Talking To...Kimmie Rhodes
Texas singer songwriter Kimmie Rhodes now resides in Austin with her producer husband Joe Gracey and she regularly tours the UK and Europe. Fatea had the chance to talk to Kimmie *(and listen to her wonderful Texas accent) about her music, her collaboration with Willie Nelson, her thoughts on Obama, carving her own path and how growing up in Lubbock, Texas, shaped her.
KR=Kimmie Rhodes HM=Helen Mitchell
HM: Hi Kimmie, thanks for agreeing to talk to me.
KR: No problem. I recognise you, we've met before.
HM: Yeah, last year, here at the Cluny. It was my birthday and you sang 'Love and happiness' for me!
KR: That's right, I remember, your friend had told me the night before then he emailed me to say thanks right after you did!
HM: Okay, can I start, Kimmie, by asking how you got into music in the first place?
KR: Well, when I was about six years old, I was singing and my dad noticed it and we started a gospel trio with my brother and my dad and me. We sang at Church and I sang at school and I was always in choir. A lot of the music in the churches in the South sounded a lot like Willie nelson's country music. So I was influenced at an early age by going to church and singing at school like a lot of people do.
HM: Just the music that was around you?
KR: Yeah, what I was hearing around me, too. In those days radio was different. I grew up in a town called Lubbock, Texas and back in those days - it may be different here but the DJs in America tend to be more commercially driven now and they play from a list that's made up for them, but back in those days, the 'level of cool' of a DJ was knowing about what was coming down the line and what the hot new record was and DJs were actually celebrities based on knowing about music and finding out about it and there was a lot of great music going on. I didn't really have a notion of any kind of music, it was all just music to me. It was just music. You could turn to one station and you might hear Ray Charles and on another station you might hear Billie Holliday and on another station you might hear Buddy Holly and on another station you might hear George Jones. The music being played on stations then was still kind of genre driven like it is now but it had kind of a more organic feel to it. There wasn't even such a thing as talk radio so you could turn to any station and find something to listen to and I never stayed on one particular kind of music; we just used to spin the dial 'til we came to something we liked. So I had a lot of different influences early on. Then , you know, my dad always played country music and as I got older I loved The Beatles and then my mother liked to take me to theatre and always bought the latest vinyl from whatever the new big New York show going on was; so there was just a lot of different musical influence. I think that's what I always loved about The Beatles - I know in the early days they were very heavily influenced by people like Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry but then as they grew and put out records, they crossed over so you never knew what they were gonna do next. I know that had a lot to do with George Martin's influence. I think Louis Armstrong was the one who always said "There's only two kinds of music; good and bad." Really, I have always felt that way and I still do.
HM: Didn't Beth Nielsen Chapman once say that, too; that music shouldn't need to be pigeon holed into a category - that good music is just good music?
KR: You know, the more advertising and sales and ratings, and those kind of things have become the tail that wags the dog of commercial music now. That's not to say that there's not some good commercial music because there really is some great commercial music. There's also the thing to some degree where if someone follows their heart and it leads onto something that hits. Nobody really knows what makes a hit and nobody can ever know what makes a hit. What happens is if somebody gets onto something and everybody likes it and everybody buys it; you see it in clothing, or bread, or soft drinks, or anything, it just takes off and then everybody jumps on the bandwagon and wants to have one of those. It's always been that way to some degree and that's understandable but there's a line between making music for commercial reasons and making music because you make music and between writing songs for commercial reasons and writing songs because you write songs. There is a way to straddle both sides of that line, so really it's just a balance. When Chuck Berry was writing songs, he had a really good sense of wht made a good commercial song and had a lot of appeal and it was a hit - it was really great music, really great commercial music. It's like anything, there's the one hand then there's the other and you find the place where you wanna be, where you wanna exist, somewhere within those hands. You find your spot on the rainbow when you find what colour you are.
HM: I like that image a lot. So what colour do you think you are?
KR: That's a great question, I've never been asked that before. The colour that I am changes. Right now I'm somewhere between blue and yellow so I guess that makes me green.
HM: Why green?
KR: Because if you mix blue and yellow you get green.
