The Language of Birds: Natalie Spears and the Sound of Staying
Most people come to the Roaring Fork Valley to ski, spend, and leave. Natalie Spears came to build houses out of mud and straw, and stayed for the people. "The people here are what captured my heart and convinced me to stay," she told the Post Independent — a line that doubles as a decent summary of her entire body of work, which is fundamentally about attention: to a place, to migration patterns, to the language of birds.
Spears is a Colorado-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist — banjo, piano, guitar, and a high, clear voice — who landed in Carbondale through the natural-building movement, apprenticing on straw-bale homes, and never left. She's best known nationally for her duo with fiddling singer Lizzy Plotkin; their album Just Over the Ridge landed among Folk Alliance's top-ten charting records of its year and reached No. 7 on Billboard's bluegrass chart. But it's her solo work that has become the valley's own — a debut record that the Aspen Times framed explicitly as a celebration of the Roaring Fork Valley itself, its light and loss and weather.
This summer she's been touring a reimagined, string-quintet version of her album Hymn of Wild Things, a project built around the connection between birdsong and melody — the kind of concept that sounds precious on paper and turns out, live, to be quietly devastating. Spears is one of the marquee valley names on the bill at this weekend's Carbondale Mountain Fair (July 24–26 in Sopris Park), performing with the string quintet — a hometown set at the hometown festival, which for a Carbondale songwriter is roughly the equivalent of a homecoming game.
Here's why she matters to this scene specifically. A resort valley's music economy is easy to caricature: fly-in headliners, corporate festivals, ticket prices with a comma in them. What's harder to see, and more important, is the layer underneath — the working artists who live here year-round, play the farmers' market and TACAW and the fair, and give the place a musical identity that isn't just borrowed from whoever C3 booked this month. Spears is exactly that layer. She didn't come here to be discovered. She came here to live, and the songs are what living here sounds like.
That's the thing about a scene with real roots: its best local artist isn't a stepping stone to somewhere bigger. She's the reason the somewhere is worth staying in. If you only catch one homegrown set this summer, make it the string quintet in Sopris Park — and then go find Just Over the Ridge for the drive home.
Sources: Natalie Spears' debut solo album celebrates beauty of Roaring Fork Valley | AspenTimes.com; Roaring Fork Valley artist infuses 'lush sonic textures' with string quintet | PostIndependent.com; Mtn Fair Lineup — Carbondale Arts