Tag: T Bone Burnett

Sean Watkins Heeds Good Advice (or Not) on Watkins Family Hour’s Second Album

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For brother sister, Watkins Family Hour’s sophomore album and first in five years, Sara and Sean Watkins decided to tighten their focus, writing songs that allowed them to shine as a duo. “It was an experiment, and it ended up being so fun and totally different from the first Watkins Family Hour record we did,” Sean says. “In this case, more than any other project, we were very deliberate about the style of the songs, how they came together, and how we recorded them.”

The effort paid off. Ringing in at ten tracks, including seven originals, brother sister ranges from glittering, harmony-driven folk (opener “The Cure”) to can’t-help-but-dance silliness (“Keep It Clean,” a Charley Jordan featuring vocals from David Garza, Gaby Moreno, and John C. Reilly). We caught up with Sara and Sean individually, chatting about the album and the forces in their careers that built them, including their early years with Nickel Creek. Read our Artist of the Month interview with Sean below, and catch Sara’s interview here.

BGS: You wrote a good portion of “Fake Badge, Real Gun” before you brought the idea to Sara. What inspired it?

Sean Watkins: I have a folder in my notes on my phone, Future Song Titles. I like to think about what a good song title is — you know, when you see a song title on a record and you’re like, “Oh, I really want to know, I want to hear that song.” A book title can be the same way. I heard the term “Fake Badge, Real Gun” in a hotel room on some kind of local news station. It was a headline, probably a story about a kid, or somebody who was pretending to be a police officer. When I heard that phrase, I put it in my phone, because I just thought, “There’s a lot more in there to be explored.”

There are plenty of people in power who don’t deserve to be. They have the power to destroy and create a lot of chaos, but they didn’t really earn it, or they don’t deserve to be there for one reason or another. Everybody comes into contact with authorities who affect you in profound ways, especially when you’re younger, without knowing how they’re affecting you negatively. At a certain age you get to a point where you unpack your childhood — what your teachers taught you, what you heard in church or what you heard in college — and you have to look at it objectively and figure out who gave you that advice, what they were meaning to get across, and whether you still believe it.

Did anything in your life specifically come to mind?

I went to a Baptist Christian school for a while. It wasn’t because my family was Baptist, but because it was the closest private school, and my parents were public school teachers and didn’t really like the way public school was going. The teachers were pretty strict, evangelical, and I remember this girl who was probably in seventh or eighth grade. She had a great voice, and she got vocal nodes on her vocal chords — it’s just something that happens when you don’t use the right singing technique. It happens to a lot of people. But she asked our Bible teacher, “Do you think God gave me these vocal nodes because I’ve been singing secular music?” I think she’d sang an Oasis song at a coffee shop or something.

And the teacher said, “Yeah, that’s probably why.” Like, in all seriousness, he told her that, because she sang a secular song, God gave her these vocal nodes. And he believed it! But who knows how long that stuck with her, that by singing a certain kind of song God will strike you. You can carry that with you for the rest of your life, whether you know it or not. So I try to think about that in my life: What are the things that I’m carrying around that I don’t need to carry around, because someone who had authority used their “gun” in a way that was, looking back, absolutely wrong? You can take the idea out to any number of places in the world.

The cover of the Charley Jordan song is so fun — what a way to end the record. Can you tell me about deciding to cover “Keep It Clean”?

A few weeks before going into the studio, and we were taking inventory of what we had, what kinds of things might be fun to add to the record, what was missing. We just thought it’d be fun to have one song that’s just a party song: what people know the Family Hour to be, which is kind of a wild, fun ruckus; a song that’s easy for anyone to jump in on, with different people singing verses. Something that sounds like what we do when we play our shows [in Los Angeles] at Largo.

Originally I heard this song when I did a month of shows with Lyle Lovett, playing in his band years ago filling in for a friend of mine who played guitar with him. He did that song every night, but totally different: His version was a bouncy, Texas-swing kind of vibe. I really liked it, and I asked him where it came from. He said it was a Charley Jordan song, but that he’d changed it a lot, and that I should check out the original. It’s so funny because it’s such an old song, but it has such a beautiful, almost current pop melody to it. The guitar line in the original version sounds like a Beach Boys melody. It doesn’t sound like ‘20s blues at all, and I thought that was a really cool element of it. So we based our version on that, although it evolved and sounds very different.

Another thing I like about it is that the lyrics are just quirky and weird; you can’t really tell what they are. The verses were based on popular off-color jokes at the time. So people hearing the song back then would have gotten these references that we’re not getting right now. [Laughs] And they might just be really dumb jokes! It’s like a museum piece. I thought it was so cool.

It’s been twenty years since Nickel Creek released its self-titled, breakout album. How do you feel like the success you had then influenced the way Americana and bluegrass are perceived now, or influenced the player you are now?

Every seven or ten years it seems like there’s a recurrence of some kind of music, and at that time, there was a confluence of things that happened that brought acoustic music way more to the forefront. A big one of those was the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack: a soundtrack for a movie that sells millions and millions of records, and is mostly old-time bluegrass, that’s a big deal. Alison Krauss was the only one selling millions of records playing anything related to bluegrass, and she wasn’t playing very traditional music. So that record came out, and Alison was — still is — just cranking away, hugely popular. We kind of got lumped in with all of that. People thought we were on the soundtrack a lot, which we weren’t. [Laughs]

There was just a wave. We have to give Alison credit because she saw the potential in what we could do. That first record is a very different record than we wanted it to be. We were so young, so green. We wanted to make a much more wild and aggressive type of record, and she was like, “Listen, that’s fine for your live shows. But it’s not gonna wear well. It’s going to be exciting to listen to the first couple of times, but people aren’t gonna want to listen to it a year from now — you’re not gonna want to listen to it a year from now.” She was really wise in restraining us in a lot of ways that we wouldn’t have.

Do you still take that advice to heart when you’re recording?

Absolutely. I have a mental bag of tricks that I’ve collected from different people over the years. A lot of the great producers will say something that really sticks with you, and it’s immediately like, “I’m gonna remember that and apply it the rest of my life.” I remember being in the studio one time for something that T-Bone Burnett was producing. We were in the control room, and he was musing and talking about the creative process, and he said, “People think about writing songs like writing songs. Don’t think about it that way. Think about writing a feeling. Like when you’re writing a movie, you’re writing a story. When you’re writing a song, just write a feeling — don’t write a song.” I was like, “That is soooo great.” Because that’s exactly what it is! A song’s supposed to make you feel something.

(Read our interview with Sara Watkins here.)

Photo credit: Jacob Boll

The Breakdown – ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

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This week, hosts Patrick M’Gonigle and Emma John dissect the bluegrass-centered soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, with a little help from their friends Chris Thomas King and Dan Tyminski.

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O Brother, Where Art Thou? was the movie that brought bluegrass to a new generation, and sent dozens of musical careers into the stratosphere. Fake beards not required.

Season 2 of The Breakdown is sponsored by The Soundtrack of America: Made In Tennessee. Visit TNvacation.com to start planning your trip.

Joe Henry Surrenders to the Song

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Joe Henry is sitting and chatting in the living room of his vintage, Spanish-style home in Pasadena, California. The subject of the note that starts off his new album, The Gospel According to Water, comes up. He looks over his left shoulder and points to the corner.

“It’s that guitar right there,” he says. “It’s an all-mahogany Martin from 1922. It was the first guitar they made that was created for steel strings.”

Seeing this small, plain instrument, it seems impossible that it was from this that he conjured the note in question, a sound deep yet brittle, intimately resonant. It’s at once ancient and fully present in the now. And it’s a sound that serves as something of a motif throughout the marvelously moving, affectingly poetic cycle of songs. It was a sound from a specific source that was echoing in his head when he sat in the Los Angeles studio of his longtime friend, recording engineer Husky Huskold, to set a new batch of songs on tape.

“I played him one song from Lightnin’ Hopkins,” he says. The song was “Mama and Papa Hopkins,” a 1959 recording from the point of view of young Lightnin’ getting his feuding parents to see the good they share.

“It was just vocal and acoustic guitar. And Lightnin’ is mostly singing to a single string that he’s playing. And yet the way it’s recorded, it’s so heavy. There’s such a sense of ominous space. And I said, ‘Look. I know I’m not him. I’m never going to be Lightnin’ Hopkins. But listen to what’s going on here. There’s something that’s making this so visceral in a way that I want to hear. Even if this is just demos, I want to hear a sense of drama.’”

You’d think Henry, who just turned 59 last week, would have had more than enough drama. A week before Thanksgiving 2018, he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had metastasized to his skeletal system. (He is in remission now and feeling hearty.) When he went in to record, it was a week before Father’s Day. All but two of the songs had been written in an unexpected rush of expression that started at Valentine’s Day. He specifically references those poignant holidays when giving the timeline.

As he plucked that first note for “Famine Walk” (one of two songs on the album written during a two-month writing residency at a small art college on the west coast of Ireland, before the cancer diagnosis), he had no idea it would be how he opened the album. He had no idea he was making an album.

He just wanted to get these songs down while they seemed fresh, and that’s all he thought he was doing in the course of two quick days of recording with his son, as well as reeds player Levon Henry, pianist Patrick Warren and guitarist John Smith sitting in on some of the songs, and with David Piltch playing bass on “Book of Common Prayer.” At the end of the second day, he went home to listen to the recordings, sitting in his office with his wife Melanie Ciccone, Levon, and a friend. Only then did he really hear what he had.

“We just listened to the whole thing,” he says. “And it was so obvious to me and to everybody in the room listening back that it felt fully realized. I mean, it’s raw. It’s really spare. But emotionally speaking, I heard it and thought, ‘I don’t know if I’ll get closer to the intention of these songs.”

The only thing added later was the background vocals of Allison Russell and JT Nero, AKA Birds of Chicago, on the songs “In Time for Tomorrow” and “The Fact of Love.” He would have added his longtime drummer Jay Bellerose to some of this, but when he sent the tracks to him, Bellerose responded with a simple voicemail: “Um, not on your life.” His drummer’s instincts of when not to play, though extreme here, were exactly right.

