Editor's note: This story was originally published in the Daily Yonder. You can read the original here. For more rural reporting and small-town stories visit dailyyonder.com.
In late January of 2025, I loaded up my bright red Prius with my camera, a handheld recorder, and my trusty cowboy boots and set off for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada (you can read more about the gathering here).
There, I met Avery Hellman, a singer-songwriter from northern California known onstage as ISMAY. Their debut album, “Songs of Sonoma Mountain,” released in 2020 to critical acclaim in the Bay Area.
Hellman’s been in the country/folk/americana music scene since they were a kid: their grandfather is philanthropist Warren Hellman, the founder of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a completely free, three-day music festival held annually in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The festival has been headlined by icons like Alison Krauss, Ani DiFranco, Brandi Carlile, and Dolly Parton.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that Hellman’s path has taken them in the direction of music. But beyond ISMAY, Hellman’s also dipped their toe into journalism: In May of 2025, Hellman launched the podcast “Finding Lucinda,” a 14-part series about country music legend Lucinda Williams. A documentary that follows Hellman’s research into Williams’ life will be released later this year to accompany the series.
Like any worthwhile conversation there was no formal beginning to our chat at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering, so I’ll place you in the middle of it, after we’d talked about this newsletter’s history of interviewing musicians, led in large part by my brilliant colleague Olivia Weeks (who has since gone to greener pastures, i.e., graduate school).
Enjoy our conversation about internet addictions, “cowbirls,” and Lucinda Williams, below.
Claire Carlson, The Daily Yonder: I feel like all you musicians are very cool to talk to.
Avery Hellman: Oh, good! We’re not annoying and self-absorbed.
DY: No, no, definitely not.
AH: That’s what I worry about us musicians, that we’re like, “everything’s about us” and we’re up there in the center of everything on stage. Anyways, I’m just messing around.
DY: That is interesting though. Do you worry about being too centered in the performance of your work?
AH: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I love performing and I love more than anything writing and creating projects, but I’m very uncomfortable with being located as a source of admiration or anything. It’s sort of like I want to be on the same level as the audience and as the other people, I don’t want to be above them. I recognize my role and I love being the performer, but it’s important to me to feel like we’re all part of a culture that’s doing something as a group.
DY: I feel like there are a lot of writer-ly people who are not comfortable being in the center of things. I don’t feel very comfortable with it, even though with journalists you sort of have to be a little bit more outgoing and put yourself in situations. It’s always very impressive to me when there’s journalists out there who do that, because I feel like with writing, it’s a very internalized process.
AH: That’s a good point, because it’s asking you to be two polar opposite things as a journalist — being a writer who’s able to contemplate and gather information, but also to be somebody who’s out there and not extracting but engaging with somebody and taking away interesting things. I’m impressed that people can do that. I’m way too shy.
DY: Same, honestly. I feel like it’s kind of similar with musicians, who seem to experience a very internal songwriting process but then have to be outgoing onstage. And with that writing process, I feel like you need a lot of free time to create, but then you have to balance the busy-ness of, I don’t know, marketing yourself, for example. It’s so contradictory.
AH: There’s a huge tension between marketing and creating. And we’re in an era of heavy marketing, and it’s forcing a lot of people to make difficult decisions about how you protect yourself from the constant need to promote your work and where your boundaries are about exposing your life. And that’s been a big thing for me and other people I’ve spoken with, is there’s this expectation that you not only influence people through whatever you create, but your personal life is itself supposed to influence people. Other people can do that, but it feels like it’s taking away something from the arts. It’s taking away people’s focus and it’s taking away their energy and it’s taking away their happiness.
I’m not a crusader against anything, but for me personally, it’s very important to focus more than ever on creating the best work I can. And that’s not to say that I don’t spend time promoting it, but it’s odd that artists are expected to not only spend time promoting their work, but also be expected to spend all their time on a (social media) platform that steals their energy. And that’s the big tension going around — it’s like a deal with the devil. That’s really what it is. Not like I really believe in the devil, but it’s a great turn of phrase. That’s exactly what’s happening. And it’s difficult because you have to decide what’s more important to you as an artist.