HM: (laughs) yeah, I mean...
KR: (laughs) That was the art question! I'm a little bit blue but optimism to me is yellow...I'm not really really blue and I'm not really really sunny either, I'm somewhere in the middle. Let's say I'm green with a forecast of yellow! Hopefully.
HM: I like that. So, what was it like growing up in Lubbock? I've been there so I'd be interested to hear your take.
KR: Growing up in Lubbock you made your own fun. It was a farming community and in those days farmers could do very very well. It was the plains which just go on forever, flat, so it makes it really great for farming.
HM: It is incredibly flat, isn't it? I couldn't believe it.
KR: It's as flat as it gets. It does not get any flatter. That makes it really good for farming. Also Lubbock sits on top of a big, giant water reservoir called the Yana ?, so whether it rains or whether it doesn't, water can be brought up from the ground. The thing they had to watch out for is storms called pails. The community would thrive when the farmers were thriving and would not thrive when they were not. It was an economy based on cotton. Like any community there was sort of a collective consciousness and there I think people are really attuned to the weather and what it brought there. The weather can be really hard. Sometimes the wind blows and the sand blows and sometimes it rains mud.
HM: Really?!
KR: Yeah, it rains mud from the sky. It can be very very harshly cold. I think growing up in Lubbock even from my very first memory, I was always completely aware of the elements, so the sky always seemed really big to me. When you're on flat land you just don't know - the weather can change and become sweet and beautiful or completely horrendous. There would be days you couldn't even see your hand in front of your face as the sand would just get in everything and in your eyes. So the elements can be really harsh there. Everybody's always aware of that so I think growing up in Lubbock might be a little harder than other places - certainly being in Lubbock was a lot harder than being in Austin is. A lot of the musicians I know moved from Lubbock to Austin because it was just a friendlier environment. In the time period I was growing up there was also the hippy era and Rock and Roll had happened and was blossoming and then you got a real blend between Texas borders from Mexico so there were a lot of Mexican families there. There was always that Tex-Mex influence, even though we were up in the Panhandle, about as far from Mexico as you can get in Texas. A lot of Mexican immigrants came in to work in the cotton fields. That element found its way into everybody's music. It's kind of a fishbowl, you know; a fishbowl with a lot of sand in it. (laughs) As far as answering the question of what it was like growing up in Lubbock, that excludes any personal or family, that's just the best answer I could give about the actual place. There's kind of the Southern Baptist religion thing there so that was an element in the community and then there were some real hard drinking, down on their luck people that had come there to try to make a living and weren't faring so well. There was always a dichotomy of people. There were two kinds of different people, you know, there was this line drawn between the really, really religious and the people that were outside of that. For example in Lubbock, to buy alcohol you had to go outside of the town, outside of the city limits, even to buy beer.
HM: yeah, where my friend lives in MS, you have to go across to AL, to buy liquor.
KR: Yeah, you still see that in some places. It all coloured my upbringing as we were both. We went to church on Sunday and my dad would drive out of town to buy beer. It was challenging to be in a community where you were asked to be one kind of person or another.
HM: Kind of being pulled in 2 directions.
KR: Well, you weren't pulled in 2 directions as such but there was always a feeling of being pulled two ways. We knew who we were. When we went to church we went for the music, not to be told what to do. It's kind of a weird place. I always felt that the elements in general caused people to have an edge, it colours their mental perspective, like the winds in France.
HM: It was actually in Lubbock where I saw the most spectacular rainstorm - fork and sheet lightning, thunder and rain so heavy it was bouncing off the sidewalk into the motel room when we opened the door.KR: yeah and you get hail and balls of ice the size of baseballs and tornadoes, so you never know which you're gonna get. There's an edge to Lubbock that I think the elements cause. That edge kind of finds its way into your development.
HM: Shapes who you are?
