BGS 5+5: The Band of Heathens

Artist: Ed Jurdi of The Band of Heathens
Hometown: Asheville, North Carolina; band’s hometown is Austin, Texas
Latest album: Stranger
Band Nicknames: The Hand of Beathens

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

At the Americana Awards a few years back. I remember being on stage at the Ryman Auditorium and looking around and realizing that I was performing with a bunch of my heroes. Delbert McClinton, Emmylou Harris, John Hiatt and Sam Bush, to name just a few. It truly was a full circle moment for sure.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?

In short they all do. I have always been in awe of painters who can really create a world with their colors and imagery. I find myself being really inspired by the impressionistic painters and the way they use light to offer a unique and different perspective on things that can be somewhat mundane.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

I don’t have any real set rituals, but I generally like to hang around the gig and sing some songs either by myself, or with whoever else is hanging out. It’s a good way to warm up and it’s a fun way to get the group vibes in a positive space.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

Follow the muse. Lead with your art and expression and figure out how to make the business part of the career work in service of the creativity. I can happily say that has always been the case.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

I live in Asheville, North Carolina, so I spend the most time in the mountains and the forests that surround us. I love being able to hike way out into the woods and find a vista where I can see both the great scope of things, but also hear the rustling of the leaves and the wind blowing through the tops of the trees. In those moments of solitude I find my mind is incredibly clear and clean, which is almost always when ideas begin to present themselves almost out of nowhere.


Photo credit: Jason Quigley

WATCH: Adam Chaffins, “Who I Am” (Live)

Artist: Adam Chaffins
Hometown: 10 years+ Nashvillian (Eastern Kentucky native, from Louisa, Kentucky)
Song: “Who I Am” (Live)
Album: Some Things Won’t Last
Label: Chaffins Music

In Their Words: “A lot of my influence as a songwriter comes from torch songs. Keith Whitley sang a lot of them, like ‘I’ll Be Your Stepping Stone’ with J.D. Crowe & the New South. Songs of eternal pining for a love. ‘Who I Am’ is a torch song with a lot more brutal honesty to the torcheé. I started playing this version supporting John Hiatt on the road in 2019. It’s as bare-bones as a song can get.” — Adam Chaffins


Photo credit: Melissa Stillwell

BGS Podcast Roundup // May 22

We’ve got another round of podcasts for you this Friday, with episodes featuring one of the last founding fathers of bluegrass, a delicious Mexican-inspired meal from an award-winning Austin chef (in your home!), a young Nashville phenom’s debut on Rounder Records, and much much more.

Make sure to follow along with the BGS Podcast Network on our social media [Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram] and right here, where we’ll consistently gather our new episodes, as well as some past favorites:

The Shift List – Chef Fermín Núñez (Suerte) – Austin, TX

This week, our first in a series of shows from Austin, Texas, starting off with Fermín Núñez, executive chef of East Austin’s Mexican-inspired restaurant Suerte and Eater Austin’s 2018 chef of the year.

As you’ll soon discover, Chef Fermín is a man with a mission: To create the perfect tortilla, every single day. It’s his attention to detail that has made Suerte one of the most beloved new restaurants in Austin, and Chef Fermín’s love of music is woven into each part of the day, from the making of the masa, to prepping his mise en place, to the entire staff stopping at 4pm to clap to a cover of “Achy Breaky Heart” in Spanish and prepare for the night of service ahead.

Speaking of service, Suerte closed for a few weeks back in early March to regroup and recalibrate as the city of Austin sheltered in place because of the new coronavirus. In mid-March they reemerged with the Suerte Taqueria, providing highlights from Suerte’s menu for takeout — a highlight being the Suadero Taco Meal kit for families to enjoy at home. The kit includes all the ingredients needed to prepare Chef Fermín’s signature dish at home, including confit brisket, avocado crudo, black magic oil, signature tortillas, and sides. In addition to cooking instructions, they rounded out the experience with a video of Chef Fermín cooking along in his own kitchen, and a link to his favorite playlist in an attempt to bring the full Suerte experience into your kitchen.

The kits are still available, so if you live in the Austin area and need some high quality sustenance, head over to Suerteatx.com.


The String – Lilly Hiatt, Gabe Lee

Lilly Hiatt put in a lot of work at the local and regional level, including releasing two albums, before her third, Trinity Lane, met the moment and became a breakout work.

