Hey all,
Thank you for all your kind words about the launch of the website and this blog. Having spent rather a long time feeling as though I was treading water, it’s lovely to feel that I’m finally heading somewhere. There may still be the occasional mouthful of seawater, but at least there’s a direction.
Work on *The Heartbreak Handbook* is continuing in great strides, and it’s been wonderful to be working with Don Richmond. I wanted to tell you a little more about him, because what he’s undertaken with this record is no small thing.
Continuing an album that began with someone who is no longer physically here involves far more than opening the files and deciding what needs another guitar. There’s a friendship in those recordings. There are conversations, decisions, little moments of discovery, and all the things Chris and I understood without necessarily having to explain them. Asking someone else to enter that space is a considerable act of trust.
Don has approached it with a sensitivity, attention to detail and empathetic consideration that I know Chris would have felt very good about. That means an enormous amount to me.
For those of you who haven’t encountered Don’s work, he’s spent more than fifty years making music in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, with his home territory around Alamosa and the San Luis Valley providing the backdrop to a remarkable musical life. He’s a singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist, which seems a slightly inadequate description for someone who can move between guitar, fiddle, mandolin, banjo, dobro and pedal steel, then apparently decide that what’s really missing is an accordion. Some people collect instruments. Don appears to have learnt them.
He helped found Tumbleweed and Hired Hands, and plays with the Rifters, whose music draws on the folk, country and roots traditions of the Southwest. Through his Howlin’ Dog studio, he’s recorded and produced hundreds of albums. His musical associations include Michael Hearne, Bill Hearne and Eliza Gilkyson, and he also teaches songwriting workshops with Eliza and John Gorka. He even wrote a book called *Getting Your Music Past the Fear*, which strikes me as a useful qualification for anyone agreeing to work with a songwriter.
But the part that matters most to me isn’t the formidable list of things he can do. It’s the care he brings to doing them.
I’ve known Don over the years, and have always felt a musical kinship between him and Chris: that combination of extraordinary ability and a willingness to listen properly. With this album, Don understands that moving forward also means treating what’s already there with love. He’s helping me hear where the songs can go, while respecting where they began.
That’s a delicate balance. And at a point when I wasn’t entirely sure how I could carry this record across the finishing line, it’s given me something I’d been missing for quite a while: the excitement of hearing it come to life again.
We’ve been working remotely, with Don up in Alamosa, Colorado, and me here in Austin, Texas, in my little apartment studio. It’s rather like that game we used to play at school, where you’d draw something at the top of a piece of paper, fold it over, and pass it to someone else to draw the next bit. On it went until you unfolded the whole thing and discovered what you’d collectively brought into existence. Usually a man with a giraffe’s neck and disproportionately ambitious trousers.
Thankfully, the musical results have been rather more coherent, but there’s something of that same lovely anticipation in it. I send something off, Don spends some time with it, and back it comes with a new detail, a different colour, or a possibility I hadn’t heard before. Then it’s my turn again.
I really love what Don is bringing to these songs. His musicality, his playfulness, and that sense of duty he has to a song are something to behold. There’s such imagination in what he does, but always with an ear to what the song actually needs. Sometimes that means adding something wonderful; sometimes it means knowing when to leave well alone. As someone who owns rather more instruments than any sensible apartment should accommodate, I have considerable respect for that last skill.
It’s making the distance between Colorado and Texas feel surprisingly small. We may be sitting in different rooms, but we’re very much inside the same songs.
There’s also been a little excursion out of the apartment and onto a stage. On October 9, I joined the Pepperland Players at The 04 Center here in Austin for a celebration of John Lennon’s birthday. He would have turned 86, which is a peculiar thought when so much of his music still feels younger than most of us.
For those who haven’t caught us yet, the Pepperland Players are a gathering of Austin musicians with a shared affection for the Beatles and the wider musical world around them. Alongside me for this show were Bruce Hughes, Darin Murphy, Matt Patterson and Heath Allyn. Our adventures have included full performances of Beatles albums such as Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, as well as outings into Lennon and McCartney’s solo work and a celebration of Dylan going electric. It’s a very agreeable excuse to spend time inside records that have given us so much, while discovering just how much work was hiding underneath something that sounded effortless.
With everything going on around my own album, it was lovely to spend an evening celebrating another songwriter whose music has meant so much to me. The photographs here are by Randy Dees, who has kindly captured the occasion—and supplied evidence that I do occasionally leave the studio.
I’ll keep you all updated as we edge closer to the finishing line with the recording, and then move on to mixing—where we get to spend a quite unreasonable amount of time deciding whether something should be a fraction louder.
Away from the recording, I had a very enjoyable photo shoot today with my very good friend Nicola Gell. Nicola is not only a wonderful photographer, but an incredible visual artist. She’s taken my favourite photographs of Andrea and me in Beat Root Revival, as well as my favourite pictures of me on my own, which is no small achievement given the subject matter.
She has a wonderful way of making a room feel calm, comfortable and fun. That’s a considerable gift when you’re asking someone to stand in front of a camera and somehow look like themselves, rather than a man who’s just been asked what he’s done with the receipts. Particularly when, like me, you have a great face for radio.
It’s been lovely to feel things moving forward on both fronts: the music taking shape, and the beginnings of the pictures that will accompany it. After all the pauses along the way, there’s something quietly wonderful about having a day where you can simply enjoy making things again.
More soon, and thank you for being here.
Ben