Jeff McCord on the month’s new releases
Ruthie Foster
The Truth According to Ruthie Foster
Blue Corn
It took a few tries, but Ruthie Foster’s 2007 The Phenomenal Ruthie Foster was a stone- soul triumph for the Austin singer, with an unprecedented laser focus on her strengths. To a large degree, The Truth According to Ruthie Foster (Blue Corn) follows suit. Working at Memphis’s famed Ardent Studios with some top-notch session players (Robben Ford, Jim Dickinson), Foster ditches the cheesy keyboard effects and homegrown feel for a more pristine sound. At times, like with gritty soul/blues grinds “Nickel and a Nail” and “Dues Paid in Full,” the album is curiously indistinguishable from its seventies-steeped predecessor. But stylistically it is much broader, with mixed results: There’s the cover of Patty Griffin’s “When It Don’t Come Easy” (nice but not special), E. Bibb’s “Love in the Middle” (eh), and Foster’s own “Joy on the Other Side” (moving) and “Tears of Pain” (overwrought). This is a minor complaint; Foster is a gifted singer who understandably likes showcasing a variety of styles. Still, when a deep groove like “Truth!” kicks in, you can’t help but think “Damn, why couldn’t there be a whole album of this?”
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys
The Tiffany Transcriptions
Collectors’ Choice
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys took the fiddle-country-cawing influences of Wills’s Kosse youth and infused them with the popular music of the time—swing—for a combination that would inspire generations. Despite the band’s numerous albums over the years, it’s The Tiffany Transcriptions (Collectors’ Choice), a loose set of radio recordings made from 1946 to 1947, that many consider to be Wills’ seminal work. The 150 songs were recorded on the fly at the end of grueling tours (when the musicians could nail the material’s complex harmonies in their sleep), and the sessions, made without the time or financial constraints of 78 rpm label recordings, were sent out on sixteen-inch discs. Because of this, they captured the magic of the Playboys on the bandstand. This ten-CD set essentially collects ten previous single-disc Transcription reissues (Kaleidoscope and Rhino), missing the chance to assemble the sessions chronologically and give them further historical relevance. The liner notes are a bit skimpy too. But the music—which includes the first recording of “Faded Love”— is an absolute Texas treasure.
Ben Kweller
Changing Horses
ATO
Hearing Ben Kweller cite Garth Brooks as a childhood influence may not be welcome news to his fans, who have already followed the young songwriter through one abrupt stylistic shift. His Greenville grunge band, Radish, was as well-known for being at the center of a Nirvana-fueled major-label bidding war as for a hit in the UK (“Little Pink Stars”), and after the group called it quits, Kweller moved to New York and morphed into a heart-on-his-sleeve pop star. Now relocated to Austin, it seems he’s done the most clichéd thing possible: He’s made a country album. But Changing Horses (ATO) is a surprisingly logical extension of his work, much more Gram (Parsons) than Garth. The self-produced session is languid, muddy, and full of slyly pleasing melodies and impassioned singing; the steel guitar is simply icing on the cake. While naiveté has made Kweller’s recent work appealing, his lyrics can be embarrassingly trite. Yet for every “Wantin’ Her Again” and “Things I Like to Do,” there’s a sublime work like “Gypsy Rose” and “Old Hat” to convince you that Kweller may have found his niche.
Gurf Morlix
Gurf Morlix
Photograph by Brende Fuller
The acclaimed Austin guitarist and producer (Blaze Foley, Lucinda Williams, Slaid Cleaves, Ray Wylie Hubbard) is also fast becoming known—on the basis of his 2007 album, Diamonds to Dust (Blue Corn), and this month’s LAST EXIT TO HAPPYLAND (Rootball)—as a songwriter.
You spent eleven years playing with and producing for Lucinda Williams, leaving during the Car Wheels on a Gravel Road sessions. Were those sessions really as bad as everyone’s reported? Uh, yeah. Probably worse.
What happened? There was always a balance of the music versus the rest of it. And then the scales tipped. You know, I could always walk away when it got crazy. And then all of a sudden I couldn’t. So I quit.
That was more than ten years ago. Have you reconciled? No, I haven’t spoken to her.
Was 1988’s classic Lucinda Williams the first record you ever produced? Yes. I was playing these shows with Lucinda around Hollywood, and we had a cool band and she had great songs, but we were making $8 or $10 a night—for the whole band. It was too much work for too little pay. I was trying to think of a way to tell her that I was going to quit when she called me up and said, “We have a record deal. Who’s going to produce it?” And I said, “I will!”
What made you think you could do it? I’d always been the guy in the band with the tape recorder. I knew the records I liked, and I knew how to make things sound that way.
You’re known as a musician’s musician, but in a way, you’re an anti-musician. You’re not about flash or having a lot of gear. My approach is basically simplicity. I’m not wired to hear a lot of notes. I see a record like a painting or a flower arrangement: Everything’s got its place. You start with a great song and a great singer and some great musicians, and then your job is just to not screw that up.
You didn’t make your first solo album until 2000, yet you’d been writing songs since the seventies. Yeah, I was writing songs all the while, but they weren’t any good.
Then came Diamonds to Dust, which was the work of a focused songwriter. How did that come about? I think maybe I got nodes or something [laughs]. I found my voice as a songwriter, and I found my voice as a singer. What happened was that friends of mine started dying, and I wrote about that. It was sort of a big step.
And now the new album. Do you feel you’ve had a creative songwriting burst? I write whenever the songs show up, which is usually when I’m going to bed. I’ve learned it’s really hard to write a good song. It’s not hard to write something that rhymes and doesn’t sound stupid, but it has to be better than that if it’s going to be compelling. [Singer-songwriter] Mary Gauthier told me once that she’ll rewrite a song dozens of times and spend a year or two on it if it’s not right, until she gets every syllable the way she wants it. I finally realized that that was what I needed to be doing.
The song “Voice of Midnight” is about your friend Ian McLagan and his wife, Kim, who died in an auto accident. Yeah, that song came to me late one night. I didn’t sit down to write a song about Kim. I just had that line in my head, “voice of midnight”; that’s all it was. When I got it all written down and I played it, the hair was standing up on the back of my neck, and I was like, “F—, that’s about Kim and Mac.” I’d had no idea at that point. It sort of freaked me out. I tried to play it again, and I couldn’t. That moment was pretty powerful.
“Hard Road” feels like one of the album’s centerpieces. It’s kind of an epic song. It is kind of an epic. I don’t know how I wrote this one. I know that as I was trying to make it perfect in my mind, it kept getting longer and longer. Somebody that I respect a lot at one point said, “That song’s too long.” And I thought about it, and then I added another verse. Read the full interview.
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