“I do have bands every now and then. I pick up one here and there around the planet when I need it, especially in Europe, and enjoy that. But 95 percent of the time I play solo. I love the spontaneity of it. I take requests, and I can do whatever song I want to do, and play it with whatever feel I want. It can be a very audience-involved show.”
Anyone who’s had the pleasure of seeing Jason Ringenberg rock out solo and acoustic — jumping on the bar or crawling on the floor as the mood strikes, covering anything from the Ramones to Hank Williams — has seen just how loose the solo format allows this particularly uninhibited natural entertainer to be.
Translating that sense of surprise and spontaneity to disc has always been a challenge for anybody. What’s more, in this case, as the opening track “American Question” makes abundantly clear, Jason also wanted even avid fans to know that this time something quite different was cooking in the very sound of the record.
In rhythm and tone, he arrives at a place on that opener about midway between an Outkast track and a Woody Guthrie-style country talking song. The musical layers, in fact, come not from Jason but from his collaborator Jim Roll, a rootsy but nevertheless often experimental singer-songwriter and instrumentalist with a handful of albums to his credit.
They met when Roll opened for Ringenberg at a Michigan show. “Jason stayed at my house,” Roll recalls, “and I just gave him a click-track beat, which he recited the “American Question” poem to. And he went home saying, “Can you make this the weirdest thing I’ve ever done?’
“The first version I did was with that same beat you hear, but with all banjo and fiddle. And he said, ‘No no no! That’s too conservative! I really want you to fuck this thing up!’…I think that he wanted to show — maybe even more to himself than to the listener — that this was serious and different, that there would be a little jolt to it.”
Roll’s unusual arrangement is married to a lyric Ringenberg is particularly proud of. It begins, “We can bomb most any land, then send their kids to Disneyland, give them a Big Mac and a prayer — then forget that they are there.”
The encounter with Roll also led to the appearance of one of the most moving tracks on Empire Builders, a cover of Roll’s epic song “Eddie Rode The Orphan Train” (from Roll’s 2002 disc Inhabiting The Ball). It’s the true story of a Midwest orphan sent off on a train full of them, in search of families who’ll take them in. The hard and too-long loveless life that followed — and the hope that Eddie brought into manhood and fatherhood nonetheless — are the stuff of Roll’s poignant and pointed story.
Ringenberg says he was blown away by its power when he heard Roll perform it live, and also saw connection to the themes of Empire Builders which made it a natural for inclusion. Like the many cuts written by Ringenberg, “Eddie” is a song about large dreams for life in this country, harsher realities that ensued, and hope that remains for doing better in any case.
Ringenberg’s version, which dramatically repeats the title line as something approximating an orchestra rises behind him, focuses us on the moment when little Eddie, riding that train, looks out the window over the vast American space and possibility, in all innocence — but we know what will happen to him, because the harsher side of the tale has been told. It’s a very powerful musical moment, comparable to the moment when little Vito Corleone looks up at the Statue of Liberty coming into New York Harbor in The Godfather, Part 2 — and we know, already, what was to become of him.
The power of the track, along with many other effective musical touches on the record, calls attention to producer and multi-instrumentalist George Bradfute, who has worked on all of Ringenberg’s solo records. “Quite frankly, George is more responsible for the way my records sound than I am,” Ringenberg says. “He’s a Nashville genius.”
Ringenberg’s desire to incorporate the likes of those orchestral sounds on “Eddie” led to a lot of opportunities for input from his producer. “‘Eddie’ started out kind of simple,” says Bradfute, “and we built on it. Jason was trying to figure out what key to do it in, and I said since he sounded good in both, maybe we could start out in one and switch. I knew that was a great little transition there, because the drummer liked it! And since the verse and the chorus are mirror images of each other, in the chords, forward and back, that leant itself to the orchestral thing. And the ‘orchestra’ is really just me and Fats Kaplin playing fiddles and cellos.”
Other tracks got equally intensive attention. “We worked on that ‘Rebel Flag’ song a whole lot,” Bradfute says. “At first we did a kind of stately rebel/Waylon Jennings sort of version of it, and then decided to take that up a notch or three. It took us a long time to figure out what to do with a couple of these songs. We probably worked on this record more than all the others we did together; we spent more time on it, put in more effort, thought, and ideas. We tried several different approaches on some of these songs; it was experimental, and with some of them, we really achieved something by going in a different sort of direction.”
