Interview – Flatpick Guitar Magazine

Interview – Flatpick Guitar Magazine

By Chris Thiessen

[Editor’s note: In the eleven years since we started publishing FGM, subscribers have repeatedly asked us what’s been happening with many of our cover artists. This new column, “Catching Up,” allows us to do just that. We’ll be revisiting—in no particular order—many of those artists and see what they’ve been doing since their cover FGM appearance. To initiate this column, we’ll check in with Russ Barenberg, who appeared on our March/April 1998 cover.]

Russ Barenberg has just released a new solo CD (When At Last), his first since the late 80s, and has returned to the music scene full time. We last spoke in 1998; in that time, we suppose there have been some minor changes in your life.

Let’s see… After that article in 1998 I continued to play pretty regularly with Jerry [Douglas] and Edgar [Meyer] in our trio for the next three years. I did some gigs with Tim O’Brien—worked on some of his performances of the music from his CD The Crossing where the Footworks dance troop did a beautiful dance production to go with the songs from the CD. In 2001, Bryan Sutton and I started working as a duo, and we’ve done several gigs every year since then. In fact, we just did a swing up through Vermont and New York State back in May, and we’re both looking to play more frequently together in the future. I was also still working my non-music job for Saturn [as a training developer] up until about a year ago when I went back to doing music full time. Of course, I was doing music all during that time and always tried to put as much time into it as I could, writing tunes and free-lancing.

I’ve been on staff at a few music and dance camps—Pinewoods, Ashokan, and Augusta—and have been playing some contradances. I did a lot of that when I was in Boston in the 80s, and have gotten back into it a little more in the last six or seven years. I’ve played some with Rodney Miller, the great dance fiddler from New Hampshire, and with others including James Bryan and Ed Baggot, both very fine fiddlers from Alabama.

The Transatlantic Sessions over in Scotland is another thing I’ve been involved with. It’s a series of music television programs. We did the first series in 1994, then another one in 1998. Basically, there’s a house band for all the shows, then various featured artists from the British Isles and from America come in for a few days at a time for some spontaneous collaborations with the theme being “both sides of the Atlantic.” The Scottish fiddler Aly Bain initiated the program along with Pelicula Films in Glasgow, and I’ve been in the house band and a featured artist for all three sessions. We just did another set of shows in March of this year, so I was over there for two weeks. In the past, they’ve been shown mostly in the UK, funded largely by the BBC. Each session is cut into six half-hour music shows. But there’s a good chance this latest series will be shown here in the States. The shows are due to air over there in September, and the production company is talking about releasing CDs and DVDs as well. There were actually two CDs worth of music released from the 1998 shows.

How did you come onto this gig?

I got to know Aly back in the early 80s when Fiddle Fever did some gigs with his band, the Boys of the Lough. Aly and Jay Unger, with whom I played in Fiddle Fever, were music directors for the first set of the Sessions. So I was fortunate enough to be involved from the beginning and have been part of it ever since. Aly and Jerry Douglas co-music directed the second and third series. For the past four years we’ve also been doing a live concert version in Glasgow at the Celtic Connections Festival.

Okay, in the late 80s you moved from Boston to Nashville, and found this full-time gig writing and developing training for Saturn. Although that was in Nashville, it would seem to have moved you away from full-time music.

Well, I moved to Nashville in ’86 for the music and after about three years made the choice—for a variety of reasons—to start doing some other work as well. I was hoping to do more studio work when I came here, but it turned out, at that time anyway, not to be such a great match for me. I had young kids and just decided to do something else to make money that would allow me to be home more, with a predictable income, and do the music I really wanted to do, to be more selective. Fortunately, some great opportunities came up and I was able to do that. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to do as much of it as I wanted. But now my kids are grown up, I’m more in a position to accept the musician lifestyle, and I’m really enjoying it. I’m especially excited to have the record out and am ready to get out there a whole lot more than I have for a while now.

But let’s get some specifics on the CD. Obviously you’ve been formulating songs over the past ten years; it’s been more than a decade since your last CD, right?

Well, my last solo album was in ‘88 or ‘89, so that’s more than a decade. I did the Skip, Hop and Wobble CD with Edgar and Jerry in ’93, so that was really the last one that I was a full participant in. The tunes on When at Last were written all through the period since then, maybe one or two back around ’93 and ’94, and the rest spread over that time, with a couple written just prior to the recording session for When At Last. They’re not the only things I’ve written, but you pick what you think is going to make the best set of tunes for the album. Ideally people put the CD on and won’t want to skip over some tracks. I really hope people just put it on and let it play.

Do you think that your relative unavailability during the past decade may have actually helped you in this phase of your career?  

Well, I’m really not the person to answer that, but I doubt it [laughs]. I’d have no idea as to whether that was in anyone’s mind or not. I’m just really happy now to have the record out, to get my music out, and have opportunities to do other interesting projects. I felt that I’ve been lucky enough all along to have—and still have—opportunities for great projects, like playing with Tim, with Jerry and Edgar, doing the Transatlantic Sessions, and playing festivals like Telluride and MerleFest. I just felt that I was fortunate to do things like that even when I wasn’t out pounding the pavement full time.

