Last Rose
The Story of the Songs

My Honky-Tonk Odyssey began when I got a job filling in in a band run by a guy named Bill Murray (not the comedian). Bill had gained some notoriety in the coal regions as a singer of traditional country. Always turned out to the nines and then some, Bill had an arsenal of Nudie suits from Manuel of Nashville. The first gig I played with him took place in McFarland and Sons’ truck repair garage by Lizard Creek at the foot of the Blue Mountain.

Apparently, Rod McFarland had been throwing Friday night country dances in his garage since time immemorial. He’d set up a raised stage in there, like a boxing ring with Christmas-light-wrapped railings instead of ropes. The dances drew big crowds. For air-conditioning the garage doors were flung wide, adding katydid and tree-frog backup to the din. Undeterred by the distinct bouquet of motor oil fermenting in the summer heat, the crowd gamely scuffled across that stained cement floor in a cloud of sweaty steam.

This experience inspired me to put together a fake-book of country hits from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. I knew most of the songs already, absorbed by osmosis I guess, but I’d never immersed myself before. What I liked about them is how they addressed everyday grown-up concerns. Nothing special, or deep, or intellectual, just the regular, normal stuff adults deal with. I especially went for that honky-tonk country music sound, early Ray Price, Wynn Stewart, Buck Owens. I started playing every 4/4 song I knew with that low-down walking-bass shuffle. It gives a song a whole nother rhythmic dimension, in my opinion.

The Recording

At a certain point in the course of human events, I decided I had no recourse but to get my work online. My music. My books. My drawings. My inventions. Everything. And, as with everything in this cockeyed caravan, wrestling the technology into submission took way longer than it should have. Just trying to get a simple jpeg inserted into a book nearly done me in. But eventually muleheadedness prevailed. Whereupon, ever the glutton for punishment, I realized I could probably set up a home studio and make recordings. Inaugurating another superhuman man vs. machine smackdown slugfest.

Emerging bloody but unbowed, I finally stumbled over some luck. Or luck stumbled over me. Since a proper honky-tonk song requires pedal steel and fiddle, I cold-emailed Dan Dugmore and Byron Berline and damned if they didn’t say they liked my songs and would be glad to play on them. I e-mailed them rough mixes and they e-mailed me great tracks back. Voila.

Dan and Byron spent many years working as studio musicians in LA. I found out after they recorded with me that they had played together on many songs, notably on James Taylor’s “Carolina in my Mind.”

When I played some rough mixes of Last Rose for my friend, Nashville producer Ben Fowler, he professed amazement at how well my guest artists’ tracks fit with my songs. And that’s a fact. They’re seamless, like we were all in the same room.

The Players

Dan Dugmore

Dan Dugmore, although he’s played 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.” His beautiful, plaintive call-and-response playing adds a perfect high lonesome wistfulness to Last Rose.

Byron Berline

Byron Berline should need no introduction. He has played with everybody. A small representative selection would include the Flying Burritos, Gram Parsons, The Byrds, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, along with classic country artists like Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, Vince Gill. (And me.)

What I like about Byron’s playing is that any given track will never sound like “just riffs,” but like a deliberately and artfully designed part, and a very unusual part at that. I love that inimitable wild, hard, bluesy, yearning, earthy, folk-like, homespun sound that is unique to Byron. Right before I was ready to mix the final song on Last Rose, Kristin told me of his passing. I was devastated. I had these plans of calling him up at his shop (The Double Stop Fiddle Shop in Guthrie, Oklahoma) and getting him to spin me tall tales of his days in the studio trenches. Now I make do with A Fiddler’s Diary.

Kristin Scott-Benson

The last song on Last Rose, “She’s the One,” cried out for banjo, and five-time Banjo Player of the Year Kristin Scott-Benson answered the call (or the cold e-mail to be exact). She is a real virtuoso. She effortlessly combines the intricate, innovative sound of Bela Fleck (whom she has worked with) with the straight-ahead traditional locomotion of Earl Scruggs. I really like how she weaves beautiful little hidden melodies into her contrapuntal texture, and surprising syncopations into her traditional picking figures.

Jason Carter

Jason Carter, of the Del McCoury Bluegrass Band, 3-time Grammy winner, 5-time Fiddle Player of the Year, arrived to save the day and provide a great fiddle part for the last song. What can I say? Jason can play anything. His soaring improvisations lift a song to the next level, and he really knows how to kick a rhythm into high gear.

After finishing Last Rose, I’ve worked with Jason Carter and Dan Dugmore on two more songs, “And She Just Laughed,” and “Fancy Meeting You,” songs which will be on my next release, TBA.

“Why Do We Have to Dream?”

The summer I wrote “Why Do We Have to Dream?”, at the place I was living we still had one of those big, rattling, roaring, in-wall bedroom air-conditioners left over from when they’d built the house long before. Enabling me to sit in the living room, strum my unplugged Harmony Rocket and wail away into the wee small hours to my heart’s content without bothering anybody.

