It sounds like Guy was hands on for This One’s For Him. “No, not at all. Apart from that, I stayed out of it completely. Everybody could do whatever they wanted to do and I didn’t stick my nose in it until they handed me a copy. I thought it was great as there were some really good performances on there.”
One of the highlights was Lyle Lovett’s performing Anyhow I Love You and on Guy’s new album, there is one song that he hasn’t written, Lyle Lovett’s The Waltzing Fool. “In the early 80s Lyle had left a tape for me at my office here in Nashville and when I got around to listening to it, it flipped me out. I went through the roof at how cool it was. Lyle had asked me to perform one of the songs at an ASCAP awards banquet where he was receiving a lifetime achievement award or something like that. People would honour him by singing songs and I chose The Waltzing Fool.”
Guy Clark sings it so well in that deep, lived-in voice of his that I wondered if he had considered following Willie Nelson, James Taylor and Rod Stewart by recording an album of his favourite songs by other songwriters. “No, not really, but I’ve got it in my mind for when I’ve run out of stuff to record.”
Perhaps like Willie Nelson’s Stardust, the cover of such an album could be one of Susanna’s paintings. “A nice idea as she was a great artist. She also did the covers for Nanci Griffith’s Dust Bowl Symphony and Emmy’s Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town. She wrote the title song on that album too. It’s a beautiful song. We wrote Black Haired Boy and some others together but not too many.”
On Guy’s 1998 album, Cold Dog Soup, he and Shawn Camp wrote and recorded their song, Sis Draper, and now we have The Death Of Sis Draper. Could there be a concept album of Sis Draper songs? “There could be but I don’t intend to do that. Actually, we have completed seven Sis Draper songs. She was a real person whom Shawn knew as a child. She had a band and played fiddle and she taught him how to play. There are seven songs so far and we’ve finally had to kill her off. We have taken many, many liberties with the truth, I am sure of that, but as she’s dead, we can’t call her and ask her about it. I have been thinking about writing The Ghost Of Sis Draper.”
A fine singer and songwriter in his own right, Shawn Camp is part of Guy Clark’s regular team when it comes to playing concerts or making records. “Well, that’s the way to work. They are all friends of mine and I don’t make the kind of records where you get all the luminaries to assist you. I have done that and I can tell you that getting those records together is tedious. It’s hard to be thinking about all that stuff when you are trying to create something, so I prefer working with people I am comfortable with.”
The female harmony vocals are crucial to a Guy Clark record as they contrast so strongly with his own voice and give the songs an additional dimension. “This time I am mostly working with Morgane Hayes and she is now Morgane Stapleton as she is married to Chris Stapleton who is in the original SteelDrivers. She is an incredible singer, but then she is everybody’s favourite singer. Bryn Davies, the upright bass player and cello player, sang on some tracks too. Morgane and Chris were co-songwriters with me on Hell Bent On A Heartache which was her idea. I think it’s really good.”
It is a good song and the lyric takes clichés like “Ain’t love funny, ain’t love strange” and reworks them in a novel way. “Nothing wrong with that. There is one reason why those things are clichés and that is because they are really good, really smart or really right. You don’t want a steady diet of them but I don’t mind putting clichés into songs if they need to be there.”
In keeping with Sis Draper, the album opens with the delightful dance song, Cornmeal Waltz, again written by Guy and Shawn Camp. “I’m not much of a dance band person myself but that is a real Texas dance hall picture. The little girl dancing on her daddy’s shoes: now there’s a cliché that works really good!”
Although he is not playing on the record, Guy wrote I’ll Show Me with his old friend, Rodney Crowell. “I have written several songs with him over the years. Rodney had most of I’ll Show Me written and he brought it over to my house and he said he couldn’t get any further and he wanted me to help finish it. We sat down a couple of times with it and finished it. It was a hard song for me to learn for the record as he was doing it in a key that I can’t really sing or play the guitar in and I had to transpose the guitar part.”