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New No Depression interview with LAW; "That's What's Already In Me"
Topic Started: Nov 7 2008, 07:51 PM (329 Views)
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"That's what's already in me": A conversation with Lee Ann Womack
* by barry mazor
* Nov 6, 2008


Texas-raised Lee Ann Womack has been a leading light in country music since her self-titled debut album of 1997. With one ear on country history and another on contemporary sounds and themes, she's won respect in mainstream country and in Americana as well. Her albums frequently have been highly praised, and the latest, Call Me Crazy, is no exception.

NoDepression.com senior editor Barry Mazor had this conversation with Womack on October 30, in Nashville. She was just back from a week of television appearances in New York – and other places there.

Barry: I have to ask: Did you find many honky-tonkers ringing the bell at closing time up there at the New York Stock Exchange last week?

Lee Ann: It was so funny, as I was walking through the floor there, to hear them with their accents say "I may love you tonight, but I'm going to hate myself in the morning," and all that. They were yelling out titles to my songs and sayin', "We know country music here; don't think we don't!"

Barry: You're not a performer people get to see live often, outside of special events; your website lists shows mainly live on radio stations for the months ahead, for instance. Do you like the live side of performing – and why or why not?

Lee Ann: I do. The only reason I don't tour more is that I have kids, and I just don't feel right about leaving them very much. As they get a little older, maybe I'll be able to do that a little more. If I was single and didn't have kids, I'd be on the road every day of the year, I'm sure.

Barry: For a mainstream country singer, you've shown an unusual comfort level and familiarity with artists usually labeled "Americana" or even "alternative country," from having Buddy and Julie Miller on your CD a decade ago, to turning to the SteelDrivers' Chris Stapleton for the song "Either Way" and harmony singing on the new one. Do you regularly follow music out here toward the edge of country, or even make a distinction like that?

Lee Ann: I don't make a distinction; I really just hear something every once in awhile that just catches my ear. I think I first heard Buddy Miller or Julie Miller when some of their songs were pitched to me by my husband, who was my A&R guy at the time – and at that point I went and searched out every Buddy and Julie thing I could find. Now, maybe my 17-year-old daughter turns me on to something, or Frank [Liddell, her husband] does, or because I know Buddy and Julie and people like that, then they will.

Barry: A lot of people haven't caught on to Chris Stapleton's music yet, as good as that SteelDrivers record is, and as their shows are. You're onto that early.

Lee Ann: Right. I first heard Chris when my former assistant played me his CD full of demos, songs he was trying to get cut – and there again, I said I want everything I can have from him. But of course, I do the duet with George Strait, too ["Everything But Quits"]. I just look at who I really dig and whose voice I love that would I want to sing with, whether it's George Strait or Chris Stapleton.

Barry: The reviews and reports on the new CD, Call Me Crazy, have been very positive, and also, they've been talking about how it blends – in a good way – traditional, hardcore country and, for want of a better description, "radio" country sounds. So just how deliberate is that? Is this mixture something you were shooting for from the beginnings of the record – back there writing and picking songs?

Lee Ann: No; I wouldn't say it's deliberate. Basically, I gather up a bunch of songs that I love, whether I wrote 'em or somebody else wrote 'em, and then I play 'em for my producer [Tony Brown on Call Me Crazy] – and then we just sort of cut them! It's not like I go "Hey, I really want to be cool, so lets make sure we throw that in."

Barry: No; of course not. But in your show at the War Memorial Auditorium here last week, you were cracking people up, mocking the notion that you could always turn to pop in a crunch – since you were "born" to do that. Yet there's at least some country pop in the record, so were you, at the minimum, looking for a sweet spot between more traditional hardcore honky-tonk and contemporary, a balance?

Lee Ann: Hmm. Well, there have been times where I've tried to be calculated as far as what radio will play, and I'll record things that I hope they'll play. But I can't say that it's ever been the other way, in choosing to do something from 'outside' that; that's just what I'm drawn to. You know, when you grow up listening to Vern Gosdin and George Jones and Tammy Wynette, songs that were written by Max C. Barnes or by Tammy and Billy Sherrill, you're just drawn to stuff that is real. So when I hear something like Waylon Payne's song ("Solitary Thinkin'"), it catches my ear.

Barry: It strikes me that most of the songs on the new one that you've had a hand in writing – "If These Walls Could Talk" and "Have You Seen That Girl", for instance – are unmistakably hard country songs, which seems central to what you do.