So a lot of ears were lifted toward her 2020 release of Walking Proof, and it was quickly acclaimed as punchy, vivid and memorable. We talk about going on the road with her dad songwriter John Hiatt back in the day, the deserved success of Trinity Lane and new musical directions. Also, a get-acquainted talk with Nashville-born, rocking country songwriter Gabe Lee.


Toy Heart: A Podcast About Bluegrass – Jesse McReynolds

One of the last founding fathers of bluegrass, Jesse McReynold’s story is the story of bluegrass — a music that emerged out of the country, into rural schoolhouses, onto rural radio, finding sponsorship along the way, enmeshing itself into the mainstream of American culture.

McReynolds tells the story of his grandfather, who played in the first recorded country music session, talks about being offered a gig with the Stanley Brothers, serving with the armed forces in Korea and singing alongside Charlie Louvin. He relates hunting down record deals and successes with his brother Jim, starting their own label, being sought out by counter cultural icons like the Grateful Dead and The Doors. Now nearing the age of 91, McReynolds spends some time reflecting as well, on his brother Jim’s death, his own struggles with the Opry, and how he feels about his legacy in the music. This is an icon of American music whose story isn’t often told, and we’re honored to play a part.


The String – Katie Pruitt, Jenee Fleenor

Katie Pruitt has been known as a phenom ready for big things in Nashville for a few years now. With patience and enough maturity to get the music exactly as she intended, Pruitt has now made her debut on Rounder Records.

The album Expectations is a bold, ambitious, and succulent collection, and vividly honest as well, with songs documenting a difficult journey from a conservative family in Georgia to a proud gay woman in Music City. This is a 25-year-old singer, songwriter, and guitarist poised for big things. Also in the hour, the journey of Arkansas born fiddler Jenee Fleenor. She was named CMA Musician of the Year and she’s releasing her first recordings of her own music after years supporting others.


The Show on the Road – Steve Poltz

This week on The Show On The Road, we feature a conversation with a Canadian-born paraparetic prince of pop-folk singers, who has jumped through more gauntlets of the modern music industry than almost anyone in his three plus decades of making records, Steve Poltz.

Poltz first hit the scene with the San Diego-based underground punk-folk favorites The Rugburns, then as an accidental hitmaker and MTV video heartthrob with collaborator and friend Jewel, and then as a wild-haired, two hundred shows a year internationally revered solo act. He’s put out a baker’s dozen of whacked-out, deceptively sensitive, and fearlessly personal albums that have won him devoted audiences from his ancestral home in Nova Scotia to the dance party dives of California to massive festivals across Australia and beyond.

As we are still quite separated during the pandemic, host Z. Lupetin called up Poltz in Nashville to discuss the long and twisty road Poltz has travelled — jumping from his inspired, most-recent album Shine On back to his childhood in swinging Palm Springs (where he met Elvis and Sinatra), to making $100,000 music videos for his ill-fated major label debut in ’98, to nearly dying on stage after substance abuse problems and never-say-no-to-a-gig exhaustion took its toll.

We now find him in a more peaceful, purposeful existence, where he is newly married and enjoying making music at home (government orders!) for the first time in decades.


 

The String – John Hiatt

To start the new year, a full-hour with one of the certified icons of roots/Americana music and Nashville songwriting, John Hiatt.

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We cover a lot of ground, from getting launched out of Indianapolis in 1970 through a long, frustrating recording career and a breakthrough in the mid 1980s to his stature today as a Nashville leader. His long-time label New West Records has just released a limited edition 15-LP box set covering his most recent 11 albums. It’s a heavyweight tribute to a soulful master of the art.

Gaby Moreno and Van Dyke Parks Take a Vibrant Trip Across the Americas

“Oh man, I’m forgetting.”

Gaby Moreno is trying to remember the joke Van Dyke Parks told her earlier this day.

“It was the one about…. shoot! It will come to me.”

And it does.

“It was this one: ‘There are three kinds of people in the world. Those who can count, and those who can’t.’”

Moreno laughs at the simple, if groan-worthy humor, typical of Parks’ always-stylish banter, as anyone who’s encountered the noted composer-arranger-musicologist-raconteur extraordinaire knows. But the joke, inadvertently, relates to another bit of math involving the new album, ¡Spangled! The collaboration between the Guatemala-born nightingale-ian singer Moreno and Mississippi-originated, California-rooted Parks is a vibrant trip through musics the pair have been describing as “Pan-American.”

And that involves the simple equatorial-spanning equation of 1+1+1=1.

