Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light

While music occupied most of her time since Rachel Sumner became a founding member of Boston-based genre-blending band Twisted Pine in 2014, much more weighed on the singer-songwriter’s mind by 2019.

Family health issues included her own battle with the bottle. Sumner needed to address those crucial concerns as she considered what career steps to take next. The multi-instrumentalist serving as Twisted Pine’s guitarist, who also shared lead vocal duties with Kathleen Parks and was one of the unconventional string quartet’s primary songwriters, made what she called a “very difficult decision.”

With a heavy heart, Sumner left behind Twisted Pine. After reflecting and researching, it was inevitable she would handpick a few other Boston-area musicians to record her own songs. A bullish band packed with skills was soon ready to go — Rachel Sumner and Traveling Light. The smooth and stylish self-titled debut album she also produced will be released Friday (August 5).

“I felt like my songwriting had begun to lend itself to a different sound,” Sumner explained in an interview for Americana Highways. The departure not only provided more family time but also gave her “an opportunity to write a bunch, chase that sound, and see what happened. I tried out different combinations of instrumentation [including drums, cello and mandolin] and put on some really fun shows with some fabulous musicians.”

While the global pandemic sidelined many a music maker, Sumner enjoyed some creative freedom to write 10 songs for a yet-to-be-released album with Sam Kassirer (Lake Street Dive, Josh Ritter, Langhorne Slim). She then assembled a “versatile” string band that not only could be effective in a live show setting but also “made the most sense for my songs.”


Banding Together to Build Repertoire
The core members — “all scattered around the Greater Boston area” who rehearse regularly in Somerville — include upright bassist, friend and longtime collaborator Mike Siegel, along with Kat Wallace (fiddle, harmonies) and Ira Klein (acoustic guitar), both of whom Sumner learned about from mutual pals and Instagram videos she watched during the lockdown.

“I asked them all if they’d play a show with me when Club Passim, my home base, opened back up for live music,” offered Sumner, a California native who is the historic Cambridge venue’s sound engineer while also managing the organization’s School of Music after attending Berklee College of Music. “We only had 20 days to work up a set, but it was very clear from the first rehearsal that these were the perfect folks to bring life to my songs.”


Sumner will continue touring with what she calls the “mighty” traveling trio, and “we’ve become interested in functioning as a truly collaborative band that can shine in various contexts. For instance, we’re playing more and more old-time and trad bluegrass music, building a repertoire together. It’s mostly because we have fun doing it. We’ve been known to drop in on local jams when we’re on tour. But it also comes in handy for wedding gigs and warming up before a soundcheck.”

For the album, Sumner’s friend Alex Formento was an expressive, impressive addition, laying down glad-to-feel-sad pedal steel notes on several tracks, including “Unrecorded Night,” “Easton” and the instrumental “Come Along, Rowan.”

The songs, mostly written after Sumner finished her lockdown LP, were tracked at The Record Co. studio in Boston over two days in November and another in March.

Seeking a band name by perusing lyrics from her favorite songs, Sumner disclosed that Traveling Light was taken from “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne,” a song from 2015 written by Joanna Newsom, who’s obviously an artist she admires greatly. (See the “Bonus Tracking” segment below.) Citing the line — “Never saw what we could unravel / In traveling light” — Sumner added, “It seemed like the right fit for us — a little bit of a dad-joke, but mostly a reference to the stars. I wanted the band name to reflect the feeling that it could evolve and change over time if it needed to — whether that be stylistically, instrumentally or lineup-wise — and light shifts constantly!”

Sumner, whose wistful vocals often unite with fiddle and pedal steel virtuosity that’ll make grown men weep, wrote the album’s six original songs. (There also are three varied covers from A-list artists.) She did elicit some help from Wallace for the “Homegrown Sorrow” chorus — “But I hope we find / more yesterdays in time.” Since then, the two started writing together. The entire outfit also helped with song arrangements and mixing the album.