In its sense of space, The Gospel According to Water is a perfect portrayal of the experiences that brought it about, mystifying and mystical in as personal a way as can be. At times it’s as elliptical and elastic as the engagingly playful folk-jazz that’s been a signature of his last several albums. But here that portrayal is stripped down to its essence.

At the center is the natural fragility of Henry’s voice as he lingers over key words and phrases in ways that can be enchanting and startling, sometimes both at once. While it’s instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with his work, it stands apart not only from his previous 14 solo albums, but also from his many production credits: for New Orleans titan Allen Toussaint’s final works (including the 2006 The River in Reverse, a collaboration with Elvis Costello following the city’s devastating flood), Bonnie Raitt, Rosanne Cash, Bettye LaVette, the Milk Carton Kids, Joan Baez’s most recent album Whistle Down the Wind, and Rhiannon Giddens’ and Francesco Turrisi’s stunning there is no Other.

But he winces at this being considered his “cancer album.” He even considered trying to avoid the topic in interviews and promotion of the release. But ultimately he opted for openness.

“Whether it’s fair or not, it’s going to happen,” he says. “I lost a little bit of sleep over that, wondering how I can mitigate that. And then I just realized that I can’t now, more than I ever could, control how people respond to the music — if they respond at all — and rein that in… People are going to hear it like that, and there’s not much I can do about it. It’s an aspect of how this record happened and what it is.”

Indeed, as the music made its way out to the world, friends and fans alike started sending him notes, almost all mentioning his health issues. He came to accept that for the good intentions, too.

“I just believe in the songs enough,” he says. “They’re already moving out into the world without me. They’re going to have to make their own way. They’re going to have to straighten their own teeth, find their own job. I can only do so much and when I go out and perform these songs, I may or may not at times offer any framing context about how the songs occurred or when they occurred.”

He references a comment made many years ago by his mentor T Bone Burnett, who produced Henry’s 1990 album Shuffletown, when discussing his Christian faith in regards to his art. Burnett said that while some sing about the light, he sings about what he sees illuminated by the light. Henry addressed that, in his own way, when he first played a few of the songs in public, in a concert at the Los Angeles’s Largo theater.

“Part of my preamble was to say, ‘Look, I know I’m holding this shoehorn that would help you into the tight fit of a big batch of new songs. And if I have one reluctance to hand this shoehorn over it’s because I don’t want you to think, from what I’m about to say, that where a song comes from is what a song is,’” he says. “A song is not where it comes from. Just because my particular health crisis has invited me to receive these songs in a particular sort of way, that is not what the songs are.”

He thinks back to being with Toussaint, doing interviews right after New Orleans was flooded in 2005, his home among the many destroyed. In interview after interview, Henry saw Toussaint refuse to deliver the “heartbreak” stories journalists craved. Finally, when pushed by a CNN interviewer, he made his point.

“He said, ‘You have to understand something: More than a drowning, this was a baptism,’” Henry recalls. “And talk about something that silenced the room, myself included. I’ve thought about this so many times since this occurrence for me, the fact that Allen wasn’t in denial about what had just happened. He just had the ability to see, that his vision didn’t stop with this trauma. He was seeing beyond.”


Some of that is elusive on the album, found in shadows cast by the metaphorical light. The song “Orson Welles” is a good example, with its arresting chorus: “You provide the terms of my surrender, I’ll provide the war.” He’s still mystified how that one came about, the words written as he and Melanie flew from Burbank to San Francisco.

“That’s just something I found falling off my hand,” he says. “I open my notebook and I literally watched my hand write ‘Orson Welles’ at the top of the page. And I didn’t know what Orson had to do with anything. It’s just one of those moments where it felt spring-loaded. I didn’t believe I was writing about Orson, but I believe that somehow his specter was kind of directing, gesturing me on to something, somewhere I needed to go in that moment. And I just followed, because, you know, who wouldn’t?”

He found himself thinking about a part of Citizen Kane in which Welles’ title character wants his newspaper to have headlines from a conflict in South America that is petering out, so he cables his correspondent there, “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.” (In real life, William Randolph Hearst instructed his staff, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war.”)

For Henry it took a different turn, though, with the idea of surrender — certainly tied to his health situation, and the ultimate lack of power over it, but extending far beyond that.

“I feel like I’ve written about surrender a good bit,” he says. “And I don’t mean surrender in terms of resignation, I kind of mean surrender in terms of radical acceptance, which is empowering, which is motivating, as opposed to the idea of collapse.”

Two titles stand out, though, for the clear view of the basics of life, the perspective brought by such things as loss, age, kids growing up and facing mortality. “The Fact of Love” is pretty much self-explanatory, but “Salt and Sugar” really captures it. “Everything is salt and sugar now,” he sings, boiling it down to things that make life possible and meaningful — though too much of either can kill you.

He explains that he and Melanie have been doing some “decluttering” in recent years, having left the large house in which they raised their two kids, and moving twice to subsequently smaller places. But the song definitely shows what he’s seen from the light brought by his health.

“It’s paring things down to salt and sugar,” he says. “Everything. What matters? How do you make a record? How do you express what you want to say? Who do you spend your time with? What do you spend your days doing? All that.”

He recounts many of the changes in his life in recent years, the moves, the attachments and the letting go of attachments. Finally, he sums it up in a way that gets to the heart of what he has done with The Gospel According to Water, and it’s just as on-point as that note he plucked to start the album.

“I mean, just, you know, occupy life.”

Photo Credit: Jacob Blickenstaff

The String – Shawn Colvin

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

In 1989 the album Steady On marked a pivot in Shawn Colvin’s life from playing bars to make the rent to being a leader in the singer/songwriter movement.


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Through a string of albums, including the hit-producing A Few Small Repairs, Colvin became a multi Grammy winner and an Americana Lifetime Achievement Award winner. This year, she’s revisited Steady On, recording and performing it in her signature, solo acoustic guitar style. Stripped to its essence, the songs speak as clearly now as they did 30 years ago. Also, an introduction to new Rounder Records artist Logan Ledger, a Nashville transplant with a voice so arresting his demo led to a production deal with T Bone Burnett.

Ten Years After ‘Crazy Heart,’ Ryan Bingham Comes Around to “The Weary Kind”

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When Ryan Bingham accepted an Academy Award in 2010, he looked like he was on top of the world. Amanda Seyfried and Miley Cyrus announced that his song “The Weary Kind,” from the film Crazy Heart, had beaten two compositions by Randy Newman, and he took the stage with producer/co-writer T Bone Burnett, thanking his wife (“I love you more than rainbows, baby”) before showing gratitude to the cast and crew. It was a modest and heartfelt speech, not to mention a rare moment when roots music is given a prominent platform and one of the most prestigious awards in any art form.

A decade later, however, Bingham admits he was in a dark place, unable to enjoy the honor or the opportunities that came with it. “It was pretty tough when that film came out,” says the New Mexico-born/Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter. “A lot of people didn’t know that my mother had passed away just before it came out, and my father passed away soon after. People kept asking me to play that song all the time, and they kept saying, ‘Aren’t you happy about winning an Oscar? You must be having the best time of your life.’ But it was actually one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through. I didn’t know how to talk about it, and I was depressed.”

A downcast tune that captures his mood at the time, “The Weary Kind” is one of those songs that doesn’t sound like it was written; rather, it sounds like it’s been haunting dive bar jukeboxes for decades, even if it dispels any romance that might cling to such locations. “This ain’t no place for the weary kind,” Bingham sings, his voice tender as a bruise. “This ain’t no place to fall behind.”

There’s a danger to this place he’s describing, which might be one of the cramped bars depicted in Crazy Heart or might be something more figurative, like down in the dumps, but the song isn’t exactly grim. Bingham manages to locate a small, precious kernel of hope: “Pick up your crazy heart and give it one more try.”

When asked by the press about the inspiration for the tune, he didn’t talk about his parents or their hard lives. “I would just tell them it was the film and the character,” Bingham says, referring to the main character, a washed-up outlaw country singer named Bad Blake. Played by Jeff Bridges (who won the Best Actor Oscar), Bad drives his trusty Suburban to shows around the Southwest, playing to a handful of aging fans while trading off the notoriety of a few dusty hits from decades ago. A barely functioning alcoholic, he bristles against all opportunities to crawl out of his rut, convincing himself that his knockabout life is somehow noble. In the novel he meets a tragic end, but in Cooper’s film Bad finds a possibility of salvation.

“The Weary Kind” is a remarkable piece of songwriterly ventriloquism, not only showing the obstacles Bad faces but how he feels about them. Cooper devotes several scenes to showing Bad writing those lines, picking out the melody on his guitar, searching diligently for the perfect rhyme. Rarely do movies give so much time and attention to the mundanities of the creative process, but the act of writing that song in the film is a transformative endeavor, a means of confronting his demons and embracing a future that has scared him for so long.

Bingham, however, could find no such solace in the tune. “I was trying to find my place in the world, and I’ve always struggled with my identity — where I was from and what I wanted my music to do. I hadn’t figured that out yet, and I was afraid of getting pigeonholed. I was young and rebelling against notoriety and fame and all that. It was all too heavy for me to bring up without breaking down. People just didn’t know, and that wasn’t their fault. How could they have known?”

Crazy Heart was a modest hit at the box office and a major hit during awards season, but it has proved surprisingly durable and influential over the last decade, too. It provided the template for Bradley Cooper’s remake of A Star Is Born last year, in which the actor-director played a much younger, somehow more grizzled version of Bad Blake. It also put outlaw country in front of a mainstream filmgoing audience, creating a space for such similar fare as Ethan Hawke’s Blaze (about the singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, who was partly an inspiration for Bad Blake).

Since winning an Oscar, Bingham has released four albums, including this year’s roadhouse-ready American Love Song. And he has continued acting, with a role in Cooper’s 2017 western Hostiles and a recurring part on the Paramount Network series Yellowstone, starring Kevin Costner and Wes Bentley. As Crazy Heart’s influence has grown, Bingham’s relationship with its theme song has softened, and he’s learned to embrace “The Weary Kind” and to appreciate its impact on his fans.

