Tim O’Brien – Time After Time
Although he might not have known it at the time, the RCA experience primed O’Brien to start his own label a decade later. “You have to have a solid sense of yourself,” he explained. “You have to answer to a lot of different things and if you don’t know the answers to the questions, it’s nerve-wracking and you become faceless and go with a lot of people who are giving you directions that aren’t good for you.”
After extended stints on Flying Fish and Sugar Hill, O’Brien released Songs From The Mountain in 1999 and Real Time in April on Howdy Skies. O’Brien and his wife, Kit Swingle, started the label at the urging of collaborator Dirk Powell, largely because no other imprint showed interest in releasing Songs From The Mountain, an album based on Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier’s best-selling novel about North Carolina mountain culture during the Civil War.
“A couple of indies said, ‘Huh? We’ll get back to you,'” O’Brien recalls. “They didn’t understand.” The album — a collaboration between O’Brien, Powell and John Herrmann — features several originals, traditional fiddle tunes, rousing waltzes, and hymns that the area’s Scotch-Irish immigrants brought with them in the late 1700s.
After finishing the record, O’Brien and his cohorts had to scale a legal mountain to get it in stores. Although Frazier fully supported the recording project, the rights to the novel had been sold to MGM-UA for a motion picture (Miramax has since become a partner in the film, currently to be written and directed by Anthony Minghella of The English Patient fame). The lawyers said Howdy Skies couldn’t use the book title on the CD cover, although O’Brien and Powell could list it in the liner notes. Then the disc could only be sold as a package with the paperback edition of the novel, which meant the folks who’d purchased the hardback had to re-buy the book to get the album (5,000 of those were sold). Eventually, the disc became available separately, but the distributor ran into problems and couldn’t fill orders.
To further complicate matters, O’Brien has a limited time to sell through the second pressing of Songs From The Mountain — presently through the end of 2001 — because the film’s producers don’t want to confuse the soundtrack-buying public. The movie originally was slated for release in early 2001, but the screenplay has yet to be written. The earliest it could be filmed, Swingle says, would be the fall of 2001, and O’Brien, Powell and Herrmann’s hopes to write the soundtrack remain in limbo. Swingle said Howdy Skies’ lawyers are asking an extension on the availability of Songs From The Mountain for a year or two longer.
While his 20-year career has earned him bin space in retail stores, O’Brien will also put out some Internet-only releases through the label’s website (www.howdyskies.com). “With the Internet, it’s good to grab control these days,” he explains. “Basically I think I know better what I’m good at doing and not. That’s what makes me confident that I can sell some records.”
In true O’Brien form, since traditional bluegrass albums are in vogue, he’ll do the opposite, delving into his Irish roots with a follow-up to The Crossing and continue culling from the Dylan archives for a sequel to Red On Blonde. Also in the vaults are live recordings from the Flatheads, his bluegrass band with comrades Jerry Douglas, Jeff White, Charlie Cushman and Mark Schatz.
Amidst all the these divergent projects, O’Brien hasn’t released a proper album of his own since 1997’s much-lauded When No One’s Around. “I need to make a real solo record,” he acknowledges. “I’m going to try to synthesize different elements — old time, bluegrass, blues and country music. I haven’t really done that since Rock In My Shoe.”
If O’Brien’s life were a song, the verses would be his musical tangents — swing, bluegrass , Irish, folk, even the honky-tonk experiments with Red Knuckles — that O’Brien has unreeled like a fisherman casts a line. The chorus, the irresistible riff he always returns to, is his love of traditional music, regardless of genre.
“I’m trying to make traditional music real for people of this day and age,” he says. “The idea of being original is not only bothersome, it’s beside the point. I think music is meant to be part of a certain line and it’s meant to bring people back to the ground.”
Lisa Sorg writes about music in Bloomington, Indiana.