Katie Darby Recommends

I’ve obviously been out for a while– not because of a lack of great music coming across my threshold. In fact, I’ve had the opposite problem: I started a bunch of new jobs (including guest editor of Measure, a metrical poetry magazine, in which I’ll be exploring the divide (and similarities) between songwriting and poetry– if you are a poet, songwriter, or just someone who is interested in that, please contact me!). I also started writing for News 4U in Evansville, which is especially cool because I’m writing a Katie Darby Recommends column for them, starting with KDR Artist Tony Memmel.

The problem with all of this is that I’ve been pretty focused on my geographic surroundings– where there is rarely a lot of incoming music. I got lucky though– not only is Shawn Mullins (yes, of “Lullaby”) headlining the Ferdinand Folk Festival in Ferdinand, Indiana this weekend– he was willing to talk to me about it. Mullins has been a well-respected songwriter even since before he burst onto the 90′s scene with Soul’s Core (which is a record– partially due to the genius of “Tannin’ Bed Song”– that stays in relatively frequent rotation on my iPod). Last year, he released Light You Up with one notable difference– he began working heavily with co-writers. There’s an expansiveness and an exploration to it that, while not lacking on his other records, is really exemplified here. I enjoyed talking to him, and I hope you guys will enjoy his answers. (And southern Indiana folks– the festival is this Saturday, and Mullins hits the stage at 8 p.m. Definitely worth catching!)

How did you get involved in the Ferdinand Folk Festival?

I’ve been doing a lot of small town folk festivals and street festivals. I’ve been doing it in the last couple years. I feel like a lot of the smaller towns, especially through the Midwest, as I travel through—because you don’t live there, you aren’t going to get the full effect of what’s going on. I’m not speaking specifically about Ferdinand, but of the old-school small town, Norman Rockwell towns—they’re a different thing now, in general. So there’s a resurgence of culture and community, which is great, and that’s happening a lot. Part of that is the festivals. I think it’s perfect, because we really need to get to the smaller towns—the unemployment is worse, they don’t have 100$ to go see a bigger show. So I love doing them, and it’s just kind of—the only thing I can think of right off to connect with America on that level is to go to them instead of only playing Chicago, or Indianapolis— I’m trying to get into the smaller areas.

Are you from a small town?

Well, I’m—I love small towns. I’m from Atlanta, actually, which is WAY bigger than it was when I was a kid, but we would always go to the country. My dad’s family was from the foothills of GA, northern Georgia, and we had a family farm. Not a working farm, but an old farmhouse that was about to fall down, and we would go out there on the weekends. We had some cattle, and from time to time we’d have chickens and grow gardens. I had a little taste of being a country boy. I love small towns, I just do. I love the kind of—I don’t know, it just feels, some more than others, but it’s like, “OK, it’s still happening.” People are still able to do it on a small level in a community, and there’s are a lot of problems. In small towns, you see lots of store fronts that are empty—and that’s part of the whole deal. You just want it to grow and get to see people—I don’t know if I’m making any sense. What I write on, it’s almost from a childlike place.

You’re from such a great, generative part of the country. The college rock scene in Georgia…

Absolutely… and even before that scene, there was this other scene in Athens, Atlanta and Macon and Augusta—there was all this kind of—Mother’s Finest was a band I grew up loving. A funk band, but a rock band. If you can imagine members of Lynyrd Skynyrd combined with members of Rick James and then just kick ass, really great vocals—soul vocals—just a wonderful band. That was one of the bands I kind of grew up listening to, very soulful. We had tons of music in the house. My dad as a second job worked at Rich’s Department Store in the record department and would often bring home promo copies of late 60s, early 70s records. By the mid 70s, my brother and sister were high school age, they were buying a lot of records.

But my grandfather was a musician—he played upright bass and bass horns—he was the tangible musical influence I had. He played mostly big band music. I loved going to see him as a toddler. Some of my first memories were sitting on the side of the stage. At an Oktoberfest playing polka music (laughs)–he was wonderful about opening doors, musically, as a small kid. Trying to teach me how to read music as a kid—it didn’t always work, my ear would take over. I have a really strong ear. As a little kid, I could memorize things quicker than I could read them. I could mostly hear it—I wasn’t Mozart or anything, but I had a good ear. And he’d laugh, because he had a great ear too, and he’d make jokes about how I was going to sleep my way through college without reading music.

How do you maintain the inventiveness in your records while maintaining a high standard of musicianship? You don’t ever buy a Shawn Mullins record knowing exactly what to expect, but it always feels good anyway.

You’ll have to know, it’s a little bit of an insecurity of mine that I don’t have, other than my voice, a “sound” about what I always bring. There’s an acoutic guitar typically, but if I think it wasn’t for my voice and that people enjoy what I do, people wouldn’t be able to recognize it because I change it up so much. I think it’s a fault of mine actually (laughs), but I appreciate it. I think part of me needs that artistically, to be able to change it up just a little bit—a lot of it is who I am working with. I surround myself with people that create peace, and this album is like that.

We went through the songs, we’d spend a day on a song basically, and we’d all set up in my cabin in a live setting, but we were in somewhat of a circle, and we would go through the song a couple times, and we might make changes as we were going through, which is natural, “Let’s shorten that bridge, take a longer solo on that,” so we get the song worked out, and then have lunch and in the afternoon, we’d start tracking it. So we would track it live as much as possible at 1, 1:30 in the afternoon, and usually by 3 or 3:30, we would have mostly what we need and I would start cutting vocals. We could have an overdub, start going into the details of the piece, but we’d have the bulk of it. It’s a different way to do it—we had amps in closets ad microphones strung up to the ceilings. We were utilizing the space and the fact that a lot of it was done at the same time—it’s a pain to do it that way, it’s so much easier just to start with a drum click and add drums to that and just start stacking it. But there’s a human element that is removed from that style of recording.

