Thoughts on Broke Down
12/20/99
In the winter of '99 I was putting the songs together for this album, and the material I had written was all pretty bleak. There was the ghost of a rancher, a dying lumber jack, two dead miners, a divorced couple, a couple about to break up, and a couple that never quite got together, plus a couple of guys who are so far beyond depressed they're into defiance and then some. I thought, well, either I need to write some happy stuff to balance this record out, or I need to just go with the dark stuff.
And then I had a little epiphany, and I said, Yeah. I'll be the guy who writes the saddest songs, the tragic stuff. That's always been what's moved me. When I was five I would cry when I heard Hank sing Poor Old Kawliga. When I was starting out, I learned everyone's saddest song. Hank's Ramblin' Man and Six More Miles, Bruce's The River and Stolen Car, Tom Waits' Hang Down Your Head, Dylan's Hollis Brown, Woody's Ain't Got No Home and Poor Boy. When I was playing on the street in the late 80s I could do every song on Springsteen's Nebraska (even the B-sides). So, that's obviously what I'm most interested in. And then I thought, Who writes sad stuff anymore? Nashville's Hallmark greeting card writers pump out "uplifting love songs" (publishers said that over and over while I was up there - that's all they were interested in). And pop is full of adolescent angst and irony, which is fine for all the 16-year-olds. When's the last time you saw a video that told a story of being down, being broke, struggling, facing death? Well, I thought, there's my niche.
Of course, there's a reason you don't see that stuff on TV. Everyone wants to escape. Nobody wants to hear "depressing music." I remember a teacher in high school saying, "Why do you like The River? It's such a depressing album." Well, I don't find these songs depressing at all. I feel uplifted when I hear a story that lets me know I'm not alone, that everyone struggles, that life is not easy. I feel more in touch with the human race when I listen to these songs. I feel more alive. It's a cathartic feeling to sing these songs and to share in the common struggle of life. Did you hear the Carter Family sing uplifting love songs? Or Jimmie Rodgers? Hell, he wrote a gallows humor song about the very disease that was killing him. Hank wrote a few fun songs, but the ones that endure are the darkest and saddest: I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Cold Cold Heart, The Angel of Death (OK, that's just one of my favorites).
This idea struck me as I was driving home from a gig in Birmingham: I'm singing the blues. Of course nobody is going to put my record in the Blues section at Tower. All that "The Blues" means today is a technical style, and that's not what I do. But I think that what I'm after is closer to the lament of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters than I ever realized before. Did you ever notice how many of Hank's songs have "Blues" in the title (at least eight)? It's my theory that what made Hank and Woody and Muddy and Robert Johnson and Jimmie Rodgers and the Carters so enduringly great (and so popular in their day) was the connection they made to people via "the blues," that is the laments and hard luck tales that let people know they are not alone and give people a feeling of connection to their community and compassion for their fellow man.
There's precious little to connect to in today's mass marketed music, and I guess it's probably always been like that for the most part. I know I'll never make such a profound connection with the people of this country as my heros did, but I'll bet someone will eventually. In the meantime I hope to rekindle some of their spirit on a small scale as I travel around the country, singing my sad songs and hard luck tales.
Broke Down
This is really Rod Picott's song. He wrote it as his second marriage was breaking apart. He said, "Yeah, I've got these 4 year marriages down." I just changed a few lines and smoothed out the melody. He's the only songwriter I write with regularly, which is about once a year these days. We grew up around the corner from each other in a little town in Maine. We bonded as fellow outcasts, staying inside and listening to Beatles records when we were 10 instead of playing football outside. We formed a garage band in high school - the Magic Rats - named after a character in Springsteen's "Jungleland." Even at the time, we knew we'd stick with music for the long haul, while the other guys in the band would drift off into normal life. Rod lives in Nashville now and is recording an album in his home studio.
One Good Year
I was in Karen Poston's living room in South Austin, and we were catching up on our latest disappointments, and Karen said with a sigh, "All we need is one good year." I said, "That sounds like a song." We worked on it for a while and didn't come up with anything. But then she whipped out a fragment about the Horseshoe Lounge, and we got something out of that. Months later I wrote an early version of One Good Year, but it was kind of predictable. I sat down with Steve Brooks on January 2 and he injected some life into it. I finished it up a few months later, just in time to make it onto the record. Steve and Karen don't get much recognition in Austin, but they each have a handful of truly brilliant songs, in my opinion.
Horseshoe Lounge
I've got a confession to make: I'd never been until the record came out. But I've been to enough bars and honky-tonks and holes-in-the-wall. My friend Karen Poston had the basic structure of the song, and we worked on it together and separately (and even over the phone when I was on the road) for a couple of months. We were trying to capture the haunting feeling of a relationship that just didn't quite get started. The Horseshoe has been around since the 50s, and whenever I play the song in Texas I ask the audience if anyone has a story about the Horseshoe Lounge, and someone usually does: "I won $100 playing shuffleboard there one time." "I got beat at pool by a one-armed man." "My uncle got shot there. No, that was the Circleville Inn." This song seemed more commercial to me than most of myothers so I showed it to a publisher in Nashville. He said that no one would want to record it unless their dad worked at the Horseshoe Lounge, or something like that.
Cold & Lonely
It was time to write songs, but I kept getting distracted by the phone, the TV, the trash needs to go out, the oil needs changing, etc. So I took up an offer from my friend (and Houston DJ) David John Scribner to stay on his family's long-abandoned ranch in Old Dime Box Texas. No phone line, no TV, no chores, no heat (it was January). Just pasture and cows and barbed wire and a lonely old house, haunted by the ghosts of long-dead farming families.