“I’ve grown up and grown more comfortable in my own skin. I’ve dealt with family stuff, so it’s been easier to get back into playing that song for people,” he says. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the film, Bingham spoke with BGS about his impromptu audition, the film’s original downer ending, and growing up in the pool halls and dive bars of New Mexico.

BGS: When you think back on that time, what stands out to you most?

RB: The thing that always stands out to me is the script. I hadn’t written any songs for TV or film before. In fact, the songs that I’d been writing tended to be very personal — about things I’d gone through in my own life. But reading this script and looking at this other character allowed me to get out of my own skin and put myself in the shoes of someone else. I got to live vicariously through them and tell their story through the songs, and at the same time I was able to relate some of my own experiences as well.

And you’re not just writing for a character, but you’re writing for a character as he goes through this ordeal and tries to get his life together.

When I first read the script, the ending was different. They found him dead in a ditch outside some bar. It was really gloomy, so when I was writing that song, I was thinking about this poor son of a bitch dying by the side of the road somewhere. Then they changed the ending later on. I think the original ending was in the novel that Thomas Cobb had written, but I’m glad they changed it.

What kind of direction did you get from Scott Cooper or music supervisor T Bone Burnett?

None at all. I had met Scott just one time. He contacted me and said he was looking for some songs, so I met him for lunch and he told me about the project. I hit the road right after that, and he told me to read the script and let him know if I was inspired to write anything.

When I got home a few months later, I recorded this tune I’d been working on, and I called him up to ask where I should send it. I was just looking for an address, but he said he happened to be in L.A. visiting T Bone Burnett and asked if I could just bring it by.

So I drove over there to drop it off, and T Bone answers the door, all seven feet of him, and says, “Why don’t you come in and play it for us?” It was him and Scott and Jeff Bridges and Stephen Bruton and some other people. So I play him a little bit of the recording, and T Bone says, “That’s cool but can you play it for us yourself?” He gave me a guitar and sat me down on the couch, and I’m like, “Aw fuck, here we go!”

That sounds like a trial by fire.

It was. I wasn’t even sure I could remember it! But they liked it and unanimously decided to use it. I ended up hanging around with them and working on more songs for the film. I think from that point on I was over at T Bone’s house every day writing with those guys.

Did you have people in mind while you were writing? I see Townes Van Zandt and Blaze Foley in the character of Bad Blake.

I had a ton of people in mind. Where I’m from out in Hobbs, New Mexico, right on the Texas border, there are a lot of those characters out there, and one of them in particular was my father. He was very much a character like Townes or Bad, so I wrote the song thinking about my father and his situation.

When I was growing up, he would drag me into these old pool halls and bars. I was barely old enough to see over the bars, but he and his friends would give me quarters for the jukebox or the pool table. They’d all get drunk during happy hour and then I’d drive them all home. I grew up in those rough roadhouse places, and then when I got into writing songs, I discovered all these songwriters from that area, like Townes and Guy Clark and Joe Ely and Terry Allen and Billy Joe Shaver.

Those guys took me under their wing in a big way. I don’t know how many times I’d go see them play a show and they’d invite me up to play a song and introduce me to their audience. They really helped me out a lot and encouraged me to play. I was this young kid from a little town in the middle of nowhere, and I had no direction or any kind of formal lessons. I didn’t have anybody to teach me anything, so those guys were really important to me.

Was your father a musician?

He wasn’t. He was just a straight-up ol’ boozer who worked in the oilfields. My dad and uncles were all cowboys and roughnecks. When I was a kid, I used to go to these junior rodeos. My dad would haul me around on weekends, and it was always long drives on desolate roads. There was always the piss jug in the van. That translated into my own music later on when I started playing in a band and spending a lot of time on the highway. It was a lifestyle I had lived as a kid. So I could relate to that aspect of Bad Blake when I read the script.

Is that why you were cast as his backing band in those early scenes? How did that happen?

I had a show in Los Angeles at the Troubadour, and Scott came out to see me and my band the Dead Horses play. He said, “You guys gotta be in this thing!” He wanted to cast us as the backing band in the bowling alley. We were really just a bar band playing around in these roadhouses and honky-tonks in Texas, but we had just started coming up to the West Coast to play. We would play at bowling alleys, bars, backyard parties — anywhere anyone would let us play.

Did you ever work as somebody else’s pickup band?

I’d never done that before. I didn’t get into playing music until later on, and for the longest time it was just me and a guitar. Once I started getting gigs in these bars, they wanted you to have a band, so the whole experience of playing in a band was still new to me. I’d never been a side player for anybody or played in a backing band. That was new to me.

But some of my friends who were playing with me in the Dead Horses had been in backing bands, so they knew the deal. And I thought about those guys who’d mentored me when we did that scene where Bad Blake was giving advice to his band. He’s not passing down the torch, but those guys were always giving a little bit to the younger guys, showing them how you do it. There was a bit of that in those scenes.

It almost felt like he was trying to warn them away from that troubadour life.

You bet. I think about guys like Townes who lived a very hard, sad life, and that’s something I’ve always been cautious about. You don’t have to do it that way. You don’t have to be sad to write a good song. I’ve known a lot of songwriters who felt like they needed to live that lifestyle in order to create, and I grew up around that with my old man and my mother as well. That was something I knew I didn’t want to do, and I’ve always tried to get away from that stuff. There’s gotta be a better way or else you’re going to end up in a ditch somewhere.

Crazy Heart seems to suggest that that’s the easy way out. It’s easy to embrace that self-destructive side of it.

And that lifestyle too is so easy to slip into when you’re in a bar every night. You’ve always got people bringing you drinks and wanting to party with you. It’s hard to get away from it when it’s always around you.

Did writing for this character and this project change the way you write?

It didn’t really change the way that I approach songwriting, but it definitely exposed my music to so many people who might never have even heard it. It opened up a lot of doors for me to play in other places. We were this bar band from Austin, and a lot of those places we played early on… people went there to get drunk and dance and have a good time. They didn’t go to sit down and listen to a folk singer performing sad, quiet songs.

We were caught in between some of those things, with a lot of people coming out to our shows to hear that one song they knew from the film. But the rest of our set was full of loud rock ‘n’ roll and barn-burning honky-tonk songs. Our fanbase grew, but some people didn’t know what it was all about. So it was an interesting time, with fans getting to know what I was doing and me trying to figure out what they wanted. It was an interesting challenge because at the same time I just wanted to be myself and grab hold of whatever identity I had.

That has to be even tougher when you’re writing songs about your own personal experiences.

I had been around these older people who’d been playing for a long time, and they told me constantly that you have to have something to say in the song. You have to be truthful with people and be truthful about how you feel. So I’ve always felt an obligation to wear my heart on my sleeve when I’m writing songs. I need to be vulnerable, which is a way of carrying on that tradition.

“The Weary Kind” has started showing up in your sets recently. What has it been like to revisit the song?

I’ve been playing it a lot more these days. I’ve managed to deal with my family stuff, so it’s been easier to play that song for people. It’s still very emotional for me, but it’s different now. I think what brought it back for me was hearing stories from all these fans who have their own experiences and tell me how they relate to the song, how it’s helped them deal with certain things.

That was really inspiring, and now I sing it because I realize how much it means to people who come to the shows. I try to be respectful of that. If that song means something to them, then that’s a good thing for all of us — and a bit of a healing process for me as well. I can sing that song and not suppress all those emotions. I can get it all off my chest.

It makes for some heavy shows, especially when it’s just me and a guitar. I’ve played that song with four or five people in the front row just bawling. I’ve come to realize that the more I can give them, the more they give back to me. And they understand when there’s a rough night and I can’t play song. They know why.

 

The Producers: Gabe Witcher

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Gabe Witcher has a superstition about shutterbugs in recording sessions. “I’m a strong believer that all photos that come out of the studio must be in black and white. Color photography is too real. It loses mystery to me. Black and white has enough fantasy in it, where you can use your imagination to create the world that existed at the time the recording was captured.”

It is, he admits, a “weird little thing that I think about,” but he’s not wrong. Most iconic music photos — whether it’s Paul Simon smashing his bass onstage or Johnny Cash furiously flipping the bird — need no other hues beyond black and white. Anything else is a distraction: too flagrant, too revealing, too matter-of-fact. Witcher would rather let the creative process retain some sense of fantasy and wonder.

Thirty years into his career, he has yet to tire of the mystery. Something like a child prodigy on the fiddle, he paid his dues in the Southern California bluegrass scene, appearing on Star Search in the 1980s before joining Herb Pederson’s band, the Laurel Canyon Ramblers, as a teenager. Witcher has recorded with Béla Fleck, Dave Rawlings, Eric Clapton, and many others, but he’s best known as a founding member of the renowned prog-grass group Punch Brothers. Comprised of superlative musicians, they’ve recorded four albums of adventurous acoustic music with such producers as T Bone Burnett, Jacquire King, and Jon Brion.

Throughout his career, Witcher has gravitated toward the other side of the glass, gradually accepting more production responsibilities within Punch Brothers and without. He helmed Sara Watkins’ breakout third album, Young in All the Wrong Ways, in 2016, and this year he produced two new records by his Punch Brethren: Universal Favorite finds banjoist Noam Pikelny going truly solo, just his voice and banjo in a variety of styles and settings, and Witcher ensures it sounds both intimate and expansive. For Mount Royal, the second collaborative album by guitarists Chris “Critter” Eldridge” and Julian Lage, the producer emphasizes their masterful technique as well as their subtle and insightful arrangements. They’re representational albums, he says, but full of verve and skill and even a little mystery.

How did you gravitate toward this particular role?

