Sundown Trace
The Story of the Songs
I already told the story of the origin of my recent honky-tonk albums in Honky-Tonk Album, Last Rose: The Story of the Songs. I thought that now I’d go back farther. To my musical origins.
First it was the Beatles. Like a billion others, the Beatles conquered me. I was fascinated by their melodies, their chords, their harmonies. Soon, however, like many others, I learned that the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, all those groups were stealing from somebody. So then we tracked down their influences: the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ray Charles. Setting the time machine back a notch further, we discovered Jimmy Reed, Memphis Minnie, Bessie Smith, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson. The tradition hooked us. Is it any wonder so many of my cohorts, rather than form Beatles bands, formed blues or rockabilly bands when they grew up
My parents had lived in Nashville before I was born, resulting in my father’s Tennessee Ernie Ford obsession. “Sixteen Tons” was his theme song. Then Ray Charles introduced me to a plethora of country songs under the guise of rhythm and blues. I still sing “Crying Time” like he did. Then the Byrds came out with Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I still sing “You’re Still on my Mind” like Gram Parsons did.
And so, when I came upon that Hank Williams Greatest Hits album, I was primed. The Beatles had got me trying to write complex songs. Hank Williams got me trying to write simple songs. Simple songs are harder. It’s easy to write something original with a thousand chords. It’s hard to be original with three. But I felt those Hank Williams songs in my bones. They strike some primordial, innate chord. Maybe I share a trait with Uncle Pete, my great-uncle, who they tell me used to, of occasion, roll his wheelchair down to Susquehanna River-side dives where he would strum guitar and sing country music for tips and drinks.
Then, at 19, I moved to Nashville myself. I lived in a room above Johnny’s Cash Market, a cinder-block dump at the corner of 21st Avenue and Broadway, back before the skyscrapers. I don’t think many 19-year-olds know what they’re doing. I, at 19, among them. But I did pickle myself in the brine of the Nashville stew; you could learn a lot from the odd musician, odd musicians being, once upon a time, legion on the streets of Nashville.
Ever since, I’ve played country music in many and various venues. But my most recent honk-tonk inspiration came from backing up Bill Murray (not the comedian) in the Poconos. Bill Murray’s hero was Ray Price, and now he’s mine.
The Recording
This time, I set up my studio in a nice 1940s style brick bungalow on a back street near the college in Reading, Pennsylvania. I was house-sitting for a professor on sabbatical. For my second honky-tonk album, I was more experienced. I didn’t have to teach myself anything. I knew how to work Reaper. I had my Audio-Technica microphone. I had my Pre-73 Golden Age Project pre-amp. I knew how to work around the imperfections in my Martin. And I had ten months of peace and quiet. On a typical recording day, I would wake up on musician’s time, make myself lunch, screw around or run errands for a while, take a constitutional around the college baseball diamond, break out a folding chair and get some sun sitting out back by the Japanese fish pond reading a book, repair to the digital audio workstation, and record for eight hours or so. Every night it was the same. Around 3 AM, I would finally start cooking with gas, and it was way past my bed-time. Many’s the morning found me serenading the rising sun.
The Players
Jason Carter
Jason Carter, 3-time Grammy winner, 6-time Fiddle Player of the Year, 33-year veteran of the Del McCoury Bluegrass Band, but now out on his own, newly espoused spouse of intrepid fellow fiddler Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, what can I say? Jason can play anything. Note particularly how the duel between Jason and banjoist Ron Carter kicks “Lonely Driver” into high gear and then some.
Dan Dugmore
Dan Dugmore, although he’s played pedal steel with everybody, is most famous for playing for nearly two decades in Linda Ronstadt’s and James Taylor’s bands. That’s him doing the solo on “Blue Bayou.” Dan, along with the late, legendary fiddler, Byron Berline, festooned my first honky-tonk album, Last Rose, with their style, and class, and virtuosity. Allow me to draw your attention to Dan’s truly transcendent solo on the Sundown Trace album’s “Fancy Meetin’ You.” I don’t know about you, but it transports me altogether to other worlds every time I hear it. Here’s a playlist I made of some recordings featuring Dan Dugmore: Pedal Steel Virtuoso Dan Dugmore.
