Storyteller S.G. Goodman Embraces Her Southern Roots and Cosmic Beliefs

Real life has always been the inspiration behind the songs of S.G. Goodman, and some experiences are just more ridiculous than others. 

Last year, the Kentucky singer-songwriter had just finished some European dates and was flying back home from Spain, and for the first time found herself on an especially low-budget airline. There were people smoking cigarettes in the aisle. There was no Internet or even a place to charge a phone. And Goodman had just loaded up on coffee.

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“So there I was with all this energy, and as you know from being on the phone with me now, I can be a talker,” she says with a laugh. “I just started punishing this girl beside me. I wanted a little friend, and sooner or later she got her Kindle out and put her AirPods in.”

Goodman spent much of the flight making the best of it, and got out of her seat. “I was walking and going back and forth to the bathroom, and I just kept singing, like, ‘I’m talking shit and having fun…’” She wrote down the words and stepped into the lavatory to record it on her phone.

That experience and rough song sketch became the seed for “Satellite,” the dreamy first single and opening track from her new album, Planting By the Signs, released June 20. Set to a martial beat and shimmering electric guitar, it’s the first of 11 new songs of increasing feeling and sophistication, building on her history as an Americana artist creating music of real longing and social commentary.

As always, she sings in an alluring warble equally powerful and vulnerable, sharing experiences and images of her life in the rural South. Goodman is an introspective singer-songwriter who can crank things up or gently touch something deeper, from the psychedelic “I Can See the Devil” to the understated “Nature’s Child,” a duet with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, aka fellow Kentuckian Will Oldham.

“With this album, I’m taking it upon myself to realize that I’m a storyteller,” she explains. “I’m passing down old beliefs. I’m interrogating them. I’m asking other people too, and in every aspect of this record, I want to show different mediums of how stories are passed down. And in Southern culture, stories aren’t typically short, you know? So I allowed myself to be more heavy-handed in lyrics and in length and narrative. That was one way I would say my writing kind of got back to something that I felt like I did more when I was younger.”

Goodman is talking from her home just outside of Murray, Kentucky, a college town in the southwestern corner of the state, where she’s lived since she was 18. She attended Murray State University there, studied philosophy and creative writing, then found a place within the town’s local punk and indie rock scene, and settled in. Her house is surrounded by mostly nature and farmland, and it feels like home. “I might be here in 50 years,” she says.

With 2022’s Teeth Marks, Goodman and her music found a growing fanbase and ongoing critical acclaim. There was fascination with her being a queer artist in a rural community in the South, but her songs connected in a real way with a wide range of listeners, telling stories of heartbreak and injustice. 

She grew up in rural Hickman, Kentucky, as a farmer’s daughter whose childhood involved growing her own crop of sweet corn, hunting for deer, and getting behind the wheel of a truck by age 10. Just as crucial, she was raised on the traditional country icons George Jones, Patsy Cline, and Randy Travis, then discovered her own heroes in Stevie Nicks and Sheryl Crow, in hip-hop and indie rock.

The title Planting By the Signs is taken from an ancient practice known by many names: lunar gardening, agricultural astrology, planting by the moon, among them. The root of the belief is that because the moon affects water, it also affects moisture levels in the soil—and since anything (and anybody) composed of water is influenced by lunar cycles, people and plants alike respond to the moon and star placements in the cosmos.  It is a belief that goes back many centuries that took hold in Appalachia and the South. 

“For me, what was odd growing up in the rural South, my brother cuts his hair by the signs. I was weaned off of breastfeeding by the signs as a child,” she explains. “Old people would say, ‘Oh, don’t pull a tooth. Signs are in the head, you’ll bleed more.’ Or, ‘We need to plant plants that are growing underground,’ like your root vegetables and things like that.”

Once she landed on the ancient practice as a driving force for her third album, she studied the subject obsessively for months, so by the time she was writing the songs, they flowed out of her, without so much as an opened copy of the Old Farmers’ Almanac as a guide. For Goodman, the songwriting could be broken down into themes of planting, pruning, building, and harvesting.

“That was a really fun and interesting way to break down the album and to realize that the imagery and the themes within the songs on this album fit into that belief system,” she says.

Along the way, the most personal signs were many—moon-based and otherwise. First, there was grief, for the death of her dog Howard, a balding, diabetic, and beloved mutt. Then came the unexpected passing of Michael Harmon, an older friend and mentor back home in Murray. Harmon was an engineer and sometime musician, a writer and the kind of dude who built little houses for feral cats. Goodman heard the news of his death at age 69 while she was on tour in Los Angeles. 

One of her first calls was to her estranged friend Matt Rowan, previously Goodman’s longtime collaborator and guitarist. He’d been an important voice on her first two solo albums, but friction during an overlong period of touring erupted in mutual recriminations in 2021. Two years had passed since their falling out. 

Their reconciliation was a comfort at a time of mutual grief, and ultimately led to a renewal of their creative spark, and the new music that would follow. Rowan returned as a collaborator and co-produced Planting By the Signs. Had the two friends not reconciled, he would have been missed. 

