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“I kind of hate it when people explain songs,” Weezy Ford says. Luckily, the 10 songs on her new album, In the Movement, don’t need it. They seem to careen through space, and the Corbett singer’s voice, full of almost avian trills and curlicues, reinforces the impression that she’s soaring through the arrangements. The black-and-white cover photo shows the singer-songwriter dancing ecstatically in the woods as the sun streams down through the trees. There’s a very specific feeling here, and it eludes explanation.
Ford was born near Asheville, N.C., into a family of artists. Her father, Hobey, is an acclaimed puppeteer, and her mother, Sue, is a marimba virtuoso. Her sister Sallie is a singer-songwriter, known for fronting the Portland-area retro-rock band Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside, which was voted Willamette Week’s Best New Band in 2010.
“We were homeschooled, and my mom was a music teacher, so we would sing together on car rides all the time as a family,” Ford says.
Sallie made the move to Portland first, and Weezy followed not long after. “I actually got on her tour van, that’s how I got out here,” Ford says. “Asheville is kind of a kindred city to Portland. They’re both artistic, liberal cities in the middle of conservative states that have cool music and beer scenes and beautiful outdoors.”
Ford released her debut EP, Bobbypin Graveyard, in 2016, followed by her debut full-length, Sugarcane, in 2019. She and Sallie released their first album together, a country album as The Barbaras, in late 2022; Weezy’s partner, Mark Robertson, who records much of her music, mixed and provided backing vocals.
“We definitely grew up listening to a lot of classic country, like Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn and Hank Williams,” she says. “Sallie had this idea of wanting to make country music, and so we had one song that we co-wrote together at first, and then it sort of evolved from there.”
While The Barbaras are country-forward, Ford’s solo work leans more toward the guitar music of the mid-20th century, including ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll, vintage surf music, and the ‘60s French pop subgenre known as yé-yé, after which Ford titled a track on Sugarcane.
One unique quality that brought some early attention to Weezy Ford shows was her tap-dancing skills, which infused both visual and rhythmic interest into her performances. You won’t hear the click of Ford’s heels on In the Movement, but she still seems to dance through these songs. The album is just slightly over half an hour long, and each song barrels into the next.
Ford describes the album’s subject matter as “movement and loss and love songs to friends and mushroom hunting.” “Chanterelle,” which Ford describes as having a “secret agent” feeling, is an ode to the edible fungus of the same name—and to a hobby she’s had since she was a girl.
“My uncle introduced me first to [mushroom hunting] in the Appalachian Mountains where we grew up, and I’ve done it more intensely starting during the pandemic,” she says. “We live in the Columbia Gorge actually, so we have mushrooms on our land and we will cook them or make them into medicine.”
The album’s catchiest song may be “Talkin bout that Wind,” whose glam-rock stomp makes it sound almost like a countrified version of T. Rex’s “Hot Love.” It’s a love letter to her friend Bob Reynolds, who long ago made a cryptic prophecy that one day she would be “talking about that wind.”
“I ended up moving to Corbett, which is the ‘Home of the East Wind,’ so it definitely became true,” Ford says.
More earthbound is “Angel,” a “lullaby” to a friend who suffered a bad breakup during the pandemic. The songs were written over a long period of time, from 2018 through the worst years of COVID, and Ford and Robertson recorded it just after the end of lockdown at the home studio on their property.
Ford will support the release of the new album with a show at the Showdown supported by Chris King and the Gutterballs. Jeff Munger, formerly of the Sound Outside, has joined her band on guitar; James Owen Greenan, who played pedal steel on The Barbaras’ record and has performed in Oregon country bands Fronjentress and The Cedar Shakes, will play slide guitar.
“We’re gonna play with the smoke machine and the cool lights,” Ford says. “It’s gonna be a fun time.”
SEE IT: Weezy Ford plays at The Showdown, 1195 SE Powell Blvd., showdownpdx.com. 8 pm Thursday, May 2. $10 in advance, $15 day of show.