Rito Seco Records

SAM Quarterly | Spring Music Issue, 2026

The Songs She Left Behind
Selah and Elara Vance on folk music, found poetry, and the eleven years
between them

by Deanna Marsh

The Appalachian Collection at Belk Library occupies the fourth floor of a building that smells of old paper and institutional carpet, and Selah Vance moves through it the way some people move through their own kitchens — without looking, without hesitating, reaching for things before she has consciously decided to reach. She has worked here, in one capacity or another, for the better part of fifteen years. She knows where everything is.

Her stepsister Elara is forty minutes late. When she arrives, slightly breathless, still unwinding a scarf, she does not apologize. Selah does not appear to have expected her to.

“Sorry I’m late,” Selah says, not looking up from the folder she is reordering. Elara drops into the chair across from me and grins. “She’s been saying that for me since I was six.”

This, it turns out, is a reasonable introduction to the dynamic between the two women at the center of Kat’s Sundog, whose debut album, Snakeweed Season, releases this month on Rito Seco Records. The album adapts fifteen poems from a collection by the Colorado poet Kat Couch — a writer neither woman has met in person, whose manuscript arrived in their world through a guitarist named Jonah Briggs and changed the direction of what the band was going to be.

We talk for three hours. Selah makes tea. Elara drinks most of it.

You’ve described the band differently in different contexts. In press materials it’s a folk quartet. In conversations I’ve read, you’ve called it a production group, a concept, a family business. What is it, actually?
Selah: All of those things, depending on the day. I think what it actually is, is four people who found a project larger than any of us expected and have been catching up to it ever since.
Elara: It’s a band. (to Selah) It’s a band.
Selah: It’s a band.

You two have known each other since Elara was born. But you didn’t grow up in the same house.
Selah: No. Elara was in Harlan County with her mother. I was here in Boone with ours — with Dad. We had summers, holidays. Phone calls when we were old enough for phone calls.
Elara: I think I was nine before I understood what a stepsister actually was. Before that, I just thought Selah was someone who knew everything about music and lived in a place with a lot of records. Which was accurate.
Selah: (dry) The bar was low.
Elara: The bar was not low. I thought you were extraordinary. I still think you’re extraordinary. You’re just also annoying.

Was music always the connective tissue between you?
Elara: It was the only language we had in common, really. My family in Harlan — my grandfather Dillard, my mom’s people — they all played. Music was just the air. And Selah had this whole other relationship with it, the archive side of it, the history. When I was twelve or thirteen and starting to get serious about the fiddle, she was already the person I wanted to talk to. Not because she played — though she did — but because she knew why things sounded the way they sounded.
Selah: I remember the first time she played something for me over the phone. She was maybe fourteen. She’d worked out a version of Old Joe Clark in a tuning she’d found by accident, and she just set the phone up by the fiddle. (pause) I didn’t say anything for a while.
Elara: She said, “Do that again.”
Selah: I said, “Do that again.”
Elara: And I knew she meant it as a compliment. I’d learned to read her by then.

The album — let’s talk about how it actually came to exist. Jonah Briggs found the manuscript in Austin.
Selah: He sent it to me first, actually. Before he showed it to Elara. He thought I would know the context — the landscape, the poetry tradition, whether it was the real thing.

Was it?
Selah: (without hesitation) Yes. I read the first section in one sitting, at this table, at about two in the morning. There’s a poem called “The KISS Principle” that functions as a kind of preface to the whole collection, and the last image — whispering the thunder to sleep — I knew that…idiom.
Elara: She called me at two-thirty.
Selah: I didn’t think about the time.
Elara: She never thinks about the time. But I was awake. I’m always awake at two-thirty. And she read me the poem. Didn’t explain it. And I started hearing something underneath it immediately. Not a melody exactly. More like a key. Like the song that was already
inside it. It became “Keepin’ It Simple”.

How do you describe the process of adapting a poem into a song?
Elara: For me it’s less like translation and more like — you know how some light comes through a window at a certain angle and you can suddenly see all the dust that’s been in the room the whole time? The poem is the window. The song is the dust. It was already there.
You just changed the angle.
Selah: That’s very poetic for someone who’s supposed to be the practical one.
Elara: I contain multitudes.
Selah: For me the process was more architectural. Elara would bring a song in a rough form and I’d listen for what it needed structurally — where the drone should sit, whether the melody was fighting the text or following it. A lot of Kat Couch’s poems have a natural modal quality, a flatted seventh or a suspended resolution, that fits the dulcimer’s tuning almost without adjustment. It was uncanny, honestly. Like the poems had been written for this instrumentation without knowing it.

