The singer-songwriter’s sophomore album transforms decades of travel, family history and lived experience into an intimate portrait of place, memory and connection.
For Jim Choukas-Bradley, songwriting has never been entirely separate from geography. Places carry histories, encounters and emotional residue, and on his sophomore album, Black Hills Ranger, those landscapes become almost as important as the people inhabiting them.
“The sound I was going for throughout the album was one in which the sense of time and place is very important, both in the music and the lyrics,” Choukas-Bradley explains. That philosophy extends from historical narratives like the title track to more intimate songs such as “Heaven Bound.”
Released August 7, Black Hills Ranger brings together Americana, folk and storytelling shaped by an unusually expansive life. Choukas-Bradley grew up in Connecticut, attended high school in Bangkok and New York, hitchhiked the Pacific Coast, rode freight trains and eventually traveled throughout all 50 states during a legal career spanning more than four decades.
Those experiences remain embedded in the record. The Dakotas in particular emerge as its geographical and emotional center: Choukas-Bradley first visited the Badlands and Black Hills at 16, while both of his grandfathers were born in South Dakota in 1889 and his maternal grandmother’s family homesteaded there during the same era.
Family is equally present. His son Jesse contributes vocals and guitar, his wife Melanie co-wrote “Lazuli,” and Jesse’s wife Morgan appears on background vocals. The result is an album that connects personal memory to a much larger fascination with American history, landscape and the stories of people whose lives rarely become part of the official record.
With Black Hills Ranger, Choukas-Bradley isn’t simply looking backward. He’s asking what traveling, listening and remaining curious about other people’s lives can still teach us.
We spoke with him about the album, recording in Nashville, his formative years hitchhiking and riding freight trains, balancing music with a 45-year legal career, and why family remains at the heart of his songwriting.
Black Hills Ranger draws from a lifetime of travel, history, and family experiences. How did these diverse influences come together to shape the specific sound and stories of this new album?
The sound I was going for throughout the album was one in which the sense of time and place is very important, both in the music and the lyrics, so that the feel of the song is of a piece. This is true both for the story songs – like Black Hills Ranger – and the love songs – like Heaven Bound. When I sing the songs, I believe in them and what they are saying and I am in them all the way. For example, with the title song, I of course was not part of the Gold Rush of 1875 to the Black Hills of Dakota Territory, but my travels through the US, including in many rural and remote areas, and my years of adventure and sometime scuffling helped me feel like I was the person in the song as I sang it. This is especially fun to do in the studio, where Bobby (Bobby Knepper, the Producer) would insist on multiple takes of the vocals to help me emphasize different emotions.
Your debut, Rising Tide, was recorded in part at Levon Helm’s legendary studio. How did that initial experience influence your approach to recording Black Hills Ranger in Nashville?
Recording at Levon Helm’s Studio (which he knew as The Barn) in Woodstock, NY was a dream come true for me. I was a devotee of The Band from the moment I first heard Tears of Rage coming out of the speakers on a record player down the hall. How did it happen that I came to play there? Like so many things in life, it turned out all I had to do was ask Justin Guip, the Engineer who ran the Studio, what I had to do to book time! My family and I had been to one of Levon’s early Midnight Rambles there as he recovered from throat cancer and began playing live shows. We got to see him perform not only with his daughter Amy Helm’s wonderful band Olabelle, but also with special guest Emmy Lou Harris!
I came home from that experience and wrote a tribute song to Levon, and wanted to record it. I had been recording my first album at Bias Studios in Northern Virginia, but thought, if I can, I need to record the Levon song with the band (Rhododendron Road) at the Levon Helm Studios. And so I got the number of the studio, called, and talked with Justin Guip, and realizing that I could actually afford studio time, we arranged recording dates.
My biggest takeaway was the sheer joy of recording in that atmosphere, where I had experienced Levon and Emmy Lou and the others play not twenty feet away from where my family and I sat. Now here I was sitting at the piano and standing at the microphone on that same stage. I felt profoundly the importance of staying simple, not overproduced, and letting each of the musicians play and each of the songs come to life organically.
