Radney Foster

Radney Foster

YOU CAN GO YOUR OWN WAY

Radney Foster Blazes His Own Path on Another Way to Go
It may have been four years since country hit-maker Radney Foster released a studio album, but with his latest, Another Way to Go, he picks up right where he left off. A nice balance of the rambunctious and the thoughtful, this new batch of powerful original songs is both rich in content, as it charts Foster's response to the events of September 11th, and wildly exuberant in its more celebratory moments. From the time he and partner Bill Lloyd, as Foster & Lloyd, joined the vanguard of the New Traditionalist movement in the late '80s and throughout his solo career, Foster has evinced a command of hard country, honky-tonk, roots rock, and southern soul. All of those influences come to bear on Another Way to Go. . In an exclusive interview, Foster spoke with Barnes & Noble.com's David McGee about his new label, PureSpunk.com, as well as the personal turn his songwriting has taken in recent years and the stories behind some of Another Way to Go's most powerful songs.

Barnes & Noble.com: Are You Ready for the Big Show? was one of the best albums of 2001. But it was a live album -- So what were you doing during those four years? I can't imagine you were hurting for material.

Radney Foster: Yeah, I write about 25 or 30 songs a year, and that's been pretty consistent for about 20 years. So I was writing, but I spent a year in the legal mess of getting off of Arista. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Then it took about a year to get my thoughts and finances together to create my own label, and about that time Dan Harrington and Scott Robinson were creating Dualtone. They said, "Why don't you lease your records to us and we'll do all the marketing and promotion for you and you'll still own the masters?" That was talking my language, so we got geared up and made the live record, toured for a year or more doing that, and then turned around and made this record.

B&N.com: So how does your label, PureSpunk.com, fit into this whole scenario?

RF: It started off with our hopes of being a small record label and an online magazine, sort of a clearinghouse for finding roots music, alternative music, Americana, and a lot of those kinds of things. We're not a public company, but just sort of doing things in the basement on a really small level. But right about the time we were ready for the advertising to really kick in, the dot-com bubble burst, and it cut a lot of money that advertisers would have spent on the Net in half. So the online magazine side went by the wayside, but the production company and little record label has worked out well.... I'm making my own records and touring, having kids, and it seems I'm kind of busy. Trying to maintain a family life, juggling a lot of things.

B&N.com: Let me run a high-falutin' theory by you about your album. The album starts with "Real Fine Place to Start" and finishes with "Another Way to Go" -- the titles alone suggest a journey. In between, the songs suggest we need to appreciate the time we have, love the one you're with, not let anyone discourage you from pursuing your dreams and, on "Another Way to Go," even fight for your dream. Does any of this make sense to you?

RF: Oh, yeah! I think I've gotten to the age and the thought process where trying to write something that's other than what is germane to my own life doesn't make sense to me anymore. About five years ago my then-almost-six-year-old son moved to France with his mom, and that really made me cross a Rubicon in life, not just in songwriting. It affected everything about the way I toured, the way I thought about music, the way I thought about making records, the way I thought about family, the way I thought about how I had to be a dad. If I'm going to write something I'm going to write it from a heartfelt perspective. Not that I didn't before, but it got really re-emphasized in a really strong way and it made me [think that] going, "Gosh that's a cool hook, maybe I should write a song," is not as important as asking, "What am I trying to say here?"

B&N.com: Are you at all amazed by how something you wrote from personal experience could reach out and affect someone else in a profound way?

RF: I tell you, that's been the biggest compliment. You sell records and someone besides your mom and dad are listening to your music. That's a big start right there. To have an audience as loyal as mine is has been a real joy. In addition to that, every once in awhile I write something like "Everyday Angel" that's incredibly personal to me, and it begins to resonate with people all over the country, and you reach people you may never have expected to. And that's been true several times in my life, sometimes with something not near as poignant as "Everyday Angel." "Crazy Over You," there was nothing poignant about it, but it sure did make a lot of twentysomething college kids want to dance, and that sure did make 'em want to come out to our shows, buy our records, and do all the things that twentysomethings do. And that's very cool.

B&N.com: "Everyday Angel" is a good example of what you're talking about. I appreciate the way you approached the 9/11 portion of the song obliquely by putting it at the end. It addresses 9/11 without being specifically about 9/11. There are many different perceptions are about what that day meant. There are people who just love Toby Keith's "Angry American," while others feel Springsteen's approach is the proper response. But "Everyday Angel" goes a step further and reminds us that these everyday people have been around --

RF: All our lives. They come and they go from the time we're children to the time we hit the grave.

