Room Enough, Time Enough
A New Record of folk Songs, Activism & Desert Native Americana
Praise for Room Enough, Time Enough
"His new album, Room Enough Time Enough, officially debuts on February 26th and serves as a bold environmental battle cry…The lyrical poetry of the album also carries the sound higher through its overarching theme of perseverance and preservation.” – American Songwriter
David Huckfelt is a midwestern folksinger who has been involved in the increasingly desperate fight to stop the construction of Line 3, a tar-sands pipeline that would cut across Minnesota. His new single, “Book of Life,” is dedicated to “the Indigenous water protectors standing up and speaking out for Mother Earth all across Turtle Island.” - bill mckibben, the new yorker
Singer-songwriter David Huckfelt likewise celebrates both the joy and the sociopolitical power of art, embracing a belief, as he puts it, “that music should expand the space of the room where you sit, but at the same time, be so powerful that it nails you to the wall.” – No Depression
"Haunted landscapes and spirits are all over the ex-Pines leader’s second solo LP, ... which doesn’t stick to the cowboy myth but adds Indigenous people into the story. Among the guests are various Native American musicians, as on a fascinating cover of Patti Smith’s "Ghost Dance"; A Satisfied Mind is a lovely duet with Greg Brown." - **** (four stars) MOJO MAGAZINE
“With Room Enough, Time Enough, David Huckfelt tells us we can transcend our country’s troubled past if we come together with honesty and a healthy respect for each other and in the process gives us a glorious American masterpiece for our times.” –Americana Highways
“Room Enough, Time Enough illustrates the power of song to speak love to power, to create an atmosphere in which we ponder what it means to be human, and to evoke the power of memory to liberate and to provide hope.” – Folk Alley
"Even the Americana classics like "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie" and "Cole Younger" are given new life with horn passages, a blend of electronic and acoustic instruments, and multiple voices. What was once a dry and sparse scrubland now overflows with melody—all driven by Huckfelt's high, smooth voice.” – Tucson Weekly
“For its ambitious scope and inventive cover interpretations, this is an early candidate for one of the top roots music albums of the year.” – Glide Magazine
David Huckfelt's music is both solid and porous on Room Enough Time Enough. It's grounded in musicianship and songcraft, even as it invites the indwelling of spirits, voices across time, space, culture. – Routes and Branches
Check out the premiere of the video for “hidden Made Known” – The Bluegrass Situation
Exclusive Premiere of “Gambler’s Dharma” – Magnet
Stream Room Enough, Time Enough here!
When the world's on fire and the seeds of division are sown throughout the land, music and ceremony have always held a sacred space for healing and renewal. Room Enough, Time Enough, only the second full-length solo record from singer-lyricist & folk activist David Huckfelt of The Pines, is a record about restoring balance: space and attention, peace and equality, redeeming the marginalized, and remembering the forgotten. It's a new expression of the ancient ritual and power of songs to weave a web of resilience and protection over our land, our loves, and our resistance, from a songwriter whose new solo endeavor is a present-moment plea for connection and compassion.
“The phrase ‘Room Enough, Time Enough’ comes from a name the Navajo used to describe their ancestral homeland in northern Arizona and New Mexico, not far from where the record was made”, Huckfelt says. “It’s one of the most breathtaking and beautiful places in the country, where a person can hear themselves not-think, a place where every mesa and every rock is a god with a name and power. We are fortunate to even be allowed to pass through this land. Places like this are a paradox of vulnerability and resilience, and the geography of the desert is where and how this record was born.” Featuring a collection of new original material seamlessly entwined with folk songs from deep in the American soil, “Room Enough, Time Enough” draws inspiration from such powerful protest records as Johnny Cash’s “Bitter Tears” and Floyd Red Crow Westerman’s “Custer Died For Your Sins”; records that open a trap door to a different version of America, and speak out against oppression while holding fast to beauty for beauty’s sake.
In an all-out effort to find common ground, Huckfelt’s friendships with a beautiful and diverse cast of musical voices across genres, including singular but oft-ignored Native American songwriters, form the basis of the new work. “I’m not Native, but for me, it wouldn’t be a stretch at all to say that Indigenous thought, spirituality, and friendships spared me from being a casualty on the rocks of American Christianity. It’s an undeserved mercy I long to repay in some way. For this record, I wanted to bring storytellers and voices that we have forgotten how to listen to into unison, without falling into nostalgia or idealism,” Huckfelt says. “The idea is to build a wider tent and a longer table for collaboration across genre, race, class, with songs like Woody Guthrie said don’t “tell you that you’re born to lose” - songs that can help lead to healing and positive solutions. And just to let everyone be as wild and real as they are at heart.” The record and the songs are primarily about protecting the spirits of vulnerable people and places, whosoever & wheresoever they may be. “I tried to bring together every strange, beautiful voice on the edges of the musical garden I live in; unlikely combos, unlikely people, unlikely songs, and urgent messages that have the power to help break the dark spell American has been under,” says Huckfelt. “A record of spirit protection.”
