What are you doing with yourself today, Tom?
Right now I am looking at horses and dodging the heat.
Are they your horses?
No, I am looking at my neighbour’s horses. I am too smart to keep horses myself because they need food and that costs a lot of money. We keep geese and grow Pecan trees, the only fruit or nut tree that will grow out here in the desert.
What is the big attraction to want to live out in the desert?
Ha, Ha! People might not call it attraction but I like the weather. It is sunny here for three hundred and twenty days and hot for two months. We are just coming out of the heat and moving into the fall, I think it is beautiful. We have the desert scenery and mountains that irrigate off the Rio Grande. I also have a little place in Switzerland.
Was it over in Europe where your career gained a bit of a kick-start?
Yeah, we did really well in Norway. The UK has come a long way the last ten years with the last three or four records and now over in the US we are doing well too.
During your recent albums you have featured a liberal helping of music of a Borderland feel and have also paid tribute to the poets of our time and even earlier?
I have done this and that. I did Hotwalker that had Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac and a lot of people like that. Currently, we have a DVD out called Don’t Look Down and have the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti reciting some of my songs and they have a 30 - 40 minute wrap up of my career so far. They also have me singing with the likes of Gretchen Peters, Nanci Griffith and Emmylou Harris. I think the fans will like it and it is on our website www.tomrussell.com
Singing with others. You did quite a bit of that earlier in your career with fellow recording act Katy Moffatt?
That was a long time ago. We wrote I think 40 songs together Katy and me and then there was Ian Tyson after that. But these days, the last five to ten years I tend to write my own songs without compromise. Sometimes it is harder but mostly it is easier because you get to go where you want to go, explains Tom.
How did the idea for Mesabi (the place from whence Bob Dylan came) come about?
Well, the last record Blood And Candle Smoke was mainly recorded with Calexico and made in Tucson and that did very well. It has been my best selling record but I wanted to reach out further than that, started the record about a year ago in Tucson and did four songs with Calexico. One of them was the Dylan song ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ and I was thrilled to have Lucinda Williams to come in later on to duet on it with me. I wanted to stretch out so I recorded in about five different places. I went to San Antonio, Texas to record the Mexican stuff with Augie Meyers from the Texas Tornados and Joel Guzman the great accordionist. Plus, we had Jacob Valenzuela the great trumpet player from Calexico. Then I recorded at Jack Johnson’s studio in Los Angeles with Van Dyke Parks, who is an American icon keyboard player. I did two songs there and did one in El Paso, the Flamenco song ‘Jai Alai’ and did the remainder and the mixing in Nashville with Gretchen Peters, Barry Walsh on keyboards and Victor Krauss (bass) who plays with Lyle Lovett and is the brother of Alison Krauss. It helped make this a bigger sounding record, on using a lot more musicians and locations professes a proud Tom Russell.
You have been doing lots of other things too?
I wrote the music for the new Monte Hellman movie, Road To Nowhere. He did a great movie in the seventies, Two Lane Blacktop with James Taylor and Dennis Wilson. An iconic American road movie that is now out on DVD and doing well.
If you hadn’t been a singer-songwriter recording artist do you see yourself as possibly being a scriptwriter?
Maybe, a novelist. I am in fact working on novel about the Juarez El Paso border and fifteen years ago had a novel published in Norway called Blood Sports and it just came out in paper back again. I went to New York in the early 1980s to write novels and then got back into songwriter and it went well. Right now, I am writing a book of essays about the west and working on that novel and painting quite a bit. There is a book that has come this week on my painting called, Blue Horse Red Desert and it can be found on our website www. Tomrussell.com and on Amazon.
Do you find having so many irons in the fire help spur on the other interests or does one sometime infringe on another?
No, they relate to each other. Songwriting is my first priority and I sing everyday on the piano or guitar. If I get tired of that I will paint a little, plus I will work on the essays and the novel. I will swop from one thing to another quite a bit. We keep ourselves busy and don’t own a television out here. When I am off the road we do our creative stuff. My wife manages the music business and we do work on the place. We are going to be on the road for the next six months starting here in the US and end up in the UK, doing Scotland (Glasgow’s Celtic Connections being among his dates) and Ireland in January.
It must be heart-wrenching knowing you aren’t going to see home for such a long time?
