>>PREVIEW
SLAID CLEAVES
Saturday, October 28
Ironwood Stage
It should be no surprise that respected Austin, Texas singer-songwriter Slaid Cleaves is on the road when he does his phone interview. No, not just touring, but literally on the road, in a van between here and there as he heads for an airport city for his annual flight to Europe, where, yep, he’ll be on the road.
Cleaves is living his vision of being a touring musician. Only the parts about driving the van, repairing it, hauling equipment and making so many e-mails and phone calls weren’t in the original version of his vision. And as he says, he has to play pretty much constantly to come home with any money.
"I made the commitment to go everywhere that my records are available and it’s a big world out there, so it takes up a lot of my time," he says.
And those records – from 1997’s No Angel Knows to 2004’s Wishbones – set a high standard for songwriting. So, in fact, does this year’s Unsung, but the difference is it’s an album of 13 songs Cleaves didn’t write. Instead, he chose to give airtime to some really great unknown songwriters such as Karen Poston, whose song "Lydia," recorded on his standout 2000 album Broke Down, is his most requested live song. The question most people ask is why such a phenomenal songwriter would release an album of covers.
It comes back to all those hours in the van.
"I tend to lump all my touring into eight or ten months and then I take a few weeks to fix the van and clean up the mess which happens when you are gone. Then I have a few weeks scheduled to write, and have been doing that over the last couple of years. Sometimes it works – sometimes there’s nothing there.
"Sometimes I’m just not even trying and hope the images are building up, and they are."
In the past those images begat songs of lives so real you’re sure you’ve brushed against the characters on a crowded street. While you might think the pace and texture of travel is the best way to get the images building up, it isn’t.
"The pace of the tour was actually kind of mind-numbing. Everything goes by so fast and the scenery changes so quickly that it’s all we can do to get from gig to gig and I really don’t remember much honestly.
"You have to be ever vigilant – you have to capture and distil the exciting stuff outta life (into songs)."
While he misses the laid-back pre-tour days that left him time to collect stories from characters and border towns, Cleaves wanted to be a touring musician for years. But he says that something in his pace has to give."Something’s got to change because I’ve got to address the material problem here, the lack of songs. Doing other people’s songs is a great way to get some breathing room and let them come slowly. However, I’ve set the bar pretty high in the songs that I’ve recorded – I want to match or beat that. So I’ve got to figure out a way to write songs, whether it’s to tour less or hire a road manager and just not make any money. My life’s a little out of balance right now. But musicians don’t retire or quit, they just play until they can’t play anymore." |
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