Immersed in honky-tonk, I resolved to write a honky-tonk song ‒ “Why Do We Have to Dream?” the result. I was determined to keep it simple, three chords maximum, but somehow the logic of the song cried out for an A minor. I didn’t notice the suspended fourth in the first phrase of the melody until I was working on the harmony for the recording. That’s strange, I thought. How’d I do that?

I also noticed only in retrospect that the chorus’s melismas (do I have to say “melismata”?) mirror the theme (that teeth-clenching frustration having dreams can lead to). My subconscious sometimes knows what it’s doing better than I do. The basic “best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley” theme emerged early on. Thenceforth I toiled away at getting the internal rhyme just right. I’ve become obsessive about perfect form of late. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s uncommon.

Byron and Dan have a great duel in the solo verse. With such musicians, it behooved me to give them a lot of room to show off

“That One Last Rose”

I wrote “That One Last Rose,” before “Why Do We Have to Dream?”, when I was living in a real, bona fide artist’s attic garret, the kind where you hit your head on the ceiling when you come up the stairs—only it was in Emmaus, PA, instead of Paris.

I’d sit in my slowly crumpling old armchair, looking out over the borough rooftops at the South Mountain, Rod and Gun Club blasting away up there, afternoon sunlight streaming in the many windows, and strum away at my boomy old Fender Montara with the fingernail gouges that made it like playing razor wire. I wrote “That One Last Rose” as a straight country song, only noticing that it lent itself to a honky-tonk treatment when I started recording.

This time I really worked hard on the melody. I must have made and rejected each phrase a hundred times until I found one I liked. I think this trial-and-error method is why each phrase in the verse has a different length, as well as a different melody.

I was also determined to write a song with a structure where the last two lines of the bridge are the same as the last two lines of the verse. Like “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” amongst a thousand other Hank Williams songs.

I don’t know where the idea came from, although wild unbridled squandering is a practice I am not unfamiliar with. I also thought the rose metaphor itself kind of strange, but to my surprise chucking roses in the trash seems to mean something to people, who knows why.

“I’m Gonna Haul Off and Love You, Elena”

I also wrote “I’m Gonna Haul Off and Love You, Elena,” in my garret. I had resolved to write a country waltz. It sounds like it should be an answer song to “Why Don’t You Haul Off and Love Me,” (my favorite version of which is Bull Moose Jackson’s), but as usual it must have been a subconscious answer. Because I didn’t consciously know Wayne Raney’s song at the time.

I think I got the name, “Elena,” from some Bonnie Raitt or Linda Ronstadt song, but for the life me which one escapes me.

Or maybe it was this woman named Helena who used to come into this bar and grill I was known to frequent, her fiancé, Ben, ostentatiously in tow. Browbeat, outclassed, Ben looked about as ready for their broadly advertised nuptials as the frog is ready for the snake. Helena and Ben’s situation didn’t really fit the song’s themes of fidelity and patience and upward mobility. But maybe the name was floating around beneath my skull somewhere at the time, I don’t know.

The melody originated from me playing a G7 chord with an F on the D string, and that gave me my opening note. From then on, I was channeling Lucinda Williams, consciously. You can hear it in all those suspended 2nds.

Don’t miss the especially beautiful job of fiddling Byron Berline does on this song, especially in Mix 2.

“She’s the One”

It seemed to me that the album needed an up-tempo number to top it off. And so, I looked through the Hundred Songs Project, video demos of songs I wrote that I made a while back with the help of Tom Walz at venerable old Godfrey Daniels Coffeehouse, playing a big, old, very expensive flattop guitar Dick Boak at Martin lent me, and I found “She’s the One.”

I had originally thought of it as a garage-band song, what with the Louie-Louie chords in the intro. Then as a “Silhouettes,” “No Reply”-type unrequited love song. Finally, it settled into a shy-guy-saved-by-alcohol rave-up. And rave-up, to my mind, meant banjo and fiddle, honky-tonk bluegrass with drums.

Kristin went “Huh?” when I asked her to kick it off all on her own. But I heard it in my head, and for once I think my head was on straight. She and Jason Carter never played together as far as I know, but you’d think they’d been a team since way back, the way their parts complement one another.

I told them to kick out the jams on the slightly gospelesque rave-up ending of this my rave-up song, and they followed instructions explicitly. Sounds like I had to fade it out before they skidded off the record and took flight.

I would counsel those who think the lyrics totally naive and retrograde to listen again. I beg to differ.

Byron’s Extra Fiddling and the “Mix 2”s

After we lost Byron, I realized that we had a lot of extra fiddling of his that we weren’t using in our first masters of the songs he had played on. Because Byron had played all the way through the song, rather than just playing on the intros and in the solo verse–just like he did in the Rolling Stones’ ” Country Honk.”  And so, my engineer, Andrejs Sadkovoys, and I decided we just had to make every note we had of Byron Berline available to the world by remixing to include it all. Hence, the “Mix 2” versions at the end of the album. Don’t miss them. Especially on “I’m Gonna Haul Off and Love You, Elena.”