The Road He's On: the transcript (2 of 3)

Sony Landreth photo by Terri Fensel

What do you mean by "more trusting?"

I think of myself. I always put a great amount of trust into my fellow musicians, and I'm very proud of everything I've done up until now. Everyone I've worked with has done a great job. I have no regrets of anything I would change. It's like John Lennon said, once they would finish a recording, he would never listen to it again. You can always keep changing it and making it better. So from that perspective, you have to learn to let go. That's something I've had a little bit of problem with in the past. I think I'm beginning to own up to that a bit more. And there's the trusting part. Yeah, let it be. Leave it in. Have that moment the way it is.

I'll admit, from a practical standpoint, I don't want to wait three to five years to put an album out. I think that that's hurt me somewhat in the past. You have to keep something out there in order to stay on the road, to do the festivals, to tour. It's very much, "Well, what have you done for me lately?" out there. There's so much volume of new material coming out at all times. They have to account for the new music from the groups coming up and the ones that have already been established. So if your album starts to lag into the third year, your phone doesn't ring as much. So there's a practical part of it, too.

I couldn't really just say, "Okay, I've got to make an album because I've got to keep money coming in." I've never been able to do that. Obviously, I've never done this for the money. Obviously. But, at the same time, this all sort of came together in the right way. I wanted to get back to the blues. I wanted it to be a simpler approach. I've got a lot of music that I want to get out. I want people to hear it. I want it to see the light of day. Each time you do a project, it goes out into the world and takes on a life of its own.You've talked about the production and the recording of The Road We're On and the more intimate approach. Each of these songs is written in the first person, even though the voices are all different. Was that conscious?

That's part of the narrative form of the story songs we were talking about earlier. It comes from a tradition. I'm very aware of that. I've always found it more interesting to write more in the second person, or from a bit of a distance. The overview just seems to be more interesting. You have more potential that way. Even these songs, if I'm saying "I" it's more of a shared experience, like a copilot. There's two of us in there. I don't know who the other guy or gal is, but there's more than just me. I think it makes it more interesting as well.

But sure, my own experiences are interwoven in all of these songs along with experiences of people that are close to me, things I've observed first hand and conjecture. It's always a bit of everything. That makes good songwriting. It makes good storytelling.

I wanted the lyrics to reflect what was happening to the music and vice versa. The music needs to support the lyrics. So if the form of the lyrics and the effect of it is being very direct and immediate, then it stands to reason that the music should be like that. Here's the music that's in that room.

In fact, that's how we recorded it and that's how we played it. I could stand in the hallway there in Tony's (Daigle) funky studio. Here's the drum room with a high ceiling. Dave's in the next room, and here's the studio right behind me. I've kind of got my foot in all of those doors. There's a big open feel about that, even though those were rooms. It's an open building, so there's a lot of bleed anyway. We had mics all over the place to pick up everything.

You've done a lot of work out at Dockside Studio in Maurice with a beautiful setting right there on the bayou. I guess if you get frustrated, you can just walk out to the bayou. At Tony's place, though, if you walk outside, you're at Dwyer's Dumpster. Does that, and particularly the recording environment, have anything to do with the mood of this record?

(Laughs) I love Dockside. That's just heaven out there. It's like my other home. I love Wish and Steve (Nails). They're very dear friends. They've been wonderful to me and supportive over the years. To go out there and just get set up and be in the middle of that paradise, you're absolutely right, it affects me. I'm able to walk outside onto 12 acres of beautiful property. At the same time, there's this big two-inch Studer machine and a Neve console. It's great. It worked perfect for South of I-10 and Levee Town.

But I needed to go to the city to get that down-in-the-alley vibe, that Clifton Chenier used to say. So when you walk out the back door, as you walk down (looking) into the Dumpster, you're there. It's a funky element about it all that we just needed.

And, frankly, I was on a budget. I had to really stay close to that. I don't have a major label deal like I did in the BMG days. At the same time, I don't feel like we've sacrificed anything in terms of quality. That's always been a big issue for me. Sonically, it's got to be great. But when you're making a change and you need a different vibe, you change the environment. It worked out really well.

You've worked with Tony Daigle a lot in the past, but according to the credits on the CD cover, he seems to have played a larger role than he was in the past.

He's there from the get-go, from the time we turn the lights on in the studio until the time we turn the lights off at the end of the whole thing. When everyone else is going home, it's me and Tony.

(R.S.) Bobby Field, my co-producer, who's truly gifted and great to work with, only had a certain allotment of time to give the project. So again, it's Tony and I. Tony had a lot to do with it. He had everything to do with the sonics and the decision-making. It's good to have someone like that. When you get close to someone like that, when you work as a team, it's great to have that feedback and to bounce ideas off of each other. Let's face it, that old cliche' about the forest and the trees, sometimes I don't have a clue. I just step back and go, "What in the hell was I thinking? The problem is I've dragged us all into this thing, now let me try to help get us out of here." But it's part of the adventure. There are definitely ups and downs. Some things work, and some things don't. You've got to be willing to take chances, though. Tony was certainly there every step of the way.

