New Dangerfield are a string band consisting of Jake Blount, Tray Wellington, Nelson Williams and Kaia Kater, who co-wrote ‘Put No Walls Around Your Garden‘ with Billy Keane. It a song that mixes elements of “old timey” string band with folk and more modern Americana elements to produce a song that seems like a centuries old composition which has sprung magically from the ground. It’s good.
It’s a song with a timeless theme – wealth inequality and the greedy guarding of scarce resources, themes that are as relevant now as in any time of inflation, food insecurity, and profiteering. Says Kaia Kater: “I wrote ‘Put No Walls Around Your Garden’ with Billy Keane, a wonderful songwriter from the Berkshires, during a 2023 retreat at The House of Songs in the Ozark Mountains. We used the allegory of a farmer and their seasonal crop yield as a commentary on resource hoarding and climate change. I brought the song to the band and we arranged it for a stringband context, while also inserting a bridge/breakdown meant to illustrate the urgency of the message. Playing and singing the twin banjo and vocal melody makes this song so fitting for stringband music in a new context, and I find it’s a bit of an earworm!”
Very nice!