The album has a wider range than most debut folk records. Dell Rodgers, Rafael Santos, a Bakersfield Sound track with an uncredited vocalist. Was that always the plan?
Elara: No. (laughs) The plan, to the extent we had one, was a folk album. What happened was Jonah. Jonah is constitutionally incapable of hearing a song without hearing what else it could be.
Selah: He’s a production group waiting to happen. Well, he’s a producer.
Elara: Which is either a gift or a —
Selah: It’s a gift. Mostly.

There’s some tension in that “mostly.”
Selah: (long pause) I came to this project because of the source material. These poems have an affinity with a very specific tradition — the deep archive of Appalachian music, the modal tunings, the Child Ballads. That’s the water I swim in. And Jonah is right that the poems have more range than that, and the record we made reflects that range, and it’s a better record for it. I believe that.

But?
Selah: But I’m already thinking about what the second album looks like. Whether we’ll have the same conversation again. Jonah has given me his word, and I believe his word, that we go traditional next time. Full stop. I’ll hold him to it.
Elara: She absolutely will.

The album opens with your voice, Elara, and closes with Jonah’s. But Selah, you carry two of the most emotionally significant songs — “Sugar Beets” and “Magpies”. How did those casting decisions get made?
Elara: Selfishly or honestly?
Honestly.
Elara: Selfishly is honestly— I wrote those songs. My voice was on the demo. I had… feelings about it.
Selah: She had feelings.
Elara: I had significant feelings. And then I heard Selah sing “Sugar Beets” in rehearsal and I — (stops)

Selah: She cried.
Elara: I did not cry. I took a minute.
Selah: She left the room for fifteen minutes.
Elara: I needed air. (beat) The point is that she was right for it in a way I wasn’t, and I could hear that, and it was —
Selah: Hard.
Elara: It was hard. And also completely correct. The song needed someone who was holding the memory at a distance. Selah holds things at a distance the way archivists do — carefully, with both hands, fully aware of the weight. My version would have been — I’d have been inside it. Too close.
Selah: Your version was beautiful.
Elara: It was too close.
Selah: It was beautiful and too close.

And Magpies?
Selah: That one I asked for. (pause) There’s a counting rhyme in the original poem — one for sorrow, two for joy, and so on — and it ends at seven with the number sealed. It’s unspoken. Elara’s version kept the seal. Mine opens it. For reasons of my own.

Do you want to say what the reason was?
Selah: (considers, then) Seven years is a long time to be with someone. And a long time to figure out, slowly, that compatible isn’t the same as right.

A silence settles over the table. Elara reaches across and refills Selah’s tea without being asked.

The poet, Kat Couch — you’ve corresponded but not met. What do you know about her?
Elara: Him. Kat is a pen name. It’s — it’s a long story involving a cat and a Cornish literary figure, and I don’t want to get it wrong, so I’ll just say: the name fits. The poems fit the name.
Selah: What I know is that the poems were written in the early hours of the morning, over fourteen months, on a high desert mesa in southern Colorado. That the landscape in them is real and closely observed — I’ve compared the plants, the birds, the geology, all of it, against ours. Different and strangely the same. The poem about counting magpies, there’s someone who cuts their hair next to the water tank and leaves the clippings on the ground. Nobody makes that stuff up.
Elara: The thing I know is that when Jonah contacted him for permission to use the poems, the permission came back the same day. No conditions, no negotiation, no request for approval over the arrangements. Just — yes, and thank you. That told me everything I needed to know about whether we were doing the right thing.

What question do you most want to ask him, if you ever meet?
Elara: (immediately) What happened at the end. The poem “Until They Come For Me” that became “Santero” — the last one in the collection — there’s a “you” in it that the song skips over. Someone the speaker is
addressing all the way through, whose face is sketched as a flock of nighthawks. I want to know if the person is real and if they know.
Selah: I’d want to know what the mesa sounds like at four in the morning. Is it quiet? Is it full of sound?

Why? Why do you want to know?
Selah: Because the poems are full of sound. And I’ve wondered whether that comes from the silence… or because — because we need to fill it.

After the interview, Elara retrieves her fiddle from the car and plays something in the archive — a modal tune she learned from her grandfather, adapted almost beyond recognition by four years of working in these rooms with her sister. Selah sits at the table and listens with her eyes open. When it ends she says nothing for a moment.
“Again,” she says.
Elara plays it again.

Kat’s Sundog’s debut album Snakeweed Season is released this month on Rito Seco Records. The poetry collection of the same name by Kat Couch is slated for publication in August 2026.

Photographs by Will Hereford, taken at Belk Library, Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina.