Tag: guitar

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

Posted on by Editor

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

Guitarist David Grier Steps Out as a Lead Singer, Too

Posted on by Editor

David Grier gets asked all kinds of questions.

He’s asked about his phenomenal cross-picking guitar techniques, which put him among the greatest bluegrass/folk players of the last several decades, talked about in the same breath with Doc Watson, Clarence White, and Tony Rice.

He’s asked about his dad, Lamar, who played banjo with Bill Monroe. Yeah, that Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass.

He’s asked about Clarence White’s brother Roland, the Kentucky Colonels mandolinist who was an early teacher of his. And of course he’s also asked Clarence, Grier’s big influence, who brought bluegrass guitar into the rock age with the Colonels and then, on electric guitar, powered early country-rock with the Byrds.

He’s asked, maybe too much, about his beard, a prodigious gray broadsword of whiskers stretching from chin to navel, an abstraction of which is the signature feature of his silhouette, featured on his T-shirts and other merch.

But one thing the D.C.-raised, Nashville-based musician is never really asked about: His singing. And for good reason. He’s never done it.

“It’s always been, ‘Why don’t you sing? You play guitar!’” he says, an irrepressible joviality marking his droll drawl.

Somehow, he sighs, people often seem to think that simply because he plays guitar he ought to sing too.

“I know I play guitar,” he says, more amused than exasperated. “I never donated any time toward [singing]. I tried once or twice through the years. Just like anything else, I gave it five or ten times and stopped.”

Until now.

His new album, Ways of the World, features five songs with him on lead vocals. That’s a first. In his career going back to the early ‘80s and covering ten solo albums now, several side projects (Psychograss, Helen Highwater Stringband), and hundreds of guest spots and sessions, he’s never stepped out as a vocalist before.

And in a rather bold move, he puts his lead vocals alongside some noted vocal talents: Maura O’Connell, Tim O’Brien, Shad Cobb, Andrea Zonn, and Mike Compton. What’s more, he’s feels pretty good about it.

“I do,” he says. “I know later I won’t, because every time I think something’s perfect, I listen to it later and go, ‘Gee, why didn’t I hear that before?’”

So the next question comes naturally: “Why now?”

“It was the Helen Highwater Stringband,” he says. “Three or four years ago they said they needed another singer for a vocal trio. They looked at me. I said, ‘I don’t sing!’ They said, ‘You do now!’ I went, ‘Wow.’ They were encouraging. It was helpful. All that went into account and then I did it on stage. People weren’t running for the exits, so this is good. And it just kept going.”

If he was going to sing, he needed words, and he dove right into that as well. Songwriting was another new challenge.

“I’d written the first two lines: ‘I’m afloat on the great big waves of the ocean, I drift on the ways of the world,’” he says of the title song, with Zonn singing with him, which opens the album. “I thought, ‘Hell! That’s going to be a song!’”

But he thought he’d need help and, while heading out for a five-and-a-half-week tour in South Africa, he went to a friend to have him finish it. That didn’t happen. So with two off-days he set to it himself.

“I finished it in an Airbnb on the beach in South Africa,” he says.

It was a whatever-it-takes approach to songwriting. “Dust Bowl Dream,” with harmonies by O’Brien, came from a bar bet for a round of drinks with some Nashville buddies as to who could write the best song in a week.

“I wasn’t even going to write a song,” he says. “Thought I’d just buy drinks for the buddies. But I had this melody that was lonesome and I thought, ‘Well, dust bowl is lonesome.’ Wrote the words in an airport, wrote the verse, chorus, second verse. I thought it was great. Got to the hotel later that day and started playing. First verse was great, second was great, last verse was horrible! I wrote another and that was worse. I went back to the first version I wrote and thought, ‘If I don’t sing it, that’s great.’ So I talk through it, like Bill Anderson would. It’s a recitation, and I think it really helped the tune. You feel it more.”

Now, all you who savor every splendiferous Grier guitar lick, dread not. The five songs featuring vocals are accompanied by eight sparkling instrumentals, and the ones with singing also feature, of course, his spectacular picking.

