Biographies
DWIGHT YOAKAM
"Under the Covers"
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DWIGHT YOAKAM, the maverick California-based country singer with a shelf full of awards and numerous platinum and multi-platinum albums to his credit, has never been one to take the conventional route. With the release of UNDER THE COVERS he takes another impressive--and unorthodox--step forward. The Grammy-winning singer uses his new vantage point to explore a dozen well-known rock, pop and country hits originally written and recorded by the disparate likes of the Clash, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Sonny & Cher and Johnny Horton.
Taking on such an artistic challenge is characteristic for Yoakam, as his impressive performance as Doyle Hargraves in the Academy Award-winning Sling Blade clearly demonstrated. UNDER THE COVERS gives fascinating new perspectives on Yoakam and collaborator/producer Pete Anderson's creative approach to both songs and arrangements. In a sense, the album is not so much a departure--country stars from Bob Wills to Merle Haggard have always included pop standards in their repertoires--as it is an affirmation of the artist's instinctive role as communicator and interpreter.
"Absolutely, that's the point of this," Yoakam says. "It's also an exploration and a musical journey that illustrates that music should be and can be completely freeing."
From the first notes of opener "Claudette," the CD's debut single, Yoakam is clearly in command and obviously enjoying himself: "It's so expressive of the kind of musical legacy that I come from, which is The Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison--two of the major musical influences in my life," he says. "So here's a song that was written by one, Roy, and performed by and identified with the other act, The Everlys."
The musical dialog of UNDER THE COVERS, Yoakam's eighth album, is enhanced further by some esteemed guest talent. With contributions from renowned steel guitar veteran Tom Brumley to up and coming country-rockers the Lonesome Strangers, to name but a few, the set tours a lush musical landscape. Legendary bluegrass figurehead Ralph Stanley helps spin the Clash's pop-punk "Train In Vain" into another musical dimension. As Yoakam explains, "It's a twist on a song and a twist on bluegrass. It's not truly a pure bluegrass performance because we've added accordion and drums. Ralph Stanley is playing banjo and singing harmony with me. In the spirit of the album, it is a hybrid kind of bluegrass performance of a song that I've always loved."
"Baby Don't Go," a duet with modern pop empress Sheryl Crow, was a choice as unlikely as it was inevitable: "Pete Anderson and I had both, at different times, heard the song," Yoakam says, "and we'd be on the phone with each other immediately after having heard it and I'd bring it up and I'd say, 'Remember that shuffle Sonny and Cher did?' We both felt it was a well-written song and always liked it. Sheryl brings a reading to it that is unique," he adds. "She's singing in a lower register and there's a sultriness to that performance that has a great charisma. It reminded me of a combination of Mavis Staples and Bonnie Bramlett. I was really mesmerized by her performance and flattered that she agreed to do that with us."
Of course, Yoakam "keeps it country," paying homage to his childhood idol Johnny Horton on "North To Alaska," a smash hit for Horton in 1960. "In finding Johnny Horton first as a seven-year-old child listening to my parents' record collection," he says, "I was always fascinated with these images that he created, lyrically, that were absolutely paintings in my mind of places and events and specifically on `North To Alaska.' Even to this day, every time I sing that line, 'One small band of gold to place on sweet Jenny's hand,' I see pictures. I probably learned about lyrical picture painting, visualization by listening to him. It's almost a subconscious acknowledgment of that influence."
Yoakam makes a point of acknowledging often overlooked California country pioneer Wynn Stewart, who helped create the Bakersfield sound on his 1950s Challenge recordings, with a plangent version of "Playboy," Stewart's irony-laden signature song. "'Playboy' had always appealed to me," he says. "I'd never performed it in public. I'd bring it up time to time as an illustration of that Bakersfield sound in conversations and interviews over the years. I just love Wynn's vocal style and his recording of it."
He also favors two countrypolitan AM Pop radio classics, "Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues" and "Wichita Lineman," with startlingly sensitive performances. "One of the examples of the feeling that we were not prisoners of any kind of genre perimeters is 'Good Time Charlie,'" Yoakam says. "The words of the song, I think, are so profoundly well-written and poignant that I just let myself open up to where I felt the emotions of the song were at the moment I began singing the first verse. There's a melancholy to the situation and circumstances he describes that is so succinctly extreme that it made me want to curl up, figuratively, in an emotional fetal position as I began performing the melody, which is what I was probably attempting to do by restricting the intervals I sang in each verse, sort of withdrawing into the dark blueness of the lyrics, so-to-speak. I hope Danny O'Keefe enjoys my interpretation of it. I'm such a fan of his own reading of the song, and thought the original recording was such a perfect expression of those emotions, that I felt it was almost untouchable."