“Matt and I have a very special chemistry for sure,” she says. “Matt is an actual savant musician, and I’m a hummer. So I can find what parts I want, and I can be very, very particular about them, but Matt can actually execute them.”

The true story of friendship, loss, and reconciliation is told through the song “Michael Told Me.” To a gentle swirling rhythm, Goodman sings, “Even with the pain between each other / I was reaching for my brother.” And with a voice growing soft and near-breaking, she goes on: “Michael told me we could handle it…Oh, and I’ve seen the light shining through.”

While Rowan is not part of Goodman’s touring band anymore, he’s back as a key creative force in the studio, she says. “The funny thing about me and Matt is that wasn’t the first time we’ve not been on speaking terms in our over-a-decade-long friendship. We are similar in ways and passionate people, and we can rub each other the wrong way for sure.

“I have full faith that Mike didn’t have to die for Matt and I to become friends again,” Goodman says. “But it was odd because I really sought Mike’s ear when it came to the trouble that Matt and I had experienced with each other. And his encouragement around that, it really came full circle. And now Matt is playing on that song.”

The music video for “Michael Told Me” was shot in the studio, simply presenting the players performing the track, direct and demystified. The same is true for “Fire Sign” and “Satellite,” sometimes intercut with surveillance footage of animals in the woods or with glowing eyes at night. The single exception is for “Snapping Turtle,” which captures something of the rural childhood that Goodman knew, with children innocent and close to the earth, idyllic and feral.

“Ooo, small town is where my mind gets stuck,” Goodman sings, as she tells a story spanning from teen to adulthood, considering the fate of her childhood friend she calls LeAnna. She was another girl whose dreams and potential were left unfulfilled. “Eighteen became a mother … god could have thought up a better way / To teach me just how small I am / To teach me the other side of luck.”

“Every line in it’s true,” says Goodman. “Everyone has probably had a friend, a family member, someone they knew who they saw such potential and saw the cycle of situation or circumstance just totally eat ’em. And unless you’re just a slug or something, you probably have had that experience in your life when you first really conceptualized the fact that you’re not in control of the hand that you were dealt, and you’re not in control of the hand that others were dealt. And that can be a very painful thing sometimes. And you might can not have justice in that for yourself or others. It’s a hard thing to carry.”

Her own life has evolved in surprising ways, even as she remains grounded in her Kentucky home, where Goodman still keeps a stuffed bobcat on top of her upright piano. Back when she was a teenager, the animal attacked while she was out deer hunting, and she had to shoot, much to her lingering regret. 

Even during days of her solo debut, Old Time Feeling, she found herself in new places and in unexpected company, as her music reached out further. Not that she was always aware of it. At one point, she began hearing from friends that the acclaimed movie director and screenwriter Paul Schrader had been sharing her music on social media. Goodman didn’t know who Schrader was, but she wrote him a thank you note. They became friends, and the musician soon saw her song “Space and Time” covered in Schrader’s film Master Gardener, and she appeared with Robert Levon Been on the song “Mercy of Man” in The Card Counter. But she still hasn’t seen Taxi Driver.

“I’m the most unworthy person to wind up being friends with Paul Schrader because I had no idea what he does that’s so prolific. Now I have come to understand that. I’ve watched some of his films, I’ve read about him, and of course, spent time with him,” says Goodman, who admits to generally being oblivious to fame. She hasn’t even owned a TV for most of her life.

“Funny thing about me is it is highly likely that I could be in a room with someone who’s insanely famous and have no idea who they are. I’m not somebody who you would want to have on your trivia team at a bar,” she adds. “That might be why I feel like for some reason I’m able to have actual relationships with people like that.”

One night, as Goodman was touring for Teeth Marks, Schrader invited Goodman to stop for dinner at Bruce Springsteen’s house in New Jersey. She’d heard of him.

Goodman brought her manager along, and they had spaghetti and meatballs on Springsteen’s porch with Schrader and the Boss. “He was wearing Hoka running shoes, some casual workout pants, a flannel shirt, and all of his jewelry. Unless you had known you were sitting by Bruce Springsteen, he could have been somebody’s uncle who had, like, a very good plumbing business,” she says with a laugh. “But in our conversation, he was everything that you would hope for, just so kind, so humble, and was just as interested in what you had to say as anything else.”

For her own music, Planting By the Signs represents her ongoing growth as an artist and writer. It took time to get it right, her weirdly inspired plane ride from Spain notwithstanding. It’s her first album in three years, reflecting her natural creative rhythm, not a viral marketing plan. 

“My record cycle process will probably be as chaotic as everything else in my brain,” she says. “I might finish a record next month. And it might not come out for another five years.”

She’s not concerned by that possibility, as she prepares for a North American and European tour that begins June 27 across the state in Lexington, Kentucky, with a return to Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry soon after. The next round of songs will come when they’re supposed to.

“I think every artist has to decide this—are you going to put out content in the way that this day and age asks for it, which is constantly,” she asks. “Or are you going to give yourself time to put out something that you really believe in?”

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