In Nashville at The Waiting Room, Bobby Knepper’s Studio, we brought a relaxed but focused approach to each session, just like in Woodstock, and let the different parts of each song build over time. Jesse Choukas-Bradley, my son who lives in Nashville and who asked his friend Bobby if he would produce the album, have exquisite musical ears and are full of great ideas in the studio, so that the building of each song, while retaining organic simplicity, was an adventure in itself.
You’ve balanced a successful legal career for 45 years while maintaining a life in music. How do these two distinct paths inform each other, and do you find that your legal work ever finds its way into your songwriting?
I have had a deeply satisfying career as a lawyer, working in the energy and public finance worlds, working to keep energy supplies secure and energy costs affordable for millions of people in different parts of the US. I don’t write songs about my cases or projects. But my attitude toward that work and the people I am working for and working to help carries over into my music and my songwriting. I love and respect the people I work with and for and I am endlessly interested in the lives of people who work hard and raise families and love their friends and neighbors and love where they live. I feel like that infuses my music and songwriting.
An interesting phenomenon is that some of my most inspired songwriting and singing follows the conclusion of a particularly intense and difficult stretch of work on a case or project. I feel the relief of it being over, and successfully over, and the inner thoughts and emotions that have remained dormant, sometimes for a long time, suddenly can come out and want to find expression. Hold On Me and Heaven Bound are two such songs on this album.
Your wife, Melanie, contributed lyrics to the album, and your son, Jesse, provided vocals and guitar. What does it mean to you to have such a personal, family-centered collaboration at the heart of this project?
It means everything to me! Jesse not only plays a major part in the album as a singer and guitar player, but he was instrumental in the initiation of the project and in the production of the album. He played guitar and sang on Rising Tide as well, as part of Rhododendron Road. He is a fine musician and being with him in the studio and building the music together brings me joy, both while it is happening and for all time to come.
Writing Lazuli with Melanie was one of the highlights of our life together and of my own lifetime. We had travelled west for 2000 miles to visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota, and upon arriving at the entrance to the Park at the Painted Canyon, we heard a beautiful bird song not five feet away that we had never heard before. Melanie is a Naturalist and she knows her birds, but this was a new song to her. And try as we might, we could not spot the bird that was doing the singing for minutes, as close as it was! But then, we spotted this beautiful little bird, perched on the far side of a very thin young tree, blue and red, at the very edge of the Canyon – a Lazuli Bunting, a Western bird at the far eastern end of its range.
That inspired Melanie, who is also an often-published poet, to suggest that she could write lyrics to a new song about the bird and about us if I could contribute a tune. And it just so happened that I had a tune that I loved kicking around that was awaiting the inspiration of lyrics. Lazuli was the result.
In addition to Melanie and Jesse, Morgan Choukas-Bradley, Jesse’s wife, sings background vocals on the album. And Melanie’s and my daughter Sophie wrote a beautiful song to her new daughter which she sang and we recorded during the sessions, though it does not appear on the album.
I am a family man, through and through, and having my family involved in this project in such important, and lasting, ways means the world to me and has further enriched my life as one of its greatest blessings.
You spent time hitchhiking across the Pacific Coast and riding freight trains as a young man. Do you feel those formative adventures still echo in the music you write today?
There is no question those formative adventures of hitchhiking across the country and riding freight trains still echo in the music I write now, and they always will. Those were such iconic adventures of the time – highly unusual but not unique to me – hallowed in the history of the hobos of the Great Depression and the music of Woody Guthrie and the writings of Jack Kerouac.
I had flirted with the thought of running away from home as a teenager, unhappy in Westchester County, New York, and when I was on my own I realized I was on my own and could do what I wanted to do! And soon thereafter I started writing songs in earnest, influenced most heavily by the words and music of Bob Dylan and The Band. I loved it! The sense of freedom and adventure, of being out in the world in open spaces, open to my surroundings and every experience and to every new person I would meet, all seemingly so different and yet so familiar, was exhilarating and revelatory.
