It certainly puts you in good company. Speaking of that, when did you first come across Woody Guthrie’s songs?

I’ve known about Woody Guthrie for a long time, and way back when I was a young musician, some of the first songs I learned were written by Woody Guthrie. I didn’t know much about him. The name is iconic—it just sounds iconic. Woody Guthrie. So as I tried to find out more about him, as a young guy, I heard somewhere along the way that Bob Dylan was heavily influenced by Woody Guthrie—that was just part of the lore early on. And also I knew that some of the first songs I learned were by Woody, and I had some friends that were kind of into him. And so I started to try to find out about him when I was in my twenties, and there wasn’t a lot of information, quite frankly. There were a couple of books. One book I found, called Born to Win, was a compilation of a lot of his writings and songs and poetry and stuff, put together by Robert Shelton. And then there was another book called Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, and it had been compiled by Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, collectively. Pete had scored all the music out, Alan Lomax had kind of found all the music, and the Woody had written notes for all of the songs. Born to Win actually had some lyrics in it that music had never been written for. One of them was “Way Over Yonder in a Minor Key,” which was later given to Billy Bragg for the Mermaid Avenue albums. And another one in there was “Dance a Little Longer,” which was one of the ones given to me. So I saw those lyrics back in the ’70s, but didn’t really know much about it or the fact that Woody had written thousands of songs.

And the Woody Guthrie albums you made in 2003 and 2005—I was curious what made you want to compile that music and put out albums at that particular time.

Well I didn’t know it would turn into two albums. In 1998, I got a postcard from my friend Ray Wylie Hubbard, and it said he was going to be playing at the Woody Guthrie festival in Okemah, Oklahoma. It was the first annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. And I just said, “Man, I gotta be on that.” So I had my manager call them, and as it turned out, when I told her about it, she had already gotten a letter from them already—because she also managed Jackson Browne—asking for a quote from Jackson about Woody. So she was able to send them a quote and also kind of pitch me as another artist. I’m not sure exactly how I got on the first year, but they put me in the festival, and I ended up opening up the Woody Guthrie festival the very first year in. Consequently, I’ve been invited back every year—this’ll be my eighteenth year this year. And about the second year in was when the Mermaid Avenue albums came out. I decided I’d like to see some of this material and have a chance to write some music to some of these songs. I knew about the one in the book, “Dance a Little Longer,” and that was one that I’d already thought about. So I wrote a letter to Nora Guthrie, introduced myself, and she kind of checked me out, checked up on who I was and what my credentials were, if I actually was on the Woody fest. And she got back to me and gave me that first song, along with an invite to come to the archives and look through Woody’s unfinished stuff. So I consequently ended up with five co-writes with Woody, and it stretched out into two albums of material. I have another book that was given to me by a friend who works with the Huntington’s Disease foundation in Lowell, Massachusetts. He had a book that had been left behind, I think by Marjorie Guthrie, Woody’s wife, after Woody died. Somebody was just gonna throw them away, didn’t realize what they were. But it’s a book of like 265 Woody Guthrie songs. I mean, you never see that. And it’s songs on every subject known to man. So when I did the Woody Guthrie albums, I went through that book and found a bunch of different songs, so consequently the songs on the recording, some of them are well-known, some of them are songs that were never recorded, and then some of them are co-writes that I finished.

What was it like taking on a project like the Woody albums, interpreting another person’s work—or even co-writing with someone who isn’t there—as opposed to creating your own? How did that affect your writing when you returned to doing your own albums?

With the Woody stuff, in terms of actual composition, it was pretty easy, because I’ve always been kind of a melody person. So when I sat down—depending on the song—at the piano or the guitar, I just picked a place to start and they just kind of rolled out. One of them really fast, then the other ones within a day or two. I was kind of fooling around with a certain progression and seeing how the words fit, made a few adjustments, and I was pretty much there. I didn’t really struggle over it. Because I also thought, too, in terms of like what you said about putting yourself into the persona, I think that’s kind of hard to do with someone that’s passed away that you’ve never met, but especially with somebody like Woody Guthrie. The thing I really believe about Woody is that for as many people that have tried to do what he did or be like him, nobody’s gonna ever do it, you know? He was a totally original kind of character, with a lot of different elements to his personality, from what I’ve been able to find out. I don’t profess to be an expert on him or anything, except to say that he was probably really unpredictable, had a lot of highs and lows. You know, I’ve heard people talk about how much they loved him, and I’ve heard people talk about how annoying he could be, and I’ve heard people talk about how he scared them. Ronnie Gilbert, who was in The Weavers, she was really young when she met Woody, and when she talked about meeting Woody, she said he was really scary to her. Because he was very critical, and older, and very sure of himself in a certain way, at a completely different time than now, when relationships were different than they are now, between genders even. It’s hard to really know what somebody was like, but the one thing that I could say is Woody didn’t struggle over the music that much. He came up with some great stuff, and a lot of stuff was based on traditional folk melodies that he might have heard sung to him. And when you listen to his songs, he was the guy that put the focus on the words. They say about Woody: three chords and the truth. So that’s how I tried to approach the music. You can’t get too complex about it. I think the experience of working with his stuff—the stuff that I wrote and also the stuff that I found and worked on to make my own for the recording—I won’t say it changed me, it just enhanced what I do. It made me more conscious of the whole process and what it means to me and what it means to other people.

