Kim Richey – Voices carry
In addition to co-writing Foster’s hit “Nobody Wins”, Richey sang backing vocals throughout his 1992 album Del Rio, TX, 1959. A Richey co-write with Steve Kolander, “Desire”, turned up on the Dixie Chicks’ 1993 Shouldn’t A Told You That (before Natalie Maines joined the band). She backed Foster again on his 1995 Labor Of Love, and co-wrote “If It Were Me” with him. She supplied backing vocals on Reba McEntire’s 1995 Starting Over. Trisha Yearwood’s 1996 Everybody Knows earned her another #1 hit with “Believe Me, Baby (I Lied)”, a co-write with Gottlieb. Suzy Bogguss covered Richey’s co-write with Tia Sillers, “From Where I Stand”, on 1998’s Nobody Love, Nobody Gets Hurt. Yearwood covered a Richey co-write with Mary Chapin Carpenter, “Where Are You Now”, on her 2000 release Real Live Woman.
Richey’s flair for harmony and backing vocals make her a popular session singer. They are, she says, her favorite thing to do. She hears them like guitar parts she can’t play. It’s a gift Padgham recognized and encouraged her to explore on Glimmer: He made her put down her guitar and concentrate on the vocal parts playing in her head.
“I don’t play guitar all that well,” she says. “I’m a good rhythm player, but recording, I would hear melodies and stuff, counter-melodies to what was going on, and I couldn’t really play them on any other instrument. So on that record I got to do some vocal parts that were more like instrumental parts, rather than just singing like a third along with a lead vocal or something. It was more like singing parts than harmony.” The trick stuck, and she uses it all over Rise.
Singing has come naturally to Richey since childhood. “I always liked just singing all the time,” she says. “My mom [is] a really great singer. She has a beautiful voice. She was never a professional singer or anything, but she would always sing around the house and…some kind of music was always going, records or radio or whatever.
“Then I remember when I was a little kid, my sister and I shared a room. We had these twin beds angled out from the corner against each wall and I figured out that if I sang facing the wall, like real close to the wall, I could really hear myself, and I could sing really quietly. I would practice singing these songs over and over again because I thought I sounded like the person [on the record] when I really practiced it — until Mom finally would shut me down: ‘That’s about it for tonight, Kim. Thank you very much, I think you need to go to sleep now.'”
Richey’s childhood was rich with popular music, and her record collection was the envy of schoolmates. “My great aunt lived in McConnelsville, Ohio, where my Mom and Dad were from. It’s just a really, really tiny town, She had a record store that was in the bottom floor of an old house, and whenever we would come to visit, we got to pick 45s from her. The only one I can remember for sure was the Lovin’ Spoonful’s `Summer In The City’. I just had tons of them, anything from like Jackson Five to Neil Young. I remember I had a 45 of Janis Joplin’s ‘Me And Bobby McGee’. [They were] all over the map. I just loved to listen to records. That was something I did by myself mostly. I’d listen to all these records and then I would sing along.”
By the time she made her debut album, Richey also had a sizable collection of Nashville musician friends. They made a party of the whole affair. “I really like that record,” she says in retrospect. “I have a really fond place in my heart for it too, just because I love Richard Bennett so much and working with him was really great and he’s just a beautiful musician, too.
“The guys that played on the record were guys I’d known for a couple of years that had played on demos that I’d been doing before I got a record deal. Most of them had already played all these songs, so a lot of the first record went down live. It was a really great atmosphere, too. We brought a lot of stuff from home. I have a bunch of folk art and we decorated the studio, and then other people would drop by and they’d say, ‘Oh I’ve got something that you need to have in here,’ and pretty soon it just got to be like a clubhouse or something. It wasn’t so fun tearing it all down at the end, but I just had the best time making that record.”
After drawing from the Nashville well again for Bitter Sweet, Richey was ready to try something new with Glimmer. “I really needed to get totally out of Nashville and what I’d been doing,” she says. “I just wanted to shake myself up, so I worked with a bunch of people I’d never worked with, recorded some in London, some in New York. It was good.”
Hugh Padgham produced the heck out of it all, loading it with keyboards, programmed percussion and an overall synthesized texture, and stocking it with so many players the liner notes require a grid for the credits. Glimmer is an apt title for its production sheen.
Richey thinks her traditional audience was put off by it. “People don’t like you to change so much, and I think that’s a natural process to change when you’re exposed to different types of music, different people,” she says.
Richey adds, though, that “I’m really fond of the songs that are on that record. They were just like really personal songs, things that were going on with me at the time.” The standout tracks are two songs Richey wrote on her own: “Hello, Friend”, a genial, wry and slightly scarred response to that phone call you know will come (“And is it me?/Or are you lonely?/Well, aren’t we all?”); and “Long Way Back”, when that phone call doesn’t begin to be enough (“the cold, hard facts make for a heavy load”).
Richey’s sojourn in California to record Rise was something of a return to the live ambiance that sparked her debut, but she brought to the project an attitude of openness that seemed to have worked for her on Glimmer. Not only was much of Rise recorded live, most of the songs were written or finished on the spot.