The heartfelt vocal numbers are surrounded by a selection of wryly titled original picking showcases (“Waiting on Daddy’s Money,” “The Curmudgeon’s Gait,” and so on) and sparkling interpretations of, or variations on, old fiddle tunes (“Billy in the Lowground”). And playing with Grier is a stellar cast of associates: a core of Casey Campbell on mandolin, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Dennis Crouch on bass, with John Gardner on drums for some songs, and banjo from Justin Moses and Cory Walker. What’s more, there’s electric guitar by Bryan Sutton on one song (“Dustbowl Dream”) and on “Farewell to Redboots,” there’s trumpet by Rod McGaha — something perhaps even more surprising than Grier’s singing.

“For me having a trumpet on a song is brand new,” he says. “I just heard it in my head that way and imagined it that way. But having it happen was amazing.”

The whole experience, it seems, was liberating in a way that led Grier to try some different approaches to his picking, as if the pressure was off to make the album completely about that. The result is a rich, engaging tone throughout.

“I think on this record there’s less flash, just for flash’s sake,” he says. “Less, ‘Watch what I can do! Watch! This is hot!’ This is more reined in for a bit. Some of the solos are simplistic, and in my mind harken back to the beginnings of bluegrass music.”

He cites the intro to one song, “Dead Flowers,” an original, not the Rolling Stones song.

“That’s as basic as you can be,” he says, noting that it happened that way in the moment when he was caught off guard. “I got in the studio and thought someone else would kick it off. ‘Who’s gonna kick it off?’ Crickets. ‘You start it.’”

On the other hand, he also found himself spontaneously taking some other unexpected directions in “Red Boots.”

“There are three solos in that,” he says. “First one of me, then the horn, then me again. The first one’s just the melody, nothing fancy. The melody is cool. But the last solo is completely different, a little bit of Wes Montgomery, some string-bending in there. Just popped out! I’d never played that before. Every time I’d played that song it was just the melody, ‘cause I’m generally sitting here playing by myself. In the studio it was, ‘Well, I’ve done that. I want to do something different.’ I like that. Fresh and exciting. Note by note. Not the boring same old thing.”

And that’s the thread of the whole album.

“A lot of improvisation on this record,” he says. “From my viewpoint, it’s playful. All in the vibe. Not some hot lick thrown in just to show I can play a hot lick.”

Not that he isn’t proud of his playing here.

“There’s things in there people might want to learn when they hear it,” he says.

And speaking of learning, one more question: Has he ever tried fingerpicking?

Grier sighs.

“That’s another thing maybe I gave five minutes.”

Well… given what he said about singing, stay tuned for the next album.

Photo credit: Scott Simontacchi

Doc Watson & David Grisman, “Watson Blues”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s fitting that this week, leading up to the 32nd year of MerleFest in Wilkesboro, North Carolina — a festival named after Doc Watson’s late son, Merle — that for Tunesday Tuesday we spend a few minutes with a song named after Doc himself. Bill Monroe wrote “Watson Blues” (or “Watson’s Blues,” as it’s also called), naming it after his friend and premier flatpicker, and the two performed it live and recorded it together on more than one occasion. This version with David “Dawg” Grisman, though, showcases the effortless way that Doc could keep up with and quietly, subtly innovate alongside musicians and artists who were much more famous for roaming further afield.

What’s additionally striking about this particular recording is how simple and focused the track is. Doc’s steady, unwavering hand pushes the song along at a perfectly breezy clip, matching the mellow, round, warm, huggable tones from his flattop. Meanwhile, Dawg plays the roll of Big Mon convincingly, peppering his signature, wacky, jazz-inflected phrases only rarely, choosing instead to let the tune stand on its own. Stuart Duncan’s plaintive twin fiddling is the icing on this tasty, minimal, “Watson Blues” cake.