“I really love collaboration in a band, and I admire Kat’s writing in her own projects. I think variety is what makes for a good album, and cowriting is a fantastic way to capture that! I am very excited to see what we come up with for the next record!” declared Sumner, who admitted in the track-by-track description that it took her “roughly seven years” before finishing serene album opener “Hunting Doves.”

Sumner’s most personal song on the LP, though, might be “Unrecorded Night,” where she opens up about “fighting the good fight” after giving up alcohol. Asked how her sobriety is going, she responded in an email received on July 28, “It’s still going! I’ve got 3 years, 7 months and counting of sober living, and it keeps getting better the longer I go. I still get cravings, but the support system I’ve created in my life and within the band is so strong and keeps me to my commitment.

“Before I quit altogether, I had tried to practice moderation, only drinking one drink every so often. My thoughts soon became consumed with the question, ‘Is tonight the night I can let myself have a drink?’ and I hated giving up that much mental real estate to a habit. So, I decided altogether to just make the choice to quit. I realized alcohol was at the center of the worst experiences in my life and that I could be more present for my family and friends if I quit. The most difficult part of the journey to sobriety was divorcing my creative process from drinking. That took a lot of time and patience, but I feel like I’m making my best work now that I have a fully sober mind.”

I had grown weary of the well / And the work it took to waste myself /
Too numb to stir awake / Too weak to own my own mistakes

Lyrics from Rachel Sumner’s “Unrecorded Night”


Finding Her Voice
Deciding to tackle a drinking problem is among plenty of right choices Sumner has made in her life. Born on December 2, 1992, in Southern California, she and five siblings grew up in Lancaster, nestled in the Antelope Valley on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

“We moved a lot, so I went to seven different schools between K-12,” she shared. “One of those schools was a charter school whose campus was at a mosque. I learned Arabic at that school. I skipped the seventh grade, started high school when I was 12 and graduated when I was 16. I am 29 and still don’t have my driver’s license, though I’m hoping to remedy that this year.”

As a fourth-grader, Sumner found the drive to play the flute. She her mother Arlene would sing along to tunes by the Everly Brothers, James Taylor and many others they heard on CDs, tapes and the radio, “especially in the car,” Sumner recalled. “It wasn’t until I was learning bluegrass songs and then writing my own songs that I started to get serious about singing. I’d say that was probably about a year into my schooling at Berklee.

Rachel Sumner and Traveling Light
“I was all about harmony singing at first — I worked up a bunch of Hazel & Alice songs with my school friend Molly Tuttle, and soaked up as much of the bluegrass idiom as I could through my time with her and through deep study of old recordings. After I could convincingly sing bluegrass songs, I was able to focus on figuring out what my own voice sounded like when I sang my own songs.”

Along with discovering the music of Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, Sumner began following the career of Anaïs Mitchell in 2013. “I’ve admired her ability to take on such a wide variety of musical projects and interests,” said the former classical flutist who initially enrolled at Berklee to study composition, intending to professionally pursue film orchestration.

Mitchell has built a “career template” worth establishing for herself, Sumner revealed. “One where I can make an album of my own songs one year, write a musical the next, and then go and reimagine traditional folk songs with my friends. Not that I’ll necessarily do all those specific things, but the freedom to follow my muse and my interests is what’s most important to me,” she maintained.

Pining for Prime Time
With Boston and Berklee forming a common geographical bond, Twisted Pine emerged at Cantab Lounge, a dive bar on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. Sumner and her bandmates — co-lead vocalist and fiddler Parks, mandolinist Dan Bui and bassist Chris Sartori — started a residency there, playing bluegrass on the first Tuesday night of each month.

Their interests in other genres such as jazz, pop and British balladry gained them an early following and some success. They won the FreshGrass band competition in 2014. A recording contract with prestigious Northampton label Signature Sounds was another sign of affirmation. Their self-titled full-length debut album in July 2017 included Sumner’s “Easton,” which she revisits on her new release.

Twisted Pine first came to my attention before they released a splendid EP of covers titled Dreams in June 2018, as they took on classics such as the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” the Cranberries’ “Dreams” and Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Debbie Harry’s breathy vocals were captured on the latter song, which was featured in a music video they presented along with our interview at PopMatters.