KR: Yeah Waylon Jennings, Buddy Holly, Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore; there's a long list of people who are from Lubbock and we tend to fall just a little bit under the radar of what is commercially acceptable, most of the time. It creates a perspective. I think people in Lubbock are honest, I think you learn to look for the truth in things, but there's definitely an edge, even to a child in Lubbock, you know, you live with it every day. That thing. This is the Lubbock of my childhood, it could be totally different now, I haven't been there for years. You create yourself every day no matter who you are. Really everyone in the world is an artist on that level because you create who you are every day. If you got those kinds of things coming at you that has to find its way into who you are. It was rock and roll. You made your own fun and what was in those days in Lubbock was to mow lawns until you had enough to buy a guitar and an amp, get in a garage and try to make up songs that sounded like Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. Even The Beatles did that you know. Even over here in Liverpool they figured out how to get their grandma or someone to buy them an amp and a guitar and got in a garage and tried to write a song like Buddy Holly or Roy Orbison or someone. This exciting thing had happened in music and everyone wanted to be a part of it. It was a hobby, it was what we cared about. Also American cars were very cool back then, so cars mattered and music, luike all younger generations have things they're into.
HM: It's almost coming back around isn't it with ipods - young people are almost rediscovering music. Albeit that our chart music isn't very good!
KR: You know, I believe that anything new that is created, has the potential to be either good or bad. Then you know, I might think something is crap but someone else might think it's great. It's all relative to whose ears it's fallen on and what it is.
HM: Don't you think your own life experience influences what music you like, too and what you relate to?
KR: Oh, absolutely. There's the musical influence as far as just the sound of it but then there's the lyrical content that has everything to do with what you have to say and what you have to say. For me, lyrics are like are map; I can have a feeling and I don't know what it's about and I can sit down in front of a blank piece of paper, start a melody on a guitar or piano that sounds like I feel - then you're already better off as you have a way out of yourself. Then if you can stay with that. Your mind can start to find its way to say what it is you're feeling.
HM: Does the melody always come first, then?
KR: Well, sometimes they can go down at the same time. You can write a song for a lot of different reasons, but we're down into this deeper part - this conversation's made its way to the nut. I wrote a song called Windblown where I just picked up my guitar in the middle of the night with a feeling that had been with me for a long time. I wasn';t even meaning to write a song, I wasn't trying to write a song, my intent was to go to sleep but I started playing this melody and it felt good; it felt like I felt. Then these words started falling out - I didn't know where they were coming from or what they meant but I wasn't fighting it. Sometimes a song tells me what I think. I wrote a song called I'm Gonna Fly, like that. Sometimes a lot of ideas I get for songs I just scratch out on a piece of paper, the little crystal moments where I know what something means and if I write that phrase down the feeling is sometimes kind of encoded within that phrase and sometimes there's music encoded with it too. It's kinda like what you're doing now, like a shorthand where I can go 'Yeah I got it trapped now.' And I can put it away if I don't have time to write. Sometimes I don't know any more than that or sometimes I'll know it's a part of another idea. Sometimes I know there isn't enough to finish it, so I'll just put it away until I do.
HM: What's the longest it's taken you to finish a song?
KR: Well, you know, being as that I have a lot of unfinished songs that's a hard question to answer because so many years have gone by with ideas I haven't finished and don't know if I ever will. I do have a song called I Just Drove By...
HM: That's one of my favourites.
KR: (smiles) I re wrote that song for seven years. Even when I would finish it I would know it wasn't done. Then when I got the real inspiration I got a real feeling about what it was about and that's a good song. It happens when it happens. My mind is always ready for it, but it's hard to make it happen. You can sit down with somebody with an idea and write but that's a different kind of writing than the kind I'm talking about. I could sit right here and write you a song and I might get lucky and it might be a good song but it might not. Who knows. It's the mystery of songwriting. I could sit down with another person and write a good song because what happens is you get good at it, you get good at crafting a good song. If two good writers sit down together they know how to cu to the chase and then you've got two heads or three heads working on ideas.
HM: Do you have any favourite people to write with?
KR: Yeah I do and that changes over the years. I tend to just click with some people. I've written some really good songs with Gary Nicholson. I like to write with Gary Nicholson a lot because I like hanging out with him. Al Anderson, I tend to be able to really click with him. You mentioned Beth Nielsen Chapman, I have written some songs with Beth which I love, but Beth would tell you the same thing, the two of us writing together is not that easy because we're both real lyrical and we distract each other. I went to lunch with Gary Nicholson the other day and we wrote two songs over lunch. Sometimes you just start talking in song and someone says 'We need to write that down because now whether we like it or not, we're writing a song.'
