S. G. Goodman: The Articulation of Longing

S.G. Goodman’s breakout 2020 album, “Old Time Feeling,” captivated listeners and critics alike, and led to her touring with Jason Isbell and John Moreland, among others. Her second album, “Teeth Marks,” to be released in June, finds her at “the top of her vocal game,” exploring empathy, trauma, addiction, and Goodman’s South.

Story by Silas House | Photographs by Ryan Hartley

April 26, 2022

Video Premiere ~ TEETH MARKS

Her new album, “Teeth Marks,” drops on June 3. The record is more sonically adventurous, and her songwriting goes to new places of revelation and complexity. A mix of driving, punk-influenced country-rock and soul-bearing ballads, “Teeth Marks” finds Goodman at the top of her vocal game. 

“It’s about the way we leave marks on each other, and empathy or the lack thereof,” she says. Goodman feels it is less folk-driven than her debut yet retains the singer-songwriter vibe, with a sound influenced by bands like The Velvet Underground and Pavement. Despite this pedigree, it is still very much an album of Southern music, not only because of its imagery but also due to country influences that show up in guitar licks, an a cappella song reminiscent of an Appalachian dirge, or in the highlight of the album, “Work Until I Die.” This song may create its own genre of Southern punk with swinging rockabilly guitars and a head-bobbing drumline that travels from Goodman singing in cursing anger to repeating a calming prayer. The track uses a snippet of Bob McDill’s “Song of the South,” popularized by the band Alabama in its 1989 No. 1 hit, that tells the story of a Depression-era South wherein rural people can achieve success only by moving to the city. Goodman’s version, co-written with Matt Rowan, is not nostalgic, boasting lines like:

Oh, it’s the song, song of the South
Take a little piece of pie
Or they’ll bust your mouth
You make the rich more rich
No it won’t be you
Pennies for your time and crumbs to chew

Goodman’s South, as featured on the album, is one where bodies carry trauma in a moving song like “Keeper of the Time,” the closing track, which Goodman feels is a rebuttal to the suicide letter of “Space and Time” from her first album. A South where loving an addict doesn’t mean you have to stay with them on “Dead Soldiers,” named after a slang reference to empty beer bottles. “There are lots of songs from the point of view of the addict but not many from the people who are bearing witness to that,” Goodman explains.

It’s also a new, queer South, where, in “Patron Saint of the Dollar Store” we’re told:

Oh and if I catch hell
If I’m met with harm
Know I found heaven
Lying in a woman’s arms

Her favorite part of “Teeth Marks” is an almost eight-minute, two-part song that begins with a rocking meditation on empathy, “If You Were Someone I Loved,” and ends with an a cappella tag called “You Were Someone I Loved,” featuring a repeated image of “a momma killdeer” working hard to protect her young. “We wanted to put all the focus on the human experience,” she says, explaining the choice for recording only her voice. “It’s more important for someone to hear my breath and my lips smack than it would be for a guitar following me.”

Even though it may sometimes be thematically dark, there is more fun to be found on this sophomore effort. One can’t sit still while listening to most of it, and Goodman says that is intentional. 

“I wanted to stretch myself and think about what kind of live show I want to put on.” That wasn’t without effort, though. “Writing a fast song is, for me, much harder than writing a slower, emotional song, so I really push myself to bring up the energy in ways.”

The joyful sound woven through the album is sometimes driven by love, sometimes by defiance, but always by a delight in singing out. The album feels like the declaration of an artist who knows exactly who she is, backed by a band that blows the roof off the studio, effectively giving the listener the experience of hearing the music live. It’s music for a South that is not only a place of farmers and workers, but also of queer people, progressives, and folks fed up with the abuse of those close to them and of the ways pharmaceutical companies and corporations exploit the place and its people. “‘Teeth Marks’ is about coming to grips with someone not returning the feelings you have for them,” Goodman says, and she could easily be talking about the many people who love a South they feel doesn’t always return the affection.