I had a band with my dad when I was young called the Witcher Brothers, and we made a record when I was 11. That was my first foray into the studio, and I remember having so much fun. Back then, it was all tape. I remember the feel of the machines, getting the microphone set up and coming into the control room for the first time and hearing the sounds of the instruments coming back at me through the speakers. It was a thrill. At that moment, I was hooked on recording. I got a four-track machine, and I spent a lot of time at my cousin’s dad’s house — I guess my mother’s cousin. His name is Don Was, and he’s a huge record producer. He had a bunch of recording gear, and I was always in the studio, setting up equipment and recording for fun. It was something I loved to do in my spare time. When I was about 14, I was asked by someone I didn’t know to play on their record, and that started my career as a session musician in Los Angeles. I got asked to play on other things and, little by little, I managed to build up a reputation. So I’ve always felt at home in the studio.

Were there any particular albums where you started to notice the production?

One of my earliest musical memories was listening to Abbey Road on my parents’ turntable. I couldn’t have been older than two or three, and especially as I got a little older, I remember listening to that record and realizing that there were only four guys in the band, but the sound they were making was much bigger than that. This guy plays the drums, these two guys play guitar, and this guy plays bass. How are they able to get all this other stuff going on? That really opened the door to figuring out what the technology was and what overdubbing was: “How does that work?” I started to think about how they were building tracks and, from then on, a world of possibilities opened up.

When Punch Brothers started making records, I was already an old hand at it and could instinctively take on the role of producer with those guys. Everybody finds his own role within the band, and that became mine. For the last record, Phosphorescent Blues, we had the amazing T Bone Burnett to produce, and I had already been working with him as a co-producer on a bunch of projects — and as an arranger. When you work with T Bone, it means you’re going to hear him say something like, “I’d love for you to write a string arrangement or a horn arrangement for this song.” So you’d do that and, “Okay great, now go record it.” He’s giving you the keys to the kingdom. Sometimes he would show up for sessions and sometimes he wouldn’t, and to have him place that level of trust in me gave me the confidence to think of myself as a producer.

How did that affect the sessions with Punch Brothers?

He was there for all the tracking and he got all the performances out of us, but when it came time for all the editing and mixing, I knew what the band wanted and I knew what I wanted, so he let me take the reins. I was there with the engineer, Mike Piersante, and we finished tracking all the guys. When everybody else had left, I was sitting there with a bunch of hard drives with hours and hours of music — and it’s up to me to edit and oversee the mixing. It was a natural extension of all the things that I’d already been doing.

The band has worked with a different producer on each album. How were those experiences different?

Each producer brings a different aesthetic and a different worldview to the proceedings. Early on, we were very idealistic and dead set on making only representational documents. With The Blind Leading the Blind, we knew it was an ambitious piece, but we wanted to make sure we could actually perform it live. We were very stubborn about capturing it all live, so Nonesuch recommended we get a classical producer. Because that’s what we were doing: We were making a classical piece, so we needed to record it in a classical way with a classical producer [Steven Epstein]. Looking back 10 years later, was that the best way to present that music? I don’t know. If we had to do it over again, we would probably play most of it live and overdub harmony vocals, but you learn.

Jon Brion had a different method on Antifogmatic. He set us up in a semi-circle because he wanted to capture the energy and interaction of what we do. We played all of the music live, but he was able to get a better vocal sound by overdubbing the vocals. I understand that, but it’s very hard when you have five people imagining trying to play based on what they imagine the vocals are going to sound like. We had to learn on the fly how to do that. We had to learn to listen in a different way, and I think it was successful in its own way.

Jacquire King was a lot of fun. He was down for a lot of experimentation on Who’s Feeling Young Now? By that point, we wanted to utilize the studio as another sonic tool instead of just something take a snapshot. We wanted to use the element of fantasy that the studio provides. We dipped our toes in a little bit with that record. We experimented with sounds and overdubs — anything to introduce new things, but always dependent on the song and what it needs. Jacquire really helped us figure out what works for our instruments, and he had us thinking about ways to capture sound that I had never really thought about before.

And the thing with T Bone is, he’s wide open. He wants to do whatever is going to make the best end product. We had different set-ups for different songs. It was a fun process because he’s a master and keeping the bigger picture in mind. The Punch Brothers have a tendency to overdo things and try to squeeze so much perfection out of everything that we squeeze the life out of it. So it was a real education to see how he worked.

What did you take away from those experiences that you’ve applied to your own sessions as a producer?

The most important thing you can have in a producer is trust. You trust that they’re going to understand your vision and you trust that they’re going to help you achieve your goal. It’s such a deep relationship with the rest of the band, and we understand each other so well, that it made sense that I would be the one sitting on the other side of the speakers telling them if they’ve gotten what they want. And I know what they’re capable of doing, so I’m in a unique position to push them. Someone else might be like, “Hey, that was great.” But I would be like, “Hey, that was great but I know you can do better.”

That seems like it would be crucial, especially on these records where there’s nothing to hide behind. It’s just one banjo or two guitars.

Those are very, very representational records without many studio tricks. You approach that kind of project as though you’re making a document. There’s not a lot of fantasy involved. Your job as producer is to put them in a position where they’re comfortable and playing their best, then you have to make sure you capture the sound they’re making as fully as you can. That all sounds very simple, but you become something more like a psychologist at that point. You’re talking a line between keeping people happy and creative, but also trying to find positive ways to shape what they’re doing, to get the best possible results. It helps that the Punch Brothers guys have been working together for so long that we know how to speak to each other in a way that avoids any bad clashes or setting each other off and making them freeze up.

For instance, Noam is extremely thorough — more thorough than I think he needs to be. There’s an interesting dynamic where we’ll work on a song for a couple of hours, and I’ll be very happy with what we got. I’m confident in what we got, so why not come in and take a break before we start working on the next song. But he’ll say, “Let me just do one more. One more time.” Three hours later, he’ll finally feel okay about it even though we have three times as much material as we actually need. He’s familiar with me, but he might not feel as comfortable with someone else to sit there for hours on end. He obviously does feel comfortable: It’s just Gabe. He can’t get mad at me.

As a producer, you have a couple of jobs. One: You’re a proxy for the artist. You’re basically in a position to say, “If I was an audience member, would this be reaching me? Is this going to impact me emotionally?” Two: You have to make sure there is some underlying theme that ties it all together and makes it work as a whole. All the best records tell a story of some kind. It’s all just storytelling. Even though one song is about one thing and the next song is about something else, you can still construct some kind of narrative out of them, even though it may not be a linear story. That’s a big part of the producer’s job: to make sure everything fits together in a satisfying way.

Is telling a story easier or harder with instrumental versus vocal tracks?

They’re challenging in different ways. To create a narrative on an instrumental record, you have to make sure there’s enough variety to feel like you’ve gone somewhere. When you’re making a record, you’re making a 40- or 50-minute piece of music. It might be divided up into 10 or 12 or 15 segments, but you’re making a piece of music that’s roughly the same length as most symphonic music, so you have to approach it that way. You have to piece it together in a way that gives the material shape and keeps it interesting. For a record with singing on it, you have the added difficulty of that extra layer of words. You have to have the musical narrative and then you have to have the lyrical narrative. There’s some wiggle room in there, but you also have to keep in mind the artist and what they’re trying to say. On the Critter and Julian record, they brought in a bunch of vocal songs that were all great, but I just didn’t believe Critter when he sang them. I had to figure out why, which was tricky, but it came down to what I knew about him — where he comes from and what kind of music he has made in the past. The material had to fit within the story of him as a performer, as an artist, and not just within the context of an album.

How does that work with someone like Sara Watkins? What I love about Young in All the Wrong Ways is how it plays against what we know of her as an artist and takes her story in a new direction.

Absolutely. What makes it work with her is that she acknowledges that it’s something different from her. People change and evolve and grow, and this is where she is right at this particular moment. I really felt the honesty of what she was singing to me in those songs. It all made sense. There was a weird incident in the studio with her. All of the songs that ended up on that record were her original songs, but early in the process, she had brought in a song that Benmont Tench had written. It was a new song of his and we had permission to record it. I thought it was good, so we put it on the list. We were about three-quarters of the way through tracking her record when we got to that song. It was just her singing and Benmont playing. The song is dark, about a relationship that’s past its prime and she’s struggling to break from it. She started singing, and the mood in the studio shifted. It had been very happy and positive and constructive, but it turned really dark really quickly. It had been easy-going up to that point, and I watched everybody get very frustrated.

The next day, Jay Bellerose, who plays drums on the record, was talking to me and asked me what happened. The only thing we could come up with was that the song just wasn’t her voice. Nobody believed it, when it was coming out of her mouth. It was a case of the wrong song for the artist, and it’s the only song that didn’t make the record. Don’t get me wrong: It’s a great song, when Benmont sings it. It’s his experience. It wasn’t Sarah’s experience. There was just something about the vibe of the song that wasn’t right for her.

It’s extremely hard to explain that kind of thing, and everybody feels it in a different way. The studio is such a vulnerable space, especially for the person who’s being recorded. It’s such an intimate setting that interpersonal dynamics become the thing that makes or breaks a record. You’re going for an indescribable feeling — something way beyond playing in time or singing in tune, all the technical aspects that make a good performance. When you achieve that next layer, it’s hard to describe. There’s an energy that comes from getting the right people in a room together. Sara’s record was successful because we got the right people playing the right music, which becomes a positive feedback loop. Good things start happening, which inspire more good things, which inspire more good things, and then you have this wonderful document of that time and those people. This kind of thing never happens, especially when you hire a band, but for Sara’s record, people were hanging out in the studio after the tracking was done. We would play for hours and hours, then we would do overdubs in the evening and people would just hang out. We’d open a bottle of wine and people would just hang out in the studio. It was beautiful.

I feel like people sometimes fixate on gear — finding the right pedal or using a certain kind of microphone. That seems much less important to these sessions.

That’s exactly right. People can get caught up in the technological aspect of the studio — at great detriment to the music. At least in regard to the music that I’m interested in making, we have way too much ability to manipulate sound. I hear so much recorded music that has no vibe, no human quality to it. It sounds like the people weren’t even in the same room and maybe not even in the same country when they recorded it. It’s all been pieced together very carefully, but it’s missing an essential element: There’s no interaction. Some people can do beautiful things that way. For what Radiohead does, it’s great. They’re able to use those tools in a musical way. But the music that I want to make has to feel, in some way, like it’s being passed from person to person. It’s interesting because, when you nail it, it’s the kind of thing that sinks into the background. It becomes so effortless that you don’t think about it. It’s the same with movies: You know a director has done his job right when you can’t tell that they’re even there. The goal is to get lost in the storytelling.