“We wanted to imagine a project that could unite both hemispheres of the Americas,” she says. “It’s not just Latin American music, but music that crosses borders, can make us all celebrate the diversity and richness and culture that exists. It’s the whole continent. I think of it as all one America: North, Central and South. It’s a beautiful thing we should all be proud of.”

It’s also, of course, a timely album, though Moreno stresses that while the current situation regarding immigration seems quite acute and divisive, it is hardly a new issue. Parks is not so restrained in his expression, though. “I’m frightened by the toxicity,” he says, not joking at all now. “And we must push back. And my way is with this project.”

¡Spangled! slides through the 20th century and right up to today, moving with ease through countries and cultures — the songs originating in Venezuela, Trinidad, Panama, Peru, Brazil, Puerto Rico and the U.S.

That sweep is represented vividly in Parks’ orchestrations, mostly sporting a sound that can only be called cinematic, marked by such signature Parks flourishes as heavenly harps (both Latin American and “concert” variations) and soaring strings. And then there is Moreno’s naturally pure voice, oft-layered into an angelic choir, whether in Spanish, English or, on two songs, Brazilian Portuguese. The support cast also includes such notables as guitarist Ry Cooder, bassist Leland Sklar and drummer Jim Keltner, though the MVP would likely be Mexican harpist Celso Duarte.

The oldest song is the Venezuelan classic “Alma Llanera,” written in 1914. That is also the song among this batch that first came to Moreno’s attention, something that’s been part of her life since she can first remember.

“It’s kind of the second national anthem for that country. I remember growing up listening to it. My parents would listen to it in the house. It was popular all over Latin America — anyone who is Latin, you ask and they know it. I was very excited to hear what Van Dyke did with the song. He took it to another level. For me singing it, it was very emotional, given the circumstances in Venezuela now. It’s sort of my love letter to them.”

The newest is her own, the very personal “El Sombrerón,” first recorded on her 2008 album Postales in a gorgeously spare version. This one, in Parks’ hands, is anything but spare, the orchestral splendor of his approach illuminating the deep connection it holds for Moreno.

“That’s a folk legend from Guatemala,” she says. “I wrote that many years ago. It was one of the first movies ever made there. It’s about this character, El Sombrerón. And my grandfather was a character in the movie! I was watching it, and in my head I thought it could sound like a song from a Tarantino film.”

And while there is a sense of urgent purpose to it all, it is not really a political album, aside from perhaps two songs: The opening version of “Across the Borderline” (written by John Hiatt, Cooder and Jim Dickinson for the 1982 Jack Nicholson movie The Border) featuring guest Jackson Browne, serves as prologue to a vivid journey. And modern Trinidadian calypso giant David Rudder’s ever-more-topical “The Immigrants,” though written 21 years ago, puts a right-now point on it all.

But aside from that, this is mostly romantic music, from the 1955 Panamanian song “Historia de un Amor” to the ‘70s whimsical hit “I’ll Take a Tango,” written by Alex Harvey and recorded by, among others, Harry Nilsson, a close Parks associate.

“There’s love songs, songs about heartbreak,” Moreno says. “Songs about life.”

A happy album, then?

“Yes!” she says. “Absolutely! Maybe only a couple of songs aren’t. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Life. Ups and downs.”

But that’s migration, too.

“It’s the story of the migration through space and time,” she says. “How the songs evolved, originated in one place and then been taken by other people. The migration of songs through the Americas.”

And that, in turn, is embodied in Moreno’s own story.

“Absolutely,” she says. “I migrated here, almost two decades ago. Yes! I am definitely an immigrant, and it’s very important for me to keep talking about the immigrant issue and how I can help make this a better place, bring some hope to people, through my art, through music. That’s what I’m most interested in.”

It is quite the story, taking her from Guatemala City to the U.S. as a teen, where she started to make a name for herself in such Los Angeles clubs as the vibrant Largo (sometimes as part of Sean and Sara Watkins’ variety-filled Watkins Family Hour shows and on bills put together by Inara George). She’s also a co-writer of the peppy instrumental theme of the hit comedy series, Parks and Recreation.

And now she has gained considerable national exposure as a regular featured guest alongside her friend Chris Thile on the NPR show Live From Here. Along the way she won the Best New Artist Latin Grammy in 2013 and was nominated for Best Latin Pop Album for Illusions for the 2017 Grammys.