Three of Twisted Pine’s original members remain, with Anh Phung (flute) the new addition ahead of their most recent release — 2020’s Right Now.

“I’ve loved seeing how they’ve grown as a band in the time since I left!” Sumner stated. “They are wildly creative. And I’m glad to see them making their mark on the acoustic music scene in exactly the way they want. We are all on good terms — I still see and talk to them every now and then. I’m rooting hard for them!”

Seeing the Light
All is obviously going well for Sumner, too. Not only has it involved her continued sobriety and a renewed sense of purpose with Traveling Light. She found personal happiness in 2019 by marrying Ian Fitzgerald, a New England-based folk singer-songwriter. In the album liner notes, she dedicates this work of art to family members, including her mom and grandmother Ascencion. Sumner also gives “infinite thanks to the man who gives me the courage to shoot for the stars and offers everything and anything to help me get there: my love and darling husband, Ian. I love you to the moon and back.”

In this interview, there’s a shout-out to all three worthy of a group hug as she calls them “my No. 1 supporters and my favorite people on the planet.”

Sumner knows all about top billing. Some of her songs gained high marks in recent competitions. By winning the folk category of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest last year for “Radium Girls (Curie Eleison),” her ballad about the horrible conditions female factory workers faced around World War I, she and the 11 other genre champions competed for Song of the Year and $20,000 (that was awarded in July to country’s Brittany Ann Tranbaugh). Sumner also was one of 24 finalists in the 2021 Kerrville Folk Festival’s New Folk event and among the top Massachusetts entrants in NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2020 (“Radium Girls”) and 2021 (“Unrecorded Night”).

“It’s been VERY affirming, and I’ve been so honored to have had this positive feedback about my writing from such established competitions and musicians,” a grateful Sumner proclaimed. “I do think it’s helped some more people find my music, which was my main hope when I entered into these competitions.”

After previously releasing a five-song EP with Fitzgerald — Sing Me an Old Tune — on Valentine’s Day, 2019, and two more — 2018’s Anything Worth Doing and 2019’s The Things You Forgot — under her own name, Sumner leaves the door open for other possibilities … and a change of scenery. “I’m pretty happy right now here in Boston, but I’m always open to moving wherever it makes the most sense for me to be career-wise,” she contended.

Yet since Sumner enjoys her “day job” at Club Passim, where Twisted Pine will appear on September 14 (reunion, anyone?), the Winchester resident hastened to add, “For the foreseeable future, I’ll remain near Boston and Cambridge!”

Before another studio album with her latest group, currently without an agent or management team, the road will beckon again. Shows will give more devoted fans and newbies a taste of what’s in store.

“We’re looking to play a whole lot in the future!” exclaimed Sumner, who has two solo appearances, including a free show at the Rhode Island Folk Festival, in August, then a Cambridge date with the Traveling Light trio at Atwood’s Tavern on September 18, just before summer turns to fall. “I am the one making the connections and booking, and it’s been quite an experience learning how to make this touring stuff happen! … This is a good bunch of folks, and we work hard to support each other on the road and make sure everyone is happy and feeling healthy. We are crossing our fingers for as many tours and festivals as we can take on next year!”

So this Un-Twisted Sister seems content to continue Traveling Light during this transition period. ’Tis the season for dear hearts, open minds, gentle songs and sweet, soothing voices. The Sumner of Love has arrived.


Bonus Tracking: Rachel Sumner Looks Inside the Album
American Highways: You wrote six of the nine songs on the album. The others are from an eclectic mix of artists (Joanna Newsom, Johnny Cash, and Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings). How did you choose the covers? And how do they fit in with your songs?

Rachel Sumner: All the covers are songs by writers I greatly admire, who’ve influenced my own writing. All the songs are also deep cuts from their respective catalogs, which always appeals to me; I enjoy introducing folks to lesser-known works by artists they might be familiar with. The connecting thematic thread I discovered within this record was the concept of transformation of self, of relationships, and of the world surrounding us. I felt these songs fit in perfectly with my own in that regard.

