Courtney Hartman takes us into a world of her own making with Glade

GLADE: A natural opening or a passage made, a place left unfrozen,
A gleam of light, a bright patch of sky, the spacebetween clouds, a clearing.
Liner notes from the album, Glade, by Courtney Hartman

Hideaway: a season of healing

The story behind the making of Glade, Courtney Hartman’s most recent full-length release, has as much do with the beauty of this work as the music itself. A few years ago, Hartman struggled with her relationship with music. She had been touring heavily with a band on the East Coast. “I had lost some of the ways music fed me, or connected me, to myself and my surroundings, and felt like I was going through the motions,” she confides during a Zoom interview, sitting outside her home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. “You do that for long enough and all of a sudden you realize there’s no spirit left. Getting back to that place was a priority for me during that season.”

When the weather clears I’ll show my face again
Maybe I won’t be so afraid of my own skin
But til then I’ve gotta hide away in the foothills
Don’t try to find me, don’t try to find me
Hideaway, by Courtney Hartman, BMI (Reckoner Publishing)

During this pivotal season, Hartman returned to her family’s property in Loveland, Colorado, where she lived in a camper and reevaluated her relationship with music and writing. Her biography reads:

It was a simple season; tending to the land, mending ties and writing in the stillness of each morning. “Music during that time was a relationship I fumbled in. So I made a promise to myself – if writing didn’t bring healing or joy in some form, I could let it go.” But the songs came steadily, weaving together the pieces of herself she had forgotten. “In those early summer months writing for Glade, I was not making songs to be heard, but songs to mend and remake who I was in such a tethered and familial place.”

Hartman carved out space to decide, in part, whether she would continue playing music for people or keep it as something private. “I recognized again the power that writing has, to weave you in and through seasons, and the healing power that it has, and I had forgotten a lot of that,” she explains. “Those songs came out of a really messy time, [when I was] feeling ungrounded. I had a lot of ideas of how I wanted to move forward, gaining a sense of what my own boundaries are, what makes me feel whole, wanting to get a better sense of what life has to offer.”

Marrow: music comes to life

Autumn came and Courtney moved into the loft of a barn on the property, steadily rebuilding the inside. With a small grant from Colorado Creative Industries, she gathered a few pieces of gear – a Craigslist computer, a Wasaphone mic, and a Casio keyboard from Goodwill – then pulled out her guitars and a few borrowed instruments and began to find her way into Glade’s sounds and textures.
Hartman’s biography on her website

The ever-capable Hartman transformed a barn loft into a recording space, building baffles out of wood palettes and quilts. She then produced and engineered all of the songs on Glade herself, while also performing all lead vocal and guitar credits, as well as bass, violin (on “Bright at My Back”), Organelle, Casio and percussion.

“Engineering was something I was interested in, but [I was] not necessarily interested in doing my own project,” she explains. “But with extra time and restrictions, that’s what happened. It was a lot of learning.” The result is a beautiful collection of songs with clean, open arrangements that allow her velvety, soothing vocals and introspective lyrics to shine through.

While Hartman did all the heavy lifting in the making of Glade, she took the opportunity for musical collaboration within her community, inviting some of the region’s brightest musicians to contribute their talents. Gregory Alan Isakov lends vocal harmonies on “Home Remedy;” John Dehaven performs a soft, warm wash of trumpet on the songs “Home Remedy” and “Have We Landed,” recalling classic folk the likes of Joni Mitchell. Gorgeous string arrangements by Russell Durham enhance “Home Remedy” and the lovely final track, “Turning.” The hammered dulcimer part on “Marrow” is a delightful surprise courtesy of Simon Chrisman, while drums and percussion by Shane Leonard, Tobias Banks and Jesse Hartman help the record feel grounded from beginning to end.

These are days of disarray and they are golden
They hold a bitter taste but sweetness lies within them
These days passing slowly, thick like honey
Let it run over, let it run over me
Love is the marrow
Love is the marrow
Love is the marrow
In our bones
Marrow, by Courtney Hartman, BMI (Reckoner Publishing)

Wandering: moving forward

Through the writing process, Hartman renewed her relationship with art and garnered a clearer vision of how she wanted to live her life moving forward. The songs on Glade address exploring one’s inner world, as well as examining the relationship between one’s self and the natural world as it continues its cycle of life. It asks the questions: how can I carve out a sense of home and a life of peace? How can I commit to tending my own mental health, as well as celebrating and serving my relationships with my loved ones? Because Hartman put aside time and space to explore these questions for herself, the rest of us can follow suit and take inspiration from her art.

While Hartman has already started writing for her next project, she’s trying to let go of expectations about recording and release schedules. “I’m learning to hold less tightly to timelines. Expectations are a funny thing. But I am writing, and I’m excited and grateful.”

Courtney Hartman “Bright At My Back” (Official Music Video)

When asked how it feels to have her art out in the world, bringing joy and inspiration to others, Hartman says: “It goes from feeling really personal in the moment when you write something, and then it shifts and changes when you record it, and all of this time passes. Now, if something touches someone, or if people feel some sort of relationship with an experience I went through, or with the way that I see the world and then put it into song, that’s amazing. Every song continues to morph in my own life as well, which is always a fascinating thing to watch – something you wrote about, an experience or a certain person, even or place – takes on a whole different meaning two or three years later, or ten years. I like that. I like watching that evolve.”

I had begun to lose my hope
Feeling like I was gonna choke
And thinking life was a cruel joke
I want to think a better way
That we can make a life of being free
We can make a life of you and me
We can make a life of wandering
And the wandering doesn’t have to happen alone
Wandering, by Courtney Hartman, BMI (Reckoner Publishing)