Track #1, "California"
Chuck Cannon and I wrote this one together, and it's one of the best songs I've ever written. We started at my cabin in Georgia and then finished it one night in a hotel room in Taos, New Mexico. My favorite line is "Fate would take them to L.A. County and get 'em stuck in a traffic jam, an El Camino and a red Trans Am." We had been talking about Prince's "Little Red Corvette" and how we both loved the double meaning throughout that song as well as the imagery. We knew we wanted the two characters in our song to meet in L.A. but didn't know how it should happen. I mentioned that we had used an old El Camino in one of my videos years ago, and that I'd had a ball racing it down the California desert highways. So then we got the idea of having them meet on the 101 in a traffic jam. That's when we decided that one of them should be in an El Camino, and the red Trans Am was an extension of our conversation about ''Little Red Corvette". That type of brainstorming is what lead us to the song. And it was really fun to use cars to help describe the two characters. We never really say who was driving what, and it doesn't really matter, we left that up to the listener's imagination.
"California" is the first track on the new album, and I knew as soon as we wrote it that it would kick start the whole thing. When we were recording "California", we had the guitar amp set up in one room and a U-67 mic in the room next to it. We used the bleed between the rooms to give it that distant, far off sound on the opening guitar riff. We also recorded Marty Kearns banging a really loud, low octave on the grand piano, and then we reversed the waveform which is what the low, swelling sound is leading into the song.
Matthew Sweet stacked harmony parts with mine to give it a kind of Beach Boys feel. I love Matthew's voice, and he's a huge part of this song. He and I are both big Brian Wilson fans and we really wanted that vibe, but because Matthew was in California and I was in Atlanta, we couldn't sing the parts together at the same time like the Beach Boys did. So we recorded my parts first, then we sent the tracks to Matthew in L.A., and he doubled all my harmonies. It ends up being eight voices between the two of us. I love this track!
Track #2 "Light You Up"
I woke up one morning with this chorus playing over and over in my head. I had been dreaming, I don't remember what about, but this refrain that was now stuck in my head had been the soundtrack to the dream. That only happened a couple of other times for me. Melodies do come fairly easy, but I don't typically dream them. Well... maybe I do, maybe I just don't realize it. Maybe the melodies are always part of my dreams, but I forget about them when I wake up. And maybe they just decide to show up later in the day. That's a possibility, I guess. Huh, I never thought of it like that before, but I guess it's possible. Maybe all songs are dreams that come back to you when they're ready. Maybe that's why I can't force a great song to be written. I always have to wait until it’s ready. You can practice writing every day, and that keeps the tools sharp, but the great ones come when they're good and ready.
Anyway, I kept singing this tune that I had dreamed throughout the day, and at some point I put it down in Garage Band. Garage Band is a great way to work a song out. I don't usually get into the arrangement or the production of the song at that point. I'm just getting the basic structure down; melody, lyrics, and a simple chord progression. I've found that trying to produce a song before its written won't make the song better. It's easy to get a little drum loop going, but once I do that, I want to hear bass, and keys, and so on, and so on... In my experience, if I can just stick to working out the lyrics, writing the best lyric I can, the melody will fall into place. Also, by doing this, I've saved the demo making for later and won't get hung up on the original demo. I've seen people get stuck on a certain sound they got on a self produced demo, and sometimes they're not able to reproduce it.
So I sang "Light You Up" for Chuck Cannon one afternoon when we were on tour together. We were in Asheville, and he loved the melody and said," Are you asking me in on this one?" Which means, “Are you opening up the song to me for a co-write?" And I said, "Yeah man, let's write this thing together!" He asked me to sing what I had again, I sang -
I just want to light you up
Light you up
Like a fire
I just want to turn you on
Lift you up
Take you higher
Chuck sang back the second half replacing "Lift you up" with "Turn you on", repeating the previous line. This is what I had done in the first half of the chorus. "Chuck sang it back with the repeat of "Turn you on", and that tied the whole chorus together. We did our show in Asheville and went our separate ways, and we didn't see each other for a couple of months. I was itching to finish the song because I knew that Chuck and I were gonna eventually nail it to the wall.
