Big Harp

Stefanie Drootin and Chris Senseney—the married parents of two who have been the core of the band Big Harp essentially since they met two decades ago—are music lifers. As a teenager in the San Fernando Valley, Drootin committed to the DIY scene early, joining bands as a bassist before she could drive and bailing on high school with only a year left in order to tour. At 17, she sold her Volvo for a van and has spent the last quarter-century circling the world with the likes of The Good Life, Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst, Azure Ray, She & Him, and M. Ward.

Though perhaps less romantic, Senseney’s story is one guided by sound, too. As a kid in Nebraska’s wild Sandhills, his mother would lift the needle from the turntable and explain the words they’d just heard; his father was an old-time picker who could build instruments from most anything. When college in Omaha didn’t go as planned, he fell in with the city’s legendary scene and became an in-demand player. He met Drootin on the road in 2007. A month later, they accidentally moved to California together, got married, had their first kid, and then started Big Harp. They were that couple playing hard-edged folk-rock in clubs, Senseney’s mom often babysitting during their sets. They are lifers, and lifers make it work.

Never mind, then, the decade that has passed since the 2015 release of Waveless, the third—and, it seemed from the outside, final—Big Harp record. Drootin was still touring hard. Senseney never stopped writing songs in their Los Angeles home; he simply stopped sharing the songs quite so much. They even started a slanted rock duo called Umm. Their return as Big Harp was an inevitability waiting on the right life and creative circumstances, where the spark of inspiration dovetailed with a chance to set aside some studio time.

Big Harp’s fourth album, Runs to Blue, does not feel overdue. With songs of wanderlust and loss, love for your children and love for your lover, accepting one’s increasing age while also lamenting that we can never be what we once were, Runs to Blue feels right on time, like visiting Drootin and Senseney at home one evening and hearing them laugh and cry their way through stories about their past and hopes for their future. Recorded totally live in the studio with only acoustic guitar, bass, and two voices who know one another like hand and glove, Runs to Blue is the simplest sounding Big Harp record. It is, however, the most emotionally complex, two lives long combined distilled into 10 frank and disarming songs.

In 2022, Senseney’s mom, Nicki, died unexpectedly. Mother and son had always been close, so close that she had toured with the band, not just a babysitter but a ball of energy in bright tennis shoes. Days before she passed, Senseney started writing a song he eventually called “Kill It, Kill It, Kill It,” a meditation on the fragile nature of love and joy and elation and sadness, how to name such things is to risk breaking the purity of the feeling. He finished it just after she died, then moved on to “I Ain’t Gonna Cry,” a tender tune about remembering the beautiful relationship he shared with his mother for so many decades rather than weep for its sudden loss. “I’m goin’ on, getting’ used to all kinds of weather,” he sings, his voice dipping deep into his baritone well before rising like Guy Clark delivering a bit of hard-won wisdom. “And I can tolerate a little rain.”

Not long after, Pierre de Reeder—the Rilo Kiley bassist who had recorded White Hat, Big Harp’s debut—hosted a loose backyard show. Senseney played a few songs de Reeder had never heard, and de Reeder wondered if the couple would like to come by his Highland Park studio, 64 Sound, and record them. Senseney had just lost his longtime job, so they could do it cheap and casual, a “layoff special.” There was no goal of making a record, but it steadily happened a few songs at a time, anyway. Drootin and Senseney put the songs down as a pair, her spry harmonies slipping beneath his oaken voice while their instruments curled around one another like a hug or a ripple of laughter.

While Senseney was writing during Big Harp’s unintentional hiatus, he started to care less about seeming smart, about the ability of his songs to impress some imagined audience. He simply wanted to express himself in this very familiar way. His mom’s death reinforced that desire. She’d raised him, after all, on classic country, so he wanted to make something she would have loved—songs that cut to the emotional quick, nothing flashy or trendy about them. That sense is the lifeblood of Runs to Blue, where Senseney expresses his closest feelings with a mix of clarity and wit that would have made John Prine grin.

“Hello Honey” is a totally charming staying-in-love song, a heart-in-the-mic transmission from two decades together. Senseney sings about his utter admiration for Drootin, but, when the chorus comes in, he checks in just to make sure she feels the same. Her harmonies are a reminder that this neuroticism is simply love at work, that we’ve all shared this anxiety no matter how strong the bond. “Colored Lights” stacks a series of highly specific snapshots from their relationship, like the pages of a photo album—Senseney first spotting Drootin in her pencil skirt and holding her bass, sharing a hotel room on tour with an infant, falling asleep on the couch these days while watching TV. The song is about the familiar but also the ineffable and unknowable, how we can never get every detail of any other human being. That’s why we stay in love. So imaginative, playful, and smart throughout all of Runs to Blue, Drootin’s bass offers a game of cat and mouse here, daring Senseney to keep track of the shifts and choices.

“Take It Easy on Me” is the perfect parental lament, voicing endless love for a kid who is going to change in ways that cannot be imagined and who might not always reciprocate those fond feelings. “I don’t blame you for the things that you say,” Senseney sings, the survivor in a sea of adolescent hormones. “You’re not wrong/We’re just living on different planes.” Of course, no picture of domestic life is complete without wondering about greener grass, about considering what has been left behind in settling down. One of the last songs written and recorded here, “I Got an Itch” is a winning snapshot of that sensation, of thinking about trading in “the Subaru for a 15-passenger van” and getting back to all-night drives for little rooms crowded with listeners.

Drootin and Senseney attribute Big Harp’s break, at least in part, to the feeling that it wasn’t fun anymore. Trying to make a living in the modern music industry had drained some of the goodness from the music itself. Drootin even turned down a few tours to start a successful Pilates studio. But Runs to Blue sounds blessedly unconcerned with trying to “make it,” with trying to be the next big anything, with trying to be anything other than who they are. It is a snapshot in the life of a couple whose relationship began with song and remains bound to it, no matter how long they stepped back. It sounds like folk music because it is folk music, exactly—an honest collection of experiences set to unadorned tunes you can sing and keep with you always, little reminders of the past to guide you into the unknown that’s up ahead.