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Stolen Moments

Nashville songwriter John Hiatt takes time out to record a solid, all-acoustic album

by Simone Solondz

December 2000, Acoustic Guitar magazine, No. 96

Photo by Simone Solondz

If you’ve turned on your radio at all in recent months, you’ve probably heard the music of singer-songwriter John Hiatt. That Eric Clapton/B.B. King duet, "Riding with the King," is Hiatt’s song. He’s been consistently churning out quality roots rock since moving to Nashville at 18 in 1970. His upbeat foot-stompers and sweetly crooned ballads have been covered by everyone from Bonnie Raitt ("Thing Called Love") to the Neville Brothers ("Washable Ink"), and he’s had his share of success performing his own musical stories as well. After a move to L.A. in 1978, he made five critically acclaimed (but commercially unsuccessful) rock records for MCA and Geffen, and he also toured as part of Ry Cooder’s band.

Roots music fans began to take notice in 1987, when Hiatt released Bring the Family, a pared-down collection of mostly love songs he recorded in three or four days with the help of Cooder, Nick Lowe, and Jim Keltner, among others, after getting axed by Geffen in 1985. He followed that album up with the equally strong rock ’n’ roll record Slow Turning, but label commitments prevented him from recording an entirely acoustic project until now. After being released from his Capitol contract earlier this year, Hiatt found himself in the role of free agent. Vanguard Records and MP3-based Internet company Emusic expressed interest in jointly releasing an all-acoustic Hiatt collection (on CD and downloadable digital files), and Crossing Muddy Waters was off and running.

Hiatt also hosted PBS television’s late-night music series Sessions at West 54th this year and is currently in the midst of an acoustic tour. He’s been collaborating on stage and in the studio with slide guitar wizard Sonny Landreth and his band the Goners (David Ranson on bass and Ken Blevins on drums). I caught up with Hiatt in late July after a rousing set with the Goners at the Fat Fry festival in Santa Cruz, California.

What got you in the mood to do an acoustic record?

HIATT: Well, we were making a rock ’n’ roll record last summer with [Sonny Landreth and] the Goners and we got into a situation with Capitol Records where they weren’t quite digging it as much as we were digging it [laughs]. So that put that record on hold and threw us into this process of trying to get out of [our commitments at] Capitol and take that record with us when we went, which was a little tricky. We finally achieved that in January and I became a free agent, for lack of a better term, for the first time in 13 years. My manager called me up one day and said, "Hey, you want to make an acoustic record?" And I said, "Whoa, I’ve always wanted to do that." And he said, "Well, Emusic would love to do something, and Vanguard Records would love to do something. You can own the master and they’ll put it out."

I got back together with Dave Immerglück, who played on Walk On, and also Davey Faragher, who played bass with me for about five or six years. I had all these songs, a bunch of new stuff and some older songs that I’d always wanted to put on a record and was never able to. It was like Bring the Family in that regard. That happened under similar circumstances. I was between labels, and a small company put up the money to make a little record, which we made in the same amount of time—three or four days. It seems to be a good amount of time for me.

I hear you recorded the new one sitting in a circle in Justin Niebank’s basement studio in Nashville.

HIATT: Yeah, all live. Live vocals, live performances. Dave Immerglück, Davey Faragher, and I just had a kind of communication, musically. There wasn’t really any rehearsing. I would play them the song once and they’d get a little feel going, and we’d go, "Right, roll it" and do a performance.

Who was the producer?

HIATT: Aha! There was none. We just decided to leave that off. We couldn’t figure out who was the culprit, so we all took the blame.

And it’s material you wrote on guitar?

HIATT: Yeah, I write most stuff on acoustic guitar. Every once in a while I’ll write a song on electric. But acoustic guitar is my main instrument--has been since I was a kid. Most of the songs are new, with the exception of "Lincoln Town"; the title track, "Crossing Muddy Waters"; and "Only the Song Survives," which are all about five years old. Everything else is new.

