Conducted By Trev Gibb 15th July 2002

What inspired you into a career in music, and was there anything in particular that started it all off?

Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly and the Weavers pretty much kicked it off as well as hearing stuff on the radio like the Everly Brothers, the Coasters, Hank Ballard, Lloyd Price.

What was the first song you wrote?

I can barely remember.  I think it was called “Please Mr. Postman” which wasn’t the same as the hit song.

What was the song about? How did it come about and what influenced its development?

Well it was so long ago, I don’t remember. But see, I wrote poetry, and then I learned guitar, so those poems sort of found their way into songs eventually.  It took a long time before I wrote one that I was really happy about.  But what really got me started writing songs was Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album.  For the couple of years before that, music had gotten so crazy with all the psychedelic stuff, that when John Wesley Harding came out it was like you could hear the guitar again.  John Wesley Harding brought the sound back to a basic guitar thing.  I could hear what the guitar was doing and thought, well, I can do that.

How do you go about writing songs, is there a particular method you use or is it more of a stream of consciousness or freeform process?

It really depends.  The way it happens is I’ll be sitting around playing and singing and something will come to me, either from something I’m playing on the guitar, or from that other mystical place that songs come from and I’ll take it from there.  Sometimes I’ll be doing something else entirely and an idea will come, and then you try to hold onto it.

Do you believe that songs are already there in the atmosphere floating around waiting for us to channel them in some way?

Pretty much.  I think the best ones are.  My favorite songs that I wrote are the ones I didn’t know I was gonna write.  It’s like they flow through me and I kind of shape them.

So the best ones to you are the natural ones, ones that haven’t been pre-determined?

Yes.  There are exceptions of course.

So are you usually just messing around and you find a particular chord, or a crazy line hits you?

Quite often I’m just messing around.  I might be playing a song and find something on the guitar and just be messing with it and that kicks if off.  Or some idea, usually a line or a hook will come to me so I’ll start messing around with that.  Most songwriters say the same thing.  One of the best examples is Paul McCartney’s story about how “Yesterday” started off being “Scrambled eggs.”

Is there a particular mood you write best in, a time of day?  Do you write better at night when there is a mood, a darkness, and does it matter to you?

Nope.  A lot of it might happen at night, but not necessarily.  A lot of the songs on the album I wrote during the day. 

A song like “Insignificant” has that sort of moody nighttime feel, a feeling of timelessness that kind of implies nighttime, although minor chords musically often do that to the mood of the song.  How did that particular song come about and what inspired it?

Well that is a song I knew I was going to write though I didn’t know what form it would take till it actually happened.  I was going through a lot of heavy duty things at that time, some very serious things, but that opening line came to me, and I think I had that line for a while before I wrote the song.  I’d been hurt pretty bad in a robbery and I couldn’t sing for a couple of months, so I had quite a bit of time to come up with ideas that I just kept in my head.

Well I’d agree that “Insignificant” is a direct song.  It doesn’t pussy foot around and you certainly convey your feelings.  It’s a dark song, but it closes Up Against It wonderfully.  It seals the moment and leaves the listener quite taken back.  Is that how you intended it, to end the album and to have that effect?

Well originally that wasn’t going to close the album, it was going to be in the middle of the album but the record company changed the song order.  It was actually going to be right in the middle of the album.  When I sequenced the album, even though I knew it was gonna be a CD, I sequenced it like an LP, side one and side two and that would have ended side one.  But it worked at the end also, though it was a very dark ending.

So would side one and side two have had different moods, each side presenting a different thing?

That was kind of my original intention.  Thematically the songs would have completed some sort of circle.

What comes first, music or lyrics or does it vary?

It varies.  Something on the guitar could kick off a lyric.  It usually kind of happens all at once.  You kind of get this feeling when you know you have something and go get some paper, and write and sing and write and sing, and try to find the right music for what you’re saying.

What are your influences musically, in writing songs as well as what you listen to?

Well everything I listen to influences me, but it’s a matter of what I can pull off, so it all depends.  I mean obviously there’s Bob Dylan, but there’s lots of other music as well, the great blues guys, the great country guys, a lot of Memphis Soul music.  All the stuff I heard growing up.

Have you recorded previously to Up Against It?

Yes, I’d been in the studio oh at least five times before that I think, maybe more, working on demos, sometimes with my bands, sometimes just with other musicians I got to back me up on a session.  It was different every time.  Bismeaux was a far more professional studio than the other ones I’d used previously.  It really all depends on the engineer.  The guy I worked with, Frank Campbell knew what he was doing right off and didn’t waste time.  We had already discussed the sound we wanted to go for which was pretty much talking about records we liked.

