Amy Helm on Finding Her Own Voice With ‘Didn’t It Rain’ Album
Her dad was Levon Helm, the renowned drummer for the Band. Mom is singer-songwriter Libby Titus, and her stepfather is Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen. Still, when it comes to making music, Amy Helm is very much her own person.
“All of my parents, stepparents, their friends and peers [were] really good in backing off and letting me find my way,” Helm tells Rolling Stone Country of making her rootsy new album, Didn’t It Rain. “And then when I was giving in to fear too much, they were really good about stepping in. My dad would always say to me, ‘Buck up, girl!'”
Though the set marks her solo debut, Helm is hardly a newcomer. She recorded three albums with alt-country quartet Ollabelle and spent 10 years in the Midnight Ramble Band with her father. Levon played on three tracks on Amy’s record, his last recordings before he passed away in 2012. He’s not the only recognizable name on the album: Allison Moorer sings back up, while John Medeski and Little Feat’s Bill Payne both play keyboards.
It’s clearly heard on the project that Helm shares a certain loose-limbed sensibility with Bonnie Raitt, her rangy voice easily sliding from the New Orleans’ tinged title track (one of several covers on the album) to the swampy closer, “Wild Girl.” Rolling Stone Country caught up with the versatile singer-songwriter in Colorado, where she was on a working vacation with her two young sons.
Following your success with Ollabelle and the Ramble, why was the time right to do a solo record?
I wanted to challenge myself to step farther out and see what it would feel like to have to lead a song and lead a whole set and to do what all my heroes that made me want to sing in the first place were doing.
Over the course of making the album, you were going through a lot of life changes, including your father’s death. How did that affect the album?
I was facing the end of my marriage and delivered my second baby boy and everything just shifted all at once. When that happens, it really throws you into a place where you have to reach deep down and let yourself get very vulnerable and find your strength in a way that you hadn’t had to before. [The changes] re-formed how I sang the songs and what I was writing and what material I was choosing.
And you re-recorded half the album.
When I started making that album I had actually never done a gig of my own. After my father passed, I started to do small gigs under my own name. As we built the band and got more confident, what we were doing live just didn’t match what I had recorded so I felt it was really important for me to go in and try to re-cut some of the songs that had changed and grown so much just from being road tested.