ifitbeyourwill Podcast #168 • Trippers & Askers

Episode 168 — Jay Hammond brings Trippers & Askers to the show from Durham, North Carolina, ahead of his May 2026 album Tried to Do's — a record about grief, healing, and what it means to put things back together. Drawing from indie folk, jazz, and experimental textures, Hammond's sound resists easy categorization. We talk growing up in Jackson, Tennessee, finding his songwriting footing in his early twenties, and why music remains his most honest outlet. East Coast tour dates and a handful of UK shows are on the way.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Trippers and Askers 0:14

There is no breather.

colleyc 0:30

All right, people, welcome back. Another episode of If It Be Your Will Podcast coming to you. We are back recording, as you can tell by if you're hearing this. I'm going about it a bit slower these days, and I've decided to eliminate seasons, and it's just gonna be a number. This will be number 168, if you can believe that. And I have such a great guest today. I'm really excited to have him. And as I'm starting to reach back out to the music community, I'm getting some really great answers back. And this one I was really excited about Trippers and Askers. I have Jay Hammond here from North Carolina, Durham, North Carolina, who creates really quite awesome stuff that I've just kind of ran into. I got sent one of the singles off his record coming out trite to do's, which is coming out in May. And he is here to talk to us all about trippers and askers. And again, this is like experimentally, but also has a definite folk jazzy sense. I mean, it's definitely indie too. He has a great bandcamp page if you want to check that out as you're listening to this or after you listen to this. So, Jay, thanks so much for carving a little piece of time out for us to have this chat today.

Early Guitar Roots In Tennessee

Jay Hammond 1:58

Sure. Happy to be here. Thanks so much for the invitation. It's my pleasure.

colleyc 2:03

So, Jay, I like to rewind time. Maybe if you listen to a couple of these casts, I tend to like to ask this question first and just kind of set a foundation as to when did music come to you as you grew up? And like, could you give us a couple of those moments where you so it feels like yesterday, where music shifted in your life to becoming important and that it would always be a part of what you did and who you were? Sure, yeah. Thank you. I love that question. Just a small question.

Jay Hammond 2:40

Yeah, yeah, just a small, yeah, right, right. Well, it had a specificity to it. I mean, when you were talking, well, uh yeah, I I did think of a specific moment when you were talking, and you know, just a little bit of context. I grew up in West Tennessee. I grew up in a in a town, well, city, small city called Jackson, Tennessee, which is kind of the only city between Memphis and Nashville. And yeah, a very musical place. And I I uh I took up the guitar at age 12 because my dad had a guitar sitting around, and I was curious and started asking him questions about it. And, you know, he taught me, taught me a few chords and taught me what he knew, and and then lucky for me, once he had taught me what he knew was which was enough, but you know, not a few tunes. He he went and found he and my mother went and found me a great teacher named Charlie Baker, who Charlie toured with Carl Perkins, who wrote this wrote the song Blue Suede Choose. And you know, I I I got to sort of from a very early age get get you know tutelage from a really fantastic musician. I guess uh the the thing I was thinking of in terms of the second part of your question was yeah, I just in turn of you know, when did I kind of know that I was really obsessed with music and that it would be a part of my life? I remember just practicing guitar in in our house and and just I remember the kind of the first time I had that feeling of learning learning something new on the instrument and just kind of being obsessed with it's like I'm I'm not gonna move from this position until I get this right. You know. So yeah, I don't know. That feel like a yeah.

colleyc 4:44

It it's great when those memories still maintain, you know, like the purpose of all this because the struggle is gonna be there, right? Like, and I'm sure you've experienced struggle with music. Um, it's not an easy business, but the reward from it is just it's so priceless. It's like like of course I'm gonna do this, you know. And I'm just curious about your dad and him playing, like what what would he play like on his guitar that like who were the songs that you remember him playing that were like my dad's kicking ass here and I wanna do that? Like, were there any of those moments that you remember taking?

Jay Hammond 5:26

Oh, definitely. Yeah, I mean he was a classic rock, you know, guy. I mean, he he loved Neil Young. He he played the The Needle in the Damage Done was his the one that he kind of always went back to. Yeah, I mean, yeah, Don't Think Twice, you know, he was he liked Bob Dylan and you know, House of the Rising Sun, Dueling Banjos, you know, I don't know. He he he taught me, yeah, just kind of classics like that. But I mean, to be honest, we're I think we have two or three more on the list, and then once we finish the that's that's when he got taught me the lesson.

colleyc 6:06

Right. And Jay, do you remember your first songs? Like, do you remember your first attempts at writing a whole song, like from start to finish? The chords, the lyrics, like do you remember the that that experience in your life?

