Olympia teen steeped in old-time music will launch indie-rock album at Traditions show

Old-time music wunderkind Maggie Teachout is now a singer-songwriter — and an indie rocker.

Teachout, also known as Maggie Neatherlin, celebrates her first solo disc, “Maybe I’m Still Just Peter,” with an album release party Friday at New Traditions.

“It’s very different from any of my old-time projects,” Teachout, 18, told The Olympian. “It’s more indie rock. At the same time, it’s important to me that I remember where I came from.

“You can definitely hear some old-time influences in my music if you listen for it,” said Teachout, who graduated from Olympia High School in 2018. “It’s something that’s always going to stay with me.”

That said, “very different” is an accurate description of her work on “Peter,” recorded on Olympia’s Green Monkey Records with drummer Charles Thompson and bassist Corey Mahler.

She’s traded in fiddle for guitar and set aside traditional tunes in favor of originals about growing up and making art, moving forward and looking back.

While some songs are fast and furious, “Waltz for My Daughter” pays homage to old time, with which Teachout and sister Ruby Neatherlin grew up. Ruby, 14 and a freshman at Olympia High School, plays bass and shares vocals on “Waltz.”

Teachout has grown up rooted in and surrounded by traditional music because of her parents, Emily Teachout, who organizes the Oly Old-Time Festival, and Erik Neatherlin.

Though this is her first solo album, Maggie Teachout has been performing and recording for about a decade with the Grizzle Grazzle Tune Snugglers; the Teachout-Neatherlin family band, Fiddlie-I-Ay; and others.

She’s called and played for dances, taught at the Oly Old-Time Festival and other traditional-music festivals, acted with Olympia Family Theater (in shows including 2016’s “Charlotte’s Web” and 2014’s “Orphan Train”) and performed both old-time and original tunes with guitarist Vince Brown at TEDxOlympia in 2015.

Well before all of that, she was playing old-time tunes. Banjo player and maker John Flory remembers Teachout playing at jams at his home near Littlerock before she was old enough to handle a full-size instrument, he told The Olympian.

Although Friday’s show is a celebration of Teachout’s new music, it will include a nod to the old.

She’ll perform a revamped version of an old protest song with some new lyrics, and she and her family and friends have made a crankie, a traditional scroll made to illustrate a song, to go along with it.

“We’re keeping that a little bit of a surprise,” she said, then added, “There’s some revolution in there. That’s always fun, and it’s needed right now.”

The combination of tradition and innovation fits for a musician who’s always looked for the new tunes within old time, and the combination of music and art is appropriate, too.

Beginning in the fall, Teachout will study visual art at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts. She envisions following that with a master’s degree in songwriting at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

In the meantime, she’s headed in a new direction not just musically but also geographically: On Saturday, she hits the road to study traditional music and its connection to oppression, a journey that will take her from Louisiana to Quebec and then to Europe.

Maggie Teachout

• What: The singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Olympia celebrates the release of her first solo album, an indie-rock effort called “Maybe I’m Still Just Peter.”
  
  
• When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 25
  
  
• Where: New Traditions Fair Trade Café, 300 Fifth Ave. SW, Olympia
  
  
• Tickets: $15 general admission, $10 for students and those with low incomes
  
  
• More information: 360-705-2819, traditionsfairtrade.com
  
  
• Buy: The album will be available at New Traditions and on Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp.