Mamie Minch confronts questions of legacy with abandon. As a folk singer-songwriter, Minch re-wraps lyrical and thematic legacy with a graceful repose. As co-owner of Brooklyn Lutherie, a stringed instrument repair shop, Minch retells the buried histories of broken instruments.
Despite these seemingly bifurcated identities, Minch’s work has always existed in the theme of community. Minch moved to Brooklyn twenty-five years ago with a studio scholarship and has since remained in the city that nurtured the Folk revival movement of the ‘60s where Americana, folk, bluegrass, and the blues—all genres Minch draws from—blossomed. Immediately immersing herself within this scene, she began playing around the city in the band Delta Dreambox. In 2020, Minch released For the Love of Hazel alongside New-York vocalist Dayna Kurtz. Whether she’s playing in DIY house shows alongside her 1937 National Duolian Resophonic, performing at the annual Brooklyn Americana Music Festival, or repairing and collaborating with her peers, Minch has found herself integral to New York City blues.
I witnessed one such show earlier this January at the Owl Music Parlor, where I saw Minch play. While she performed her 2020 album Slow Burn, a collection of feminist blues and folk in collaboration with drummer and producer Dean Sharenow, Minch also incorporated restructured blues songs torn from classic songbooks and more forgotten pieces from artists like Connie Converse. Minch’s powerful voice, tactful finger-picking, and crafted narratives, both spoken and sung, embodied the hope music should offer.
Minch’s latest collaboration involves a two-week run with Vicki Kristina Barcelona (VKB), a trio composed of Minch, Rachelle Garniez, and Amanda Homi that reimagines the essence of Tom Waits’ songs through new harmonic contexts. A few weeks after Minch arrives home, we land at this interview. Mamie and I discuss intentionality, the Gowanus Canal, and the dialect between folk and inheritance. Though Minch avoids claims of “superhero-like” qualities, as the world poises to tackle the uneasy world we exist within, Minch has been tackling the necessary reimaginings that the rest have just started paying attention to.
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
You just came back from a few weeks in India with your band Vicki Kristina Barcelona. Did you eat good food? Where did you go?
I ate great food! It was so banging. We started in Bangalore, we were only there for three nights and two concerts.
You were there with the band playing Tom Waits covers. When I listen to the songs, they sound so unlike any of your other projects. How did you first get involved with the project?
The project is very singer-songwriter and bluesy. [VKB] is a Tom Waits cover band. They were already a band before I joined. There used to be four people, and the other guitar player left. They asked me to sit in with the other players, Rachelle Garniez and Amanda Homi. They’re really experienced recording artists. The recording process is a whole other thing. Live, we sound really different from the recordings. There’s a lot more going on in the recordings. It’s guitar-heavy and vocal-heavy. It’s about toe-ing the narrative of the song.
Was the band Tom Waits-focused as you came in? How was that decision made?
I happen to be the biggest Tom Waits fan of the women in the band. I’ve loved him since forever. I cover his songs in my own sets sometimes. We have this booking agent in Germany. He asked us, “What’s your band about?” So we said, “Well, we play Tom Waits!” He has this 50 year recording career: He’s got tons of albums, tons of material, and the songs are really really good. And—maybe not anymore—you’d turn on the radio and say, “Who wrote this song? I know it’s Rod Stewart singing, but who wrote it?” It’s Tom Waits. And a lot of songs just have Tom Waits behind them. So, we say we “redecorate” the compositions of Tom Waits. But, you know, nobody is doing an impersonation of him.
You were incredible at the last show I saw you at in Owl Music Parlor alongside Charlie Burnahm and Fred Cash. It seemed like such a tightly knit community.
Thank you! Completely, before us, Chloe Swanter played. And after us were Charlie Burnham and Fred Cash. Charlie is from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and he still lives in the house he grew up in. Which is wild, because it was an African-American family—four or five kids, parents—and everyone kind of moved away, and the area kept gentrifying. And the house ended up being worth a ton of money. His mom moved out, and he said, “I’d live there!” He’s a part of Brooklyn music. He is really special.
You are too—The way you interact with your community is incredible.
Thank you. I feel really overwhelmed sometimes. Shop, music, travel. I organize this acoustic guitar camp at Ashokan. I hire all the teachers and kind of curate who’s going to be there. It’s 100 campers. It’s a sleepaway camp. Do you wanna guess who the average camper is? Age and demographic.
I feel like I’m going to be tricked right now. I’m thinking of an eleven year old white boy.
Take that boy and add about 50 years to age. A 60 year old white man. I have no problem with any of them. They kind of carried me away, because I came, I taught, and I was like, “You know you guys this is so cool, but you need to have students who are not old white men, because you want this to keep going. You want this to be a relevant thing.” Because the world doesn’t look like that. And, of course, there’s tons of teachers who would be amazing who fall into that narrative. And it means that the students begin to not fall under that narrow demographic.