I’m in the process of putting together a band of my own. I’m just not sure who will be involved yet, but I’m planning that by next spring I’ll have a band together and out doing shows. I just had a CD release concert for When at Last at the Station Inn, and it went well and was incredibly fun. It was very satisfying playing a whole night of my material with a great band including Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Viktor Krauss, Kenny Malone and a fine young guitarist, Todd Lombardo. Not a band I could take on the road, but it gave me a taste of what could be possible and how a band of my own could go over.

One of the things about this CD is that all the musicians have a wonderful transparency: everyone plays together, for a common musical intent. It’s a statement about the level of musicianship, because the musical dynamics correspond to the playing.

Thanks! They are great musicians, and that’s more than half the battle, getting the right people who are great ensemble players who play in the service of the tune and have a great feeling for all sorts of music. They can learn tunes quickly and just do great things with them. I was also very happy to have Ruthie Dornfeld [fiddle] and Jeremiah McLane [accordion] on the record as well, some people who were from outside the Nashville music scene, people I had played with more in the contradance world who play more traditional music. Ruthie is a fiddler I’ve played with for years; I used to play a lot of dance music with her when I was in Boston. She’s just got an unbelievably cool groove, and I’ve always wanted to do a project with her. Jeremiah McLane is a great accordion player from Vermont, and he and Ruthie and I did a little tour in France. I just wanted to have that accordion sound, and Jeremiah’s great at it. He usually plays in a band called Nightingale, a very sophisticated, cool little trio that I really enjoy listening to. All of these folks just did a great job on the tunes.

Perhaps you could go from place to place in the country, not carrying a standard band but playing with various ensembles, one in Nashville, one in Boston, one in Seattle…

[Laughs] Well, that would make the music hard to sell, and practicing would be especially difficult. I think I’d prefer a group that plays together a lot. Of course, I’m still open to playing in a lot of different settings as well, and I’m sure I’ll do some of that, but the group is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve been in a lot of interesting and collaborative kind of groups—not that this wouldn’t be a collaborative effort—but it would be more my own thing.

How would you define the “Russ Barenberg” sound?

Well, I should leave that definition to others—it’s always a little dangerous trying to define your own sound—but it certainly has to do with the tunes I’ve written, a melodic approach to soloing, and perhaps a rhythmic influence from playing dances.

In that vein, I’m looking at “The Pleasant Beggar,” which you describe as “an Irishy tune.” What does that mean?

That tune is reminiscent of Irish fiddle music. Recording it with fiddle and accordion is a classic sound, not just in Ireland but all over the world. It has that sort of flavor, that’s all. Obviously it’s not an Irish tune (I wrote it right here in my living room), but it has that feel.

Well, looking over the liner notes, let’s talk about “written right there in the living room”: you have a wide variety of inspirations for these tunes. When you write, is it more a process of “gee, what a pleasant day it is,” and let that musically ferment in your mind?

Absolutely not. The tunes are just music. I’m generally not thinking about too much beyond the sound. It is what it is. I guess that some of the “it’s a beautiful day” may seep into the sound, but that’s not the primary thing. Even the dogs I talk about [“On Milo’s Back” or “Jump Back Barley”] are more to do with the titles than the music itself. Generally the tunes are written and then it takes me a while to come up with titles. Sometimes I’m still working on titles right up to when I have to give the copy to the record company. It’s hard, but fun to come up with titles to instrumentals and I try to find ones that somehow work with the tune. But the music comes first. There is just one time that I can remember when a tune was inspired by an event or something external. I wrote “For J.L.” back in 1980 as an emotional response to John Lennon’s death. But for the most part my tunes are not a response to an object or event or a description of something I’m seeing or doing. Music for me is an abstract form that grows somehow from internal human sources, and I’m just playing around with musical ideas and sounds. Ideas for tunes are generally things I stumble upon in delight.

So you are moved more by the spirit of the music itself, by the art involved.

I guess you could say that. I would love to write more for occasions, such as film music. Film music is one thing in which you are definitely responding to something external. I’ve done some films and would love to do more, because it’s nice to have something to respond to, a collaboration of ideas and forms. But in terms of the tunes that I’ve written for the CD or tunes in general, it’s just me playing around on the guitar or humming something or just laying around dreaming something up. Inspiration happens a lot of different ways. So it’s more about the process of discovering melodies. In some cases, tunes come from a rhythmic origin. I may have a little rhythm guitar lick, as in “The Man in the Hat,” and then a chord progression grew out of it. The melody was more or less improvised on that one. But a lot of my tunes are strongly melodically based and are melody-driven.

One of the great strengths of this CD is its ensemble setting, rather than you laying down individual tracks.

