Tim O’Brien – Time After Time
Meanwhile, O’Brien had assembled the O’Boys (Scott Nygaard and Mark Schatz) to back up his original material. The trio’s flexibility freed him to play different instruments, be it guitar, mandolin, fiddle or bouzouki. “It’s a band, but it’s so much more open than a normal band,” he says. “They can go from a whisper to a roar in a moment’s notice. It’s almost a spiritual thing: ‘Let’s take a breath, put the pick on a string and see where we go.'”
The O’Boys’ initial sets formed the basis for O’Brien’s first Sugar Hill solo outing, Odd Man In, and he worked with them again on Oh Boy! O’Boy!, which featured the newgrass number “Church Steeple” and a duet with Del McCoury on Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. This cut portended a more ambitious project: Three years later, O’Brien recorded Red On Blonde, an album of Dylan covers.
His interpretations breathed new life into both classic and obscure selections from the Dylan songbook. On “Wicked Messenger”, the original bass line transforms into a Bill Monroe mandolin riff. O’Brien’s string-band treatments of “Tombstone Blues”, “Farewell Angelina” and “Maggie’s Farm” brought out the contours of Dylan’s poetry and, as O’Brien explains in the liner notes, served “to separate the songs from the enigma.”
O’Brien says Sugar Hill was wary about releasing Red On Blonde. The label needn’t have worried; the album was nominated for a Grammy in 1996 and went to No. 1 on the Gavin Americana charts.
O’Brien celebrated the intersection of Irish and American music on The Crossing (Alula Records), an album about “going the other direction and seeing where you’re from.” O’Brien traced his roots to County Cavan; Irish music also informed his American musical heritage, as immigrants settled in the Appalachian mountains and carried with them old-time and fiddle styles he loves.
“It seems to me if you hear any kind of ethnic music, there’s a blue quality, a keening sound,” he says. “That’s what I like about mountain music; it’s kind of otherworldy and down in the root of things.”
For the project, he enlisted fellow Irish and bluegrass heavyweights including Paul Brady, Edgar Meyer, Altan, Del McCoury, Earl Scruggs, Seamus Egan and Darrell Scott. They add their loving touches to both the traditional numbers — “Wagoner’s Lad” and “Ireland’s Green Shore” are resurrected from public domain — and new originals including “John Riley”, which O’Brien co-wrote with Guy Clark.
Although O’Brien’s music has constantly defied the kind of categorization that’s usually a necessity for commercial success, he’s done quite well for himself. In addition to the Kathy Mattea hit, O’Brien’s “When No One’s Around” (co-written with Scott) landed on Garth Brooks’ multiplatinum album Sevens. Even on his own, in addition to several IBMAs and Grammy nominations, O’Brien’s Rock In My Shoe stayed atop on the Americana charts for six weeks. Yet he’s spent most of his recording life on small labels.
A brief liaison with RCA yielded nothing but frustration. In the wake of Nanci Griffith and Lyle Lovett’s successes on MCA, O’Brien signed as a solo artist to RCA in 1990, only to leave the label later the same year with no album to show for it. “RCA was a little different label than MCA,” O’Brien says. “They were more cautious. I gave them the album and they said, ‘What can we do with this?’ I felt like I’d compromised enough to get my stuff on country radio. I was mixing up the roots forms and coming up with my own style. But that’s not the place to do it. So I went my own way.”