What got you in the mood to
do an acoustic record?
HIATT
Well, we were making a rock ’n’ roll record last summer with [Sonny
Landreth and] the Goners and we got into a situation with Capitol
Records where they weren’t quite digging it as much as we were digging
it [laughs]. So that put that record on hold and
threw us into this process of trying to get out of [our commitments at]
Capitol and take that record with us when we went, which was a little
tricky. We finally achieved that in January and I became a free agent,
for lack of a better term, for the first time in 13 years. My manager
called me up one day and said, "Hey, you want to make an acoustic
record?" And I said, "Whoa, I’ve always wanted to do that." And he
said, "Well, Emusic would love to do something, and Vanguard Records
would love to do something. You can own the master and they’ll put it
out."
I got back together with
Dave Immerglück, who played on Walk On, and also
Davey Faragher, who played bass with me for about five or six years. I
had all these songs, a bunch of new stuff and some older songs that I’d
always wanted to put on a record and was never able to. It was like Bring
the Family in that regard. That happened under similar
circumstances. I was between labels, and a small company put up the
money to make a little record, which we made in the same amount of
time—three or four days. It seems to be a good amount of time for me.
I hear you recorded the new
one sitting in a circle in Justin Niebank’s basement studio in
Nashville.
HIATT
Yeah, all live. Live vocals, live performances. Dave Immerglück, Davey
Faragher, and I just had a kind of communication, musically. There
wasn’t really any rehearsing. I would play them the song once and
they’d get a little feel going, and we’d go, "Right, roll it" and do a
performance.
Who was the producer?
HIATT
Aha! There was none. We just decided to leave that off. We couldn’t
figure out who was the culprit, so we all took the blame.
And it’s material you wrote
on guitar?
HIATT
Yeah, I write most stuff on acoustic guitar. Every once in a while I’ll
write a song on electric. But acoustic guitar is my main
instrument--has been since I was a kid. Most of the songs are new, with
the exception of "Lincoln Town"; the title track, "Crossing Muddy
Waters"; and "Only the Song Survives," which are all about five years
old. Everything else is new.
Did Dave Immerglück and
Davey Faragher come up with their own parts for the arrangements?
HIATT
Oh yeah. We developed a sort of language among ourselves. Our approach
is really instinctual. I’d start playing a song, and Dave would start
playing a rhythm that would embellish what I was doing on acoustic. And
Davey would always have the groove down at the low end. Davey also
played stomp board. We miked his foot and let that be the percussion.
Metal folding chair was also
listed as an instrument in the liner notes.
HIATT
He hit a metal folding chair on a couple of songs for a little
backbeat. The only overdubs were metal folding chair and the harmony
vocals. Everything else was live. Very hi-tech. This was actually my
first digital recording. I’ve been a tape guy all my life. But Justin
Niebank, the engineer, talked me into recording on this Atari hard-disk
system that he’s quite fond of. It’s a 24-track, 24-bit, hard-disk
recorder.
Can you hear the difference
from the analog?
HIATT
The only thing missing is the tape compression you can get on analog,
but you can do other kinds of compression to make up for it. I think it
sounds really good. I was kind of surprised. I never thought I’d hear a
multitrack digital machine that I thought sounded right. I think
they’re getting it figured out.
I saw that you’re playing
harmonium on the record as well as guitar.
HIATT
Yeah, the harmonium is the low-end droney stuff. When we were
recording, we kind of visualized the sound. When we’re talking about
what we’re doing, we don’t say, you know, "Play a B-flat in the third
bar of section 32." We don’t know about that stuff, so we just draw
pictures for each other. We imagined ourselves on the porch making this
record. We felt like it was a real back porch sound, the wood, stomping
on those boards you have on back porches. We imagined that the door was
open and there was just a screen door and there was a thin-lipped,
Presbyterian woman who was the wife of one of the guys playing on the
porch. We were out there carrying on, and every once in a while she’d
hear something she wanted to join in on, so she’d bring out her little
church harmonium and jam with us, as it were.
Where did you first come
across a harmonium?
HIATT
I think the first time I ever used one on a record was Stolen
Moments with Glyn Johns [producing]. He brought one, and we
used it on "Real Fine Love." It’s a little keyboard and a squeeze-box,
sort of a sit-down accordion. You play the keyboard with one hand and
keep moving the squeezer back and forth with the other. It’s perfect
for me because I’m not much of a keyboard player anyway. One hand is
plenty! But it’s got a neat sound. It’s kind of a cross between an old
pump organ, bagpipes, and an accordion. It can sound really sad, and I
like that about it.
Are you still playing guitar
mostly in standard tuning?
HIATT
Pretty much standard. I always tell myself that I’m going to sit down
and do some tuning. I’ve actually written a couple of songs in tunings,
but I haven’t recorded them. Maybe I’ll drop a D. I’ve got a tuning I
use a lot where I drop the G down to E. It takes the third out of the
chord and leaves a drone in the middle. It’s the "Drive South" tuning.
It’s good on bluesy kinds of things. It gives you just ones and fives,
so it’s kind of mean [laughs].
How do you go about writing
a song?
HIATT
It’s almost always sitting down with an acoustic guitar and just
strumming. The songs are in the acoustic guitar, I think. I’ll play
like a three-fingered C chord, where you don’t play the G in the bass,
and that sounds one way. And then you’ll have a G in the bass and that
sounds another way. I mean, I only play three chords, for God’s sake!
That’s about all I know. So I just put two or three chords together,
and a certain key will bring about a certain kind of feel. Putting a
capo on the guitar makes magical things happen--moving it up and down
the neck, playing the same fingerings up the neck.
