"How great is Tom Russell? Isn't he tremendous? Always the best. I would like to quit my job and travel with him.... if the money could be worked out." - David Letterman, Late Night, 19 April 2006
"Tom Russell is an original, a brilliant songwriter with a restless curiosity and an almost violent imagination." - Annie Prouxl Pulitzer Prize winning author: "The Shipping News" & "Brokeback Mountain
"If American Music needs an heir to Johnny Cash, Tom Russell might just be the man, he's the real deal." - UNCUT 5/04
"The greatest living country songwriter in a man named Tom Russell; he's written songs that capture the essence of America, a trait that can only be matched by the country's greatest novelists..." - Rolling Stone John Swenson
Tom Russell: Blood and Candle Smoke
It would be easy for Tom Russell to coast on reputation alone. With a career stretching back nearly four decades, and a catalog of more than 20 albums, the consummate storyteller has amassed a devoted following that cherishes his vivid, novelistic tales evoking the spirit of the American experience in tightly constructed, panoramic vignettes. Among his most ardent fans are fellow artists: Russell’s compositions have been covered by the likes of Johnny Cash, Doug Sahm, k.d. lang, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Iris Dement, Dave Alvin, Joe Ely, Ian Tyson, Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark and Dave Van Ronk.
But all of that work has, in Russell’s own estimation, been a first act. The dozen new songs comprising Blood and Candle Smoke, released September 15th on Shout! Factory, “start the second half of the story, reaching out toward wider realms,” he says, 25 years after the release of his debut solo album, Heart on a Sleeve. “I feel I’ve at least got five or 10 records left in me.”
Blood and Candle Smoke—which follows 2008’s Veteran’s Day: The Tom Russell Anthology, Shout! Factory’s two-disc comprehensive summation of Russell’s career to date—makes a convincing case for Russell’s confident prediction and marks an auspicious turning of the page. For the new set, featuring some of his most intimate, insightful material, Russell ventured from his home in El Paso, Tex. (where he moved from New York 10 years ago), to Tucson’s Wave Lab Studios. With studio owner Craig Schumacher co-producing and local heroes Calexico providing the bulk of the instrumental support, Russell has brought a new, contemporary spark to his music.
“I became disenchanted with lining up the usual suspects in Austin and making an Americana record or a Tex-Mex record,” Russell says. “Then the soundtrack to that Dylan film, I’m Not There, came out, where all these different young bands with a young sound were interpreting Bob Dylan songs. The ones that really stood out to me were the ones backed by Calexico. I thought, how great is that—you’ve got a new kind of world/mariachi sound but the great writing of Bob Dylan. That’s a great direction to go if I think I’ve got good songs, because what’s lacking in indie rock is great songwriters. It’s no mystery to me why Dylan’s number one again and Leonard Cohen is playing to 10,000 people a night all over the world. So I did more research and I found that a lot of the records Calexico, Neko Case and others were making came out of this one studio in Tucson called Wave Lab.
“I went in there for two weeks and sat on a stool and sang everything live with my guitar, and they built it around that,” says Russell about the recording of Blood and Candle Smoke. “There was some overdubbing but not much. The studio doesn’t even have a separate glass booth for the engineer so it’s all happening in real time in real air."
The album leads off with “East of Woodstock, West of Viet Nam,” a dramatic, autobiographical recounting of Russell’s time spent in Nigeria at the tail end of the 1960s. In a lived-in, tenacious voice, Russell recalls the “moveable feast of war and memory, a dark old lullaby” that he experienced in the days after he graduated college with a Master’s degree in criminology from the University of California and taught in Africa on a grant—as his peers back home enjoyed the fruits of the counterculture. Accompanied by Calexico members Joey Burns on bass and guitars, John Convertino on drums and Jacob Valenzuela on trumpets, plus Barry Walsh on keyboards and frequent collaborator Gretchen Peters and the Oshogbo Orphan Choir on harmony vocals, Russell introduces an album that finds him repeatedly baring his soul and detailing his worldview more vibrantly than ever before. “I’ve finally arrived at a newer sound that I like, and 12 new songs that I really like,” he says. “I think I’m really stepping forward into a bigger, broader world with this album.”
“Santa Ana Winds,” a ballad influenced by the author Joan Didion and also featuring Peters and Nick Luka on steel guitar, brings to mind the duets of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, the former a seminal influence on Russell’s songwriting and performance style in his early days, after he’d left his native Los Angeles, where he was born in 1953, and returned from Africa to settle for some time in Vancouver. Since then, Russell has moved often and traveled extensively, picking up life experiences and song material along the way.
“Nina Simone” recounts Russell’s first exposure to the legendary vocalist, hearing her interpretation of Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” while in Mexico. “I was in an exotic locale and in between love affairs and feeling bad and it really hit me. I had to hear it over and over again,” he says.