AH: How/when did you come across the book (Forever Words) that included Johnny Cash’s poem? Are you the first — and only — artist to turn his poem into a song?

Rachel Sumner: I found the book on an unusually warm day this last winter. “If You Love Me” was the very first poem I flipped to. The first few lines took my breath away — “The fluctuating worth of this very terminal earth / And the satellite that glows at night above me / Won’t bear upon my mind, but concerning human kind / I won’t care if you’re there and if you love me.” Climate change was weighing pretty heavily on my mind and I couldn’t believe I was reading a love poem seemingly for the apocalypse written by Johnny Cash in 1983! The music came very quickly. It was only after that I found out Elvis Costello had set it to music as well.

AH: Considering “Hunting Doves” took you “roughly seven years to write,” I’m guessing that might answer this question: What was the most challenging song for you to write, and why?

Rachel Sumner: Funny enough, it wasn’t the most difficult song to write! I’d say “Homegrown Sorrow” was the most difficult one to finish. I made lyrical edits right up until I was tracking vocals for the album. “Homegrown Sorrow” was a song I started writing a few years back during an extremely raw moment in my life. Revisiting that moment and trying to honor the origins of the song was a little difficult, but I’m happy with the final version. I feel like I can finally lay those feelings to rest.

AH: “Colleen,” the cover of Joanna Newsom’s quirky folk ballad, seems to have some inherent challenges of its own. How difficult was it to sing? Were there many takes?

Rachel Sumner: A lot of people have strong opinions on Joanna Newsom’s voice in particular, with many saying they don’t like it, but the moment anyone tries to work up one of her songs, they see what a stellar singer she actually is! It was not an easy thing to do … this was one of the few songs I did not track live vocals to — I wanted to be sure I was able to get it right. The “hups!” from the instrumental bits alone took … like 15-plus takes for me to be satisfied!

AH: Since you said “Come Along, Rowan” is a banjo tune, and it figures prominently on the instrumental, who played the banjo? It wasn’t in the credits.

Rachel Sumner: Oops! I forgot to list it, but I play banjo on the tune!

Thanks for talking with us, Rachel.

Find more music and tour dates for Rachel Sumner here: https://rachelsumnermusic.com/ - Americana Highways

Folk singer Rachel Sumner, who came to Connecticut for a performance Saturday night, is riding high after winning the John Lennon Songwriting Contest earlier this year for her song “Radium Girls.”

It tells the tragic story of women factory workers in the early 20th century who painted “glow in the dark” watch and clock dials using powdered radium. They were told to use their mouth to make a fine point on the tip of the brush, and then dip the brush in the radium vial. The workers were all exposed to massive amounts of radiation poisoning, which led to various forms of cancer and a host of other ailments. Factories in Thomaston, New Haven and Waterbury employed radium girls.

Employees of the U.S. Radium Corp. paint numbers on the faces of wristwatches using dangerous radioactive paint. Dozens of women, known as "radium girls," later died of radium poisoning. One of the last radium girls died this year at 107.
Argonne National Laboratory
Employees of the U.S. Radium Corp. paint numbers on the faces of wristwatches using dangerous radioactive paint. Dozens of women, known as "radium girls," later died of radium poisoning.
For her song “Radium Girls,” the Boston-based Sumner adopted an old folk style: the ballad.

“Once I heard about the radium girls, I wanted to try to tell everybody I could about their story because I think that there is something eerily familiar to it that we see even today,” Sumner said. “And I wanted to build on that, that old folk tradition of telling a story and giving a warning.”

Sumner says that when she was writing the song, she agonized over how to properly honor these women in a six-minute song.


“I honestly lost sleep over this,” Sumner said. “I wanted to show the radium girls and what they went through, the specific things that happened to them — how their bosses didn’t believe them when they said that they were getting sick and how they were treating them. I wanted to outline that. So often, women aren’t believed about many things until it’s way too late unfortunately.”

In September, “Radium Girls” won the grand prize in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest’s folk category. Sumner and her band Traveling Light performed Saturday night at Cafe Nine in New Haven with local favorites Lys Guillorn and Mercy Choir. - NPR

When Rachel Sumner moved from California’s Mojave Desert to Boston in 2011, the flutist’s goal was to study orchestration at Berklee College of Music and to eventually score films.