A brand new first-time father, Huckfelt and his partner welcomed a son Billy Niobrara into the world in March of this year; while the songs and record were written with protecting and nurturing this new life in mind, they had no idea how desperate and dangerous their new world was about to become. “Having our son arrive just as the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic hit full-on was a crushing exercise in vulnerability; even now in mid-autumn, no one in our family has been able to meet Billy, and the risk around every turn is just menacing. Then, just as we were getting the hang of quarantine and isolation, George Floyd was murdered just a mile away from where we live.”
As Huckfelt began putting the finishing touches on the record back home in Minneapolis, his city erupted in a revolutionary response to the systemic racism and police brutality with repercussions around the globe. “Minneapolis, this relatively quiet, bitter-cold, liberal city in the north lands holds a great deal of little-known history about the American experiment. The American Indian Movement was started here in the ’60s to protest police brutality; Abraham Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution in US history near here, the Dakota 38 in Mankato in 1862. It’s impossible to live in Minnesota and ignore the Indigenous history and resistance of this land, but the same should be said about all of the United States.”
With decades of police brutality and racial discrimination as a foundation, Minneapolis exploded in May with the very best and the very worst that America has to offer. “While we had the largest multi-racial peaceful protests in the history of the country, we also had white supremacists from out of town driving around armed to the teeth and placing explosives in people’s backyards and alleys. Friends of mine with Black Lives Matter signs in their yard woke up to hand-written notes saying “Take this sign down, or tonight we come back real quiet & burn you and your children while you sleep.” Says Huckfelt, “The experience of watching your eight-week-old baby sleep in the window moonlight while helicopters, explosives, gunshots, and sirens rage all around you is unlike anything I’ve ever known. It became clear as I watched the Minneapolis Native American community join forces with Black Lives Matter and thousands of white allies that the time was now for everyone to do their part to make room for these marginalized voices and let them speak for themselves, they talk; we listen. As an artist and songwriter, my big hope is to create art that opens up room, time, & space for new narratives to arise. I think music has a special role to play in the healing.”
In a career on the road less traveled that has found him sharing stages with a staggering diversity of artists: from Mavis Staples & Emmylou Harris, to Bon Iver & Arcade Fire, and more recently an impressive array of Native American musicians including John Trudell, Quiltman, Keith Secola, and Annie Humphrey, Huckfelt wanted to build a new musical community for this collection of songs. While his 2018 solo debut record “Stranger Angels” was written in complete isolation at Isle Royale National Park on Lake Superior just a few miles from the Canadian border, “Room Enough, Time Enough” was created in the borderlands of southern Arizona, in the musical mecca of Tucson, the high Sonoran Desert and one of the richest, most biodiverse ecosystems in the world. “Tucson was the perfect place to dig back in time before border walls, reservations & even statehood. It’s the only city in America to have five flags flown above it: Spanish, Mexican, Confederate, United States and Arizona.” He asked Tucson producer and multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Sullivan (XIXA) to open up Dust + Stone Studios to a host of friends, contemporaries, strangers, artists, outlaws, cowboys, and Native musicians: Ojibwe ambassador of Native Americana music Keith Secola, Tucson's own living songwriting legend Billy Sedlmayr, Giant Sand founder and head purveyor of the southwestern electric-fuzz border sound Howe Gelb; former Bob Dylan drummer Winston Watson, Arizona Blues Hall of Fame harmonica player Tom Walbank, and Calexico hired guns Connor Gallaher on pedal steel and Jon Villa on trumpet. Together with the unmatched vocal chants of John Trudell's constant collaborator & Warm Springs Nation Native singer Quiltman, these songs found their people and vice versa in a perfect storm of generosity, fierceness and compassion.
“After I got home, I knew the record wasn’t quite finished, but I hadn't decided yet how to proceed. Then, after the first couple weeks of the virus and quarantine, I realized that every musician I knew and loved was at home with studio gear, looking for anything to do. I definitely had some work for them.” Huckfelt tapped members of his Unarmed Forces band, and other Midwestern musical luminaries such as Iowa folk legend Greg Brown, Dave Simonett & Ryan Young (Trampled By Turtles), Pieta Brown, Jeremy Ylvisaker (Andrew Bird), J.T. Bates (Big Red Machine, Taylor Swift), Erik Koskinen, Michael Rossetto, and more to add the finishing touches to the record.
