Forbert’s 1988 release Streets Of This Town, his debut for Geffen and his first album to reach the record racks in six years, contained some of the toughest, bitterest rock of his career (“Don’t Tell Me (I Know)”, “Wait A Little Longer”), balanced against some of his very best ballads (“Mexico”, “Search Your Heart”). While the title track wouldn’t have sounded out-of-place on radio stations playing Foster & Lloyd’s “Texas In 1880” and Dwight Yoakam’s “Streets Of Bakersfield”, Forbert and producer Garry Tallent were hardly courting a country audience; rather, Forbert’s folk-rock was expanding in subtle but confident directions, somehow drawing more deeply on traditional sounds while rocking harder.
The same might be said for Forbert’s work in the following decade, from 1992’s The American In Me (produced by Pete Anderson) to 1995’s Mission Of The Crossroad Palms (his most lyrical album) to 1996’s Rocking Horse Head (a collaboration with members of Wilco) to 2000’s Evergreen Boy (his most soul-shaded release).
Forbert’s 2002 tribute to Jimmie Rodgers, Any Old Time, was nominated for a traditional-folk Grammy (ultimately losing to June Carter Cash’s Wildwood Flower). It was a project that Forbert, who had been singing Rodgers’ songs since his youth in Meridian, felt was in many ways overdue.
“When you realize how great he was, and you know the influence he had, it’s kind of weird to be from Meridian and not record a serious tip of the hat to him,” Forbert explains. “He was just so good, so influential, and in that light, being from his hometown meant something to me. When you get way into the material, you find out it’s deceptively simple, a lot trickier that it first appears. There are a lot of people who know about Woody Guthrie but don’t know about Jimmie Rodgers, and that’s a little off-balance, with all due respect to Woody.”
In the summer of 2003, in producer Marc Muller’s home studio in Neptune, New Jersey, Forbert began to record demos for Just Like There’s Nothin’ To It, an album that would ultimately refine the lyrical and musical impulses of the folk-rock from which he has never radically departed.
He and Muller worked through seven songs, with Muller adding guitar, lap steel and keyboards until he had to fulfill a tour obligation with Shania Twain. To complete the album, Forbert initially contacted longtime Nashville producer Kyle Lehning (whose credits include Chuck Berry, Randy Travis, George Jones and countless others); he recommended his son Jason, who had been working with his father as an engineer for over ten years.
“Kyle would come in and work with us periodically,” Forbert says. “It was kind of lucky the way it worked out. The next thing I knew, I was so happy with Jason and his ideas and the way we were finishing the tracks from New Jersey, and how we were starting the remaining songs, the next thing I knew we were done. I took the mixes to Kyle and said, ‘You know, we had a ball doing this. Sorry.’ Kyle just smiled. He had every confidence in Jason.”
With its layers of pianos and organs (notably from Dixie Chicks keyboardist John Deaderick), lap and pedal steel (played by Jason Lehning, Muller and Dan Dugmore), and mandolin and acoustic guitar from Bryan Sutton, Just Like There’s Nothin’ To It is Forbert’s most gracefully textured and deftly arranged record to date. Even rockers such as “The Change Song” and “I Just Work Here” shift and slide in unexpected directions.
The album’s second track, “Wild As The Wind (A Tribute To Rick Danko)”, looks at the life of The Band bassist and singer, without glossing over his cocaine abuse or his irrepressible humor and talent.
“I didn’t know him real well,” Forbert says of Danko. “I knew him through the ’80s up in Woodstock, drinking, hanging out, having fun with him. I’d see him when he came through Nashville or when we were on the same bill. He was always the same guy — oddly down-to-earth and just as wild as the wind. Who’d picture Rick getting old comes into that. He wasn’t the kind of person you’d picture in a wheelchair in a nursing home.”
The heart of the record, as with most Forbert albums, is in the lyrical ballads. “I Married A Girl” opens with a repeated figure played on a trio of piano, acoustic guitar and bass; its melody will melt into that of “Oh, To Be With You”, the most devastating song from Mission Of The Crossroad Palms. The song is more than a reprise; it’s a bittersweet haunting, brimming with all the emotions embodied in a fated heartache. “What I did, I did for me/And also you to some degree,” Forbert sings, with a wry pang, in the closing lines. “I saw the truth and set you free/I hope we’ll learn what love could be.”
“Those songs are about the same person,” Forbert says, reluctant to explain too much. “It’s all in the songs, really. There’s really nothing more to tell. I’ve been divorced now for a couple of years.”
The album closes as it began, with a meditation on dreams. These are not dreams as fantasies, but as inspiration and sustenance against time’s attrition and the inevitable mistakes along the way. “Well you chase yours and I’ll chase mine/And I hope our dreams will meet up on the boulevard sometime,” he sings. “And I hope we’ll both be happy if the dreams we dream come true/And I hope as well we don’t just wind up bent, sad and blue about a dream.” It’s a sentiment that runs throughout Forbert’s songwriting career: the patience and risk-taking that are necessary to follow a dream.
Or a song, for that matter. “It’s a slower process now, for a lot of reasons,” Forbert says of his songwriting. “It’s a lot of work to get them to where I’m happy with them. It can really drive you round the bend. I have more distractions now; everybody in the culture has more distractions. It’s harder to bloody think. It’s harder to stay in touch with simple, grounding forces.”
Roy Kasten lives, writes and dreams in St. Louis, Missouri.