But when she fell in with a group of bluegrass and roots musicians at school, she picked up guitar — and discovered a love for songwriting.

Last May, Sumner entered the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, an international competition. In September, she won the Session 1 Folk Grand Prize. Another group of artists competed in Session 2; those winners were announced in March. In April, the public voted for artists in both sessions, which resulted in Sumner winning the 2021 John Lennon Award in Folk.

One of 12 winners, she now completes against artists from Iceland to Australia who have won other genre categories — country, gospel, hip-hop, pop, and rock, among them — for “Song of the Year,” a $20,000 grand prize, and equipment. (Her folk win earned her recording equipment.)

That decision is now in the hands of celebrity judges — including Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, George Clinton, Jimmy Cliff, Sheila E., and the Bacon Brothers. The winner will be announced in July.

Originally from Lancaster, Calif., Sumner, 29, now of Winchester, has worked at Passim in Cambridge for nearly seven years, doing “everything from serving to box office to teaching.” She is now Passim’s School of Music manager.

Sumner cofounded the Boston bluegrass group Twisted Pine, leaving in 2019 to go solo. Her new band, Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light, will release their debut album in August. You can catch Sumner’s band at Passim June 4. The John Lennon Award winner in the country music category, Brittany Ann Tranbaugh, opens.

Influenced by murder ballads, Sumner entered her song “Radium Girls (Curie Eleison).”

“I thought it was my best work, but I also thought there was a message to it,” Sumner said in a recent phone interview. John Lennon wrote quite a few message songs, “so I felt like it might resonate with the folks at the competition. Plus, I want as many people as possible to know about the radium girls.”

The radium girls, she explained, were a group of women factory workers circa World War I who painted watch dials with a glow-in-the-dark paint containing radium.

“The women didn’t have lead-lined [protection] — they just sat at tables and painted. The factories knew it was dangerous. The women started to disintegrate. Their jaws would break off. They’d get huge swollen lymph nodes, their teeth would fall out. They started dying,” she said. “The factories said it was from syphilis.”

Why write about it?

“I’m very interested old English ballads, in the functionality of them. Old murder ballads were written about actual murders and cases,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to try my hand at writing something like that, but never found a story I connected with until I discovered the radium girls.”

Learn more he about the John Lennon Songwriting Contest at jlsc.com. Lauren Daley can be reached at ldaley33@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @laurendaley1. - The Boston Globe

Rachel Sumner first came to the attention of this website’s readers last year when she was voted runner up in our search for new talent the “Twang Factor”. Now the Boston based singer has released her debut album with her band Traveling Light – ‘Rachel Sumner And Traveling Light’ – not the most imaginative title for this imaginative and evocative album.

The album is made up of nine songs, six written by Sumner and three covers, ‘If You Loved Me’ which uses a Johnny Cash poem for the lyrics, the Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings’ song ‘Strangers Again’ and Joanna Newsom’s ‘Colleen”. This is one of the most interesting tracks on the album as well as the longest at over six minutes. It sounds like a Celtic story ballad with handclaps and is almost reel like in feel.

Sumner’s own songs are mainly ballads although ‘Come Along Rowan’ is an instrumental featuring Sumner on banjo which was written to inspire a friend to go into labour – presumably Rowan was the result. The other five self-penned songs have a gentle, bucolic but emotional feel to them and as Sumner says, “There’s a thread through the songs in this Traveling Light album of people feeling other or finding they’ve transformed into strangers, whether it’s to someone they were once close to, or to themselves”.

Although recorded at The Record Co. in Boston, the album sounds as if it was recorded somewhere in the Appalachian mountains near a gentle spring with the snow-capped mountains in the distance. Sumner’s last band was the bluegrass influenced Twisted Pine and she never strays for from those roots on this album. Most of the tracks have a similar line-up with Sumner on acoustic guitar superbly backed-up by Kat Wallace on fiddle and delightful harmonies, Ira Klein on acoustic guitar, Alex Formento on pedal steel and Mike Siegel anchoring everything on upright bass.

