Musician Abbie Morin knows full well what it takes to try to make it as a fulltime musician—a lot of part-time, maybe less than satisfying odd jobs. The bills, after all, must get paid. And so Morin, who is 27, has been a pizza delivery lady, wait person and house cleaner. All for the cause of making music.

Her latest project, Hammydown, released its debut EP Pizzaface this summer. It explores, not surprisingly perhaps, the emotional and physical tax of coming home every day from work with sore soles and still feel like a slacker. “I think we all feel this pressure that hopefully whatever fulfills us in life will also make us money, and I just think that we were all super set up for failure with that,” Morin says. “I think it’s rare that actually what you love tends to be enough to be comfy.” The conundrum is disheartening, but its ubiquity affords an opportunity to come together around it. “I think we all forget that everyone’s in the same boat.”

Hammydown may be a new presence, but Morin is no stranger to the New England music scene. Growing up in New Hampshire, she discovered a passion listening to records of Queen, The Beatles, and Nirvana with her father. For almost 13 years, Morin played acoustic guitar. It was her trusty partner through her start as a solo artist; during her almost in a self-titled band out of Burlington, Vermont; and during a four-month tour as an acoustic duo. Morin describes her sound during that time “folk, Americana-style.”

Abbie Morin of Hammydown. Photo Courtesy of Robert Fitzsimmons

After the tour, though, her sound began to change. “Once I returned from that trip, I found myself beachside in Long Beach Island, New Jersey at a family house,” Morin recalls. “I was sort of starting to feel really boxed in by my acoustic guitar in general. I couldn’t play a show without breaking a string, and I just was feeling a little tired of my wistful country love songs.”

So she experimented with her great-uncle’s Gretsch drum kit. “It was exactly the change in energy that I needed to start finding the new voice of what I was wanting to say, at this stage of my life.” she says. “I put down the acoustic and started writing from the drum kit and that’s when the Hammydown stuff started to emerge.” She bought an electric guitar—a Fender Jazzmaster—and moved to Northampton to join her best friend, Hannah Mohan, of And The Kids fame. There, she met bassist Josh Speers and drummer Jacob Burnstein. They began playing as Hammydown this past January.

Whereas Morin’s memories of New Hampshire and Vermont’s bucolic landscapes and lush nature informed her earlier folk music, Hammydown’s unadorned, unpretentious garage-pop “takes place right at the dishwasher or something.” Strenuous jobs, unearthly hours in an unfamiliar town provided Morin space for introspection and reflection on her goals. As she hunkered down in her apartment after work, exhausted, practicing on her electric guitar, she had the space to reflect on “letting it be okay to write about what most people find to maybe be mundane, or just writing about the everyday things in life. I used to kind of feel like I have to write about this huge event, or love, or loss, and this time I was just like this is just where I’m at right now.”

In Northampton, Morin found a community of people at a similar place in life. “New England is such a kindred-feeling place,” she says. “I’ve always felt like my community is around. The states I call home—I like to think my music kind of creates that kindred spirit, like ‘We’re all in this together.’” Hammydown’s music is purposely lighthearted to make it universally enjoyable, in appreciation of the kindred spirit. “As much as we want to get heavy, it’s important to me that it’s something you want to sing along to,” she says.

Abbie Morin, Hammydown. Photo Courtesy Brad Bahner

Despite the strain, there is a net positive outcome to all the work Morin has shouldered through. “There’s always an opportunity to make connections with someone,” she says. “I think I’ve learned that I can’t let my weariness and my exhaustion sometimes make me blind to the fact that even the customers that are coming in—there’s an opportunity to meet people and be close to people and to be continuing to just foster that community.”

Want to hear what Morin listens to for musical inspiration? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify channel to hear what’s on her playlist and on the playlists of other musicians we’ve featured.

Abbie Morin–musician, Hammydown
Northampton, Massachusetts
Website
Facebook
Bandcamp

Top image: Abbie Morin, Hammydown. Photo Credit Kayhl Cooper 2017

The post Abbie Morin: Working 9 to 5 And Then Some appeared first on Take Magazine.

You could almost set a timer —every 20 years or so, the Northampton-area music scene attracts national attention. Bands get signed, stories get written, hype builds. Then, like a lighthouse beam, the spotlight rotates away to the next town or sound. A couple of decades go by, and the whole process repeats: starting in the late 1960s with western Massachusetts acts like Arlo Guthrie, Clean Living, and Fat; continuing into the late ’80s and early ’90s with Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, and the Scud Mountain Boys; and moving all the way up to a crop of current groups that includes And the Kids, LuxDeluxe, and California X.

Yet as any music fan in the region knows, the local scene doesn’t rely on outside illumination to thrive. For more than 45 years, the sound of music in western Massachusetts—in Northampton, but also throughout the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires—has been abundant and varied. Rock ’n’ roll, blues, punk, and various indie rock sounds have all taken root, along with heavy metal, jazz, and plenty of folk. Bands have come and gone; venues have opened, closed, and burned down; and the scene has flourished through it all.

“I just always marvel at the richness of it, considering how small the area is,” says David Sokol, who was music editor at the Valley Advocate from 1977 to 1993.

Dave Sokol, photo by Izzy Berdan

Billboard magazine expressed a similar sentiment in a slightly condescending frontpage story in 1992 that described the area as “a picturesque, place-that-time-forgot farming community.” Yet despite a population less than a quarter of the 3.4 million people in greater Seattle—the aspirational baseline for music scenes since the city birthed the ’90s grunge explosion that gave us Nirvana and Pearl Jam—the four counties of western Massachusetts have for years had the essential ingredients of any successful music scene: a creative class of musicians; places for them to play; audiences who will go see them; and supportive local media, including radio station WRSI-FM and the Valley Advocate, that will play their records on the air and write about them.

Western Massachusetts is also an affordable place to live, with a youthful atmosphere that flows from the local colleges, most notably Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts. It’s also near the intersection of two interstate highways, which is helpful when it’s time to go on tour. Those attributes have made this area attractive to a continual flow of music-minded people, far more than there’s room to mention. Some of them got famous; more of them, then and now, play music simply because they love it and it’s fun.

“Northampton is an incredible place to emerge as an artist and to find that group of people who support what you do,” says folksinger Dar Williams, who moved to Northampton in 1992 and began building her career. So far it’s yielded 10 solo studio albums, including this year’s Emerald. Though she relocated to New York in 2000, she adds, “I would say it’s the reason I’m still doing what I’m doing.”

Ray Mason, photo by Izzy Berdan

The beginnings of the western Massachusetts scene date to the mid-1960s, when musicians like Holyoke native Ray Mason would play the local YMCA and slip an occasional original song into sets of covers of The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and The Rascals. The covers-are-king attitude started to fade when bands like the Rockin’ Ramrods from Boston and The Wildweeds from Connecticut came through playing their own songs, almost as if they were demonstrating that such a thing was possible for regular guys from New England.

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