“Seems like for decades now, everybody's been doing theme albums. Pizzarelli did a pop album. McCartney did a jazz standards album. Willie did a western swing album. Charlie Haden did a country album.  Willie did a standards album. Boz Skaggs, Linda Ronstadt, you name ‘em, everybody's done some. I think it first got legs way back when this rock’n’roll band had an album full of songs so diverse they didn't know what to do. They got the idea to stitch it all together as a circus variety show band and they called it Sgt. Pepper's. Ironic that themes got style and variety was out. Now it looks like you're telling diversity to stand on its own legs.” ~ MT

It’s been my good fortune to work and create in environments that were both structured and unconstrained.  Looking back, I don’t see too many instances where experimentation was discouraged, and most of those took place in the advertising industry and not in the creation of music.  Advertising is a whole different animal, where the singer has to deal with power struggles and art manipulators and ticking clocks.  It calls on the singer to dress up product with chirpy overtones and even the occasional deceit.  My experiences creating spots for Southwest Airlines were anything but stodgy, though.  They were more like paid vacations with really smart, creative, funny people.  I'll just say that making good music has put lots of teachers in my path, as well as great opportunity and freedom.  The smart singer learns when the lesson looks like a threat.

I think sometimes of Rosemary Clooney, with her hilarious story about being forced to cut Wayne Raney's "Why Don't You Haul Off And Love Me" - I think it was Mitch Miller who brought the song to her, and she said in her book, "Girl Singer", that is was the most god-awful song she ever had to record.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EOSyrhTrtI

Rosemary Clooney
1950s

On this cut she even sounds like my pal Maryann Price, getting kinda kitschy with the lyric, because what else could she do?  It’s hardly “Autumn Leaves”.  That fantastic voice stooping to slog through this yokel cheese is amusing until you realize the waste involved.  Even though it was recorded by lots of different artists in the late 40s and early 50s it was just a bad match for Rosie.  Mitch Miller was aggressively pop pop pop in his commercial productions.  This guy had the chutzpah to persuade Sinatra to record an abysmal number called “Mama Will Bark”.  Mitch Miller was no dope, but even guys with experience and instinct sometimes stand and watch the ship growing smaller in the distance, knowing they missed it, at least artistically.

Wayne Raney

 “Why Don’t You Haul Off And Love Me” was perfect for the man who wrote it, a harmonica player from Wolf Bayou, Arkansas. http://ia600306.us.archive.org/28/items/WayneRainey-WhyDontYouHaulOffAndLoveMe1949/WayneRainey-WhyDontYouHaulOffAndLoveMe1949.mp3  We hear harmonica, flat top guitars, maybe a bass. This song was on the set list the first time I ever heard Asleep At The Wheel at American University in D.C. in October, 1970, with Ray Benson taking the hillbilly bull by the horns and blowing away the audience with The Wheel’s hip/pie  version of this simple tune.  The Wheel's performance of Raney's tune made perfect artistic and visual sense.  It sounded a damn sight better coming out of Ray's face than it ever could have coming out of Rosemary’s.

This all raises the question of appropriate choice of material for the artist, and who gets to choose.  Rosemary had a deal with Mitch, who threatened to fire her if she didn’t sing “Come On-A My House” in a fake Armenian accent.  In my early days, when recording in Nashville, I had the experience of being locked in Billy Sherrill’s office with an Epic rep telling me I shouldn’t sing the songs that my own songwriters were coming up with - writers like LeRoy Preston and Blackie Farrell - but that I should, instead, sing the songs that my producer du jour had written or co-written.  So I was pitched one song after another while the band waited for me to return to the studio.  Maybe this guy didn’t know I played guitar and was needed for the basic tracks, I don’t know.  But I declined and told him I was prepared to sing the songs I brought with me, and despite his best efforts to sell me the company tunes, I cut what I wanted.  I have three songs on that Epic album:  “Last Letter”, Rex Griffin's 1937 suicide weeper; “The Kind Of Love I Can’t Forget”, which was a western swing standard written by my friend and early Texas Playboy fiddler Jesse Ashlock; and “Our Names Aren’t Mentioned (Together Anymore)”, a jukebox country duet, a waltz written by LeRoy Preston.

With Jesse Ashlock, circa 1975

I trusted my songwriters and my own instincts.  Why shouldn't I sing what I wanted?  I was coming to understand that I could try any kind of song that felt right.  The Wheel was doing demos for different labels and I would find myself singing a LeRoy Preston love song, then an Etta James song, and then a Stevie Wonder tune followed by a song recorded in 1961 by Bobbie Smith and The Dream Girls.  And the band's publishing house was getting on board with this, sending all kind of songs to try, things written by John Hiatt and Mike Duke and Del Shannon.

When I first started singing I was learning derivative versions of songs; before I was a teenager I heard Arthur Alexander through John Lennon’s version of “Anna” and Don Covay through Mick Jagger’s stone cop of “Mercy Mercy”.  It wasn’t till I left my home in Virginia and became surrounded by players a few years ahead of me that I started to see the complete family tree.  Irma Thomas and Helen Humes and Little Jimmy Scott and Dinah Washington and Big Joe Turner - “nice to meet you!”  In fact, it was you, Merle, who turned me on to Irma Thomas shortly after I got to California.  It was a great time to be in music, in the early 70s, and once The Wheel got to Berkeley inspiration was coming in under the door.  A turntable.  Floor speakers.  A burgeoning collection of cool and interesting vinyl.  Freedom.

My new release, "Be Right Back!", contains 13 wildly diverse styles of music. This is not a palette of similar hues and shades.  I don’t have time to waste on filler material or re-hashings of what I’ve done before.  The project was ambitious and demanded that we hire the most versatile musicians we know.  We were very fortunate that new players, some of whom I’d never met, turned in terrific performances.  Old pals went out their way to participate out of love and devotion.  It was the strength of these individual and collective contributions that drove me to step up my own game.

I chose songs that I thought were poignant or droll or evocative.  That’s what I’ve always done.  I have trouble singing lyrics that don’t paint a picture.  I left my toughest song until the very end of the vocal sessions, and then I had to get on the mad side to sing it.  I have often used anger for situational management.  (Ask anyone who knows me!)  Fortunately for all involved, this time it turned out in our favor!  In coming back to singing after having been away so long I had to reintroduce myself to my own vocal chops and try to remember my shortcuts, how to get from point A to point B without dropping the character or the intensity, how to maintain pitch and tone while increasing thrust, how to inhabit the song.  That last one is the hardest, because some of the material is stark and desolate.  It’s painful to tell some of the stories on this record.  Yeah, I still call it a record.  "I hate it - I’m never doing this again.  I mean it.  We're done."  "I love this, it’s so huge and swingin'!"  "Wait a minute, that can be better."  "This song hates me."  "It wasn’t as hard as I imagined it would be."  "How did he make it sound so effortless?  It's not."  "I just got lucky there!"  That's how it all went down.  That’s how enduring things are made.

If you look inside any random Crayola box you will see this album.  It’s got the pink cloud, the greenhorn, the sunny yellow of “what the hell”, the dark blue of loss.  Colors are celebrated instrumentally or brought to the table vocally.  It navigates human emotion like a heart-and-soul GPS, complete with suggested turns into cheerless neighborhoods, but you get to choose the destination.  Or just sit in it and ride around . . . like we used to do, with the windows down.

"My Grace, Myself", Preparing to Cruise, 2004