HM: Speaking of collaborating, I have to ask, how did the CD with Willie come about - Seven Spanish Angels is the first country song I can recall.
KR: I love that song. The CD was his idea. Willie and I have known each other for a long time and worked together on a lot of things. It was right around Christmas time and he was home - we just live down the road from each other - and he said 'Why don't we get together.' We were going to experiment with some MP3 files back before it was really happening.
HM: Pioneers!
KR: We were pioneering. We were experimenting really. Willie is truly a pioneer. So I said 'Sure.' and as we knew a lot of the same songs, Willie and me, and our friend David Zettner on bass, and my son Gabe Rhodes all got in a room together and my husband recorded it, Joe Gracey, and we just sat there like the friends that we are. You know Willie just loves to play music and people just love to play music with him. So it was something to do that day and we're in the music business so we decided that we'd set up a website to sell the Mp3s - any excuse to play music and have a good time, really. We didn't make a list of songs, we'd just say 'How about this one?' or 'How about that one?' Then I said 'Hey Willie, I love your song Valentine, why don't we do that?' I love Rodney Crowell's song Til I Can Gain Control Again, so we did that and we had some fun like we've always done together, doing the ones we knew we knew together, then we did the ones that we knew each other knew. Willie had written an amazing song called It Always Will Be and that was at the heart of it and it just happened. It comes very naturally for us to sit down and record together. It's like if you were an ice skater and you got with someone who was another ice skater, you'd say 'How about we go ice skating tomorrow?' it's what we do and what we like to do.
HM: Why not?
KR: yeah we get to hang. (laughs) You can bet if it quit being fun, neither of us would do it anymore. The thing about that record that I love is that if anything, it's underproduced. What I hear when I play that CD, is me and my friend Willie, sitting down and playing songs. It's like if we were doing a live radio programme. We like to sing and we like to record, we didn't have to go find a big recording studio and a bunch of money and a label. In a way it's like you're back in the garage with the amps and the guitars. When you play music in a garage with your friends, you;re doing it for the love of music. When you get Willie and me and some guitars and we sit down, we're doing it for the love of doing it so you don't think about a record deal, if it's gonna sell, you're just making music and getting a recording of a moment in time.
HM: The love of music I guess it what it should be about, but I guess it's easy to get lost in the politics?
KR: Well, it's pretty easy for me not to get lost in the politics but it's easy to get lost in the shuffle. I just started my own label. In the early days before digital recordings, you really needed to find a record deal because it cost a lot of money to go out and do a recording and hire a band. I just hadn't had enough time to build a world around me yet that could accommodate me on my terms. It took me some time but eventually I did build a world around me that would accommodate me on my own terms. Now I have a recording studio at my house and my husband is an engineer and record producer and my son, Gabe is a multi instrumentalist.
HM: A very good looking one, too!
KR: Aw, thankyou (laughs) Over a while you start to collect things. My house is my garage, you know. I can write songs, a family full of people who play music, a recording studio, my own label, my own computers, my own art department, so I don't have to have the frustration of trying to find a label - it's like casting for a movie; you really want a part, but they just don't need someone who looks like you. It's not your fault and it's not their fault but it's hard when you have to keep trying to open doors, unless you want to design yourself to look like what they want each time. Some people are really good at that and I admire people like that but it's never been that way for me. I get an inkling of what it is artistically and my focus is more on finding my way to that than on what I need to do to get a record deal. It was never just about being a big ol' singing star for me.
HM: Well, I think that's good, as then you're being honest, you're being true to yourself and not trying to be something you're not. That comes through in the music.