Most of these songs were new to Moreno, though, brought in by Parks, whose love for Latin American and Afro-Caribbean music goes back to when he and his brother moved to California in the early 1960s and performed as a duo up and down the coast. Coming from the American South, it was almost like being in another country for them. “In California, I thought I was in Mexico,” he says.

And he embraced the exotic and worked diligently to make it familiar, first to himself and then to the world. “I studied flamenco music and all sorts of Latin music,” he says.

The initial impetus, he says, was classic, if not exactly high-minded: “I wanted to lose my virginity,” he says, thinking at the time that learning music in another language might help with that.

The fascination with the styles became its own love affair, though. He drove his Volkswagen Beetle to Veracruz and returned with a locally crafted folk harp strapped to its top. He went to see Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto at her first appearance here, at the old Lighthouse club. Later he took his knowledge and passion into his role as a producer and executive at Warner Bros. Records, bringing it into work with Cooder, Bonnie Raitt and many others.

He deftly crafted his Pan-American sensibilities in his own cult-cherished albums, most clearly in his 1972 opus Discover America and its 1976 follow-up Clang of the Yankee Reaper, both largely drawing on Calypso hits from the first half of the 20th century. While he may be best known as Brian Wilson’s chief collaborator on the ill-fated “lost” album Smile (which would be “found” again and reconstructed in 2004), these albums of his own may make for better representations of his vision.

The vision was renewed 10 years ago when he first saw Moreno at one of those Largo shows — George is the daughter of the late Lowell George of Little Feat, with whom Park worked a lot, and he and Inara have made much music together. He was taken with her talents.

Then one day not long after, he was sitting in a hotel lobby in Berlin and a man who recognized him approached and asked if he’d like to do a special performance with an orchestra at the huge Roskilde Music Festival in Denmark in the summer of 2010. Two dates were offered, one being July 4. Pointedly, Parks took that one.

“I came back to L.A. and called Gaby,” he says, and soon the two came up with eight songs that were to be performed in that concert. From there it grew into the full album project, though with their own various commitments, and the inherent expenses of doing it, it took this long to complete. Now there are talks of some sort of full performance of the album, possibly next year. Moreno will be featuring at least a few of the songs in concerts with orchestras Dec. 2 at the Kaufman Music Center in New York and Dec. 6, with Ben Folds as well, at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.

It’s not hard to imagine the presentation almost as a musical, or at least a song-cycle, perhaps evoking a time suggested by the arrangements, a time that for Parks brings to mind another Pan American, as in the now-gone airline of that name.

“We can remember when people dressed up to go on an airplane to go find out about music and culture, and people were not so xenophobic,” he says.

Nostalgic fantasy? Maybe. But with ¡Spangled! it’s also a wish for the future.

“It’s a trip back to see what we have lost in our sense of inquiry and the xenophobia of this president,” he says. “That’s why we did this album. Someone said, ‘You’re going all over the place on this!’ Yes! We are!”


Photo credit: Andrzej Liguz

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Jeff Hanna Reflects on ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume Two’

Why mess with a classic? That was the original thought from a few members of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band when the idea was presented to record a sequel to their seminal 1972 album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

However, with encouragement from one of the group’s biggest fans, the legendary June Carter Cash, the recording sessions for Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume Two commenced in the winter of 1988, with a cast of accomplished musicians who are now considered cornerstones of Americana music.

Often referred to simply as Circle 2, the acclaimed project was released in 1989 and went on to win three Grammy Awards and a CMA Award for Album of the Year. To commemorate its 30th anniversary, Jeff Hanna shares its back story with the Bluegrass Situation.

Editor’s Note: Jeff Hanna and guest Sam Bush will participate in a screening of clips from a documentary film, The Making of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume Two, at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville on Wednesday, September 11 at 11 a.m., during AmericanaFest.

BGS: Can you explain why Circle 2 is such an important album for the band?

Hanna: It’s important in our history because at that point, we were no longer just the kids. We were all in our early 20s when we did the first Circle record, making music with those revered folks. And so we had a different point of view, somewhat. Here we were in the midst of our mainstream country career, and we still revered the first album.

The way we viewed Circle 1 was like something untouchable – just leave it. It is what it is. As time went on and as that project matured, it mattered a lot to a lot of people, including us. So we resisted the concept of doing another Circle record. Especially me, Jimmy Ibbotson, and Jimmie Fadden. Bob Carpenter was like, “I didn’t get to play on the first one! I wasn’t in the band! I want to do it!” He was pretty excited about the concept, and Chuck Morris, our manager at the time, brought it up a bunch. But we waited a while, and by the time it came out, it was 17 years between the releases.