Buck Reid
Although Buck Reid has played pedal steel with artists as varied as Keith Urban, Sting, Bill Anderson, Mark Miller of Sawyer Brown, LeAnn Rimes, Dierks Bentley, and many others, he is best known for his 18-year stint with Lyle Lovett’s Large Band. Listen to his dulcet tones ringing and chiming and weaving their way through “This Old Heart”, “A Snapshot of You”, and “The Last Time”.
Ron Stewart
Ron Stewart plays banjo. Ron Stewart plays everything (apparently). He also plays fiddle, mandolin, guitar, and, who knows, maybe fluegelhorn. He won 2011 Banjo Player of the Year and 2000 Fiddler of the Year. Ron has played with such luminaries as Lester Flatt, Curly Seckler, Gary Brewer, J.D. Crowe, Dan Tyminski, and many more, and is currently with Seldom Scene. But my favorite is when, as a kid, he appeared as “Little Ronnie Stewart” with the Stewart Family Band. When I asked Ron to “play like a car” on “Lonely Driver,” I never knew he would be so relentless. He followed instructions to a T. He played like a Formula One at the Indy 500. (Which is appropriate because he hails from Indiana.)
“Fancy Meetin’ You”
I wrote “Fancy Meetin’ You” while I was doing what I guess you could call “post-production” on my first honky-tonk album, Last Rose. It stands out in my mind because I wrote the whole thing, the whole melody, bridge and all, on lead guitar. Not singing along to rhythm guitar or piano, like I write most songs. Not even singing to myself a cappella, which I’ve done once in a while. No, I actually laboriously worked out the melody in single notes plucking pluckily away on my old f-hole Harmony Rocket. I had to work out the surprisingly complex chords after the fact. (“Gosh, where did that come from?”) The song obsessed me at the time. That strange melody demanded not only complex chords, but complex, cross-verse rhyming to get the lyrics right. I’d be singing to myself, trying out lyrics, while I was driving along, or stopping at the drugstore, or lying in bed. I think maybe some Fabian Perez painting inspired the setting. I am often inspired by Fabian Perez paintings. They depict a sophisticated, romantic cafe life that the dream me frequents frequently (Hemingway’s Paris; Borges’s Buenos Aires)—and the real me wouldn’t know from a hole in the ground. Dan Dugmore’s pedal steel solo is transcendental.
“And She Just Laughed”
I dug “And She Just Laughed” out of my YouTube 100 Songs Project because it really lent itself to a honky-tonk treatment. When I wrote it, I set out to write a “Louie Louie” type country song, where the chords repeat all the way through. I had the theme down from the beginning, that teeth-grinding humiliation you feel when faced with utter un-sympathy after having just spilled your guts out all over the floor. The revenge fantasy of the last verse originated with a paper a teacher once had me write on old English poems that use the fortuitous cruel/school/fool rhyme. I don’t know how Jason Carter pulls off that rolling, circling, double-stopped intro riff, but it shore is effective. This is probably the hardest rockingest honky-tonk on the album.
“Lonely Driver”
When I lived in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, a small town of brick row houses beneath the South Mountain, a friend of mine who lived down the street used to throw bluegrass picnics, summer hootenannies of burgers and chili and beer and lightning-fast picking. I would attend and play every country song I ever wrote—every song I knew, actually—bluegrass-style. Similar to the way I honky-tonk-ize regular country songs. Those picnics inspired me to write a bluegrass song that was meant from the git-go to be a bluegrass song, and I came up with “Lonely Driver.” It’s supposed to be one of those bluesy bluegrass songs, like Dan Tyminski does. I wrote it as a kind of traditional murder ballad with a chorus. When we got around to recording it, I realized that, maybe, since it was a driving song, it should sound like it was a driving song. “You know how bluegrass is full of train songs?” I exhorted Jason Carter and Ron Stewart, like Busby Berkeley galvanizing the troops,”and you stick train effects in? For this song, think, not trains, but cars. Think driving, driving, driving.” Ron Stewart told me he really enjoyed playing on it, and you can tell. Finally, I stuck that revving-up riff onto the very beginning. I don’t know if anybody will get that that’s what it is, a revving-up riff—except you, dear reader, because I told ya.
