Tag: David Menconi

With ‘Arm in Arm,’ Steep Canyon Rangers Give Everyone Time to Shine (Part 2 of 2)

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Steep Canyon Rangers’ Arm in Arm, their first collection of all-new material in two years, is a set of highly grown-up songs, some with storylines that you’d expect from the likes of Drive-By Truckers or Bruce Springsteen. It’s more loose-limbed and less traditional than past Rangers albums, with fine ensemble playing throughout.

BGS caught up with co-leaders Woody Platt and Graham Sharp in separate conversations leading up to the release of Arm in Arm. After starting with Platt yesterday, here is the conversation with Sharp.

BGS: With the band off the road, have you been able to do any songwriting during this time?

Sharp: I started off writing on a real tear the first few months. But then I slacked off a bit, in part because that coincided with me starting to make an album of my own. Switching from writing to recording slowed down that end of it, but working on my own stuff is kind of out of necessity. For the band to survive this and come back when it’s time, we’ve all got to look out for ourselves a little more.

It’s a strange new hustle, but we’re holding up pretty good. We’ve all been forced to sort of pivot, after having not stopped moving in 20 years. This is the longest any of us have stayed put that whole time. It takes a moment to settle, but it’s been eye-opening. Forced me into some new directions that have been good and ought to pay dividends once we can get the band back together. I’m trying to pull out as many silver linings as I can.

That’s a bit of news, about the solo album. What can you tell us about that?

I don’t know where or when it will ever come out, but the solo album is close to done. I’ve been working with Seth Kaufman from Floating Action in his little basement studio here in Black Mountain. It’s mostly new songs, and a handful of tunes the Rangers have been kicking around a while without getting to them. Nothing bluegrassy about it, mostly country to country-soul, because I have definite tendencies in that direction and a deep love for country music of the ’60s, ’70s, ’50s. That’s still among my favorites.

After Charles Humphreys III left the Rangers in 2017, this is the first album where you’ve written all the songs, not just most of them. Was there more pressure on you?

Not necessarily. It did not change my process much, anyway. I always just try to compile as much good material as I can. It is neat that with a band as organic as this one, a song can kick around for years where we’ll never find a place for it and then suddenly it’s revived. The last song on the album “Crystal Ship” was like that. I had that one for a long time and then backstage one day, [Mike] Ashworth just started playing that melody because he remembered it from a year or two earlier. It’s cool to have the band’s collective memory to draw on, where everybody is part of the process.

The first song “One Drop of Rain” is another. I probably wrote that one six or seven years ago and I’d just never taken the time to find the right groove and place for it. Then one night Woody and I were backstage, I had this little banjo roll, he had the phrasing to go with that and we put it together. A lot of songs come together over time like that. The process is more cumulative than me bringing something in, “Hey, I’ve got this new song.”

Do you have any particular favorite songs on this one?

Probably “One Drop of Rain” and “Honey on My Tongue,” for different reasons. I can remember exactly where I was and the situation I was trying to capture with “One Drop,” just shortly after my father-in-law had died very unexpectedly — 64 years old. What it gets at for me is, try to love your way through the hardest situations. And “Honey” is one I wrote with my daughter in mind. She was giving me a hard time, saying I never write songs for her — not true! But yeah, okay, that was written specifically for her. There are several songs about resilience, dealing with loss, setbacks. All to different degrees, tied to different moments in time.

This record sounds very, dare I say it, mature and grown up.

Well, we’re all passing into the point in our lives where we see a lot of past decisions come to fruition as everyone’s lives play out, our own as well as others. That perspective figures into it. As a songwriter, I’m maturing and trying to hone in on the emotional center of a song – and trying not to write about fluff. We were all very aware while making this album that a lot of the songs aren’t necessarily sad, but a little bit heavier.

And on this record, you’ve also got the first lead vocal from new bassist Barrett Smith.

It’s been cool, having him take on a bigger vocal role. With Woody or myself, it’s just us singing songs at this point. But with Barrett, there’s this ability to tailor songs to a new voice in the band. The song he sings, “Everything You Know,” we talked through the lyrics and the story. Woody and I have always done that, gone through songs in detail. Although sometimes, I don’t necessarily want to influence the pictures anybody else sees in their head while singing.