Above her superb musicians soars Sumner’s almost brittle sounding vocals. She has a cutglass edge to her at times which enables her to wring the emotion out of her songs, some of which have been years gestating before she got the chance to record them. The three covers are given new and interesting takes, putting her stamp on them and making them her own.

The result of the Twang Factor’s vote shows there’s no doubt that the readers of this website know talent when they hear it and that Rachel Sumner And Traveling Light have repaid their faith in her talent by releasing an excellent album that augurs well for the future.

8/10 - AmericanaUK

Call it a question of what lens you use to view the thing. Folk audiences, real folk devotees, will embrace and champion the debut LP from Rachel Sumner and Traveling Light. After all, it’s an emotive and well-crafted collection of folksy gems, ripe with bright acoustic guitar strumming, Kat Wallace’s mellifluous fiddling, and angelic vocals from the former Twisted Pine alumnus. Then again, more mainstream audiences, the consumers of “popular music,” will not take the time necessary to find Sumner’s charms. After all, the record lacks the tension of the sociopolitical moment, and the nine-track LP might benefit from a heavier bottom end, and more aggressive editing, particularly in how it sequences Sumner’s tales of love and longing. So, is the eponymous debut a great LP or something that needed just a little more time to cook? Again, depends on where you stand.

Many people will – or should – check out Sumner’s latest for her band’s take on Gillian Welch’s “Strangers Again.” “Hello, stranger, lover, friend/ Hello, angel on the mend,” Sumner sings to open the song, over tides of fiddle and pedal steel. “There’s a side of you/ That I never knew/ As you shed another skin/ We’re strangers again.” There are few places on the new record where Sumner’s voice is as confident or effective, and the backing from a slightly buried-in-the-mix acoustic guitar is spot-on good. The good news for those keeping track: Sumner actually revisits a handful of other people’s songs on the LP. She works wonders with “If You Love Me,” which is based on a Johnny Cash poem, making the carefully picked acoustic and swelling pedal steel overflow with heartache. Sumner’s take on Joanna Newsom’s “Colleen” is a daring bit of standing on the shoulders of giants, and the hand-clap-driven bridge borders on the celebratory, a real success.

What to make of the original material? It’s more than just decent, and Sumner clearly has an older, wiser musician’s ability to pen insightful, understated lyrics and sparkling melodies. “Hunting Doves,” the album’s opener, gathers steam as it unfolds and ends in an interesting place, given its fragile, tentative beginnings. “Easton,” another great song, starts with the sound of pitch-perfect acoustic guitar coming from someone’s spring porch. “The Arms of Your Mother” is a beautiful ode to Sumner’s matriarch.

Elsewhere, the songs lack shine but not inspiration. Sumner switches to banjo for the lead on “Come Along, Rowan,” and, while there are moments where the Old Time references mesh and push the song beyond previous limits, it, elsewhere, is a little cluttered. “Unrecorded Night,” which features some oddly pointy lyrics, hints at the acoustic shuffle of flamenco but never fully embraces it, much to the detriment of a song that packs lots of emotion but lacks backbone.

Then, again, there’s always “Strangers Again.” Welch sort of arbitrarily tossed out the song, including on a “lost songs” collection, but Sumner gives it the deluxe treatment it’s due. “Hello, rain man in the mirror/ Now I see you’ve noticed all these tears,” Sumner coos. “Wе can start anew/ If you’re willing/ To smile and prеtend/ We’re strangers again.” Riveting stuff.

So, you want a verdict? Tough to say. The songwriting throughout the Boston outfit’s debut is solid, airtight as a jar left for winter. And Sumner, an essential part of why Twisted Pine had such a bright future in the first place, shines here. But the accessibility of the forms and formulas herein causes gaps in the ability to rave about the new LP. For audiences who respect, celebrate and pay homage to familiar tropes – insert a Dylan “Judas!” reference or two here – this is a tremendous accomplishment. I just don’t know if Sumner can cut through the cultural static to use these songs to reach audiences beyond that insular little circle. Regardless of where it goes, though, it’s a fine ride. - Spectrum Culture

Rachel Sumner originally moved to Boston to study the flute at Berklee College of Music. But she quickly fell in love with, of all things, bluegrass music. “All of Bill Monroe’s songs, he said they were 'true life blues,'” Sumner says. “Seeing him put himself in those songs was really appealing to me.”