 

Photo credit: Brantley Gutierrez

The Producers: Colin Linden

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Colin Linden is a musician’s musician, a player who pretty much does it all. At 11, he was hanging with Howlin’ Wolf. At 13, he was learning to fingerpick at the knee of David Wilcox. By the time he was in his mid-20s, he was working with members of the Band. Having recorded several albums as a solo artist and with his band — Blackie and the Rodeo Kings — played myriad sessions for T Bone Burnett, and produced albums for the likes of Lindi Ortega and Bruce Cockburn, Linden has a lot to say about making records, for himself and with others.

You came up playing the blues. You’ve been a sideman for everyone from Robert Plant to John Oates. You’ve made your own records, you’ve made records with the Rodeo Kings. Where on that spectrum did you decide it would be a good idea to become a producer?

Well, I always loved making records. From the very beginning — in addition to being somebody up there singing and playing guitar and picking up songs — I always dreamed about making records. I always found that records were fascinating, even from the labels. When I was a little kid, it was kind of a parlor trick that I would blab off all the credits from the records. You know, like, “Mother’s Little Helper” was three minutes and 49 seconds; it was on London; it was produced by Andrew Loog Oldham … all that. That was kind of a parlor trick for my brothers to parade around when I was five.

You too, huh? [Laughs]

Records were always a really big deal for me. There was a magic in it. I didn’t live in a place, as a little kid, where there were people sitting around playing guitars or sitting around the piano singing songs or any of that. Our world was records.

And, not that there’s anything wrong with the way that we listen to music today, but there was a certain aesthetic in the way that you listened to recordings in those days. You went to the stereo in the living room or your bedroom and you sat next to it. You had that piece of artwork and all that information in your hands. It was an entirely different world than it is today.

It was absolutely a glorious experience to put on a record, to listen to a song you loved, and to be able to put it on again and listen to it over and over. It was an absolutely glorious experience. It was the key to another world that you knew existed out there somewhere. It was absolutely real. In some ways, it felt like it was more real than your own life. For me, records were really a big part of it. So I always wanted to make records.

In terms of actually thinking about producing records, I kind of evolved into doing it because I loved being in the studio so much. I began to get calls from friends of mine in the blues scene, especially in Toronto. They would say, "Man, every time I go into the studio, the engineer makes me turn my amp down and turn my reverb off and it’s rotten. But when you come in with me, you always seem to have a good time when you go in." That’s how it started. There were a few people early on who were really encouraging to me and who I got to work with in some cases.

The first guy who ever recorded me in a professional environment was Daniel Lanois. He had already moved out of his mom’s basement, which was where he and his brother had started their studio. They bought a house in Hamilton called Grant Avenue and, when I was 18, I had my first experience as a session player. I loved working with Dan. I loved his whole aesthetic. There was something about it — it was not a clinical approach, even though it was before Dan had started doing a lot of the things that he later mined in terms of recording in unique environments. It was something that I could really relate to, and it made me feel very comfortable and excited about the process.

There’s a certain similarity to your producing approaches, at least to my ears. Is that accurate? Does he have some influence on the way you approach things?

Absolutely! I love his music. I love his production and I love what he does. I’m real good friends with T Bone Burnett — for over 24 years now. He’s my mentor. Every time I get to play on a record for him, it’s like I get a lesson in production. There’s so much that I learned from him. And I love him as an artist, too. I think so many of the artists who’ve had an influence on me, especially in the last 20 years, have been people who come about it from a record-making point of view — be it Willie Dixon or Allen Toussaint or Cowboy Jack Clement. And then, of course, T Bone and Dan. I think they’re real masters.

You just name dropped three of the best there are! [Laughs]

Yeah, I think so, and I think that they’re great artists, as performers, as well — all of them, all of the ones I just mentioned. You can add more — Johnny Otis, Smokey Robinson — these guys understand music from in front of it, from behind, from the sides, from above, from below. There’s an element that you get, I think, when you work with people in a production capacity, or even a collaborative capacity of any kind, that allows you to have a different viewpoint of how a song works and how a piece of music works.

Smokey’s an interesting one to bring up. Can you talk specifically about him as he relates to your music? That’s interesting to me.

For me, he always reached down and got some real truth as a songwriter from the simplest ways of saying something. I think, on the records that he produced for Motown, there was a certain kind of timeless soul. Especially in the mid-'60s period. All of those guys — Holland/Dozier/Holland, Berry Gordy — all of them. But there was something about Smokey that seemed to touch a more soulful nerve for me.

The most recent record on your resumé other than your own is Lindi Ortega’s Faded Gloryville. That’s an interesting record. Three different producers, three distinct sounds. Tell me about your part in that.

For me, I didn’t really think, "Okay, what am I doing differently than the other guys that are going to be on it?" … although I enjoyed the idea. I thought it was kind of a nice, modern template to have one guy do a few songs and another guy do a few songs. I have a great deal of respect and affection for Dave Cobb’s work. I don’t know him that well, but he seems like a fantastic guy. I really like him a lot. Same with John Paul White. I’ve only played with him a couple times, but we get along really well. So I kind of felt like we had something different to offer, but we all kind of enjoyed some of the same food groups. So I was really pleased that we all got to work on the record that way.

So much of my approach with Lindi is connected to guitar playing. I know that she likes certain types of sounds. So I get on guitar and she is encouraging and gives me free rein to come up with guitar tones and approaches, and that I can kind of just be her guitar player. That’s where some of it starts. She goes for real simple approaches. She doesn’t want to make something too quirky, or too unnecessarily complex, which is something that I can relate to. When she gets behind a microphone, she stands and delivers, too. I produced an album for her a couple years ago called Cigarettes & Truckstops, and I really enjoyed working with her. We hit it off really well personally. We did that record very quickly, like we did these tracks quickly. It was like, "Okay, let’s go make a record. Let’s go out and make a record." It wasn’t like we had meetings about other meetings, leading us to other meetings and then, in six months, try out all the ideas and maybe have a meeting about it. It was very straightforward. We were going to go in and make a record. We were going to work with three different producers and these were the songs we wanted to work on. Let’s do it!

There’s a certain thread between you guys that makes the record come off really well.

I’m glad that you feel that. It really felt like that for me, too. I actually had never intentionally done a project like that. But now I’m encouraging other artists to take that approach. These days, the nature of making albums is different than it was — just the way people are getting songs. I still think the world is a better place for thinking of a body of music that lasts for 40 minutes instead of three or four minutes. I think that listening to somebody’s music that comes from a certain period of time, and has a cumulative effect, is a really powerful thing. I believe in the medium of an album of one sort or another. But I do really like the idea that some people can help paint a bigger picture by looking at a smaller amount of work. I really enjoyed the experience of doing that.

You’ve been doing this long enough that you must have a few cool, fun, weird, unusual stories. You can change the names to protect the innocent, but have you got anything? [Laughs]

Well, it’s a little easier for me to say, "Hey, what was this record like?" And then I can remember it. The things that are unpleasant are really weird. I try to forget, and I’m actually becoming better at doing that. From somebody saying, "You better turn up the piano or I’m going to stop liking this song and I’ll make sure it doesn’t come out" … it’s like, don’t shoot yourself in the foot!

Let’s talk, then, about the process of your new record Rich in Love. What was the process from start to finish? Did you have 10 or 12 meetings with yourself about that? 

It’s such a funny thing with that record because it was grown right here in our house. Basically, it’s the result of the deep friendship and personal relationship that both my wife and I have with John Dymond and Gary Craig. Gary has been playing drums with me for 31 years and Johnny’s been playing bass with me for 25. Those guys are my closest friends. For 18 of those years, we played with the greatest musician any of us have played with: Richard Bell. The record is such a reflection of our relationship together — it’s a real co-production.

We did the majority of the recording right here in the house. We did one day at House of Blues, which was very nice. Gary Bell let us come in to do some reconnaissance recording and I didn’t even know if it was going to be on the record, until the record was 85 percent finished. There were songs that I didn’t know were going to make the final cut but they did, and really made the record better, I think.

We spent one day at Sound Emporium B here in Nashville, a place I love to work at, to do some overdubs. Charlie Musselwhite’s stuff was recorded at the studio in Clarksville and Amy Helm’s stuff was recorded at Levon’s studio. Aside from that, everything we did, we did right here at the house. I was working on the Nashville TV show and I had a shoot.

So, Johnny and Gary came to the house and we said, "Let’s do some recording." The worst that could happen was we’d see where the songs were at. The most that would happen was maybe some of what we do will end up being on the record. So, I was working on the Nashville show and I had a shoot to go to. I came back from the shoot four hours later, and my wife, Janice Powers — who wrote three of the songs on the record with me — and Johnny had put up a bunch of curtains in the studio and they had moved the couch out and Gary had set up his drums there. They had taken the couch cushions and placed them in wildly precarious and very interesting and unexpected positions. So I came back to the house, and the studio was completely changed. And it sounded great! That’s really how it started. We kept it that way and, in between the food and the wine, we ended up getting a lot of work done. We did that in a few different blocks. They would come down every couple weeks and we would just chip away at it. The record is such a reflection of our relationship with them.

I would say, then, that your relationship with them — if I were to base it on hearing that record — is a very lush, elegant, and thoughtful relationship.

Well, good! I’d be honored, if that’s the case. I think that "lush" might be thought of in more than one usage of the word.

[Laughs] Well, you did mention wine!

We did drink a lot of wine in the making of the record.

“Knob & Tube” is one of my favorites from your record. I love the lyrics, I love the turn of phrase, I love the groove.

I’m so glad. That one was really grown right at the kitchen table. I had the title for it. The song was built so much like the rest of the record was built: There was a ukulele on the kitchen table. One of the things I do is impersonate an 11-year-old girl playing the ukulele.

