MURRAY, Ky. – SG Goodman was looking for the perfect sentence. Sitting in her modern living room in this small college town and incessantly ignoring the howl of her balding terrier, Howard, the singer-songwriter flipped through a copy of “My People’s Waltz† the Pulitzer-nominated 1999 short story collection by her mentor and friend Dale Ray Phillips.
“All his sentences are so beautiful and frugal,” she said, but she couldn’t find what she had in mind. “He taught me that a really good way to understand what feelings you’re trying to capture is to read something like a short story or a novel and really pay attention to the moments or images that make your stomach turn.”
Goodman put those lessons to good use, especially on her sophomore album, “Teeth Marks,” due out Friday. She approaches her songs as if they were stories, with an emphasis on character and scene. Over a series of tender, twangy guitar notes on the title track of the LP, she sings: ‘When you left the bed, after you bit my arm. A small souvenir, where your teeth have left traces.’ Her voice is an intimate whisper, her phrasing is defined by her West Kentucky accent, and the image itself is both playful and painful. Love – especially unrequited love – leaves a physical impact, an idea she explores throughout the album.
With her keen eye for character and scene and her arresting voice—which sounds like it could have come from an age-old 78—Goodman, 33, is the latest in a wave of Kentucky artists drawing divine inspiration from their home state. Like Kelsey Waldon from Monkey’s Eyebrow, Joan Shelley from Louisville and Tyler Childers from Lawrence County, she embraces the freedom of making music far from Nashville and New York. Her songs don’t stray too far from home, though they do address issues and ideas much bigger than her hometown.
“It’s important to represent the South and the countryside with beauty and complexity,” Goodman said, adjusting her glasses and running her hand through the thick brown hair that has become her signature. “I don’t think anyone can do that who has just decided they like the style of music that typifies those places. You write from a region. You don’t write in it.”
Western Kentucky has left its mark on Goodman and her songs. Growing up in Hickman, right on the Mississippi River, she’s quick to point out that “Mark Twain actually called it ‘a pretty town, set on a pretty hill’.” It’s “mostly run down now,” she noted, “but it’s still charming and beautiful.” Her family were tenant farmers, responsible for thousands of acres of wheat, corn, and soybeans.Every summer, Goodman’s father planted sweet corn for each of his children, and they would be responsible for harvesting and selling the crop.After tithing at the local Baptist church, the profits go to buying school clothes.
Goodman left Hickman in 2007 to attend Murray State University, in this small town in the western corner of the state. After studying philosophy and creative writing, she has become a local historian with a deep knowledge of the region and its eccentric characters. She’ll take you on Route 641 to Puryear, Tennessee, a common route for buying beer in the nearest wet county. And along the way, she’ll point out where the Big Apple Café once stood, welcoming black and white customers even when other establishments in the area were still segregated.
“When the city wasn’t ready to move forward, these were places where change could happen,” she explained. “They received different kinds of people and visions, and they’ve been a life force for people in rural communities.”
She also takes you to Terrapin Station, a strip-store record store that serves as the hub of Murray’s lively scene, featuring merchandise from local bands and the occasional shows. This is where Goodman got her start as a musician, buying records and playing bills with local punk bands.
“I remember years ago she walked into the store with a goody bag of homemade CDs,” said Tim Peyton, one of the owners of Terrapin, who plays in the local post-punk band Quailbones. “She didn’t want to sell them. She wanted us to give them away to people. Just put it in someone’s bag. That’s how she introduced herself. Now she’s making a name for herself, but it’s amazing she’s doing it while staying here in Murray.”
However, to record “Teeth Marks”, Goodman had to leave town. She and her backing band of Murray musicians drove the eight hours to Athens, Georgia, to record with co-producer Drew Vandenberg at Chase Park Transduction Studios. “One of the things that she and I really bonded with was that we just loved so many different kinds of music,” Vandenberg said. “She didn’t just want to make a country record.”
The 11-track album encompasses country music, spartan post-punk and lonely Appalachian balladry, all tied together by Goodman’s indelible vocals. For the grim “You Were Someone I Loved,” in which Goodman sings unaccompanied, Vandenberg let her run the studio. “It was like one of those experiments where the act of observing something changes what it’s going to do,” he explained. “So I left the tape rolling and left her alone so she wouldn’t have to worry about this person staring at her through the glass.”
In Teeth Marks in particular, Goodman carefully selects her data to help you squirm better as she prays for a dead squirrel, or counts the 32 voicemail messages she’s received in one day, asking if she’s okay. Or when she reveals the object of her unrequited love on the reserve “Patron Saint of the Dollar Store”: “Know that I have found heaven in the arms of a woman.” It’s the most explicit description of the subject matter of her love songs, and it complicates the stories she tells even more: She knows that small towns and rural communities, even her beloved Murray, are often viewed as hostile to those who identify as queer.
“When I signed my record deal, I knew I wouldn’t keep my sexuality a secret,” she said, pausing to choose her words carefully. “The fact that I was queer was known to almost everyone in my life.” When journalists covering her 2020 album ‘Old Time Feeling’ described her as a queer singer-songwriter, it made her known to even more people, pulling her own story out of her control. “It was a disappointment,” she said, “because I felt like people might be happy if I put out an album, but I realized there will always be people who won’t stand behind me no matter what I do. Because I’m going to do it while I’m gay.”
As dedicated as she is to creating art in Murray and mapping the region through her music, Goodman spends less time in her hometown and more on the road. Pulling Howard onto her lap, she said, “I have a stronger sense of where I come from and my situation here, wherever I am in the world. I’m really not sure if I’ll ever be able to remove myself from this place.”