“Criminology,” which adds bassist Chris Giambelucca, drummer Winston Watson and saxophonist Marco Rosano to the mix, also draws on the 1969 African experience, a period in Russell’s life often fraught with danger, as its opening line makes clear: “I had a gun pointed at my head on several occasions,” Russell sings, employing a lead vocal in a higher register than he usually uses. “It’s sort of a West African/reggae song. I must be channeling somebody or something I heard,” he comments.
“Crosses of San Carlos” returns to the Native American experience, one Russell has visited often. “It’s more of a straight-ahead, cowboy rock approach,” he says. “Finding You” is a simple love ballad to Russell’s wife, whom he calls in the song the “miracle of miracles, the one that changed my life.”
“Mississippi River Runnin’ Backwards” evokes an America that’s all but disappeared, one of “old ladies gamblin’ in riverboat casinos, whirlpools swallowed ’em down, insurance executives and Fuller Brush salesmen, bushwhacked tryin’ to leave town.” With Russell playing resonator guitar and autoharp, Burns on something called chicken-pluck guitar, Luka on the electric six-string, Schumacher on organ, Valenzuela on trumpet, Rosano contributing sax, Walsh moving over to Wurlitzer piano, Giambelucca on bass and Watson on drums, it’s one of the standouts on an album with nary a weak spot.
“The Most Dangerous Woman in America” is, on one hand, a tribute to Mother Jones, the early 20th century labor organizer who championed miners’ rights—the song, which Russell likens to something that Bruce Springsteen might have written for his Nebraska album, shares its title with a book on this extraordinary woman. But in the end she is merely a tangential character in a song whose narrative its author describes as “bleak, Midwest winter, a guy’s coming home from prison, he’s a junkie, basically. He’s going home to bury his father and robs a liquor store. It’s movie-esque, I’d think.”
“Don’t Look Down,” Russell explains, is “basically about being on the road. That line about ‘in the shadow of the Ferris wheel’ came from, I think, a heavy metal rocker guy who was on the way down and said, ‘I knew I was headed for the bottom when I looked up from the stage every night in different towns and saw the Ferris wheel.’”
The next track, “Guadalupe”—which Russell calls “probably my favorite song that I’ve written” and from whose lyrics the album title Blood and Candle Smoke is taken—appeared earlier this year in another version, featuring Peters on lead vocal, on a duets album titled One to the Heart, One to the Head. On the new rendition, the pair is backed by Walsh on piano, organ, bass and accordion, David Henry on cello and Thad Beckman supplying lead acoustic guitar. “I was in Mexico City about five or six years ago and I spent an afternoon in the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe,” says Russell, who grew up listening to Mexican and country music before discovering Bob Dylan and joining the ranks of the guitar-slinging troubadours himself. “I was moved by the spirit of the Indians that were coming in there. That’s what the song is more or less about, wishing in a way that I had that, that passionate spirit.”
“American Rivers” also references the American Indian, but brings an ecological message to the story. “I say we named a lot of our rivers out of guilt for what we’ve done to the Indians,” Russell says. “River towns have a lot of power and this is sort of a Huckleberry Finn song about a kid dreaming of rivers that have become polluted.”
The album ends with “Darkness Visible,” another snapshot of an America that never makes the headlines, its title drawn from a William Styron novel. “It’s kind of a carnival song,” says Russell. “The carnival is over, the circus has left town, and this poor loveless guy is putting up posters for the next show.”
Charles Young of The Atlantic Monthly, has written that “Russell's work summons up Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Russell's reach is both wide and deep." But now, with Blood and Candle Smoke, Russell moves into a new phase, one ushered in by the Veteran’s Day anthology and the 2007 tribute album Wounded Heart of America, on which Russell’s songs were interpreted by several of the artists mentioned earlier, alongside Suzy Bogguss, Laurie Lewis, Jerry Jeff Walker, Eliza Gilkyson and even the iconic American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reflecting on that album, and phrases often ascribed to him such as “writer’s writer” and “the best unknown songwriter in America,” Russell says, “People aren’t always looking for hit songs so much as looking for well-written, credible songs with a story.”
Tom Russell has always delivered just that, and as he moves along in his life, he only gets better at it. “I think I was just doing my homework [on my earliest recordings] and then moved on in the ’90s to more personal records,” he says, citing 1999’s The Man From God Knows Where and 2005’s Hotwalker as albums that particularly resonated with audiences. Blood and Candle Smoke, a collection of powerful observations and deliberations, elevates his work to another level entirely. With this new entry into an already estimable discography, Tom Russell should give fellow artists, and fans both old and new, plenty to absorb for many years to come. |
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