When did you decide to move forward with it?

We were on tour with the Johnny Cash show, which included the Carter Family, and we were in Europe. I think it was in 1988 in Switzerland. June came into our dressing room — and she would visit us a lot. She was really sweet and she loved to talk about Mother Maybelle, and how much she loved us. She called us “them dirty boys.” I love that. And at the end of the conversation, she said, “You know, if you all ever thought about doing another Circle record, John and I would really love to take part in it.”

That was the tipping point. If you have that sort of endorsement from folks we idolized, and who were so important in the history of this music – and music in general — we thought, “Well, there you go.” That’s what we did. The winter of ’88, we started making calls.

How did you come up with the guest list, so to speak, for this one?

Our approach was to delve more into the next generation of folks, like New Grass Revival, and certainly a lot of our singer-songwriter buddies, like Bruce Hornsby, John Hiatt, Rosanne Cash, and John Prine. We had only recorded a little bit with Emmylou Harris and we really wanted to work with her. And we were really excited to do a record with Levon Helm. That was one of the highlights.

I think the collaborative spirit of this album really shines through when Bruce Hornsby is playing “Valley Road” with you guys.

I’d never met Bruce Hornsby but I was a huge fan of his music. I heard “Every Little Kiss” on the radio and it just blew me away. But then I’m reading an article in a magazine, and it was a “desert island disc” thing, talking about the records that you’ve gotta have, and he mentioned Will the Circle Be Unbroken. It was like, WOW! So I somehow got his phone number, I called him up — cold-called him — and he said, “Oh yeah, man, I love that record, I love you guys.” I said, “You’ve seen us play?” He said, “Yeah, my brother and I sneaked in.” We were playing a college show in his hometown, and those guys started carrying amps into the venue. We were unloading the truck and they started carrying gear in, and ended up sort of hiding behind the bleachers, and when the show started, came out and watched the show.

We hit it off right away, so there’s a direct line to Circle 1 right there. And when we were putting together our core band for the sessions, of course we included our buddy Randy Scruggs (who was on the first Circle album), Roy Huskey Jr. (whose dad Junior Huskey played on the first album), Jerry Douglas, Mark O’Connor… It was so much fun walking in and making music with those guys every day. Chet Atkins is on a track and played one of my guitars, which I liked. I know I’m never selling that guitar.

One of the coolest tracks on there is “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” How did that come about?

We brought in Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, because the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers were so important to us. The Byrds had done Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” but they wouldn’t play it on country radio, so we cut a version of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” with Roger and Chris, and it became a Top 10 country single, which we thought was cool redemption. We were really excited about being on the track with them. We still play that tune now and again. That’s one of our favorites. We’re really happy to have a good excuse to play it, because for years we played it in sound checks anyway.

It’s been 30 years now, but what do you remember about how Circle 2 was received upon release?

Perhaps because we had the platform of being a hit country band right about then, the label promoted the heck out of the record when it initially came out. And it had hits on it, that’s the other thing. Circle 1 didn’t really have any radio impact, whereas Circle 2 had “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” and we had a song called “When It’s Gone” that was a Top 10 single.

It’s a significant record and it’s funny, having been there from the get-go with this band, and having that first Circle record so deeply ingrained in my DNA, I sometimes forget how important Circle 2 was to a lot of folks. I’ve had more than one songwriter and musician tell me, “That’s what got me into you guys.”


 

John Hiatt’s ‘The Eclipse Sessions’ Shares Common Bond with His Best Work

Nowadays we make pinhole cameras and don special glasses to take it in, and we forget that an eclipse must have once been terrifying. We’ve got thousands of years of science and human experience to reassure us now, but what must the first one have felt like? Unexplained darkness in the middle of the day, no idea if or when the sun would reappear—it had to have been unnerving to say the least. It’s a novelty now because we know it’s nothing to worry about; the sun always comes back.

That’s not why legendary songwriter John Hiatt chose to name his latest record The Eclipse Sessions, though it was recorded during the solar eclipse in August 2017. (“I never know what to call these things, so this one kind of presented itself and it seemed to fit,” he says.) But with four years in between it and 2014’s Terms of My Surrender, the highly prolific Hiatt was forced to similarly wait calmly for something he knew would return eventually.

