Feb. 01, 2012 - Issue #850: Godot
What happens in Nashville ...
James Murdoch and Jay Sparrow's creative retreat yields a one-off show and live recording
» Northern songwriters back from the south
Nashville North
Featuring James Murdoch and Jay Sparrow
Arden Theatre, $32
It was midway through their 10 days in Nashville, when James Murdoch and Jay Sparrow were writing songs in a park, that Emmylou Harris wandered into sight.
"We would sit facing each other with two guitars," Jay Sparrow explains. "And I was working on a part, and he was listening back, and I looked at his face and his face just went white—his eyes were open. He was like, 'Emmylou Harris is standing right behind you.'"
The pair chatted Harris up for a few minutes—"Totally gracious," Murdoch notes of the country-folk legend—then watched her do a free concert. "It was kind of a big deal.," Sparrow adds. "It rounded out our Nashville experience."
Chancing upon a musical hero is surely as a good an omen as any for the creative process the pair had underway: Murdoch and Sparrow were down in Music City for almost two weeks to write what will debut this weekend as Nashville North—a one-off concert, pulling on the material the pair wrote on that creative retreat. The show will be recorded, and later released as a live album.
The idea came from Murdoch: he was asked to do a show at the Arden as part of their season, but found himself hung up on how he wanted to approach the gig.
"I really wanted to push all of my boundaries," Murdoch says. "So, work with somebody else, work with someone I hadn't worked with before, do this live record, and who knows what it's going to be. But I just wanted to make sure that it was an event."
Murdoch had long known Sparrow—Sparrow recalls going to him for early career advice. "If you want something, ask," was Murdoch's tip and the merit of it was the reason why Sparrow's recorded an album at Willie Nelson's house ("No-one would think that you could just do that. But I asked."). Both are able, proven musicians in their own right, but collaboration, was something neither had much experience with.
"We'd never worked together on a writing standpoint, and I've never worked with anyone ever on a writing standpoint," Sparrow says. "I always wrote my own stuff. I had to learn first how to do that, and what that meant. So, you take this really introspective thing that's usually done behind closed doors, and you're now doing it in front of someone who you've never worked with before. It was a weird thing. But we had so little time, we didn't have time to waste. We just jumped right in."
The first song they wrote together was ultimately scrapped, but yielded two characters who became the backbone of the finished North. The album's 10 songs trace a narrative of two characters headed west at the turn of the last century: one, helping build the burgeoning country along the railway, and the other, a woman that they refer to as "a casuality of the time."
"It's basically like a libretto of a rock opera. But it's a country-folk record instead," Murdoch says.
"[Writing about characters] brought a lot of gravity to the songs, which I didn't normally have before, because when you're just writing a song out of the thin air, you're kind of just accepting whatever falls from the creative spark," Sparrow adds. "But when you're specifically having to fill out this person's identity, and an important story to that person, just made the songs feel like they had more weight, and when you listen to the music now, it feels like they're kind of large. It sounds like large, orcestrated music, because we just want to do right by these two characters."
For the show, Murdoch and Sparrow will be backed by a five-piece band on the night of, which will be further supplemented by live animations, projected to help tell that album's story. The recording they make of the night will be the first and last take for a Nashville North—no nuanced studio version is on either one's mind.
"I think the only way it would've become a studio album is if we weren't able to pull it off live," Murdoch says. "I now have so much confidence—we've had a couple rehearsals, we've recorded a rehearsal just on a mic, to have a reference of it, and it sounds so great. And I really think that this needs to be what it was initially set out to be: a live recording. And so, no, I don't think that this record should go into the studio. I think it needs to be a snapshot of what it was that night." vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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