Rising acts perform at the Folk Alliance International Conference

The TV crew is here, so Louis Meyers puts on a smile.

He’s a little busy for this latest last-minute interview. It’s just a week before the 26th Annual Folk Alliance International Conference and Winter Music Camp gets under way, and Meyers, FAI’s executive director, is shoring up the details at FAI headquarters.

Headquarters is the Folk Store, at 509 Delaware — a small River Market music shop whose bright-green walls are lined with dozens of stringed instruments: guitars, banjos, the odd ukulele or dobro. Near the door, show posters and fliers for music lessons compete for space on a community billboard. Meyers leans against a file cabinet and waits for the camera operator to set up.

Meyers, one of South by Southwest’s four founders, has been the FAI conference director since July 2005. This year’s event marks his final term with the organization. After that, Meyers says, he’s retiring. It’ll be up to the next FAI executive director, whose appointment will come this summer, to program the four years left on Kansas City’s contract. The organization is putting on this and future conferences downtown, at Crown Center.

This year, that means 300 artists booked for showcase performances over four nights, February 19–22. Each subscribes to some form of folk music, but the subgenres are as varied as spices in a cabinet: Grammy nominee and banjo prodigy Sarah Jarosz plays a set Thursday night at the same time that New York’s Gangstagrass, in another room, mashes up bluegrass and hip-hop. The next evening, two stages go to Canadian and European imports.

But the point is neither diversity for its own sake nor sheer talent bulk. For Meyers, the conference — and a definition of modern folk — is simpler.

“Folk music is music that can be shared,” he says. “Folk music has always been about sharing — songs that people can play together, songs that people can sing together. What I love about folk music is that it always represents the present. It has a historical value — it comes out of tradition — but people sing about their world right now, good or bad. Folk music has always been that way. That’s why it’s so different to everybody.”

Among those representing the present locally are the five up-and-coming acts we’re spotlighting here: the local faces of contemporary folk. Each is excited to play the conference. Beyond that, the commonalities and contrasts aren’t necessarily what you’d expect. Each does it his or her way. “We need people who are going to move the music forward,” Meyers says. These artists are doing just that.

KATY GUILLEN AND THE GIRLS

Katy Guillen never really meant to start a band. But now, looking back a little, the 28-year-old sees that this is where she was always headed. She grew up surrounded by music, with a musician mother who played records by Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bonnie Raitt. Guillen, in fact, recalls the exact moment her career began.

“I was 12 or 13, and I was just playing around on a guitar in a guitar store, and this lady just came up to me. She told me about a jam that her band hosted at Blayney’s [now the Union]. My dad took me, and even though I couldn’t get in — they were really strict about the age restriction — I knew I wanted to do it.”

With her father as a chaperone, young Guillen began plugging herself into blues jams around the city, at Harling’s and the now-closed Grand Emporium. She gradually mastered the guitar, and she built a network of connections with local players.

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“I got a feel for what it meant to play music with people, and the blues made it really easy to do that,” Guillen says. “It’s easy to just pick up and start jamming with someone. Those years were invaluable.”

Fast-forward a decade and a half, and Guillen is making use of everything she has learned. In January, her band — Katy Guillen and the Girls, with bassist Claire Adams and drummer Stephanie Williams — traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to compete in the 30th Annual International Blues Challenge. Of the 255 acts vying for the prize, Katy Guillen and the Girls — the only all-female band — placed fourth.

“The final was at the historical Orpheum Theatre,” Guillen says. “I mean, they filmed part of Walk the Line there. Getting to that point, that was by far the biggest stage we’ve ever played on and the biggest crowd we’ve ever played for. And the sound inside the theater was unlike anything we’ve ever played. It was kind of a landmark moment for us.”

Not bad for a band that has logged just a year and a half together, with only a three-song EP to its name. …And Then There Were Three doesn’t push past the 15-minute mark, but it explodes with feral rawness. If Katy Guillen and the Girls were an animal on your street, you’d double-bolt your door at night.

Guillen herself is nothing but tame. She apologizes for rambling, for sounding awkward. She doesn’t ramble much, and she’s not all that awkward. She’s just one of those artists more comfortable onstage, roaring into a microphone, than telling someone in a midtown coffee shop where her talent comes from and where her music is going. I ask her about the state of folk, and she looks around the room, perhaps hoping to find an answer hanging on the menu.

“When I think of folk … it’s a pretty overarching genre,” she says. “I still think of it as a pretty traditional singer-songwriter style, one of America’s simplest forms of music, but the most acceptable and, I think, one of the most rooted forms. I feel like I play folk music naturally, when I’m at home, just playing my guitar or my banjo. I relate to it.”

A little more than a year ago, Guillen quit her day job to focus entirely on music. This, she says, has been her best decision.