There are two little girls who are unbelievably talented, also from Canada: Lennon and Maisy Stella, who play ukulele on the show. On the recordings, I usually end up playing the ukulele and she will end up learning the parts. So, I had the ukulele on the kitchen table because I had to go give her a lesson or something like that. I gave Janice the title of the song. Gary, I think, was working on another session, but Johnny, Janice, and I were at the house. And I said, "We should write a song with this title" and, 45 minutes later, she came down with bunch of lyrics to the first verse or two. We all started chipping in, throwing in lines, and I had the ukulele here. Immediately, I picked it up and the motif of the music came up. So it was really written right around our kitchen table, and we recorded it within 24 hours of when we wrote it. It was grown the way the record was grown.

Gary came back to the house and we set up a mic in the kitchen. It was a little too boomy for it to be good in the kitchen, so we went back in the studio, which was about six feet away. We recorded the song and, 45 minutes later, it was exactly what you hear. We added Amy [Helm] to it and a second piece of percussion. There’s sort of a subliminal electric guitar that I added, just using the room in the back, to give it some rumble. Aside from that, what you hear is exactly how we played it.

That’s why I enjoy these interviews so much. I love hearing about how things happen and the process behind it. Tell me about the process for “Luck of a Fool.” Was there a particular artist or record that influenced the sound of that song? It has that kind of reverb-drenched cowboy thing going on.

You know, it’s funny. I didn’t really even think of it that way, so much. I guess I had a few of the lyrics ready for it. I think I wrote that one in the middle of the night when I was having insomnia in Fredericton, New Brunswick. I was stranded there in a snowstorm after Blackie had played there and I couldn’t get back to Nashville for another day. I sat down and that idea just came to me. For me, it wasn’t so much of a cowboy thing as it was a gospel music thing. I always loved it when, before the bridge or chorus of a song, you moved up an inversion. Even if the chords didn’t change that much, just if the melody moved up. That was something I really liked, and something I was thinking of regarding that song. We did the actual recording of it here in the little room. It sounded good with more of the mics open, it sounded like it was bigger. I wasn’t sure exactly how we should take it, in terms of producing it. When we had Reese Wynans on it, Reese said, "Man, I think it’s cool as shit that you don’t have anything else but guitar, bass, and drums. I can play a tiny little organ part and that will be it." I thought, "You know what? Reese is a pretty smart guy. Let’s do that."

It’s cool when you’re in that kind of setting, and there’s the respect of great musicians, beautiful ideas come out of it. It’s really quite brilliant.

I think that’s just the nature of it. When you’re working with people that you’re already friendly with, it’s easier for that to happen. But I have to say, you get more and more confidence in that being the way it is when you work with somebody like T Bone. T Bone is so incredibly supportive of people’s ideas and of letting people be who they are. He makes you feel, when you’re on a session, that even if there’s someone better than you, you’re the one who he wanted to be in the room with him on that day. That kind of confidence, that whatever your contribution is and whatever is inherent about who you are, is what you’ve got to bring to it. It’s not that he’s haphazard about it either. He’s the kind of guy who will let something get to a certain point, and he’ll be sitting in the back of the room, encouraging its development. Then he’ll move up to the desk and start playing with things. Then, 30 seconds later, everything will sound different and better. He’s absolutely brilliant that way. He lets it develop by having confidence in the strength and having faith in the character of the people that he’s chosen to be there. It always serves the spirit of the music. I think that’s what he holds in the highest regard.

Photo by Laura Godwin

My Least Favorite Life: A Conversation with True Detective’s Lera Lynn

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Fans of HBO’s critically acclaimed crime show, True Detective, are well aware of Lera Lynn, the remarkably talented singer whose original songs set the tone for a number of scenes in the show’s diviest of dive bars, the Black Rose. She took a few minutes to tell us how she landed the role; what it’s like to work with the show’s music supervisor, T Bone Burnett; and where we can find the songs she wrote for the show.

You got to play your original music on one of the coolest, most widely acclaimed shows on TV. Inquiring minds want to know how you managed to score that gig.

Good looks and charm!

My Dad used to say the same thing, but he was not nearly as charming and definitely not as good-looking.

[Laughs] My manager had been sending my music to T Bone and he was interested in using the title track from an EP I released last year called Lying in the Sun. So we had a meeting in Nashville — “a three martini lunch,” as he calls it — and we just hit it off. He asked me if I’d be interested in writing music for the show and [facetiously] I told him I’d have to think about it. I said, “Hell, yeah, I’d love to” so he flew me out to L.A. We wrote and recorded four songs in two days. We played those songs for [the show's creator] Nic Pizzolato and the producer, Scott Stevens, and they really liked the music. T Bone said, “What do you think about this girl as the singer?” I remember Nic saying they might have to give me a third eye for it to make sense. Luckily, I was just made into a junkie, not a three-eyed monster.

I interviewed Rhiannon Giddens back in the spring time. Her last record was produced by T Bone. Her response was the same as yours when he suggested he produce it. She said, “Yeah, you know, I have to think about it … for two seconds!” Tell me about working with him, about his approach.

I don’t know that his approach is the same for every project. For this one, he made it very clear to me that we were trying to shape a character through the tone, the style, the delivery. A character that would match the tone of the show, that would fit into that dive bar. That bar scene where the chick is always playing and nobody’s listening. Other than that, it was pretty relaxed and easy working together. He wanted to capture live performances, so we would just set up mic for the guitar and a mic for the vocal. I’d do a few passes and he would come in after every take and say, “Yeah … that’s good … let’s do some more.” It was a little nerve-wracking and surreal, too, the first time we sat down to write together. I didn’t really know what to expect; I haven’t done a lot of co-writing, so I’m not well-versed in that arena. But he’s a really easy-going guy and, I think, one of his greatest skills as a producer is knowing which person is right for the job. It was a really natural process.

Casting is everything. Knowing how to cast the right person for a role or the right person for a song.

Absolutely. Everyone T Bone works with is just great. Every musician, every engineer. He’s a very interesting person. He’s very easy-going, but you can tell the wheels are constantly turning.

How different was “shaping a character” from the way you have approached songwriting on your own?

I think there are a lot of advantages to having restrictions in art. Writing for a character other than myself was liberating because I don’t necessarily have to stand behind the sentiments expressed as being my own values and opinions. They weren’t tied to my personal identity. So it freed me up to explore things.

This question comes from our editor, who asks, "Why does your character look so bruised and beaten up? And why on earth is she playing music in that horrible bar filled with crime bosses?" 

It has to fit the show. It wouldn’t make sense for a person of sound mind and spirit to be playing that music in that place. The music is pretty high quality, it’s pretty sophisticated stuff. Most people who are capable of writing music like that would probably think, “Hey, I might be good at music; maybe I should try and pursue a career.” Unless, there’s one other problem, which she clearly has and is therefore lacking motivation.

… to go beyond that stage with that guitar and that voice.

Right. Exactly. And those songs.

One of my favorite episodes in which you appear is the one called “Down Will Come.” You’re doing this desolate tune about this man alone, just you and electric guitar, with Semyon and Velcoro doing some serious guy talk in the booth by the stage. For those of us who love the behind-the-scenes stuff, can you give us a little insight on how that scene was shot? Were they always in the room? Out of the room? Multiple takes, stuff like that.

They were always in the room. I was always in the room. Either just for eyeline or background shots. Every different angle is a different set up. They have to move the cameras and shoot it again. It was my first time being a part of any of that. It’s very elaborate and it’s very impressive how quickly and efficiently 50 people in one room can work together.

It is, isn’t it?

And then the actors, of course … their ability to jump into a character, at a moment’s notice … I can’t wrap my brain around that. I remember the first time they said, “Hey, singer, we need you over here for eyeline.” First of all, I thought, “What the hell is ‘eyeline’?,” ‘cuz no one was really explaining to me how the process worked or what any of the lingo meant. She said, “Just stand here so the actors can look at you, as if you’re on stage.” I didn’t know, when they were looking at me, if I was supposed to be looking at them, or am I looking at the floor, or was I supposed to smile and wave? [Laughs] It was a funny moment for me.

Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell are pretty impressive actors. Did you get to hang out on set with those guys?

Yeah. They were so kind. They were very appreciative and complimentary of the music. I think they were really excited to have music being played in a scene; it was inspiring for them. They were very hospitable and nice to me.

We always like to hear that about actors we respect.

Yeah. I mean they’re nicer than “nice people,” actually. I was impressed with how kind they are to everyone around them.

I saw an email from your manager that read, “‘My Least Favorite Life’ — from True Detective, music from the HBO Series — is out today!” Tell me more about that.

Harvest Records has released the songs as singles as they’ve appeared on the show so that’s how “My Least Favorite Life” has become available. It says “unknown artist” until the song appears on the show, then it unveils itself to the world. It’s on iTunes, Amazon, all the streaming services, etc. Four of my songs have been released and then, I think, there are a couple others that have been released, as well. In August, they’re going to release the full soundtrack.

Are you interested in continuing acting?

Yeah, I’d love to explore it. I have no experience. I don’t know that it’s fair for me to say, "I want to continue acting." I haven’t paid any dues; I haven’t put in any time. But it would be great to explore.

Gillian Welch: Retracing the Miles of Music

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There’s something about looking back at an old photograph — especially a candid one, a moment you didn’t ever know would be dug up and reflected upon some-odd years later — that makes you look at the present differently. Sometimes you recognize long-ingrained mannerisms that still pop up. Other times, you exhale with relief at the fact you’ve kicked a regrettable habit, letting out a smirk or a quick pang of embarrassment at the passing trends you rocked for the cameras or the half-smiles you favored to hide your braces. It’s a pretty personal thing, to take a piece of your life preserved in print and trace the way it led you to where you are now. Gillian Welch’s latest release, Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg, is the musical incarnation of that kind of endearing deep-dive into the past.

“I hear me before I really sound how I sing,” says Welch of the 21-song release, which is comprised of early demos and unreleased recordings from the time period leading up to her breakout debut, Revival, in 1996. “My voice is in there, but it's just not quite as focused, and there aren't as many miles on me. Dave [Rawlings] and I often talk about being able to hear the miles on a singer. There's just no substitute for the years and the hours and all of the gigs — literally, all the miles.”