Well, I love playing in ensembles, and I would definitely agree that there is a synergy in the ensemble you cannot achieve by playing alone and laying down individual tracks. I love the energy and the interplay that comes in an ensemble. It tends to draw things out of you that you might not normally do on your own. There’s just a lot of communication and transfer of pulse and energy as people react to each other. It’s just fun to make this kind of unified sound. And when I’m recording, I like to get as much down live as possible. Take again, “The Man in the Hat”: that was a very conversational tune, in the same way that Dixieland jazz tends to be. I was very happy with the very live and spontaneous playing on that.

You’re a guitarist and mandolinist. Are there other instruments you play?

No, that’s mainly it. Anything like a mandolin—an octave mandolin or a tenor banjo—I may pick up and play, but I don’t play them that much. It’s mainly guitar and mandolin. I did use a resonator mandolin on the final cut, “Aux Marches du Palais,” but it was still a mandolin. I write on both guitar and mandolin. Four of the cuts on this CD—“Fat Mountain,” “Jump Back Barley,” “On Milo’s Back,” and “The Pleasant Beggar”—were written on mandolin.

Do you find the mandolin more accessible as a tune writing device? Or do you feel equally at home with either mandolin or guitar?

More at home on guitar. I know the guitar more extensively and in more detail. I play mandolin more often with dance music, but I would never consider myself a bluegrass mandolin player. I can fake my way through, but I have to be honest with myself. I believe what I write on the mandolin is more fiddle-tuney, and for that the mandolin is excellent. I just have a broader feeling for the guitar and what it can do. I have a more complete knowledge of the instrument.

It seems you have a penchant for the Gibson sound. Is that a general preference or a particular instrument?

It has been a preference lately. In past recordings I’ve used Martins primarily, but in 1992 I found a J-45 Gibson with maple back and sides, and I started exploring the Gibson sound more. As I hear it, they’ve got a very saturated kind of midrange. It’s a robust sound that appeals to me and seems to work with the way I play. I’m constantly trying other kinds of guitars, but I seem to keep coming back to this Gibson. I’ve also used a mahogany J-45 on some cuts; it’s not as much an all-purpose guitar, but it has a great voice for slow melodies. The tune “When At Last” was recorded with the mahogany J-45, as well as the guitar solos on “Fat Mountain.”

Certainly there’s a rich texture to that sound, with a complexity that emerges from repeated listenings.

Yes. The Gibsons have a complex sound, and I’ve just grown to like it. But on a couple of cuts I used this inexpensive Olympia guitar, mahogany back and sides, solid wood, but a $285 guitar. I used it on “The Man in the Hat” and “A Dream for Sophie,” and I think it sounds really good. People get hung up on designer guitars, but there are an awful lot of guitars out there that you can get good sounds out of. That maple J-45 has laminated back and sides, and it still has great sound.

Obviously the player is the main thing. With most good players you can recognize their sound because of how they play, rather than what they play. But still I love to experiment with the tone of different guitars. Tone is brain and soul and fingers and heart; everything all together.

So, what Barenberg projects are in the works besides the duo with Bryan Sutton?

Well, as I said before, putting together my own group. And as always, writing and looking toward doing the next record. And as I still seem to do a very occasional concert with Jerry Douglas and Edger Meyer; we did last year’s RockyGrass. I’m doing some freelance and session work. I played recently on a CD Bil Vorndick produced for Amy England, a songwriter from Nantucket and on a “gift shop” record of Elvis songs on bluegrass instruments for fiddler Craig Duncan. I’m doing some gigs with Mike Snider, a very funny comedian and great old-time banjo and mandolin player. He has a really good twin fiddle band. In August I’m going up to Boston to play with a great Irish singer named Cara Dillon, who I met during the Transatlantic Sessions. That’s something new. So a lot of different things.

Certainly, I plan within the next year to be out doing my own stuff. But you never know what path things are going to take, so you have to be flexible. I think that’s what’s fun about it: you never quite know what is going to come up, and things sometimes just surprise you.

Perhaps that occurs more now because people know you’re available.

I certainly hope that’s the case [laughs]. Right now I’m pretty focused on getting the infrastructure in place, the things like the CD, a myspace page, a website, and a mailing list, some basic things I hadn’t done during the period I was doing music part time.

But the electronic presence is a new paradigm of the music business. Twenty years ago, websites and myspace pages were unknown.

Exactly. I didn’t need it as much, though it would have been a benefit, but I’m spending time on those projects now, as well as just practicing and trying to get into shape, to maintain and improve as a guitar player. If you want people to hire you, you need to be able to deliver. But it’s also for my own sake; I need to keep moving forward.

So there we have it: a return to music full-time, a new CD, session work, continuing with Bryan Sutton as a touring duet, the Transatlantic Sessions, contradances, staff at music camps, occasional festival appearances, more Homespun projects, a possible re-issue of the legendary Clarence White book, and the promise of a Russ Barenberg band in the near future. And for those who might be planning to attend the Kaufman Kamp next year, Russ tells us that he’s agreed to be on staff there next year! With a schedule like that, be sure to bookmark both Russ’s website (www.russbarenberg.com) and his Myspace account (www.myspace.com/russbarenberg) to keep track of what Russ is doing or where he might be appearing in the near future. Regardless of the project, it is certainly good to have Russ back full-time!