If you’re headed to MerleFest this weekend, make sure this track is on your driving playlists to/from the festival — and be sure to check out our 2019 MerleFest preview for tips and tricks for the weekend. And, finally, make sure you stay tuned after the 3:52 runtime of “Watson Blues” passes — Doc, Dawg, and Jack Lawrence give us an incredibly tasty version of “Bye Bye Blues” to wrap up the album. It’s an acoustic pickin’ heroes encore.

Molly Tuttle: Confident and ‘Ready’

Posted on by Editor

Even before releasing her first full-length album, Molly Tuttle made history. She became the first woman to be named IBMA Guitar Player of the Year, a title she’s won twice, in addition to winning Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year, all on the strength of her 2017 EP, RISE. But to focus exclusively on Tuttle as a guitarist would be a mistake. She isn’t interpreting others’ songs. She’s writing and singing her own, and as her debut record When You’re Ready proves, she’s doing it not only with classically trained musicianship, but with an exciting willingness to explore and trust her own wide-ranging artistic instincts.

Tuttle talked with BGS about When You’re Ready, feeling optimistic about women in music, and why California’s Bay Area has her heart.

BGS: When You’re Ready is such a confident debut. Were you feeling confident from the jump, or did your confidence grow as you recorded?

Tuttle: I think it grew. As I was writing the songs, I got more and more confident just saying what I felt and what I was thinking in the songs. I remember feeling really confident in the studio in what I was saying and in the parts I was playing. Ryan Hewitt, who produced it, helped me feel confident. He wanted everything to sound really strong – it was a good experience.

A lot of these songs seem to explore relationships and how we interact with each other. Do you feel like there are some currents that run through thematically and connect all of these songs?

I think there’s kind of a theme of longing on the album, and also a theme of just being confident in who you are and what you’re feeling. When I was writing it, it was, “I’m just going to say where I’m at.” The theme on the album for me would be accepting your feelings and embracing them.

You’re from California, then you went to college in Boston, and now you’re living in Nashville. Do you feel like all of that geographic diversity changed the trajectory of your music?

I think so. I got exposed to lots of different kinds of music in California, and then especially when I was at Berklee, there were all sorts of different kinds of music going on all the time at school. Then, obviously, Nashville is one of the most amazing music cities in the world. I think living in California was influential, growing up there. I really relate to the Bay Area and a lot of my songs are still inspired by California. It’s where my soul is, still.

What is it about the Bay Area you love so much?

I really love the ocean. I love the nature there, the scenery. I think people are really open there. Everyone — well, not everyone, but a lot of people in the Bay — are just trying to be good people and trying to be accepting of other people. That was something I was taught in school a lot as a kid: that you should accept everyone as they are. Of course, nobody is perfect at that. But I think people are trying to do that there, and that’s a feeling I’ve tried to carry with me.

When you write, are you focusing on the guitar part first and then the lyrics, or does it vary?

There are times when I do the guitar part first, but for this album, I was really focusing on the lyrics and melodies. The guitar parts were the last parts that came with these songs — and I really wanted to have interesting guitar parts on this album. I thought it’d make it more interesting to have a singer/songwriter record with guitar lines that could weave it all together, so I worked on that after I finished writing the songs.

The guitar playing on “Take the Journey” jumps out: the percussion, the lead, the bass, the counter-melodies — that’s all you on acoustic guitar. How’d you come up with this song?

I wrote that with Sarah Siskind. We wrote it pretty quickly in a couple of hours, which for me is quick for writing a song. We had a song that was in that modal-key feel — you don’t really know if it’s major or minor. When we were writing it, I went into this different tuning: it’s an open G tuning, but you get rid of the third and tune the B up to C, which makes it like a Gsus4.

I like that style of guitar playing. When I was a teenager, I learned clawhammer banjo because I really liked old-time music. Someone showed me that you could move the clawhammer style onto the guitar and play a really percussive-sounding style. I went with that and created different rhythms that I like to use — more syncopated — and really worked on getting the bass notes to pop out, letting my hand hit the guitar so it’s percussive sounding.

Your vocals on “Don’t Let Go” move between smooth and comfortable verses to more of a staccato and breathy chorus. How’d you decide to approach the vocals this way?