For an artist like Welch, whose careful interpretation of bluegrass and gospel music effectively laid the groundwork for today’s thriving Americana scene, rewinding the mileage is all the more rewarding. A 1993 living room tape of “Orphan Girl,” for example, reveals a lighter, higher vocal than the one fans came to know three years later. (It’s a thrill, too, to realize that Emmylou Harris likely decided to record the number based on this very tape.)

“[These sessions] were some of the first times I was ever recorded, and you can hear my influences,” Welch says. This act of retracing early work is one she’s enjoyed as a fan of other artists, too. “I think it's interesting to hear where they started and what they changed. One of the most fascinating things, when you hear really early recordings of singers who you know so well, is that you hear them before they've really become themselves.”

In addition to the novelty of hearing a greener Gillian on the more popular songs from her catalog, Boots No. 1 also boasts songs like “Wichita,” which appeared on set lists and a live DVD but never made a proper album, and “Dry Town,” which was written by Welch but recorded by Miranda Lambert and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

“I guess we just didn't feel like they fit in. I don't think we had any agenda, didn't have anything against these songs. We're really album-oriented artists,” says Welch. “This was a great way to have them come out in to the world, because they really make sense in context with Revival.”

The sessions for Revival began in the Summer of 1995 in Los Angeles, bounced down to Nashville in the Fall, and wrapped up back in L.A. at the end of the year. These recordings formed the basis for the archival project — after all, the fact that these forgotten sessions were mixed live was an unusual luxury.

“This is very rare now, and was fairly uncommon in the mid-'90s,” notes Welch. “This would have been how people were making records in the '60s and before. But it was great for this project because it meant that we actually had mixes of takes that never got used, alternate takes. People these days aren't often in that situation.”

Welch had lived in Nashville for about three years when the recordings featured on Boots No. 1 went to tape, mostly performing as a duo with partner Rawlings in small clubs and on writers’ rounds while finding a voice as a songwriter. “We were playing as much as we could,” she says, though the out-of-town gigs were only beginning to roll in.

“I had moved to town with two songs,” she says. “By the time we were going in to make Revival, I was going into the session with something like 35 songs. It had been, for me, an incredibly productive couple of years.”

Specifically, she cites a songwriting competition at North Carolina’s Merle Watson Memorial Festival as the catalyst for better gigs and more credibility as a writer, and the community she found there continued to push her forward.

“After that, people like Peter Rowan, and Tim and Molly O'Brien, and the Nashville Bluegrass Band, all these people suddenly knew who we were and started asking us to open for them. The bluegrass world was really the first place where we got acceptance. That was our home,” she says. “Actually, the night that I met T Bone [Burnett], we were opening for Peter Rowan at the Station Inn in Nashville.”

Burnett was the perfect fit for Welch and Rawlings in the studio, but if the final product he helped to sculpt on Revival sounds like a departure from what listeners hear on Boots No. 1, it’s not because the veteran producer was out to change their sound.

“Dave and I knew what we liked,” says Welch. “We really did, going into it; but even so, it's hard when you're that young and you've never done any recordings to just go in there and do it and feel confidence. He gave us that strength — not even to mention the fact that he knew his way around record-making like crazy. Nothing got put on that record that Dave, T Bone, and myself weren't happy with.”

That attention to detail is as evident today as it was in 1996 and, although each of the songs on Boots No. 1 is its own glimpse into Welch’s roots, each half of the double album stands as its own: a Revival for parallel universes.

“Dave felt very strongly that whatever we made should be playable like a record, not feel like a library project. I felt very strongly the same way,” she says.

These recordings may have been cast aside as the songs themselves evolved into live anthems and borrowed cuts. But to hear them emerge unchanged as puzzle pieces that fit together in such a meticulously curated collection as Boots No. 1 is a compelling message for any artist or maker: that even the less-polished parts of the past can be a vital part of the future.

“I hear a starting place to where we ended up going, and hopefully that's interesting to people. I know, as a listener, it's interesting to me,” she says. “Obviously we play [the songs] a little differently, and our voices are a little different now, but I still understand them, and I think that's because of how we wrote them. We wrote them for them to have everything you need to connect with them, right there.”

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

The Producers: Joe Henry

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Leaving a home studio can be a tragedy for some musicians, especially when it’s beautiful both in its architecture and in its acoustics. But Joe Henry took it in stride. He recently moved his family out of their home in South Pasadena, which was built in 1904 for President Garfield’s widow and which housed the facilities where he recorded albums by Loudon Wainwright III, Over the Rhine, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Aaron Neville, among others. The final sessions were a crowd-funded effort by the husband-and-wife croon-folk act Birds of Chicago.

“It was a wonderful, incredible experience to have that studio,” Henry says, “and some of the greatest musical moments of my life happened in that basement. But in a very real way, with so many changes in the record industry, it was just not sustainable.” He is, however, not particularly sentimental about the space. “Frankly, it asked a lot of my family to have that happening. Every time I had a project, it took over everybody’s life for a week. I didn’t step out of it by choice, but at the same time, I don’t feel diminished for having done so. You just look at it and say, 'What’s next?'”

Henry has been asking himself that very question for 30 years now. A Detroit native, he started out in the 1980s as a singer/songwriter in the John Hiatt/Alejandro Escovedo mode, eventually absorbed — somewhat reluctantly — by the alt-country movement of the 1990s. Although he did pen the liner notes for the Jayhawks’ epochal Hollywood Town Hall, Henry was never quite part of that scene, trading in what little twang he had for smokier and more sophisticated sounds on his excellent trio of late ‘90s/early 2000s albums: Trampoline, Fuse, and Scar.

His has been an unpredictable career, covering a wide swath of styles and expanding the definition of “roots” to be wide and inclusive. In addition to his own albums, he has manned the boards for the Carolina Chocolate Drops, jazz pianist Mose Allison, R&B singer Solomon Burke, Bonnie Raitt, Aimee Mann, Susan Tedeschi, and Hugh Laurie, among many, many others. To each of these diverse projects, he brings what might be called a signature elegance, spare and understated — the instruments all resonating against each other to illuminate the song.

His latest project is a slight reinvention of the Texas troubadour Hayes Carll, whose new album, Lovers and Leavers, chucks the full-band sound of his last two efforts. In its place is a quieter sound — introverted and melancholic — more akin to the low-key ruminations of Mickey Newbury than the wild romps of Ray Wylie Hubbard. That it succeeds is a testament not only to Carll’s vivid songwriting, but to the intimate setting Henry creates for these songs.

What kind of conversations did you have with Hayes Carll going into those sessions?

When we were first talking about working together, he did send me a few demos, so I had some sense of his landscape, but what he told me when we got on the phone was that he didn’t want to keep making the same record over and over. He didn’t want to go back to his old methodology and just create something that might be more wood on the pile, however good it might be. He wanted to do a record that arrives with its own atmosphere, its own movie. I always think of records as making movies. They have to add up to a narrative arc, even if it’s just an abstract one. So when he played me some songs and we talked more, I suggested doing something that was very austere — at least in terms of the number of ensemble members — yet something that would feel very complete.

How did you find that balance where it would sound sparse but not like a demo?

I always want records to feel like they have an orchestral element and, by that, I mean not just setting up excuses for musicians in the studio to riff on top of somebody’s song. I don’t ever in my life want to hear — and I certainly don’t want to be responsible for — anybody treating a song as simply an opportunity to be individually seen or heard. I want everybody involved to disappear into the songs, and I want the elements to always be speaking on behalf of the song’s dramatic arc. There are moments on this record that are just acoustic guitar, upright bass, and drums, but I think they play in a very widescreen sort of way. It’s more The Last Picture Show than it is Gone with the Wind, that’s for sure.

It definitely has a sense of place. Some of the songs sound like somebody playing a club right as it’s closing down for the night.

I always hope that there’s a sonic thread that grounds a record, no matter how different the songs might be. The common thread in this case is the singer’s voice and the character implied by that voice, which suggest a sense of place. A location where these stories are happening — even if the story is in process, even if it’s in motion, even if the locations shift like they would in a movie. Somebody might move from one town to the other, but the story itself has a coherent grounding. I think listeners want to feel that connectivity, and anybody who is willing to listen to a record in sequence, as presented, and take it in as a whole statement should be gratified and should be rewarded for bringing that kind of time and attention to bear.

With an album like Lovers and Leavers, which represents a dramatic change, it seems like an artist would have to really trust whomever he’s working with. Do you think it makes it easier for an artist to trust you as a producer because you were a performer first?

I would always hope so. I am a songwriter first and foremost and, as a result, even when I’m working as someone’s producer, I’m still looking at everything through the lens of the songwriter. I don’t turn that part of my brain off, jump the fence, and become a record producer. I am a songwriter standing at that wheel on the ship’s bridge, and I’m always thinking in terms of the song.

I’m not trying to create a song that reflects well on the artist, though. I’m trying to encourage the artist to reflect well on the song. That’s a distinct difference. It might seem like a fine line to some people, but there are great chasms on both sides of that line: "Are we in service to the song? Or do you think the song should be in service to some public persona?" I would like to think I give a certain authority with the people I work with because I walk that walk every day. I engage in the act of writing songs every day … some days more successfully than others. But it’s something that constantly occupies me, and I’m always listening for the moment in which the song becomes a living thing and just walks away from us.

How do you mean?

The song has to take over. We’ve all seen evidence of musicians who create songs that just serve as advertisements for the performer’s persona. There’s not a song that somebody else would cover. There’s not enough song there to engage anybody else. It’s there just to fly like a banner above a public performer. I’m interested in the ways that we, as devoted musicians, can disappear into the song and help to illuminate it. That’s not because I’m egoless; I just find my ego perfectly satisfied when a song is fully realized — when it is vividly itself and moving on its own steam. I don’t need people to see my face in their head when they’re hearing it. I don’t want them to hear my hand at work as a producer. That’s a failure to me. If we all do our jobs right, the song just sounds as if it were inevitable.