Did Dave Immerglück and Davey Faragher come up with their own parts for the arrangements?

HIATT: Oh yeah. We developed a sort of language among ourselves. Our approach is really instinctual. I’d start playing a song, and Dave would start playing a rhythm that would embellish what I was doing on acoustic. And Davey would always have the groove down at the low end. Davey also played stomp board. We miked his foot and let that be the percussion.

Metal folding chair was also listed as an instrument in the liner notes.

HIATT: He hit a metal folding chair on a couple of songs for a little backbeat. The only overdubs were metal folding chair and the harmony vocals. Everything else was live. Very hi-tech. This was actually my first digital recording. I’ve been a tape guy all my life. But Justin Niebank, the engineer, talked me into recording on this Atari hard-disk system that he’s quite fond of. It’s a 24-track, 24-bit, hard-disk recorder.

Can you hear the difference from the analog?

HIATT: The only thing missing is the tape compression you can get on analog, but you can do other kinds of compression to make up for it. I think it sounds really good. I was kind of surprised. I never thought I’d hear a multitrack digital machine that I thought sounded right. I think they’re getting it figured out.

I saw that you’re playing harmonium on the record as well as guitar.

HIATT: Yeah, the harmonium is the low-end droney stuff. When we were recording, we kind of visualized the sound. When we’re talking about what we’re doing, we don’t say, you know, "Play a B-flat in the third bar of section 32." We don’t know about that stuff, so we just draw pictures for each other. We imagined ourselves on the porch making this record. We felt like it was a real back porch sound, the wood, stomping on those boards you have on back porches. We imagined that the door was open and there was just a screen door and there was a thin-lipped, Presbyterian woman who was the wife of one of the guys playing on the porch. We were out there carrying on, and every once in a while she’d hear something she wanted to join in on, so she’d bring out her little church harmonium and jam with us, as it were.

Where did you first come across a harmonium?

HIATT: I think the first time I ever used one on a record was Stolen Moments with Glyn Johns [producing]. He brought one, and we used it on "Real Fine Love." It’s a little keyboard and a squeeze-box, sort of a sit-down accordion. You play the keyboard with one hand and keep moving the squeezer back and forth with the other. It’s perfect for me because I’m not much of a keyboard player anyway. One hand is plenty! But it’s got a neat sound. It’s kind of a cross between an old pump organ, bagpipes, and an accordion. It can sound really sad, and I like that about it.

Are you still playing guitar mostly in standard tuning?

HIATT: Pretty much standard. I always tell myself that I’m going to sit down and do some tuning. I’ve actually written a couple of songs in tunings, but I haven’t recorded them. Maybe I’ll drop a D. I’ve got a tuning I use a lot where I drop the G down to E. It takes the third out of the chord and leaves a drone in the middle. It’s the "Drive South" tuning. It’s good on bluesy kinds of things. It gives you just ones and fives, so it’s kind of mean [laughs].

How do you go about writing a song?

HIATT: It’s almost always sitting down with an acoustic guitar and just strumming. The songs are in the acoustic guitar, I think. I’ll play like a three-fingered C chord, where you don’t play the G in the bass, and that sounds one way. And then you’ll have a G in the bass and that sounds another way. I mean, I only play three chords, for God’s sake! That’s about all I know. So I just put two or three chords together, and a certain key will bring about a certain kind of feel. Putting a capo on the guitar makes magical things happen--moving it up and down the neck, playing the same fingerings up the neck.

Photo by Simone Solondz

So you get in a mood and you start to hear a melody?

HIATT: Yeah, I’ll start playing a chord progression and then I’ll start singing to it, or moaning or wailing or mumbling. The chords come first, the feeling that comes out of the guitar, and then the melody. The lyrics are the last thing for me, almost every time. The melody and the chords seem to suggest something, and something will pop out of my mouth.

Do you write down a lot of lines and then edit what you have?