Tag: songwriters

Georgia on His Mind: A Conversation with Brent Cobb

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Georgia-born Brent Cobb doesn’t run from his roots. The singer/songwriter, a cousin to well-known Americana producer Dave Cobb, includes bits from his hometown and his upbringing throughout his latest full-length, Shine on Rainy Day. But this isn’t an album about a homebody or a good ol’ boy pining for old times. Rather, the record balances the comforts of homes and hometowns with the forward-moving momentum of life on the road. Songs like “Country Bound,” a number Brent borrowed from his father Patrick Cobb, is a homesick number, while “Traveling Poor Boy” shows off Cobb’s troubadour side. Shine on Rainy Day is a record for listeners with those same sensibilities, appealing to homesickness and travel and loss with an enduring message that urges its audience to see past current hardships.

Let’s start off with something basic: Can you tell me about growing up with music — your first experiences starting to write songs and also seeing songs written?

Yeah, I can still remember the first song I ever wrote … I don't know if you want to hear about that …

I do!

It was about rocks.

[Laughs]

It was walking around through the iron ore pits at my grandmother's house with my little sister. We were collecting iron ore rocks and it was a song about collecting rocks. It was "Millions and Billions and Jillions of Rocks," that was the name of my first song. [Laughs] I was 8 or 9. We just had picking parties — family picking parties and everybody played, and everybody wrote, and everybody sang.

Just to let you know what level it went to … In ’92, my dad had the opportunity — Doug Stone flew him to Nashville and took him around to a lot of publishers and with agents and record labels — and my dad was going to sign with Giant Records. He wound up not doing it because I was 7 and my sister was 3, and they kept talking about how much he would be gone on the road. So he decided to stay local, stay regional, and just play on weekends. I just always grew up around music. It was accepted as a trade and a career in my family.

“Country Bound” was the first song that I ever witnessed being written. I was 5, and we were in Cleveland, Ohio, for Christmas with my mama's folk. I was seeing snow for the first time out the window and then I would turn around and my dad and my uncle were writing "Country Bound." I remember them like it was yesterday writing "Country Bound." Every year on Thanksgiving, when my aunts and uncles would come into Georgia from Cleveland, we'd always play "Country Bound." I wanted to include it on this album because it's always been my favorite song. This album sort of has a theme of getting back home a little bit to it.

I really noticed that theme of getting back home. I know Dave Cobb produced this record, and you guys are related and you’d worked together before. How did this specific record come about?

After he moved to Nashville, we'd get together here and there and we always were just like, "Someday we'll do a record here." I toured for about four years — did 120 dates a year — and I stopped when I found out that I was fixin’ to have my first baby. I had a little baby girl, and so I took an indefinite amount of time off the road, and didn't know if I'd ever go back to making records as an artist or if I'd continue to just write songs.

In the middle of this break, Dave called me and he was making Southern Family. He said "Man, I'm putting together a concept album called Southern Family and I only thought it'd be appropriate for me to have my own Southern family be a part of the record, if you would write a song for it." And I was like, "Hell, yeah, I'll do that! That'd be great!" And so I wrote a song for Southern Family called "Down Home." I also helped … I was fortunate enough to write Miranda Lambert's song with her in "Sweet By and By."

When we were in the studio recording both of these songs, it just felt so good to be back in there with Dave. It just felt like home, and we knew that we had to make a record, but we didn't know that it was going to turn into all of this and I was going to do a deal with him or anything.

He produces like the way that I think I write. I write real spontaneously, and I write off of the muse of a moment. He's the same way as a producer. When he says something doesn't feel right, he doesn't mean technically it doesn't feel right; he means in his heart it doesn't feel right. And that's the way that I am when I write songs. It just magically happens.

Tell me a little bit more about writing songs. You’ve got the one song on the record, “Solving Problems,” that digs into the songwriting portion of your career. I think there is an interesting dynamic between this idea of being an artist versus being a songwriter when really, songwriting is an art.