KR: Yeah. I mean, ideally, in a perfect world, you could be like Tom Petty, you could be honest and true and good at what you do and it would just happen to have that appeal to it. Then it's timing and a lot of talent. Then there's the machinery and people behind them making it happen, and it depends what level you want. See I never really wanted to ride across America in a big ol' bus; I wanted to make my art and make my records, and make a living, have my fans and communicate to people. Get it out there enough that people could hear it and have people who cared what I have to say (so I'm not talking to the wall) I have had the most amazing life that in some ways I've maybe been a little bit bratty because if it's not fun I just don't want anything to do with it, and if it's not making me feel good and happy I just don't care about it. I've actually turned down the opportunity to be in big commercial bands. I remember one time I said @You know what, thank you so much and I'm so honoured, but just because it's a super highway doesn't mean it's gonna get me where I'm goin.' You have to look at it, you don't wanna blow an opportunity but you don't wanna blow your life out by making a wrong choice, either. I've had a lot of opportunities to make a lot of different decisions and I've pretty much taken one day at a time, made whatever choices were in front of me and ended up with a version of what to me was success. There are some really miserable people who are wildly successful, but I get to play music with my family, I get to travel, there's music around my house all the time. We have the studio there and I can have my friends come over and record in it so I get to hear them nmake music. I've gotten to do things you can't do if you're obligated to the whole machinery of success.
HM: More freedom...
KR: Yeah, yeah, definitely more freedom, plays and musicals and things that for some people would have been a waste of time but have let me figure out what I want and what I have to say.
HM: Picking up on the ideas of travelling and communication, how do you find audiences differ here from the USA?
KR: Well, that's like saying how are the audiences in Italy different from the audiences in Czechoslovakia? America is a big place. Texas is the size of France. Dallas is a big place - you can go to one side of Dallas and get an audience that's totally different from the other side. The problem in America is because it is so huge, and it's a long way between gigs it makes it harder to find people who appreciate what you do and more expensive to get to them. You really need to fly. In America I just plan it where I can fly to where I want to be to do something I really wanna do. Here, I'm gonna do 8 dates here, take a quick flight over to Ireland and do 5 dates there. It's more concentrated. Also there are people here who tend to just do their homework on the songs . I think it's more song driven and less genre driven. Music is a cultivated taste, like wine and food - in Europe I've been able to find people who have cultivated their taste and really like what I do. Here there's a cultivated taste for American singer-songwriters and it's not so big that you can't get around. It's easier to tour here - America's not rockin as far as transportation goes and the food's better here too! There are places in LA, or New York,or Austin...
HM: Chuy's is my favourite in Austin.
KR: Yes, used to go there all the time. You've been to Austin?
HM: Yeah, then went back for a day from Dallas as my friend hadn't been. I love Texas, I could live there!
KR: I love Texas too, I've lived there all my life.
HM: You'll know, you've travelled - you know when you find a certain place you love so much a bit of your soul stays behind? That's how I feel about Texas.
KR: Really? I feel that exact way about France. When I leave France I leave a part of me and I think about that part of me that stays there, often.
HM: There's a bit of me in Paris, too.
KR: There's always part of me walking around Paris. When I leave Paris - it's hard to articulate but it's still going on down there - Paris is so vivid, like a vivid dream it's unreal to me that I can leave somewhere so vivid, completely, for somewhere that's not as vivid. How can you ever leave somewhere that's more vivid than where you are? I always have the sense that I left this little trinket of me there and it's still going on. It's a very clanky clattery, city, French people talking, and it's been going on for so long. It's like an ancient thing.
HM: Though that's what I love about American history - you can almost reach and touch it, it's so much more recent.
KR: America is the frontier, it is still the frontier. America's got that innocent lack of history that makes it just dumb enough to be brave while there's always the potential that something new might happen. It's got like the brave innocence of a child, even though it's lost some of its innocence lately. The world knows what America is and America knows what America is. I think that's why lately people have wished America would just wake up and be what it is again. Europe has always been more sophisticated. There was always hope new things could happen in America, like putting men on the moon, getting from New York to California, just to see what was there - the pioneering spirit.
HM: I think you find the real America outside of the big cities.
