DAUGHTERS OF THUNDERSTORMS: Rising Appalachia rolls into Greenfield Lake May 10
- Shannon Rae Gentry
- 5 days ago
- 11 min read
As an only child growing up in rural North Carolina, I became very accustomed to boredom. I didn’t like it, but I was used to it. Hours filled with piddling around outside with my thoughts, or inside on stormy afternoons sitting with them just the same. Now I have an 8-year-old daughter, also an only child, who hates being bored as much as I did; but unlike me at her age, there are now many more alternatives to kicking it with internal monologues.
I often think about growing up in a relatively tech-free space, actually being bored and allowing the mind to wander until it stumbles upon something interesting.
“They say that is the key to creativity,” Leah Song agrees over the phone. “First you touch boredom and then something opens. You can’t get there in any other way.”
Leah Song is one part of Rising Appalachia with her sister Chloe Smith. Song, a self-described daughter of thunderstorms, tells me that a great storm is rolling in as she looks out to her Georgia garden. We fear our cell connection might get lost in the storm but still commune over how much we need the rain in our respective regions (and gardens). “I think so much of my creative juju has come from the thunderstorm climates of my upbringing,” she notes.
Song and Rising Appalachia will roll into Wilmington this Sunday, May 10 at Greenfield Lake after two nights at Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival in Pittsboro, NC. Shakori Hills is rich with community, art, music and dancing—and their first Shakori marked Rising Appalachia’s first post-pandemic show. They have returned many times to both New York and North Carolina Shakori festivals since.
“It’s one of our favorite traditional folk music gathering places,” Song says. “There’s so much traditional music in those spaces.”
“Yes, and community,” I insert. “Genuine community, and getting to spend a lot of time in a space where people appreciate not just the music but the art and artists that are everywhere.”
“And amazing dancing,” Song adds.
Georgia born and raised, the sisters of Rising Appalachia make clear their Irish roots in the music. I also catch Irish notes in Song’s accent—picked up over time spent on the Emerald Isle.
“Both sides of our family have a lot of Irish roots, and our mother picked up the Irish‑style fiddle playing when we were little girls,” Song explains. “So we were immersed in both a lot of traditional Irish music and the traditional Appalachian music that was the soundtrack of our upbringing. We traveled a lot to the Celtic Isles as young people, and recently I’ve been going back a lot more myself, with my solo work. I have a small, budding solo project, and I spend a lot of time studying and digging in and spending time in Ireland.”
Song says she’ll have a solo set this Friday at Shakori before a full-band performance on Saturday—so there’s a chance for her to actually enjoy the community and festivities, too, before hitting the road again.
This touring season marks a bit of a farewell to Rising Appalachia’s extensive catalog of songs and albums over the years as they prepare to release a forthcoming album in October 2026. This record will include their single “Lady Liberty” with another out June 12 and a single a month until October.
While I can’t imagine what the life of a touring artist must be like—one show after another, being on the road for weeks or months at time—Song notes that her and her sister are not your typical “road dogs” when it comes to their music. Like storms, they have seasons and swells.
“When you’re busy, you’re a little too busy, and when you’re off the road, sometimes we’re all wanting just a little more of our daily routines in there. So I think of it very much as seasonal work,” she says. “And that’s the way we do it. We’re not the old‑fashioned road warriors. We built this little music movement concept by design, to figure out ways to also have gardens and study crafts and have as much slower time between the tours as we could squeeze in.”
Read more of my conversation with Lisa Song:
Shannon Rae Gentry: I think a lot of people are gravitating toward that same sort of movement—making time for your gardens and the spaces in life that are outside the 9-to-5 hustle and consumerist culture.
Lisa Song: You know, we’re in a much faster‑paced world, especially in this country. In the South we’re slower, in the grand scheme of things. But I think the United States is still on hyper‑drive, hyper‑speed.We’re always trying to figure out how to catch our breath and slow down. I’m staring at my garden right now as we’re talking. It’s bursting with ferns and lemon balm and all kinds of wild Appalachian herbs that I’ve been slowly cultivating.
Shannon: I feel like I could pick your brain all day about this balance of pursuing a musical career while also having a life rooted in home and in the garden. It sounds like, from what I’ve read about y’all, that you come from this bohemian lifestyle and parents who are culturally and musically minded. Was this mentality of balance always there, or did you have to rediscover it?
