WORDS Tara Crutchfield
PHOTOGRAPH Amy Sexson
Van Plating Whether underfoot as her mother played hymns and gospel piano, making a beeline towards the music anytime her rock-nroll father picked up a guitar, or sitting in on the bluegrass picking and singing of her grandad and his band of eight brothers – Van Plating has always been ‘home’ within a song. “My mom would say that I sang before I used coherent sentences,” Plating said. “It was just in my DNA, I think.”
In a 2021 interview during AmericanaFest in Nashville, Plating likened instruments to different colors on a song. Her favorite ‘color’ is her voice. “The voice is my obsession because that’s your vehicle for storytelling,” Plating said. Consumed with practicing, she focuses on technique and how her tone may emphasize the lyric. “If I let the vocal fall apart, I’m doing it on purpose. If I’m in falsetto, I’m doing it on purpose.”
Plating has been touring on the heels of the release of her second solo album last fall. The Lakeland-based artist is already writing her third solo album, working toward completing three albums in three years. Radiant and effortless in a flowy white dress and black boots, Plating sat in her living room, overlooking her home studio as she discussed her roots, her favorite novelists, and her own storytelling.
Storytelling is chief in Plating’s music. “My lyric writing is very inspired by contemporary American writers and novelists,” she noted. Plating ‘fills her well’ with writers like Wendell Berry, a Kentucky-based novelist, poet, conservationist, and farmer. “He has that very rooted-in-location and generational language to his work, but he’s also very profound,” she said of Berry. The works of Annie Dillard and Patti Smith also fill her bookshelves. “I’m re-reading [Smith’s] memoirs right now because I just love her. She’s gifted at taking what you would consider a mundane, everyday moment and making a book out of it.”
VAN’S MUSICAL DNA The indie-Americana solo artist has been a classically trained violinist and singer since childhood. Her instrumental repertoire now includes violin, viola, piano, keyboards, and electric guitar.
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