Biographies
DWIGHT YOAKAM
"POPULATION: ME"
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"Grabbing elements from my head,
this is a foretelling of where I’ve drifted full circle,
from when I first arrived in ’77, wandering through Tijuana and Vegas on the way to California…
It was Maria McKee and Lone Justice, Rank & File,
the ancillary stuff like X and the Knitters, Dave (Alvin) and the Blasters, Los Lobos –
things that were an extension of Gram (Parsons) and Clarence White,
the Kentucky Colonels, the Byrds which led to Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
It led to the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris,
and that whole Southern California country-rock thing, which just keeps coming around…
Like now.
It’s all starting over."
Population: Me, Dwight Yoakam’s first album for his own Electrodisc Records, in partnership with the maverick traditionalists at Audium, is both a reclamation of his tried-and-true Bakersfield franchise and the opening of a whole new chapter of what country music can be. Harder-edged, tighter-written, even deeper into the roots of the Southern California country-rock cross-pollination, Population: Me finds the songwriter exploring the possibilities.
"It’s that rolling, hillbilly blues-based note, whether it’s the Orbison I was infatuated with as a kid, Buddy Holly’s rockabilly or even the early Beatles…Because they were only steps away from country. Those things were an integral part of this.
Just embracing the blues is catharsis: the hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you kind of healing. And it’s an outgrowth of a culture I learned about through the range of my Appalachian grandmother’s voice when she’d sing. It’s a beautiful voice, a haunted voice, that allows transcendence to happen. It’s my earliest memory, that transformation, so it may be innate."
"Population: Me" may be a foreshadowing for me, especially with ‘The Late Great Golden State.’ It’s an echo from over the horizon. Radar works like that, you know: it sends a ray out, which bounces back from somewhere and it’s that return that hits you. At the time, to hear that song after coming to this place, well, it puts me in the moment.”
With a deft whip stitch, the last of the mysterious rhinestone cowboys embroiders an homage to the essence of four pivotal California Country scenes: the Haggard/Owens-Bakersfield reality; the Gram Parsons-fueled Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo hybrid; leading to the more mainstream Eagles/Ronstadt/Browne/ Zevon/Emmylou post-Troubadour, country-rock revival; and the cowpunk insurrection of Lone Justice, the Blasters, X (and even to a certain extent, Los Lobos), grounded at the hallowed epicenter of all these schools of hillbilly music, The Palomino.
With a circular banjo riff that moves fast and slides up, a bass line that bares down on you with the insistence of a Pony Expressman running two weeks late, and harmonies that suggest the “Doolin’ Dalton”-era Eagles, "The Late Great Golden State" paints the horizon with something that could reignite 6-1-5’s vitality, integrity and excitement from the inside out. And it does so by invoking the very response that was a violent reaction to Nashville's bulked-up industrial bloat of the late ’70s.
It was about a whole other Country – one that was more true, more full-tilt and certainly more autonomous.
"The superficiality of L.A. is deceptive,” says Yoakam of his muse. “All you can do is take in the vastness of the area from San Bernardino to Ventura, because that enormousness makes it all about surface. But then, when you go to Silver Lake or Echo Park, that corridor is so about being who you are. The anonymity allowed by that vastness lets you be free without pious judgement.
“The very curiosity that drew the country west, these dust bowl refugees chasing the sunset on Route 66 and the Grapes of Wrath highways…that spirit will never be extinguished.”
Given that searing intensity, Yoakam – a Kentucky-born, Columbus, Ohio-reared, Appalachian-steeped, busted-heart tenor – forged his seminal Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc., and ignited a flashfire with his uncompromising classic country forms. With Population: Me, the two-time Grammy winner and 21-time nominee intensifies his music again.
Whether it’s the timeless lean regret of “No Such Thing” which wraps denial in the Zen Buddhistry of a spare, Willie Nelson-esque lyric/arrangement, or the shuffling “Staying Up Late (Thinking About It)” that puts a whole new level of haunted on the dance floor, or the slip-timed title track's recognition of isolation of regret that is both mocking and all-encompassing, or the staggeringly beautiful ache of “If Teardrops Were Diamonds,” featuring Nelson’s own echoing plangency, Yoakam digs deep into his own always-aching soul. The result is a record so deeply pained, the catharsis is an open wound that makes one surrender to the worst so it can be over in a way that’s wholly complete.
“The shimmering sadness and the sparkle of tears is where all the beauty lies,” confesses the man hailed by Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times and Vanity Fair. “It’s like that last blast of sunset over Santa Monica Bay that refracts all the colors and hopes and heartbreaks. It’s all out in the distance, that mirage of what it could be…”
If anything has loosened the shackles on one of modern country and mostly western’s true poets, it may well have been his immersion in the world of film and screenwriting. Not only did it change the physical reality of his process – he couldn’t just take three months to write an album as he had before, rather he had to keep chipping away at it while on the Texas set of “The Newton Boys” – but it marginalized the dependence of the words on the music.