Upon leaving Murray, one is immersed in the countryside in less than a minute. Goodman drives fast, taking the curves in the country roads with ease as the long, wide fields for soybeans, corn, tobacco, and redtop fly by. This part of Kentucky tends to be flat, but only 10 minutes outside town, she’s in a place of rolling ridgelines and dense woods on the property of a retired art professor, where she works part time as a groundskeeper. Acres here are covered in glowing green moss, and daffodils are sprouting. Goodman points it all out, mentioning the lady’s slipper and crane-fly orchids that grow here. “It’s so quiet and peaceful,” she says, pausing for a moment as she listens to nothing except the breeze stirring the tops of the trees.

She’s grown close to the landowner, who plans to leave the property to a trust so it will be a nature preserve. Sometimes they walk the land together and work side by side. 

“I’ve always been close to people who were 20 or 30 years older than me,” Goodman says. “And I have learned that manual labor is very important for my creative process.” When melodies or lyrics come to her, she speaks or hums them into her phone recorder while adding lime to a bed of asparagus or weeding a stand of garlic. “I’m always surprised by people who just had a few chores growing up. When I was little, we worked. If it hadn’t been for my mother putting us in little sports leagues and stuff to make sure we got to be kids, we would have worked all the time. I didn’t know any different. I hated it then, but I’m thankful for it now.” She leans on the wooden fence surrounding the garden. “Daddy would always tell us that you have to make working a game. He’s been working in the fields since he was 4 years old, and he can mimic just about any bird in Kentucky. I think that’s where I learned how to work on lines for songs, and now it feels like it’s part of my process.”

Her family has farmed on the banks of the volatile Mississippi River for generations. “I grew up right on Bayou de Chien,” she says, pronouncing it in the local parlance: By-duh-shay. “That’s a little Creole influence,” she explains, since this means Dog Bayou in French. As a child, she spent a lot of time working in sweet corn, which she remembers as a hot, sweaty affair. 

Goodman, born in 1988, had a rural childhood that would have seemed more common 20 years before. “You didn’t act up in the grocery store, because any of the mamas might whup your ass,” she laughs. She spent most of her time outside — “We’d be out in the creek all day” — and remembers days of gigging for gar (prehistoric-looking fish with long beaks full of needlelike teeth) when they would wash up into the fields after high water. She never pumped her own gas until she came to college, because the local gas station had full service. Most of the businesses in Hickman offered charge accounts, a system that had faded out in most rural places by the 1970s. At the local store, Mr. Charlie’s, she would often eat liver cheese on saltines. 

“It’s a gone way of life,” she says, making it clear she still carries a deep love for the place. One thing that so many relate to in her music is a sense of longing: for lost places, lost loves, to belong. 

A place where she found both belonging and, eventually, rejection, was the Southern Baptist church, where she grew up going to three or four services a week. Although she would come to question its doctrines, she’s thankful for the musical knowledge she gained there. 

“People describe my voice as having a tremolo, or a warble. That’s from listening to old ladies in my church,” Goodman says. “That’s where I heard that sound. To me, that registered as how you should sing to God. The old hymn writers, that’s where I think you first learn the melodies that will break your heart. The emotional melodies.”

Then she sings a little, in a high, sweet voice:

Jesus, keep me near the cross, there’s a precious fountain

She closes her eyes, switches to another song from her childhood:

There’s a sweet, sweet spirit in this place

“Those are some of the most powerful ballads that were ever written, the most emotional songs that are out there, and it’s kind of crazy.” 

Goodman says she was an odd child who read a lot of books and was curious about faith. “Around 16, I was introduced to the concept of free will. I was asking a lot of questions … and one of my preachers, who I really respected, told me I had to have faith, and that put a little seed of doubt in me. As a gay woman, according to the way I was taught, with God being omniscient, I was born to go to hell according to my belief system at that time. That’s a lot to hold.”

Her music taste was becoming more eclectic, too. As a teenager, she adored George Jones, Don Williams, Patsy Cline, and Randy Travis, all singers she listened to with her family. But she also loved artists like Stevie Nicks, Sheryl Crow, and Alanis Morissette. The isolated county where she grew up is one of the most diverse in Kentucky: about 30% of its population are people of color, and most of Goodman’s friends were Black. She was one of the only white girls on her basketball team. She says this helped to shape her taste by being exposed to music groups like one of her favorites, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, as well as other bands and singers.

