Tag Archives: blickenstaff

Singer Aaron Neville’s Rough Road to Salvation

by MirandaI21 Posted on October 23, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Jacob Blickenstaff

The distinct beauty of Aaron Neville’s voice has been a constant through a recording career that covers regional soul of New Orleans, his integral work with his siblings in the Neville Brothers, his crossover pop success with Linda Ronstadt in the ’80s, and his more recent tributes to his old doo-wop and gospel influences.

Now 75, Neville’s latest album, Apache (a nickname from his youth), reconnects him with the sounds of 1960s and ’70s New Orleans soul, courtesy of producer Eric Krasno of the bands Soulive and Lettuce. Apache also serves as Neville’s reclamation of a youth fraught with challenges. He served a six-month stint in Orleans Parish Prison for car theft at the age of 19, and was later sentenced for burglary (the result of his falling in with a bad manager, the 1950s R&B singer and pimp Larry Williams). He also struggled with addiction into the early ’80s.

Neville’s poems—candid statements on love, awareness of the world, and his memories—are the lyrical source for the majority of the album, a first for a singer whose work is typically more interpretive. But his original songs have been signposts in a long career, starting with the 1960’s “Everyday” on the flip side of his first single, the Neville Brothers staple “Yellow Moon,” and “To Make Me Who I Am,” from the 1997 album of the same title.

Apache presents an opportunity to get to know an honest, humble soul who happens to be one of our greatest living voices. I photographed and spoke with Neville at his farm in Duchess County, New York, where he lives with his wife, Sarah; their peekapoo, Apache Jr.; and a whole bunch of chickens.

Mother Jones: You were 19 when you first set foot in a New Orleans recording studio. Tell me about the experience.

Aaron Neville: I just wanted to sing. I’d been wanting to record, like Ernie K-Doe and Irma Thomas, and I got a chance to be on the same label, Minit Records. Larry Williams got me the first recording session, he and Larry McKinley, who was a disc jockey. I would learn the song right then, because most of the stuff Allen Toussaint wrote. I wrote my first song, “Everyday” and he wrote the B-side, “Over You.” It’s not like today where they can fix things. Whatever you did was what you had—there wasn’t no 10 and 12 takes. If you did harmonies, it was everyone around the same microphone. To hear my voice coming back on the tape, that was amazing: “Oh wow, that’s me.” Then when it started playing on the radio, that was a big thing there.

MJ: I heard a story that Toussaint pushed you to sing more straight-ahead on that first session. Was there much creative tension in that relationship?

AN: No, I just sang that the way he wanted me to, and he was satisfied. After he did the music on “Everyday,” he started modeling everything else he wrote for me behind that—sort of like a doo-wop thing.

MJ: Tell me about your relationship with Larry Williams.

AN: Larry came to New Orleans around ’56 and took the Hawkettes out on the road with him, but he told me, “I’ll be back for you.” When I got out of jail, he got me in the studio to record and took me on the road. He got tired of being misused, so he says he’s going to be a pimp—he went to California and started pimping. When I went out there, he was going to manage me, but I had a contract with Minit records, so I did a few gigs with him and Etta James and Johnny Watson at the 5-4 Ballroom.

I had to do something to earn my keep. Since I didn’t want to pimp, he said we’ve got this guy who will book some burglaries. We’d go and clean the place out, and we had rooms in a hotel out on the highway and we’d fill it up with clothes and suits and whatever. The whole time I’m saying to myself, “Lord, get me out of this, send me back home, please.” So when I did get busted, I said, “Thank you, Jesus.” I ended up doing time in ’63 and part of ’64 fighting forest fires. It was dangerous. That’s when I first got into the weights. I was looking like the Hulk up in there. I was 22 years old.

MJ: The success of 1966’s “Tell It Like It Is”—another local New Orleans production—caused problems in that the label, Parlo, couldn’t keep up with the demand. Was that frustrating for you?

AN: They were trying to make it look like they knew what they were doing, but they didn’t. They had to declare bankruptcy, so hey. I was fresh out on the streets with a hit record. I didn’t have time to really think about that. I had people coming at me to manage me—they didn’t have nothing to offer, they were just telling me crazy stuff. They were going to send me on the road with no music, no stage clothes, no nothing. This guy Joe Jones, who was managing the Dixie Cups and Alvin “Shine” Robinson, was a shyster, but he kinda saved the day because he came in and made sure that I had music, clothes, and pictures and stuff. He was a professional but, like I said, a shyster—he was looking out for his interests. At the time, Frank Sinatra wanted to do something with me but Joe didn’t let me know about it, and messed it up.

