Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness: Dwight Yoakam: Another Favourite Singer of Mine - Still Blurring the Lines

I have mentioned Dwight Yoakam on this blog before. As far as country music is concerned he is my favourite performer.

He always was quite the maverick in country music and he still stands out with this highly original new effort.

This article concerns Dwight’s latest album “3 Pears”, and also talks about how it came into being.

He also mentions the performers who influenced his musical career: Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, as well as my other favourite – Gram Parsons, and others.

By Kelli Skye Fadroski

Seven years had passed since Dwight Yoakam put out any original material, and the Grammy-winning country maverick was beginning to get restless.

At 56 he had still managed to keep plenty busy, continuing to write and tour and in 2007 put together Dwight Sings Buck, a tribute to his late friend and legend Buck Owens, icon of the Bakersfield sound Yoakam evoked from the earliest days of his unorthodox career in the mid-’80s.

A bit-part player in movies since the early ’90s, the Sling Blade supporting star also took on more and bigger film roles, including his 2001 directorial debut South of Heaven, West of Hell, other Westerns like The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (directed by Tommy Lee Jones) and The Last Rites of Ransom Pride (opposite Kris Kristofferson, with whom he re-teamed in last year’s Bloodworth), and the coming-of-age comedy Dirty Girl.

But Yoakam wanted to focus on new songs. So he started pulling together resources. As a start, he hooked up with buddy Kid Rock, who fleshed out a song Yoakam had been sitting on for two decades.

“Bobby (his real name is Robert Ritchie) and I had threatened to do a song together for a while,” he said during a recent phone chat while, as he put it, he was “upside down” in Australia on tour. Yoakam just returned to the States, though, and comes to City National Grove of Anaheim on Thursday.

“Right when I went into the studio to start recording he called me up. We threw around some song ideas and we took a look at this one that had been languishing in an unfinished state for years. I say it took 20 years and five hours to finish writing that song. I had the opening and then he just took it, and we drove it forward and finished ‘Take Hold of My Hand.’”

That would become the opener for the finished product, September’s 3 Pears, one of the most stylistically diverse and best-reviewed collections in his catalog.

Along with characteristic fare, like a country-rock cover of Joe Maphis’ “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (And Loud, Loud Music),” the album features collaborations with Pistol Annies’ player Ashley Monroe and indie-rock icon Beck.

Yoakam admits he wasn’t all that familiar with the latter’s body of work beyond radio hits that he enjoyed: “Loser,” “Devil’s Haircut.” But he became more intrigued around the time of Beck’s beautiful downer Sea Change (2002) because of his “melodic inclinations. I just had an instinct to call him and see if he’d be interested in collaborating as a producer.”

They spent about three hours in Yoakam’s office, he says, “talking about everything from life in L.A. and the culture to playing out some of these ideas and where I thought I’d go with the album.”

Months later they met again, this time in Beck’s home studio in Malibu, to collaborate on two songs, “Missing Heart” and “A Heart Like Mine.” Yoakam went in with a ton of ideas, mainly the sound of the intro to the latter cut, something like “a two beat-bounce to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising.’ I got in there and his assistant engineer, who is a drummer, started playing it a bit, and I got the guitar – and before I knew it Beck was turning knobs and saying, ‘Do you want another guitar?’

“We built that song that day. I teased him and said, ‘It’s like we’ve got the Stones colliding with Johnny Cash.’”

Beck, a connoisseur with catholic taste who knows his traditional country, was convinced that “what I was doing would appeal to an audience I wasn’t aware I had. … There’s a certain raw emotion to the album, which is something very reminiscent to me of the moment I broke into the business on the West Coast, in the L.A. scene with what they referred to as ‘cowpunk.’ It’s very full circle.”

L.A. Clubs and Crossover Crowds

Yoakam was never really bound for Nashville. His authentic honky-tonk approach just didn’t fit in amid Music Row’s increasingly pop-driven mainstays. So in the ’80s he moved to L.A., where he was welcomed into nightclubs on the Sunset Strip and played gigs with popular rockabilly acts like the Blasters and X’s Americana side project the Knitters.

