Music Review: The Foxgloves, ‘Mama Was a Bandit’
The six-woman Twin Cities outfit comes out guns blazing with their first full album, a rowdy but heartfelt collection of stories as unique as the band itself.
The Foxgloves Mama Was a Bandit album artwork, 2022.
The Foxgloves first exploded into my awareness when I caught their set on the Backwoods Stage at the 2021 Blue Ox Music Festival in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. They’d gotten their spot by winning the Virtual Band Competition, and I followed some friends out of mild curiosity. I still remember the infectious energy and joy radiating off the stage that drew an ever-growing crowd through the trees to the clearing to see who was getting such big applause on the little stage.
Wherever you may see them for the first time, the band makes a striking impression: six women, each with their own unique and eye-catching fashion sense, surrounded by a multitude of instruments—including a floor harp! Since they’re an up-and-coming band, they sometimes have to fit all that onto a small stage, like the one at the 331 Club. Their performances brim with energy and warmth, and they share the spotlight freely; nearly all of them sing lead at some point.
Their songs are as vivid as their appearance. Although I highly, highly recommend that you catch their live show if you can, their brash personas and sense of fun come through loud and clear on their studio recordings, not only in their vocals and instrumentation but in the creative songwriting.
Although they play on classic themes, their songs aren’t quite like anyone else’s. On their first full-length album, Mama Was a Bandit, they display their unique storytelling abilities with a collection of songs that run the gamut from country to folk, from heartbreaking to hell-raising.
The opening track, “Toledo,” is a fun, fast number that never fails to get the crowd going at their shows. Guitarist Liz DeYoe starts it off with some showy acoustic guitar licks and banjolele/washboard player Steph Snow takes the lead vocals on a song about moving to make a new start, and more band members join her in the triumphant refrain: “This is not what I wanted / This is not what I need / Don’t spend time waitin’ ’round for something that’ll never be.”
It’s hard to top the energy of that song, but the next track, “Hometown,” does just that. Featuring harp/autoharp player Nikki LeMire on lead vocals, it’s the story of a troublemaker who moves away but returns periodically to stir things up again (“Trouble’s right where I left it”). The rip-roaring chorus (“Got a bottle of Jack, a box of wine / gonna meet you out on the county line”) legit makes me wish I was invited to this small-town party!
After those two sassy numbers, “Forget Me Not” is a sweet surprise, a lovely, wistful ballad of star-crossed lovers. Percussionist Sara Tinklenberg sings lead, her gentle vocals buoyed by a sweet tangle of stringed instruments. Guitar and fiddle both have their moments but the harp is the standout on this mellow but somehow effervescent track.
The Foxgloves at The Hook & Ladder. Photo credit: Tom Smouse, 2022.
“Wild River Honey” features yet another lead vocalist, fiddle/mandolin player Maura Dunst. The most carefree and upbeat song on the album is a tongue-in-cheek praise song about being head over heels in love (and lust), with a line that always makes me chuckle: “He gives me the kind of thoughts that send me to confession.”
One of the saddest songs on the album follows on the heels of that giddy one. “Speed Queen” imagines what a meth-addicted woman’s childhood might have looked like, what her hopes and dreams were before her life was destroyed, what the fateful moment might’ve been like when it all started to go wrong. The hypothetical moments of her life flicker and change throughout the song but, whatever her backstory is, it doesn’t change the sad outcome.
Another sad song in an entirely different vein, “Across the Rio Grande” is a stirring, dramatic story song that Marty Robbins or Johnny Horton would be delighted to sing. Its tragic hero is a man from El Salvador trying to bring his daughter to safety after his wife is killed. What makes it especially powerful is that, like “Speed Queen,” this is such a universal story, it could be historical or current-day.
The sole instrumental track on the album, I learned at the band’s album release show, was written by DeYoe as a tribute to an insect known as the lesser yellow underwing. Foxgloves (the flowers) are toxic to humans and many other creatures, and it’s one of the few that feeds on it. For over half the song, Dunst’s fiddle soars above a lush backdrop laid by the other instruments, though DeYoe’s guitar and LeMire’s harp sometimes pick up the melody like a baton and carry it for a time. Knowing the inspiration, “Underwing” feels to me like a gambol through a field of wildflowers (with the insects that love them) on a sunny day.
More cryptic than most of The Foxgloves’ story songs, “Better Run” sketches the barest outlines of a story and lets the listener’s imagination fill it in however they choose. Slow and sweet and folky, the track could be taken for a mournful lost-love ballad if you don’t listen closely to the lyrics. There’s something darker at its core, though all that’s clear is that someone has done something irrevocable, as evidenced by the chorus: “Oh my love what have you done? / You better run.”
The title song and penultimate track cranks the energy and attitude way up again. “Mama Was a Bandit” is a tongue-in-cheek story about a family of female outlaws: “Like mother like daughter / I can’t live the way I oughtta,” they sing, later boasting “She drew the line at killin’ anybody / and that’s the difference between my mama and me.” Several band members trade lead vocals on this one; I feel like this narrator is so much fun that they all wanted to take a turn stepping into her shoes.
The album came in like a lion but goes out like a lamb with “Fast and Light,” a bittersweet ballad that tries to assuage the heaviness of grief by imagining a loved one’s death as a freeing event and a natural progression of the universe. (I’ve seen a similar theme crop up on several pandemic-era records; it feels like collectively we’ve got a lot of processing and comforting to do and it’s coming out in the art being created.)
The Foxgloves at The Hook & Ladder. Photo credit: Tom Smouse, 2022.
How do I sum up Mama Was a Bandit? It’s as eclectic as the ladies that make up The Foxgloves, funny and tough and lighthearted and sad by turns. It’s an album that could only have been created by this group of artists and would never be mistaken as anyone else’s music. In the crowded field of Americana, that’s the highest compliment I can pay any album or any act.
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the primary music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley!