Lisa: Yeah. We were raised in Georgia, and although they’re quite worldly, our parents raised us in the same home and the same neighborhood they still live in, so we have very rooted parents there. Our mother plays weekly at the local Irish pub session in Decatur, Georgia, and she also plays in contra dance still. Both of our parents kept us very tied to traditional music. It was their biggest love and hobby. It wasn’t their career, but it was their biggest love—still is. We were raised blue‑collar; but your creativity is a wonderful thing to water and tend to, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it being a hobby and also having a day job.
And I think we went into our entire craft—still to this day—quite surprised that it’s also our work. It’s our family story, our lineage, a lot of creative expression. And it’s hard work to make your art also your work. So I think we’re both honored to do it as a job, and also constantly trying to make sure that it doesn’t take us out of the soil—the metaphorical soil—of our upbringing, which is a pretty grounded, humble, local life.
We move around more. We have friends and community in a few different parts of the world, so we’re not quite as rooted as our family raised us. But that balance is there. The art and the craft and the tending of those relationships is just one branch of your bigger tree. To live a life that feels balanced for us, we need to water some other branches—make sure we have gardens, crafts, community, and other studies. That’s our choice. Some musicians do it differently—the path of the touring artist is everything, 365 days a year. For us, especially for my sister and me, we always knew we wanted it to be part of what we were doing, but we wanted other branches on our tree.
Shannon: That certainly resonates with me as someone who has had many different jobs and career paths and ideas of what I would do. I’m 43 now, and I feel like I’ve landed on something I’ll be doing for the foreseeable future, for a lot of the same reasons.
Lisa: Flexibility.
Shannon: Yes, it’s that freedom, the freedom of movement. Physically and metaphorically. We take that for granted, and we take for granted the importance of being able to do that.
Lisa: I actually romanticize being a third‑grade art teacher. I really romanticize a day job because it’s been so many years that it has been really— It ebbs and flows with the seasons. All my friends with more regular schedules are always making fun of me because I’m like, What is it like to have that daily, daily schedule? That’s not what we have. We have more flexibility, like you said. It is more free‑flowing, and that has tremendous gifts—and, like everything, it has challenges as well.
Shannon: Yeah, and it’s also, oddly, a very privileged position to be in.
Lisa: One hundred percent.
Shannon: You have a single out now, “Lady Liberty,” which I find very lovely. I’m curious if this is part of an album in the works—or is it a bit hush‑hush?
Lisa: Yes, we have a pretty robust body of work, but it’s been some years since we recorded a full studio album. “Lady Liberty” is a single that will be part of our next full‑release studio album, which is the first one we’ve done in many, many years. It stalled pretty significantly because we were hoping to finish it the year of Hurricane Helene [2024].
We had a large amount of it started and tracked, and we were really looking forward to a release. Then we were home for Hurricane Helene, and it did tremendous rewiring and reworking of our lives and livelihoods. So that album really hit pause while we were home and committing our time and energy to the rebuild here locally in Appalachia, which felt lifechanging. But it put our work and our recording very much on pause.
We are finally at the end of a long finish line with a 16‑track album that is going to have another single released in June, and the whole album will come out in October. We’re so excited to bring it to the world. It’s been a long time coming. It has a new song on it because of the storm—one we wrote after we were impacted so much by the natural disasters that are starting to become more regular.
So the album has changed, and the media around it has changed, and it’s beginning its journey to the public. We won’t be performing a ton of new material yet. We’re really enjoying singing these old songs that have been so meaningful for us for so many years, but we’re almost singing them now with a sense of nostalgia, because we know we’ll be putting them away soon to make way for the new body of work. We will definitely do a couple of new ones at the show.
Shannon: What is it like to start something and be relatively close to the finish line, and then have to pause and pick it back up? Did it take quite some time—a year or more? What was it like coming back to the work?
Lisa: It has kind of an accordion of energy. I think there’s a pulse to the creative arc of things. It was very jolting, I think, on our system and the nervous system of our entire community, to be sidelined mid‑arc in this creative process. It took some time for everybody to catch their breath and pick it back up.
But now, at this end, it feels like it’s deeper and has more layers of honesty—honest parts of our story and the catharsis of art and songwriting in really turbulent times. It makes it feel like it’s an even truer perspective, an even more honest creative voice for us, because of the amount of time, the duration, and all the things that have come between when we began it and this final end.
Shannon: Were there any songs that were changed drastically or even cut as a result of coming back and having gone through such an experience?
