Gurf Morlix
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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.
I heard a story that Jerry Wexler once wrote a letter to Ray Wylie Hubbard about one of your productions. Is that true?
He did. It was a postcard, and I’ve got a blowup of it in my studio. It says, “Dear Ray,”—it’s handwritten—“Delirium knocked me out”—he means Delirium Tremolos—“Dynamite in all respects: rhythm, execution, material, vocals, plus a really great mix.” “Great” is underlined. It also says, “Pianist Dick Hyman laid this on me: When in doubt, tremolo. Jerry Wexler.” If I ever have moments of self-doubt, I look at that. That’s all I need to see.
Do you have those moments in the studio?
Usually with every project, there’s one where I think, “Oh, man, I’m f—ing up here.” Big time. But it goes away fast. I’ve done so many records now that I pretty much know what I’m doing.
ou 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.
So what made you feel you were actually ready to do it?
Digital recording made it a lot easier to have a home studio. And then my friend Buddy Miller made a record around that time, and I was kind of goaded into it. Once I put the studio in my house and started making records for other people, I thought, “Well, maybe I should do my own record.”
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.
So you feel the serious subject matter brought some gravitas to the music?
Yes. I had all these songs, and I didn’t really know what the album was about until I sat back and listened to it. And there it was. It all came together at the right moment.
What songwriters do you really admire?
All of the people that I’ve worked with: Ray Wylie, Slaid Cleaves, Mary Gauthier, Lucinda, Tom Russell. I’m going to forget some here. Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and Blaze Foley. All of those great songwriters.
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 that 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. 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.
A few of your songs on the new record really stood out to me. What can you tell us about “Drums From New Orleans”? You have a couple of New Orleans songs on the record.
I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and there was a disc jockey there named George “Hound Dog” Lorenz, who when I was just starting to become aware of music, I would hear on the radio. He was playing fifties R&B, and it was incredible. I actually found him online recently and listened to some of those shows. He was playing Little Richard, and it was incredible. I could hear New Orleans music. I wrote that song with my friend George Carver, who also grew up in Buffalo. We started talking about how we’d be up at night under the covers, just twelve years old, and listening to the radio.
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.
Only a drummer and a backing vocalist are credited on the album. You played all the other instruments?
Well, I couldn’t afford to hire anybody. I love Rick Richards’s drumming.
As someone who is so conscientious about production, it must be difficult to have your studio be in your home, because the temptation is probably to work all the time.
I do work all the time. I’m not a workaholic, but if I’m working on a project, like the ones I’m doing now, I’m on a schedule and going in as often as I can.
Is your studio separate enough to where the rest of your home life doesn’t intrude on it?
Well, the spare bedroom downstairs is the control room, and the drums are at the end of the living room. Then there’s the guest room, where I put the singers in. And the office—I have some guitar amps in there. But the studio doesn’t really take over; it’s all kind of unobtrusive. Unless there’s a drummer playing.
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