A conversation with John Hiatt

That's a pretty busy year you've got planned.

It is. It's great. That's what so exciting about the business right now to me. There are so many more opportunities.

Like what?

Just the fact that it's so wide open, that the corporate labels are being caught with their pants down. And obviously their reaction to Napster, which is I guess typical of modern corporate America doing business. When they find a competitor, their reaction is just to annihilate them.

So that was their knee-jerk reaction, but I think what it really said was, "Geez, we don't know anything about this stuff." I have lots of different feelings about Napster and that technology. It's great in terms of kids sharing music, but I think it's a problem when college kids download whole CDs and turn around and sell them for $20. But there are solutions to all this, I would think. And obviously the courts felt the same way because they've given Napster a chance at least to come up with a defense. It's not going to go away; it's going to change the music industry. It's already doing it.

Is it going to be good for the artist?

Absolutely. How could it not be? How could another avenue of being able to get yourself heard not be a good thing? The traditional avenues have gotten so corporatized -- it's going to be one big major label when they're all done eating each other. And then there's one or two conglomerates that own all the radio stations, so you have to sound a certain way to make that work. When things get so constricted like that, other arteries have to open up. And that's what's happening, I think. The industry's needing a triple bypass. [Laughs] And the Web's giving it to 'em.

Why an acoustic album?

I'd always wanted to make a more acoustic singer-songwriter kind of record. And this was the chance to do it. It's pretty much acoustic, but there's an electric slide on one song. And Dave [Immergl|ck] plays electric mandolin on another. No drums, though. We finally got rid of the drummer.

Is recording an acoustic album any different from recording when you're all plugged in?

It's just like any other record to me. It's a joy and a thrill. But then, I never really have anything planned out, to be honest. And we made this record in four days, which is how much time we spent on "Bring the Family."

I wanted to get kind of a back-porch feel to it, and I wanted to do it live. So we just sat around in a circle in this little studio up the road, about three or four miles from our farm. I'd play the song once and David Immergl|ck and Davey Faragher [the bass player] would remember the chord progressions. But my chord progressions aren't too difficult to remember, and we'd played together for about six years, so we had a pretty good musical rapport. And we just rolled tape. A lot of it's first take. There are a couple of second takes, but mostly we just went with it.

Have you worked that way before?

Yeah, that's pretty much the way we work -- especially with those guys. Davey Faragher has been playing with me since the "Perfectly Good Guitar" tour, which was, what, '93, '94? And Dave Immergl|ck has been playing with me since "Walk On." We've arrived at the idea that we're better when we don't know what we're doing. [Laughs]

What's your writing ritual?

I've been writing for a long time. I picked up a guitar when I was 11 and within a couple of months I wrote my first song, so I've been around -- I'm 48, so what's that, 37 years?

Over the years I've employed all kinds of little tricks and disciplines, but they've all fallen by the wayside. I just write pretty much when the inspiration hits me. Usually, it's just picking up a guitar and playing, and the next thing you know, you've got a chord pattern, and you've got a melody, and you're singing nonsense because you like the melody so much. And the next thing you know, it sticks with you to the extent that you think, gee, maybe I oughta write some lyrics. So that's when you get the paper out and try to come up with something that's worth singing.

When you go back and listen to your music, can you identify in the music what you were going through when you wrote it?

Oh yeah. When I go back and listen, I definitely remember where I was at the time. When I listen to those first three A&M records ["Bring the Family," "Slow Turning" and "Stolen Moments"], I can go back to when we were newly married and when we had the baby and how the kids were all little -- we each had a kid we brought to the marriage -- when I wrote this song or that song. Or I look back and go, "Oh boy, I had my head directly up my own ass on that one." You get a lot of that, too.

Is it weird for you to listen to the albums from the rough years? Some of the emotions seem so raw.

Oh, no. The songs are what got me through. It's kind of like only the song survives. It's not my real life in these songs. It's inspired by bits of it, but it's inspired by a lot of different bits. The songs were my release; the music makes me free. I've always felt like there's nothing I couldn't write my way out of.

Is it easier for you to write from a happy place or a place that's a little dark?

That's a tough one to answer, because once you start writing, all kinds of things come up. But, generally, I think the popular myth about suffering for your art is a bunch of crap. Who wants to suffer for anything? The fact is, life includes as part of the ticket price plenty of suffering. It's gonna be there. I think the more whole I become as a person, the more whole I become as an artist.

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