Lisa: That’s a great question. Nothing was cut out that we really had designed for the album. But we’re working on a mini‑documentary video piece that accompanies it, and, like I said, we wrote an entire almost folk‑blues song that wouldn’t necessarily be the style of songwriting we’d normally put on an album, but it tells our story of the storm. It’s no‑frills. It’s not a fancy, creative interpretation; it’s like a folk ballad of our story.
That also accompanies some of the footage in the video of the storm itself—some of the destruction and some of the work within it. That just wasn’t part of this creative process for us originally. It was an emergent response to what we were going through that has woven itself in, in a pretty significant way, to a body of work that wasn’t originally written in that way. So it’s really deepened—that’s the best way to describe it.
Shannon: What was the name of that song?
Lisa: It’s called “Helene” the storm herself.
Shannon: And I hope everyone is okay.
Lisa: Everyone is. I think we’re catching our breath.
Ironically, my sister and I both spent about seven years living in New Orleans. We moved there after Hurricane Katrina; we weren’t there for the storm, but we moved as part of the recovery work. So this is the second time we’ve been living very deeply in a community as they were doing rebuilding and recovery work. I am so grateful for our years in New Orleans, because I feel like it prepared us mentally and psychologically to know it’s a long haul.You have to catch your breath and take your time and know it’s not a fast process. Sometimes funding comes in, sometimes community resilience comes in, sometimes there have to be pivots, sometimes things need to relocate. People come in with energy and then run out of energy, and then you wait for the next crew to come in. It’s a long haul. We have some experience with that, so there’s not a sense of “it will be fixed quickly.” There’s a knowledge that, although it’s full of circumstances that might call for urgency, you cannot rush the process.
It’s going to be a long time. This region will spend many years rebuilding. We lost probably upwards of 100,000 trees—just trees—within the local forests. That alone is going to change the climate and what’s able to grow. That’s just in the wilderness itself. Will the temperature change a little bit in the summer? Will there be a different understory in the areas that were really decimated and are now exposed to the sun? What kind of plants are even going to be part of this rebuild? We have a lot to keep paying attention to and observing and learning from and making sense of.
Shannon: Do you feel like this knowledge or understanding is widely known or accepted? I’m sure you meet a lot of folks touring and being in different places in this country. It seems like there are people who don’t understand that once something happens, it doesn’t magically go back to the way it was. We have a very short memory in this country, especially about natural disasters and other terrible or impactful things that come with years or generations of recovery. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that public perception and what impact storytelling and music like yours can have.
Lisa: I think we’re in the era of overwhelm and fake news. As much information as you can possibly shove in any direction—whether it’s fake news or real news—it’s an impossible amount for any human brain or psyche to process. We can’t possibly retain what we’re ingesting around every disaster, every triumph, every emergency, every crisis happening in every corner of the world.
They say the average American attention span is 3 seconds or less [note: it’s about 8 seconds, less than a goldfish, down from 12 seconds in 2000], which is really depressing. Some unbelievably small fraction of time. Most of the things we’re all dealing with as humans, all around the world, are long hauls. They take long‑form storytelling; they take long‑form attention.
Instead of trying to go upriver and figure out how to navigate an overwhelm of media and social media and really any media, I think we’re doing our best to lean into folk music and songs and folk art and craft‑keeping and storytelling as an antidote. It’s probably not going to fix it—I’d be a fool to think we have the answer to repair this rocky moment in the human story. But it is an antidote. It creates an experience that’s lived in real time in a room together, with people all in the same space sharing the same experience.
Even just that sense of communion and catharsis is becoming rarer as we move into more isolated spaces. That’s our little gesture—it’s a seed.
Shannon: Absolutely, and art—especially folk music—has always been for humanity, cultures and civilizations. It’s planting a seed of hope and resilience. It is documentation of stories.
Lisa: Absolutely.
Shannon: It’s our historic archives, if you will. And I think that’s why I love talking to artists like yourself. I feel like we’re all coming at this from the same perspective: how do we tell compelling stories and connect more people, and also maybe validate.
Lisa: Right, and lift up. It’s so valuable to lift up the many, many, many examples of people who are doing beautiful, good, powerful, uplifting, connective work—because there are hundreds and thousands of them. That, in and of itself, gives us a little more vitality to figure out how to do good by this world.
Shannon: Absolutely. I know we’re coming up on 30 minutes, so I don’t want to distract you from a really lovely storm for too long.
Lisa: It hasn’t cracked yet. I’m impressed.
Shannon: It’s holding off for the sake of our conversation.
Lisa: Yeah, I’m so glad to get a little time to tell a couple stories.