Lee Ann: Definitely. When I sit down to write and think about hooks, or am just talking and something comes out of my mouth, I'm just naturally going to go in that direction – in the melody, the lyrics, whatever. When I think about music, that's what's already in me. Anything else, I kind of have to seek out.

Barry: In that song "New Again" we can just about hear you seeking it.

Lee Ann: I came up with the idea for that one because I'm truly fascinated by people who can make things new again – and that can be clothing or a piece of furniture, restoring a house, or in music. I was thinking about how George Strait takes traditional, hardcore country music and seems to make it new over and over again. That fascinates me.

Barry: In a way, Call Me Crazy is sort of a blues record, in the sense that it's full of ballads about heartbreak and loneliness and drinking whiskey on occasion, without joking about doing it – themes that don't necessarily get heard all that often on country radio lately. They've been a big part of what you do; what draws you to them?

Lee Ann: Isn't that what country music is, or is supposed to be, a form of blues? For me, it always has been. I heard so much of that at an impressionable age, as a child, that it just became so familiar to me.

Barry: You mentioned George Jones. You've got Jim Lauderdale's "King Of Broken Hearts" on this CD, which is partly a salute to George, and your song "If These Walls Could Talk" is a new ballad very much in the Jones mode. How have his singing and songs mattered to you?

Lee Ann: George Jones did something that I'm not sure he gets enough credit for – he created a style of singing, And I love it. It's beautiful to me, and it's so creative. I've sat around and studied his phrasing, the licks he does, the way he hears music, and how he opens his mouth and it just comes out. He's a master; if he were in classical music he would be applauded and studied in schools. As far as I'm concerned, he should be studied a little more!

Barry: The other night, at the Musicians Hall of Fame inductions show, you sang Tammy Wynette's "Till I Can Make It On My Own" during the induction of producer and writer Billy Sherrill. Their modern hard-country records together got mentioned a lot as a reference point for your last CD, There's More Where That Came From, which won the CMA Album of the Year. What appealed to you especially about those Sherrill-produced Wynette records?

Lee Ann: Tammy had real emotion in her voice; it was not the faux "Now here I go; I'm really gonna milk it now and watch the crowd go crazy" sort of thing. She really tapped deep down into what she experienced in her life, and used that in her singing. It's rare that you hear a singer who can do that. She's one, Jones is one, Merle Haggard, Tony Bennett – masters of singing. See, it's one thing to learn a melody the way you hear it on a demo tape, or the way you hear another singer do it, and then go out there and just copy it, if maybe right on pitch. It's another thing to go, "OK, now I'm gonna try to convey this emotion to the audience.' Tammy was able to do that effortlessly and naturally – and Billy Sherrill knew how to get it on tape, and help her write songs that touched people.

Barry: The other day, when you provided The Nashville Tennessean with a list of "Ten Crazy Things You've Done," one was "Spray-painted 'You've never even heard country music'" on the side of an unnamed Music Row building. So what set that off?

Lee Ann: Sometimes I sit late at night and have some old music playing. 95 percent of the time it's George Jones, and then I get more and more torqued up about what's happened with this music. Where does this go? That night, I must have been really torqued up. I do remember that it seemed like a good idea at the time!

Barry: Country radio can show you numbers that say the limited song and artist lists they play reach people – but there are surely a lot of other people who want to hear more than that, though those numbers are hard to measure.

Lee Ann: They are – but I want to be there for those people.

Barry: In his last memoir, Johnny Cash, who comes up on your record in the song "I Think I Know", wondered out loud if recognizable country music could last as less and less people are raised rural. How do you see the music's future?

Lee Ann: Well, I love that point. I sometimes feel like on both coasts it's sometimes forgotten that there's a whole country in there – and there are still a lot of rural people in it. I'm just as guilty as anybody of forgetting, because I now live on a bus or an airplane, in airports in New York and L.A. and Houston. I still have a house in East Texas, though, and I do still go back there. My parents still live in a rural area. Maybe there aren't as many farmers now, but there are still hard-working people who deal with these real-life situations every day – and that can be smack dab in the middle of Manhattan or in a tiny town in East Texas, and a lot of those people still get the message of "Till I Can Make It On My Own". In fact, you can get that lyric no matter what economic status you are, or where you live. And that's why it touches so many people.
-CF
http://www.icfmusic.wordpress.com/
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