We finally got together in Nashville at his studio where we stayed up for a couple of days straight writing. That's how we do it. Most songwriters meet somewhere at a reasonable hour and write for three or four hours and they have a song. You know, very civil. The problem with this kind of writing is that unless you can come back to the song and tweak it, you probably have a mediocre song at best. Every once in a while one will slip out quickly and doesn't need much editing or revision. But usually a song needs a little more love than three hours. Chuck and I both like to write late at night. It's quiet, no interruptions or other appointments, and also the later into the night you start on a song, the better, because your editor goes to sleep early. So your initial brainstorming of ideas and lines aren't stopped in their tracks by your internal editor. That should come later.
Where was I? Oh yeah, so Chuck and I started working on the verses to "Light You Up" at about Eleven PM, and around 2 AM, we had the basic verses. Then we started a completely different song and got it mostly done. We caught a few hours of sleep and then came back to "Light You Up" and started the tweaks. Even weeks after we'd written it, Chuck would call me and say, “Hey man, you know that line ' Everybody wants a piece of your pipe dream?' What about, 'Everybody wants a puff of your pipe dream?" This is one of the things Chuck's really great at, you get to the point when you think the song is done, and he calls you and makes a slight change like 'puff of your pipe dream,' that's bad ass! That's when a song starts getting really good.
The funny thing about this song is that we weren't really thinking about sex or trying to write a sexy song. It was more like, let’s put random things in a song that everybody wants more of. A new flat screen TV, recognition, fame, acceptance, the real deal, sex, money, and sex. It wasn't until we both had performed it for other people that we realized how sultry the song is. We just thought it was really funny.
"Light You Up" is one of my favorites. Major thanks to my dear friend and writing partner Chuck Cannon for bringing his special 'tongue pressed firmly in cheek' swagger to its creation. He's truly one of the world's greatest songwriters.
Track #3 "Murphy's Song"
Glen Phillips and I wrote this one. We were at a writing retreat called the Cayamo Sessions and were paired off to write. Glen asked me what I thought of being a brand new father. Murphy is our first, he was only a few weeks old then, and I told Glen that I was very happy and also scared to death. He laughed and said that he had felt the same way when his kids were born. We agreed that it's almost like you've lived another life before kids. It seems as though you're another person at times. And that even your dreams and goals change.
And that started the song. Glen literally sang most of the first verse. It just fell out of him. We originally had called the song "New Dream", but when my wife heard it, she kept referring to it as Murphy's Song. I thought, 'Wow, that's actually a really good title!' I love writing with Glen. He comes at a song from a different angle than most other writers, and he always keeps it fun.
When we tracked the song, Gerry heard a kind of Bakersfield sound for the drums. Patrick was the meat and potatoes on bass, and Davis played his late '50s Telecaster. That guitar cuts like a lot of Telecasters, but also has this thick, dirty tone. And nobody plays like Davis Causey. I did my thing on my Gibson J200, and later we added Marty on organ and Dan Dugmore on pedal steel guitar. Dan plays on a lot of Sugarland tracks and is probably best known for his pedal steel work on early James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt records.
Track #4 "No Blue Sky"
Some of you may remember a band I was in a few years ago with Matthew Sweet and Pete Droge. That whole thing started out with another line up all together. It was me, Pete, Marshall Altman, and Glen Phillips. The four of us wrote "No Blue Sky," and a couple of other songs, one of which became "Beautiful Wreck" four years later after I wrote a new chorus. But we were just writing. Then Matthew Sweet, Pete, and I wrote a few together, and something clicked. We happened to sing three part harmony on the demos, and it just took off from there.
Columbia Records signed the band to a one album deal after hearing our voices together. It was a side project for the three of us, and we all agreed to put our solo careers on hold for a bit while we gave this thing a shot. No one knew what to call the project. The record company wanted to call us Sweet, Mullins, and Droge. How original, right? Not to mention that it sounds like some kind of bad casserole. Although as far as marketing goes, that band name was probably a pretty good idea. But we all thought it sounded really cheesy, so we called ourselves The Thorns instead. Matthew and I...half jokingly, but not really, wanted to call the band Weed.
Anyway, we wrote 20 songs together in about 10 days out in Santa Ynez, California. Matthew's friend Andy was generous enough to let us use his ranch, and it was a perfect setting for a songwriting retreat. We made the record in Atlanta a few months later with Brendan O’Brian producing, and Columbia thought it was going to be huge. When the album was finished, we didn't know what to think. It was kinda slick and a little over produced. We just thought it needed more balls. When we played live with the full band it was really cool, loose (in a good way), not perfect like the record. And even though we made a pretty sound together when we sang harmony, there was also a certain amount of recklessness to the live band that I loved.
