The recording itself took about a day and a half. The album was recorded at Nelson’s hideaway studio, tucked away in the “saloon” in Luck. (If you’ve ever seen Nelson’s film of Redheaded Stranger, or the “Arkansas” town scenes in Lonesome Dove, you’ve seen Luck.)
Some of the tracks were already in place. Two duets, “We’ve Done This Before” and “Love Me Like A Song”, were recycled from Rhodes’ album of last year; Willie already had a new song of his own, the melancholy “Love Will Always Be”, ready to go. The sweetly melancholy title track, a song Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan wrote for Waits’ 1999 album Mule Variations, was Kimmie’s choice, but it fits Nelson’s cracked-leather baritone and her effervescent soprano as though it were written for them. Other recognizable selections include Rodney Crowell’s “Til I Gain Control Again” and Nelson’s “Valentine” (from his 1993 album Across The Borderline).
“He’s been really good to me, and I love him,” she says of her mentor. “Just to sing on his songs and have him sing mine, to be intimate as artists in that way, has been one of the privileges of my musical life.”
Rhodes pauses to ponder. “I learned a lot by watching Willie looking at what is there and using it. I really think a lot of his success is that he just creatively and imaginatively knows how to make use of what’s around him, be it me or whoever it is. He just goes, ‘Well, this is what’s here and I appreciate that’ — he seems to have an appreciation for what is there, and an ability to utilize it to help people around him and help himself, too.”
Perspective helps, too. “Either the planets have lined up in your favor or they have not. And over the span of a 40 or 50 year career, that’s gonna ebb and flow,” she figures. “But you can still manage to be creative and put your records out, regardless….When we were recording Picture In A Frame, and we were sitting at the bar [in Luck] listening to it, I said, ‘You know, I love to just be able to do something without having to ask anybody if I can or not.’ And he said, ‘Exactly.'”
Kimmie Rhodes grew up in Lubbock wanting to be a florist — a poignant ambition in that arid region, where mesquite trees and endless rows of cotton and sorghum are the dominant botanical life forms. She remembers, as a child, tornadoes chasing her and her family around from town to town. (Her friend Sharon Ely recalls always having something pretty to wear at hand during spring storm season, in case she met a cute boy in a tornado shelter.)
That upbringing, inevitably, finds its way into her art. Former Texas governor Ann Richards good-naturedly called Small Town Girl, one of the plays Rhodes authored, “a West Texas Fellini movie.”
Some of Rhodes’ music is informed by her childhood; some is a reaction against it. “My experience with going to church in Lubbock was sort of contrary to my spiritual beliefs,” she told another interviewer. “I mean, nothing bad against any of that, but I didn’t really enjoy going to church when I was a kid. But I did sing. That’s kind of how I got started singing.”
When Georgia O’Keeffe was an art teacher in the tiny West Texas town of Canyon from 1916-1918, she did a series of watercolors called “Light Coming Onto The Plains”. “The light comes and goes for a long time [below the distant horizon] before it finally comes,” she wrote of the Panhandle dawn. “The wind blows like mad — and there is nothing after the last house of town as far as you can see — there is something wonderful about the bigness and the loneliness and the windiness of it all.”
Some of that same sensibility finds itself in Rhodes’ songs. In “Send Me The Sun”, she sings: “Send me the sun wrapped in a rainbow/And I’ll wash my face in this rain/And brave this tornado/Hey, hey, you’re the only one/Who could send me the sun.”
Though she ceased calling West Texas home many years ago, it continues to inform her art — music, painting and playwriting alike. She enjoys that perspective in common with a group of contemporary West Texas women, a loosely-knit sororal affiliation of playwrights, actresses, artists and songwriters.
Though far less celebrated than their male counterparts (Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Terry Allen), West Texas-bred artists such as Rhodes, playwright/actress Jo Harvey Allen, songwriter/playwright Jo Carol Pierce, playwright Deanna Shoemaker, artist Debbie Milosevich, filmmaker Amy Maner and others bring a distaff perspective to life in that spare and difficult country.
The wisdom Rhodes has internalized speaks volumes about why she has been able to attract talents on the order of Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zandt to perform with her, and why her music resonates so far out of proportion to her personal celebrity (or the absence of it).
Once, a couple of years ago, she was suffering a particularly brutal series of losses. A clutch of friends seemed to sicken or die, one right after another. The last straw was when a friend finally died of AIDS after a prolonged period of suffering. “I came in one day, and he had just died,” she recalled not long after the incident. “His hand was still soft and warm, but he was gone.
“Something happened to me in that moment…I just went, now I get it! And it was like, oh, let’s open that bottle of fifteen-year old wine! Oh, let’s get out the good tablecloth and china. What are you saving it for?
“Sharon Ely’s always kind of understood that more than most of us. She’s always had such a flair for everything — a bon vivant person. She’s always saying, ‘Kimmie, why are you waiting for a special occasion to dress up? Dress up! It IS a special occasion, it’s your life.’
“All this stuff, you’re waiting for something special to happen, and something special is happening — your life.”
John T. Davis is a freelance writer living just east of Willie World.