Jay Hammond 6:21

Yeah, I do, yeah. I mean, I remember sitting in my bedroom and kind of yeah, just jotting down lyrics and having chords. And uh, you know, I had a I had a really bad high school band that we were mostly a cover band, but I we I I had a few original songs that we played. And so yeah, I mean, those were those were the early days. It I would say that you know, I went in and out of being really interested in songwriting before I really settled on it as something that was pretty central because I was I was just really obsessed with the guitar. I was really into jazz and you know wanted to wanted to be a shredder, you know. But yeah, it was kind of in my early 20s that I started to get more serious about writing songs. Right, right.

colleyc 7:16

And did you find when you were like, how did what was your process of finding your voice or your style or your genre that you wanted to maybe start exploring further? Like, were there moments where you started to come into a sound that you were right comfortable with that it was like what was your process of actually flushing out what is J Hamming gonna, you know, what's my style? What am I gonna be like? Because I I asked you that because your style is so very distinct in a way that I have a hard time like saying it's this or that or this or that, right? Like it's such it's quite expansive in in in in style and stuff. So I'm just wondering if you had an idea when you started of what what it was. Like what what what did you want? What kind of sound did you want after you got past the thrasher phase?

Jay Hammond 8:08

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it yeah, it was I mean, it's an it it was an it was and still is in many ways, I think, a sort of constant, almost, I mean, literally existential question. It's like, who am I? What you know, and I think, yeah, I was I was heavy into the contemporary jazz world. I went to school for that, but then I I got more into writing songs, and my brother is also a musician, and we we started playing music together, and kind of through him, I started getting more into in the kind of arts, like indie rock world. And he was in a college that just had a lot of great indie rock coming through. So I got to see, I mean, like I got to see Thurston Moore and that phosphorescent, and I don't know, there were just a lot of uh dirty projectors, the the kind of aughts of kind of Brooklyn indie rock was really influential at that time. And I I was seeing people who were extremely, you know, impressive on their instruments, but doing things like I had never, it was just very different from the from the jazz world I'd been kind of immersed in for so long. But I think, and I I had a band with my brother, we played together a lot, and you know, I think when I started, when Trippers and Askers started taking shape was kind of 2008, 2009. I was just doing a lot of home recording, and there's a song actually on Bandcamp called Anna, that's it's it's like the her the really the first recording that I would call a trippers and askers recording. And I mean I made it on a you know a a MacBook in 2008 on Garage Band, you know, but the kind of like the odd meter finger style thing and layering like bluegrass like mandolin and kind of like traditional instruments that that sort of to me became like oh this is this is what I want my sound to be. Right, right.

How Trippers And Askers Evolved

colleyc 10:33

Kind of like building it as you're thinking of it, but and with the layers and stuff, I I have similar experiences with that too, because like just band camp garage band in on a Mac, it just opened doors for so many artists where finally you got to see layers, right? It wasn't like a rec a cassette record where you could do one thing at a time, or just transformed. And and I was listening to actually because I wanted to listen to your beginning stuff, and I I actually have it up here. So that was that came out in twenty two thousand nine, right? So you recorded 2008, came out 2009, May 24th, to be exact. Yeah, yeah. Have you uh have you found, and I guess this is a pretty obvious question, but has trippers and askers changed over time? So you're on the you're on the verge here of putting out, I think this is your fourth or fifth record that that that you're gonna be putting out into the world to try to do's. Has your sound evolved over time? And if so, like what what in your opinion have been the biggest shifts that you guys have gone through or you have gone through as a singer-songwriter?

