Kasey Rausch returns with Guitar in Hand

Coda Bar & Grill is empty, give or take the bartender. It’s a frigid Tuesday afternoon, and Kasey Rausch and I have just sat down on stools and stripped off our top layers of protection against the vengeful cold. Rausch props an elbow on the bar and rests her cheek in her hand. She has pulled the brown waves of her hair into a tidy ponytail, making her wide eyes more prominent. Her gaze, in the stagnant silence of the unoccupied bar, is almost unnerving.

We’re here to discuss Rausch’s excellent new album, the bluegrass-heavy Guitar in Hand — her first since 2007’s Live How You Love. It arrives this week, not far ahead of her 40th birthday. When I point out that seven years seems a long stretch for a songwriter to go between releases, the corners of her lips curl up in a cautious smile.

It is a long time, she agrees. But there was a good reason. After Live How You Love, Rausch decided to leave the music industry. She had been trying to make a go of it full time for years, since her 2004 debut (Born Near the Waters), and she didn’t feel that any of it was working.

“I got burned out in the first round, doing music full time, because I was doing everything wrong,” Rausch tells me. “I was accepting every gig that came my way because I was so grateful that the gigs were coming my way. I wasn’t being selective about it. My kids were young then, too, so it was a lot of late nights and early mornings, and I just found myself not really being the person that I wanted to be because I was just so burned out and tired all the time. That’s what initiated the break from music. I got a full-time job [at a health-food store] in ’08, and music just wasn’t in my life, really.”

Not in her life just then but still in her blood. Rausch’s great-grandparents on both sides were musicians, she says, and she eventually felt her craft calling again. In 2011, four years after walking away from her guitar, Rausch quit the day job.

“I realized I couldn’t not do music,” she says. “I finally just took the leap, and I went through the Artist INC program [at cultural-advocacy nonprofit ArtsKC], and that really turned my music career around. It gave me the skills to treat this like a business, which I was hesitant to do for so long because I felt like the words ‘business’ and ‘music’ were opposites.”

But understanding how to weave together those parts of her career, Rausch says, has solidified her belief that her path in life is paved with songs. And this time around, she’s prepared.

“I feel really good and really excited about things,” she says. “I’ve signed a deal with [local roots label] MudStomp Records, so for the first time, I really feel like there’s a lot of support in putting an album out. I feel like I have a team now. And, also, my kids are older — I’ve got a junior and a senior in high school right now, and my daughter will graduate in May. The way I’m coping with that — because it’s kind of difficult for me to think about — is that it also opens up doors as far as being able to travel and get on the road.”

Guitar in Hand didn’t happen overnight. The recording process began in March, she says, around the same time that she began co-hosting the Sunday-morning radio program River Trade Radio on KKFI 90.1 with fellow roots artist Mikal Shapiro (who is also on Guitar), and there were plenty of bumps in the road.

“This album took a lot longer to get made than was originally planned,” Rausch says. “There were a lot of delays, and with each delay, I just had to remind myself to take a breath and trust that everything that needs to happen is going to happen in its own time.”

Her patience paid off. One of the rescheduled studio sessions happened to coincide with a visit from Chad Graves — of the Springfield, Missouri, bluegrass band the HillBenders — whom Rausch regards as “one of the 10 best dobro players in the nation.” He added his name to the long list of accomplished folk musicians whom Rausch called on for Guitar in Hand, joining fiddler Betse Ellis, bassist Chris DeVictor and guitarist Chad Brothers. Those artists and a handful of others appear with Rausch at Knuckleheads Saloon Friday for her album-release show.

With that kind of backing (and the songs themselves), Guitar in Hand puts Rausch at the front of the local folk scene. The arrangements are both elaborate and elemental; if the swooning fiddle and dobro on “Sweet Missouri” don’t inspire some love for your home state, nothing will. And Rausch’s voice settles easily around spirited bluegrass (“Moonshiner’s Dream”) and twangy country (“My Piney Wood Home”), showing the influence of both Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris as well as a new maturity. Hers is a voice you trust to tell the truth, a voice you can hear singing lullabies, a shield that protects against the darkness.

It’s a long way from working retail to an album like Guitar in Hand. Rausch knows that.

“One of my biggest driving factors is to be an example for my kids,” Rausch says. “I don’t want them to end up working some crap job just because they think they’re stuck in that place. I want them to see, in action, that you can do what you want in life and you can follow your dreams, as long as you’re smart about it, and as long as you surround yourself with good people and you work hard. That’s my biggest motivator right now.”