Where the melody is in my range, I naturally had to go up to a breathy head voice, so we thought that could be a really cool thing, to make it sound really emotional. And on this one, when I was singing the chorus, I did get really emotional in the studio. That helped me get the quivers in my voice. I think you can hear it in the track. There are little things that came out in my singing that I hadn’t really done before recording this. I had to go to an emotional place to get the take that worked.

Do you have a favorite song on here or is that impossible?

I think my favorite is “Sleepwalking.”

All of that imagery on “Sleepwalking” – and on some other songs too – blurry screens, white noise, and even sleepwalking itself: it’s such a direct contrast to the specific, refined sounds you’re making. What is it about the hazy imagery that you’re drawn to?

Yeah, I think a lot of my songs have themes of trying to make a connection with a person or a place or a feeling. There are a few songs that talk about white noise or static or anything that’s kind of blurring the connection. That’s something I feel — like with technology, sometimes it makes me feel like I’m not actually connected to anything and not connected to myself.

I think that comes through in my songs. “Sleepwalking” is a song I wrote about that specific feeling of being disconnected from the world around you. Maybe you’re relying on one person or one place or feeling to be your connection. It’s kind of a love song, but it’s kind of a cry for help in a way. [Laughs]

Of the women who are widely known first as guitar players – a number that’s still too low – most aren’t acoustic, steel-string players. It’s also a physically demanding instrument, especially the way you play. Why were you drawn to it? Why do you think you’ve succeeded?

I’ve never really seen limitations on guitar for me as a woman. I remember, I was first drawn to it in a really natural way when I was a kid. I just liked the mellow sound of it. So I don’t remember specifically what drew me to it, but I remember seeing guitars around, and I told my parents I wanted a guitar. That was after I’d tried like three different instruments and failed at all of them. [Laughs] I tried to play fiddle, and I think I got tired of just not sounding good on it. Guitar is a lot less abrasive when you’re first starting out. I had a tiny guitar when I started, and my dad showed me some stuff on it.

I really liked that you could play it while you were singing. I never thought about it being a physically demanding instrument, even when I first played and my fingers got really sore. It felt pretty natural to me. Then, when I went to Berklee, I was 19 and all of a sudden there were no other women in any of my guitar classes. [Laughs] That was weird. It was definitely an uncomfortable experience at times.

But it was good because I’d walk into class and be the only one, and because all this attention was instantly on me, I thought, “Oh, I better practice and be good or they’re just going to write me off as some girl trying to play guitar.” It felt like there was some added pressure there, which is not really fair, but at least it made me practice more.

You’re not the “best woman guitar player.” You’re the best guitar player. Do you feel like the industry and culture in general are beginning to consider contributions of women more fairly – that you’re weighed equally?

I think it’s definitely changing at a rapid pace right now, especially with the #MeToo movement. Now that’s starting to affect the music world. I’m seeing so many women coming up and their careers are just exploding in new ways – like at the Grammys. There were so many women winning awards and playing.

I think women are feeling really empowered to just say, “No. I’m not a female musician. I’m just a musician.” Women are fully embracing feminism more and just feeling like we can say what’s on our minds. We don’t have to tiptoe around these issues anymore. I think that’s helping everything change. We are not accepting any crap anymore — like “you’re a female guitar player.” [Laughs] I certainly don’t want to be pegged as a female guitar player. My gender doesn’t have anything to do with my guitar playing. We’re talking about the issues more and that’s helping everything to change.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

David Grier, “Waiting on Daddy’s Money”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The initial A and B parts of virtuosic flatpicker David Grier’s “Waiting on Daddy’s Money” will strike your ear as timeless. It’s a subtly haunting and awry melody that conjures many of bluegrass and old-time’s iconic fiddle tunes. But, as soon as the first form is complete, Grier’s countless embellishments and reiterations of that melody demonstrate that this is no play-the-same-tune-for-half-an-hour-in-unison old-time revelry. Instead, this is an artistic study, a series of complicated opuses revisiting and revising the tune into a truly original, nearly inimitable six-string soliloquy.

