One song on her new album, a cover of Paul Westerberg’s “They’re Blind” (which originally appeared on the Replacements’ 1989 album Don’t Tell A Soul), addresses those concerns directly: “They hold you too close to the light/And I see what they only might/If they’d learn/But they’re letting you burn/’Cause they’re blind.”
“I was never really a Replacements fan, but I fell in love with that song,” Willis says. “I fell for the old struggling-artist angle of it. And I could commiserate with that feeling of being unappreciated, or people not seeing who you really are, not being able to see through.”
Perhaps as important as the message of the song was the messenger. Whereas Willis’ MCA albums focused on material by songwriters readily identifiable with country music — though, granted, they were respected names such as Steve Earle, Jim Lauderdale, Kevin Welch and Paul Kennerley — What I Deserve finds her tapping into a wholly different vein of popular music. In addition to the Westerberg song, there’s also the aforementioned Nick Drake cover (“Time Has Told Me”); a tune co-written by Dan Penn and Chuck Prophet; and, expanding upon the precedent set with the Fading Fast EP, three songs co-written with Gary Louris.
The Penn/Prophet track, “Real Deep Feeling”, came out of the original recording sessions in San Francisco. Prophet also ended up singing on the track, at the insistence of Willis. “That was a song Chuck brought in to the session; it was sort of a last-minute thing,” she recalls. “On the demo I had, Chuck and Dan were singing on it together. And I just felt like, well, Chuck has to sing on it, because his voice is so cool. I wish I could sing exactly like Chuck Prophet; if I could sing like anyone, that’s who I would sing like. ”
The Nick Drake tune was a result of Ensenat’s influence, though somewhat indirectly. Ensenat had given Willis a collection of Drake’s music and recommended that she cover one of the songs, but the one Ensenat had in mind was one that “I just couldn’t get around, I just couldn’t get ahold of,” Willis says. “But I listened to some of the other songs, and I fell in love with ‘Time Has Told Me’. I remember I sang it for Bruce [her husband], or maybe I played him the demo of it that I had just cut. And he thought that I wrote it. And for him to think that I wrote it made me feel like, well, OK, I think I connected — I think this song somehow speaks to what I’m trying to express musically.
“And it also shows you how much he loves me, to think that I could have written a song that beautiful,” she adds with a self-deprecating laugh — but one that offers a hint toward a more serious struggle with self-confidence that has dogged Willis throughout her career, particularly when it comes to songwriting.
“I’ve written a lot of songs, but the ones that I end up recording are the ones that I took to someone to help me finish,” she says. “I have a confidence problem, where I feel like it’s not good until somebody else tells me that it’s good. If somebody else feels it was worthy for them to put their name on it, then I go, ‘OK, I can take this to the band now.'”
As such, it’s perhaps not surprising that five of the thirteen tracks on What I Deserve are Willis co-writes (though she did write one song, “Talk Like That”, on her own). In addition to the three with Louris, two were written with John Leventhal, who had previously collaborated with Willis on two cuts from her self-titled MCA album of 1993. Other songwriters Willis shared credits with during her MCA days included Paul Kennerley, Kostas, and her first husband, Mas Palermo.
Despite these various collaborations, Willis says that “I think it’s pretty awkward to write with other people. I’m sure there are a lot of people that write songs as a craft, for somebody else to do; they’re not really thinking about themselves performing it. But I’m always thinking about singing it myself, and it’s a story that is true to me. So if you sit down with somebody else and they add stuff that you can’t really relate to — it’s just hard, I think, to find somebody else who you can tap into the same feelings with.”
Louris and Leventhal in particular have been welcome exceptions to that rule for Willis. She first hooked up with Louris through Ensenat’s efforts to pair her with artists whose music Willis admired. “I had been a fan of the Jayhawks, and Teresa would just ask me, ‘Who do you like, who do you want to write with?’ And I’d mention some people, and she’d call them up. She was very assertive, which was a good balance to me. So, she called Gary up, and he came down for South by Southwest, and we wrote three songs together that first time. And then we got together another time and wrote a couple more.
“It was just really natural, and easy. And there are very few people that, when you sit down to write with them, you don’t feel really uncomfortable, or you’re not afraid to say, like, ‘That sounds like this song’ — just stuff where you don’t feel like you’re gonna hurt anyone’s feelings. And he and John Leventhal are like that for me, where you just say it like it is, and you can shoot straight with each other.”
For his part, Louris says that Willis “basically was generous with me for songwriting credits. They were all her songs basically, and then I just worked on them with her….I didn’t really help her much with the words; she had her words going, and seemed to wanna hang onto that. But I would help her with writing a chorus, or twisting things here and there, maybe coming up with another part. It was a good collaboration; we definitely got things done and we felt comfortable with each other. And she was pretty open; it wasn’t like everything had to be a 1-5-4 chord progression. She didn’t mind if something was a little bit strange, and had a bit of a pop chorus to it.”
The three songs they wrote together are among the highlights of What I Deserve; two of them, in fact — “Take Me Down” and the title track — lead off the record. Louris’ pop influence clearly takes Willis down a different path than she ever would have been pushed to pursue in her MCA days, and her music is all the better for it — if still staunchly difficult to corner in a radio-driven marketplace. “I would hope that it would have a chance on Triple-A radio, and I know it would fit in with Americana,” she says of the album. “I think it could also get played on country radio, but I just don’t know if that’s even a possibility in this world.”
Indeed, for all the more adventurous directions Willis takes on What I Deserve, “some of the songs are hardcore country,” she points out. Her cover of Robison’s “Wrapped” (the title track of his self-released 1997 disc which was reissued last year on Sony’s Lucky Dog imprint) certainly qualifies in that category, while her rendition of up-and-coming Austin songwriter Damon Bramblett’s “Heavenbound” also is delivered with a definite twang.
