Category: American Songwriter

I discovered Paul Simon on MTV when I was in third grade, back when the video for “You Can Call Me Al” was on constant rotation. It featured Chevy Chase lip-synching the words to the song while a dour-looking Simon traded off on a variety of instruments. As I was unfamiliar with the work of Chevy Chase at the time, I assumed that this tall, tan, hysterical guy was Paul Simon. I now had a new musical hero. He was cool, funny, and made great music to boot.

This illusion lasted for about a month. I told my parents about my newfound discovery, which prompted my dad to pull out a dusty old Simon & Garfunkel vinyl from his record collection. The short one was there, with much longer hair, mind you, but the other guy was clearly not my Paul Simon. My mind had been officially blown.

I got over the hang-up, and the Graceland cassette entered into my possession not long afterward. For Simon, it was a watershed album that re-energized his career and earned him a whole new subset of fans. It now stands as one of the best albums of that decade.

As a songwriter, Simon is an American titan, one of the few that can be mentioned in the same breath as Bob Dylan. The writer Cormac McCarthy once quipped, “Simon told us what was happening [in the ‘60s], Dylan told us what was going to happen.” Indeed.

And why they haven’t awarded Simon – or Dylan, for that matter – a Presidential Medal Of Freedom is beyond me. So, Obama, if you’re reading this ….

In our exclusive interview, Simon comes off as modest and unassuming. He says he doesn’t write with any grand themes in mind, and is not trying to make a major philosophical statement.

For his new album, So Beautiful Or So What, Simon says he’s mainly just interested to see where the road takes him, given that the commercial landscape for music has changed so dramatically. He seems buoyant about prospect of continuing to write and play music, even at age 70, proving that age is only the province of a defeated spirit.

There has always been an elusive spirit to Simon’s music, and his songs, more often than not, are tinged with melancholy. The movie Almost Famous has a great scene when Zooey Deschanel’s character Anita plays Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” to explain to her mother her reason for leaving home. Today, in the age of Twitter and Best Buy, that song sounds like an elegy for a lost time, when running away from home was still a romantic pursuit.

Stevie Nicks is another seasoned artist who refuses to give up the ghost. Her latest album, In Your Dreams, her first solo effort in nearly a decade, features what she considers to be some of her finest work. The ‘70s icon discusses her unique approach to writing, and relates a funny episode with ex-beau Don Henley about writing “Dreams.”

Another great American writer, Brian Wilson, offers a lesson in synesthesia, explaining what colors he associates with the different keys of the musical scale. He also makes the case that pop music began to descend in quality after reaching its climax in the ‘60s. The reason: he says songwriters went out of business. To call Wilson self-effacing would be a grand understatement. The genius behind Pet Sounds – quite sadly – says he’s unsure if his music has brought any joy into the world. Well, we’re pretty sure it has.
And we certainly don’t think the quality of music has declined since the ‘60s. There’s as much good music being made now as ever before. It’s just a little harder to find sometimes, that’s all.

But if you’re looking for some great new artists, check out Nikki Lane, a live-wire from South Carolina whose debut album Walk Of Shame marries the twang of Loretta with classic punk swagger. Another standout is Beirut, the lo-fi orchestral folk project from Zach Condon. His new album The Rip Tide is definitely one of the year’s best.

It’s late May in Nashville, and Justin Townes Earle is back in his hometown amid a short break from touring. For the first time in a long while, he finds himself walking the streets of Music Row – ground zero for a type of music he certainly doesn’t consider “country.”

Earle’s own songs possess a strong sense of location, and he appears to be an artist inspired by the spirit of a place. Music Row clearly isn’t one of them. “Should have waited to take my shower ‘cause now I just feel dirty!” he posts on his Twitter feed.

Justin’s father, Steve, developed his own allergy to Music Row in the mid-70s, where he moved in and out of a series of publishing deals, before finally releasing the critically-acclaimed Guitar Town in 1986. The elder Earle never considered Music Row to be a nurturing place for a songwriter. “Me and everybody like me … we have to take what we’re given,” he told American Songwriter in 2007. “Songwriters, especially the kind of songwriter I came to be, have to live in the margin.”

And live in the margin he did. In the late ‘80s, Earle released a handful of albums on MCA Records that moved from country to heartland rock to a sound he termed “heavy-metal bluegrass.” Today, Earle considers himself to be a folk singer more than anything else, a songwriter with the chops to make a living busking in the subway if push came to shove.

New York currently serves as the adopted home of both Earles. Steve pulled up stakes in Nashville several years ago and settled in Greenwich Village, paying tribute to the neighborhood’s folk music heritage on the album Washington Square Serenade.

For this issue’s photo shoot, Nashville’s Joshua Black Wilkins caught up with father and son on the boardwalk of Coney Island, that carny section of Brooklyn that was home to Woody Guthrie in the decade after World War II. Woody even wrote about the boardwalk, describing it as a place where “the prettiest of the maidulas, leave their leg prints in that sand/ Just beneath our love-soaked boardwalk, with the bravest of our lads.”

It was a fitting locale for our cover shoot, given that Woody is a guiding light for both songwriters. Steve paid direct homage to the legendary singer in the song “Christmas In Washington,” at once a prayer and call to arms for left-wing activism that also summons the ghost of Joe Hill, the songwriter and labor-activist for the Wobblies. “The Gulf Of Mexico,” off of Steve’s new album I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive, also invokes Woody’s spirit. A modern day folk-ballad with a strong Irish lilt, the song traces the lives of three generations of workers who made their living on the water. The song’s denouement comes in the form of the oil spill, and we’ve seen a Gulf that has turned from blue to green to blood red.

Guthrie served as one of the touchstones for Justin’s album Harlem River Blues, an impressive song-cycle that imagines a cross-section of southern music through the prism of big city life in the 21st century.

“When Woody Guthrie was around, he wrote about what was around him,” the younger Earle tells AS. “He wrote about all these amazing new inventions, like the Grand Coulee Dam. He was taking an old form of music that he had learned in Pampa, Texas, and was translating it to a modern time.”

Earle’s most Guthrie-esque tune on Harlem River is “Wanderin,’” a roustabout tale that casts the protagonist as a sort of latter-day Huck Finn.

Now, my father was a traveler and my mama stayed at home
And she cried the day that he walked out and left us on our own
But now I’m older than he was when I was born and I don’t know
Which way is home so I’m wanderin’

In our story, the younger Earle says he’ll always consider himself “white trash from Middle Tennessee.” Buried beneath the wanderlust of his songs is the search for a home. Here’s hoping he keeps searching, at least for the sake of his songs.

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