Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion – Gathering stones together
When Irion arrived in Los Angeles in the fall of 1997, Guthrie was already there, also on Robinson’s advice. They had met the previous summer when Guthrie was tour-managing her father on the Furthur Festival, headlined by the Black Crowes. Guthrie made friends with Robinson and others on the tour, and also wanted to act. So she made the move to Los Angeles, scoring a part in 1998’s Bulworth as the daughter of Warren Beatty’s U.S. Senator character.
“Yeah, I wanted to be an actress,” Guthrie says. “That was my thing. I was in theater until I was 12, when I went into an ashram for the rest of my schooling. So I kinda forgot about it for a few years, and then I met Warren Beatty and got that part in Bulworth. It was pretty small — they talk about my character more than you actually see her — but that inspired me to go for it again: ‘Gosh, I know Warren Beatty, I should do something.’ I still want to be an actress, someday. But I get a lot of that from performing music, too.”
When they first met, Irion found Guthrie’s folkie lineage more impressive than Guthrie herself did. But it wasn’t long before they were singing together, and Guthrie started adapting some of her poems into songs. By the time they married in 1999 and moved to South Carolina, Sarah Lee and Johnny were rising stars on the folk festival circuit.
They made separate solo albums in 2001, but each was a major presence on the other’s record. A duo album was the logical next step. Exploration features three co-writes and the Pete Seeger cover, plus two songs by just her and six by just him. That proportion won’t surprise anybody who knows Irion and his work habits.
“Johnny is one of those guys who wakes up going, ‘I’ve gotta write a song!'” says Louris. “He makes me feel lazy, he’s just so hungry to write every single day. That pushes Sarah Lee, and it’s also been inspiring to me.”
Indeed, sometimes Irion and Guthrie bump up against each other where songwriting is concerned. Since they live together and hear each other’s songs while they’re still in utero, sometimes the temptation to finish a song the other is working on is just too great.
“The songs I write are usually just me,” Guthrie says, “because I tend to be stubborn about it — ‘This is how it goes, don’t try and change it!’ Which he usually does, but we work it out and usually get back to what I started with in the first place. That’s all part of it.
“Johnny’s much more open to allowing me to change things in his songs. And the ones we write together, we really do. ‘Cease Fire’, we wrote in the car together and that’s just exactly the way it came out.
“‘Swing Of Things’ is an interesting story,” she continues. “He was singing that chorus for a long time and I really liked it. I had my part all figured out and I asked him, ‘Would you just go ahead and finish that one already?’ Finally I told him, ‘I wrote some verses for your song.’ ‘So did I.’ ‘Oh, you did? Well, I’ve got a bridge.’ ‘So do I.’ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s compare notes.’
“We sat down at the dinner table that night, and I was about eight months pregnant. Turned out I could sing my verses, he could sing his verses, and my bridge and his bridge fit together perfectly, where I could sing my part over what he’d written.
“I’ll never forget that,” she concludes with a laugh, “especially since a skunk sprayed the house later that night.”
The title track, “Exploration”, part protest ballad and part space-rock song, is all Irion’s. He wrote it in a rush not long after pre-production wrapped up, so it arrived just in the nick of time.
“I remember playing it at the piano after Sarah Lee had gone up to bed,” Irion says. “It happened in about an hour, just boom boom boom, and we never even made a demo of it. The version on the record was like the third live take in the studio.”
“It was exactly what we needed,” Guthrie adds. “I don’t know what we would have done without it for this record. I came down stairs the next morning and he sang it, and it was so perfect. It was beautiful and had an edge, so original and genre-less, and it’s got that message: ‘Lookin’ out our door at the downtrodden for sure, but they ain’t in their neck of the woods.’ It’s a great song to sing, especially for some of the folks we sing for in places like Washington, D.C. I don’t want to get all ‘preachy teachy,’ as Pete says, but it definitely makes you think.”
The other notable message song on Exploration is “Dr. King”, a previously unrecorded tune by Pete Seeger. Guthrie has always had a special relationship with Seeger, who served as her honorary grandfather in place of Woody (who died twelve years before she was born). “Dr. King” connects the dots between resistance to the civil rights movement and fallout from September 11, finding a common denominator in both: fear.
Irion and Guthrie first heard “Dr. King” at a festival a few years back, when they were summoned to come sing a new song Seeger had just written. “First of all, we were thinking, ‘Whoa, Pete has a new song,'” Guthrie recalls. “He hasn’t really written that many songs so much as sung songs by other people, and he hasn’t written too many recently. After we heard it, Johnny told Pete he really liked that song and he wanted to do it.”
“Pete told he me was hoping somebody would take that song and do something with it, after he put it out there for everybody,” Irion says.
“So Pete wrote out the music and the words for us to use,” Guthrie continues. “He said he’d been working on it a really long time, and finished it right after 9-11. We were scared, believe me, because we changed it up pretty drastically. Johnny sat down at the piano and drug it through what Pete calls ‘the folk process.’ But Pete really likes to see young people singing. He thinks it’s inspiring.
“So the last time we were at Carnegie Hall with his grandson Tao, we played our version of ‘Dr. King’ for him. He said he was honored, which made me just go, ‘Wow, Pete’s honored. Crazy!'”
The first time ND contributing editor David Menconi typed Johnny Irion’s name in the Raleigh News & Observer was 1993. He has profound admiration for anyone who makes parenthood look as easy as Irion and Sarah Lee Guthrie do.