We put "No Blue Sky" on the Thorns album from the earlier writing sessions with me, Pete, Marshall, and Glen. It was never a single off that record, but I always loved the song. I had felt that the Thorns version was too fast and too epic sounding. Too me, it was a song written from the point of view of a New Yorker in the days following September 11, 2001. It was meant to be sad and subtle in its arrangement. I knew if I ever had another chance to record it the way I'd heard it, I would. So I decided to put the song on my new record. It just seemed to somehow fit. "No Blue Sky" still won't be a single because it's five minutes long, but I'm o.k. with that. If you do it too fast just for the sake of speeding it up to fit in single/hit land, then you lose the whole feel. I hope you like this version.
Track #5 "The Ghost of Johnny Cash"
I'm not a songwriter who's afraid to put a cover song on a record. My only rules are, it has to be one I wish I'd written, and I must be able to communicate it and deliver it like it's mine. The few covers I've included on my records over the years all make sense as far as"my rules" go. I've been blogging a little about the writing and recording of the new songs, and I was thinking of what to say about "The Ghost Of Johnny Cash." After thinking some on it, I decided it was only fair to let one of its actual songwriters let you in on how this great song was created. Phil Madeira is one hell of a songwriter. He dreamed a great deal of this song, and he and Chuck Cannon tweaked and finished it over time.
The following blog was written by Phil not too long after the song was written. He's one of the best bloggers I've read so enjoy this one! Click on the mugshot of "the man in black" to read : The Church of St. Johnny by Phil Madeira.
Track #6 "Tinseltown"
I met Max Gomez a couple of years ago after his manager sent me a song Max wrote called "Black and White". It was just a demo, not even real drums on it, and I was blown away. He was from Taos, New Mexico and was 21 years old at the time, and I hadn't heard something that good from an unsigned artist in quite a while. So Max and I started talking on the phone and emailing, and we finally got together to write in Nashville. He was traveling across the country from L.A., and I was coming up from Atlanta, and like any new co-writing thing, neither of us had any idea how it would go. Sometimes in a writing session it works and sometimes it's just a fun hang and nothing happens. And sometimes there's no connection at all.
Co-writing is a relationship. My buddy Chuck Cannon always says "It's like a close friendship, it's a commitment, and how many close friends do you really have? But luckily Max and I did enjoy hanging out, and we also wrote a couple of songs that trip, so we planned to get together again when we could. Like me, Max loves the songwriter's songwriter. He's a huge John Prine fan, and you just don't run into a lot of 21 year old John Prine fans out there. Maybe there are a lot of them, but my guess is that the Avett Brothers is about as 'Americana' as it gets with that particular age group...nothing against the Bros. But Max and I both shared a passion for great songwriters and singers. He's a big Petty fan too {Tom, not Richard}, and we also both love Johnny Cash.
Anyway when we finally got back together at my cabin in Georgia, we wrote a couple more songs, one of which we called Tinseltown. I loved the idea, the melody and most of the lyrics. Max was having a similar experience in L.A. that I always had when I traveled there to play music. We both liked Hollywood, but neither of us felt like we really belonged there. So we wrote "Tinseltown" from that perspective. But again, we only had a day or so to write, so we left it about half finished. Max went back to L.A. and opened the song up to Jeff Trott. You might not know Jeff's name, but he's a great writer and musician and is one of Sheryl Crow's go-to guys for songs. Jeff's a really cool writer and usually comes at a song from an angle most of us wouldn't think of.
So while Max and Jeff worked on Tinseltown a bit more, I opened it up to Chuck Jones while we were at the Key West Songwriters Festival. Chuck Jones, Chuck Cannon, and I all shared a house for four days, and we played some shows, partied a bit, and worked on a few songs. Key West is an amazing spot on the planet. Whenever I get off a plane there, my heart rate slows down, and I'm overcome with a feeling of perpetual bliss. I can totally see why so many writers gravitate to the Keys. In fact some never leave. Shel Silversteen, another one of my faves had a place down there, as well as Ernest Hemmingway and of course, Jimmy Buffett.
So me and Chuck Jones worked on Tinseltown one afternoon, and I loved what we wrote. Max and Jeff did their thing back in L.A., and when we were all done, we had this song that had been written in three different parts of the country, but it all somehow worked. And I really love what the guys in the band did on the recording. And it's a blast to play live with the band!