I have not performed that much this year so I am pretty anxious to get out there and to perform the new songs. My wife and I like it on the road and I have a great guitar player in Thad Beckman from Portland, Oregon who has a lot of records out and he has been a great boost for the live shows. He likes it on the road and is from Austria. It all starts this Sunday when I play with Calexico in Tucson when we do a benefit for a friend of ours.
Staying with guitar players, you have the brilliant Will Kimbrough playing a considerable part on the album?
Yeah, Will’s great. He is in our film Don’t Look Down that we watched last night, it reminded me just how great a guitarist he is. He has recently played with Emmylou (Harris) and Rodney Crowell and he also has some cool records out of his own. I look forward to working with him again.
You also organise and perform on the epic train rides of yours?
We are looking to organise one for next year. Probably, October next year and it would be to the Grand Canyon. We will go from Los Angeles to Santa Fe, New Mexico and then to Winslow, Arizona and bus the people to the Grand Canyon. I am really excited about it and it now has Jon Langford of the Mekons on board. Jon is a great painter too. He paints Hank Williams, Gram Parsons and that stuff. We are trying to get into edgier territory and asking the likes of the guys out of Calexico to be involved. I have done about ten train journeys through US, Canada and New Mexico and the website for the west coast trip is www.rootsontherails.com. People can see what we do on there.
It was interesting to see you pay tribute to the ukelele player Cliff Edwards on the cd; the instrument is currently going through quite a revival on both sides of the Atlantic?
It has come back. Cliff Edwards initially, is a 1920s and 1930s player that helped popularised the instrument that is, primarily Hawaiian and then it died out. It is only recently it has re-emerged. Eddie Vedder put out an ukelele record and a lot of rock‘n’roll guys are using it as a kind of different texture. Which is cool. It is a pretty easy instrument to play, basically.
It is great for you to have Regina and Ann McCrary sing on the record. I recall them singing some great stuff on Buddy Miller’s Universal House Of Prayer album?
Regina toured with Bob Dylan for three or four years and she told us a bunch of Dylan stories, one about how Bob came over to her house with a bodyguard and of her mother dismissing the bodyguard before she cooked Dylan a huge dish of soul food. It was great working with them, they also have a four sister gospel act. They brought a lot to the song ‘Heart Within A Heart’ which is probably the most commercial song on the record. It is a song about digging deeper when things go bad and the most spiritual song on the album.
Talking about spiritual side of things, I have noticed it crop up quite regularly on your albums recently. I understand organised religion is something that goes a long way back with you?
A-ha, he chuckles. I have mixed emotions about religion. I was raised, and went to a Catholic school for twelve years. I think I have become a little more spiritual recently and there is some stuff about myself on the record. I think any Tom Russell record needs a positive song before we go back to the darker stuff. That is it, basically. There is a song ‘Guadalupe’ that Gretchen does on the album we did together ‘One To The Heart, One To The Head’ that fits the category. Gretchen sings a great version of it.
There is also a song on there called, ‘Love Abides’ at the end of Mesabi. It is a song I re-recorded and previously had on the album The Man From A God Knows Where (Russell’s critically acclaimed Folk Opera). I wanted this record to end with a positive song. So it is just me and the guitar singing ‘Love Abides’ because there is all this dark, holy dark stories in some of the songs but love abides in the end!
How did you come to choose Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ as a bonus track for the record?
It meant a lot to me as a kid, it was on his second record and it is a very big record for me. I used to go see him at Santa Monica and got to talk with him a couple of times and that song was ahead of its time. He did not really start writing songs like it till two or three records later. It was kind of like a long poem, sort of about the end of the world, very poetic. I was just singing it here in El Paso a couple of years ago. I finger pick it and don’t do it as a waltz, not a basic waltz like he did it and liked what I had come up with it. I told Calexico when I got into the studio last year let’s try it once seeing as it is so long and I was going to have to read some of the lyrics. If it works it works then we will move on and if it doesn’t work I would not do it anymore. But it did work and I wanted another voice on it since it is so long and has so many verses and I got Linda (Williams) finally on it. To me she is like a female Bob Dylan, a great songwriter. The song is getting a lot of recognition right now, it is song of the week in Today magazine and in Canada the Mail and the Globe have likewise picked up on it. Classic rock magazine in the UK had it as Pick of the month and no doubt there are others too.