I never really got paid for “Tell It Like Is,” but I look back at it and say God knew what he was doing; he probably figured that if I had got money back in them days I wouldn’t be here now. That’s okay. I’m here. And I’m still singing the song.

MJ: So, Apache marks the first time in your career you’ve written the lyrics for an entire album.

AN: I write poetry on my iPhone. I’ve got about 100 poems on there. So I wanted to do some of my stuff and that’s how I got hooked up with Eric Krasno and Dave Gutter. We started talking on the phone, or texting, and they’d send me some ideas, and then we got in the studio.

MJ: So these songs start purely as poems? Expressions of feeling that you later set to music?

AN: I write when there’s something happening in my life and it helps me to get through whatever. I have to be inspired. I can’t just sit down and plan to write. “Yellow Moon” was a poem. My wife at the time, Joel—she’s dead now—it was our 25th anniversary. She had the chance to go on a cruise with her sister. And I’m home with the kids and looking up and I saw the big moon, and I just started writing.

MJ: A few songs on Apache speak of your love for your second wife, Sarah, whom you married in 2010, three years after Joel passed. How did you navigate your grief and open yourself up to a new relationship?

AN: I buried Joel on our 48th anniversary. I had been with her since I was 16. I think Joel might have sent Sarah into my life. It was God-sent. That first year after she passed, I can’t even explain it. I would cry, and people would come and tell me, “I know what you’re going through.” I’d think, “You don’t know what I’m going through.” They had no idea! It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Before that, the lowest part was when Joel had left with the kids and went to be near her momma in ’72. That’s when I did “Hercules.” When Sarah came in, she let me talk about Joel, because it was heavy on me. I’d cry and it was a healing thing, you know?

MJ: Anyone who writes about you points out how distinctive your voice is. Even when you account for your influences—cowboy yodels, early gospel, doo-wop, and soul—there’s something in it that is undeniably unique, improvisational, and in the moment.

AN: There’s a saying, “He who sings prays twice.” It’s like somebody is telling me how to do it. I can’t explain it, and sometimes I’ll be singing and I just want to close my eyes, and I wish I could just hit a note that could cure cancer. That’s how I feel when I’m singing. This lady told me about an autistic boy in Las Vegas, he was about six years old, they couldn’t do nothing with him; he’d flail around and they had to keep him constrained. The only thing that would calm him down: They’d put the headset on and I was singing. It gave me chills to hear that. I said it must have been the God in me touching the God in him. I ain’t gonna take credit for that.

MJ: It’s worth mentioning this beautiful farm that we’re looking out at.

AN: It’s paradise. Going to the city, I’m always in a hurry to get back here. Peace and calm. Sometimes I just sit out there and look at the trees, the harmony in the trees. They just lay together. There are no problems, nobody arguing with each other, except the chickens maybe.

Jacob Blickenstaff

Visit source – 

Singer Aaron Neville’s Rough Road to Salvation

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Paradise, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Singer Aaron Neville’s Rough Road to Salvation

Contact: Guitar Wunderkind Blake Mills

by NoellaPride Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

Photographs by Jacob Blickenstaff

The 28-year-old California native Blake Mills has been playing guitar with a singular focus since he was 10. As a high school kid he cofounded, with Taylor Goldsmith, the band Simon Dawes—which would reform as Dawes following Mill’s 2007 departure.

Over the years, Mills has established a rep as a top guitar talent. Eric Clapton has called his playing “phenomenal” and Rick Rubin described it as “breathtaking.” A musician’s musician, he’s been hired for touring and session work with Kid Rock, Fiona Apple, Julian Casablancas, Jenny Lewis, Jackson Browne, Neil Diamond, Conor Oberst, Ed Sheeran, and Norah Jones.

His two albums as a songwriter, 2010’s Break Mirrors and last year’s major label debut Heigh Ho, featured contributions from his contemporaries as well as legendary elder statesmen, including drummer Jim Keltner, bassists Don Was and Mike Elizondo, and pianist Benmont Tench. He’s also becoming a sought-after producer and was recently tapped to work with Alabama Shakes on their highly anticipated second album, Sound & Color.

I photographed and spoke with Mills in Los Angeles at the home of producer and frequent collaborator Tony Berg.

