Kalamazoo singer-songwriter Darcy Wilkin and Cara Lieurance met recently to discuss her second solo album, Time Walks Along — a record that finds her traveling far from home, reuniting with musical heroes, and reckoning honestly with the passage of time.
Wilkin, also known as the host of the folk and traditional music program Grassroots on WMUK and a founding member of The Corn Fed Girls, spent six years writing new material after her debut solo album Bristol. She says,"I've noticed a change in subject matter. Some of the older ones were more about love songs, and as I've aged, my songwriting has kind of changed a little bit and has been a lot more about the passage of time."
Wilkin grew up immersed in traditional music, attending festivals and house concerts from infancy. Her father, Mark Sahlgren, led a band called Sweetcorn, and their home was a gathering place for musicians passing through Kalamazoo. The influence left a permanent mark on how Wilkin hears — and writes — music.
To capture that evolution on record, Wilkin headed to Good Luck Studio in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, working with producer Joe Newberry — an International Bluegrass Music Association award-winning songwriter she's known for about a decade through Midwest Banjo Camp. The recording brought together more than a dozen musicians and unfolded over an intensive eight days. "If it were just me by myself, it would just be me and my guitar," Wilkin says. "This was a lot of fun to deal with different orchestrations and different instrumentation."
Perhaps the most meaningful collaborators were Mike Craver and Jim Watson, original members of The Red Clay Ramblers — the North Carolina string band that Sahlgren's circle also loved, and that Wilkin calls "my favorite band in the whole world." As a child, Ramblers members would tour the Midwest, stay at the Sahlgren family home, and play into the night at backyard gatherings. Having them appear on Time Walks Along was, Wilkin says, "a very surreal moment for me" — a childhood dream fulfilled decades later.
The album ranges widely in style — opening with a cover of Newberry's "Only the River Is Real," chosen for its meditation on time and aging, then moving through a Cajun-inflected romp ("One More Time Round the Floor"), a stark organ-and-harmonica meditation on the death penalty ("Caged Bird"), and the lush string arrangement of the love song "Binary Star." Wilkin also wrote what she calls her first murder ballad, "The Willis House," a nod to the deep folk tradition she was raised in. "There's a whole bunch of different styles that we tried out, and a lot of that is Joe Newberry because he's got lots of great ideas."
Writing honestly about difficult subjects — aging parents, mortality, heartache, injustice — is something Wilkin says she finds therapeutic. "There is something kind of therapeutic about it and just sort of leaving things as they are as honest as possible." Her songwriting touchstone is John Prine, whose plain-spoken directness she has admired since childhood. "John Prine is my guy, for sure. He's the standard to me of people that can put ideas out there that are simple and complicated at the same time with very plain language."
Grounding it all is Wheatland Music Festival in Remus, Michigan, which Wilkin describes as her spiritual home. She has attended every year since she was eight months old — her father's band Sweetcorn played its early editions — and the annual ritual of returning there has deepened her meditations on the passage of time.
Time Walks Along is available on streaming platforms and on CD at Green Light Records in Kalamazoo.
The interview was summarized by Claude AI and edited by the author.