Jay Hammond 11:54

Yeah. I mean, I think it was, you know, in those early days, it was kind of a home recording project, but also a band. I mean, we I had a band in New York around that time, and we would play out, you know, but it was I I basically got I got I went on a a pretty long, uh nearly decade-long sort of side like tangent. I wouldn't call it a tangent, but I in a way it was. I mean, I I went to grad school and I got really into academia and ended up moving down to to Durham at that time and was just had my head in books for a really long time. And yeah, there's a that that's a long, maybe a longer story. But I would say that coming at the other end of that when Trip Root, when I started sort of reviving the project, I was living in Durham and had was just surrounded by a totally not yeah, just a new scene. I had met a lot of people there, a lot of great musicians. And I I was sort of coming into being really embedded in that community. So yeah, that I mean, and all the records I've made since then have been really I mean, yeah, that they've they've been centered around that community in a way. Although this this last one, I'm kind of spending more and more time in in New York. And actually Greg Chubzik, who played bass on the very first Trippers and Askers shows in 2009 in Brooklyn, is he's on this record. He it's because we did some sessions in New York, and so it's kind of coming coming back around.

Nikki Giovanni And Tried To Do’s

colleyc 13:48

Yeah, yeah. And I love this too that you bring up your literary, you know, kind of journey that you've been through and what you brought to this record, this record that's coming out. Can you tell me about Nikki Giovanni, who seems to be one of your influences in in this record? And I love how it was described that it's it's like a it's like an album cycle or flow, right? It's not like song, song, song, song, song. It's like it it flows and ebbs, and I really feel like it was like it felt to me listening that it's kind of like a book in a way that you're fluidly going through the pages, and sure there might be chapters, but it's just a continuous kind of one song informing the next to the next to the next. Could you talk a little bit about the influence on this latest record and why what how she influenced you or how maybe maybe not influence, but how she inspired you to craft this record around the writings that you were reading?

Jay Hammond 15:01

Sure, yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, so Nikki Giovanni was a black revolutionary poet and musician who she just passed quite recently. So she's been on my mind. I would say, you know, if if uh anyone listening is new to Nikki Giovanni, I would say just start by YouTubing uh Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin. And there's an unbelievable long conversation that was aired in, I think, the the 1960s or the early 70s. So you can really kind of get a sense of of who she was and her mind. And and her her records are great too. She had a lot, she was a poet, but she released records and her her kind of commercial recordings were really amazing. But she, yeah, she used to she's credited with this line. I really don't think life's about the I could have been's. Um, I really think that life is about the I tried to do's. And it's actually not anything she ever published. She just said it a lot. And people people quote her as saying it. And when I decided to name the record after this, I was like, I gotta find out where she published this. And it turns out she didn't publish it. It's just something that she would say. And and she's quoted a lot as saying that. So yeah, I mean, I think uh, you know, this isn't a concept record. I didn't start thinking I'm gonna make a record that's inspired by Nikki Giovanni. Um as I was kind of doing the work of sequencing uh these songs, uh a thing that I realized was that, you know, I mean, there's a song called Tried to Do's where I'm real I'm literally just chanting that line that I that I just recited there. And that that's the that's a song that's gonna be one of the ones that's only out on Van Camp, but it is part of the record. It's a very yeah, core part, the title track, in fact. But, you know, yeah, I don't know. I think a thing that I realized was that every, you know, the the record is about grief and mourning and ways of grieving and and ways of healing. And and a thing that I noticed was like, oh, just about all of these songs are things I've tried to do. That's uh that's a way you could characterize what this song is kind of about. So yeah, and I mean I I think that you know, your question about the song cycle, you know, that's one way that it hangs together is through that theme of things I've tried to do. But another sort of the beginning and the end of the record, uh my hope is that, you know, in the days of CDs when albums would just repeat back over itself, my hope is that, you know, the the start of the record has an instrumental piece that we're calling New Churchyard, which is a a sort of a just a little instrumental moment that's based on my arrangement of old churchyard, which is how the record ends. So it has a cyclical kind of quality to it, where if it just swerved to repeat over and over, it would be more of a of a cycle and less of something linear.

Remembering As Relationship Repair

colleyc 18:26

Interesting. Interesting. There is something too that I read about remembering now, R.E.-membering of putting things that were broken back together. Where does this theme connect to you? I love this idea of remembering, like I just, you know, remembering, like remembering things to putting things back together. How did that theme come to you as a writer?

