“And,” he laughs, “I don’t even know who the guy was who wrote it. How do you do that? That’s what an artist is. Even Dylan’s astounded that he wrote some of the stuff he did. This chemical stuff comes together in the mind and body at a certain point, and for me it produced Squeezing Out Sparks.”
Yet that peak precipitated the Rumour’s downfall, when Parker and band were unable to capitalize and take their career to the next level. Despite high hopes, an optimistic title and a guest vocal from Bruce Springsteen, the following year’s The Up Escalator failed to generate the sparks of its predecessor, escalating musical tensions between Parker and the band. After half a decade on a touring treadmill, they’d apparently gone as far as they could together.
For those of us who will forever remember Parker and the Rumour as a more dynamic musical experience than Springsteen and the E Streeters, the split that Parker considered inevitable seemed all but tragic. He wanted to hear different sorts of arrangements — sparer and simpler — write different sorts of songs, play with different musicians. From the start, his relationship with his older bandmates had been more of a shotgun marriage than the usual boys’ club.
“That band was very, very exciting, and deeply musical, but they would never settle for something simple,” he explains. “It just refreshes you to play with different people, because you start to resent what you’re doing and you resent your musicians. It never got to that point with the Rumour, but I think it would have. They were getting disgruntled as well — another album and another three months of touring. Why?”
Flash forward a quarter-century, and Parker admits he’d love to have his career on a level that he once took for granted, to play larger halls with a killer band instead of hitting the road solo and playing smaller, half-filled clubs in some parts of the country. He’s had his peaks — 1988’s The Mona Lisa’s Sister, 1991’s Struck By Lightning — and his valleys. Even on his current tour with the Figgs, promoting his strongest album in years, Parker knows he has to pick his spots, that there are places it just doesn’t make economic sense for him to take a band.
“There are towns I won’t name where I’ve been going year after year, and it’s always the same 30 to 50 drunken guys there,” he says. “Record companies want you to tour, but I know from experience that my tours don’t sell my records. You’re either playing to the converted or you’re playing to people who got stuck on Squeezing Out Sparks and they won’t buy a new record anyway. It would be much easier for touring if I could play big places and pack them out, but once you get onstage and have an audience, these kind of negative ideas don’t come into it. You just have to be very thankful to have an audience that still wants to get into what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.”
After decades of bouncing between labels who didn’t seem to have much of an idea what he was doing — or at least how to market it — Parker feels like he’s found a home with Chicago’s Bloodshot. Alt-country associations aside, the label’s renegade spirit seems as appropriate for Songs Of No Consequence as it was for last year’s Your Country.
Parker actually made his label debut when Jon Langford recruited him back in 2000 as guest vocalist with the Waco Brothers for “See Willy Fly By” on Bloodshot’s fifth anniversary anthology. “Then later I was in Chicago for a benefit show, and Sally Timms was at their office,” he says. “I told her I wasn’t on a label and was wondering where I should go. And she said that if I ever got a bunch of material together in that kind of [country] vein, I should think of Bloodshot. That helped spur me to write Your Country. I’d been on Razor & Tie, who seemed more conservative and kind of staid, and I thought it might be good to get out there with the grungy crowd a little bit.
“This time, I did the record without playing them anything and sent it to them when I’d finished,” he continues. “I said, ‘I don’t know if this is up your street, it doesn’t have a country flavor,’ but they liked it so much they took it on.”
Whatever happens with Songs Of No Consequence, Parker is already on to the next, with eight songs demoed for an album he describes as “a bit more rootsy, but not country, and not quite as aggressive as this.” For a guy whose master plan initially didn’t extend beyond three or four albums — “I thought maybe I could make enough money that I wouldn’t have to do anything for the rest of my life,” he says with a laugh — the maturation of the angry young spitfire into the seasoned veteran has given him a life he never anticipated.
“I had no idea it would go on,” he says of his career, “but it just does. I thought writers were supposed to burn out, but I found I kept writing songs, and they’re good enough, so I’ll go make an album. I never anticipated Squeezing Out Sparks, and I never anticipated all the ones that have come after it, especially ones as good as Mona Lisa’s Sister and this record.
“Writing is always brutally hard, to reject the stuff you’re writing to get to the good stuff. And then sometimes it only takes you three minutes to write a great three-minute song. It’s continually surprising.”
As long as Parker can continue to surprise himself and his listeners, that’s all the impetus he needs.
