If “South Front Street” was just a career retrospective for Alabama singer-songwriter Grayson Capps, it would be a pretty cool thing.
If “South Front Street” was just Grammy-winning engineer Trina Shoemaker bringing all her talents to bear on the songs that matter more to her than any others, in a labor of love she considers the culmination of her career, that also would be a pretty cool thing.
But the newly released album is all that and more. It’s a time capsule of the life Capps and Shoemaker have shared and the troubles they’ve overcome, a wormhole back to their youth and things that might have been, a summation of who they are and who they might choose to be.
“I began this retrospective as a personal compilation that I sequenced for myself,” Shoemaker writes in the liner notes. “It is a collection of songs that paint a picture of our life together and reveals a world from the uniquely enchanted, poetic and tormented perspective of Grayson Capps. … these songs capture a life in motion, in pain and joy, in gain and loss, in humility and in grace.”
It’s hard to know where to start. The most obvious beginning is back in the ’90s, when Stavin’ Chain, one of Capps’ early bands, broke up and left him at loose ends. A friend clued him in to a living situation that was colorful even by New Orleans’ standards: A row of shotgun houses “on the railroad tracks, sandwiched between warehouses, off Tchoupitoulas on the river side.”
John Lawrence, a former bandmate, lived on one side. John Dawson, a guitarist with familial connection to New Orleans musical royalty, lived on the other. Capps could walk from there to a job working the door at Tipitina’s. The rent started out cheap and then dropped off to nothing after the landlord’s demise, when ownership of the property fell into legal limbo.
“We went two and a half years without paying rent at all,” said Capps. Utilities also were gamed, with extension cords running from house to house. “All we had to do was make money for food,” he said.
It was a rich creative environment for a young songwriter: Plenty of collaborators, vacant lots become wildflower fields, an easy walk to a river, access to trains. “I spent a lot of time in boxcars,” Capps said. “Yeah, the reverb in boxcars is bad-ass.”
The opening track of the collection, “Get Back Up,” takes you right there: “I live on a place they call South Front Street/ It ain’t on the map you couldn’t find me if you tried/ We got a horse, and a train and a garden in the backyard/ it’s a rotten paradise, at times I think I’m gon’ die.”
Fast forward, fast forward, fast forward: Shoemaker and Capps moved in some of the same circles in New Orleans but never met until she saw him performing at the Matador Club one night well after his Front Street days. She left him a note: “if you’re single and live in Louisiana, you should call me.” He did and they’ve been together ever since. Hurricane Katrina drove them to Nashville, where things were great for a few years as they raised their son. The financial crash of 2008 was a second storm, slowing her career and pushing him to spend more and more time on the road. They moved to Fairhope, where he’d graduated from high school, and worked to rebuild again.
Finally the day came when he started unpacking pictures, letters, recordings and other keepsakes that had been boxed up since Katrina. This was also a beginning: It started them both thinking about who’d they’d been before the storms, who they’d turned out to be in the meantime, who they might become.
“I had already started putting together a retrospective compilation in my head,” she said. But the artifacts from his past helped her rediscover her own, and to turn that idea of a retrospective into something that could be cut into vinyl.
Rewind: As they compared notes, they realized that once upon a time in New Orleans, years before they met, she’d worked a session in a certain studio. The producer had asked if she could come back the next night, to help with another project. She had a commitment and couldn’t. The next night, Capps recorded there.
“If I’d stayed, we’d have fallen in love then,” Shoemaker said with absolute certainty. “And I would have made that record a hit and made him a star.”
For Capps, South Front Street is a world that shaped who he is. For Shoemaker it’s a place she never knew but now can visit, as if the music is a gateway to her own private Narnia. There, she and Capps are young and in love, free of the obligations of parenthood, adulthood and time. She said visiting that place has given her the freedom of imagination to start writing a novel -- but that’s a whole ‘nother story.
Asked about the process of deciding what songs from Capps’ extensive catalog made the cut for this project, Shoemaker just laughed. “There was no process,” she said. “I chose everything.”
It’s not exactly a greatest hits collection. Shoemaker said that in order to showcase Capps’ distinctive insight, she picked “things that could never ever be construed as, or be confused as, bar-band tracks or jam-band tracks.”
That means that for fans of Capps’ weathered voice and his tales of lives lived on the roads less traveled, “South Front Street” is both something old and something new. It draws on material ranging from early in his career -- including tracks from the band Stavin’ Chain and his first solo album “Songbones” -- to his 2017 album “Scarlett Roses.” In between are songs known from his days with The Stumpknockers and The Lost Cause Minstrels. “May We Love” features Will Kimbrough, Corky Hughes and Anthony Crawford, most of his bandmates in the coastal supergroup Willie Sugarcapps.
“It’s songs people know but it’s also different mixes and different takes from different times,” Capps said, so even people who know the songs well will hear something new.
Capps said that, oddly enough, the retrospective fits his present situation very well. When the COVID-19 epidemic put a stop to touring, he shifted online. He’s done well with formal subscribers on the subscription service Patreon, but he’s also found a sweet spot doing regular Facebook Live performances. It takes him back to old times busking in New Orleans, but with a twist: His audience on any given night is a mix of local and international listeners, and they’ve begun to form a community of their own.
“I’ve been accruing new fans quicker than I would on the road,” he said in a recent interview. For them, “South Front Street” should be a quick way to get a handle on where he’s coming from.
“It’s almost the perfect time to do it,” he said.
All that’s a nice bonus for Shoemaker, for whom it remains a personal passion project.
“I found a fountain of youth there,” she said. “It’s about the fact that through the music I’m able to define who I am and what I do.”
“They’re wonderful,” she said of the songs that do this for her. “They encompass the entirety of my career, and his.”
“South Front Street” is available on CD, vinyl and digital formats via royalpotatofamily.com and www.graysoncapps.com.
"Love" - Google News
June 25, 2020 at 10:51PM
https://ift.tt/2A3V6y1
‘South Front Street:’ Music revisited, love reexamined - AL.com
"Love" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35xnZOr
https://ift.tt/2z10xgv
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "‘South Front Street:’ Music revisited, love reexamined - AL.com"
Post a Comment