A Conversation with Radney Foster – HuffPost 8.27.12

Mike Ragogna: Radney Foster! How’re you doing?

Radney Foster: Hey Mike, how are you? It’s great to hear your voice again.

MR: Yours too, sir. Let’s first talk about your first solo album, Del Rio, Texas, from 1992. It really resonated when it was released, and it featured many hits and classic tracks. It was autobiographical, wasn’t it?

RF: Absolutely. I just wrote what I knew and unfortunately, I was in a tumultuous marriage and I wrote about life. I thank the guys who were my mentors in addition to Bill Lloyd. Bill was a great mentor and partner. But, you know, I loved Guy Clark and Rodney Crowell. Those guys really wrote about where they were from and from life experiences. Even when they were making things up, you knew that they were throwing things in there that had to be real. I think one of the reasons why that was such a successful record, and I think one of the reasons it stood the test of time? I still have requests for those songs night after night because I wrote them from that perspective.

MR: Right, the personal material always resonates. Now, you are still a touring musician.

RF: I am.

MR: How often do you get out there?

RF: I still probably do about 75 gigs a year.

MR: Nice. Where mostly?

RF: I would say half are in Texas. The other half are in Seattle and London. There is travel time now and again.

MR: They do love their country music in Britain.

RF: They do indeed. I play over there about every 18 months. I go play the UK and the rest of Europe as well.

MR: Okay, we’re celebrating your 20th Anniversary of Del Rio, Texas, with a kind of new take on the same material. Of course, they both feature songs such as “Easier Said Than Done,” “Just Call Me,” and “Nobody Wins.” Radney, what is the most revealing song on this album?

RF: I think there are two. One is “Easier Said Than Done.” It was a big hit for me. It is about breaking trust in a relationship and I had unfortunately done that. I think with the lyrics, at the time, I would have denied them, saying that I had made them up out of thin air. There was a great deal of personal experience in there. I remember having a journalist, after an interview, ask me, “What do you do to rebuild after you’ve obviously crushed this person?” I was like, “Wow, how did you know?” I’m in a different relationship now and I still feel the pain of that song. I can remember what it was like to write that song. I know that was very revealing of me.

The other one is really “Old Silver,” which is written in the style of an Irish murder ballad, inspired by the death of my grandfather. He was a great raconteur, cowboy, and storyteller, and he could certainly keep kids around a campfire on top of a hill on a ranch entertained for hours with stories. I really wrote that from that perspective and created sort of the drama of a sidekick and a woman who’s the lover of Old Silver, and the side kick has always been in love with her, too. I made a little western movie out of it. I was taking my cues from the stories of my grandfather and my love for Irish music.

MR: Okay, now, let’s go to Del Rio, Texas, from 2012. It’s many years later, this album’s 20th anniversary. To me, this is like Radney Foster looking at his life the way it was back then, now visiting it from the perspective of your older self. Am I getting it right, is that what’s going on with this album?

RF: Absolutely. One of the things I wanted to do is honor the 20th anniversary of that record. It was the biggest country record I ever made and, arguably, the best country record I ever made. Also, I had so much trouble…it was out of print for years. I had to fight to put it on iTunes. I heard that people would try to recreate lightening in a bottle and do their records and make some profit at least the same way they did them before. But they just laid there like a dead fish.

MR: Yeah, and that’s something you’re not doing here.

RF: There wasn’t anything fresh about them. I started thinking about ways to make it fresh. One way was to make a live record and do sort of an unplugged, different themed record. My friend, Steve Fishell has the Music Producers Institute. He has bands and fans that come in and see people who actually record real records. I did it in Austin unplugged with bluegrass players in several different musical traditions, did it all live in the room with no headphones. You can’t really replace anything because the fiddle parts are in the acoustic guitar parts, which are in my vocal parts because you are right there in one circle. So we had a live audience and an unplugged sort of thing. It really came together really well.

MR: More and more, there are stories of artists getting back to recording that way. For many, it can be a more inspired approach compared to layering and pitch-correcting. And this version of Del Rio, Texas, reads that much more personally because of that.

RF: One of the things that was in the forefront of our minds was that if we were going to revisit this, we really needed to deconstruct it down to its bones. My co-producer, Justin Tocket, and I spent a lot of time with just me and him and a guitar even before we got to Austin. I’d say, “Here’s the original arrangement and here is what I have been doing live with the arrangement. Where do we go from here?” He really encouraged me. In the last 20 years, I’ve learned a lot of alternate tunings and I got a lot more bottom end on my voice. It didn’t really hit until I was 40 years old. He made these lower keys. He would ask, “Why don’t you try that in a lower tuning? Maybe you should slow that down so the lyrics can speak a little more.” Those kinds of things. It was nice to have those ideas going into the studio. When you get there, you have these other musicians you can collaborate with where you go, “Wow, what are you doing!” That’s cooler than anything I thought about before we went in.

MR: Of course, you were part of the country duo Foster & Lloyd with Bill Lloyd. Can you tell the story of how you went from being Foster & Lloyd to starting your solo career? I would guess like many, many bands, you guys just wanted to do your own creative projects at some point.