What’s remarkable though, through that artistry — that ebbs and flows from simplistic, familiar staple licks to utterly singular, mind-boggling musical acrobatics — is that the tune, and Grier’s cyclical interpretations of it, are never at any point esoteric or inaccessible to the listener’s ear. Somewhat counterintuitively, it effortlessly holds onto that classic fiddle tune vibe. Grier himself refers to these interpretations as “mutations,” though that descriptor belies the decades upon decades of learned, practiced nuance and ease that make each reharmonization, key change, chord inversion, syncopated rhythm, and string sweep a boon to the song, rather than self-aggrandizing distractions.

Above all else, “Waiting on Daddy’s Money” — and the entire album, Ways of the World — demonstrates that Grier is an unimpeachably superlative guitarist with a one-of-a-kind musical voice that not only draws on his history growing up with bluegrass, but also consciously and magnificently blazes an impeccably fresh trail that no other picker has yet to even attempt to trod.

Photo credit: Scott Simontacchi

Keller Williams, “M&Ms”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Music made by Keller Williams, but without his whimsical, sideways, and often silly songwriting perspective might seem like a counterintuitive concept for a record, but Sans, his latest album, leans into just that concept, featuring nine purely instrumental tunes. Williams inhabits an equal parts entrancing and perplexing center of a Venn diagram that includes among its constituent circles bluegrass, jamgrass, musical humorism, satire, and instrumental prowess that combines flatpicking sensibility with Phil Keaggy-style ingenuity and song structure. It’s as if you dumped every single goddamn flavor of M&Ms candy you could find into one giant bowl and dared listeners to try their luck and grab a handful that made sense.

Of course, a handful of delicious, if not suspiciously harlequin, sweets will almost always excite glee, and “M&Ms,” a frenetic guitar/percussion/arco bass bounty unto itself most certainly does. It’s a kaleidoscope; a frenzy; a nearly perfect distillate of Williams’ singular personality, so potent that you almost don’t miss his lyrics — especially given the marked lyricism of the interplay between the looped guitar tracks throughout. The ebb and flow of the arrangement cast a wide array of colors and shades, each sugary scoop different from the last, but just as delicious; the “M&Ms” flavors in this bowl are not peanut, or pretzel, or classic, they’re trance, dance, jam, fingerstyle, loop station, foot-tapping, harmonic-plucking, sternum-vibrating bass, and many, many others as yet to be named. It deserves a taste.

Photo credit: Taylor Crothers

Richard Thompson, “Banish Misfortune”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Our artist of the month, iconic English folk rock singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Richard Thompson, is well known for his literary, poetic, and evocative songsmithery. His decades-long career and international recognition were built not only on the deft timelessness of his pen, but on his instrumental chops as well, his ease and aplomb on the guitar paving a clear, direct path of delivery for his lyrics with a strong sense of personality and melodic identity.

We would be remiss, in our month-long celebration of the man and his brand new album, 13 Rivers, if we didn’t dive deep into his discography to showcase his six-string prowess. On his 1981 release, Strict Tempo!, Thompson tracked 12 traditional songs and tune sets and one original number, playing every single instrument on every single tune himself (except the drums). In a modern context, and juxtaposed against 13 Rivers, the record is a beautiful retrospective that showcases the fundamental building blocks of Thompson’s musical worldview: traditional Irish, Scottish, and English tunes played by folk instruments, in live-sounding, raw contexts that let the tunes themselves — and Thompson’s fleet fingers — shine. “Banish Misfortune,” a traditional Irish tune also known as “The Stoat That Ate Me Sandals” and myriad other names, stands out. Thompson allows the jig’s lazy lilt to gently pull his fingerstyle rendition of the late 1800s melody forward, while he embellishes with that classic Irish guitar flair, a dash of Thompson whimsy in every note.

There’s a compelling argument to be made here, that having this sort of “institutional knowledge,” an understanding, appreciation, and working vocabulary of the folk art forms that gave rise to our current genres and formats, is directly correlated to an artist’s longevity and their ability to connect, musically, on a much deeper level — of course, that could just be the magic of Richard Thompson himself.