“I’ve never been at the stage in my life where I’ve had this much control over my career and my time,” she says. “I get to do what I love to do on pretty much a daily basis, which is play music with a lot of different people.”

A Katy Guillen and the Girls record is in the works. The band has plenty of material, and demand for its time is only growing

“Really, we’re just going to keep moving forward,” she says. “The only plan that I’ve ever had for us is just to keep playing shows.”

Katy Guillen and the Girls play at 10:15 p.m. Wednesday, February 19, on the Pershing West Stage.

CONNOR LEIMER

In person, Connor Leimer comes across as your average high school student. He’s tall and lanky, with a fresh face and a wide, easy smile. He trusts easily. His tender 17-year-old heart has yet to be split open by life.

That’s fortunate — at least for the rest of us — because we wouldn’t have his excellent debut EP, Like It’s June, if not for that ingenuous, youthful spirit.

Leimer, a Blue Valley North High School junior, has been writing songs for the guitar since seventh grade, but he composed most of the EP’s five tracks last summer. Leimer was part of the Grammy Museum’s 2013 Music Revolution Project, a four-week summer school of sorts for teens interested in developing their craft. There, Leimer met fellow artists Hank Wiedel, Blair Bryant, Haley Ryan and Brandon Thomas, all of whom appear on June.

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The record was recorded at the local Weights and Measures Soundlab. As its title suggests, Like It’s June is an easy, windows-rolled-down collection. Yet it’s also surprisingly mature, with a sound somewhere between the sunny catchiness of Jack Johnson and the rawness of Jake Bugg. And that’s what Leimer wanted.

“Before this program [the Grammy Music Revolution], I was just a guy writing acoustic songs in my room,” Leimer says. “But I love doing this. I feel like I’ve been doing it forever.”

Leimer is one of FAI’s youngest conference performers, but he has ready opinions about folk, rattling off a long list of artists he says fit the category. On his short honor roll: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; John Mayer; and local Americana band She’s a Keeper. The common denominator for him is the songwriting itself.

“I’m primarily a songwriter, so I really get into that,” he says. “The lyrics are really important to me. It’s natural. That’s what I like about it. You have a memory of that particular moment in time, and you can play it back for your kids 30 years later. It kind of becomes a little bit of history.”

Connor Leimer plays at 9:20 p.m. Wednesday, February 19, on the Roanoke Stage.

SKY SMEED

Two hours southwest of KC, in Chanute, Kansas, singer-songwriter Sky Smeed makes his home in an old train depot he restored. That is, when he’s not on the road — which is often.

“When I was 19, I moved out to Massachusetts, and that’s when I started writing songs,” he says. “But I really wanted a place I could create on my own and have a home base to start playing music full time. It made sense to center myself.”

To get there, he returned to his hometown. Now 31, Smeed has been back in Chanute for six years, and his most recent album, 2012’s Mill River, feels like a testament to his roots. Having given himself plenty of time and space, on the beautiful, expressive Mill River, to finesse his songwriting, he sounds like he has finally figured it out. The record’s 13 tracks stretch out like a cat in the sun, unhurried and easy to like.

“It’s just me playing in my friend’s barn, which he converted into a studio, about 20 minutes away from me, in rural Kansas,” he says. “That’s where I recorded. I just sat down and played like it was any other show, like if I was in your living room.”

Mill River sounds more like Smeed falling into your living room after a long stretch of gigs, kicking off his boots and merrily raising a glass to you before telling you all the lessons he learned on the road. That’s how the record unfolds: one story after another, good times and bad. Because for Smeed, whose heroes include Gram Parsons and Guy Clark, the story is the thing.

“Maybe because I’ve always heard those kinds of songs,” Smeed says. “I grew up with that kind of stuff. They feel like they’re part of my life.”

For Smeed, folk is the breadcrumb trail you follow from those stories back to their origins: “When I think of folk music, I immediately think of somebody with a guitar and a voice, you know?

“But that’s not what it is anymore,” he adds. “I can hear those songs through the years, like anybody, I guess. A line can take me back to a certain place in time. Everything just crosses lines. I don’t mind that.”

Sky Smeed plays at 10:20 p.m. Wednesday, February 19, on the Roanoke Stage.

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THE ELECTRIC LUNGS

The Electric Lungs might be the loudest band booked for the conference. After all, the long-acquainted foursome didn’t exactly start with the gentle strumming of an acoustic guitar.

Before becoming the Electric Lungs, Tripp Kirby, Marc Bollinger and Eric Jones were in a group together called Action Figure — what Kirby calls a “straightforward pop-punk band.” It came apart, but the musicians reunited in May 2012, when Kirby set about “trying something different.”

