Courtney Hartman’s newest album, With You, invites listeners into a room of friends, inside a circle of care and generosity. The record is a full pendulum swing from Hartman’s 2021 release, Glade, an album she recorded mostly alone while living in a barn on the same Colorado property where she grew up. With You was written, funded and recorded with a wide community of friends and musical collaborators. The album was co-written with other mothers in the music industry and recorded with those who upheld Hartman through her own journey of becoming a mother.
The songs began in the quiet and isolation of a heavy season for Hartman. She and her husband were in the middle of gutting and rebuilding their small 1930s home in Eau Claire, WI, when they found out they were pregnant. “In the months that followed, a string of unexpected challenges arose,” she describes. “We experienced a peeling away in our life. My husband fell off a ladder and couldn’t walk for multiple months. He lost two jobs. I was dropped by my booking agent. We totaled our car.I had planned to make an album in the fall, but we ended up needing to survive off the money I’d saved to record it.”
During a writing retreat at Everwood Farm, Hartman felt a nudge to set aside the songs she was finishing to record and instead write through the journey of becoming a mother. “I was resistant,” she said. “It wasn’t something I wanted to write about or share publicly. Pregnancy was the most miraculous and wild experience of my life, but it felt vulnerable and uncomfortable to write about.” But she listened, laying down her plans for that initial album to continue writing. “I didn’t realize it until later, but writing about what was happening in my body gave my heart something to pay attention to other than the chaos of our life in that season.”
At eight months pregnant, with no working kitchen, Hartman would sing while washing dishes and tools in the bathtub, circumventing her wide belly to reach over the edge. “I’d sing-yell over the sound of the water to keep myself from spiraling,” she remembers, laughing. “Maybe it helped.” They finished up the essentials just a few days before their daughter arrived. And in the early hours of labor, Hartman wrote what became “Softening,” the song that begins and ends With You.
The summer after her daughter was born, as Hartman navigated the newness of motherhood and bouts of postpartum depression, she began making a list of mothers who had continued a life of creative work amidst caregiving. Her list spilled over the page and she began reaching out, inviting these women into the songs she had begun. “I can see now that I was looking for women a few steps ahead of me in the journey, to take my hand and show me that I would make it through.”
Sarah Siskind, Dawn Landes, Ana Egge, Tift Merritt, Kristin Andreassen and Emily Frantz Marlin of Watchhouse became Hartman’s co-writers alongside musical guests Rachel Sermanni, Ruth Ungar, Michaela Anne, Sarah Elstran, Liz Eldridge and Sarah Krueger. “It was clear what a wide net of mothers there were, present and past, to lean on and learn from,” said Hartman. “There were many others I watched from a distance — Allison Russell, Sara Watkins, Aoife O’Donavan, Abigail Washburn, Leslie Feist and Anaïs Mitchell — knowing that I could make it through because they had.”
With her album budget spent on groceries and bills, Hartman knew she would need financial help to record again. For the first time in her career, she turned to her community-at-large, through crowdfunding. “Asking for help like this was one of the hardest things I had ever done,” she said. “But 557 friends, family and fans came alongside me to help bring With You into being. I’ve never felt more humbled or more supported.”
That support allowed her to record With You with her musical community in Eau Claire. “I wanted to create this music with friends who had walked alongside my family, seen us on our lowest days, cooked us meals, pounded nails into our floorboards and brought light into our lives,” she said. Hartman gathered at Brian Joseph’s studio, hive, with her local musical companions Sean Carey and Ben Lester and her former bandmate Zoe Guigueno. They spent two weeks together, recording music during the day and sharing meals together in the studio meadow at night. A long list of musical guests joined in through both careful planning and some serious serendipity.
“The two records I listened to incessantly that year were Watchhouse’s duo album and Phil Cook’s All These Years,” said Hartman. Cook came through town to be with family and stopped into the studio early one day. He and Hartman sat in the control room improvising together and then recorded “Hindsight.” Later in the week, Watchhouse was playing a local festival and spent a few hours at the studio, singing together in the live room on a rainy summer morning. Together they tracked “Can You See,” a song Hartman had finished writing with Frantz Marlin a few months earlier. “Both of those sessions were done in a single room, eyes on each other, headphones off,” she remembers. “The songs came about with such ease.”
In its essence, With You is about the transformative power of care — the choice to stay beside each other even in seasons when the walking is labored and slow. As Hartman writes in the title track: Go easy now / learning to move again / see how the burden shifts / breathing alongside you / moving in rhythm with you. Hartman hopes this album provides a sense of companionship. “I want these songs to bring a lightness into someone’s day, to celebrate the often-invisible work of caring for one another,” she said. “And I want you, the listener, to feel seen.”
photos by Michelle Bennett
