“Lexington Jail” shows off Easton’s love for rambling blues and fingerpicking (an underappreciated part of his arsenal that impressed many at the Getty show), while “The Man That You Need” is a stirring mini-opus of guitars and various keys played entirely by Easton. He calls this the artistic breakthrough on the album.
Rounding out Break Your Mother’s Heart are a pair of songs by J.P. Olsen: the heartbreaking character sketch “John Gilmartin” and a rockabilly-tinged ode to love and dysfunction called “True Ways” that closes the album. This is not the first time Easton has covered the obscure Brooklyn singer-songwriter; he also included two Olsen cuts on The Truth About Us, including “Don’t Walk Alone,” a standard in waiting if there ever was one.
“I do believe he is one of the greatest songwriters and undiscovered treasures in America,” Easton says. “Part of my career is devoted to making sure people learn about his songs. He’s got a ton more.”
The album’s title is taken from a line in the chorus of “Poor Poor LA”. It was inspired by something he’d heard someone say in Oaxaca, and he meant it as a message to “friends and people that have gone way overboard, even warmongers,” he explains. The complete line: “You don’t have to break your mama’s heart to change the world.”
Months later, after Break Your Mother’s Heart was finished and sent off to be manufactured, Easton’s mother had open-heart surgery. And here was his album title about breaking her heart. Etched in stone. It horrified him. “That was a very, very difficult period for me,” he confesses.
If Easton would prefer to forget that episode (his mother’s health has since improved), he also would rather not look back on Break Your Mother’s Heart much at all. “I don’t listen to it anymore, I’m onto newer things already,” he says. “But I’m taking with me what I’ve learned, how to improve and keep going.”
And there’s no shortage of plans and dreams. Immediately on the agenda is getting his new backing band, featuring bassist Keith Hanna and drummer Miles Loretta from the Cleveland group Rosavelt, primed for touring. While on the road, Easton hopes to come up with new material — “Gotta get your hotel writing on,” as he puts it — and hash out the new songs onstage with Hanna and Loretta, with an eye on recording them when the tour is over (preferably in order of what will be the final sequence for a new album, he adds).
Easton is also interested in making a record of original material performed by him alone, using the Break Your Mother’s Heart cut “Man That You Need” as his inspiration, and he’d also like to record another collection devoted exclusively to Olsen’s songs. Somewhere in there, or on the wish list, at least, is another soul-healing international trek — Cuba or Brazil, perhaps.
Plus, there’s plenty still to learn about the studio process. “Part of me so much wants to go, ‘Hey man, play what you feel,’ you know, the old Blood On The Tracks kind of thing — assemble a bunch of people and say, ‘Let’s do it.’ But I think that the better producer and the better arranger would get in there and know exactly what they wanted. Their vision should be a little more sharp. So I’m thinking that more and more I’d like to pinpoint my vision and tell someone exactly what to do.”
He adds, “If I want to make myself 100 percent more satisfied, I need to step up and say, ‘Mr. Keltner, step outside for a second. That might fly with Randy Newman, but…'”
Neal Weiss was recently freed from the shackles of daily, dot-com music news. He has no plans to report on Third Eye Blind tour dates at any time in the near or distant future.
