“I’m 54 now, and having children…you begin to see the circle of life. It happens even more clearly with pets. They’re on a different schedule, so you see them as they’re born, and as they grow up, and as they die. The older I get, the more precious time becomes.”
Olney is trying to explain how his new album, The Wheel, came to center on the transience of life and its circular nature. More than any other album of his career, The Wheel forsakes skewed tales, instead focusing on philosophical ruminations about the brief time we’re allotted in this mortal world. It’s tempting, of course, to ascribe such thoughts to the events of September 11, but in fact Olney penned and recorded nearly all the songs for the album prior to that day.
“Some of them were written a long time ago,” he says. “I had actually recorded ‘Big Cadillac’ [the stormy rocker that opens the album] about ten years ago, but I wanted to do it again. And then once I got going I started writing a bunch of new stuff. ‘Chained And Bound To The Wheel’ is a new song. With that one, I had just read King Lear and wanted to get some of that imagery in.”
As it turned out, much of The Wheel ended up being made without a record contract in hand. Although Olney is quick to express his gratitude to Rounder for their support, he sensed after his last album for the label that it was time to move on. Omar’s Blues, released in 2000 on Dead Reckoning, appeared at roughly the same time the label Kieran Kane and Kevin Welch had put together threatened to disintegrate.
For the new album, prior to each recording session at Robb Earls’ Sound Vortex Studio, Olney would run the players through a rehearsal of four or five songs, in order to save studio time. Olney handled most of the guitars, while longtime friends Deanie Richardson, Mike Fleming and Pat McInerney fleshed things out on fiddle, bass and drums, respectively. Additional help came from Earls, Mike Henderson and Tommy Goldsmith, with Earls’ wife Carole Edwards contributing a couple of beautiful between-song vocal interludes. Edwards also duets with Olney on the final track, a “round” inspired by Moondog, a brilliant and eccentric street musician Olney saw during his brief stay in New York in 1971.
“He wore a Viking suit, and he was blind, and it seemed like he was about eight feet tall,” Olney remembers. “Later I found out he was an accomplished musician who had had songs recorded by Big Brother & the Holding Company. Anyway, a while back I ran across a used CD by him that had a bunch of rounds he’d written. There were about twenty of them, along with a sort of classical piece, and each one was about a minute long. That got me to thinking that maybe I could do that. It’s kind of a cool idea, because you write a melody, and then you just sort of write one line. And then you write another melody, and stick a line in that. You don’t have to worry about rhyming or anything.”
Other high points on The Wheel include “Boss Don’t Shoot No Dice”, a John Hiatt-style rocker (written with Janis Ian) based on the famous Einstein quote about God, dice, and the universe; “God Shaped Hole” (not the Hayseed song of the same name), a wordplay-rich romp triggered by Sartre’s comment that God is dead, but that he left a God-shaped hole in human beings; and “Revolution”, a sung-spoken ballad that likens the changing of the seasons to the overthrow of a government.
Tellingly, two of the three closing tracks are drop-dead gorgeous love songs, delivered by Olney in a voice that’s rough enough around the edges to command authority, but also tempered with more than a trace of vulnerability. As the title implies, the album also exhibits a gemlike symmetry in both theme and structure.
“Having [a thematic concept] helps me to stay focused on a project,” Olney says, downplaying this rare and distinct talent. “If there’s a kind of connection between the songs, when you go into the studio you don’t feel you’re starting anew every time.”
It’s anybody’s guess, of course, whether someone with the profile of Emmylou Harris or Linda Ronstadt will decide to put his or her own spin on any of these songs. It’s also likely that Booka Michel — the respected Austin musician/entrepreneur who picked up The Wheel for release on his Loud House Records label — wishes simply for as many listeners as possible to become privy to Olney’s work.
Regardless, Olney himself is content with the way his own wheel has turned. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how when you’re young, you really want fame badly,” he says. “It seems like such an odd thing, to crave the approval of total strangers. But you really want it, and for a number of years I was quite disappointed that I didn’t get that.
“And then I thought, if I had gotten that, I wouldn’t have written the things that I did write. I don’t know if this is sour grapes, or if maybe I’m getting wise in my dotage, but I feel very fortunate that not many people know who I am. I can go out and do other things, and live a normal life. I write songs because that’s what I do. The feeling of finishing a song is one of the most satisfying feelings I’ve ever felt.”
Russell Hall lives in Anderson, South Carolina, where four years ago he gave up life in the corporate world to begin writing about music full-time. He’s been a fan of David Olney ever since first hearing his superb 1997 album Real Lies.