Richard Thompson Lets the Songs Guide ‘13 Rivers’

Posted on by Editor

Richard Thompson’s new album contains 13 tracks and is called 13 Rivers, which suggests an intriguing metaphor regarding music and bodies of water. These are songs as rushing currents, as tributaries cutting through the landscape with unstoppable force; they can be dammed but not contained, their power harnessed but not diminished. Or perhaps they are obstacles to be crossed, either by swimming against dangerous rapids or by devising elaborate feats of engineering. It is any wonder that songs have bridges?

Thompson admits he didn’t think too hard about it. “It’s just a convenient title, and I liked the way it sounds,” he says with a chuckle that sounds both self-deprecating and possibly curious about the idea. “I’m not sure how deep it is or if it stands up to intellectual scrutiny. I guess songs and rivers can be fast or slow, straight or meandering. They have a beginning or end. You should make of it as much as you can. The more you make of it, the better I sound.”

He doesn’t need me or anyone else to make him look smart, but let’s go ahead and make too much out of that metaphor. Thompson’s catalog is full of raging rivers, most with rock rapids and treacherous oxbows, some stretching for miles and miles or years and years. He’s been navigating them for more than half a century, ever since he strummed his first notes as the guitarist and occasional songwriter for the famed London outfit Fairport Convention. That band helped to electrify folk music in the late 1960s, adding drums and Stratocaster to centuries-old rural ballads about maidens and knights, before Thompson went solo to emphasize his own songwriting.

For years he was merely a cult artist in the States, his early records available only as imports, at least until 1980’s Shoot Out the Lights—written, performed, and recorded with his then-wife Linda Thompson—established him as an insightful chronicler of the challenges of commitment and contentment, a songwriter who is neither blandly optimistic nor cynically dismissive, but somewhere right between bitter and sweet.

And, of course, he is a guitar player whose resourcefulness somehow dwarfs his technical virtuosity. A teenager in the late 1960s, he was too young to be as enamored with American blues as other players were, which means he was never a contemporary of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, or Jimi Hendrix. Instead his playing is grounded in folk music, aligned with the experiments and excursions of Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, and Davy Graham. Like them, he has significant range, incorporating a range of styles and sounds: African desert rock, urban punk, country & western, Indian ragas. His solos change shape constantly; listening to him play, you never know where he’s going but you know he’s going to get there.

While many of the players listed above have either died or all but retired, Thompson continues to make relevant music in the 2010s, both as a songwriter and as an instrumentalist. “The most important thing is the song—the particular batch of songs you find yourself with. That dictates so much about the way the record sounds,” he says. “The songs are going to tell you how they want to be shaped, how they want to sound in the end. They tell you if they want to be acoustic or electric; they tell you if they want to be simple or complex. If you’re listening to what the songs are saying to you, then making the record should be a fairly easy task.”

The batch of songs that comprises 13 Rivers stemmed from what he calls a “difficult time in my life,” although he declines to discuss the specifics of those difficulties. Still, it’s possible to gauge the general nature of them based on songs like “Rattle Within” and “Shaking the Gates,” which suggest a feisty relationship with the idea of mortality. Writing them, however, is not necessarily a conscious effort to address certain events or predicaments. “It’s a semi-conscious process. You’re not always thinking about the big picture. You’re just kind of floating sometimes. You’re almost allowing yourself to switch off some of your critical faculties in order to write. And once you’ve written it, you think, okay, here’s this song, now what does it mean? But you’re not thinking about that meaning while you’re writing it.”

Take the opening track, “The Storm Won’t Come.” A low, brooding number with a worried vocal and a searing solo, it reverses the typical storm metaphor, casting the thunder and rain as something other than destructive. Especially opening the album, it almost sounds like an invocation by an artist waiting for inspiration to strike like lightning. “That’s not what I had in mind, but that sounds great! I was thinking more than sometimes in life, you can feel stymied and you long for change. Sometimes if you try to change it yourself, it doesn’t work. You have to wait for the world to do it to you,” he says.

