exhaust everyone, wear everyone down, make them all afraid of each other, and nervous about each other’s incentives.
I believe that music is here to do the exact opposite, which is to uplift, to bring people energy in their own bodies and their own voices. Also, to put a whole bunch of people in the same room who may not agree about everything politically, and then they realize how much they still have in common and how important their wider humanity is. So, I think that’s still the overarching ask of music: to remind us of how united we all are, no matter where you sit within your socioeconomic and political constructs. Actually, we have so much in common with one another, and we are so much better off figuring out how to lift each other up.
PopMatters: Yes! Will “Lady Liberty” be on the new record, or will it be all new material?
Leah Song: “Lady Liberty” is on the new Rising Appalachia album, which has just begun to come out. It’s a 16-track album, and we’re so, so excited about it. It’s been years and years and years in the making, and it straddles also our relationship with the biggest natural disaster that has swept across the Southeast. We were in Western North Carolina when Hurricane Helene came through. We were deeply impacted, and our lives were changed forever. [The sisters continue to live in Asheville, North Carolina, where they often performed for the community during the hurricane recovery effort, adding extra substance to their 2019 song “Resilient”.]
PopMatters: That had to be tough facing apocalyptic climate change at your front door. Let’s turn the clock back a bit before that to the Park City Song Summit in 2022 [where performers also participated in workshops about songwriting and the music industry]. In one of your workshops, you and Chloe talked about how you don’t have to be a starving artist; you can have a day job, and it’s healthy to find a lifestyle where you don’t have to feel like your art is something that needs to be desperately extracted from the muses.
That brought to mind an episode of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series on Netflix, about an author who had a literal muse locked up in his house because he was afraid of writer’s block and that he wouldn’t be able to meet the deadline for his next book without her. It was like a Twilight Zone episode, and your comment about the muses was interesting. So what are some ways you’ve gotten around that, to make ends meet since it’s hard for music to be a full-time income for a lot of bands these days?
Leah Song: I have not heard of that show, though I always love good cultural undertones and places where this shows up in contemporary culture. I kind of live under a rock, so I don’t ever watch anything, but I always like to know what’s out there in the world. And I think I stand by that mentality, and that’s a question we get asked all the time over the years: like, how do we make it? How do we get there? What is your advice to make it as an artist? My advice consistently, even though it can come across as a frustrating answer, is I don’t think that needs to be anybody’s drive. I think if your drive as an artist is to make it, then you probably have an agenda that isn’t only about creative integrity.
I think that being able to work as an artist is a wonderful, wonderful thing, but I deeply believe that having a day job, being a nurse, being in the service industry, working as an arborist, whatever it is, having a day job and then having your relationship to your creativity and your muses and your craft be what you do as a gesture of praise and creative commitment, that’s the way that you have reprieve from your daily life.
It’s equally as important, as much in service to the creativity as anything in quote unquote “making it in the industry”. So for those of us that make art for our living, we are, I think, all very grateful. Any working artist would also tell you it is full and overflowing with tricky, difficult decisions, times when you feel like you don’t have creativity to give. You have to milk a stone, times when you might feel very far away from your own relationship to your muses. You have to keep churning something out, which is very exhausting, so I don’t think there’s a better or worse way to do it.
I’m so grateful to work in the arts, and it’s my primary language. Our father [a sculptor] is one of the best artists we know, and he never made a lick of a living off of his creativity. He worked many different day jobs, and his art was his safe haven. It was where he processed all the tricky things going on in his life, and he was still, to this day, prolific in his creativity, and I think that’s brought him tremendous anchoring, tremendous joy, and a deep, deep wellspring. So, I stand by it that you want to have a relationship with your creativity and your muses in whatever way your life shapes out, and it doesn’t have to be your one and only, or the way you live or you quote “make it” for it to be a huge part of your life.
PopMatters: Doing some research on your past, it was fascinating to discover that you went down to Chiapas, Mexico when you were just 18 or 19 and lived and studied with the Zapatistas for a year [a guerrilla rebellion movement for indigenous rights and autonomy against corporate globalization that captured the imagination of social justice activists around the world, thanks in large part to poetically intellectual critiques of the modern global order by charismatic spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos.] What was it like being down there at such a formative time in your life?
Leah Song: I moved to Southern Mexico as a young woman, fresh out of Georgia, with both urban and Appalachian life in the South, and I wanted to understand the wider world. My family gave me the wonderful prompt. My parents said, ‘You don’t have to go to college, but you have to educate yourself; you can’t just float around.’ So if you’re gonna travel, [then] study, work, learn, get involved in projects.
So that was the first place that I moved as a young adult. I studied Spanish, I worked with youth community on mural projects and young arts projects in San Cristobal in central Chiapas, and I lived with an amazing Mayan family of educators and intellectuals and architects and political activists, and just began to learn about the story of the Mexican and Mayan lineages and ancestries, the folklore, the struggle.
What I was really touched by in my time in Chiapas – I lived in Mexico for about one year, and after that lived across Latin America for an additional six years; I spent a lot of my young adult life in Central and South America. That felt also important as an American to understand the wider concept of the Americas, the language, the traditions, the cultures. It was one of the most educational things I have ever done, and it was so eye-opening.
Also, the way art, poetry, painting, videography, and photography really were a big leading part in the Zapatista movement and in the revolution. There was this huge concept that there was an invitation for artists to come and learn about these stories, and tell these stories to the wider world. I think it’s interesting because I spend a lot of time traveling still, and I haven’t thought about this in this exact context, but saying it here, it’s really clear that I think that experience was one of the earlier pivotal times where I understood, Oh, actually my art and my activism can be closely linked because what art does, is it draws people in.