KR: well, that's the thing, there is really more than one kind of American. Along the coast there are lots of people, then there's this humongous expanse of land in between. It's like if everybody in Europe tried to have one leader - it wouldn't work. It's really quite miraculous that America somehow made it work. Imagine 50 states - like 50 countries, coming together to form a union, and hold that together based on a belief that you all behave a certain way. It's all based on the constitution so the argument is you go back and forth to the constitution as a set of rules like in a board game. The way the government is run is on whether it's constitutional or not. There's a lot of hope in America right now because a lot of unconstitutional things have happened recently and that upsets people which means America is still alive because people still care about the constitution. That's why the division between state and church causes problems, it's a fine line you have to walk to balance your morals against this set of guidelines. It always amazes me how pure the constitution actually is and how you can always go back to it. Like the game board. You flip over the lid and read the rules, then everyone argues about the rules and that's America.
HM: Dare I ask, is Obama a 'good thing'?
KR: Obama is a great thing!
HM: I had a feeling you were going to say that!
KR: yeah, Obama is a great thing, because, well first of all I grew up in the South, where African American people were still fighting to vote not that long ago and were having to ride on the back of a bus. I've never been a prejudiced person and I've always felt like I needed to apologise for something I didn't do, just as some people feel they deserved an apology but from someone who isn't even alive anymore. It just kinda all ran off the road. We went to Memphis, TN, the day after the elections (the city where the cotton boats came down the MS river) just to see the joy. It was just wonderful. America seems to have relaxed, a lot. I'm not saying all the problems just went away but it has relaxed, because it was the right person, nobody's perfect, but he really is a fair guy and he's very smart. He is a smart honest person and after the last 8 years that's what we all needed. Europe seemed disappointed with America that we would let that happen, we should have gone back to the constitution. How could there not be a fair election in America. People were over their prejudice so much it didn't matter that he was black -he said it mattered for that one day then everyone moved on. I wouldn't have voted for him because he was black - actually at first I was for Hilary Clinton - but once I saw the potential in Barack Obama for healing...I think the answer to the economic problem is in a new domestic product, not that we aren't making things but everybody has two of everything. We need to produce something that people need. I think what we're seeing is that the world is going to change again - the world always changes - we've needed change for a while but been held back by people with self - serving agendas. We need to stay on the front edge of things, the planet needs, it the economy needs it...
HM: People need it...
KR: People need it and there's a lot of work to do. The one thing about being held back is it's been like a horse bucking in a stable now we know exactly what the work is, what needs to be done and we can move it forward. When you get a recession like we are seeing, we need to throw money at it; if the right person is throwing money at it it's an opportunity to invest in the future. If we pay someone to dig holes and fill them in again, we're still stimulating the economy. I personally have two or three of everything, what I'd like to buy is one of those heaters that heats the water as you use it, or a good American car that ran on electricity and it'd be great if we had a train that was efficient, like y'all have here. We don't have those things in America anymore. There are lots of things Americans would spend their money on but you can't buy them at Walmart.
HM: That's really interesting, to get your perspective. Can I go back to music to ask one more thing? When i spoke to you after your show last time, you told me Rich from the Journey is your favourite of your CDs. Can I ask, why that one?
KR: Well I think that has the most potential to help people. I said things I really wanted to say. I got to the heart of what I wanted to say in a way I know has helped people. I think because of what I was going through I made a lot more statements than on other CDs. I found that the better part of grief is gratitude. When you grieve, the same things that make you sad are the things that make you happy; memories. It's like the two sides of a coin and you just can't have one without the other. I think I was closer to what happens in life when I was there making that record and it was a group of songs making that point. I know how it feels to hurt, here's how I made myself feel better and maybe it can help you too. It's still my favourite.
HM: After all these years.
KR: Yeah. I like my new one a lot, some part of my latest thing is always my favourite just because it's new...but when I step back I say 'No, that one.' And if I forget someone always comes along and gives me a reason to think it again!
HM: if you had to pick a favourite song from the new CD, which would it be?
KR: I like Walls Fall Down, and after that I like I've been Loved by You. There's another one, Beautiful. I just started playing it live three shows ago, so it changes. They're probably my three favourites.
HM: Phew. I'm going to stop there and let you have time out before you play. Thank you so much for that, Kimmie,
KR: Thank you. It was really good. Enjoy the show.
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