I’ve been listening through the new album, Baladista, and one thing that hit me was that is doesn’t sound like there are any drums on the album. Is that right?

No, there’s no drums on the album at all. When I started to develop the idea of how I was going to do the record, one of the jokes was “the only thing better than a really great drummer is no drummer.” [Laughs] I’m a drummer, so there’s a lot of tempo in my music anyway, so even without the drums, there’s no speeding up or slowing down or whatever. The songs all have tempo. I called up my friend Greg Leisz to come down and play some dobro on it. He’s a pedal steel player mainly. So we put pedal steel on the other one. And it was such a fun session, I just said, let’s just do this about five more times, just electric guitar and pedal steel, and then I’ll just do what I do, guitar, harmonica and vocal. So that’s how we put the tracks together. And just as I was finishing up the tracks, I got a call from Hutch Hutchinson, who plays bass with Bonnie Raitt, and he said he heard I was making a record and wanted to know if I needed any bass parts. The other joke had been “the only thing better than a great bass player is no bass player.” But he’s a great bass player, so he came down to my studio, brought about five basses, and did all the bass work. So there’s no drums on it, which is kind of ironic, because I’m a drummer, but I really think there’s a ton of rhythm in there. I thought about putting some percussion on a couple of tracks and fooled around with some things, but it just didn’t really seem to need it in the long run. And I’m really happy with it, because, arrangement-wise, the tracks have a lot of continuity all the way through, a real continual sound or vibe from beginning to end.

It’s definitely more of a low-key affair than at least your previous couple of albums.

Yeah, and the previous couple I consciously tried to go a little bit more traditional band setup, after the Woody stuff. Because the ones before the Woody stuff had percussion, but it was all unconventional percussion. And, I don’t know, you get influenced by all kinds of things, and some of them you should get influenced by and some of them you shouldn’t. Like one of the things I remember a guy saying to me from a local radio station, back in the ’90s—“Have you ever thought of putting a snare drum on your stuff?” I remember thinking wow, I’m a drummer and you’re saying that to me. But at that point, all of my percussion was hand drums, Native American ring drums and djembe, some cymbals, stuff like that. So then when I did Thirteen Stories High, I just had access to a great band, Jimmy LaFave’s band, and they’re a very conventional rock and roll band. And I was able to use elements of Jackson Browne’s band and Crosby Still & Nash’s band for my America Come Home album. I had great drummers on both of those records. Stevie D [DiStanislao] on American Comes Home, he’s just amazing.

So this recent low-key approach was deliberate? Because the songs on Baladista really lend themselves to it. Like you said, there’s a line going through the whole album.

Yeah, it was a totally organic decision. It wasn’t like they weren’t available. After I did the first sessions with Greg, I had some shows in Oklahoma. I had about four or five tracks recorded with Greg where it was me in the middle, with harmonica and guitar, and then electric guitar on one side and pedal steel on the other. So at these gigs in Oklahoma, I was playing with the guitar player named Terry Ware, and he told me that there was another friend of his from Nashville that was in town, a guy named Jim Hoke, who would be willing to sit in with us in Oklahoma City, and he’s a pedal steel player. And that’s what I had on my record. So he sat in with us that night, and it was just so much fun. I like to say it was like driving a sports car, for me. It was just the two instruments, electric guitar and pedal steel, and I could just glide, do what I do, and those guys would completely key in on me. It just felt like the tracks I was laying down right then. And that’s when I decided this is really working. It was actually one of those guys who came up with the [drummer] joke. The thing I’m liking about this is that I can really hear everything, I can hear every note. And sometimes when you got a full band up there, you can’t hear everything. But it was really cool, because I could hear every note of the pedal steel and electric guitar, and I could hear what I was doing, too, without getting distracted. So when I came home, I was like, okay, that’s what I’m going to do. The rest of this record, I’m just gonna go the same route.

One song on the album I was particularly interested in was “El Bracero.” It seems to be more of a traditional folk/protest song. What inspired the writing of that one?

That was a song that I had written because of an experience I’d had witnessing the dedication of the Bracero Memorial Highway, that section of the California US 101 and the dedication of a headstone on the mass grave of the twenty-eight victims of Woody Guthrie’s song “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” He wrote that song in 1948, about twenty-eight Mexican nationals what were killed in a plane crash on their way back to Mexico. Just a couple years ago, a couple guys up in the Fresno area, where this mass grave is, found all the names to put on the headstones. And then when I went there to go to the mass for that, I found out that they weren’t undocumented workers. Everybody always thought they were undocumented. They were part of the bracero program, working legally in the United States, during the years beginning with World War II and after, to supplement the agriculture labor force in the Central Valley and other parts of the country where we grow food. So that’s when I wrote “El Bracero.”

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