After the success of his album Black Cowboys singer-songwriter Dom Flemons set out to retool his rootsy sound. What he found was a more electrified style that touched on contemporary themes like climate change and global uncertainty. The resulting album, Traveling Wildfire, was also more personal. Flemons spoke with KNAU’s Ryan Heinsius ahead of his performance at Pickin’ in the Pines Bluegrass Festival this weekend.
DOM FLEMONS: A few years back I was traveling with my family between Arkansas, and I was going to Tennessee to perform at Bonnaroo, and we got caught up in Hurricane Ida. Bonnaroo got canceled that year and we ended up being stranded in a hotel for two or three days and it was also sort of on the eve of a supermoon that was going on.
And then as we were sitting there, I turned on the TV and I saw the huge wildfires that were going through Southern California during that particular moment at the same time, and so I ended up seeing sort of the uncertainty of weather and what it meant to people. And then, of course, with the pandemic going on, the uncertainty of the stability of life. And so, going into my artistic brain I decided to pull all these elements and turn it into Traveling Wildfire.
And so, I wanted to overlay the suspense songs next to the country music sounds of African American country music. Some of the themes I embedded it with those elements without being so overt by saying this is a Black country song. I try to be a little bit more crafty with it, a little bit more artistic.
We only have one Earth that we live on and so in that way, we have to be conscious of what we’re seeing in the world. Climate change is a real thing.
For me, and in terms of my personal journey, you can’t be bogged down by everything that’s happening because there’s so much going on that, I mean, if you just let everything affect you 100%, you just go into your room and curl up into a ball. And, you know, to be able to live a prosperous life you have to be able to go outside. You have to be able to enjoy the things that you can.
At the end of the day there’s always going to be tough times. There’s always going to be division in the world in some form or another. It’s just either on a rise or on a decline, but it’s always going to be there because that’s just the nature of the world itself. But you can’t let that stop you from being the best person you can be.
And then just to kind of flip things around — because I’m going to be coming to Pickin’ in the Pines with the Traveling Wildfires band in which I named them off of the album. We’re trying to destroy the negative feelings with the fire that we’re bringing on stage. And so, I guess to be able to kind of turn it around into something a bit more positive that’s what the Traveling Wildfires does. We want to come in and get everybody lifted up and be able to get them feeling really good about things with the power of the music and the whirlwind of sound that we can bring.
Pickin’ in the Pines is a financial supporter of KNAU.
