“She’s a much more complex person than she seems,” Bob says. “And that’s not in any way a bad thing. She’s very, very smart, and probably has trouble being taken seriously in a lot of this business because she is so incredibly good-looking. Musically, she’s amazing. If you start to take apart those songs from a chord structure point of view, the way they get from one place to another, she’s a fucking genius.”
“He’s my best friend,” Allison says, simply.
Not long after they met, Moorer agreed to sing the duet part in Bob’s “The Plans We Made”, a stunning murder ballad he’d written back in New York City about 1992. He also included a Moorer-Primm song, “Call My Name”, on his 1997 debut, Things Fall Apart.
That’s one of the few cuts Moorer and Primm have had, though Trisha Yearwood included “Bring Me All Your Lovin'” (with Buddy Miller on backing vocals) on 1998’s Where Your Road Leads. Moorer’s version appears on The Hardest Part.
Alabama Song, released by MCA in 1998, is not the kind of debut often issued by a major label in Nashville. Allison co-wrote all the songs, save for Walter Hyatt’s “Tell Me Baby”. It got good notices, and Moorer’s cameo in The Horse Whisperer led to an Oscar nomination for her song “A Soft Place To Fall” (co-written with friend Gwil Owen). According to SoundScan, Alabama Song sold about 45,000 copies.
6. Sugar hurts my teeth
Artists on major labels have been dropped after delivering gold records (which sell 500,000 copies). It is a common enough practice that it rarely attracts much notice. There is incredible pressure, especially in country music, to produce hits…or perish.
That would seem not to be one of the pressures in Allison’s life. “I won’t purposely do anything for commercial success,” she says. “Even though I want commercial success, that’s not my motivation. I want every record I do to be a real album. That’s very important to me, to create a piece of work from the front to the end.”
In essence, she has chosen to play the game by her own rules.
“What I didn’t do,” Allison says, “is go to [MCA head] Tony Brown and say, ‘I’ll do anything you want me to do, I want to be a star.’ I went, knowing what I didn’t want to do, and maybe he was intrigued by something. But I never said, ‘OK, I want to be a star.’ It was, ‘Let’s make records.'”
Tony Brown has made a lot of records, and a lot of money for MCA’s shareholders. He also signed Steve Earle, and several other artists better-known for the quality of their work than for their contributions to corporate prosperity.
Brown laughs when asked to explain how Moorer is allowed to make albums filled with her own songs. “I let her,” he says with evident pleasure. “A singer-songwriter like an Allison Moorer or a Lyle Lovett or a Steve Earle, you can’t just slide an outside mainstream kinda song in the middle of their album. It would sound stupid.
“I guess I got a good schooling on this kind of artist working with Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell. I noticed that the only outside songs that they ever cut were songs that they found themselves, and they were usually by friends of theirs that they hung out with. And they hung out with great songwriters like Guy Clark. So when I signed her, I knew that up-front. And that’s the risk I’ve taken.”
It is also a risk Brown has earned the right to take. “Trust me, the label doesn’t jump up and down when I sign these kinds of artists,” he says. “They don’t. I mean, it’s my prerogative, and the only reason I have a license to do this kind of stuff is because I also cut some huge records for the company, and have for 15 years.
