A Brief Intermission

It's been a while since I've written on here. And not for a lack of things to talk about. There's been a lot going on. Let me give you some of the highlights of the last month or so.

Nathan Thomas, my bassist and main go-to-guy, and I have started pre-production on what will eventually turn into the next album. Since moving to Nashville (and a little before) I started demoing ideas on GarageBand. From simple acoustic sketches, to full-blown homemade productions, I've gathered around 20 songs now. Nathan and I have choosen 5 to focus our attention on.

* So Hard to Find an Easy Getaway - the oldest song of the bunch. I originally wrote this song in the Spring of 2008 while visiting my cousin David in Texas. We briefly played it during the last days of the Traveling Mercies. It didn't seem to fit the mood of "Shouting At A Silent Sky", but I kept the song around. Recently, I've revised the lyrics a bit, and we've brought it back into the last few shows. The song has a Chuck Berry style narrative about a troubled flight from Seattle to Texas, and has a Stones-eque loose rock feel. "Well, Austin might as well have been Boston / San Marcos might as well have been Spain / I left the clouds hoping for sunshine / but the dust bowl was flooded with rain / Yeah, the world is so strange it's so hard to make an easy getaway."

* Southern Pines - I started writing this song in the Fall of 2009, and it's gone thru quite an metamorphosis over the last few months. There's a time-change on the chorus, which I kept going back and forth on, but I think it'll be an interesting record when it's done. Like, "Easy Getaway", this song has a storyline narrative, but there are more layers to the lyrics. I originally wrote it as a sort of jazzy tin pan alley tune, then it became more like an Irish Folk song, and now it's going more riff rock. So we'll see where this one ends up. "You took me in under your spell / You clipped my wings and I could tell / Your ivory tower was now my prison cell / I plead my case and I rebelled / Your love letters were all misspelled / And I escaped without a word of farewell."

* What is this Love? - This song burst forth over the Summer of '09, and I've hardly changed a thing since. It's got an almost Latin groove to it, and it feels really fresh to me. Songs about love can be the most challenging since there have been so many great songs (and plenty of crappy ones) written about the subject over the years, but this one comes at it from a unique angle. It's more about the mystery of love, with contrasting sensual and spiritual themes. "What is this love that is spreading / What is this love like a virus / My heart pumps it to my brain and I keep waking up everyday / Just when I think I've had enough / What is this love?"

* When You Found Me - This was the first song I wrote as I settled into Nashville. Again, it's always nice when a love song presents itself and it's not a complete throwaway. The song revolves around a repeating blues riff, with a hypnotic groove, during the bridge it switches between minor and major in a way that hopefully wakes the listener from their trance. instead of focusing on how great life is with this new lover, it focuses more on how bad life was before. "When you found me I didn't believe in love / I'd been burned and I'd been bluffed / Wasn't a woman I could trust / I was blind I could not see / When you found me."

* I Know I Should Know Better - It's ironic that this is the title of the first song I'm re-recording. I originally wrote and recorded the song for the Mercies' first album back in 2007. But over the last couple years, I've felt like I could re-approach this song and breathe new life into it. It's always been an important song to me, and where we are taking it now should be a whole new experience for the listener.

So these are the first batch of songs Nathan and I will be focusing on once he gets back from his Honeymoon.

Honeymoon? On Saturday, June 26th, Nathan married his long-time sweetheart Leslie at a beautiful ceremony in Dickson, TN. They are now off to Mexico for the week. And the rest of the band has been busy as well - over the last month Aaron Tosti has been sharing his drum talents with Run Kid Run, The Almost, and will soon be on the road as a drum-tech for Underoath. Eric Newcomer has been on the road playing bass with House of Heroes, and our most recent addition to the band, the amazingly telented keyboardist Travis Terrell has been driving a bus for Peter Frampton. Yes, Peter Frampton!

So all that to say, progress is gonna be a little slower than I'd like, but hopefully we can find a day or two when each of these great players can add their magic to these tracks. The goal from there is to get these pre-production demos into the hands of people that might be able to take the project to the NEXT level. Whether it's a producer, a label, or whatever - we should have some good tracks to pass around.

So what have I been doing with my downtime? Well, I'm still working three days a week at the best honky tonk on Lower Broadway - Robert's Western World. And lately I've re-discovered my love of painting. I've started a series of "Heroes", and I've almost completed my first two - Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. For Nathan's wedding gift I painted him a portrait of Prince (who is his favorite artist).

As always there is more to talk about, but I've said enough already.

But you'll be hearing from me soon, I promise.

PERFECT SONG: JOLENE by Dolly Parton

For the second installment of my "Perfect Song" series I've chosen Dolly Parton's 1973 breakout hit, Jolene. Like the previous song I focused on (The Beatles' Help!), I'm not choosing an esoteric song to prove to you the depths of my music appreciation. I've chosen a song that for all intent and purpose has probably gotten all the attention it's deserved. It was a #1 hit on the Country Billboard charts, it's been covered by everyone from Olivia Newton John to the White Stripes, and Rolling Stone includes it on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.


(click HERE to watch a clip of JOLENE on YouTube)

I like to choose songs that I think about when I am writing a new song. Sometimes I'll look at a favorite song to study it's structure, or examine how the writer got out of a key-change during the bridge, or sometimes simply to figure out what I like about it. With Dolly Parton's Jolene, we have a perfect song. Like The Beatles' Help!, Jolene begins with the chorus. It throws us right into the fire of this housewife's jealousy. After she hooks us with the chorus, the first verse is pure poetry as she describes her competition, "Your beauty is beyond compare/With flaming locks of auburn hair/With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green."

Unlike Loretta Lynn's tough talking, You Ain't Woman Enough (to Take My Man), Dolly's protagonist exposes her fear and insecurity, "And I can easily understand/How you could easily take my man/But you don't know what he means to me, Jolene." It puts Dolly in a very vulnerable place, which makes the song all the more relate-able. And it's haunting, almost "House of the Rising Sun", chord progression adds more to the allure of the song.

During the first verses, you might picture the lyrics being sung in solitude, but the last verse reveals that this has been a conversation with Jolene the whole time, "I had to have this talk with you/My happiness depends on you/And whatever you decide to do, Jolene." And she puts her fate in whatever Jolene's next move is. Often there is the temptation to write a story with a beginning, middle, and end - but great songs like this show us that it can be more effective to just throw the listener into the middle of the chaos, and not try to wrap it up tidy in the end. The song ends the same way it begins, with that great acoustic guitar pickin', and the desperate chorus begging Jolene "please don't take my man." We know more about this woman Jolene, and we know that the protagonist fears for life after her man, but we are left in the dark as far as what happens next.

I've been focusing mainly on the lyrics, but its the combination of the words with the music that make Jolene a perfect song. I love that its in a minor key, still a rarity for commercial country. The chorus and the verses are basically the same progression, but the melody changes and creates beautiful tension, so you are never tired of the chord pattern. And I love the eeriy, almost middle-eastern final chant of "Joleeenne" at the end. The drum beat, though, has probably been the biggest influence on me. With it's almost country-disco "four-on-the-floor" feel, it uproots the traditional folk chords, and gives it a fresh shuffle that drives the song. I've opened my last two albums with songs using a Jolene-esque beat, and I've got a song or two in the works that employ more of the Jolene charm. I can't get away from this song!


My brother, Brandon Tutmarc adapted that beat for "Fair Warning" which opened our second family band album, Hey Lazarus!


And, Mark Pickerel used a similar beat on "Mortality Blues" which opens my latest album, Shouting At A Silent Sky.