The Story of ‘Cardinals at the Window,’ the All-Star Benefit Album That Raised $340,000 for Western North Carolina
The compilation, which came together in the week following Hurricane Helene, is a testament to the strength of community among musicians.
The singer-songwriter Rosali Middleman was about to drive through Asheville when Hurricane Helene hit in late September. She lives about 200 miles away, near Durham, and was headed west to perform at Gonerfest in Memphis, a route that would ordinarily take her along the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. Amid torrential rain, she saw signs that roads were closed for standing water, and diverted north, not yet realizing the devastation that the storm was already beginning to inflict. “I had no idea how bad it was, but the drive was pretty intense,” she remembered about a month later. “When I finally stopped and saw what was going on, it was a moment of pure shock and disbelief and sadness. I don’t think anybody knew how bad it would be.”
Like a lot of musicians, Rosali has strong feelings about Asheville and its surrounding expanse of mountains dotted by small towns. Her partner’s family lives in the area. She wrote the gracefully rollicking songs of her 2021 album No Medium while staying not too far away. She’s played some great shows in Asheville, and has a lot of friends there.
Speaking from my own life as a touring musician: Everyone does. Not so secretly, the region is one of the great wellsprings of American music, whether your taste is for old-time string band music or raggedly contemporary indie rock. It’s one of the cities you can’t wait to get to on tour, where you can be sure of a few friendly faces in the audience. After the gig, you might wander across the street into a roadside dive where the greatest country band you’ve ever heard is playing for a packed house of beer-drunk two-steppers until the wee hours of Thursday morning—as my band and I did when we passed through town just a week and a half before Helene prompted that same bar to refashion itself as a de facto first aid and food distribution center.
So musicians were ready to pitch in when disaster struck. Rosali had barely arrived for her show in Memphis when she got a text from David Walker, a lifelong North Carolinian who runs the music blog New Commute, about a compilation that he and some friends were organizing to raise money for relief and mutual aid organizations in the area. “I said ‘yes’ immediately, even before I knew what I was going to contribute,” she told me. She ended up giving two tracks to the compilation, which was eventually titled Cardinals at the Window: a prickly instrumental from her solo-guitar side project Edsel Axle and an exultant rock ballad called “Hey Heron,” which was already slated to come out as a single when disaster struck. She thought about canceling the release: It’s a song about a river, with lyrics that luxuriate in images of rushing water, which suddenly felt wrong. Putting it on the compilation offered a powerful way to recontextualize the song while also contributing something to people in need.
Rosali was one of more than 100 acts who offered up tracks, a dazzling roster that includes local North Carolinians like Sluice, Sarah Louise, and Magic Tuber String Band alongside heavy hitters like Phish, Waxahatchee, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and the War on Drugs. (And—like MJ Lenderman, Helado Negro, Angel Olsen, and Indigo de Souza—quite a few artists who are both.) By any metric, Cardinals at the Window has been a runaway success. The whole thing, all 10 hours of it, was finished in about a week and went up for sale on Bandcamp just 11 days after Helene struck the region. By necessity, it’s a ragtag assembly of genres and fidelities: jam-band live recordings, delicate singer-songwriter demos, ambient instrumental excursions, a triumphant rap song from NC underground legends Little Brother. They come together like an old patchwork quilt, the tattered edges only adding to the sense of homey familiarity.
A ton of people bought it, enough to land the comp in the top 10 of Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart the week of its release. When I spoke with Walker on October 28, Cardinals at the Window had raised $340,000 to donate to organizations like Community Foundation of Western North Carolina and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. He and his fellow organizers were particularly touched by the average donation: $20, twice the posted asking price.
Walker and the prolific North Carolina fiddler and songwriter Libby Rodenbough—whose ghostly lo-fi meditation “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” appears as track 67 of Cardinals at the Window—conceived of the compilation in Helene’s immediate aftermath. Initially, they figured it would be a relatively humble affair. They spread the word about contributing through their community of local musicians, hoping they might make a few thousand dollars to donate. “Probably just to counter the feeling of hopelessness and gloom, I was like, Man, there’s gotta be some way to activate my little network of people I know,” Walker said.
Then they brought on Grayson Haver Currin, a North Carolina-native music journalist now based in Denver, who called me in a rare window of cell service while he made his way on a 1,200-mile, five-and-a-half week hike across Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail. “I don’t really know how to do things on a limited scale,” he told me with a laugh. “I guess this is going for a walk.”
Currin is old friends with the War on Drugs guys, who refer to him only half-facetiously as their first fan from outside of their Philadelphia hometown. He saw them play in Denver on September 28, the day after Helene hit Asheville, and the same day that Rosali played Gonerfest and got the text from Walker about contributing. When Currin asked the band about contributing a song for the compilation, they agreed right away, perhaps in part because Dave Hartley, the band’s bassist, is an Asheville resident himself.
“That was the moment when we realized we could just ask people and see what happens,” Currin said. “We asked friends, or friends of friends, and everyone was saying ‘yes’ really quickly. And when that starts happening, you just say, Fuck it, I’ll ask this other person. And that led to asking R.E.M. and Tyler Childers and Jason Isbell,” all of whom contributed songs.
In addition to its obvious utility as a fundraiser, Cardinals at the Window is a window into the remarkable strength of musical community. You could draw an elaborate web across the tracklist to connect who’s toured with who, who crashes at whose house when they’re in whatever town, who’s shared cigarettes over breakfast, who lent an emergency guitar when a string broke onstage and who played it. I have at least a dozen friends from the road on the tracklist, Rosali included. I once performed in Nashville with a couple of them and ended up passing around a single acoustic guitar in the dark after a car hit an electrical pole and knocked the power out. There’s another guy on Cardinals who filled in on drums with my band with no questions asked when our drummer had to leave a European tour because of a death in the family. Everyone on there surely has at least one of those kinds of stories about someone else.
Of course, a broken string is not the same thing as a flooded neighborhood. Still, I couldn’t help but think about that network of support among musicians when Walker, who is from western North Carolina originally but now lives in Charlotte, told me about a scene of mutual aid that a friend of his had witnessed in rural Ashe County, which was hit hard by the storm. “He was at a volunteer fire department area,” Walker said. “And he was like, ‘Man, you couldn’t tell the difference between the helping and the helped.’”