I remember reading a quote from a composer who specialized in film scores. I can’t remember who it was, but it has stuck with me. He said something to the effect of, "If you remember the music at the end of the movie, then I haven’t done my job."

I agree with that, for the most part. I certainly agree with the sentiment, in regards to somebody scoring a film. The score should be no less or more important than what the lighting designer or somebody else brings. The music should permeate everything, but you’re not supposed to be conscious of the craft. You’re supposed to be caught up in the moment. In that regard, I do agree. But there’s a disconnect for me: I could listen to somebody else’s record, and I’ll just picture people sitting in a room with headphones on. I picture the act of record making. And I don’t want to. I want to be seduced. I want to be seduced by the character and the story and the journey.

Is there a moment when you realize that a song has reached that point and become its own thing? Is that something you’re aware of happening?

I think you always know. There will be times when I’m sitting in the studio and I’m supposed to be listening to how this guitar overdub works or what this mandolin adds. And I sit there waiting for the playback and I forget what I’m supposed to be listening for. I go back to just hearing the story, and when I get to the end, I realize I completely forgot to pay attention to what I’m supposed to be paying attention to. So it must be working. Something else has taken over. There are moments when everybody undeniably knows that something has shifted and has become real. It’s not just an idea anymore. It’s wonderful when that happens in real time — in an immediate way that is beyond a doubt.

Is that when you know something is finished? Or do you ever know when a song is finished?

Songs can always be different. Some people are always discouraged by that idea. It makes it heard for them to reach a sense of peace and closure, because they’re thinking about what else might it be: "Is there some better way?" I don’t tend to think like that. Life is short. There are all kinds of ways a song might be successful. Our job is to find one of the ways a song might be successful and commit to it fully. I feel liberated by the fact that it can always be different. Sometimes time runs out, but that’s not necessarily an obstacle. You could chase a song in different directions all day, but we have more work that we’re obliged to do. You don’t have endless resources and endless time. I don’t see that as an obstruction. Instead, I see it as something else that’s guiding us. Otherwise, you’ll just get really lost: "Okay, we have this, but what else could it be?" It could be anything else. There are all kinds of things that it might be. But what about right now? Is the song being served and does the song then serve the whole project?

It’s not about finding the perfect mix or the perfect arrangement, but finding the iteration of the songs that works for itself and for the album.

There’s no such thing as perfect. As soon as you accept that we’re all going to die, that we’re all mortal, this idea of perfection just becomes ludicrous. Things are always in the process of blooming and decaying, so the idea that there is some static perfection becomes pointless. You could tune every note perfectly and snap everything to a tight grid, but you’ll end up with something that’s bloodless. That’s a fact I hear evident every day, and I’m not interested in that. I want to be jarred out of complacency. I want to be disturbed. I want to be seduced and I want to be confounded.

Does that desire guide you when you’re choosing projects? I think of you as someone who has worked with some very different artists.

Sure it does, because I don’t judge myself or what I think I’m capable of contributing based on any sense of genre. It doesn’t matter who I’m working with — whether as a producer or as a songwriter or as a performer or whatever — from Ornette Coleman to Madonna to Solomon Burke and Mose Allison to Harry Belafonte to anybody. The goal is always the same. The music has to be undeniably affirming and seductive. Those parameters never change. The way we get there might change from one artist to the next, but the goal is always the same.

Many of the artists you’ve worked with have long traditions in pop music. Is that something you think about when you’re working … not just their history but how to carry it forward?

I’ve had a chance to work with a lot of people who are so-called "legacy" artists. And I also work with younger people who are just beginning, too. That particular thing you’re talking about is something I think about a lot. When you approach somebody with an immense legacy — somebody who is already in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, somebody like Solomon Burke or Harry Belafonte or Mavis Staples — the question is, invariably, "How do you respect their legacy without ever being trapped by it?" 

I don’t think the goal is to look backwards and try to re-create something, but I also don’t believe that we’re required to ignore an artist’s tremendous history. You can’t bethinking, "Oh, I won’t look like a very smart producer unless I’m putting a new set of clothes on this person." The music has to feel like it’s in motion and speaking in the present tense. So when an artist has created a great and important body of work, the job isn’t to imitate it, but it’s also not to ignore it. So how do we stand with it? How are we making new music that respects the journey of this artist yet is its own thing at the same time?

You could knock something off. We’ve all heard examples of people doing that — people who are just as enamored with old Stax/Volt records as I am, who go in and try to re-create horn charts, who mic instruments as closely as they can imagine to how they were recorded ages ago. It’s not hard to do that, if you’re with people who know how to listen. A good recording engineer can listen to something and figure out how they were getting those sounds. But you’re looking over your shoulder. You’re looking into a tube. You can’t possibly be liberated and open to discovery, if what you’re trying to do is imitate something that’s already trapped in amber.

It almost sounds like the difference between a technician and an artist.

I’m not interested in the technical aspect of it, except as it serves to set us free. I’m not an engineer, myself. I work with a great one — a heroically great one. So I’m free of that. I can talk abstractly about how I want things to work and feel, and I can talk a lot about music as being the weather in the room. I know how it needs to move me. I don’t necessarily need to know what kind of gear allows this best to happen. I work with people who know how to do that.

How did you make the transition from singer/songwriter to producer?

Like most things, completely by accident. I made my third record in 1990, called Shuffletown, which was produced by T Bone Burnett, and then I moved to Los Angeles right as it was about to be released. Then my label, A&M Records, shipped the record on release date, but also dropped me as an artist on the same day. So I was a man without a country and no real way to promote the record that they had very carelessly and cruelly dispatched with no support. They might as well have given it to me. I would have been better off selling it out of the back of my car.

T Bone asked if I would come work with him as a production associate, and I didn’t even know that what I was doing was learning to be a producer. I did understand that I cared a lot about making records and that, if I was working only for myself, then maybe I would be lucky enough to spend four days in the studio every two years. And you don’t learn anything that way. You don’t learn to swim by getting in the water one day a year. You need to spend some time. You need to get lost in the process and then find your way through.

As you start learning, it becomes clear that some things are important; other things are a distraction. And there is a common language that we keep defaulting to. You just start learning by witnessing, and it’s a great way to learn. I was very lucky to be invited into that circle. And then people just started asking me. I never hung out a shingle that said, "Producer for Hire." People just started asking. I didn’t think about it much at the time, but looking back now, I think people knew I was associated with T Bone. Maybe they couldn’t get hold of him or couldn’t afford him, so they would climb a little bit down the totem pole — maybe pretty far down the totem pole — and there I was.

Do artists still seek you out? Or do you seek them out?

It happens every which way. There are people who seek me out because they’ve heard records I’ve made. But some of the most meaningful work I’ve done as a producer was because I went and asked for it. Bonnie Raitt is a good example. I didn’t wait for Bonnie Raitt to one day, hopefully, be visited by a mystical angel who told her she should give me a call. I reached out to her: "Here’s who I am. Here’s what I do. If you’re interested in trying an experiment, I’m wide open to it." I’ve gotten a lot of my best work by just going up to people I admire and saying, "Hey, you wanna go out with me?"

Your work with Bonnie Raitt [on 2012’s Slipstream ] is interesting in that those recordings don’t redefine who she is or what she does, but showcase it all in a slightly different way … as if it say, "Here’s why this person is still vital."

She was devoted to real-time discovery. Those are almost — without exception — live recordings where she and the band are putting their hands to the pulse of the song and conjuring something that can’t be conjured any other way. And it did feel new to her. To me, it seems like an old-fashioned way to work, because that’s how people always used to work.

Go back to Louis Armstrong in the mid ‘20s, when there’s one microphone and you’re cutting right into wax. There’s a microphone taking a picture of an experience. There’s no such thing as overdubbing or postproduction manipulation. What you’re asking people to do is stand together and have a mutual experience. Have a dram together. There’s something about that that’s very old-fashioned, very mysterious and mystical. I’m interested in all that. For Bonnie, at least in that moment, that approach felt brand new. I remember saying, "How can this be new to you? This must be how you always used to work." She said, very charmingly, "If it is, I don’t remember it."

I’ve worked with some people who have been making music longer than I’ve been alive, and I’ve had an amazing opportunity to work with people who have made music that was intensely important to my formation as a deep listener from the time I was 11 or 12, in my early teens. It’s amazing to stand with those people and get invited to be a part of what they’re doing.

I think it would be incredibly difficult not to revert to fan mode in the presence of somebody like Solomon Burke.

Well, that’s something that happens in the anticipation beforehand. There are certainly moments when I’ve worked with some of these artists when I’ve had to take myself out of the room. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror and just say, "How are you here? How did this actually happen? What do you really have to contribute to someone who has achieved this level of mastery?"

On the other hand, once you’re actually in it, a lot of that stuff falls away and people just become human beings trying to do something special in the short time they have to be alive. You get caught up in that. It’s not about you and it’s not about them. It’s about it. When you get to that place, you’re liberated from a lot of things, but you’re never liberated from outrageous respect and admiration. You have to get free from sheer fandom, though, or you’d never be able to challenge anybody. You couldn’t say, "That was great, Mose, but I think you can go further." You have a real job to do, and you’re doing a disservice to the project and the artist if you don’t do it.

When I was producing Allen Toussaint and Elvis Costello on their 2006 collaborative record called The River in Reverse, there was a moment toward the end of the first day when we hit a wall with a new song. I felt a little demoralized. I’ve got these incredible legacy artists, both of whom — especially Allen — have been tremendously successful producers themselves. Do I really have anything to offer? Allen divined that I was in this moment of struggle because he’s a mystical creature. He just insisted that I understand that I had an important role to play and that I wasn’t there because they were being nice to me. He told me I couldn’t just be a spectator. I had to take the wheel. That was the job. They were occupied being the artists, and they needed somebody to stand up and take the wheel. That had to be me. So I had to let loose of any sort of sense of being overwhelmed by how much I revered both of these gentlemen as artists and songwriters and producers. I had to understand that I could deal with that later. In the meantime, I gotta get busy. I can’t be lost there. I can’t just be a fan in this moment.

Photo credit: Kaleidoscope Pictures