Mother Jones: Many notables regard you as a great player. For someone who’s gone so deeply into your instrument, have you discovered certain ways of practicing that are particularly effective?

Blake Mills: I think I had a way of practicing when I wasn’t sitting with an instrument, thinking about things at such length that they ingrained themselves into my musical vocabulary so I could draw from that in an improvisational situation. Earlier on, when the things that began to really resonate with me and fascinate me started to surface, it was a kind of catharsis. Anything we were studying in school, like math, or understanding somebody’s behavior outside of school, kind of worked its way into something I could understand by way of a musical experience I’d had or something I’d heard.

MJ: So music became the lens for how you viewed and processed everything?

BM: It was the common denominator, like a first language—the Rosetta Stone that I keep going back to. Maybe that helps to keep the enthusiasm. You can get really burned out and apathetic if you listen to too much music. If you go out to shows and you hear some of the shit that comes out, it can be soul-crushing just to be exposed to it, let alone work on it or be around it for a living. It’s the most surprising thing that I’ve encountered since the experience of putting a record out with a major label and touring and everything: the need for the protecting yourself from things that take away your energy.

MJ: As you create songs and albums, do you think of it as slowly establishing a body of work?

BM: I don’t know if I think about it like that. My favorite experiences have all been finding myself at one point in a timeline and going in both directions, just discovering at my own pace. If I could admit to be playing some kind of long game, and strategizing this, I would. I think my role as a musician is much more reactionary than that of the creative personality type who locks himself in a tower and then comes out with Pet Sounds or something. I just respond to stimuli more than anything.

MJ: You could easily be out there doing front-and-center, face-melting guitar stuff—but what’s remarkable about both of these albums is that you use your abilities in the service of a bigger picture. You’re seem unconcerned with pyrotechnics.

BM: Yeah, I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt like there was an appropriate time to approach my own songs and add that thing to it. I remember being 16 or 17 and going apeshit for that kind of playing: Yngwie Malmsteen or Steve Vai. I was just going, “How do these guys do it?” And then you sit down with one of those passages and learn it, and you go, “Oh, I can do it.” But when you sit down with the chords to Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” or Kurt Weill’s “September Song” and the piece of music doesn’t give you any more insight into how a song like that is written or created. There’s something so much more fascinating and mysterious to me about where those things come from than the playing. There are things on this record where people will go, “I’m not sure where the guitar playing is on it.”

MJ: You play a lot in nonstandard tunings and really just have your own way of doing things. How did you discover those techniques?

BM: Using slide was a big precursor for me into the open tunings. There were a lot of things about Derek Trucks, Ry Cooder, Elmore James and Kokomo Arnold, this huge era of guys who all played slide in certain dialects. I had the benefit of the internet when I was growing up, so I was listening to all the live tapes of Derek Trucks‘ band that I could get ahold of, and reading interviews, and seeing that the people he was listening to were the same people I was listening to.

I grew up playing with a guy named Bob Brozman, who was a world-music guitar player. He’d just go around the globe and make these beautiful records with different musicians, spoke something like 11 or 12 languages. He turned me on to a lot of the Middle Eastern and West African players that shaped a large part of the vocabulary of what I do.

At the same time, my finger got fucked up, crushed in a door, and it was in one of those metal splints. So I started playing slide. And the open tuning thing just came with the package. Then I started thinking, I’ll be a better slide player if I really demystify this tuning. I should try some of the things, just a verbatim sort of transfer over to the open tuning, and see what it does.

MJ: What’s the most difficult part about playing for you, the thing you really have to slog through to make progress?

BM: Staying enthused about finding things; discovering new beauty in the world that can translate into music. That’s the most precious sort of resource. You have to pull stuff from outside of the musical realm. Whatever muscle it is that it takes to listen to music and stay focused, in me, is really strong. I don’t have a problem working 14 hours a day and still have ears and have a brain to mix afterwards. But I don’t have the same strength to actively pursue and stay enthused about things like literature and movies and a social life—things that enhance the music, and the person. I don’t want to become this lazy person, a guy who thinks in terms of New Year’s resolutions. I really do want to see a change in myself in certain ways, but I want to figure out exactly what they are and not have it be like a diet that I’m trying.