I know! I never knew there was a difference! I thought they were all one and the same. But apparently, that's the first question that every publisher asks on Music Row. When I first went down there and I was checking on getting a publishing deal, they asked, "Are you more of a writer or are you more of an artist?" I just didn't know it was that different, really. And I guess it's because I like to do both — performing and writing — so much. Some people don't like the idea of going to Music Row and and co-writing in a publishing house, but I love it.

What is it that you like about it?

Well, I'll just tell you what my day is, so you can get an idea of what it's like: I get up at 6:30 with my baby and I drink coffee, and my wife gets home from work. I go in to write about 9 or so in the morning. I write till 3 o'clock in the afternoon with someone, whether it’s a co-writer or my publisher schedules a writer with me. While we write, we treat it like a regular job. It’s so cool to me because of the history of Music Row. If you read Willie Nelson's memoir — It's a Long Story is the name of it — he talks about writing "Hello Walls." That was the first song that he ever co-wrote on Music Row, and he just thought that it was such a strange feeling walking in there and not knowing a person and having to write these personal songs.

It is like that, but once you get used to it, it just becomes so much fun. It's just a bunch of collaboration … It's the best job in the world. I'm just glad to have it.

What made you decide to talk about it in “Solving Problems?”

I didn't have nothing else to write that day. [Laughs] That's the God's honest truth. I couldn't make anything else come, so … It's like, "Well, man, let's just write about exactly what we're doing right here." It's cool to be on Music Row writing songs about being on Music Row writing a song.

Speaking of co-writes, I would love to talk about "Shine on Rainy Day." That song appeared on Andrew Combs' record, and it says so much about the strength of the song that you guys can both make it your own. The title is different and I'd love to hear about why you decided to make that the title track of the album and what that song means specifically to you.

For me, that song meant a lot of things, really. It was coming from a lot of different places, so it's kind of hard to say. When you're going through a tough time, it takes a tough time to get to the end of that. When a thunderstorm comes up and the lightning strikes and it cleans the air, the next day the air is crisper, and the sky is bluer, and the trees are greener, and the grass is greener. After a storm passes, things are just better. They're new again. So that's what that meant for me, and it was from the last 10 years trying to pursue this career. Just like anything, it's got its ups and downs and it gets tough sometimes. So it's really about that for me.

I love that Andrew did it, as well. In the past, there'd be five or six different versions of the same song. I don't know how many different versions of "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" there are, but there are a ton of them that were all made back then. I love when a bunch of different artists do a song and I wish that would come back. I don't know why it doesn't exist as much anymore.

I named the album Shine on Rainy Day because I had given a pre-copy of the album to a close friend of mine, when he and his wife had just gone through a very personal family tragedy. That song was the one that really stuck out to him. It just really inspired me to name the album after it.

You write a lot about Georgia. I recognize landmarks and highways in the lyrics. How much of this was influenced by where you’re from and the idea of home?

I grew up in real rural Georgia, the southwest side of Georgia. It’s the surroundings, the wildlife, the pine trees, the red clay. It's the people down there. Growing up, you couldn't buy beer on Sundays. People are a little more cut off from the rest of the world. Their traditions and their ways — and mine, too — they're a little more old school. Everything's got a routine to it. It's just like reading a book that's been around forever. I don't know how to explain it. It's just something I've always noticed, too, and I've always studied. I guess it was a mixture of those surroundings and that environment, but then also with my family, too, being musical. I just love Georgia.

Photo credit: Don VanCleave

Standing on the Table: Musing on Townes Van Zandt

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“Townes Van Zandt’s the best songwriter in the world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” — Steve Earle

Agreed, Mr. Earle.

By now, Steve Earle’s devotion to and admiration for Townes Van Zandt are fairly well-known bits of music history. Earle used to carry Van Zandt’s guitars around for him. What isn’t so known is Van Zandt’s response to the notion that he was a superior songwriter to Dylan, or that such a comical gesture such as standing on Dylan’s furniture could be accomplished: “I’ve met Bob Dylan’s bodyguards, and if Steve Earle thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table, he’s sadly mistaken,” was Townes’s pragmatic reply.

