Conversation: Robin Holcomb, Sam Amidon, Alynda Segarra with Ann Powers

If music is a garden, songs form its root system. From this fundamental unit springs symphonies, improvisational journeys, remixes, and many other reworkings. Songs connect within historical periods to tell the stories of their time, and across time to carry forward musical ideas and emotional truths. Yet there is no one real definition of “song,” no set structure or limit on what its communicative miracles can manifest. In this panel, three remarkable song creators discuss how they find songs both within themselves and from throughout music’s vast landscape. Robin Holcomb‘s work carries the spirit of folk into new spaces, her singular voice and restless vision connecting folk to jazz and classical traditions. Sam Amidon is a master of “reworking” — expanding the meanings of both folk and pop songs in radical new arrangements — and a songwriter whose own work seems to exist beyond time. As the leader of the loose collective Hurray for the Riff Raff, Alynda Segarra has journeyed beyond their roots in blues and folk into theater, Latin music, electronic sounds, and more. This conversation reveals what working within song forms — and challenging or reinventing them — means to them.