The String

Colin Linden - guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer - is one of Nashville’s most interesting musicians. You may have seen him in the Americana Awards house band, or as a key live musician on the TV series Nashville or in the dynamic Canadian country rock band Blackie and the Rodeo Kings. He wasn't born into the blues but he sure found the music early and made it his own, through a very early meeting with Howlin Wolf and a pilgrimage through the Deep South in his teens. He's also been a long-time band leader and producer for Bruce Cockburn. We talk about all that, as well as the project he’s just completed with fellow blues musician Luther Dickinson and others, a suite of vintage love songs called Amour. Plus, a visit with the new owner and proprietor of a revived historic studio in Nashville, the former home of Cowboy Jack Clement. 

Fifteen years ago, Mindy Smith rocketed from local sets in Nashville to the national stage in a matter of a few months on the strength of a duet on "Jolene" with Dolly Parton and the January 2004 release of her debut album One Moment More. She became the first winner of the Americana Music Association Emerging Artist award, and wide audiences embraced her empathic songs and translucent voice. The years since have seen periods of high profile touring and periods of quiet. She's preparing to step back out and working on a new album. On the occasion of the 15th anniversary release of One Moment More on vinyl, we catch up about her life and path and a recent discovery. Also in the hour, the honey-toned voice of Adam Wakefield reached millions on television, but in Nashville he's a blue collar songwriting artist with a fine debut album. 

Episode #81: This week, the long, diverse career of Nashville's Bill Lloyd. From country hits as a writer and artist to collaborations with leading lights of rock and pop, Bill is a dynamo. And he's got a fantastic new album out called Working The Long Game.  We hit a lot of points of Bill’s biography in our conversation, but the essentials to know going in are that he moved to Nashville after college in Bowling Green, KY to write songs. He met fellow writer Radney Foster and they shot to fame in 1987 as Foster & Lloyd, with a sound that swam upstream from the country radio mainstream. In more recent years, he’s led the band the Long Players, Nashville favorites that perform live cut-by-cut covers of full classic albums. He keeps up a steady run of solo albums that blend top-flight Nashville songcraft with the timeless sound of pop music. Also, highlights from my recent sit-down with the very busy Rhiannon Giddens about her life after the Carolina Chocolate Drops and a MacArthur Fellowship.

If Americana values all American roots forms and the fusion thereof, then nobody's more Americana than Austin singer/songwriter Ruthie Foster. She grew up singing in church in rural TX, developed a variety of skills in bands while serving in the US Navy, then became a folk troubadour who slips from country to soul to blues to gospel with ease. She has been one of if not the flagship artist for Austin’s excellent Blue Corn Music record label since 2002. She’s been featured on a guitar blues tour with Jorma Kaukonen and Robben Ford, and that's just one fragment of a rich collaborative life. She’s won the Blues Foundation’s Koko Taylor award for best traditional blues female singer SIX times, and she’s nominated again this year. She's also a charming person who radiates kindness. Also in the hour, Autin's Rob Baird, a funny, easy-going artist who's just released his fourth album, After All. It's an all Austin talk-fest with a ton of music.

Missy Raines grew up in rural west VA deeply immersed in bluegrass culture. And when she started playing professionally in her collegiate years, she went for it with, as she tells me, no plan B but a life in the music she loved. Over a couple of decades as a side musician, she became a pioneer and a scene favorite, winning seven IBMA awards for her bass playing alone. In 2008, she made real a long-standing dream of starting her own band, which became a vehicle for her innovative fusion-minded composing and her mentorship of emerging young master musicians. In late 2018, Missy released her first album under her name alone, as it’s a songwriter’s project that adds to her musical world view. Also in this hour Irishman Danny Burns, a veteran songwriter, singer and sideman who’s been working hard at a music career for going on 20 years. And at the age of 37 he’s taken the radical step of...putting out a debut album. The project, North Country, is a wonderful new-grass collection with Celtic overtones and impressive songs and guest artists. So what took him so long? He’ll explain.

The String launches a new year with a conversation with Rodney Crowell, one of the legit icons of Americana music. The Texas born, Nashville based songwriter was one of the artists around whom the format was created 20 years ago, and indeed he won the Americana Music Association's lifetime achievement award for songwriting in 2006. He’s a valued collaborator, earning a Grammy Award for his recent work with his longtime friend and colleague Emmylou Harris. He became an acclaimed author with his memoir Chinaberry Sidewalks in 2011. Recently he's released a first-ever Christmas album and a volume of stripped down "Acoustic Classics" from his extensive catalog. We cover a range of times and topics. Also in the hour, Maya de Vitry talks about her difficult but necessary departure from the beloved acoustic trio The Stray Birds. She's set out on her own with the album Adaptations. 

How and why this humble collection of towns hugging the Tennessee River in northern Alabama became a historic musical hot spot is an improbable, wonderful American story. But I grew interested in Muscle Shoals of today. More and more, roots and rock and roll musicians have been traveling there to record. A string of remarkable bands and songwriters, including Jason Isbell, John Paul White, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Dylan LeBlanc and The Secret Sisters, has emerged from the area in recent years. A half dozen studios are in demand and busy. It’s became clear that Muscle Shoals is no museum. It’s a scene. So the only thing to do was to go there and listen.

This week, an evenly split hour with very different artists who have a lot to say about change and growth. The Gibson Brothers took their experience from two decades in bluegrass and poured it into a radically different project written and produced with Dan Auerbach. Ruby Boots has been "shedding her skin" regularly through a life on at least three continents. She's now a mainstay in the East Nashville scene and her 'Don't Talk About It' is a masterful album.

Bob Dylan's transition from solo folk troubadour to electric roots rocker was as important a precursor to the idea of Americana music as any other. And that transition reached its apex with the 1966 masterpiece Blonde On Blonde. We devote this whole episode to the album. My featured guest is longtime Nashville music journalist Daryl Sanders who's just published That Thin Wild Mercury Sound, the first book to carefully track how and why Dylan came to Music City to work with young and creative session musicians such as Charlie McCoy, Wayne Moss, Mac Gayden and Kenneth Buttrey. The companion interview features songwriter Robyn Hitchcock who talks about how Blonde on Blonde changed his life and gave him a lifetime's benchmark of artistry.

Episode 74: Kathy Mattea's new album Pretty Bird is her first release in six years. In the time between, she’s struggled through some problems with her voice and in so doing reached outside of her musical comfort zones. After a couple of albums dedicated to exploring her Appalachian heritage, this one’s more eclectic. She calls it a journey back to singing for the sheer joy of it. Mattea has always been a gifted interpreter from her younger days as a Music Row demo singer through her years as CMA Female Vocalist of the Year in 1989 and 90. Here she sings "Ode To Billie Joe," Bobbie Gentry’s mesmerizing hit from 1967, and an old traditional Irish ballad and Mary Gauthier’s new gospel Americana anthem "Mercy Now." But the title track, which closes the album, declares her continued allegiance to the old music of West Virginia. It’s by Hazel Dickens, herself a WV Music Hall of Famer and one of the most influential and powerful women to ever work in folk and bluegrass music. She’s a hero to Mattea and many others for her undiluted mountain sound and her down to earth feminism. Later in the show we’re going to hear the late great Hazel Dickens on tape from a biographical interview.