Tim Goodwin has a great new album out with a release party happening at the Grand in Northfield tonight (Sep 29, 2024).
Please tell us about yourself and how you came to music and your latest album, A Set of Stories.
I’m a singer songwriter from Northfield. I started playing piano as a kid and did some timid songwriting for a long time – not really sharing it with anyone. I started playing guitar about 25 years ago, but mostly quietly to myself and really digging into songwriting about 10 or 15 years ago. All along the way I was always drawn to singer-songwriter/folk music – what we’d now call Americana. I discovered songwriters such as Greg Brown and Eliza Gilkyson when I was just starting to play guitar and write more. Those two have been probably my biggest influence. I’ve gotten to know Eliza a bit through her Casa De Musica Songwriting workshops she does. IN 2019 I attended one and out of that came a co-write with her, My Heart Aches off my New American Way Album and she recorded it for her “2020” album. This was a turning point for me when I really started to consider myself a “songwriter” and not just a guy who writes some songs.
I hear the role of fate in your music (If I Could, All It Took, Come on Back) and looking forward and looking back. I’m wondering if you hear it too.
Oh yes. This album is really an exploration of relationships with each other and our place in the natural world, especially in a world that is in pretty significant crisis – all our own making and based the choices we’ve made as a society and how we view, interact with, and commodify the natural world. Exploring those ideas is of course very reflective. And it can be sad at times reflecting on mistakes and broken relationships. But always there is hope when looking forward, even if looking forward requires some pain. This is evident in a song like The Way West, where we have a character sure he is hell-bound, yet still tries to do the right thing, and is living just so he can get his wife, who he carries the memory of in his heart to see the ocean which was their shared dream. If I could is a pretty simple song really – just a dad thinking about his kids far away and written in that moment when a dad just wants to wrap his arms around his kids and keep them safe, look ahead and know that everything will be alright, which of course we can never know.
Where do you get inspiration for the music? Are these your stories or a compilation of stories from many people or entirely made up?
I’m always looking for the start to a song. Could be a little action I take, a story from a friend, an inspirational character from a book or movie, a word or phrase I hear. You never know where it will come from. I try and collect those ideas. Most of my songwriting now comes from weekly prompts from a FaceBook group, Singer-Songwriter Challenge. When I get one of those prompts it forces me to sit down and start writing. I go back and look through the ideas I’ve collected and pull one or more that aligns to the prompt and off I go. The Sweetest Think really exemplifies this. It started with a story a friend of mine told me about his chance encounter with an old friend visiting his ailing wife in the hospital. Then another friend told me another story that led directly to the chorus, and while writing the last verse a text from an uncle about a birth in the family led to how the story of the song ended. In the end it all becomes fiction because as soon as I start writing, the song takes on a life of its own and the characters kind of take over, as hokey as that sounds. If I try and preconceive the point, the story, the character development, then it comes out as preachy and contrived, which I know from lots of experience. But usually the song or character starts with something real I’ve observed and absorbed from the world around me.
I know this isn’t on the album, but please talk about Fighting the Weird, which you have posted on Facebook. (I love it!)
This came from a song prompt in the singer songwriter challenge group this summer. The prompt was Peacock, and even though I didn’t want to write a protest song, a political song, or a song about Donald Trump (enough already), As soon as I saw the prompt I could only think of Trump descending down that escalator. But I wanted to end up with a song that had some hope and fun to it, and a chorus that one could sing along to. Plus this was literally the week that she announced Walz as her running mate.
https://youtu.be/KxJPoViowUE?si=2uLNdui4brKBLvZH
Please tell us about the release and umping shows.
I have my album release show Sunday September 29 at the Grand in Northfield. Doors open at 5 (with dinner menu and full bar) and show starts at 6.
Mostly Minnesota 