“Bob’s melodic sense is amazing, his phrasing is unbelievable, he’s fearless with a song,” he continues. “And obviously he knows how to put a couple of words together, too. He’s the guy, and I think we’re all trying to keep up. There are plenty of people out there who don’t even know how influenced they are by him. Because they’re influenced by something else that was influenced by someone else who got it when Bob rewrote the whole thing.”
The time away from home, his wife Karen and his son Marlon (who is now 6) took its toll on Sexton, who describes the touring musician’s routine as “22 hours of hell and two hours of bliss.” He spent much of those years on the road in hotel rooms, writing a lyric here, a melody there, for the album he figured he’d eventually make. He’d wanted to play on a record with Dylan, and after he’d been afforded the opportunity to work on Love And Theft and to tour behind that album, he left the band, ending his tenure at three and a half years.
The Dylan experience plainly left its mark, as the opening track to the new album attests. “Don’t you look out your window, don’t you peek through the door,” warns the first line of “Gospel”, over an acoustic country-blues progression. “‘Cause you just might find the thing that scares you most.” The song sets for the tone for an album in which happiness is either elusive or an illusion, while most of life’s essential struggles occur within one’s soul.
“I never agreed with that concept that if I danced I was going to hell, that hard-line theology, but there’s a moral code that I don’t think is a bad thing to have a piece of,” he says. “I think the world makes the same mistakes it’s been making since the creation, and most of those are biblical.”
Though the predominantly midtempo material is the most broodingly introspective of Sexton’s career, some songs that date from the Sexton Brothers’ sessions complement the newer compositions, providing melodic respite from the moodier fare.
“‘Bring It Home Again’ was the last song I wrote eight years ago for that record, after we’d turned it in and they’d turned the record down and the merge happened,” he says. “It wasn’t on the record we’d turned in, but for me it was a good representation of what I was willing to do — write something that had some immediacy and melody, with some pop sensibility, but which was saying something where I believe every word. And after I did that and it didn’t get us anywhere as far as resolving the problems with the label, I didn’t write a song for two years.”
Among the other songs salvaged from that project for the new album are the uptempo “Regular Grind”, where Charlie and Will share songwriting credit, and the autobiographical “Dillingham Lane”, which received some crucial editorial input from Steve Earle. It’s a song that finds Charlie flipping through the pages of his own mental photo album.
“I had the music and this pile of lyrics when Will and I went to Nashville, but I told Steve I needed help finishing it,” Charlie recalls. “It’s about the first place we lived after we moved to Austin when I was about four, and all the images I remember so clearly. The original verse was just way too long, because I was trying to explain everything, for it all to make sense. And Steve goes, ‘Hey, man, this is a song, not a book.’ He really helped me — gave me a line here, a zinger there — he did so much without doing too much.”
Such a philosophy extends to Sexton’s burgeoning career as a producer. He says he takes as much satisfaction from studio sessions with other artists as he does in making his own albums. He earned his stripes with 2001’s Essence, the crucial follow-up for Lucinda Williams to Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. While Car Wheels had proven both a creative triumph and a career breakthrough for Williams, its troubled sessions had seen her work through three different attempts (with different producers in different cities) to record it before she was satisfied. Initially enlisted to play guitar on Essence — as he had for the final Car Wheels sessions — Sexton was brought back to salvage some tracks that had gone awry, when it appeared that the album might be heading down as bumpy a road as Car Wheels.
“I’ve known Lucinda for around 26 years, since I played with her for the first time [at age 11!],” he says. “I listened to the tapes and thought about them and said, ‘Here’s the deal. You can bring everybody back here if you want to, and it’s going to cost around 40 grand, but you don’t have to. If you give me three days, I’ll fix it all. You take some time off, go to the bookstore, do whatever you want to do.’ So after three days of massive editing and surgery, she came back and said, ‘I can’t believe it!’
“Any artist who’s any good, there’s stories about them — they’re this and they’re that — and it just doesn’t matter. Artists aren’t supposed to be politicians, and I’ll take substance any day over social [graces]. You need to take care of artists, make them feel good and safe so they can let out what’s in there without being scared of it.”
As an artist who has become comfortable in his own musical skin, Sexton no longer sounds like someone on a restless quest for identity. “I think there’s a particular sort of song that shows up on this record that I’ve been working toward for a long time,” he says. “This is what I do. The artists I love, they do a certain thing, and I go to that well to taste that water. I don’t go to Randy Newman to hear a punk rock song, or Ry Cooder to hear speed metal.
“I guess I knew I’d finally arrived when I started to sell less and less records,” he says with a laugh. “Now I’ve gotten to the point where I sell as few as some of my favorites have.”
Though older than Charlie Sexton, ND senior editor Don McLeese is still trying to decide whether he wants to be a fireman or a cowboy when he grows up.