And so Sumner, too, poured herself into her songs, writing cathartically about painful personal experiences, like the time her family was evicted on Christmas Eve. Along the way, she became as enamored with the craft of songwriting as with self-expression. “The more that I write, the more that I try to challenge myself to write differently,” she says.

Sumner’s new single, “Hunting Doves,” is a result of one of those self-challenges. Sumner loves James Joyce — the musicality of his writing, and his perfectionism — and she wondered what it would be like to structure a song around one of his sentences. Specifically, an impressionistic phrase at the end of “Finnegans Wake”: “a way a lone a last a loved a long…”

This exercise, which imposes a constraint on the already difficult process of songwriting, opens up a bounty of poetic possibilities for Sumner, who last year won the prestigious John Lennon songwriting contest for her song “Radium Girls.” Sumner’s gift for wordplay shines in “Hunting Doves.” In the second verse, she offers a deft and surprising excavation of the metaphorical possibilities of love’s most jaded symbol, the rose. “A budding love once bloomed for us/ But day broke and I rose,” Sumner sings. “A lone, a lone, left overgrown/ All thorny and exposed.”

Rachel Sumner (foreground) with her band, left to right: Mike Siegel, Kat Wallace and Ira Klein. (Courtesy Lisa Pinals)
Rachel Sumner (foreground) with her band, left to right: Mike Siegel, Kat Wallace and Ira Klein. (Courtesy Lisa Pinals)
“Hunting Doves” at times evokes the mannered and symbol-laden language of traditional folk ballads, another inspiration for Sumner. The music, too, merges old and new, with a slyly modern acoustic arrangement by Sumner’s band built around the sturdy, familiar strains of finger-picked guitar.

The song’s connection to Sumner’s personal life is somewhat oblique. It is written, in the most general sense, from the perspective of a wronged lover. Sumner says that "Hunting Doves" is about “power struggle” in a relationship. “Personally, I’ve felt that,” she says. “The desperation that you fall into is real, and it’s intense, and it feels like the end of the world. But it’s not. There is a way out.”

For the lyric video, Sumner filmed herself writing out the verses, working backwards from the last letter. Then she played the video in reverse. The result makes it appear that she is erasing the words as she writes them, mirroring the many erasures in the song: of the relationship's meaning in the wake of its end, of the self by a domineering lover, of the hunted doves. “It’s not a super hopeful song,” Sumner admits. But it ends on a fresh page. - WBUR

Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light
Rachel Sumner spent the early days of her career singing and writing songs for Twisted Pine. With this new album, she’s striking out on her own with a brand new band. The self-titled debut features arrangements steeped in bluegrass and country traditions. Traveling Light is made up of top-notch musicians, but it is Sumner’s vocal delivery that takes center stage on this release. Her hauntingly wistful voice lends emotional weight to the tracks on this collection.

Highlights for me are the Johnny Cash poem put to music “If You Love Me” and “Come Along, Rowan,” a banjo tune written to coax a friend of Sumner’s child into the world. - Outsider

Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light released their debut, self-titled album last week and it is fantastic. The first song, “Hunting Doves,” introduces this group well, showcasing their virtuosity and creativity. As we discuss in this episode of the Red Line Roots podcast, the song came together from finding pieces of songs in Rachel’s notebooks and Jame Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Intrigued?

The entire record is beautiful, and we were so lucky to catch up with Rachel this summer about it. - Red Line Roots

Harpist/singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom’s debut record, The Milk-Eyed Mender, has inspired a number of memorable covers. But look ahead through the rest of of Newsom’s work—post-2006, frankly—and notable versions become far harder to come by. Newsom’s move from Milk-Eyed to her sophomore record, Ys, and beyond involved a series of especially massive creative leaps: modest folk songs to epic orchestral suites, and, later, to triple LPs. Newsom’s work has only gotten richer and more fascinating, the lyrics denser and the arrangements knottier — but, at least based on past precedent, she’s also seemingly grown more… uncover-able.

