Properly breaking all the rules
Travel and tunes are interchangeable for songwriter Kevin Welch
PREVIEW
Kevin Welch and Kieran Kane
September 19 & 20
Engineered Air Theatre (CPA)
No wonder singer Kevin Welch has songwriting flowing through his life as if he had ink for blood and guitar strings for sinew. Born in 1955 in Long Beach, California, he hit the ground running and travelled for his first seven years before his family settled in Oklahoma. But travel was like a virus, and the only antidote was more, so he lit out at 17 and ended up spending five years on the honky-tonk circuit before Nashville, a wife and three children kind of held him in one place for a while.
The town taught him the protocol for good writing, and soon the troubadour was penning songs for Waylon Jennings, Trisha Yearwood, Roger Miller and Ricky Scaggs, dwelling in recording studios instead of roadhouses, making a name and a living for himself. But all the best lives are lived like country songs, and when his marriage dissolved after 10 years, Welch hit the road with his own versions, releasing a self-titled album in 1990 and following it with one more before he and his major label said adieu. Welch really hit his stride when he hit it off with indie label Dead Reckoning Records in the mid-90s and then hooked up with mirror-image songwriter Kieran Kane in 2000.
Back home in Nashville, following a tour of Australia to promote the release of his fifth solo album, Millionaire, Welch shares his thoughts on his journey thus far, noting that the tunes and the travel sometimes grow tedious.
"I don’t get tired of the song so much, but I get tired of myself and I get tired of hearing me do ’em…. There’s a lot of physical wear and tear in touring, and it gets harder to bounce back. I would like to spend more time at home after all these years and concentrate more on writing. I envision a Web site where everything I do goes in there – a demo, photograph, story, discussion. A rolling continuous huge CD that steadily goes in there."
Welch’s current Web site is a meditative journey in itself, featuring the standard lyrics and photos but also journal entries and uncommon wisdom like "A life lived without regret is wasted" and "It never pays to shoot snakes on the floorboard of the boat." Welch is pleased that one of his short stories has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming collection of stories by songwriters, nestling next to a work by Kris Kristofferson. Although he has mastered the Nashville songwriting format and then worked far outside of its boundaries, Welch has respect for all forms of expression.
"For better or for worse, the lyric form that we learn around here is pretty ingrained in me. Its fairly strict, and one of my main missions in trying to be a better songwriter is to learn how to properly break all the rules. I’ve tried to make myself back off of those rules, and I don’t know if the listener would realize how much of a risk I thought I was taking.
"There are some songs over the last few years that are not particularly spelled out – half the job is up to the listener to decide what they think is going on. I try to get the pictures clear as far as the actual narrative, but sometimes I leave it up to the listener to meet me halfway.
"That’s not what we’re taught to do here. You’re not supposed to leave anything up to interpretation. People kind of sneer about formula songwriting, but it’s a formula for a reason – it’s not accidental. But it’s not the only way to write a song."
Stating that he could joyfully play gigs with musical partner Kieran Kane until he can play no more, Welch doesn’t feel he could ever wear out the joy of music and writing songs, even formula songs.
"I still sometimes really enjoy following those old rules in putting a song together, it really tickles me because it's like putting together a really beautiful jigsaw puzzle, with a lot of pleasure in that. Just because there’s a formula doesn’t make it easy.
"I heard something, I don’t know what it was. It coulda been grunge, or a Japanese song, but it suddenly occurred to me that there were a million different ways to write songs, and I’d just been doing it one way. That’s when I realized I could spend the rest of my life writing nothing but songs and still only scratch the surface of all the different ways to write.
There is a pause at the other end of the phone, a pause full of reflection.
"It was kinda a peaceful feeling, realizing I’ve got plenty of work to do." |
