Kim Richey – Voices carry
“What happened with this group of people is that when we recorded at Bill Bottrell’s studio near Mendocino, we ended up writing a lot of songs. I really hadn’t planned on doing [that] because I’d gathered a bunch of songs over the last couple of years since the last record came out. I didn’t really know Bill all that well. I’d met [him] and the bass player, Birdie [Michael Hansen], just one other time when I’d gone up there, and I didn’t know Brian [MacLeod], the drummer; he was a friend of Bill’s. But once we got up there and we started writing some songs, it was really a good, lucky matchup. It was fun for me writing in a band-type situation. That opened up a lot more options, because it wasn’t just me sitting and playing acoustic guitar so much.
They also tried to record the songs very soon after they’d been written, to try to capture the spontaneity of a demo recording. “A demo has more energy to it, and I think it’s because people aren’t so familiar with the song; you’re just a little bit more aware of what’s going on and maybe try things that you wouldn’t once you’ve been playing it for a long time and have gotten comfortable with playing it a certain way. A lot of times when you’ve gone back on the record to try to repeat the demo, you just can’t capture it to produce it on a record,” Richey observes. “This time, sometimes we would write the song and record it the same day or the next day, so it really has that kind of feel to it, the feel that I really love from demos.”
She cites as an example the seductive, improbably bluegrass-inflected jungle-boogie “No Judges”. “I think ‘No Judges’ we pretty much wrote and recorded the same day. I had walked into the studio and Brian and Bill were already [there]. Brian was messing around on drums and Bill was playing this bazouki thing and it sounded really cool. And I remember I walked by and said, ‘Hey, that sounds cool, guys,’ and went on into the kitchen and made some coffee. Then I was walking back through and humming some melody that went with what they were doing, and Bill says, ‘Hey, I like that melody.’…When we’d gotten as far as we thought we could with it, we went in and started recording and just finished it up in one day.”
Similarly inspired was the Richey / Bottrell / Macleod / Hansen co-write (of which there are many) “Without You”, an almost trippily romantic litany of fantasy (“Walked on Spanish beaches / Shook the petals from my hair”).
“That was one we started on a little omnichord thing, this weird little cheesy keyboard,” Richey says. “It’s all electric and it has these bad drumbeats in it. It was a bossa nova at the start, but it’s like an organ where you pick the beat. So we used all of that and added to it. And I love how Bill did the singing ladies on a keyboard, but they did sound like Sirens or something.”
It wasn’t just the music that benefited from such openness and experimentation. In the case of “The Circus Song (Can’t Let Go)”, Richey discovered an entire lyric in an incidentally sampled pencil sharpener. The team had gone home after composing an entire song without coming up with word one, but then: “Birdie lived at the studio, so I guess he got bored at night and put this little piano part on it,” Richey says. “He had the track up and broke a pencil and when he went to sharpen it and heard that pencil sharpener, he said ‘Ooh, that sounds good.’ So he sampled that and put it on the track, too. For some reason when I heard that, I said ‘I know what this song is! This is some kind of circus song!’ Because that little piano thing sounded kind of circusy but kind of weird in a way.
“I had this idea for a lyric. I was gonna use it in another song, but it ended up not being about that, so that’s where we started from.” The result was a haunting and sultry discourse on a penchant for being the first in line to get ripped off for an illusion.
The whole team ranged freely over their inspirations, writing, composing and recording whatever was in the air: the cool, cocktail jazz “Reel Me In”; the amazing “Cowards In A Brave New World”, which sounds like Handsome Family “countronica” played by the Gourds on downers.
A couple of West Coast singer-songwriters further expanded Richey’s range of collaborators on Rise. Pete Droge traveled down from Seattle, singing melody to Richey’s harmony on the psychedelia-themed co-write “Electric Green”. San Francisco’s Chuck Prophet co-wrote and contributed vocals to the most traditionally structured song on the record, “This Love”, colored with a banjo and featuring a brilliant bass hook.
The band stands back a bit on “A Place Called Home”, a co-write with Mike Henderson that Richey brought with her from Nashville. It’s a powerful heartbreaker on its own, and the players treat it with tasteful understatement. The song is written from the point of view of a homeless drifter: “I started out a crazy kid/Miracle I made it through the things I did…I had a chance to settle down/Get a job and live in town/Work in some old factory/I never liked a foreman standin’ over me.”
The chorus would fit in a Natalie Merchant song, and it highlights the kind of counter-melody singing Richey honed with Padgham. “I couldn’t listen to it for a little while after we recorded it because it was so sad to me, because I really got into singing it,” Richey says. “I almost got choked up on the la-la part, and then Bill put some harmonica over it, and I’ve kinda gotten more used to it. It just sounded so sad to me.”
That’s the thing about Richey’s voice. Whatever she’s singing, she’s into it. The sentiment is honest, the phrasing spot on. And it’s beautiful. Which brings us to perhaps the most important difference between Rise and her earlier releases: Rise features the most intimate vocals Richey has ever recorded. And Bottrell puts them right up to your ears where they belong — just as if you were the bedroom wall of her childhood.
ND contributing editor and church choir member Linda Ray’s father used to sing around the house. She was mortified, though, whenever he let loose in the grocery store.