S04.EP05 – People in the Know: Judah Akers

To paraphrase John Lennon, life is what happens when you’re busy making other albums. After recording 2022’s Revival, singer-songwriter Judah Akers decided to creatively face the fact that his own life had imploded.

Over their decade as Nashville’s crossover folk heroes Judah & the Lion, Akers and mandolinist Brian Macdonald had built a strong enough foundation to explore both darkness and light. Not long after college, the hardcore fans of the Lumineers and Mumford & Sons made their 2014 debut, Kids These Days, then broke through with the genre-blending Folk Hop ‘n’ Roll in 2016. With 2019’s Pep Talks, they revealed the musical confidence to grapple with real life struggles, setting Akers’ candid dispatches on alcoholism and family trauma to their cohering mix of acoustic roots and Alt Rock. But throughout the creation of 2022’s Revival, after the departure of longtime banjo player Nate Zuercher, Akers kept a tight lid on some grinding personal agony that was keeping him frozen, creatively and in life.

The band had made Revival during the pandemic, with the intention of bringing more positivity to the world. But during its creation, “I was fighting for my marriage, going crazy, and getting sick,” says Akers, 33. “ I fought writing about what I was going through. Finally, a friend told me, ‘If you don’t write about the biggest heartbreak of your life, you can’t be honest in your work.’ And he was right.” Since Akers and Macdonald are both sons of therapists, ideas like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief were relatively close to hand, and once Akers committed to the harder material, the concept emerged as an almost inevitable album conceit. “It gave us a way to embody the tough and sometimes really negative emotions that I deal with in songs, but within a larger framework of empathy, forgiveness, and hope.”

Like Kübler-Ross’s model, the album begins with “Denial,” a hushed invocation over wordless choral voices, the singer musing on being inside an unruly psychic process: “Just when I thought that I had accepted it/I’d just sink into another depression.” The song is like “opening the door to a house,” Akers explains. “Where you want to indicate all the rooms a visitor will find inside, the range of experiences they’ll have.” The music enacts a subtle morphing within the track, as Macdonald described playing the mixing board like an instrument, faders moving on recorded tracks—dubbing autotuned vocals, raw ones, acoustic instruments, synth washes—bringing different emotional textures to the foreground. “We wanted it to feel as if all the emotions from the record were spinning around you,” Macdonald says.

The song flows directly into “Heartbreak Syndrome,” titled for an actual physical diagnosis that Akers received from a doctor after his left arm got so weak that he could barely hold a guitar. The music itself suggests a gathering strength—a steady 4/4 beat, stark Tom Petty-like guitar riff—while the lyrics give harrowing snapshots of jealousy-deranged paranoia—”Keep driving around east of our downtown/Every black jeep that I see is making me turn around.” The mood, which continues through the nocturnal driving song spicily titled “F L.A.” (sorry, Angelenos), is often perversely feel-good. “Because in a way, denial can feel good,” Akers explains. But the music spikes this bliss with a sense of mania in the spiraling synth that enters near the end.

Over the years, as the band stepped further into the sonic space of hip-hop and EDM technology, mandolinist Macdonald has increasingly embraced his own technological naivete. “When I first started playing mandolin it was a really, really creative time, because your fingers don’t have any memory of what you’re trying to play. You have this innocence that’s hard to maintain.” He found electronic instruments helped foster this sense of exploration, while framing new moods. “I prefer analog synths, because I really want to have my hands on it and play it like an instrument,” Macdonald says. “A lot of times I’m plugging in patch cables without knowing what sound I’ll get, and that sense of unpredictability really suited this material.”

As The Process moves through its Denial and Anger stages, the music finds what Akers describes as a “folk-meets-Weezer vibe,” dosed with “the mischievous pettiness and comic relief of Taylor Swift.” “We wanted songs like ‘Floating in the Night’ and ‘Great Decisions’ to feel anthemic, so our listeners could really own that anger—something I wasn’t encouraged to do as a southern boy growing up in Middle Tennessee.” This section breaks open with the rave-up “Son of A Gun,” which Akers co-sings with Judah & the Lion’s friend, the singer-songwriter Kristine “K Flay” Flaherty: “Misfit songs in a beat-up truck/I got 24 ways of not giving a single—” (You know.)  It’s a jubilant roar of exasperation in a sugar rush of tightly harmonized pop vocals.

After the instrumental “Bargaining” chimes a new stage, “Starting Over” comes on like a cold, hard morning: Akers’ unprocessed voice opens with a clear, down-home holler, his voice bringing shades of old-time mountain-death ballads to a clear-eyed present: “I sold off all of the things we bought together/All of our dreams and all of our old college sweaters.” “We wanted the music to feel like remnants of our older stuff,” Akers explains. “Classic guitar with nylon strings, that folk spirit, and the softness that comes with it.” Which makes the tougher stuff cut deeper: the grieving “Self-Inflicted Wounds,” the disarmingly sweet “SIS,” whose title reps both the phrase “suffer in silence” and Akers’ younger sis, a bedrock in his weakest moments.

The Acceptance stage dawns with the stirring “Long Dark Night”: “Where you find the light/It’s six feet deep where you got to go/To come alive.” The song, Akers says, “is about how life is sometimes backwards. You find strength from admitting weakness, freedom from telling the truth.” To evoke a more deeply rooted power, the band recorded its suite of Acceptance songs—”Long Dark Night, “Heart Medicine,” “Leave It Better Than You Found It”—in a way similar to how they used to make music when starting out. “The vocal takes are live and you can really feel that,” Akers says. “The vocals aren’t perfect but they feel good, and there’s a raw sense of being ok with who we are.”

Today, having gone through The Process, literally and creatively, both members of Judah & the Lion feel stronger than they’ve ever felt. Akers is now engaged. Macdonald just had a baby. And the band has a stronger sense of mission than ever before.  “We’ve always wanted to make music that helps people feel less alone,” Akers says. “Weirdly, the more specific you can be about your journey, the more others can relate to it. Music’s beautiful in that way, in how closely it connects us. When it’s real, you feel it, and it can really be life or death.”