That’s the most alarming thing to me. I’m 28, and the world just starts to look like a different place as you start realizing, “Okay, now you’re 35, now you’re 40, and it’s no longer the thing where, “He’s really young, and he’s good.” I want to be good at something else that feels a little more private, a little more personal. That I think that will ultimately be more valuable, looking at everything, if I make it to 50 or 60 or 70.

Jacob Blickenstaff

MJ: I guess that’s what I’m sensing with the albums. These are attempts at a whole process. They’re not guitar records, they’re not even just songwriter records. There’s a lot of depth to the sound.

BM: The most attractive thing that I’ve seen in the creative realm is the enthusiasm in people that does not seem to burn out. That’s what I’m after. Fuck, I can’t tell you how amazing it would to be able to be to call from memory the Schubert Lieder or Bach Etudes and be able to play them at the level of Chris Thile or Edgar Myer. I’m surrounded by guys who are some of the best musicians on their instruments that there ever were. It’s a heavy, heavy concept. And they all seem to enjoy something other than the celebration of that ability. When we get together, we play Dylan songs.

When you have the catalog of work, it doesn’t feel like you’ve got one shot to get it right; it’s just like, you’re making a new document of something at the present time, and it’s a living thing, and it changes. It’s been cool to help other people make their records, to produce. You get a crash course in things that you don’t get as the artist.

MJ: What was it like producing the Alabama Shakes?

BM: It was an amazing experience. It was such a serendipitous combination, because there aren’t a lot of bands that I’ve ever heard of who have the kind of success on the first record that they did, and then chose to be as daring and challenging as they did on their second record. Instead of trying to figure out how to capitalize on it, or keep the pace, they were energized and wanted to make a record that checked all the boxes of the honest things that worked for the forces of good. I’m worthless in a conversation of, “Well, what about the radio? Let’s listen to five records that sold really well last year.” I would way rather be on the side of something that is beautiful and never catches on than the alternative. Not that there’s one alternative, but there’s definitely some stuff you can end up in that I would be embarrassed with myself for doing.

In Close Contact is an independent documentary project on music, musicians, and creativity. Visit InCloseContact.com for extended interviews and more photography.

View the original here – 

Contact: Guitar Wunderkind Blake Mills

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, oven, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Contact: Guitar Wunderkind Blake Mills

Contact: Wandering Troubador Sean Rowe’s Inner Madman

by ShirleeDahlenbu Posted on September 8, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Sean Rowe Jacob Blickenstaff

More From CONTACT:


Liam Bailey


Thomas Bartlett and Martin Hayes


Aaron Freeman


Puss n Boots


Ben Watt


Joe Henry


Jolie Holland


Rodney Crowell


Benmont Tench

Sean Rowe began his music career 10 years ago in his hometown of Troy, New York, playing covers in bars for a living. Now based in Woodstock, Rowe (rhymes with Tao) is still known for his emotive interpretations of other people’s songs at his live performances, which are as likely to happen at a private house concert as a club or festival stage.

Tomorrow, Rowe releases Madman, his third album on ANTI- records. The songs—while mixing elements of his early influences of soul, early rock, and slide-guitar blues—often feel more like incantations calling for deeper awareness, reflection, and personal connection. The video for Madman‘s title track is a good introduction into his world, a humble and unvarnished road diary of the people he meets, the living rooms he visits, and the walks he takes in the woods. I spoke with and photographed Rowe in Brooklyn. The following is in his words:

If I really sat and analyzed what it is I’m doing, I would be exhausted just thinking about it. Because it’s a lot. Sometimes I want to tour everywhere and just perform and that’s all I want to do, and then I remember, “Oh yeah, I have a family and that’s the most important thing in the world to me, and I want to get that down right.” I love being a dad, I feel like I’m really good at that. But it requires a lot of energy to be a really good parent—being present, which I feel like I’m really struggling with, being away a lot. Balancing all that is just mad. That’s kind of where the song “Madman” came out of. I put a lot of myself into the record this time around.

And the city has a way just to make you forget,
about half the stuff you love and things you don’t know yet.

That was the first line. I sat on the song for four years. I had the line, and I had the chord progression, but it never finished itself. You gotta wait until it comes out. I realized after some time what the song was really about. The city life—I don’t think we’ve quite evolved to live that lifestyle. As exciting as it can be, and as great as the idea-sharing possibilities are, I don’t think physically we were made to walk on pavement and to be as absent-minded as the city can make you. It creates a certain mentality that is only good if you are dealing with the laws of modern society. It’s not really a universal feeling. I think it can be distracting; it can take you away from a real lasting sense of place.