One storm arrived just after he had assembled this batch of songs: The producer backed out of the project, leaving Thompson to ponder its fate. Thankfully, pragmatism won out. “I thought, well, the studio is booked, the musicians are booked, we’ve got the material, so I’ll just produce it myself. I’ve done it before. It’s always nice to have the contrast of working with other people, but it can be good to do it yourself. You can get more into the nuts and bolts of what you really intended to find in the songs.”

Perhaps that’s why so many songs have a raw-nerve friction to them, lyrically and musically. After a handful of solo acoustic albums, including 2014’s Still, produced by Jeff Tweedy, Thompson put together a very tight, very agile rock and roll combo to give these songs a jittery energy. He’s worked with bassist Taras Prodaniuk and drummer Michael Jerome for years, “so I know them a bit—what they’re likely to come up with.” They worked quickly in the studio, learning the songs just enough to pound them out but not enough to pound them life out of them. “I try to not get too embedded in learning the song. We just give it a couple of listens at rehearsals,” he says. It’s a way to avoid what Thompson calls “overlearning” the song, to allow room for happy accidents and to keep the possibilities wide open.

When the song goes out into the world, those possibilities shrink dramatically. The song becomes settled, more or less. “What the song is now is public domain. It becomes a kind of public property, and the audience won’t let you change it, even if you want to. I’ve got songs where I’ve snuck in the odd word change, but to change a verse or even a line is just asking for trouble.”

Being the song’s creator doesn’t mean he determines that meaning for anyone else. In fact, his interpretation is only one of so many. “It’s always amazing to hear other people’s ideas of what a song is about. I may have written it as a satirical song or a very pointed song, and people will say, ‘Oh that’s about Bob Dylan’ or something. How did they reach these bizarre conclusions? But I’m glad they can find their own meaning in it.”

Illustration by: Zachary Johnson
Photo by: Tom Bejgrowicz

LISTEN: Courtney Hartman & Taylor Ashton, “Better”

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Artist: Courtney Hartman & Taylor Ashton
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Song: “Better”
Album: Been on Your Side
Release Date: August 31, 2018
Label: Free Dirt Records

In Their Words: “Courtney and I and about 25 other songwriter friends around the world had an email thread going last year where we had a weekly deadline to send in a new song, as an exercise in mutual encouragement to keep in the practice of writing. One week I forgot about it until 1 a.m. on the night of the deadline, and even though I had a gig at 9 a.m. the next morning, I spent a couple hours with my banjo and “Better” came to me. It took a second to arrive at the first line and the rest all sort of fell into place. At some times in my life I’ve been attracted to the idea that you can’t force inspiration, and that it chooses when to strike. But this is an example of a time where if I hadn’t been holding myself to some arbitrary deadline I would definitely have just fallen asleep and never written this song.

The voice in the song is sort of an amalgam of myself and of a lot of people in my life so it feels good to sing it with Courtney — it brings it into a cool middle ground for me, between a specific personal sentiment and a more universal one. And to me it feels good to sing about your personal flaws in harmony with somebody else. I think the chorus is something we all want to cry out at certain times in our lives.” — Taylor Ashton

 

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

WATCH: The Earls of Leicester, ‘Long Journey Home’

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Artist: The Earls of Leicester
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Long Journey Home”
Album: The Earls of Leicester Live at The CMA Theater in The Country Music Hall of Fame
Release Date: Sept. 28
Label: Rounder Records

In Their Words: “In the bluegrass canon, the song ‘Long Journey Home’ has appeared under many alternate titles for different artists. Yet I’ve always felt Earl Scruggs’ banjo raised the Flatt and Scruggs version to a higher level. When planning our live record, we wanted to have a few fast tempo songs that we could count on to raise the blood pressure for both the listeners and our own. The tempo and fire that this song brings through Charlie Cushman’s banjo as well as Shawn Camp and Jeff White’s vocals made it an easy choice, and a welcome new entrant into the Earls repertoire.” – Jerry Douglas

Photo credit: Patrick Sheehan