Tell me a little about “Light You Up”.

I woke up one morning with the chorus of that song just playing in my head. And I started asking friends about it, people who had a good catalogue of songs in their head, because I figured I’d heard it before. It was a really nice gift. Chuck (Cannon, who co-wrote) stayed up in our studio and wrote all the lyrics to the verses. The chorus was a gift.

What I was left with was, “Oh my God, what do I do—this is a chorus. This thing is a chorus. And the lyrics are there too, I think.” And—this will give you an idea of how wonderful Chuck is as a writer and his intuition– we were doing a show and soundchecking, and I walked to his side of the stage and said, “Hey man, check this out– “I just want to light you up, light you up like a fire, lift you up, take you higher” –and he says, “That’s awesome,” and he loved it. And he said, “Are you going to let me in on that one?” and I said, “Yeah man!” and he says, “As nice as a lyric as “lift you up” is, you need to repeat “turn you on,” because you repeat “light you up”, and it’ll make it uniform and lock it into the listener’s ear. And it turns it into something else all together if you say, “Turn you on, turn you on.”

So we sat up writing lyrics to the verses and we couldn’t come up with a melody that would even remotely support that chorus. I tell him, “I’m just going to speak the verses and we’ll come up with something kind of fun.” That’s how Chuck and I write. It wasn’t as much about that song I heard, to me, it’s more fun—it’s like the lines like “ice cream” or “taste your honey,” there’s overtones, but it’s also kind of fun.  It’s where we are– we’ve all got the latest, greatest gadgets—and me too! I’m not pointing fingers. But what we both thought, we agreed,  you need to set out in the song in a way—everybody wants this, everybody wants this, all I want to do is “this”—and it turns it into a sweet, one-on-one love song. It’s a fun—Chuck and I are the best team I have. When we write together—we work really hard. That night was great, but we worked on the song multiple times after that to tweak it.

Even so, that seems quick!

I don’t know how some people write songs in two or three hours. And, what I’m seeing in Nashville, is there’s a handful of songwriters who – more than a handful really, probably fifty songwriters there—that are so amazing. They are so good. And they’ll walk in writing the song. You have to hang on, and if you don’t bring it, they’ll write it for you, and it’ll be pretty damned good. The way the publishing companies stack you up, you do two or three sessions in a day. So I always end up wth three unfinished songs. And then next time I go, I have to pick– is there one that’s worth a shit? And that’s about average. There’s usually about one out of every three that I’d want to pursue. And that’s co-writing. It’s hard, especially when you don’t know a person.

The scope of a songwriter, what it does is it opens a lot of avenues of approach, that you know, especially as a lyricist, I don’t particularly need help with melody of chord structures, I can produce. That’s arrangement stuff. But when it comes to the lyric and the melody, what I tend to work harder at is the lyric. If I find someone who can roll with a lyric—and I’ve learned so much from that, from working with Chuck Hammond—I’ve leanred looking at it from different angles. It’s fun with the right person. It’s not fun with the wrong person, you just get lunch and call it a day. But I write with a ton of people, and all of the best writers out there tell me that I’ll find  few people who I write really well with and then stick with them. It’s great to work with new people, but you can’t take everything that they throw at you. I mean, Chuck Cannon has the next George Strait single, which is enormous, and it’s a wonderful song called “Poison”—it’s a great song, it’s perfect for George Strait–  but it’s a 5 or 6 year old song.

How did co-writing change you as an artist?

As an artist, I don’t know that it’s changed my- if anything, I think co-writing with people helps me own the song more. When I work together with someone else and it turns out really well, I’m even prouder of it for some reason, because it’s a harder thing to do in a way. I think it’s harder. You have to decide if you’re choosing a good battle, like, I have this melody that I’m really having to force on another writer, but sometimes you know that it’s the right one. After a while, as the song is developing, you decide if it’s worth fighting for or not. It’s like having good friends. Most of us don’t have a lot of really close friends. A co-writer is a lot like a really good friend. The level of the intimate relationship—I mean, you have to open up  your own stuff to the other person.

Make it simple, Darrell Scott—check out Darrell Scott you will flip. He’s a huge hit songwriter, had a bunch of hits, but one of the best pickers and songwriters. He’s in the Band of Joy with Robert Plant playing mandolin and guitar. And we were talking one day and I asked his advice, I was like, “Man, have you got—it’s really tough to work with some of the writers because you don’t know each other and you have to figure out how much do you open up to this person, is it werid” and he says “I found that co-writing is a lot like any other writing, you’ve got to the tell the truth. And if people aren’t willing to the tell the truth it’s not worth a damn.”

That’s such a huge statement.

Seriously, check him out– “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive”—probably the best coal mining song I’ve ever heard. Up there with ever classic folk song you’ve ever heard. I’m sure there’s a live version of him playing it. You’ll be smoked. He’s very wonderful.

[Editor's Note: Listened to the song, tended to agree. You can check it out above.]

CHECK OUT SHAWN ONLINE:

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CHECK OUT THE FERDINAND FOLK FESTIVAL ONLINE:

Ferdinand Folk Festival (seriously, check it out: they also have falconry. Not kidding.)