Sony Landreth photo by Terri Fensel

Talking about your approach to the music this time around, there's a line from the title cut, "The road to freedom is the road we're on." Is that what this album's about for you?

Yeah, that's why I chose it for the title track. It really summed up the whole thing.

For all of our ciphering and trying to figure things out and analyzing and all that, there is a process that happens, and it's a bit of an evolutionary process. I once used the term, "the essence of direction." You're making all of these lefts and rights, and you get off the path, but you're actually making your way there. I think that sometimes what we really want in life is right in front of us anyway. Some of the greatest truths are the ones that are face-to-face with us when we get up in the morning. Sometimes we don't realize that, and that's part of the intention of that, too. I think it speaks in the music as well.

But what is freedom?

I think freedom is when you own up to truth and when you let things be, in a way. You can take that in all different categories of how you live and your thought process. Everything from being in a zydecoldsmobile driving down the Breaux Bridge highway at two o'clock in the morning with the windows down because the air conditioner doesn't work, and you're taking in everything. It's the middle of July, and the air is so thick. That's an experience. I kind of wanted that for this as well.

That's a pretty deep question. We could go pretty far on that one. As an artist or as someone struggling in the music business, it's having the freedom to create and owning up to the fact that there is no end to creativity. To think that there is a perfection is to presuppose that there is an end to creativity. I don't believe that. I think it's constantly changing, constantly evolving, but that's exciting. I think truth is like that as well. But, hey, that's just me.How did you meet R.S. Field, and how long have y'all worked together?

I met Bobby in 1990. He had gotten a copy of Way Down in Louisiana, and he loved the album. He called me up to play on John Mayall's album. In fact, he wanted to use two of the songs, "Congo Square" and "Sugar Cane." I was flabbergasted. It turns out he's from Mississippi, and I was born in Mississippi. We had all of these connections with people and music. So they flew me out to Los Angeles, and we recorded out there. I finally got to met one of my all-time heroes. The irony was that when I wrote "Congo Square," he and the Neville Brothers were the two people I had in mind, who had influenced me in a way. It goes to show you there is synchronicity. There's definitely something there.

But that's how we met, and we hit it off so well. He was involved with Zoo/Praxis, a subsidiary of BMG in Los Angeles. He was part of the team, and he helped get me in on that. They signed me to a deal, and he and I started working together. It's been a great experience ever since.

There's no one like Bobby. He's a genius. I know that much. I figured that out. He's one of these guys like the absent-minded professor or the genius scientist inventing all of this amazing stuff and then forgets where he parked his car on the street. You've got to keep your eye on him, just watch him and look out for him. His mind works on a level so far above the average person. He reads voraciously. He absorbs everything. And unlike anyone else I've ever met, he can sum up an incident or a moment or an idea or a name for a song or a name of a band, or describe the music of a band, in a way that perfectly tells a story in a sentence. He may be combining Genghis Kahn and an industrial rock band with Andy Griffith. He'll put all that together and you'll hurt yourself laughing. At the same time, you know, he's right. That's perfect. First of all, I could never put all that together at the same time, and also perfectly describe that very thing. I love that. Really, that's the way he produces. He comes up with these metaphors, and he'll figure out a way to get into there and do it. He is the antithesis of the typical Nashville producer. He's had a lot of influence on me in that regard, speaking of the moment and capturing the magic and coming up with different ways of doing things.

The other thing that happened that was very different on this go round was that I actually took upon myself the insane task of not only recording an album but continuing to play gigs at the same time. We were indeed on the road too. We'd book an allotment of time in the studio, then we'd be out on the road. The great thing was that we would come in fresh off the road and, boom, we're right in there, cutting these tracks. You can feel that energy. The down side of that is when it was time to leave again and go back on the road, we'd be right in the middle of doing this. There were times when I had to leave R.S., with Tony, to his own devices.

So I come in there, he's in the other room down the hall with a broom. He's got (Troy) Primeaux up there setting up mics, and he's sweeping the wall. On "True Blue," those aren't brushes. Those are larger than life brushes, actually a broom on a wall. I mean, I would have never thought to do that. And there's your loop. You wanted a loop. There's your loop. It's an incredible sound. Actually, by itself it was amazing. I almost wanted to make a track of that, but of course we couldn't do that. When he would do the down stroke, it was like a huge kick drum because of the ambience in between the walls. I heard that thing and I was like, "Wow, man, that's deep. Now we're talking."