“I don’t really consider writer’s block a state anymore,” he says. “I mean, I’m either writing or I’m not writing; it doesn’t really matter. You know, I go for periods where I don’t write, but the only sort of discipline I have regarding songwriting is I pick up a guitar pretty much every day for a half hour, hour, two hours, and if a song is gonna come, that’s usually when it comes, when it shows up. So I’ve always done that since I first started playing guitar when I was 11. … I guess I’ve had enough of a life of songwriting that I figured they’ll come eventually, you know. You only have writer’s block if you tell yourself you have writer’s block.”

These songs came after a period of transition that included moving into the city of Nashville after 25 years in rural Williamson County. After wrapping a long tour in 2015, Hiatt cut his dates in half, now aiming for about 60 or 70 shows a year. “And then just getting older,” he adds. “You know, I turned 66 this past summer, so a lot of things converged all at once to come up with a different set of songs with different subject matter.”

He continues, “I always use the old Guy Clark quote, when do you know when it’s time to make a record? He said, ‘When I’ve got 10 good songs,’ so that’s kind of the rule of thumb I go by. It’s always if I get a batch of songs together, then it’s time to record. So I didn’t have any until finally I had about 15 songs at midsummer last year. It took me a couple years between Terms of My Surrender and this record just to start writing. We’d been touring pretty relentlessly through the end of 2015. And like I said, with all the other shifts in my life, it took me a minute to see the next train, what station it was gonna leave out of.”

Once Hiatt amassed a decent amount of songs, he booked time in a studio south of Nashville owned by Kevin McKendree. Although he had considered a solo acoustic approach, he brought on drummer Kenneth Blevins and bass player Patrick O’Hearn for the sessions, resulting in what Hiatt calls “a little happy accident.”

“I still wasn’t convinced I was making a record. I just had some songs,” Hiatt explains. “I said ‘I’ll just bring my little Gibson LG2 and play acoustic, and I’ll just sing and play the songs and you guys just play along with me, we’ll just put them down on tape and see how it goes’ and that’s what we did,” Hiatt says. “And then next thing you know we were doing about three songs a day, and we’d get about three recorded and Kevin would come put piano or organ on it almost immediately and we’d go home at night and his little son Yates McKendree, he was 15 years old at the time, would come in at night and put an electric guitar part on, and that’s how the record got made.”

The unplanned nature of The Eclipse Sessions has led Hiatt to liken it to two of his most beloved albums, 1987’s Bring the Family and 2000’s Crossing Muddy Waters, and while he won’t go so far as to say that he works best flying by the seat of his pants, he admits that “I sure enjoy it when that happens, let’s put it that way. … It doesn’t always happen. But yeah, it always feels the best. When it works, it’s great, and when you feel like you come out with something that has a flow to it and has a beginning, middle and end that feels like it’s of a piece—that’s what I meant when I said I felt that those three records had a common bond.”

To a certain extent, all of his work shares that serendipitous quality because he’s careful to never force a writing session, preferring to wait for inspiration to strike naturally.

“My experience with that is I set myself up when I tell myself that I’m gonna write a song because it almost never happens,” he says. “So I just play guitar. I give myself the tools that make songs happen, and if it’s gonna happen, that’s when it’s gonna happen. And if it doesn’t, that’s fine too. You know, it’s just music. So I just put myself around the music and I play and I sing, yodel, whatever the hell it is I do, because I enjoy it. Like I said I’ve done it since I was 11, and I’m 66, so that’s a pretty long time at it – 55 years, Jesus Christ, that’s over half a century. It’s just part of who I am. So if I’m gonna write a song, that’s how it happens. Some days I write and some days I don’t. There’s no pressure.”

That’s how he came to write “Over the Hill,” a meditation on aging about a man who’s “long in the tooth” but still eager to take “huge bites of life.”

“I’ll get a melody going and I’ll be singing nonsense and then hopefully some sort of lyric idea will pop through and then I’ll get a line, and that’s what happened with that one,” Hiatt says. “I got that line ‘I’m over the hill, under the bridge, got a few peaks and valleys I ain’t seen’ and I thought ‘well that’s interesting, let’s write that, what’s that guy talking about?’ So that’s how that one kind of got started and then it was all about that, how do you deal with old age? You know, it’s a wonderful period of your life and yet it’s diminishing too, so it’s fascinating how you deal with that.”

And while he’s more than half a century removed from the first song he wrote (“Beth Ann,” at age 11, for a fifth-grade classmate he had his eye on), Hiatt has no plans to stop writing, recording and performing—no matter how “over the hill” he gets.