Once a song is written and out there, it belongs as much to the listener as the singer or the writer. Sometimes they come up with something different, too. “Can’t Get Home” from the last record, Woody thought I wrote that for soldiers coming home and he wasn’t the only one. I had not necessarily meant it that way, but I talked to enough other people about it that it kind of changed the song’s meaning for me, which was cool.

Did taking on the production yourself make Arm in Arm more collaborative than past albums?

I feel like what we do on stage is try to give everybody in the band moments to shine while keeping things moving. Producing this record ourselves was like that, more so than us playing while someone else producers. There are songs where I remember, so and so arranged this part, so and so suggested this harmony, so and so came up with the idea for this mix. So many different pieces where I can see everybody’s fingerprints. I’m proud of that.

I’m just psyched to have something to roll out into the world, reach out a little bit. You know, it’s not the best time to be releasing a record because we can’t tour. So I hope this will reach and touch people. I’m definitely prouder of this record than anything we’ve ever done.

Read part one of our Steep Canyon Rangers Artist of the Month interviews here.

Editor’s Note: David Menconi’s Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music, from Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk will be published in October by University of North Carolina Press.

Photo credit: David Simchock

Artist of the Month: Steep Canyon Rangers

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In a state with no shortage of bluegrass bands, North Carolina’s Steep Canyon Rangers have always set themselves apart with compelling songwriting and a camaraderie that feels authentic, whether they’re up on stage headlining Merlefest or at a performing arts center supporting Steve Martin. (The band shared IBMA Entertainer off the Year honors with Martin in 2011.) These guys have integrity, sure, but they also have an adventurous spirit, a subtle sense of humor, and a keen perspective that reflects where they are in life.

On their upcoming album, Arm in Arm, bluegrass fans will find a lot to like, but so will those listeners who pay attention to songwriting. It happens to be the first time they’ve recorded an album outside of North Carolina, opting to work at Southern Ground studio in Nashville, and to produce the album with Brandon Bell. Some of the sonic textures may sound different, but the emotions in their music remain intact.

“We’re not trying to sound like a style or genre,” says Graham Sharp, the band’s banjo player, frequent songwriter, and occasional lead singer. “We’re not trying to fit into a certain mold. For a long time, we were a traditional bluegrass band, and that meant the themes would have to fit into that mold: work songs, heartbreak songs, train songs. But we’ve evolved to play any groove, any style, and it has opened us up to so many more possibilities.”

BGS will spotlight Steep Canyon Rangers as our Artist of the Month with back-to-back interviews with two of its founding band members, Woody Platt and Graham Sharp, conducted by noted North Carolina author and journalist David Menconi. (Read part one with Woody Platt here. Read part two with Graham Sharp here.) Arm in Arm arrives on October 16, but we’ve include a few of its early tracks below in our BGS Essentials Playlist for Steep Canyon Rangers.

Photo credit: David Simchock

JJ Cale’s Unheard Songs Collected on ‘Stay Around’

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When it came to guitars, gadgets and such, JJ Cale bought plenty of stuff and more often than not wound up giving it away eventually. When it came to his music, however, Cale was not one to cast anything aside. Over the decades of his long and storied career, he amassed hundreds of recordings of songs, fragments, alternative mixes and other sonic ephemera. Fifteen songs, all complete and finished by Cale himself, have been rescued from his hard-drive vaults for the posthumously-released new album Stay Around.

“I wanted to make sure everything on this was really ‘new,’ songs that people hadn’t already heard,” says his widow, Christine Lakeland Cale, who oversaw the project. “You know, you go on YouTube and there’s a bad-sounding grainy video from a gig somebody recorded on their phone. I tried to find things that hadn’t even been out that much. I was looking for the most Cale I could give people.”

Cale, who died from a heart attack in 2013, was a marvel of consistency as a recording artist. Well beyond “After Midnight,” “Cocaine,” and his other signpost compositions, he left behind more than a dozen albums long on relaxed, amiable grooves. So it should come as no surprise that Stay Around offers that same level of quality, even though it consists of recordings spanning more than three decades.