When I was younger, I liked to think that I was leading some kind of esoteric existence, dreaming of being some kind of hermit or vagabond wandering into the woods to live off the land. But touring has showed me so many different kinds of lifestyles that are equally valid. People are people—some good, some bad. I don’t think that what I do is particularly virtuous other than I think it’s important to get in touch with your surroundings on a very basic level. Although there is spirituality in it for me, I think it is just a good practice to be aware of your neighbors, not just people, but plants and animals. It gives you a better feeling about everything. I think everybody can relate to that. I left my phone at the gig last night, and my wife and I were joking that it was God’s way of forcing me to be quiet for a little bit.

What I’m doing with the house concerts is about connecting with the fans in a direct way. House shows are pretty intense, just by the nature of the way they work. They aren’t open to the public. The people who contact me to do them are really big fans and they just have all their friends and their family come. Most of the people have never heard of you before and usually I’ve never met the hosts. And the first time they’re seeing me play is in their living room. It’s a pretty raw experience. It’s a beautiful thing, though. Music has a way of breaking down a lot of walls. It takes away the awkwardness pretty quickly and gets you in the door. One of the great things is really getting to know people, seeing what they do for a living, how they got to where they are. There’s a lot of humility in it. There’s really no pretense, there can’t be.

When I started out playing in bars it was primarily to pay the bills, because bars were the only places that would pay. That means having to play a lot of cover songs, because people want to hear what they already know. But I had always chosen the covers that I loved to play. I don’t have to play covers now, but I enjoy doing it, because if I can bring something different to it and keep the intent of the song intact, then I’ll do it. For example, I cover a song by Richard Thompson called “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” which is one of those songs that you really don’t touch. I think that I play it because I can keep the emotion alive that was intended.

Everything is up for grabs in songwriting, It doesn’t matter if you’re in the woods or a high-rise apartment, you have to be open to every kind of experience to be a good writer. My baseline lifestyle is centered on trying to live as naturally as possible. It just feels really good; it’s not the kind of thing you need to over-explain. I’ve learned not to force what I do onto other people, but for me it’s really exciting to get out there and harvest wild food and spend time in nature.

I don’t think about it too much when I’m in the process of writing. I’ll certainly try to wrap myself around the song as much as possible, but once the song is done, it has a way of becoming more than the sum of its parts. And then it just becomes the song as a whole entity. It’s like a comedian who knows something will be funny but he can’t really prove it yet; he can take something small and seemingly insignificant that he knows must be happening to everybody else, too. It’s a lot like that in songwriting, you just trust that this stuff happens to everybody.

Sean Rowe Jacob Blickenstaff

“Contact” is a series of artist portraits and interviews by Jacob Blickenstaff.

Read the article:  

Contact: Wandering Troubador Sean Rowe’s Inner Madman

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Contact: Wandering Troubador Sean Rowe’s Inner Madman

Liam Bailey’s “Definitely Now” is Sneakily Addictive

by PorfiriHaddon Posted on August 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Liam Bailey
Definitely NOW
Flying Buddha/Sony Music

Liam Bailey’s smoky rasp of a voice would enhance any setting. On this sneakily addictive debut, the UK singer skillfully mixes slick modern pop, old-school soul, torch ballads, and a dash of reggae, creating a familiar yet fresh brew reminiscent of the great Amy Winehouse, an early champion of his. Where some young vocalists tend to emote excessively in an attempt to show off their skills, Bailey makes a virtue of understatement. He’s thoroughly engaging on uptempo numbers like “Villain” and “Fool Boy,” but especially effective on slower late-night tunes such as “Autumn Leaves” (not the pop standard) and “So, Down Cold.” Make it mellow, Liam.

Also read: Bailey spoke to photographer Jacob Blickenstaff about making the album and his split with Jimi Hendrix’s old label, Polydor.

Original article: 

Liam Bailey’s “Definitely Now” is Sneakily Addictive

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Stout, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Liam Bailey’s “Definitely Now” is Sneakily Addictive

Contact: What Rodney Crowell Aims To Do "Before I Leave This World"

by Shani1315v Posted on May 19, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Rodney Crowell in New York City Jacob Blickenstaff

Rodney Crowell is a master craftsman of the song. Arriving in Nashville in 1972, his early years were spent in the close orbit with fellow luminaries Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. He also found a productive relationship with Emmylou Harris, writing many songs that she recorded, and joining her elite Hot Band as rhythm guitarist. While married to Roseanne Cash he produced her landmark album King’s Record Shop. Not long after, he had his own breakout album, Diamonds and Dirt, which launched five No. 1 Billboard country singles.