DY: Well, kind of related to this, I was on your Instagram and I saw that you call yourself a “cowbirl” (a mix between a cowboy and cowgirl). And so I’m wondering if you can talk about country and gender queerness a little bit, especially because there’s this misconception that there aren’t queer people in the country, for example. And that’s something we talk a lot about at the Daily Yonder, that rural places are not just a monolithic version of one (straight, cisgender, white) person. But I’m curious what it’s been like to claim your queerness within your work.
AH: I mean, as you said, rural America is not one thing at all. There are so many different types of places. For example, the Southeast – I am completely lacking an awareness of how that region functions, whereas I know rural California is vastly different from rural Nevada, and they’re cool in so many different ways. There’s different types of people who came there, different types of people who were already there that really influence the culture in subtle ways that take time to understand. And yeah, I mean, I think there’s a lot of people like me.
I think “cowbirl” is for anybody that feels like they resonate with the rural Western culture in particular, but doesn’t feel like they necessarily fit into the gender norms or the gender binary. And for me, it’s just sort of a term that feels like, okay, this suits who I am, and people can call themselves whatever they want. I’m not here to tell people to say that or not say that, but I think there’s so much beauty to the life of the rural West, and there’s so many different kinds of people, including people with different gender identities, LGBTQ, etc.
And so those people definitely exist and they definitely have stories to tell, and they’re very multifaceted and they have really interesting backgrounds, their decision why they live there and not somewhere else. And there’s a lot of reasons why people might not feel comfortable in certain places, and that’s completely up to them. But for me, I feel like I fit in where I live in rural California and the Eastern Sierra. I think another thing people may not realize is that a huge influence in California is the back to the land movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s with hippies going into rural areas, and they have a lot of cultural power in terms of being part of institutions.
And those people’s ideas influence the culture in a huge way. And I think I appreciate the ethos of the place where I live in terms of feeling like we don’t allow labels to get in the way of appreciating each other. And that’s important to me in all realms of life. I just don’t like labels. I mean, I guess that’s surprising given I like the cowbirl thing, but even though it’s a label, it’s sort of supposed to be breaking down these labels and allowing people to stand for who they are as a person and not be hemmed in by boundaries of what they’re supposed to look like, how they’re supposed to behave.
And we’re fortunate to live in an era in which there’s so much more freedom than there used to be for people like me to dress how I want to dress and to act how I want to act and to do what I want to do. And ultimately, I feel that through all the struggles of life and the different facets of one’s inner world or identity, I have the opportunity to express that through my music. And that’s a little home in my heart I get to keep forever and ever.
DY: I want to talk about the projects you’re currently working on. I watched the “Finding Lucinda” documentary trailer and am really excited to watch the whole thing, especially because I love Lucinda Williams so much. What brought you to this project?
AH: So basically about in 2019, I started working on a project. I was in a Lucinda Williams tribute band with my dad, the only Lucinda Williams tribute band as far as I know. And he’s a drummer, and we played together. It was a way to spend time together and we were thinking about making a record, and I was like, I don’t really want to make a record covering her music with our band. I love her records. But I was like, what about doing a documentary project? And so it evolved over time into basically being a journey for me to look towards Lucinda Williams as an aspiration, as somebody to look up to for how do I move forward with my life and my art? Because at the time I was at my family’s ranch, spending half the time working on the ranch, half the time on my music. And I felt like I want to really be a real musician, full-time, but I don’t know if I’m good enough. And especially at the time, I wasn’t getting tons of opportunities. And so I was like, well, why don’t I go on this trip, learn about what she was like when she was my age.
And it was an incredible journey. So I got to meet people, including this guitarist that she played with early on that kind of semi-quit music right after they started playing in the 1970s. And I got to meet Charlie Sexton, who’s a guitar player, and he played with her when he was like 12, I found out, which is insane. And then we also went into the archives and we found these old recordings that had never been heard since the session in the 70s. It was a crazy journey. And then we kind of just made a documentary about it and we just finished it actually.
DY: Oh my god, that’s so cool. It sounds like a treasure hunt.
AH: Yeah, it was fun. And the wonderful thing about Lucinda is that, and I didn’t realize this in the beginning, but the integrity of her writing is as good as there is. The quality of her lyrics, the depth of her storytelling, the approachableness of her melodic writing, it was so worth digging into. And I’m so glad she’s the artist that I put all that energy into because there’s so much depth and integrity to her work that it’s so worth paying all the attention you can manage.