A lot of times, activism and social justice can push people away or put people on teams. And art is this invitation to say we have a story we wanna tell, we have a cause where we have struggle. We wanna share, and we want everyone to come in. I think that was very pivotal, come to think of it, in understanding how to lean into art as a way to rally more people together in conversation.
PopMatters: Then later you and Chloe went on to do some art and activist work at the Standing Rock protests with the Sioux people against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. How did that come about?
Leah Song: Yes, we went to Standing Rock, invited by the indigenous youth council, and we did a lot of fundraising and a lot of work externally from Standing Rock, just in support of a lot of the stories of our indigenous brothers and sisters. Then we were able to go and be on the ground for about three days in support. Again, the movement, the storytelling, the unity, the understanding that this was a wider issue and that many, many people were invited to the table to figure out how to stand up for these indigenous rights and indigenous land access. It was another one of many life-changing experiences for us, to bear witness to it, and also to be invited to contribute our voices to the cause.
PopMatters: Let’s talk about some of your songs. A track that stands out on your new EP as a surprise is “If I Needed You” by Townes Van Zandt, a deep track some only discovered when it was on the Crazy Heart soundtrack in 2009 [a film in which Jeff Bridges won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role as a down-and-out country singer.] The song really hits in the feels there, and so how did you choose to record it?
Leah Song: Yeah, my bandmate and I were really excited to put together this folk EP. It’s all analog, so we recorded it all one take into a single mic, into cassette. So the whole EP is very, very analog, very stripped back, no edits, no overdubs, no second passes, no Auto-Tune, nothing. It’s a collection of songs that have a lot of meaning for both of us that we’ve been playing over the last couple of years touring under the Leah Song Project. Each one has a story and a significant meaning, and we really wanted the collection to feel like it was sort of a re-envisioning of old tunes.
The Townes Van Zandt song was one I actually didn’t know very well, and I didn’t know Van Zandt very well. My mother, who is an extraordinary fiddle player and an extraordinary singer and piano player, doesn’t play out publicly as much as she does for herself and her community. She’s just a wonderful musician, and she taught me that song literally not but a week earlier.
She said, Oh, let’s, let’s work on this song and we sat, and we worked out a version, and I just fell in love with it. I fell so in love with the song… also from learning it from my mother, but something about the vulnerability of the singer, you know, the first line saying “If I needed you”, which is different than like, If you need me, I’ll come to the rescue here. There was something so vulnerable about just that first line and that notion.
PopMatters: Very interesting. Then going back to Rising Appalachia’s Folk and Anchor EP [a collection of covers from 2024], where did Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” come from? It’s got a more upbeat arrangement that’s really cool. How did you come to choose that one and to do it that way?
Leah Song: How did we come to “I Shall Be Released”? This is a great question. Now I need to jog my memory about that one. I think that we have again worked some in justice advocacy and anti-recidivism work in the American prison system. There’s that line in there about the wall, building the walls and the man that was charged for wrongdoing, and that the world knew he wasn’t to blame. Again, these are old lyrics that feel so timeless and relevant all of a sudden to everything we’re dealing with now, even though the stories they make sense to have now nothing to do with what they were written about originally, they still feel so timeless.
PopMatters: You’re so good at bringing these different influences together. A song that stood out when Rising Appalachia played in Petaluma in 2023 was “Find Your Way” [from 2015’s Wider Circles] with the lyric “Fake it ’til you make it”, which is such good wisdom when progress in our lives is slower than we’d prefer. Who first advised you on that?
Leah Song: Oh yeah, that line we picked up from our community in New Orleans. We lived for many, many years in New Orleans. We moved down there after Hurricane Katrina, so we’ve spent a lot of our years in the South doing hurricane recovery work, which is an interesting thing that wasn’t our plan. We’re deeply mentored by the city and the community, and that was a very fun line from a lot of the activist theater projects down there, including our friends that ran a company called Mondo Bizarro. It’s the spirit of if you don’t feel good, you dress better. If you’re having a hard day, you pull yourself together because the act of pulling yourself up and out into the world will help catalyze solutions.
That doesn’t mean that you go out and put on airs that you can’t hold on to. But in a way that sometimes, when we’re not feeling our best or when we don’t feel like we have the solutions or went we’re burnt out by the world. If you can rally the energy just to go and engage with your fellow community members, you can start to feel your own revitalization. I think that’s what that means. Just shake, shake your body out and rally to feel better. Then you do begin to feel better, and from feeling better, you can interact more, make more impact, make more art, distill your ideas, and show up more for the community. It’s almost like sometimes you have just to rally yourself to take that first step, and I think that’s what that line has meant for us.
PopMatters: Alright, and so when is the new Rising Appalachia album coming out?
Leah Song: The new album has begun to roll out. The first single was just released, please take a listen to it, it’s called “In Love with the Quiet”. We’ll be releasing a single about once a month, and the full album will come out in all its glory in October, alongside a wonderful mini-documentary about our art and lives that includes some footage from the storm and some of the storytelling in a visual format.
We’re just so thankful. We’re so inspired about it. Then I put out a small analog folk EP that I’m also very proud of, just a few weeks ago (My Hope Lies Down in the Mississippi). All of the music feels like it’s just bursting out of the seas of us right now, and that’s been such a wonderful feeling. It doesn’t always feel that way. So right now we feel like we’ve got a lot of creative fluidity.