After the hot streak cooled, Crowell continued to whittle his songwriting to a fine point, mining his experience and inspirations for more personal yet universally resonant works. Following last year’s Grammy-winning collaboration with Emmylou Harris, Old Yellow Moon, he released his latest—15th!—solo album, Tarpaper Sky. Photographer Jacob Blickenstaff spoke with him recently in New York City. The following is in Crowell’s words.

I never focused on writing songs for others. That doesn’t work, and in fact I can’t do it. All of the success I’ve had with other people performing my songs was a result of just writing “for the sake of the song,” to quote Townes Van Zandt. I learned early, when I got involved with Emmylou Harris recording my songs back in the 70’s. I spent a day writing a song for her, took it over and played it for her, and she says, “That’s real nice, but I heard this demo of this song you wrote and I want to record that.” It hit me that you just have to write the songs for the song. People will cover it.

I do primarily consider myself a songwriter. I’ve always been in the business of tracking down songs, finding their trail and coaxing them out of hiding. I also hold to the theory that once it’s written, it’s got to be performed. Writing is a performance art, I think, and once the voice delivers it, it completes the circle.

I’ve made a study of inspiration based on my own experience. The kind of inspiration that came to me as a young man in my twenties was broad strokes: the theme of love or the theme of the landscape in Louisiana, the theme of running from the cops or the theme of a vacation that I couldn’t afford because I’m a poor boy from Houston. It was broad-stroke by nature, because when creativity is starting to flower it first opens up on a more broad scale. As time moved on, I could get more involved in my own experiences and become more singular. People say to me now, “God, I love what you’re writing, but it’s so you, I can’t record it,” and I understand that. That’s part of the ongoing process of how do I keep the craft sharp enough that occasionally the inspiration finds me worthy of visitation.

I’ve complained about the digital age, but with iTunes I’ve been able to do a study of old blues records and jazz from the ’20s. I always had a fascination with Lightnin’ Hopkins. I really do have a love of acoustic blues from Robert Johnson to R.L. Burnside, and Son House. In a way, Howlin’ Wolf is in that tradition and certainly Muddy Waters—part country blues, part Chicago blues.

To keep myself sharpened, I’ve been trying to understand how would I express the blues. I’m not Lightnin’ Hopkins, and if I attempted to perform like him I’d sound like a blue-eyed white boy. But there is a blues man inside me, and I’m looking for him. I have been tapping into those songs and writing from that perspective. I can follow the blues back to where I find myself in it.

Since I wrote Chinaberry Sidewalks, I got a lot more of the sense that I have to develop my self-editor, which makes my process slower because I spend more time with the songs. I revise songs two or three times to refine the the language. I hear songs that I’ve written in 1972 where I think I let a lot slide by.

Emmylou and I have written seven songs together this year. We’re thinking about making a second album together. I found that it was a bit of a relief; I had gotten so far into self-editing and really making sure I got a jeweler’s-eye view of what I was trying to say, and Emmylou was very sweetly going, “Hey, we were good three revisions back.” Emmy gave me ease in the process.

I like the satisfaction of the creative conversation. Mary Carr, a very gifted poet, writer and memoirist, I collaborated with on Kin. She had worked singularly as a poet and a writer of prose and when she got involved in the collaborative process you could tell she was intoxicated by it. She was part of our creative process in the studio. People who spend time alone in front of the typewriter or the computer screen don’t get to experience the beauty of that collaborative conversation that goes on between musicians. The self-consciousness is gone. I always say that self-consciousness is the enemy of good art.

I don’t find songwriting to get any easier. You get older, time flies by, and I believe that inspiration only comes to an artist of certain years if the dedication and the passion are still there. Going out on the road and getting around will kind of daunt your passion a bit, but not enough to back off. Before I leave this world, if I can create something that’s timeless and museum quality, then it will have all been worth it. And if I don’t? It would have still all been worth it.

“Contact” is series of portraits and conversations with musicians by Jacob Blickenstaff.

Read article here – 

Contact: What Rodney Crowell Aims To Do "Before I Leave This World"

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Contact: What Rodney Crowell Aims To Do "Before I Leave This World"