That difference turned out to be keyboard whiz kid Jason Ulanet, who was ready to plug in. The result so far: last March’s Simplified and Civilized, a debut that goes off like a bomb in a mailbox. No one’s ears are safe from Kirby’s unholy scream-singing or Ulanet’s temperamental, grimy organ.

Simplified and Civilized isn’t a record that’s easy to file. “Punk” still seems like the best box to check. But there’s no keeping the Electric Lungs from the FAI’s big folk party.

“If you listen to a few of the songs, they do have that kind of three chords and a melody and a story at the root of them,” Kirby says. “There are definitely songs that have that kind of storytelling tradition. We all listen to a little bit of everything. That’s one of those things that we definitely pull from, just not as obviously as some other things sometimes.”

Sitting at a booth at the Brick, Kirby is the opposite of the gnarly, frustrated figure he sounds like on record. He’s polite, even a little reserved. He looks freshly shaved, and there’s not a single hair out of place in his slicked-back coif. And he’s right about how his new band tugs at some old roots: Kirby was a co-founder of the local rockabilly outfit Them Damned Young Livers. Lured by a friend who loved country, Kirby says his tenure with that project forever altered the way he approached music.

“My songwriting really changed from that point on,” he says. “I started focusing more on the melody and the lyrics than on my cool guitar riffs or whatever. I think that was a big turning point.”

Fittingly, Kirby has a highly inclusive take on folk. “I think all music is technically folk music,” he says. “It’s something where you just connect with people lyrically, mainly by telling your story and hoping they relate to it. I think it’s something very visceral and very organic, and I think there are different ways of doing that, probably as many different ways as you can think of.”

The Electric Lungs play at 11 p.m. Wednesday, February 19, on the Shawnee Stage.

VICTOR & PENNY

There is no shortage of amiable, acoustic coupled-up teams in the folk world. Jeff Freling and Erin McGrane, who perform as Victor & Penny, know that. But many fewer such duos train a guitar, a ukulele and two voices on music of an exceptionally niche vintage.

“We didn’t think people would actually be interested in this kind of odd little 1920s and ’30s jazz project on ukulele and guitar,” McGrane says with a laugh. “That’s not a formula that people go, ‘Oh, yeah, this one’s gonna shoot you straight to the top, kid.'”

Freling and McGrane are not married, but they’ve been a musical duo for about as long as they’ve been together as a couple (since 2008). Both are in their 40s, and McGrane — who has a background in film, theater and commercial modeling — is a bright, bubbly sylph, one of those enviable women unlikely ever to look old. Freling, dressed in a fuzzy mustard-yellow sweater and a woven fedora when we meet, gives off a likable Jason Bateman charm.

Charm is Victor & Penny’s stock in trade. There is no difference between the people they are onstage and in real life. Since November 2010, the two have been collaborating on a self-invented subgenre they call “antique pop.”

“We started talking about what music we could do together, and he was listening to a lot of the early guitarists, Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, and I’d been singing music from the ’30s and ’40s for many years, and so we had this overlap,” McGrane says. “We found that we had a real genuine love for all these old songs. We try to dig for ones that aren’t that well-known.”

“That was what was appealing to us right off the bat, doing some of the more obscure stuff,” Freling says.

McGrane continues: “The more we got into it, the farther back we started going. We play anything from the turn of the century to the ’50s, really — we move around a bit. There’s a rich Kansas City tradition of jazz and pop from that era, too, so we come by that honestly.”

In 2012, they released their third album, Side by Side, stocking it with eight oldies and one retro-sounding original. It puts very bygone-sounding jams — “Slow Poke,” “Pork and Beans,” “The Sheik of Araby” — on a jolly, jangly carousel ride, with results as nostalgic as they are refreshing.

“Hardly any of these songs were written for the ukulele,” McGrane says. “Jeff takes all the guitar chords and translates them for me to ukulele, so that we can still get these great-sounding jazz chords, except on a four-stringed instrument that really isn’t designed to sound like that. I’m essentially playing rhythm guitar with a ukulele. It’s part of what makes us sound the way we sound.”

And if decoding older music for contemporary recitation isn’t folk, what else would be?

“Folk has a much broader definition today than it used to, and — and this is why I think we fit in it — I think we’re now going back to a simpler form of getting the music across to people,” Freling says. “It’s music in pure form, I think, and that can be jazz and bluegrass and pop music.”

“It hearkens back to tradition,” McGrane adds. “It’s us adding to that tradition. It’s what oral storytellers do, and what we’re trying to do is look back and see where we came from and decide what we can add to it today. And I think that’s where folk music is right now.”

Victor & Penny play at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, February 19, on the Washington Park Place 1 Stage, and at 7 p.m. Saturday, February 22, on the Pershing West Stage.