June 14, 2005

“I wanna love again/feel young again/the way we did when it was true”

The chorus on track #9 of Dwight Yoakam’s powerful new album, Blame The Vain, captures in a nutshell the pervasive feeling of renewal radiating from the hillbilly rocker’s 18th sonic outing in 21 years. How fitting that Yoakam’s first self-produced album would be completed in the spring, that time of rebirth: “You have to continue to discover and rediscover yourself through pushing toward a new context for expression,” Yoakam explains. “And that’s what this is – I’m still me, but maybe it’s just more me on this record.” Over the past two years, Yoakam has immersed himself in music: playing raucous live shows with a rambunctious new band, writing a fresh batch of hook-filled songs, and fearlessly grabbing the reins of the recording process. As a result, the twelve tracks comprising Blame The Vain may “tell the story of the demise of a love relationship between a couple,” says Yoakam, “but the subtext is about my love for music. I’m really looking forward to playing this stuff on the road!” Talk about spring fever…

Yoakam had just come off the road in 2002, (after four years of nonstop touring) when he stumbled across a scene that would change the direction of his musical journey. A renegade group of twangsters – going under such banners as Sweethearts of the Rodeo, Sin City All Stars, and East Bound & Down – were putting together twice-monthly C&W shows in L.A., at off-the-beaten-track nightspots Molly Malone’s and the King King Club. When he happened upon “the next incarnation of California country rock,” Yoakam was taken back to the glory days of cowpunk, when he took the stage at scruffy bars alongside the fledgling Blasters, Los Lobos, Lone Justice, and the Knitters. “This great scene reminded me of 1981, ’82, ’83,” Yoakam says, “and it probably looked a lot like 1968, when Clarence White and Gene Parsons were playing in a weird little band at a club in El Monte before joining the Byrds.”

Among the Sweethearts bunch was a fiery 30-year-old guitarist named Keith Gattis, whose Telecaster riffs caused Yoakam to prick up his ears. “We started hanging out,” says Yoakam of the budding kinship, “and played some music together at the house. I had a benefit to do so I asked him to join me and he got up and played a little banjo, mandolin, guitar, and did some singing. It was a ball! I had been doing the big band for a long time and I found a new sense of inspiration doing something very stripped-down and austere.” Keith’s buddies, drummer Mitch Marine and upright bassist Dave Roe (a 12-year veteran of Johnny Cash’s band), joined Yoakam and Gattis for a string of unforgettable shows throughout 2003.

Around this time, Yoakam – who was “born in Kentucky, raised in Ohio, and grew up in California” – began thinking about a new album and inked a deal with brash independent label New West. Ever since acting in Richard Linklater’s 1997 film, The Newton Boys, Yoakam had acquired the habit of keeping a tape recorder handy at all times. So whether he was touring, on location for a movie (he’ll be in three new ones over the next year), or hanging out at home, he could put down on tape songs that continuously come to him. “I’ll just walk down the hallway thinking about music,” Yoakam relates, “humming and hearing things. So, I keep these cassettes everywhere – two or three different places in the house, at my office, in my road bag if I’m on a movie. I just pull out the guitar when I have an idea.” Musically, the songs are the offspring of a polygamous “marriage between rock and country and bluegrass and hillbilly,”says Yoakam, ranging from the swaggering rockabilly rev-up “Three Good Reasons” to the pedal steel drenched shuffle “I’ll Pretend” to the Haggard-style weeper “Does It Show.” The Buck Owens-inspired “I Wanna Love Again”and the catchy Burritos-esque title track are guaranteed to fill any dance floor.

Yoakam chose some kindred spirits to bring his musical vision to fruition in the studio: Keith Gattis, Mitch Marine, Yoakam’s former bassist Taras Prodaniuk (on a rare break from touring and recording with Lucinda Williams), keyboardist/pedal steel guitarist Skip Edwards, and harmony singers Dave Roe, Jonathan Clark, and Timothy B. Schmitt. Special guests included former Ventures guitarist Gerry McGee who contributed the awesome finger-picking answer to Yoakam’s acoustic guitar solo on the devastating ballad “Just Passing Time” and the Jimmy Webb homage “The Last Heart in Line.” And kicking off the frisky ode to Southern culture, “Intentional Heartache,” that’s Motown percussionist Bobbye Hall (“What’s Goin’ On”) on her mighty bongos (which she plays along with other percussive instruments throughout Blame The Vain).

Working without his longtime producer and guitarist, Pete Anderson, was challenging but ultimately rewarding for Yoakam. “Being facilitated by somebody as a producer is a great gift, and I very much appreciated the opportunity to do that with Pete for so long,” says Yoakam. “I made a lot of great albums with Pete Anderson. Twenty-one years and seventeen albums is a long time, but this all came out of a moment in my life where I rediscovered what inspired me the most musically. I talked with Keith Gattis about co-producing this album, but he suggested I should produce it myself. It’s a lot of work – wearing a lot of hats. But I really enjoyed it, albeit the enormous work load. It’s incumbent upon you to keep track of every detail – but I tend to be detail-freakish anyway.” Yoakam also decided to hold down the acoustic rhythm guitar himself. “I played the acoustics on this album because I wanted to really base the sound on something that’s very primal for me,” Yoakam explains. “When I was a kid, I used to fall asleep with the guitar. I’d put my head up against it and just listen to the echo in the box. I’m not the world’s greatest guitar player – probably because I started carrying it around too young to be taught properly. I’m just completely self-taught and reckless about it.”

That same kind of energy and spontaneity spilled over into the sessions. The bipolar “Watch Out” – rockin’ one minute, weepin’ the next – was the last track written for Blame The Vain, and came together in the studio when the band was “hopped up on Thai food,” Yoakam recalls. Other studio hijinks resulted in the reincarnation of Sling Blade’s Doyle Hargraves (this time, Nocona boots, a Dale Earnhardt Jr. poster, and a Bud cap are the victims of a savage attack) in Yoakam’s hilarious “ad-lib rant” during the closing guitar raveup of “Intentional Heartache.” As for that strange ‘70s synthesizer with Yoakam playing the vocal role of an effete Brit, which segues into the straight-ahead country-rocker “She’ll Remember”: “It was one of those things where the more you do it, the stupider it gets!” Yoakam admits. “I was doing a scratch vocal and looking through the booth at Keith, Mitch, Taras, and Skip, and started doing this rant to get a yuk. Then Skip ripped off into that Emerson, Lake and Palmer insanity…and we started laughing. It was a Fawlty Towers, Monty Python kind of moment…” The guys were obviously having fun in the studio, and it shows. “There’s a simplistic, reckless joy to this album,” says Yoakam.

Rising above any antics, however, is that undeniably perfect instrument that belongs to Yoakam: That unparalleled voice of his can growl an uptempo Sun Records-style refrain, croon a heartbreaking Lefty-esque lament, then soar to Appalachia’s highest lonesome peak. It’s all Dwight, and it’s all on Blame The Vain: “It just happened to be the time and the moment for me to go ahead and fully express what I had going on in my head,” says Yoakam of this breakthrough album. “I think it’s a unique moment for me musically – and hopefully a time for people who have been listening to my music all along to re-experience me with this.”

Publicity: Mitch Schneider/Todd Brodginski/Marcee Rondan, 818.380.0400
Traci Thomas 310.246.5766/traci@newwestrecords.com.

9215 Olympic Blvd. Beverly Hills, CA 90212 ph: 310-246-5766 fx: 310-246-5767