As for "Wichita Lineman," Dwight says, "The first time I began to sing it, Pete and I both started to smile because we realized I had never explored that kind of vocal range on record," he says. "Jimmy Webb wrote some brilliant songs and this is certainly on par with the best that he ever wrote. I know everyone alludes to `McArthur Park' as being his great triumph, but lyrically, I'm hesitant to exclude `Wichita Lineman' from that same level of genius. Singing the lyrics of that song in the studio was both an exhilarating and eerie experience. There's such a mystical, other-worldly kind of quality that comes out of the imagery (due in part to the lyrical use of an experience with its extreme juxtaposition of a repairman working on a highline pole while simultaneously communicating telepathically with a lover) that the song seemed to take on a sort of wildly metaphysical importance in my mind as I was singing it. And it is a further example of Webb's metaphoric expression being so blindly brilliant that his songwriting talent all but defies analysis and description. So why did I try? We were all pleased with it and felt satisfied with the fact that in the rehearsal and arrangement process, we had not just mimicked someone else's version of a great song, but we achieved our own interpretation of the material. And that's what we were trying to do with every track on the record."
His readings of three British rock classics--Them's "Here Comes The Night," the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time" and the Beatles' "Things We Said Today"--re-define the familiar with Yoakam's singular interpretive style. On "Here Comes The Night," Yoakam says, "Maybe you're hearing a shy 15-year-old kid who found it really tough to approach a girl that he had a huge crush on. Although the lyrics deal with a relationship that's come and gone, it certainly deals with a sense of alienation and isolation that can be an outgrowth of feeling socially inept."
His take on the Beatles song (originally featured, in different form, on his European-only 1992 L'Croix D'Amour album) "was very, very freeing and allowed me to express myself in a unique way, musically. To me, the Beatles version seemed to embrace a youthful innocence. I think we were able to interpret it in a darker way and possibly introduce a new emotional mystery to the song."
Yoakam's hillbilly overdrive version of "The Last Time" has a sleek, natural appeal. "I had talked with Mick Jagger a couple of times about writing and recording something together," he says. "I hope the Rolling Stones will be flattered by our taking it off into a nuclear Merle Travis kind of break-neck mystery train groove. What we did with the vocals was perform it in a traditional bluegrass fashion. It was fascinating to sing the lyrics with that kind of interpretation applied to it."
While hearing the Stones' song performed in a bluegrass vein is somewhat surprising, UNDER THE COVERS also features a far more adventurous vision of the British Invasion: "I had decided this album might be an opportunity to take a Bobby Darin journey," Yoakam says, referring to the great early `60s swing balladeer. And the resulting track, a jumping, jaw-dropping, big-band arrangement of The Kinks' classic "Tired Of Waiting For You," is one of the album's wildest highlights. "The moment I began to sing it in that swing mode, Pete and I knew it would work and knew that it would work almost asurdly well. This album grew from a desire to knock down any parameters and preconceived notions about what we were able to do as performers, the band and myself. We explored music in its purest sense, for the joy to be found in all of its emotional expressions."
That joy is clearly evident on the album's finale, a hidden bonus track, which brings the set full circle. Here, Yoakam takes on the 1927 Jimmie Rodgers classic "T For Texas," one of country music's key songs. "A lot of people are unaware that Jimmie Rodgers, The Blue Yodeler, The Singing Brakeman, as he was referred to in the late 20's and early 30's, wrote that song and he was the first great nationally known country music star," Dwight explains. "We cut it live, just sat down and did it warts and all, didn't overdub anything. It was completely spontaneous. The way it felt when we got finished, was almost as if we're hiding ourselves in the performance of the song. It was as if Pete and I were on a porch somewhere, way back up in the hills, doing the song together in another lifetime."
A musical journey into both the past and future, UNDER THE COVERS gracefully fulfills the promise Yoakam has made throughout his body of recorded music. Even though most are familiar, each track positively rings with that sense of transportation to another time and place and the overall sense of natural, artistic freedom that has always typified Yoakam's music.
