“‘For every dollar we spend, it’s like two!'” Lamm chimes in.
“Right,” Blakey continues. “And then instead he said, ‘Well, that’s not out of the question.’ And I think Caitlin and I went home and shared a bottle of champagne after that.”
Even with Yep Roc’s support, crunching the numbers was no small task. Much of the travel budget was covered by the distinguished Netherlands roots-music festival Blue Highways, which paid for the band to come overseas and play their event in April 2005. The band built a European tour around that date, then went to London to make the album.
None of which was as simple as it might sound. “We have to give credit to Lynn for having a buttload of faith that we could make that tour work,” says Cary, who had played in England enough times — as had Lamm — to be wary of the costs. “We both were just like, Oh, this is never gonna work!”
“We sat around this table,” Blakey recalls, “and both of them were like, ‘We can’t do this.'”
“We sat with a notebook writing down money…” Cary chips in, then Blakey continues her thought: “…and the whole budget and the touring and the baby, and how are we gonna go to Europe and tour and how are we gonna do a record afterward, you know — how can this happen? And I thought, it can happen, I know it can!”
Lamm cuts to the essence. “You know, there’s one thing that I have learned in this band is that when Lynn feels it, you gotta go with it, because she’s usually right. She has really great intuition.”
The result of the sessions validated their trust in Blakey’s instincts. Bloom, Red & The Ordinary Girl marks a significant progression for Tres Chicas, taking them in a direction that their debut might have hinted at, but couldn’t have realized.
For starters, the approach between the two records was entirely different. Sweetwater started as relatively casual demo sessions in Stamey’s studio and gradually took shape over the course of more than a year, with little bits added here and there as band members had time. Bloom was a much more focused project: The entire album had to be recorded while the Chicas were in London, so there was a finite starting and ending point.
Furthermore, the backing crew was from an entirely different realm. Anchoring the band were Watkins on piano and organ, Robert Trehern (who co-produced with Brockbank) on drums, and Matt Radford on double bass. Hired hands included Nick Lowe on bass, Penguin Cafe Orchestra mainstay Bob Loveday on violin and viola, legendary pedal steel player B.J. Cole, and hotshot roots-rock guitarist Bill Kirchen. “When the guest stars started rolling in, it was sort of like, ‘Oh my God,'” Cary summarizes.
“I love the people I’ve played with,” Blakey adds, “but I had never played with people particularly like this. And it made me feel like I could play, like I was good. Maybe good people raise you up as a player. But it felt really great to play with them.”
It wasn’t so much the players’ star-studded credits as the way their style and ability affected the Chicas’ songs. “The notion was that the band would wrap itself around the singing, that the singing would absolutely be what drove everything,” Cary explains. “We had sent them really rough demos, so they knew the songs, but I don’t think anybody was coming in with preconceived notions of how things were going to sound. It was more like they wanted to hear how we played and sang them, and then fit themselves around it. And they certainly ended up creating the vibe of the way things sounded because of the way they play, and the way that they play together.”
Blakey picks up the thread. “I remember thinking that no matter what happened, we’d probably get to the heart of the songs with them,” she says. “I didn’t know how that was gonna happen, but I think because they were so soulful that even though we entered into the situation never having played with those guys before, it instantly felt like I was playing with my cousins that I’d just never met, or something. It wasn’t like we hired a band we didn’t know. It was like we knew them before we even walked in the door, playing with them felt so comfortable.”
Musically, the contrast between Bloom and Sweetwater is plainly apparent. Whereas their first record benefited from the careful roots-pop precision Stamey has honed over the years with some of alt-country’s finest acts, Bloom is a much moodier disc, steeped in shades of sultry soul and jazz.
“Stone Love Song”, a Cary/Watkins co-write, smolders with the kind of lounge cool that has permeated Lowe’s recent records. “Still I Run”, which Cary wrote with Nashville songwriter Anthony Crawford, could easily be covered by Norah Jones. Blakey’s “Sway” swings gently and sweetly on the strength of the trio’s heavenly harmonies.
“There were some things that Neil did, though, that surprised me,” Blakey observes. “Some of the songs got slowed down so they could be more soulful, which was interesting.”
“Like ‘Bloom’ was our rock hit,” Lamm notes, “and now it’s our jazz hit.”
Which brings us to the song — or, rather, songs — that inspired the album’s title, taken from lyrics contained in the disc’s third, fourth and fifth tracks. Lamm sings lead on a cover of Geraint Watkins’ “My Love”, Blakey is front-and-center on her own “Shade Trees In Bloom”, and Cary takes the reins for “Red” (which she co-wrote with Blakey).
