When the folk band I moonlight in — The Rebecca West — was driving around much of the Southeast last month, from Dallas to Nashville and back again, playing coffee shops, house concerts and festivals, we were reminded of one of the greatest things about our country: Music.

It’s been argued that American music is truly our only genuine cultural export, and I agree.

It never ceases to amaze me how uniquely American music — what we like to think The Rebecca West is —speaks to and about people from all over the globe.

We’ve been recording the last song for our album this week in the woods outside Magnolia. Though our song, "Next of Kin," sounds about as American as apple pie and fireworks, it was written about notorious Bosnian war criminal Ratko Mladic.

Just over a year ago when Mladic was captured and arrested for genocide he committed during the Bosnian War (he ordered the massacre of 8,000 men and boys in the small Bosnian town of Srbrenica in 1995) we were struck by one underreported aspect of his story.

Mladic’s beloved daughter, Ana, a beautiful 23-year-old medical student, took her life upon learning of her father’s crimes against humanity. It’s said she died of shame.

Ana shot herself with her father’s favorite pistol in their family home.

When we heard this story, we couldn’t not write a song about it. It sounded like a murder ballad of the American Old West, an era that's inspired alot of our music. When we were on tour last month, it turned out that "Next of Kin" was the song that most connected with our audiences, so even though we hadn't planned to put it on the record, last week we found ourselves doing just that.

Mladic was on trial in the Hague, as we recorded this song on the other side of the world, but the ghost of Ana wasn’t far away.

Musically, the song feels like the American south: Swampy, stompy, with plenty of angsty acoustic instruments; kick drums, tambourines, guitars, and hand claps. It's the kind of song you might hear coming off a front porch or ringing from the barn rafters. Is that the hiss of a rattlesnake or a tambourine? A train screaming down the tracks or a blazing harmonica?

If you didn't know the lyrics were about a Eastern European war criminal, you could place it squarely in the American story. But if I’ve learned anything in my thirtysomething years, it’s that love, loss and the hope of redemption are universal to the human experience, East or West. And it’s often music that connects us when all else fails to.

In the face of such heartbreak and tragedy like war, or even the dissolution of a marriage (the subject of our first song, "Lost and Found") it feels like making music is all we can do. And sometimes it feels like it's not enough.

The Rebecca West decided to try out another uniquely American phenomenon in the making of this record: Kickstarter. Kickstarter is the world’s largest fundraising platform for creative projects.

Here’s how it works: The artist comes up with a plan to make a film, a comic book, a Broadway show, or in our case an album. Through our social media network (that’s Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, your blog, etc) we ask our friends and fans to participate in the creative process by supporting our project financially.

Supporters can pledge anywhere from $1 up — and each level of giving is accompanied by a reward. For example, our $2 pledgers receive our second single off the album Drift as well as an unreleased bonus track.

But amazingly most of our pledges have been $25 and up, more than twice the going rate for a CD.

Why is that?

It seems that people are getting more than just music, they are participating in the process in a way they never have before, and it’s exciting.

Kickstarter gives us the template but we have to provide the creativity. It's our job to motivate people to participate; for less then a latte people get great music and support independant artists in the process. It's an exciting time to be a musician.

When we were in Nashville we had lunch with a Grammy winning artist and producer who is thinking about using Kickstarter for his next album. It’s not just for indies like us.

The way Kickstarter works is that if applicants don't reach 100% of their goal by the deadline, they don't get funded. But if they reach or surpass their goal they get 100% of the pledges. It was a nailbiter at times, but amazingly we hit our goal and then some. We received pledges for more than $9,500, surpassing our goal of $7,300, which means our project is a "go." Many of the pledges came from people we don't personally.

Kickstarter takes the power out of the hands of the “music business” and puts it directly in the hands of music consumers — you and me. Not long ago, a project like ours — a family folk trio — wouldn’t have been taken seriously by the music industry. But today, all kinds of music is being made and heard thanks to websites like Kickstarter, and music lovers like you.

Driving around this country in the summertime, in the service of music that you love, is a good way to remind yourself of what’s great about America. So roll down the windows, crank up The Rebecca West, and say a prayer of thanks. That’s what I’ll be doing.

Cameron Dezen Hammon is 1/3 of The Rebecca West, along with her husband Matt Hammon, and her rock star brother, Alex Dezen of The Damnwells. She is mother to one human, one cat and one dog and is currently working on a book length manuscript of memoir.