Bella White: Takes Her Own Road
Photo by: Will Wilkinson
Written by: Anna LoPinto
It’s a bright Thursday afternoon beneath the vast, pale-blue July sky on the Colorado prairie. On the banks of the Williams Creek, a warm wind brushes through blue grama and buffalo grass before catching the cattails at water’s edge. Birds flit nearby, a great blue heron glides overhead, a red-winged blackbird perches on a fence post, and a mourning dove coos from a cottonwood. All creatures find solace next to water.
Photo by: Tamara Flemming
I sit beside Bella White on the old foreman’s house porch at the Frost Ranch in Fountain, C.O. With her dog Indy contentedly at her heels, White’s cooling off after a ride across the high desert, quietly marveling at our horses’ ability to navigate cholla cactus, trotting coyote pups, and galloping pronghorn. We sip our coffee. It’s good to take a break.
This pause is temporary. White’s in the middle of a solo 2,600-mile drive from New Orleans to Seattle. Not for a tour. Not for work. A trip for herself. A rite of passage in the vein of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. She’s stopped in Santa Fe for a rowdy night of karaoke, in Taos for a hike with sheep, and here in Colorado for a swim in a cow pasture. The trip is a continuation of the 26-year-old’s peripatetic life. In early adulthood alone, she has called Calgary, Boston, Nashville, Vancouver Island, and New Orleans home. Something about movement keeps her grounded, especially when she’s the one at the wheel.
“With this album, I’m doing exactly what I want to do.”
That same spirit runs through White’s latest album, A Sign in the Weather. “With this album, I’m doing exactly what I want to do,” she says. White co-produced the record with longtime collaborator Ross Farbe, recorded it in a friend’s living room, and sang the lead vocals live. It’s a departure from the relatively glossy production of her sophomore album, Among Other Things, but also, in many ways, a homecoming to the stripped-down intimacy of her debut, Just Like Leaving—this time with a more fully realized, unmistakable sound, all her own.
“I like when you can hear one little snippet of any song, and know, ‘This is this album by this artist,’” White says. “I wanted that feeling.” She succeeds. White’s luminous vocals feel simultaneously elemental and modern, as though they’ve always existed, yet could only belong to her. Grounded by the steady warmth of her band, each song carries the easy familiarity of musicians who know and trust one another. Nothing is rushed. Even the album’s most poignant moments retain a quiet edge of playfulness. Perhaps its most compelling element is its defiance of easy categorization. As White explains, “For this album, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and Linda Ronstadt are all influences. These artists that could be categorized as classic country, but instead have just kind of been like, ‘fuck genres,’ let’s just play music.’”
Photo by: Morgan Winston
For White, fluidity feels innate. Raised by a psychiatrist and a counselor who were also artists, she grew up in a home where emotional curiosity was valued as much as artistic expression. It’s perhaps no surprise that, at just 20, she wrote the devastatingly perceptive “Marilyn” and “Rhododendron,” both of which appear on Among Other Things. In “Rhododendron,” she asks: “Could I be a mother or a lover / To something greater than my own instinct to suffer? / And would a sheep run if she knew she was for the slaughter / Or would she simply let her soft wool warm her daughter?”
On A Sign in the Weather, that remarkable emotional intelligence is again on display. White examines the first great heartbreak with surprising restraint. Rather than dramatize grief, she’s fascinated by recovery—and the strange realization that life continues. In “Doing Well” she reveals, “What do I do with this new information? / I thought that I’d be worse off than I am and I have not been / And I’ve been doing well for the first time since you called.”
It’s impossible not to wonder how White got this way, so early in life. The answer isn’t in parsing her songs or reading her lyrics, it’s in the way she moves through the world. She possesses an almost inexhaustible curiosity. I first met White two years ago when she sought guidance improving her horsemanship. She wasn’t a typical student. Details mattered. She memorized knots, studied the intricacies of tack, and absorbed the etiquette like when to open–and not open–a gate. She approached horsemanship less like a hobby and more like a language she intended to become fluent in. She was earnest and had the remarkable ability to fold into whomever’s life she was with in the moment.
This attitude isn’t unique to White’s life with horses. At 12, she began busking on the streets of Calgary, where she grew up. “I would sing the same three songs a hundred times or so,” she recalls. In high school, she acquired a fake ID and started playing the city’s country circuit. By 19, she had moved to Boston to immerse herself in the city’s thriving bluegrass scene. “When I was in Boston, I’d go to the International Bluegrass Music Association. Not because I was performing, but because I’d wander around with my guitar asking, ‘Does anyone want to jam with me?’” By 20, White released her debut album, Just Like Leaving, to widespread critical acclaim.
At the Frost Ranch, the morning after our ride, White packs up her car, loading up Indy in the backseat. Wearing a billowy lavender dress with black Frye campus boots, she’s energetic and ethereal – ready for whatever is next. I’m reminded of an earlier part of our conversation, “I know what I want now. Musically, visually, in terms of how I tour, and the people I work with. Now I’m in the driver’s seat.”
White waves a goodbye, closes the driver’s door, and heads north.
Western AF is not currently accepting feature pitches for Western Dispatch. If you simply can’t help yourself you can send it to westernafsubmissions@gmail.com but, really, we aren’t accepting pitches.