While such an endeavor is a risky proposition in business terms, it’s considerably freeing from an artistic standpoint. With no label execs looking over their shoulders, the Bottle Rockets simply made the record they wanted to make, letting the finished product sell itself when they were done. “It seems like it must be more appealing for the record label, because they actually know exactly what they’re getting,” Henneman reasons.
What Sanctuary got with Blue Sky is the most diverse album of the Bottle Rockets’ career, in terms of style, sound, and songwriting. While there’s plenty of the meat-and-potatoes roots-rock that has been the band’s foundation from the start — notably the Henneman/Taylor co-writes “Lucky Break”, “Baby’s Not My Baby Tonight” and “Man Of Constant Anxiety” — there are also bare-bones acoustic numbers from Kearns (“The Last Time”) and Henneman (“Cross By The Highway”, “Mom & Dad”), NRBQ-esque power-pop (“I Don’t Wanna Go Back”, a lost nugget from a band Kearns had been in), and even a self-described “soft-rock orchestra” ballad from Ortmann/Henneman (“Baggage Claim”) that nods its head to David Gates and Bread.
That last song is also the most direct evocation of a subject which surfaces a couple of times on the record — the inescapable effects of living in a post-September 11 world. Ortmann’s lyric reveals a man who longs for the days of meeting his lover at the gate with flowers, but is saddened by the new reality of having to “meet at the baggage claim/In a crowd of confusion I call her name.”
“It’s looking at September 11th from a different angle, and how it affects everything, down to just the smallest details,” Ortmann says. “I always thought airports were very romantic in many ways. And now with the way things are, the world’s so uptight — for obvious reasons — but at the same time, it’s a shame we lost some of the simpler things, or things we took for granted.”
A couple of lines in “Man Of Constant Anxiety” — the title references the rise of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? track “Man Of Constant Sorrow” — speak to the situation as well: “With terror in the air and in the evening news/I don’t need Howlin’ Wolf to give me the blues.”
“It’s like the atmosphere now; it’s the weather now. It’s become part of life,” says Taylor, who wrote the song’s lyrics. “It’s just one more of the modern anxieties. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, you know — here’s something really worth worrying about!”
Taylor adds, however, that he wrote the tune partly to describe his songwriting partner. “Brian is the Man Of Constant Anxiety,” he reveals. “He’s a world-class worrier.”
Funny, because you wouldn’t get that impression from the album’s title track, a bouncy, sunny, two-minute ditty about having a “blue sky wonderful day,” recalling such childhood epiphanies as “a Burger Chef pizza burger bicycle ride/Wrinkled toes and fingers from the slip and slide.” Henneman confesses it’s his favorite track on the album — although he qualifies that remark with an observation about the song that immediately follows on the disc: “‘Mom & Dad’, I can’t comment on that. I don’t even judge it as if I did it.”
In many respects, “Mom & Dad” is the most meaningful song Henneman ever wrote. Supported only by his gentle acoustic guitar strums and Haynes’ sympathetic dobro runs, he sings his simple words with a calm, cathartic grace:
Mom and dad, where have you gone
I’m here at your house
And I just mowed your lawn
Oh but nobody’s home now but me
I wonder just where you could be?
Four years ago this November and December Henneman lost first his mother and then his father, within six weeks of each other. “My mom died on Neil Young’s birthday, my dad died on Jay Farrar’s birthday,” he says, as we sit in the lobby of a Nashville hotel where, later that same night, the Americana Music Awards would honor another couple who left this earth in close proximity to each other: June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash.
The symmetry is not lost on Henneman. “It happens so many times,” he says. “That’s what they put on my dad’s death certificate — it was depression due to the recent loss of my mom. Yeah, I figured when June Carter went, that Johnny was — I just was counting the days, you know.”
The Bottle Rockets had been touring with Lucinda Williams to support their 1999 release Brand New Year when things took a turn for the worse with his mother. Simultaneously, bassist Kearns’ father also had become seriously ill, although he later recovered. Meanwhile, the band’s relationship with its label, Doolittle Records, had become a frustrating debacle. In the midst of the turmoil, they decided to take an extended hiatus.
“It was all going to hell,” Henneman recalls. “The Doolittle thing went to hell, my personal life was a shambles, dealing with my parents’ house and their estate and the whole bit. So, it was just like — EJECT, you know. Get the hell out. I couldn’t even think about worrying about what was gonna happen next.
“So we just chucked it all. We never told anybody that we were gonna quit, though — we mutually agreed that we’re not breaking up — but it was kind of like, there’s no telling when we’ll get back together. Let’s just take off, and scatter.”
