With the release of their second duo album Circle and Square, Eric Brace and Thomm Jutz pay tribute to the creative bent in human beings. With Simple Motions, their first album together after the loss of their friend and musical partner Peter Cooper, the pair demonstrated the unique dynamics they continue to enjoy, highlighting their instrumental and vocal harmonies, as well as the stellar songwriting that fans and peers have come to expect.
At their Station Inn album release show, they wove in songs from their previous recordings, opening with the title track from Simple Motions, while highlighting the new songs and often, the stories behind them. One of the dominant threads running through the new album is the creative life. Jutz noted that, while touring, they make time to visit the local art museums.
Brace and Jutz have maintained what they call an interesting writing relationship. They each have projects of their own. Jutz, who toured for years with Nanci Griffith, teaches songwriting at Belmont University. Brace left a journalism career in Washington, D.C., to pursue music in Nashville. He has been a part of the band Last Train Home and, with his wife Mary Ann Werner, runs the East Nashville label Red Beet Records. While both write with others, they write and play together, says Jutz, when they have a project in mind or when they tour. This project grew out of a recent tour of Holland. Jutz says, “We were in a beautiful part of the Hague, with all these art museums around us.” During free time, they visited the museums and thought, “Why not write about painters and their paintings?”
“Beckmann in the Frame” was influenced not only by viewing the work of Max Beckmann, who fled Nazi Germany for Amsterdam during the war, but also by the artist’s own writing about his work “On My Painting,” crafting the lyrics from the Beckmann’s words. The lyrics conjure images from the paintings—“Red sky in the middle of the day/ red sky in the blackest night.”
Another song inspired by their European tour, “10 to 4” considers the separation of time zones while away:
Now it’s morning, walking out my door
You’re still in your bed
Ten ‘til ten here, there it’s ten to four
And that’s hard to wrap you head around sometimes
The lyrics paint the scene in the Netherlands, interjecting the recurring image of a “woman on a bicycle/ passing on the street/ smiling as she goes. . . .on her way back home.” Jutz has noted that all songs, perhaps even all writing, at heart is about “time and home.”
Another art-inspired track “Diego in Detroit” explores not so much the images on the 27-paneled mural for which Diego Rivera was commissioned in the 1930s as the experiences of Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, spending time in Detroit, far from the familiarity of home in Mexico.
While much of the art referenced on the album is found in museums around the world, “Thomas Hart Benton,” a co-write by Jutz and Shawn Camp, tells the surprising story of the mural in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. The painting called The Sources of Country Music was the last completed by the famed muralist before his sudden death.
The lyrics describe details in the painting with the same kind of viewer’s eye that W.H. Auden brought to Bruegel’s The Fall of Icarus in his poem “Musee des Beaux Art,” the visual evoking the musical: A steam boat whistle and a speeding train, square dancing to “hoedown hillbilly fiddlers,” singing cowboys, and mountain women with a dulcimer. With its deceptively lilting melody, the song ends with the final chilling image of Benton, lying dead in his studio, holding his paintbrush, the mural still unsigned.
The songs for this album, Brace says, represents “every possible permutation of co-writing style. I’ll send him some music. He’s got some words. He’ll send me a couple and say, ‘Do you have some music?’ or we’ll noodle together in the same room for a while. The way we come up with things is fun because every song was different. But I had a little pattern and Thomm said, ‘Circle and Square. I’ve been working on this lyric.’”
As they wrote about art, Brace says, they soon realized they were writing about creation: “It became obvious we were writing that as a reaction to the outside world, which is so full of destruction. He recalled an interview in which Jeff Tweedy said, “I just need to create because there’s so much destruction. It’s the antithesis of destruction.”
Jutz also recalled a quote from the painter Gerard Richter, who said, “Art is the highest form of hope.” Describing himself as “someone who’s not politically active, but who has political and social concerns,” he says he sometimes wonders if he should be doing more to help the outside world, but realizes “as long as I’m creating something, I can feel like my day is of some use.”
The pair have also made the visual art a part of every album. Their friend Julie Sola created a print for their Simple Motions album, and for this new album, Brace’s wife Mary Ann Werner created the art work.