Track #7... on the way....
Track #8 "Catoosa County"
Pappy was my Mom's Father. He was a mason and a shriner. He was a christian and a working musician. He played bass fiddle and horns in all different types of bands- big band, dixieland, polka, concert, and even circus bands. He had worked a lot of other jobs in his life, too. He'd grown up working on a farm, he'd been a mechanic, a truck driver, a landlord, and even a tax collector for the state of Georgia. And Pappy knew a lot about history, especially Georgia history. As a kid, I loved listening to him tell the story of the Battle of Atlanta during the American Civil War and the burning of my home town that followed. Pappy had been my first musical influence and I guess he was my first songwriting influence too because he was such a great storyteller.
When I was about eight years old, me and the Spencer boys who lived next door were playing Rebels and Yankees in the woods behind their house. Sometimes we played just plain Army, but on this particular summer afternoon, we were playing Rebs and Yanks. We hooted and yelled as we charged through the piney woods toward the make-believe blue coats, and as we flanked the Union troops from the west side of the woods, I decided to take a flying leap backwards, pretending I'd been hit by an exploded cannon ball. I landed on my back near the creek on something hard and metal that just barely protruded from the red clay. It hurt a bit, but like most kids in the midst of summer play, I shook it off and began digging around this thing I had fallen on. At first it appeared to be a piece of machinery, maybe an old car part, but about 15 minutes later I pulled a long, rusty piece of steel from the earth.
By this time the Spencer boys had joined in, helping me clean off the clay and petrified leaves from the object I had fallen on. We washed it off in the creek, removing the remaining clay and mud that had formed an earthly cocoon around it, and when we raised it from the water, it revealed itself to us. It was a saber...a confederate officer's saber. It had probably washed down the stream from the battle of Peachtree Creek back in 1864. We knew it was a rebel officer's sword because you could still see the engraved C.S.A. on the rusty butt of the weapon. We couldn't believe it! I was so excited and proud of my archeological discovery that I had forgotten all about the war wound I'd received from its blunt handle.
I couldn't wait to show it to Pappy! This was an actual artifact from one of his stories! But the Spencer boys demanded that it was theirs to keep because it had been found on their property, although their property line ended about 50 feet shy of the spot where I had found it. Nevertheless, the Spencers proudly took the saber back to their house to show their Dad, and I walked home empty handed. My guess is that the Spencer boys probably still have that saber. I bet it hangs on the mantle above the family fireplace, or maybe they got hard-up for cash and sold it to a collector for a few hundred dollars. It doesn't matter either way, the loss of the saber is not a big deal to me now, although I still think about it sometimes and wish I'd stuck up for myself more when I was a kid.
Now I'm 42 years old. I'm an artist and a touring singer and songwriter, something I always knew I would be. What I didn't always know is that a big part of a touring musician's life entails staring through a windshield at the open or sometimes congested road. In 2007, for instance, Kip and I played over 250 shows, and most of those shows weren't fly dates. So the road is as much of my life as music I suppose.
For the last several years, whenever I'm headed to Tennessee from Atlanta, I would pass a sign just before crossing the state line that reads "Catoosa County." The sign has surely been there for longer than I've been alive, maybe three times as long. But for some reason I didn't really notice it until a couple of years ago. Last winter, as I passed that sign, I thought, "What a great song idea! It just sounds like it ought to be in a song - Catoosa County!" Several months later, on my way to another writing session in Nashville, I noticed it again, and this time I committed to working that county road sign into a song.
I've heard that Woody Guthrie once told a group of young songwriters, "You should write what you know." I'm a firm believer in this theory, that's why I write about America- its' people, its' roads, its' towns. I don't know about a lot of things, but after 20 years of touring in America, I've come to learn a great deal about this beautiful country. But I didn't know much about Catoosa County, and I needed to find out.
Some songs require a bit of research, and I have to admit, Google makes researching song ideas pretty damn easy! One afternoon I Googled it and found out that an American Civil War battle was fought in Catoosa County, Ga. Well actually, it was part of the Lookout Mountain campaign which mostly took place over the state line in Tennessee. But there was a small battle in Catoosa County, the battle of Ringold Gap, where about 1,000 lives were lost. And even though more confederates soldiers died there than Union, somehow the Rebs won that part of the battle.