An indispensable book for any Van Zandtian is To Live’s To Fly, a remarkable, lyrical effort by John Kruth with the subtitle “The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt.” It’s a book in which Kruth’s abilities rise to that of a very good fiction writer, as if [add your favorite Southern novelist] had turned musicologist and journalist writing the tumultuous times of the mythical and legendary Van Zandt. Some of the stories about Townes certainly seem part legend, part myth. Like the time Townes was attending university in Boulder, Colorado, and deliberately fell from a high balcony and plummeted, Icarus-like, to the earth in order to see how it felt. Or the time Townes was (finally) to go on tour with Lightnin’ Hopkins — one of the former’s heroes — but got drunk and flew out of a manic-paced pickup truck and broke his arm, making the tour insurmountable.

Kruth’s book is filled with interviews, stories, and anecdotes that all weave together to make something gorgeous, and his prose sometimes makes one want to give up and write at the same time, to make little efforts in crafting better thoughts and sentences. Good luck.

What little I know about Van Zandt — from his hard living, habits and addictions, and mental disorders — I have learned from Kruth’s masterpiece. What I actually discovered about Van Zandt on my own, which may be the experience of so many other souls, comes from daily attention to his songs which, in the end, are mysteries in themselves. Van Zandt’s tunes call one back and back again.

Take “Waitin’ Around to Die,” the first song he wrote, crafted in a tiny closet shortly after his marriage to his first wife, Fran. It was made just around their honeymoonish salad days, and the song speaks to the darkness that resides in so many of us, though we mask it in a variety of frivolous or sincere or even actively destructive ways. Needless to say, the song frightened Van Zandt’s wife.

At the time of filming, several musicians and friends of the unparalleled troubadour expected him to be living in a reasonable house and better situation. Instead, the scene is one of squalor and drunkenness, yet Townes performs perfectly, in spite of copious amounts of whiskey and generous allotments of poverty. We follow the singer into a tale of wife-beating, robbery, and addiction, difficult subjects to broach with one’s new bride who simply didn’t see those sorts of bleak — albeit beautifully and well-made — sentiments coming from hubby.

“And I am in retirement from love …” — William H. Gass

“’Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel’ relates a tale of bitter disappointment in intricate wordplay and metaphor, with a twist of spite that sounds inspired by Dylan. In a mosaic of images and seemingly disconnected events, Townes lays the guilt of another failed love affair at the feet of a fickle woman.” (Kruth, pg. 110)

Kevin Eggers signed Townes in 1968, and recorded and released the bulk of the musician’s work. To this day, controversy and legal battles still rage around the rights to Van Zandt’s music. It is as if the songwriter — who pushed himself through addictions and hardships to craft some of the greatest songs ever written, who was known for his hatred of money, who was concerned with the next gig, the next inspiration, the next vision and tune — isn’t free even after his release from this world. We second Guy Clark’s response to queries about Van Zandt’s royalties and estate: “That’s none of my damn business,” said the normally loquacious and articulate Clark in an interview with The Austin Chronicle in an interview. Agreed, Mr. Clark.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Leo Tolstoy wrote in one of those impossibly thick Russian novels that draw the reader in and, in the end, make him or her wish the book had been even longer. The same wish might apply to Townes’s discography. From recorded live shows to studio albums, one cannot get one’s hands on enough of his music. It’s the feeling — at least when writing an article or piece about the singer/songwriter — that one’s own efforts are false, useless. Each word and eventual sentence is swallowed whole by Van Zandt’s songs, lyrics, life.

When researching his life — from legal battles over music to his nearly cursed inability to have a long-lasting relationship with a woman to falling from that balcony — anything added now rings hollow and pointless. Townes is and was as good or better than Dylan.

I imagine Townes landing after that fall he deliberately took. I imagine him smiling and brushing himself off, and finally standing on some table of his own, singing through a golden room. I imagine him happy, finally, and letting his music also stand on its own. Townes was a body and mind tuned into something inaccessible to most. Call it a god, a form, a preternatural gift that few understand or know of. Call it the songwriter’s knack for falling and, like the mythical Phoenix, rising out of the ashes, rising from the ground, and letting the voice bell and resound against all odds.

Townes had that, whatever that is.