“A Snapshot of You”
I like to include a waltz on my honky-tonk albums. If Ray Price can do it, so can I. So I exhumed “A Snapshot of You” from out of the attic steamer trunk. I think I stole that extended hold of the IV chord from this band I was going to see in New York at the time I wrote the song. I’m not sure, though, because I can’t remember the song I stole from. I used some dramatic cliches in the lyrics, on purpose, because I wanted it to sound like how a regular person sounds all torn up. It is my experience that regular people all torn up often resort to dramatic cliches. I plead guilty to an attempt at word painting: in the last verse, the “every little thing” I stick in there has extra syllables compared to the same place in the preceding verses. Suggesting, maybe, an overabundance of “little things” causing distress? And yes, I have plenty of snapshots that evoke memories. A local band once did an up-tempo 4-beat version of “A Snapshot of You.” Yikes. That’s what I get for changing the rhythms of songs—a taste of my own medicine.
“This Old Heart”
I know right when and where I wrote “This Old Heart.” Sitting of an afternoon on a lumpy living-room futon couch, watching the sun set over the baseball diamond through the old-fashioned picture window of that 40s brick cottage I was house-sitting in Reading. I wrote “This Old Heart” expressly for the album, honky-tonk all the way. You can hear me reaching up and down to the limits of my range in an effort to find a new, more original melody. The “What didn’t you do” of the first line originally seemed to refer to “all the good things you didn’t do.” But after a lot of tinkering, it became “all the bad things you did do.” I went far afield looking for new, original metaphors for a broken heart. I don’t know if I succeeded. Since the verse was very simple, except for that slightly askew iim7 chord, for contrast, I went diminished-crazy for the bridge. Lyrics and melody for the chordally-complex bridge, though, kept paring themselves down to simplicity, without any conscious interference from me. I confess to rather blatant word painting with my melodic slide-down on the word “fall.” To get away from conventional endings, I stuck on a fancy jazz-esque, slow-down ending that I think Jason Carter and Buck Reid handle famously.
“The Last Time”
“The Last Time” is another song that I wrote as a regular country song that lent itself to honky-tonk-ization. It might seem that I have a fixation on “last” things, given the title song to my last honky-tonk album, “Last Rose,” but really the similarity is just an accident. I wrote “The Last Time” so long before I wrote “That One Last Rose” that I’d almost forgotten it. I just thought that “The Last Time” would be a good song for this album. “The Last Time” isn’t just about the end of a love affair, it’s about the illusions we comfort ourselves with, and the futility of trying to change somebody. Sort of an anthem for all my ex’s. Listen for the snippets of Floyd Cramer-style piano I wedged in there.
“When I Left the Barroom”
I wrote “When I Left the Barroom,” on the same lumpy futon, watching the same Reading sunsets, as I wrote “This Old Heart.” I was trying to write a real sloppy, suds-sloshed honky-tonk drinking song. Yes, I admit the theme resembles that of “The Bottle Let Me Down.” I would be surprised if there aren’t plenty of other country songs equally as reminiscent. In my defense, I don’t anthropomorphize any bottles. Since I don’t drink anymore, I had to use my imagination. But memory served me well. I labored over the list of drinks in the bridge. Mixing liquors always worked out so well for me. I decided to make this one all me, without guest artists. Those are my own Danelectro lead guitar parts, the interlinear ones as well as the main drunken guitar solo. Should I say that the solo sounds like that on purpose? Or is it obvious? I hope I didn’t do a poor job at imitating playing drunkenly. That would be ironic if I did.