“Even if it was just at the corner pub, it wouldn’t matter to me,” he says. “I wanna write songs, I wanna sing, and it kinda doesn’t matter where I do it or how I do it. I’m very fortunate I get to do it, and I’m extremely grateful that I’ve been able to do it and make a living and have a family, and it’s been wonderful, but I would do it regardless.

“It’s the same stuff I’ve pretty much always enjoyed doing, which is telling stories about the agony and ecstasy of life, the will of love to overcome and the pain, the agony of defeat and how we pick ourselves back up and go on in spite of the worst of it,” he says. “That stuff, the stuff that makes us all get up in the morning and go at it.”

The stuff we’ve come to trust we’ll always get from John Hiatt, as sure as the sun.


Photo credit: David McClister

BGS 5+5: Boo Ray

Name: Boo Ray
Hometown: Western Mountains of North Carolina
Latest album: Sea of Lights
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): “During the few-years span that I just couldn’t seem to stay out of jail, the other incarcerated guys that I gambled with on Spades and Tonk called me ‘Boot-a-rang.’ I didn’t ever bother to correct ‘em. In grade school, my very first band was also called Rhythm & Booze; it was a 4 piece band and Marshall Tucker’s “Can’t You See” was a feature of our set.”

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?

Ahh that’s a cool question… Well, it might could be that Southern writers like Harry Crews, Ron Rash, and Mark Twain make me think it’s important to have a writing voice, and that there’s something powerful and magic about the just right combination of words used to tell the truth of our human experience.

I knew this guy everybody called Mr. Jack that ran a sawmill-–an old V-Twin Harley motor bolted to a 12″x12″ post frame and a great big 15-foot 2″ bandsaw blade that pitched and twisted so wildly when it ran that it just seemed impossible it could have ever made a straight cut. But it did cut 18-foot-long, perfectly straight slices off the huge logs he used to run through that mill. He’d cut some 1/4″ thin cedar for me to use as lining on chests. The way Mr. Jack cussed at and about his sawmill, the logs, the lumber and his equipment, expressed his passionate care, deep affection, forgiving humor and humble mastery of his industry. I suppose my affection for the way Mr. Jack carried on about his sawmill might be responsible for my cussin’.

My great buddy, artist James Willis, is constantly teaching me about perspective and how to use detail and lack of detail as creative storytelling devices. Sean Brock’s amazing passion, depth of knowledge, agrarian approach, his wood coal cooking and his completely inclusive use of information, style, technique, perspective and philosophy, have certainly influenced me.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

The point of the spear is compassion, inspiration and empowerment. I’m compelled to express to my fellow man that the troubles of life are not for nothing. The singer-songwriters that have moved me the most write songs that are part of the classic American songbook. So the purpose of my endeavor as a singer-songwriter is to land some songs, or a song, in the classic American songbook, whatever that is. I think that songbook includes songs by Lowell George, Leon Russell, John Hiatt and Fiona Apple. My favorite Grateful Dead record is the one that Lowell George produced, Shakedown Street. The word “Pop” ain’t necessarily blasphemy to me, unless it’s in front of the word “country”…

After writing the songs my mission is to perform the songs with my badass guitar-slingin’ band and build a dynamic, powerful and unique live sound around the character and nature of each of the songs. Live performance is more important to me than recording records, but I use the records as templates, stylistically, and to suggest possible arrangements. For me, the style itself demands that the records are exciting soundscapes, and experimental in the recording and engineering. If my records sound like someone else I’ve fallen short.

For me the singer-songwriter/guitar band-sound bar is set by acts like: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Little Feat, ZZ Top, Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives, any of John Hiatt’s bands (from The Goners and Little Village to his Trio), and Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit. So what’s my mission statement? I want to be Jerry Reed.

Boo Ray & Sean Brock

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

I don’t spend enough time on/in the water lately. As a kid, I was at the river every week and in the woods all summer long. Sunrises and sunsets are important to me. I really tried to get up to my buddy Sean Minor’s for spring branding and spend some time roping, riding and working cattle this year, but had shows and sessions I couldn’t get out of. I like to do tractor work, eat homegrown tomatoes, negotiate the price of a late ’50s step-side GMC truck or dispute the shape of the taillights on a ’68 Chevelle while cracking pecans against each other, and get caught in a torrential downpour and soaked to the bone after doing some farm work.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