Well there it was, the setting for the story. Chuck Cannon and I went to work on it. I already had a really good melody that had originated on the guitar, but it needed lyrics. We both agreed that the story needed to be one soldier's account of the horrors of war. Over the phone, we tossed lyrical ideas back and forth on several occasions, working in actual history and battle facts, and we wrote two verses. Good ones too. Later Chuck came up with the third verse on his own, which is my favorite...Night fallin' on the hills and a full moon comes a shiningI can hear the whippoorwill and the coyotes go to whiningAnd all the souls of all the men roll in the holes they's buried inBlue and Grey in the blood-red Georgia clay of Catoosa County.
Pretty cool, right? But neither of us were really satisfied with just three verses for this song. It clearly needed a refrain or chorus that summed up the whole idea. The song needed to paint one soldier's true experience, and at the same time comment on the over-all picture itself... what war really does to people. Not just the dead, but the ones who survive it as well. A few days went by, and then one morning Chuck called me and left a voicemail message in his Carolina, low country drawl... "Hey Bro, what do you think about this for a chorus? It just came to me while I was taking a shower." And the blue and the grey paint the colors of the lieAnd it's true, you can pray, but even God ain't sayin' whyIf I could I would place a hundred billion dollar bounty On the hate that makes the war that digs the graves of Catoosa County
Sometimes Chuck's genius really pisses me off, but then I realize that I'm just mad at myself for not thinking of it first. What a great songwriter he is, one of the world's best. And I love making up songs with him!
We tracked "Catoosa" live with me and Davis facing each other, him on dobro and me on vocals and guitar. Then Davis put down this crazy Casio electric guitar/synth thing, pretty much all feedback screeches and squeals. The song is really more of a bluegrass song, but I wanted to do it a little weirder than that. I thought it should sound like the character in the song was singing it, which would be more rough around the edges, not polished like most bluegrass recordings. Although I would love to hear a great bluegrass band do it sometime. I really love this song, and I bet Pappy would too.
A few weeks ago, I again passed the Catoosa County sign on my way to Nashville, and as I crossed over into the great state of Tennessee, I thought about Pappy, his gentle spirit, his music and his stories, and I thought about that old, rusty confederate saber that was mine for a moment. Just then I realized that the saber was never mine, it wasn't the Spencer boys either. It wasn't anybody's but the man who died carrying it. That moment was one of those "full circle" kind of moments for me. The kind of moment where you suddenly understand that everything is connected. A moment where you see how one thing in life leads to another and then another and so on until you're back to where you started from, but in the best kind of way.
Track #9...
Track #10 "I Can't Remember Summer"
There’s something really special about this recording. When we tracked this song at the cabin, we were all blown away with what happened. From the beginning, it had its own thing going. I’d like to make an entire album that sounds like “Can’t Remember Summer.” Gerry played the drum kit with his hands, and Davis played his Johnny Smith guitar which has such a unique tone, really beautiful.
It was written as a songwriting exercise with four... yes, four other writers. I know, you’re probably asking right now, “It takes five people to write a freakin’ song?” Well, not exactly, but this one did I guess. Here’s how it happened. I’d been invited by the Sixthman folks via The Cayamo Cruise out to the Bluffs in Augusta, Ga. with Chuck Cannon, Glen Phillips, Edie Carey, and Rebecca Lovell. We all met at this old southern hunting lodge where we hunted songs for several days. We split up into sessions of two and three writers each and co-wrote some really good songs. This is also where Glen and I wrote “Murphy’s Song”. The last night we were there, we thought it would be fun to write a song as a group, just hang out in the main room of the lodge and write a song together, a total group effort. The five of us stayed up all night and wrote most of “Can’t Remember Summer.”
Rebecca and Edie started it, and then the boys jumped in. I love the song. It says a lot in the lyric because there’s a story within a story. You’ve got the out-of-work Michigan auto worker who’s recently lost his wife. We don’t know if she just left him or if she’s deceased, but I’ve always thought of her as being dead. That second verse is so personal for me; it reminds me of my dad ever since my mom passed away. And it also speaks to the bigger picture of job loss and depressed cities, towns and communities all across this great nation. It’s not the happiest song on the record, but it’s an important song, I think. I hope you guys will like it for what it is. It’s a snapshot into the life of one of so many people living on the flip side of the American Dream.