In college, she majored in philosophy. By this time she had also gotten involved in the indie music scene and was coming to terms with her sexuality. She had known she was gay from a young age but hid it behind religion. “I didn’t need a boyfriend,” she laughs, “because I had Jesus.” But she struggled with being closeted as she got older. When she came out to some of the people closest to her, she found their rejection hard to take and became suicidal. Her suicide note became her best-known song, “Space and Time,” with lines such as, “I never wanna leave this world / without saying ‘I love you’.”

Goodman’s face is lit brightly by the afternoon sun. “I was having a rough time with living a dual life, being able to be out amongst certain people and then hiding myself around others. It got me to the point that I was ready to give myself some relief.”

But music got her through. She kept writing, singing, and working. At first, she was hesitant to discuss her sexuality simply because it “feels weird to talk about it.” But when her first album debuted in 2020, Billboard described her as “a queer farmer’s daughter,” much to her surprise, and she felt exposed. 

“Random people on social media wrote to say they were praying for me. People close to me wanted to know why I hadn’t told them. There were a lot of issues. For years before I was out, I thought if I could make something of myself, then no one could question it. I finally felt like I was doing something that people could be proud of me about, and found out that wasn’t true. I realized that there weren’t gonna be any sacred moments in my life to them — whether that was getting married or winning an award or some sort of accomplishment — because I’d be doing it while gay. But also, I was going on tour during a pandemic. I knew that if I didn’t get a harder exterior about [the homophobia], it could take my career.”

So she decided to talk about it more often. 

“It’s my story. And it’s important to discuss, because it’s me and I don’t have anything to be ashamed about. Also, then people don’t have to question it. The reason I hesitated for so long is that once you’ve been rejected by people close to you, there is a real fear of being rejected by the whole town or the whole world.”

Today she has become a role model for many rural queer people who don’t often see themselves represented in media. They thank her at her shows or reach out to her online. Some of them have even found her address and shown up at her home.

Her house is a small, stylish midcentury modern populated by furniture she says she’s had since college. A magnificent stuffed bobcat is perched atop the piano in her living room. She runs her hand down its back as if it needs comforting, expressing her remorse at having shot it as a 14-year-old. “I was deer hunting, and it was coming right for me. I still feel bad about it.” 

Settled at the kitchen table now, she holds her dog, Howard, “a 15-pound, half-bald mutt,” she calls him, and kisses him on the head. He curls up on her lap, content. 

Like a good Southerner, she is mortified that she doesn’t have anything to offer guests, since she has just returned from her trip to New York City. She apologizes three times. Being a Southerner is important to her, and she’s especially glad to change definitions of what that means. She says the South is definitely changing.

“They wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop the change otherwise,” she says. She worries about the new voting laws and what that will mean for the region, and the nation. But she has hope, and she loves the way the world has broadened for many rural Southerners because of the internet. 

“For me, as a 14-year-old, I wasn’t thinking about the fluidity of gender, for example. The internet has made certain information and communities reach further.”

Goodman realizes the South has all kinds of problems, but that there is plenty to love about it, too. She’s proud to be a Southerner, and a Kentuckian, and she wants to be part of changing it for the better. Lately, she’s been dreaming of living awhile in New York City. “I just feel like I need to do it,” she says. “But I’ll never do it until I can afford to be there and keep my mortgage in Kentucky, too. I was raised to be proud of where I come from, and in some ways it kills me to not be able to say that I still live in Fulton County.”

This is part of the new South, too: that constant struggle between leaving and staying, sometimes even the love or hate relationship with the complex, troubled, beautiful place. But this new South has voices and representatives, positive examples of what it means to contain multitudes. S.G. Goodman is one of them.

Perhaps it is impossible to articulate exactly what is so powerful to us about music. Sometimes it’s music’s ability to make us happy, to get us moving, to speak to the rhythm that beats within us. Other times music slices into our emotions so deeply we can feel its silver knife diving right into what makes us tick. It can light a fire in us: the passion to fight back, or to love harder. Very often, it’s the articulation of longing that gets us, or the reminder of what we believe in. Music reminds us that we are alive. Whatever powerful, supernatural element music is able to conjure, Goodman’s has it in spades. Her voice is so full of pining, we can’t help but pine along. Her arrangements are so tight and rhythmic, we can’t help but move with them. Hers is a sound both old and brand new. A lot like the South itself.