Jay Hammond 18:59

Yeah, well, so that's a song on the record that's called Remembering. And it's I mean, you know, speaking frankly, it's a couples therapy song, you know, it's a song about healing my relationship with my wife and my partner. And, you know, I think I something that I've thought about a lot with that song is that yeah, I mean, I think I think it's so important to sort of express and talk about what healing relationships means and how it can be done. And you know, I think that in a lot of ways, I mean, I l I I love romance and love songs, you know, and in many ways falling in love is the easy part, it's the fun part. And you know, the kind of I well, I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna sort of quote an idea from one of my students now, actually. So I my day job is I I I have the pleasure and privilege of teaching music at a university. And one of one of the things I get to do is advise students on their own album projects, kind of capstone projects that they're doing. And I have a student now who's working on a on a his name's Charlie Adorney. He's working on a series of songs that yeah, that deal with love in one way or another. And an idea that he and I have been talking about is just the ordinariness, the everydayness of a of love or a relationship, and how that's like 98% of what it is, you know, and and yeah, he the thing he talked about, he talks about in one of his songs is like sort of making that shift from trying to make things less ordinary to coming to love and kind of cherish the ordinary, the everyday. And I do think that's a really important aspect of has been for me of what it means to heal a relationship. And I and I think the the idea of remembering is like thinking about any relationship, not just a romantic or a love relationship, but any relationship kind of like a body, like a human body. And you know, it can be injured. And so what does it mean to kind of put that back together, you know, heal? So yeah, that's where that word comes. Yeah.

colleyc 21:38

I mean, I I I have such high regard for musicians that that open their hearts up to feelings that we all have but cannot express. And we find this solace in when we find songs that we can connect to that speak to us about uh feelings and emotions we Have that we just can't you know oftentimes we can't verbalize and I think that that's one of the great things about about musicians that we have you know that power of putting a melody and a series of words into human feelings, human emotion, uh human existence. And I think that that's where we need music. You know, I've always found songs that I can connect to on a personal level or have illustrated things that I felt or thought about like kind of in this jumbled kind of messy way. And then suddenly I felt I really admire musicians that can do that, and it's not an easy thing to put your heart on your sleeve and and toil with some of these things in a public kind of manner, right? Like it's I I always tell musicians that it takes it takes a certain personality to be able to do that because you're dealing with things that are very uncomfortable or but are so poignant, and I think that if you don't get it out, you know, your head's gonna pop off. It's a part of that process of being a musician of working through some of these emotions. Somebody told me that it's always much easier to write about struggles than it is to write about happy stuff, you know, because when you're happy you're just kind of in that frame of mind. And then when your heart's being ripped around or pushed from side to side, something happens where the the delivery becomes something that has to be a part of that process of so I admire that in in in what you put out here.

Jay Hammond 23:55

Yeah, it's it's really like a transformation. That's how I I take that idea from from Tignathan where you you take your suffering and you you you transform it. And there's many ways to do that. And uh music is the yeah to me it's the most effective and powerful way to do it, or one of the you know, it's uh it's a way that I turn to.

Tour Plans And Release Details

colleyc 24:18

Totally. Well that's great news for all the rest of us to get to listen to what you put out in the ether. So thank you for that. I guess as we kind of bring things to a close can we just touch on so so Try To Do's is coming out May 2026? Yeah. What are you looking forward to with the release? And is there anything you can share about to the listeners as to if you're gonna be doing any performances or other stuff coming down the pipe? Anything you wanna throw out there to us so that we can keep you in our minds as we move forward with life. Yeah.

Jay Hammond 24:57

Yeah, I mean we're I'm just about finished getting the the album release tour planned. So starting in Asheville, North Carolina, the day it comes out, and then there's a big release party in Durham on the 9th, and then going all the way up the east coast up to New York through the 17th. And then I'll be about a week after that. I've got a few dates in the UK that I I managed to to get those together because well I I did a tour of the UK last summer. But this time I'll be I was yeah, it it's always hard to find funding for these things. And the way the way that I the way that I found it this time was I I get to play guitar with my friend Joseph Ticosimo and his band, and he's got some uh a festival gig over there that's helping me kind of pay for the the trip out there. So I I managed to get a few dates in in later May. So that those aren't announced yet, but they'll be out soon.

colleyc 26:03

Well, I wish you all the best with this next record. Keep doing what you do, TJ. I'm really happy I you know got that email from your from your guys. It's I mean the two songs I've listened to great. I'm gonna go back into that bang campage of yours and poke around some more because there's a lot of great music in there. And all the best with the new release and the tour, and I'd love to have you back on anytime you want to come and continue this conversation. Great. Thank you so much, Chris. Awesome. Thanks, Jay.

Trippers and Askers 27:36

There is just raining.