B&N.com: And you emphasize that beautifully by putting the verse about Dave, the fireman who responds to the call on 9/11 and never comes back, after verses about a woman who was on the front lines of the civil rights movement, the abused woman who was taken in by someone who appears to be your father --

RF: Yeah, all of the people in that song are real people.

B&N.com: And the song is a good reminder that there were a lot of people involved in the civil rights movement whose names we'll never know, because they weren't making headlines but quietly lending their souls and their bodies to the cause.

RF: Like a little grandmotherly woman named Laura McCray, who was an old woman who was terribly kind to me and my family during the hard time when my son moved overseas. A couple of years later she died. I went to the funeral and there were hundreds of people there -- congressmen, civil rights leaders. It was astounding the number of people she touched. I had no idea that this sweet little woman had stood in the barricades in order to have the right to vote. So that is obviously the first verse of "Everyday Angel." The second verse is about a woman my dad represented. He was a lawyer in a small town in Texas. She had no place to turn. It was a messy, messy situation, and she came to live with us for six months. I didn't think anything about it when I was 12, but now I look back and think, What a huge sacrifice. And then I had two friends who were in the World Trade Center who are alive and well because of guys like Dave Fontana, the man I wrote the last verse of "Everyday Angel" about. Dave lived down the street in Brooklyn from a good friend of mine who lives in Park Slope. He worked at Rescue Squad 1, right across the bridge from the World Trade Center, and my friend knew him from the neighborhood. September 11th had been his anniversary, and he had worked a double shift the day before so he could have his anniversary off. It gets to the shift change, the alarms go off, he gets on the truck and never comes back. That's one of dozens of stories I heard from my friends when I went to New York [after Christmas last year].

B&N.com: How's the response been to "Everyday Angel"?

RF: Oh, gosh, I'm getting emails. DJs have been telling me the phones light up like crazy when they play the song. The neatest thing for me is that a lot of the emails that have come to the web site have said, "Thank you for writing the song not just for September 11th but for recognizing that there's a lot of everyday angels around us, and that they're people." And they begin to tell me the story of their grandmother, their pastor, their sister.

B&N.com: There's another song on the album that is not explicitly or maybe even implicitly about 9/11, but it evokes the temper of the times -- the one you wrote with Harlan Howard, "Scary Old World," which was Harlan's last song. It's about sticking close to the one who loves you, especially when the world outside gets, as the title says, scary.

RF: That's exactly what we were thinking of. We were just sitting there drinking coffee and shooting the breeze and trying to figure out if this conversation's going to go anywhere toward writing a song or if we were just going to go over to the Longhorn and have lunch and drink White Russians, which is what he loved to do too. This was in November, December last year, and I had not seen him since 9/11. He said, "I heard you were on a plane..." I had been flying that day, so I told him the story, and he said, "Woo. Scary old world." And I said, "All right, here we go, Harlan!" We were off and running, and the first verse fell out in about 30 seconds. I think I said, "Baby, it's a scary old world," and he said, "Sometimes it's hard to tell who's really your friend." And that's the way it went -- you couldn't write it down fast enough.

B&N.com: On a lighter note, I like the way you channeled the Stones and a bit of Memphis soul on "What It Is That You Do." Nice change of pace.

RF: [laughs] Well, there's always been an R&B element to what I've done. I think it just came more to the forefront on three or four tracks. Part of the joy of being able to make the record you want and not having a major label looking over your shoulder is to be able to say, "Hey, you know what? This is a really loose, cool track and we're not going to tighten up nothin' and we're going to hire a horn section and let 'em come in and do their thing." It was fun to do.

B&N.com: What's the process like for you, from the time you write a song to casting it in the studio? For instance, did you always hear "What It Is That You Do" sounding like it does on the record?

RF: Yes, but not until after I'd finished writing it. "What It Is That You Do" I wrote with Darrell Brown, and he plays guitar and piano on it. I was in a Keith Richards tuning and had sort of this little idea going, and [Darrell] was playing the piano and pounding a hard backbeat and that set the tone. From the moment we set it down on tape with just piano and guitar after we'd written it, I said, "I know exactly which way I want this to go."

September 24, 2002