Interviewin' with the Filthy Six's Nick Etwell

The Filthy Six is an Americana act whose music draws from the country, folk, and roots traditions in a mode that is more physical and less polished than the acoustic end of the contemporary Americana scene.

Nick Etwell is the primary songwriter and one of the lead voices. This conversation took place in 2012 around the band's touring activity.

The conversation

The exchange was by email with some follow-up by phone. Etwell's answers were substantive and specific, which is not always the case in correspondence interviews.

On the band's name: it is not self-consciously provocative. It is a reference to the band's context and the roughness of the environment in which the music was first made.

On the sound: country music understood broadly, meaning not the Nashville commercial format but the tradition that runs from the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers forward. The electric guitar in the band's music comes out of that tradition rather than from rock. The distortion is a roughening rather than an amplifying.

On songwriting: the songs are built around the story first and the music follows the story. The melodies are worked out after the lyrics are in a state that can hold them. This is not the standard approach in rock songwriting, where the chord sequence and groove typically come first. It is closer to the folk and country tradition.

The Filthy Six in context

Acts like the Filthy Six operate in a specific niche of the Americana ecosystem: bands with country and folk roots that play with enough physical energy to share bills with rock acts without losing the structural properties of the tradition they come from.

This niche is not commercially prominent but it is musically productive. Some of the more interesting Americana recordings of the late 2000s and early 2010s came from it.

Full interviews archive: Interviews. For more on the broader Americana landscape: American Roots Music Primer.