“It was an accidental emancipation, if you will,” laughs the erudite honky tonker, “which was very freeing. It opened up the way I might use language because I was living only with descriptive words. You’re focusing so thoroughly on the syntax of words, what you’re trying to say. You just have a different relationship to it after that.
And it’s ultimately a matured place in my life. Everything up ‘til now has led me to here, and now is where it all seems to be coming together.”
Coming together is putting it mildly. For the lanky singer/songwriter, it starts with the songs and, even when they’re culled from personal experience, it’s the more abstract reality that he wants to drive the final realization. “You know I’m rather dodgy. I prefer not to have too many specifics about these songs,” the triple-platinum-selling Yoakam admits with a laugh. “It’s about magic, wisps of smoke, mystery. It’s more like finger painting, shapes and shadows.
“These inspirations exist in a moment of time, a place, a second of life, but it's better that not all these songs follow specifics, because people can bring their own specifics to it. If people can find their own affinity in them, their own truths, I don’t want to explain them away. Hopefully my own awareness oscillates beyond that literal reality and there’s a little channeling of the human experience.
“Look at a song like ‘I’d Avoid Me, Too.’ I know what the catalyst was: an outgrowth of a non-romantic interaction with somebody, and it wasn’t literally somebody needing to escape me, it was way more subtle. But you start writing and you let it come, and then you just discard the inspiration.”
For Yoakam, who admits he moves to “rhythms inside me,” the journey is absolutely musical. With small portable recorders stashed everywhere he spends time, his life has revolved around capturing the musical ideas that fall across his path as he walks through the world. Last year, Rhino Records put out a 4-disc retrospective called Reprise Please Baby: The Warner Brothers Years culled from his double platinum Guitars Cadillacs, his platinum follow-ups Hillbilly Deluxe, Buenas Noches From A Lonely Room, Just Lookin’ For A Hit, If There Was A Way, the triple platinum This Time and the exceedingly singular Gone, Under The Covers, and A Long Way Home.
Always one to challenge the status quo, his Tomorrow’s Sounds Today and dwightyoakamacoustic.net both appeared on CD Now’s “10 Essential Country Records of 2000.” The New York Times proclaimed, “a one-man honky tonk revival campaign… one can hear his stubborn traditionalism and his innate eclecticism intertwine,” while Rolling Stone crowed, “no man has done country better or more consistently” and Vanity Fair offered, “Yoakam strides the divide between rock’s lust and country’s lament.”
In addition, the low-brimmed musician has made his mark on motion pictures. After a scene-stealing debut 1994’s “Red Rock West,” he broke out with a hardcore turn as Doyle Hargraves in 1996’s Oscar-winning “Sling Blade.” He’s also starred in “The Newton Boys” (with Matthew McConaughey, Juliana Margulies and Vincent D’Onofrio), “The Minus Man” (with Owen Wilson and Janeane Garafolo), “Panic Room” (co-starring Jodie Foster and Forest Whitaker), and most recently, "Hollywood Homicide" with Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett.
Closest to his heart, though, would be “South of Heaven, West of Hell,” which he also directed and wrote. With an acclaimed cast that included Billy Bob Thornton, Vince Vaughn, Bridget Fonda, Peter Fonda, Paul Reubens, Bud Cort and Michael Jeter, the gothic Western was a personal expression that probed the depths of the complex writer’s psyche.
And that cinematic scope gives the pained balladry of “Fair To Midland” its expansive feel. “We were playing the ballpark outside Midland and while sitting, watching the sun set in flat, vast West Texas, I just got caught up. Had pretty much the first verse and the hook on the bus, and then came back to it….kept that tape and didn’t pull it out ‘til we’d been home for a couple of months. But there’s a lot of freedom to that way of writing, because rather than writing ‘til it’s done, you can let the song become what it wants to.”
With his take on regret and loneliness, Dwight Yoakam has remained the truest soul old-style jukebox country music has ever had. And yet, with Population: Me, he’s also found a way to make his old-school sounds even more aggressive. The loping shuffle on “Exception To The Rule” celebrates a small reservoir of fearless hope amongst the knowing, while on the almost vespers-like solace of “The Back Of Your Hand,” there's an intensity that only Yoakam could summon.
Sixteen years in, it just gets more potent. Like glass packs on a hotrod, it doesn’t change the machine, just the way it rumbles and performs. When you’ve spent a career focusing on a genre of music that’s about busted hopes, broken hearts, sweaty nights, full-tilt sexuality and obsessions that would make David Lynch (“Blue Velvet”) proud, it makes sense that you’d keep going down that dark, lost highway with a foot heavy on the gas, one hand on the wheel and the night at one’s back.
Population: Me is certainly a worthy companion for one’s journey through their darkest places. And when the catharsis hits, there is no grander pool of sorrow, release and reclamation than with a Kentucky boy with the blues.