Have you seen that change happen?
100%. It’s younger people. But younger people don’t want to do something that’s so homogenous. Especially if you’re teaching Blues. You need Black people. It’s been really fun, and it’s grown a little bit every year—in client-ship, in students, in the body of students.
It’s amazing that you’ve seen that turnaround so quickly. You’re also ingrained in the New York City Community where the world seems especially scary. How’s New York City doing?
I think people are freaked out, all these people in Columbia getting abducted by ICE. Have you heard about this guy? This guy going for his last interview for the naturalization process? This young man, like Mahmoud Khalil, was a protestor. At some point the protest got too intense for him, and he said, “I’m non-violent. I’m not going to do this.” He’s Palestinian, and this young man got a letter in the mail: “Show up for your final naturalization interview” at such-and-such date. It was a fake letter: he got there and it was ICE waiting for him. That’s the guy you want to arrest and trick? That’s very, very dark to me.
And your current shop in the Gowanus Canal—there’s a lot of environmental news in the area now, too.
Yeah, it was named a superfund in 2008. I’ve worked in the area since 2005, and it smells much better. My first job on the Canal was at the very end of the Canal, where the 19th-century masonry sewer emptied out. You know the pound—the ASPCA? It’s where you would go to adopt puppies.
The Pound.
The Pound. It was the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It was built in the 1880s, and my boss bought the building and turned it into a guitar shop. People would bring dead horses there to be cremated. It hasn’t been the ASPCA for about 30 years, guys. People would still bring puppies. Old-school.
So he bought the building for not very much, but it was right where the pipe emptied out the sewage. On a rainy day, going to work was really unpleasant. Of course, before they built all these luxury houses, who lived there? [It was] affordable housing.
You draw a lot from the city. You cover Connie Converse a lot, for example, who grew up in New York. Apart from place, what makes a song coverable to you?
If I’m interested in it. That’s where we start. I like stories, I like when a song feels a little bit out of time. I like the, “When was that written? Who wrote that?” I really like Connie Converse. I like the songs with a memory. Not every song that you think would be good is good. You have to bash it around. Try it. Is it going to work, is it not going to work?
Out of time seems to be your niche. As you travel, do you want to incorporate new techniques into your niche?
I mean, you kind of get into the question of appropriation versus appreciation. I love the idea of being inspired, but it would never be my style to go somewhere and come back as a throat singer.
Folk is different, obviously. You change music and you change lyrics. A lot of folk music involves those sort of questions about legacy and inheritance. Do you feel like you’re inheriting something?
Totally, you’re part of a river, and I do feel like I’m part of it! I’m just an American singer-songwriter, guitar-player person. If that means all of these different influences have converged to make American music—and I mean absolutely, they’ve influenced me—I’m not trying to do more than. I’m not a superhero, I’m just a musician. I love to sing, and I love the act of singing. I love that I am part of this folk tradition.
Why folk? You’ve done other things, and you are capable of other things. Why do you keep coming back to folk?
I like acoustic. I like being able to be a person in a room and do something. I like how it makes me stretch and work. That’s something I really value: the barebones. There’s something about an instrument and a voice that’s authentic to me.
If you didn’t build guitars, would you feel different?
I came to building guitars after I was in music. I was making music, and also doing fine-arts. Working in guitars was almost a job or a way to fuse those interests. It’s a career, and it’s part of my ethos, how I see things, and how I move around in the world. My business isn’t building, I’m only doing repair and restoration.
You’re telling the story of the guitar.
That’s a nice way to look at it. It’s hard to straddle those things: being an artist, making work, and making a living.
What still feels like a challenge to you?
I struggle with time management. I want to be responsive to my friends and family. I have the coolest dog in the world. I tend to say yes to a little too much, but I live in New York. Strike when the iron’s hot and all that. I’m being invited, so I say “Yes!” I’ve been lucky that I haven’t had to pound away in this city to get the gigs that I want. New York is a hard town if you’re just starting fresh here. I’ve been here for twenty-five years, so I’m beyond that, I’m part of a community. People have my number, and call me and ask me to do things.
Is collaboration more for you than solo work?
I like collaboration. Doing solo-stuff is great because you’re not waiting on anyone else to show up. It’s fun, and you can really stretch out. Collaboration is a different level of engagement. You’re bouncing off of someone. Even if you’re just doing your repertoire or their repertoire, the act of bouncing can be really generative. I love it.
One last question, how do you discover new music?
Oh, this is a tough one. I used to just buy CDs. Now, I listen to a few DJs that really light me up. Chances with Wolves are these two guys and every week they put together a two-hour playlist. It’s always really good. It’s through space and time—old records. And I’m like, “Oh my god! I’ve never heard of this Senegalese Jazz guy from the 70s!”
I also love NTS radio. It’s an internet radio: NTS.com. It’s amazing. It’s DJs from around the world. Also, I listen to KPX a lot.