The music mirrors those timeless stories of that Southwestern geography: forgotten arroyos & empty washes, cliff dwellings and cave art, cowboys, Natives, outlaws & honest men telling the story of a place older than the concept of America. “This record focuses on what my friend Keith Secola likes to call "the marginal creatures", the extraordinary & strange beings at the fringe of our fields of vision, on the outskirts of the frame, off the internet and growing like wild, endangered flowers on the edge of the garden. Songs are like that too, and for this record I chose to lift up some songs and songwriters out on the fringes of the mainstream musical ecosystem.” writes Huckfelt. Secola's hidden gem / healing song "Book of Life" is covered here for the first time, as is Lakota / South Dakota unsung Native American music hero Buddy Red Bow's song "Journey To the Spirit World". Billy Sedlmayr, a man who knows more than most about outlaws and redemption, and Huckfelt rewrote a public domain ballad both old and post-modern called "Cole Younger". And a deep-cut track from Patti Smith's debut record Easter makes an appearance here as well, "Ghost Dance", infused with new perspective from an Indigenous point of view with vocals by Secola & Quiltman. A breathless version of the classic country standard “A Satisfied Mind” features a duet with Greg Brown, and reminds us that wherever we place our treasure, our hearts will be there too.
The new original songs are peopled with the kind of imagery and insight that gives Huckfelt a singular voice and perspective among songwriters of his generation. Unpinned to any particular genre, the former theology student offers lyrics that speak to hope from every human angle; “Better To See the Face” a Zen Buddhist koan, conjures the calming power of true intimacy, face to face and heart to heart, banished so forcefully by the Covid 19 pandemic. “Gambler’s Dharma” is a meditation on the skillfulness needed to navigate an oft-times capricious world of random chance, while “Land of Room Enough, Time Enough” speaks to how the human heart & imagination thrives best with enough space to roam. “Imaginesse” is a full-throated love song about beating the odds and not winding up a casualty on the gravel road of commitment. Says Huckfelt, “I feel that with this record I’m just getting started offering what I want to offer, giving what I want to give. The line from “Better To See the Face” might say it all for me - “you just spend your love like you’re going out of style”, because we all are. Every time I work with someone I love and admire, I’m humbled just to be taking part in the conversation about the strong medicine that can heal America. “Room Enough, Time Enough” is the next step in that ceremony.”
STRANGER ANGELS - 2019
In the fall of 2017, David Huckfelt left behind the familiar—the comfort of his home in Minneapolis; the camaraderie of his critically acclaimed band, The Pines; the luxuries of heat, hot water, and electricity—and relocated to Isle Royale, America’s most remote and least visited national park in mighty Lake Superior. Six hours by boat off the Michigan coast, Isle Royale is the largest island in the world’s largest freshwater lake, an isolated stretch of wilderness seemingly forgotten by the 20th century (to say nothing of the 21st). There, as an Artist In Residence selected by the National Park Service, Huckfelt spent ten hours a day for two straight weeks writing in solitude, channeling the mysterious and lonesome island’s spirits into his stunning debut solo album, ‘Stranger Angels.’
“The island is surrounded by 300 smaller islands, decrepit lighthouses and abandoned mines, lined with shipwrecks, ghosts, and the stories of the northern Ojibway, fisherman, and early settlers,” Huckfelt reflects. “I brought a mountain of notebooks and poetry and history books with me”, says Huckfelt, “and for the first time in nearly a decade, I found the solitude, depth, range, danger, beauty, and inspiration to go all kinds of places in my writing that I hadn't had the space to visit before. With a sense of place so strong, it was less like an anchor and more like a launching pad to free up and access all kinds of places from throughout my life. It’s easy to travel anywhere in your mind in that kind of solitude, your whole experience rises up from the deep.”
Indeed, the music is both transportive and reflective, focused inwards even as it draws on an abundance of outside influence. Hypnotic banjo and gentle acoustic guitar meet trippy public domain samples and shimmering soundscapes underneath Huckfelt’s stark, raw vocals as he wrestles with questions of fate and faith, responsibility and independence, connection and loss. A thread of deep ecology runs through these songs, but not the cute bumper sticker kind, the gritty, “what-comes-next-if-we-don’t-change-our-ways” kind. “Isle Royale used to have fifty wolves in five packs…” Huckfelt says, “now there’s only one left. Cycles are cycles but it’s the height of pride to think we’re (humans) aren’t the major player.” The title track “Stranger Angels” brings this point home strongest, with the narrator longing for a place “where (he) won’t make the greedy richer”, and the fierce grip of climate change manifests in lyrics like “Wild mustangs starve in the hills outside Las Vegas… and the West is burning like a lake of fire.”