How did Up Against It come about, did it have an aim or concept of some sort?

The album came about because Ray Benson of Asleep At The Wheel who owns the studio is one of my oldest friends.  And he’d been saying to me for quite a while to come down and record.  So the time was right and I had the money to do it.  I really didn’t know when I went to Austin what would happen.  I had an album in mind, but really didn’t know whether I’d come home with an album or another demo.  As to concept, well the concept is in the songs.  I had a bunch of songs I’d written that I wanted to get down that had a certain theme, and then were a couple of other songs that I felt had go on the album.

Is there any plan for a future album and would it have another concept or a different musical setting?

Well I’d like to make another record sure, but it would have to sound as good as this one.  It really all depends what I come up with.  I have enough songs to make another album, but I might want to write a whole different batch of songs.  The songs will determine the sound.  I would like to make a harder more rocking album, but it really will depend on what I write.

In the case of the musical structure, was there anything you were trying to convey?  I find the music quite multi-layered in that you hear something different each time that changes the perspective and heightens the enthusiasm to listen, little things like guitar licks you never noticed before or the way you sing a particular line?

In answer to the first question, I was trying to make music that I like to hear and also like to play which is some combination of country, rock and roll, and blues.  The instrumentation on the album is multi-layered and you might not get that on the first or second listen.  Some songs have a lot of guitars on them.  Our aim was to make a record that you hopefully heard something in the music you didn’t hear on the first listen.  As to singing, it was done all live in the studio.  That was just the way it came out that time.  For instance I’d done “Say Yes” a lot of ways, but never that way.  It just happened!  But I had certain ideas for what I wanted on each song and discussed them with Frank Campbell.  I’d given Frank a bare bones acoustic demo of all the songs, even though I’d played all of them with various bands, but I wanted to start fresh.  These musicians except for the drummer, Turk McFadden, who was in my band at the time, had never heard the songs and I didn’t want them to be influenced by any previous arrangement.  So, basically the way it worked was I would say, I hear a pedal steel on this, a fiddle on that, a piano on this and so on and we went from there.  A lot of times Frank would say, not piano, organ.  There were some surprises along the way, like the accordion on “Before I Go” and there were some things we didn’t get to do.

“Before I Go” has a great piano part that I never ever noticed before, plus the accordion makes the song something special.  It’s almost carefree and wonderfully bright in texture.  It also conveys a kind of rural Italian market feel, if you know what I mean.  Things like that happen on this album and just lightens the whole thing up.

“Before I Go” in a sense is just as lyrically dark as “Insignificant,” but the melody isn’t dark.  The way that came out was pretty much on the spot, though the accordion is probably more Tex-Mex than Italian, but if you hear it that way, great.

So would I be right in saying the song is an oxymoron in a way?  What I mean is that you imply the song in mood is dark, but the music adds the light, and in a way it’s opposites together that actually fit, contradictory but perfect together. 

I kind of wrote it that way on purpose.  It is both dark and uplifting at the same time and it’s the music that lifts it up.  It’s kind of a prayer in a sense.  In terms of the arrangement, the song didn’t sound that way before the sessions, it kind of found itself in the studio and when I play it, I try to remember to stay true to that arrangement which doesn’t always happen.

Another song that has a great unexpected and uplifting break is “Waiting For You.”  The guitar playing is free, dancing and funky cool, especially around a minute into the song when it just goes somewhere else which is wonderful.  The same thing happens to a guitar lick in “You Don’t Have To Close The Door” where it just knocks you off your feet and that’s what I mean by multi-layered—these things hit you. 

Well “Waiting For You” is probably the one song on the album where the arrangement is pretty much the way I’d done it with whatever bands I had.  I wrote it that way and originally it was the last song on the album, which cracked up one of the guys who was in one of my bands because we opened every show with it.  And that was a thing where I pretty much told the guitar player what I wanted or he may have asked me, and we talked in terms of other guitar players.

The guitar part I mean in “You Don’t Have To Close The Door” is exactly two minutes and 50 seconds, and it’s superb, simple but superb.

I’m totally amazed that you know how long that solo is because I certainly didn’t.  That’s the same guy as on “Waiting For You,” Paul McLaughlin who was great to work with.  I don’t know whom he played with in Austin, but he did studio work and also ran a guitar store, and could do a great Willie Nelson impersonation.  “Door” was one of the songs that had to go on the album.  This was the third time I’d recorded it.

Is there a standout track in your opinion? Maybe one or two that hit you in the guts and doesn’t let go?