The Flatlanders

The Flatlanders

FULL CIRCLE
After a 30-Year Hiatus, the Flatlanders Reconvene on Now Again
"I'm out in the middle of nowhere!" shouts a husky voice over the telephone line, the connection crackling. What better setting for an interview with Joe Ely, who rang Barnes & Noble.com's David McGee while touring America with his West Texas compadres Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock as the Flatlanders. As Ely describes the process by which the three singer-songwriters came to release Now Again, the first Flatlanders album in 30 years, his voice is occasionally wiped out by the whoosh of a passing 18-wheeler or the rumble of a freight train's boxcars. But the colorful ambience only echoed the warm heartland sound of Ely and friends' latest creation. As usual, Ely -- who also produced the new disc -- was thoughtful, articulate, and funny in describing the rigorous process of putting the Flatlanders back on record, an event sparked in part by their 1998 reunion on a track for the Robert Redford film The Horse Whisperer. Their long-awaited return has proven to be well worth the arduous wait.

Barnes & Noble.com: It's been 30 years since the Flatlanders released an album, though you, Jimmie, and Butch have played together over the years and more recently toured as the Flatlanders. What made the time ripe for an album?

Joe Ely: There was something that seemed to just tell us it was time. You know, we'd always written songs for each other and other people recorded them, but we had never really sat down and wrote songs for us. And once we did, it started a ball rolling and it became kind of like necessary. So we would actually take time out from our individual schedules and get together and do more of it. We didn't plan on making a record; we got together to write and to see what songs came out. And the first time we got together we wrote three songs, and the next time we wrote two or three more, and then we took a week out and wrote five or six. We recorded about 25 songs, and in time it started looking like there might be a record hiding in there somewhere. But we never actually considered it as recording for a record; we always considered it as recording for ourselves. For a couple of years we worked at it like that. In the last, oh, six months we really started seeing a record coming together, so we really focused on that.

B&N.com: So the recording of Now Again was spread out not over a period of months, but over years? That's hardly the usual time frame.

JE: No, it's not, but for us it was perfectly natural because that's the way we worked -- we worked in spurts at different times. It covered a lot of territory, but it also evolved and changed, and we actually went out on two different tours. And when we'd come back from the tour the songs would have changed because we'd played 'em on stage. [So] some of the stuff we first laid down we re-recorded because it started taking on a life of its own after we started playing it for audiences. There's very few people nowadays who go out and play their songs on the road for two years before they record 'em. We really learned a lesson: that when you're in front of an audience you really learn how to play the song.

B&N.com: You're credited as producer. How do you work with Jimmie and Butch in that capacity? What's the division of labor?

JE: They always look to me because I grew up in a band and they were solo folk singers. My whole job in this, I thought, was to feel what the mood was and try to catch it. Jimmie and Butch just know when something's right. I worked with getting the guitars in place and getting the overall feel. There were some songs that started out acoustic, and as it went on we realized they needed to have electric instruments. And then there was a lot of just taking things out. I took more out of this record than was put in, probably. Then some songs called for a little more. On "Right Where I Belong," Robbie Gjersoe came in and said, "Man, I've got this banjo. Let's put it on something." And I said, "I'll never put a banjo on a Flatlanders track." And he said, "How about a slide banjo?" And I said, "All right, let's put it on there." So he played slide banjo on that one song. I don't know if anybody's played slide banjo.

B&N.com: Whereas Jimmie dominated the first album, Now Again is more of a showcase for Butch Hancock.

JE: As we listened to the songs and [were working out] who should sing 'em and all, it was pretty apparent who should sing the songs, even though all three of us would try 'em. When we were starting to think about how to do this, we realized that the first record was really a Jimmie record because the producer wanted to do a country album and he wanted Jimmie to be like a hillbilly singer. Jimmie said he didn't want this one to be a Jimmie Dale and the Flatlanders album, because we had all gone on in the past 30 years and made our own recordings. So we really took a listen to who should sing the songs. It was obvious that Jimmie should sing "My Wildest Dreams Grow Wilder Every Day," "Wavin' My Heart Goodbye," the Utah Phillips song ["Going Away"], and "Down on Filbert's Rise," which we wrote during the Horse Whisperer time. Jimmie had more of the honky-tonk stuff, Butch had more of the esoteric wordplay, and I felt more comfortable with a rockin' song. [On] the ones we all sang together we tried to use our voices like instruments -- almost like an orchestra would change instruments for the chorus, we would swap out, somebody else would sing the lead, and the others would take over the harmony part.

Really, when I play it now, it sounds like it must have been an easy record, but it really was one of the most difficult things I've ever worked on as far as figuring out what parts should go where. We had never harmonized much before, so actually figuring out the harmonies took a lot of time -- it didn't come natural. Our voices are all different. I had never really heard Butch and Jimmie sing a harmony part before, together.

B&N.com: So were the songs true collaborations? Because I hear a Butch song, a Jimmie song, a Joe Ely song...

JE: They were true collaborations.

B&N.com: "Yesterday Was Judgment Day" sounds so much like a Butch song, but then there's the line about "the riddle of the road without a middle or an end," and that threw me because it sounds so much like a Jimmie Dale line.

JE: Well, that's kinda the way it worked. I think the first line might've come from Butch, and the "riddle" verse might've come from Jimmie. Each song had little pieces that were from each of us, but then combined we actually worked on each verse line by line. We wouldn't move on to the next part of it until we got each line.

B&N.com: Really, you crafted the songs that carefully?

JE: It was one line at a time, and sometimes a line would take an hour or two.

B&N.com: For each song?

JE: For each song. Like "Down in the Light of the Melon Moon" -- I had started a song at one time about a guy carving a name in a tree, kind of a mystery ballad, and we got to talking about a friend of ours who had seen UFOs out at the airport in Lubbock and had kinda lost it after that, was never the same. And then we thought about his girlfriend and this whole unsolved mystery that she was, and so the whole thing just kinda came about. It started with one line, "Woody walked out into the cotton field," and then we just looked at each other like, "Okay, what did he do then?" So each song was one line at a time.

B&N.com: That's an arduous process, it seems.

JE: Well, it is, but when the three of us are together we love to untangle the mystery.

July 17, 2002