Jim Lauderdale – Headed For The Hills

For a decade and a half now, fans of so-called alternative country have been waging a kind of war against the country mainstream. It has mostly been a one-sided war. While much of the small audience for alt-country despises, quite viscerally, the music of the mainstream, most fans of, say, Alan Jackson or Brooks & Dunn don’t dislike the alt-country scene so much as they remain unaware of its existence.

Still, these audiences have at least one thing in common: Jim Lauderdale. His is not a household name, by any stretch; even so, there’s a case to be made for him as one of the real heroes of contemporary country music. The best proof of this claim, even beyond the considerable strength of his songwriting, is that Lauderdale has repeatedly shown that the presumed differences between country’s mainstream and alt varieties are not really differences at all.

Or at least they don’t have to be. Lauderdale’s plainspoken words and quirky melodies have been regularly recorded by many of the best and the most traditional acts big-time country radio has to offer: Gary Allan, Mark Chesnutt, the Dixie Chicks, Vince Gill, Patty Loveless, George Strait. Sometimes these recordings have even become major hits — more than once for both Strait and Loveless.

Lauderdale’s songs also have been cut by the Derailers, Buddy Miller, Heather Myles and Joy Lynn White, as well quite a few other acts associated with alt-country. And his collaborations have sent him all around the country map: He has done full-album collaborations with both bluegrass patriarch Ralph Stanley and folk-rock jammers Donna The Buffalo, provided backing vocals for hitmaker Dwight Yoakam and critics’ favorite Lucinda Williams, and cut tribute tracks to Buck Owens and Gram Parsons. Who else in the country field has a resume this diverse, this all-inclusive, and — with eight albums to his credit since 1999 alone — this prolific?

What’s even more impressive is that he’s managed all this not by making himself over for each new situation, but by just consistently doing what he does. For instance, take one of his best, and best-known, recordings, the rubbery-tuned honky-tonk of “The King Of Broken Hearts”, which all too perfectly encapsulates the range of his career as both a little-known solo act and a remarkably successful songwriter. Written with George Jones in mind, Lauderdale instead recorded the song himself for his excellent but commercially nonexistent 1991 debut album, Planet Of Love. Soon after, it was covered by George Strait for the multi-platinum Pure Country soundtrack. From tradition-minded obscurity to the height of contemporary success — and all with the same song.

Lauderdale’s new Headed For The Hills is a songwriting collaboration with lyricist Robert Hunter, a longtime member of the Grateful Dead. Providing words for the world’s most famous jam band must be something like writing captions for a famous photographer; the gig’s not unimportant, by any means, but it ain’t exactly the point of the thing, either. Still, Hunter has made the most of his chances, giving the world, for example, “Truckin’” and its oft-quoted line, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Hunter and Lauderdale could hardly deploy words more differently. In Lauderdale’s work, sentences are pulled from everyday conversations: “Your Guess Is As Good As Mine”, “You Don’t Seem To Miss Me”, “What Do You Say To That”, and “She Used To Say That To Me”, to cite just four of his finest songs (recorded, respectively, by the Derailers, Patty Loveless with George Jones, George Strait, and Lauderdale himself). His songs are rarely clever, they’re not filled with fancy wordplay, and they don’t try to be especially poetic. Instead, Lauderdale follows in the tradition of Harlan Howard and Rodney Crowell, conveying his heartaches through ordinary speech.

Hunter’s lyrical contributions to Headed For The Hills, by contrast, are more than a little studied, occasionally even precious. Lines such as “Tales of the Sad Hotel I’ll tell until the stars fall down” attend playfully to the sounds of the words (“…Hotel I’ll tell until…”) but never add up to any sort of sense, sad or otherwise. His words for “High Timberline” are fanciful to a fault, straining to present a spurned lover’s fond memories as “ghosts of white horses” who, “like a vision of angels,” are “stepping like dancers in three quarter time.” 

Things go better when Hunter doesn’t try so hard. The album’s best moments, “Head For The Sun” and “Looking Elsewhere”, dress Hunter’s for-once straightforward lyrics in acoustic front-porch arrangements and haunting harmonies. “The days go by so slow, hobble by on a cane,” Lauderdale sings in the former song; “I’ll get up soon and go, no sense to still remain.” Behind Lauderdale, pedal steel player Bucky Baxter lays down a part that yawns and stretches, nudging him gently to get a move on. Throughout, the album features an impressive guest list of vocalists and pickers, including guitarist Darrell Scott and mandolinist Tim O’Brien and singers Allison Moorer and Gillian Welch.

Some of Lauderdale and Hunter’s other songs feel like genre exercises — “Trashcan Tomcat” is a jaunty country blues, “Sandy Ford (Barbara Lee)” is a civil war re-enactment — but they work because Lauderdale’s melodies, when he’s not recycling old folk tunes, are often memorable and unpredictable.

Indeed, it’s his striking melodies that stand out; George Strait has frequently cited this as the quality that draws him so often to Lauderdale’s work. Lauderdale has long had a tendency to hear melodies that bounce beyond his own constricted range, and he does it again here on “High Timberline”, in which his chorus ascends to an elevation he can’t quite reach. Packing the phrasing of Buck Owens and Ralph Stanley along with him, Lauderdale makes his gruff twang rise higher and higher, straining, never quite achieving where he means it to go.

Which is precisely why it’s such an arresting moment, and one all the more steeped in loss because of its technical failures. At the song’s climax, the melody takes wing, leaving Hunter’s angelic dancing ponies in the dust, and it doesn’t matter anymore what the words are. It just hurts.