Breakfast In Hell
I was visiting Gurf Morlix and his wife Brende at their summer cottage in Ontario. They took me for a ride in their speedboat through the coves and straits of Georgian Bay. Brende pointed out the preserved wooden hulls of 100-year-old boats in the cold, shallow water and we went swimming at Sandy Grey Falls on the Musquash River. Gurf told me the story of how the falls got its name, and I said, damn, that's a folk song if I ever heard one. He had a great map of the 30,000 Island region with all these cool place-names (Go Home Bay, Giant's Tomb), and I started working on this traditional folk song at the cottage. I kept working on it all the way back to Austin the next week. It was just about done (and 6 minutes long!) when I got home. I had recently been turned on to the great Canadian songwriter, Stompin' Tom Conners, so his music was an influence. Plus there's this poem my friend Seymour Guenther recites around the campfire called "The Cremation of Sam McGee." That's pretty much where I got that very traditional rhyme scheme. I didn't think I'd ever put the song on a record because it was so traditional. I just thought of it as a good songwriting exercise. But it came out pretty good, and it's great fun to do live, so, here it is.
Bring It On
My brother J was having a rough year. Every month there was some new setback: harsh winter, can't get a job, car accident, baby needs an operation, have to move in with the in-laws. . . I said, "J, how do you keep going?" He said, "Aw, I just say Bring It On." That year really made a man out of him. I wrote one version and played it for a while, but it sounded too happy (!) I changed the melody and had Rod Picott throw a few cool lines in, and now it sounds a little more desperate.
Lydia
I'm kinda slow when it comes to figuring out the story of a song. I get distracted by the melody and the feel. I first heard this song when Karen Poston sang it at the late, great Austin Outhouse with her late, great band, Aunt Beanie's First Prize Beets. I immediately liked the melody and feel of the song, and I could tell that something tragic was going on. But it wasn't til I sat down to learn the song that I realized how sad the story is, and how gracefully this song is written. The story is revealed slowly, subtly, so that you have to listen several times, saying, "What exactly happened there?" I think that's the mark of a really great song.
This Morning I Am Born Again
My wife bought me Pastures Of Plenty, a book of unpublished Woody Guthrie songs and stories and letters, for Christmas of 1991, when we had just moved to Texas. I was invited to play at an annual Woody Tribute the following spring, so I thought I'd try to impress people and do a Woody song no one had heard of. My favorite piece in the book was a group of verses proclaiming the gospel according to Woody: a rejection of the dogma and politics of The Church in favor of seeing the dignity and spirituality in the world we are in - the world of nature and fellow strugglers. I put these verses together with a gospelly melody and sang it at the show. Being the new kid in town, I played early, and there weren't many people to impress. But a scraggly guy in a leather jacket named Ray Wylie Hubbard approached me and said he really like what I did. A couple of years went by before I saw Ray again, but we eventually did hook up. His support and encouragement have helped me out immensely, and he's become a great friend.
Key Chain
I started this one at Bradbury Mountain State Park in Maine, long before I ever thought of moving to Texas. I had already written a song that morning and I was shooting for two in one day. I was basically just putting new words onto Leon Payne's Lost Highway to tell the story of my recent failure at respectable life (I'd only been a full time singer-songwriter for about a year). Then I changed the melody just enough so I wouldn't be plagiarizing. I read years later that Hank did the same thing, sometimes getting in trouble for using melodies he thought were public domain. I'd been doing this song a lot lately at shows, and I thought we needed something simple and rough-hewn on the record. So Gurf and Ivan and I did it live in the bedroom. We did about 4 takes. One take was almost so bad it was good, but it wasn't quite bad enough.
I Feel The Blues Moving In
In 1995 I was tired of banging my head against the wall of the very competitive Austin songwriter scene. I didn't have a record deal, and I was tired of trying to promote myself and my songs. I casually hooked up with a couple of fellow open mic-ers to play songs just for fun. (What a novel concept!) Laura Nadeau, from Athens, Ohio, had a gorgeous, perfectly natural voice and a free spirit. Janek Siegele was the son of a Berlin concert organist and a lover of American roots music hanging in Austin. Somehow we hooked up, started calling ourselves Cool Beans!, and started playing very casual gigs at Threadgill's, Jovita's and the Austin Outhouse. We'd do brother harmony songs (Everly's, Louvin's, Blue Sky Boys, Stanley's) and Johnny Cash songs and a few of our own. Chuck Wentworth saw us play during South By South West and flew us up to Rhode Island for his big Cajun & Bluegrass Festival. So I booked a couple of weeks of gigs and bought a tour car (for $1) and he had a great time. When we got back to Austin, we thought we'd better get the songs down on tape while we were well-rehearsed. So we rented a DAT machine and a couple of mics and spent an afternoon recording in Laura's living room. For some reason, we hit our stride about 3 hours into the project, and take six of I Feel The Blues Moving In sounded better than anything I'd ever recorded before. We knew it was good, but we didn't have anything else that good. So we filed it away. Janek's visa ran out, so he had to go back to Germany. Laura moved back to Ohio to have a baby, and that was the end of Cool Beans! I'd pull out a copy of Blues Movingâ In once in a while, and it stood up to everything else I'd done. I thought it would fit nicely onto the record I was making, so I'm very happy that it's not oxidizing on a shelf in my closet anymore.
 Broke Down credits |
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