Then there are “Don’t Lie” and “I’m Not Over You”. The former presented itself to her when she saw a video on CMT by Trace Adkins; the latter, penned by Melba Montgomery and Carl Jackson, appeared on her first Giant album. “Where Angels Sing” comes from an Oklahoma family band, the Nobles; written by singer Aubrey Noble and her mom Sheri, with help from Darrin Vincent, it appeared on a 1998 album he produced for them.
On each of these, one can hear the ears-heart-gut progression at work. “I’m Not Over You” is perhaps the least transformed, not surprising given that Vincent is drawing on her own performance. But “Where Angels Sing” has new lyrics, written by Rhonda and her songwriting partner, bluegrass DJ Terry Herd, and the music has noticeably more energy and a faster tempo than the Nobles’ more contemplative version.
The greatest change is wrought on “Don’t Lie”, a good but not outstanding country radio single from last year. The quietly bitter edge to Vincent’s lead decisively trumps Adkins’ laid-back tone, while subtle inflections in the chorus harmonies drag a welter of emotions along as they crest and subside across the song’s four minutes.
What’s perhaps most significant, though, at least for the long haul, is that The Storm Still Rages has two genuine originals written by Vincent and Herd. Songwriting is something Vincent has found difficult in the past — and again, it was a practical need that set her to work on the first, “Cry Of The Whippoorwill”. “I couldn’t find a ‘Lonesome Wind Blues’ [which opened Back Home Again] to kick the album off,” she laughs. “I looked high and low, I searched for albums, I listened to albums at home, I could not find a ‘Lonesome Wind Blues’. So I’m driving along on the way to a show, and just started singing, and wrote it down.
“I had a verse and a chorus, and when I got to the show, Terry Herd was there, hanging out backstage. And don’t ask me why, we were just sitting around, and I said, ‘Have you ever written any songs?’ And he said ‘Well, I’ve written one or two, I’m not really a songwriter.’ I said, ‘Man, I’ve got a verse and a chorus, and I’m recording in two weeks, I’ve got to finish it. I think it’s good enough to put on the album, but I’m hung up on this.’ He took it and the next morning he called me and said, ‘I’ve got some lyrics you should take a look at.’ He had five verses written!
“What we did was finish it over the internet, we started writing over Instant Messenger, and then when we got really close, we’d get on the speakerphone and I’d get the mandolin and we’d sing and play over the phone, and then go back to Instant Messenger and just perfect everything.
“So we’ve got this songwriting now; I finally found someone I feel comfortable co-writing with. The few songs I’d written before were done when I got a burst of inspiration. It’s hard. I don’t enjoy it very much, it’s laborsome, but it’s nice to have somebody else to bounce that off, and then just so easily go, ‘Oh, this needs to go there. How nice!'”
Spend enough time around bluegrass artists, and you’ll learn that though it’s a style in which feeling is paramount, surprisingly little is said about what that means. “She sings with a lot of feeling” is the ultimate compliment, but ask a singer how or why he does what he does, and “I just try to put the feeling in it” is about as deep a response as you’re likely to get.
It’s as if there’s a widespread but tacit agreement that it’s something which simply can’t be talked about in any detail. Instead, bluegrassers tend to invest their energy in working on their skills, trusting that the feeling will be there when the time comes to let it out.
That’s what Rhonda Vincent seems to think, anyhow. “I want them both” — chops and soul — she declares. It’s as visceral and immediate a response as any she makes this evening, but it also reveals an absorption and sustained focus that involves the antithesis of those qualities. “The music has got to be right. I think my father instilled that in me, and when I listen to the musicians I admire, I hear them both. They had both. They got it right and they had the feel. So it can be done, it’s just, do you want to discipline yourself to do that?
“And in recording, a lot of it’s who you work with. Ronnie Light, who has engineered all my albums, he will wear you out. You’ll go, ‘That is good enough,’ and he’ll say, ‘OK, if you want to keep that…well, you know, I hear a little rasp in your voice.’ And so you come back the next day and he plays it and says, ‘This is what you sounded like last night, and this is what you sound like today,’ and you’ll go, ‘He was right. Doggone him.'”