The album’s tracks range from solo recordings to full-band arrangements, with highlights including the loping ode to road life “Chasing You” to the title track’s romantic crooning. Christine compiled the material in collaboration with her late husband’s longtime manager Mike Kappus, who was well-versed in Cale’s working methods. It wasn’t unusual for Cale to leave songs sitting around for years, or even decades, before releasing them. “Roll On,” the title track of Cale’s final 2009 studio album, was a song he’d had in the bag since the mid-1970s.

“I was kind of in on the complete evolution of it all,” Kappus says. “He would send me cassettes, with something like a picture of his driver’s license as artwork, just this private little clever thing between us. We’d be talking about the next album and not everything he sent would make it. At one point I told him, ‘Man, you’ve got a couple of really good, solid records here.’ But the temptation for any artist is to do what’s fresh and that’s what would happen. So there was all this material left over.”

Christine admits it took her “a couple of years of walking around foggy and not all there” until she felt up to diving into Cale’s recorded archive, which was not stored on a pile of tapes. Instead, Cale left behind about 50 hard drives on Alesis HD24 machines, a format Christine says has been obsolete for years. But Cale didn’t upgrade beyond that because the format worked and he was comfortable with it.

“He used to joke to people, ‘I’m too old to learn something new, I like what I have and I use my ears, not my eyes,’” Christine says. “So he never made the transition to Pro Tools. He could hear peaks of distortion that had to come out, instead of seeing a line on a screen to edit. He liked the familiarity of his home studio because he didn’t have to spend any time setting things up — just flip the switch and get creative.”

But just because Cale’s recording methodology was to set it and forget it, one shouldn’t conclude that he was any sort of behind-the-times Luddite. Cale was a skilled studio technician who “loved engineering more than anything else,” according to Kappus, and he had a lifelong fascination with the tools of his trade. After buying new gear or instruments, Cale would usually take them apart and rebuild them. He’d do the same thing with records, after a fashion, going to record stores and buying the entire top 10 bestsellers to study.

“He’d want to check out whatever people were buying,” Kappus says. “Not to try and copy, but to check the engineering and production aspects. We were at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Los Angeles once, where most of the people working were pretty into acoustic or folk music. And Cale starts talking about the mixes on ‘Back That Ass Up’ and some new Britney Spears record. Everybody there was going, ‘What?!’ They figured he’d only know about Willie and Waylon. But he had a lot of curiosity and he’d appreciate the mixing and recording of that stuff in a very true, knowledgeable way. It was the furthest thing from snobbery.”

Of particular note on Stay Around is its one song that Cale didn’t write, “My Baby Blues” — which Christine calls “my nod of self-indulgence,” because she wrote it herself. “My Baby Blues” is a song she and Cale recorded in 1977 at the first session where they met. Cale’s version here dates back to 1980 and Christine considers it a real find. But her favorite cut on the album is the title track, a meditation on the pleasures of being with the one you love (“Stay around, stay around, girl/And let’s make love one more time”).

“That one just floored me when I found it,” Christine says. “I couldn’t believe that one, and the guys at the label came up with the idea to make it the title because, ‘We hope his music stays around.’ That’s brilliant, how come I didn’t think of it? But I was too close to it. It takes a village.”

Some of the solo recordings are particularly intimate, especially “If We Try,” which comes by its kitchen-table feel honestly. That was one of his favorite places to record when he was home alone, and the track feels “as if you’re right there sitting at the table with him,” Christine says.

While Christine isn’t yet thinking about a follow-up, there’s more than enough material still in the vaults to make another album, which could be 100 percent previously unheard material the way this one is. And she thinks that the spirit of her late husband, who would have turned 80 last December, probably approves.

“I have had a lot of weird things happen,” she says. “Probably more so during the foggy period. But even now, things happen where I think, ‘Somebody’s just making sure things go this or that way.’ This world can’t just be it. I do think there’s something once we leave here, I just don’t know what. There’s got to be another level of intelligence in the universe because we’re such a flawed species. Without sounding too much like an old hippie, it seems like there’s the ability to let somebody know it’s okay. And he has.”

Photo credit: Stephane Sednaoui