RF: Yeah, I think so. At the time, I had all these songs that didn’t fit Foster and Lloyd because they were much more stone cold country. At the time, I thought I would just do a solo record, then go back to Foster & Lloyd. I didn’t realize that it would be a 20 year hiatus in between. It ended up being a whole different career. As much as Bill and I were good lyricists and we just did a record after 20 years–you know, the Foster & Lloyd record that came out last year–I think a lot of it has been about building around a band’s sound and writing lyrics along with that. With my first solo effort, one of the things that happened was that I went out doing shows for Mary Chapin Carpenter, just me and my guitar. There wasn’t anyone there to play guitar solos or secondary parts so it made me dig deeper lyrically because it had to work with just me and my guitar, or it was not going to happen. That was one big change at the time and made media a little deeper. What I thought I had was a group of songs for a solo record, but it got even better because I went back and dug into the songs, writing in a manner and lyrical way that was different than Foster & Lloyd.

MR: I imagine you were very pleased at the time by your first hit, “Just Call Me Lonesome,” which came out, well, 20 years ago.

RF: Yeah, absolutely. I have sung that song every night for the past 20 years. It was really me and my co-writer George Dukas; I love those Buck Owens records and those Ray Price records of the fifties and sixties. I was really trying to emulate those guys. It just took on a life of its own, which was really neat.

MR: You had five singles from that album, with “Nobody Wins” becoming a huge record for you. Any memories you can share?

RF: Yeah, it was my number one record as a solo artist. It was very gratifying. Again, born out of personal pain, it was one of those times where we slammed a lot of doors and slept in separate bedrooms with my wife. I was supposed to write with Ken Richie the next day and I sort of dragged because I got very little sleep. I was kind of down in the dumps. He asked if I was okay and I told him that we had a fight–this and that–and it was not the best of nights. I remember him saying that he had one of those two or three days ago. Nobody wins that stuff. I thought that day, “Okay, nobody wins, that’s what we’re writing today.”

MR: And that can happen outside a personal marriage or relationship, it being a universal theme of when two people are so stubborn, they don’t want to resolve things or they’re just being pigheaded.

RF: Yeah! (laughs)

MR: Seriously, nobody wins.

RF: When people live in the same house and are fighting, usually there isn’t a winner. (laughs)

MR: Or the same country, but that’s another subject. (laughs) Radney, you’ve had many covers by recording artists. Can we talk about a few of them?

RF: Yeah, absolutely. Anytime besides my mom is listening in her living room, I’m happy about it. I have been very fortunate. There have been other artists who have put more zeros behind their record sales than I do, and they’ve covered my songs. Keith Urban had a couple hits, some being “Raining On Sunday” and “I’m In.” I’ve been recorded by T. Graham Brown, Tanya Tucker, Guy Clark; Sara Evans had a hit with “Real Fun Place to Start,” Collin Ray with “Anything Else.” I’ve been lucky, all along my career. At different stages of it, someone else has picked something off one of my records or picked something I didn’t put on a record and made a big hit out of it. It has fueled a lot of trips to schools and new shoes for kids, those kind of things over the years.

MR: And let’s not forget your first hit with Bill Lloyd as a songwriter, “Since I Found You,” with Sweethearts of the Rodeo.

RF: That’s correct. It was the first time I heard myself on the radio. My wife and I, at the time, pulled the little Volkswagen over on the road and danced around the car the first time we heard it played on the radio.

MR: Sweet. And, of course, there’s “Don’t Go Out With Him” with Tanya Tucker.

RF: Uh-huh. “Don’t Go Out With Him.” In more recent times, like I said, Keith Urban, Sara Evans, Collin Raye. There are songs recorded by Kenny Chesney and Luke Bryan, Pam Tillis. I’ve been really fortunate in that respect.

MR: Looking back at that run from then until now, what do you feel is the biggest growth that’s happened creatively for Radney Foster?

RF: Well, I think I’ve grown as a writer. I like to think that I’m not getting any worse. I’m getting better and I’m still in love with the aspect of storytelling. It is a neat way to make a living. I’m fortunate that I get to wear several different hats as a musician, and as a singer and a songwriter. I don’t have to depend on just one of them to help me make my living; it doesn’t get boring that way. As a writer, what’s different for me now, is that I’m not terrified of whether or not the song is going to get finished, how it’s going to turn out, who’s going to do it. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m comfortable with just writing songs for the sake of the song. Also, I have changed a lot as a guitar play. I’m much better at 50 than I was at 25, and that’s changed things about the way I write as well.

MR: Radney, I have to ask you my traditional question: What advice do you have for new artists?

RF: Work very, very hard. Realize that you’re not selling perfection. You are not even creating perfection. You’re selling an emotion or feeling and that the more emotion you can reel in and gather into a song, the more people are going to believe it; the more believable it is.

MR: That’s beautiful, that’s actually one of the best answers I have
gotten.

RF: Thanks, Mike.

MR: Yeah, yeah. (laughs) Radney, this was great, I hope it doesn’t take another twenty years before we catch up again!

RF: Mike, it’s great to hear your voice.

Transcribed by Joe Stahl