Bluegrass virtuoso Tim O'Brien is taking his career one song at a time
Single-Minded
By Jon Weisberger
Just about anyone can tell you it's a tough proposition to make a
food-on-the-table kind of living music these days. Of course, there's
plenty of brave talk about new business models, but since much of it
comes from callow pundits with more rhetorical vehemence than actual
experience, it's understandable that folks down in the trenches tend to
let it all slide by as one undifferentiated, unhelpful mass. That's
understandable, but maybe not so smart, as the latest news— and music —
from bluegrass luminary Tim O'Brien suggests.
A Grammy-winning roots music polyglot who's assiduously built a
sustaining community of fans through a dizzying array of projects over
the past couple of decades, O'Brien's proven himself constitutionally
incapable of turning off his creative spigot. But facing a year devoted
almost exclusively to a reunited, re-energized Hot Rize — the
influential Colorado bluegrass quartet that launched his career back in
the '80s — he wanted a way to "keep the stuff coming," he tells the Scene.
"I can't really tour on my own this year, but you need to put records
out, so that people remember what you're doing, so they have something
to talk about, something to write about."So he unleashed a digital-only singles series under the quintessentially O'Brien-esque title of Short Order Sessions. "It's a singles world, they say now," he muses with a not-quite-rueful laugh. "And I'm excited about the idea of not being tied to a set of songs. There are so many fine jam sessions at the house, and it's really hard to capture those intimate moments with a plan, but I'm going to try. And I've got other things, too, like odds and ends from different compilations that maybe my fans [have] never heard.
He says the straw that broke the camel's back was a tune called "Brush My Teeth With Coca-Cola," penned as part of an unreleased set of songs centered around the Elk River chemical spill last year in Charleston, W. Va. "Where are you going to put that song?" he asks rhetorically. "Where does it belong? Well, it should come out on some kind of day that's significant with the spill, so people can play it on their radios, they can talk about it, and remember that this happened." And so, on Jan. 9, the anniversary of the spill, the Short Order Sessions was born. "It's a topical song," O'Brien goes on, "and now that we have the wherewithal to put something out right away, it might be like the old days in some ways — write the song about something that's just happened and get it out there."
O'Brien's already got the next song in the series ready to go. It's a lurching, groove-heavy take on Michael Hurley's "Ditty Boy Twang" that features cello and bass from youngsters Nat Smith and Samson Grisman playing alongside O'Brien's uninhibited mandolin. O'Brien, a realist, knows the series won't make him a living, but he hopes it will at least make him a piece of one, and an enjoyable piece at that.
"I'm going to do this anyway," he says with another laugh, "I'm going to make these songs, and think about interesting things, so why not let other people hear them? Levon Helm said one time while he was in The Band, 'Maybe this is going to fall by the wayside, but I'll probably always have a bite to eat somewhere, and a couch somewhere to sleep on.' Thank God it hasn't got to that yet, but I'm bracing for it."
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