Agreed, and I totally dig a supper club-type show. How about Sean Brock doing some kind of Low Country spread with Ossabaw pork sock-sausage, rice peas, Geechie Boy Grits with a fresh catch, and some kind summer vegetables, with Billy Gibbons giving his take on Hill Country Blues. Billy and Sean are both great historians, passionate technicians and intuitive as hell. That’d be the dream pairing.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

The artists I like definitely seem to have character-driven numbers in their repertoire: Tom Petty’s “Break Down” and “American Girl,” Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night,” and Don Williams “Tulsa Time,” written by Danny Flowers. Those kind of songs hold you up as a performer and don’t require you to emote and be so intimate, at least for three or four minutes at a time anyways. Sometimes I might jokingly introduce “Redneck Rock & Roll” as a song that I wrote first-person as Kenny Powers. But I certainly do keep a few of those songs in my set: “I Got the Jug,” “Johnny’s Tavern,” “Six Weeks in  Motel”, even “Sea of Lights” is that way now, most of the time. There’ve been a few times that singing “Sea of Lights” made me involuntarily weep and cry…

On the “you”/”me’ thing; I saw this Mary J. Blige performance once, she was singing this devastated lovesick number and my heart was just broken for her, you know? Then in the last chorus, nothing left but ashes and pain, she flips the script on the “you”/”me” switch and starts singing “bye bye” and waving as she left, and I realized she was singing my blues, and she was the one that was leaving. I was leveled. It was like a damned magic trick she’d just performed. I’ve tried variations of that writing device in my songs “Constantina,” “Six Weeks in a Motel,” and the “Hard to Tell” collab with Lilly Winwood all have a moment where they pivot or twist like that a little bit.


Photo of Boo Ray: Courtesy of Sideways Media
Photo of Boo Ray with Sean Brock: Price Harrison

10 Tunes for Your End of Summer Road Trip

Summer’s pretty much over, but there’s still time to get in one last road trip to see Uncle Phil and Aunt May down Pennsyltucky way. So roll down the windows of the minivan, bluetooth your Spotify into the entertainment system, and hit the highway to this playlist of 10 Tunes for Your End of Summer Road Trip.

New Grass Revival: "On the Boulevard"
Guitarist Pat Flynn wrote this one as the title cut for the first of four albums recorded by the band’s last lineup (that included Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, and John Cowan). It’s a nice, easy cooker that’s perfect to get you off the onramp and onto the road.

The Allman Brothers: "Jessica"
Some 40+ years since the Allmans dropped this in 1973, it’s still one of the greatest country instrumentals of all time. Dicky Betts wrote the record for his daughter with Les Dudek helping out on the bridge. Air guitaring is allowed in the passenger’s seat only.

Little Feat: "Let It Roll"
The title cut from the first post-Lowell album from the Feat, this one simply smokes, from the opening B3 spread by Billy Payne to the funky horn riffs to the song’s drive-off-the-cliff ending. Please don’t follow.

Robert Earl Keen: "Amarillo Highway"
If you’re going on a road trip, who would be the first Americana artist you’d invite? I’d invite Robert Earl Keen to sing while I drive (and beat four-on-the-floor with my free foot).

Dave Dudley: "Six Days on the Highway"
Earl Green and Muscle Shoals songwriter Carl Montgomery wrote this one for Dave Dudley. It’s a little known fact that going on a family road trip without playing this song once is illegal in 29 states and the District of Columbia.

Junior Brown: "Highway Patrol"
Dave’s the rebel and Junior’s the law — and, funny enough, they sound almost the same. One of the best songs ever recorded by a dude who easily has the best guitar collection on the planet.

John Hiatt: "Memphis in the Meantime"
Any excuse to include John Hiatt in a playlist is an acceptable excuse … except no excuse is needed. This tune rocks as hard as any he’s ever recorded.

The Band: "Endless Highway"
This is a song that was batted around the Band for a number of years but never got a proper airing. Capitol Records does us a favor by including it on a rarities record and we inject it into the proceedings, right between John Hiatt and Cross Canadian Ragweed.

Cross Canadian Ragweed: "Highway 377"
A road trip without at least one sinister song is like a campfire without a ghost story. Herein, we travel down the dark road that is “Highway 377,” courtesy of the dearly departed Cross Canadian Ragweed.

Homer & Jethro: "Freda on the Freeway"
Every sinister song needs a silly antidote and this one’s perfect. Country humorist Don Bowman recorded this one in ‘66, but his musical brethren Homer & Jethro bring this one home to roost.

Save the full playlist to your Spotify account right here.


Photo credit: Princess Stand in the Rain / Foter / CC BY-NC