Counsel of Elders: Billy Joe Shaver on Honoring the Song

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We’re starting a new column at the BGS called Counsel of Elders, wherein long-established artists pass their wisdom down to the upcoming generations.

Billy Joe Shaver is one of the most celebrated songwriters of the 20th Century. He is a songwriter’s songwriter whose music is honest and gritty … just like Shaver himself. He lives the music. As one of the main architects of the Outlaw Country movement, Shaver wrote nine of the 10 songs on Waylon Jennings' breakthrough album, Honky Tonk Heroes. Together, Shaver and Jennings broke away from the Nashville Sound and ushered in the harder, more traditional country music of the 1970s. Fellow Outlaw Kris Kristofferson was such a fan that he produced Shaver's debut album in 1973. You may not know the name Billy Joe Shaver, but we guarantee your favorite songwriter is a fan.

Is there something that you know now that you wish you'd known when you were starting out as a songwriter that would have saved you some grief?

Oh yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of things I wish I knew. I guess the main thing is that people are gonna steal from you. You know, songs are so precious and, if they steal them, it’s okay if they get it right. But most times, when they do, they get them … I hate to bring it up, but it’s the truth: If they take them from you, they don’t record them worth a darn because they’re in a big hurry. You know, a person runs faster with a stolen watermelon than one they bought.

I read that you had some publishing rights issues. Is that what you’re referring to?

Yeah, and actually some big songs went big that just broke my heart because I’d just come into town. People need to know that, when you write these things, they’re part of you. The thing is, they’re like real people. I don’t want to say you have to guard them, but you need to be careful with them and treat them good, like children really. When I find I write what I think is a good one, one that I really want to cherish, I spend a lot of time with it before I let anyone else hear it. I just keep going over and over it because it’s like a child and good. You want to spend some time with it. I know everybody says it, but it’s true.

That’s interesting because, in your songs, you feel so present in them. I don’t have kids, but I assume you see yourself in your songs much like you would in your children.

Yeah, that’s what I got. People need to get it in them that what they’re doing is really very, very important. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s not. It’s art. If you treat it like precious art, you’ll be better off. And the world, too, because you get it out the way you really wanted it. It don’t matter to me whose name is on it. If they get it right, it’s okay. As long as it’s out there right. It’s best to just watch it and be careful. It’s probably not what people want to hear, but it’s true.

It’s also what people need to hear. Was there anyone who helped you navigate the waters when you were starting out as a songwriter?

Not really, no. Nobody in my family played or did music. I was kind of older, anyway. I came into town and I knew … My English teacher way back when I was in the eighth grade told me how good I was and I took her word for it because she was real sharp. She was a 12th grade English teach we had in homeroom. The 8th graders were mixed with the 12th graders. She would come in for an hour and she would teach language … she was the one that always had you do something. She had us write poems. I wrote down one and she didn’t think I wrote it. I was one of those kids with the sleeves rolled up with cigarettes in it. So she didn’t believe I wrote it and she gave me an assignment about a very specific thing to write about and I did. It’s college-accepted poetry now. It was good.

When I quit school, she was upset with me for quitting school because I had a great talent, and I knew it. Which is why, when I cut my fingers off — when I was about 21, I had some fingers cut off at a sawmill — I shot a prayer up to God and said, “God, if you just get me through this one, I’ll go back to doing what I’m supposed to do.” And sure enough, I did. I went right back to practicing guitar. I’d been writing poetry that whole time anyway and I had these songs. I came to town and it happened very quick for me. Then again, I was older. I’d done a lot of living and been a lot of places. Everything I wrote about I did. Waylon Jennings did a whole album of my songs called Honky Tonk Heroes. It helped him as much as it did me, and that’s what I was figuring out … but I couldn’t sing as good as him. The songs are bigger than me, really. They’re huge and he banged them. He stuck his neck out and did that. That’s what got me on.

The main thing is just keep on trying. When you’re knocked down, don’t have a job, or not with a publishing company, if you’re a drunk even, or an addict, just keep on writing because as long as you’re writing and putting down words that you really like, that means you’re a success. Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not because you’ll have the songs when your time comes. And it’ll come.

Photo credit: Jim McGuire