What is often most engaging in the songwriting of Brace and Jutz is their attention to detail when recounting small historical moments that might have passed by unnoticed. The song “Fontana Dam” began with some details about the TVA project that resulted in flooding four North Carolina towns during WWII. The song is told from the perspective of a grown child whose parents’ graves had been moved to higher ground to which a promised access road was never completed.
Brace described Peter Cooper as being especially good at giving a song wide resonance by getting really specific. Aware of the impact of details both accurate and specific, Brace and Jutz researched the names of trees common to the area—all alliterative: “the beech and the balsam fir. . . the whispering birch and the buckeye.”
Similar attention to detail fleshes out “On the Back of a Horse,” an account of the Pack Horse Library Project created by the WPA during the Roosevelt Administration. Through the initiative, women on horseback delivered books to isolated Appalachian areas, particularly in Kentucky. It has only recently been heralded in historical fiction by Kim Richardson (The Bookwoman of Troublesome Creek) and Jojo Moyes (Giver of Stars). Brace and Jutz describe the scope of the women’s mission: “On the back of a horse the universe, a world on every page.”
Despite his absence, Peter Cooper still maintains a presence in the collaboration between Brace and Jutz. “Life of the Mind” essentially represents their last collaboration as a trio. Jutz and Cooper, who often visited legendary songwriter Tom T. Hall, gathered notes from Hall’s wit and wisdom, as well as some of his short poems, turning them into lyrics, which they completed in late 2021 and put them aside for a while. Jutz found them again after Cooper’s death and asked Brace to write the music for their “last three-way co-write.”
Cooper’s absence is never more apparent that on “Nothing Hurts,” written by Brace. The song begins with a list of No mores: sorry, joy, ballgames with the boy, music, words, ending with “No more nothing; nothing hurts.” The song resonates with anyone who has experienced the absence left behind by an unexpected loss—the phone message you just can’t rase, an old shirt kept as a memento—but it is especially poignant for those who knew Cooper and his relationship with Brace and Jutz.
They sing of a “brand new song [with] “an okay chorus / but it needs you singing along. . . .”
Brace admits, “I wasn’t expecting to write a song for or about Peter. In a way, it’s kind of inevitable; he sort of came out in other songs.” He noted that in their first duo record after Cooper’s death, he infused the songs, “even though most of them were created after his death.” In some of those songs, Jutz opted for the high harmony, usually sung by Cooper. At other times, they deliberately stuck with two-part harmony, leaving those spaces open.
He added that while they added a third harmony part on Circle and Square, they deliberately did that sparsely, “because with Peter, everything was three-part harmony, with all of us singing. That was our sound, and now without him, that would be weird.” At the tribute show to honor Cooper’s life, they invited Andrea Zonn to sing the high harmony on “Wait a Minute,” he said, “because she was a good friend, and it’s almost like somebody has to be initiated into the club to take that part.
Jutz said that, whether framed as Peter’s absence or presence in their music, he is reminded that cooper often quoted Emmylou Harris, who said that sometimes when two people sing together, they create a third voice: “In our case, it’s sort of reverse. We were a trio now we’re a duo, but you can still hear that missing voice. Whichever way you want to frame it, either it’s missing or it’s still there.”
Brace says that in a collaborative relationship, “there is always some unknown factor someone else will bring in.” When Jutz sent him the lyrics for “Life of the Mind,” Brace said he the music came to him easily. He sent back a kind of three-quarter-time waltz, and Jutz responded, “I never would have done that.” They continue to surprise each other, Brace says.
Part of their success may come from wisdom Brace says he got from Jutz, something he shares with aspiring songwriters: The most important thing in songwriting is to pay attention. He adds, “You can learn how to think about things and how to look at things, but they are going to be changing every day, every minute. It’s like a river that always changes.”
“Wide Open,” the track that closes the album, was inspired by Cowboy Jack Clement’s philosophy. He left his studio door open—literally and metaphorically–always looking for new ideas that might walk through, regardless of commercial potential. The song opens with “the good old cowboy passing,” a direct reference to Clement. In tribute, they sing:
We made a vow then there that day
That we would always find a way
for music seldom heard
For the sacred written word
To find a door wide open—
And the promise ain’t been broken.
Jutz recalled the words of James Hillman, who said, “Only beauty can save the world.” From start to finish, on Circle and Square, Brace and Jutz leave the door open and keep their eyes open to the creative potential, leaving their listeners with genuine hope to counteract destruction.