I remember the first time I hitchhiked south from Portland heading to the mecca of San Francisco with one of my friends at the college, and after a full day of hitching along Interstate 5 (it was illegal to actually hitchhike on the highway – you had to hitchhike from the on-ramps) we were only about 100 miles from Portland, the Sun was going down and we were on a ramp in a rural area with no traffic. My friend began to despair. What are we going to do? Should we go back? And I was in heaven, exhilarated, full of the wonder of the world around us and intoxicated by my realization of our freedom!
I loved it! In the words I used so often in those days, I yelled “Far Out!” “We are going to keep going, Joe; we will get a ride eventually and if we don’t we have our sleeping bags and we will sleep right here!” I realized, in the words of Ken Kesey, who I was reading about through Tom Wolfe instead of reading the Odyssey for my Humanities class, “You’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus!” So as you can see, these seminal experiences from my younger days are still with me.
The album title, Black Hills Ranger, evokes a sense of exploration and the American landscape. Is there a particular place or moment that feels like the anchor for this entire collection of songs?
Yes, it would be the Dakotas, the old Dakota Territory, the States of North and South Dakota, and in particular the Black Hills of South Dakota where the Gold Rush of 1875 took place and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota, one of the most beautiful yet little known places in the United States, where Melanie and I visited and wrote Lazuli together.
I had first been to the Badlands and the Black Hills on a cross country trip with my cousin when I was 16, and I fell in love with the West. Both of my grandfathers were born in South Dakota in 1889 – in Yankton on the Missouri River and in Aberdeen on the new cross country railroad line – one right before South Dakota became a state and one right after. Not only that, but my maternal grandmother’s family emigrated from Bavaria to homestead in Whitefish, South Dakota around the same time! She was born in northeastern Nebraska, after the family moved there in 1893. As I discovered during a business trip a few years ago, the house where they lived is still there and lived in and the land that they farmed is still being farmed.
You’ve performed in venues ranging from Vermont to Washington, D.C., and now Nashville. How does the setting—whether it’s the landscape or the specific musical history of a place—change how you share your stories with an audience?
I enjoy playing for myself and my loved ones, without regard to the audience, or whether there is an audience. Whenever I do play for an audience, I am aware of how they are responding to my songs and the music. If the audience wants to dance I will respond to their desires with more rousing tunes.
In Nashville for our upcoming album release show, I will be fully aware of the musical history of the city and of all of the great singers, players, and songwriters who have played, written, and recorded there. I have always been especially enamored of the Ryman. And since it began hosting its Festivals in Nashville each Fall, playing a set at one of the Americana Music Association Festival venues has been a goal of mine. Maybe in 2027!
Nashville has a way of leaving its mark on artists. In what ways do you feel your songwriting evolved by recording this album in the heart of Music City?
No question it has. The musicians who play on the album are all Nashville musicians. We recorded 16 songs in the sessions for the album, and we selected the 10 songs to include on it that we did because they evoke a mood and emotions that fit Nashville and its musical history and Tennessee overall.
Your music is often described as both deeply personal and distinctly American. How do you decide what parts of your own life are ready to be turned into a song, versus what stays private?
I would say mostly it just happens. I mostly write by inspiration, sitting at the piano or with my guitar, just playing, adlib-ing until it comes. I never know when it will, or if it will, and sometimes it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t I sometimes worry that it has flowed through me and it’s already gone!
But when it does come, it is a wonderful feeling. It may result in story songs, about real or imagined people from the past, or it may be deeply personal. I try not to edit or censure as I write, but rather to be true to what I am hearing inside out. Now, the editing or censuring may come when I decide what to record or, having recorded a song, what to include on an album!
With the release of Black Hills Ranger, what do you hope listeners discover about the American landscape and spirit through these songs that they might not have considered before?
Like all of these, that is a great question! I am very taken with the quality of these inquiries and the curiosity, and perception, they show! I hope listeners will find their interest in all of America, including rural, remote and out of the way places in all of the States, kindled by the songs and the overall experience of listening to the album, and in all of American history, including parts that are long forgotten.
I hope listeners will want to explore, and listen, and talk to each other, including to people they might not ordinarily talk to. We all have so much to learn from each other, and there is so much joy in that learning!