“There always was this sort of wonderful collage of musical styles that’s been a part of Southern California’s music scene,” he says, recalling many happy run-ins with artists like Dave Alvin and Billy Zoom. “From Bakersfield down into Orange County, it was just a mix of styles and people.”

Out of those formative years in Nudie suits sprang his widely acclaimed 1986 debut, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., a cult favorite among college rockers just discovering country but also a career-launching Warner Bros. release that snagged him the top spot on Billboard’s country chart and spawned his first signature single, a ripping remake of Johnny Horton’s “Honky Tonk Man.”

His next two efforts, Hillbilly Deluxe (1987) and Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room (1988), also went to No. 1, while arguably his strongest effort, 1993’s This Time, placed him in a league alongside Lyle Lovett, Iris DeMent, k.d. lang and Lucinda Williams of rare roots performers creating music that reveled in blurring the lines between folk and rock and country.

All along he had been attracted to greats who were most comfortable in the gray areas between genres, no matter how much they were pigeonholed into one over another.

At 8, Yoakam would listen to Roy Orbison in his bedroom, learning how to play along. He got heavily into Merle Haggard and, of course, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos.

Way before it was hip to be one he was a devotee of the Flying Burrito Brothers, the short-lived but influential cosmic country-rock outfit that included Bernie Leadon (later of the Eagles), alt-country god Gram Parsons and the ever-unsung Chris Hillman of the Byrds.

Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons

In 2008, Hillman asked Yoakam to write the forward to a his book Hot Burritos: The True Story of the Flying Burrito Brothers. “I was so flattered,” he says, “because I was such a huge fan, and Chris really did serve as the profound piece of connective tissue for an entire generation to reconnect with country music back in the late ’60s.

There wouldn’t have been a Sweetheart of the Rodeo album, which for me is the first country-rock album, if there were no Chris Hillman. He doesn’t get the credit he deserves for that.

“And the Burritos, more than any other band in country-rock, they laid the road map for this cross-pollinated next generation of California country voices to emerge.”

Naturally, Yoakam’s career followed a similarly unpredictable yet always genuine path toward melding sounds and audiences. That pattern still persists – recall how in 2008 he played both the everything-but-country Coachella festival and the all-country Stagecoach bash the very next weekend.

“I don’t think we changed the show we were doing one bit,” he says. “I just performed as me in both cases … and there’s a sense of exploration and ownership in both cases. The more ‘cowpunk’ side of my music, in a sense – the Coachella crowd got that and owned that, and they discovered everything else about me. The reverse, I think, was the case for the Stagecoach audience, who knew more of my traditional country music. Either way, it’s still just me doing my music.”

As for today’s heavily pop-influenced country music, Yoakam has no problem with it as long as the artists involved stay true to who they really are.

“Look, there were people that accused George Jones of selling out when he and Tammy Wynette were doing the Nashville countrypolitan sound in 1971. People were saying that they had sold out from the traditional country of the ’50s and ’60s – George Jones and Tammy Wynette!

“I think it’s just key to maintain personal integrity. Continue to seek personal inspiration through your music and be honest with every bit of musical expression you put out.”

Article and top picture with thanks to The Orange County Register and many thanks to Annie for sending me this.

The You Tube clip is a live version of "Waterfall" - from "3 Pears".

My other posts which mention Dwight Yoakam and Gram Parsons can be found with the search function on this blog.

Dwight and Gram

Update: Read “A Conversation With Dwight Yoakam” from “Cowboys and Indians” Magazine here.

Again, many thanks to Annie for this!

Another track from "Three Pears": A Heart Like Mine.

Dwight tweeted this great picture recently:

Another update:

Dwight Yoakam in the Live Room .

Another update:

Dwight still has it! Here’s a review of his concert with many thanks to Annie.

Another update:

Dwight’s latest album out now.21st Century Hits: Best of 2000-2012

One of my favourite songs by Dwight Yoakam is "Things Change" .

However, I still love "Long White Cadillac" and "Fast As You". What a hard choice!

Related:

The Rolling Stones at Villa Nellcôte and "Exile On Main Street"