But above and beyond conservation, “Stranger Angels” is a record about “thin places”, those spiritually charged places where heaven and earth seem to meet and the veil between the world we see and the mystical world beyond becomes transparent. On the rollicking blues-carnival track “As Below, So Above” Huckfelt pays touching to tribute to his late grandmother who helped raise him in Iowa, not by writing about her, but to her, as a defiant elegy against death. A former theology student who once wrote and preached sermons in Cook County Jail in Chicago, Huckfelt has gone through the fire of the niceties and dogma of “heaven” and “god” and come out the other end with a worldview fiercely present, concrete and expansive. “Stranger Angels as a title, to me, has a thousand references to what’s left after life and death and experience and loss and love burns off all the easy answers…” says Huckfelt. “The idea of god or spirit being hidden under the opposite of what we think we know, of ancestors and spirits visiting us, screaming in our ears all day long, but we miss it because it’s different, stranger than we expected… And the kindness we give and receive from strangers, the least, last and lost among us. Our cities are overflowing with strange angels, it’s such a mistake when we think we know which or who can offer us something, and which can’t. Every spirit has something to give. Then, when I saw the night camera footage of the moose and wolves on Isle Royale, dancing in the moonlight and gracing the forest with their presence, I thought “stranger angels” indeed.”
The record also draws on deep wells of Native American tradition and spirituality, a life-long anchor for Huckfelt which has developed more fully through working with Native songwriters and poets like John Trudell, Quiltman, Keith Secola, Tom LaBlanc and more. References to the healing and prophetic prayer-visions of indigenous thought and voices are everywhere on this record, including the chilling, epic, cosmic pow-wow closing track “Star Nation”, with the authoritative voice of American Indian Movement activist & singer Floyd Red Crow Westerman leading the way. Artfully weaving the historical, the ecological, and the personal into an elegant lyrical web, these songs contain layers of surprise and richness, as in the track “Everywind” with Huckfelt turning an imagining of the life of a woman named Everywind from a vintage photograph into a ballad in celebration of all women. The elegant “Still And Still Moving” sparkles like sunlight off the waters of Lake Superior as it ponders mortality and the impermanence of everything around us. “False True Lover Blues” stands as a gut punch at the precise place where a broken heart starts to mend, while “You Get Got” starts with notes Huckfelt took of his grandparents talking in bed after sixty-four years of marriage, and travels in a country-waltz fashion into the political and the universal with some help from guest vocalist Erik Koskinen.
When it was time to record the songs from Isle Royale, Huckfelt again sought geographic isolation, working out of a 110-year-old farmhouse studio in Menomonie, Wisconsin. This time, however, he chose to surround himself with fellow artists, assembling a dream team of musicians including drummer/co-producer J.T. Bates (Andrew Bird, Mason Jennings), bassist Darin Gray (Tweedy, William Tyler), and guitarists Michael Rossetto, Erik Koskinen, and Jeremy Ylvisaker, cutting sixteen songs in just three days. Very special guests rallied to Huckfelt’s side, including spectacular performances by Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath on “Heart, Wherever”, “Everywind” and “Stranger Angels”, Trampled By Turtles’ Dave Simonett singing harmony vocals on multiple tracks. Recorded and mixed by engineer-extraordinaire Adam Krinsky (Bellows Studio) the album captures the magic and spontaneity of a gifted band discovering the beauty and brilliance of the songs and each other all at once. Other stellar appearances include gospel-blues master Phil Cook on Hammond organ, while electronic musician and sample wizard Andrew Broder (Fog) haunts the tracks with the sparse, mercurial public domain samples of old-world Americana, as if these songs were coming through a Ham radio in an old ghost town.
‘Stranger Angels’ follows Huckfelt’s latest album with The Pines, 2016’s ‘Above The Prairie.’ Hailed by No Depression as “dazzling,” drawing the attention of Rolling Stone’s David Fricke who called The Pines “poignant stark country” and earning high praise in both the US and Europe, with Mojo calling it “their most beautiful yet” and Minnesota NPR station The Current raving that it “hits so close to the gut that it reminds us that they are truly a singular band.