It’s refreshing and impressive, then, to come across a cover of not only a post-Milk-Eyed Mender tune, but a Newsom acolyte who has made their own creative in-roads to her later work. This would be singer-songwriter Rachel Sumner, who, alongside her band Traveling Light, has shared an artful new cover of Joanna Newsom’s “Colleen.”

Once an EP-only deep cut released by Newsom in 2007, “Colleen” gets a deserved feature placement here from Sumner and her band. Their version is rooted in bluegrass instrumentation — the track announces itself with just fiddle and voice, blooming gradually into a much fuller arrangement. But like Newsom and her atypical aplomb with the harp, Traveling Light go beyond just some old-time string band redux of “Colleen,” adapting the material to their particular progressive stylings. Sumner’s sound feels aligned with a number of newgrass/Americana-adjacent groups like Crooked Still and Lake Street Dive — both groups were long-ago upstarts with roots in Boston too, where conservatory training and a thriving local acoustic scene seem to be a winning brew for studied, adventurous music-making.

Rachel Sumner and Traveling Light’s new self-titled album, featuring “Colleen” at the center, will be released this Friday August 5th. Buy/pre-order the new album on Bandcamp here, and check out the Joanna Newsom cover below. (Also included below is another late-era/deep-cut Newsom cover from Sumner: “You and Me, Bess,” drawn from the aforementioned 2010 triple LP Have One On Me, and self-released by Sumner in early 2021.) - Cover Me

This year’s Tiny Desk Contest was a bit different from those of years past. Though the “tiny desk” format usually leads to more intimate, stripped-back performances by nature, this spring, social distancing made group performances a real challenge for many. The result? A slew of solo acoustic entries, including many from Massachusetts. Not that we’re complaining — all of us on this year’s panel can confirm that all the talent in our own backyard made it tough to narrow down our favorites.

For me, in many cases it came down to the songwriting. Rachel Sumner and Grace Givertz’s Tiny Desk entries both stood out based on their lyrics. Sumner’s use of the classic murder ballad structure to tell a cautionary tale about corporate greed is detailed and chiling. Grace Givertz brings emotional clarity to the sense of loss that comes with a sudden change in perspective. In different ways, they both feel relevant to this moment.

Rachel Sumner, "Radium Girls"

“Radium Girls,” the Tiny Desk Contest entry from Boston folk musician Rachel Sumner, unfolds as a modern murder ballad, telling the tragic true story of the women who contracted preventable mercury poisoning due to dishonest practices at the factories they worked for.

Back in the 1920s, painting wristwatch faces with glowing radium paint was a coveted job among young working-class women. It paid well, and the job took on a certain glamour as the girls left every shift flecked with the luminous paint, which they’d been told was harmless. But a few years later, they began suffering grotesque fates, bones and teeth crumbling inside their bodies, tumors swelling within joints, until they started to die one by one. By the time the other women had traced the cause of death back to their workplace, it was already too late. Many of the remaining workers had already ingested deadly amounts of radium, and as it began to take effect in their bodies, the factories they’d worked for set out to discredit their claims. With the time they had left, the women sued their former employers for labor abuse, ultimately transforming workers’ rights and the world’s understanding of radioactivity.

Sumner’s soft voice adds suspense to her meticulous songwriting, rounded out by the foreboding tone of Devon Gardner’s subtle fiddling and vocal harmonies. The song’s two-word bridge, “Curie eleison,” references a traditional Christian invocation meaning “Lord, have mercy,” but it’s also a nod to Marie Curie, the scientist who first discovered radium. Though the song is rooted in events that happened a century ago, the kicker calls attention to its modern-day relevance: “You may claim that women have been long-since elevated in this world/ But how can that be? Our ashes still speak louder than our words…” - WBUR