Digital Rodeo

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Thu. Jul 10, 2008 - at Crick...
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Washington DC, Washington DC

By. As in, sung by, written by, released by, produced by...
That last one’s new for me. The only reason I never produced an album by myself before is I didn’t have time. Why not? Because I’m opening record labels and restaurants, working on movies and things like that. But I knew I was going to have to across the board dive in if I wanted this album to be one of the best of my career. So I came in with guns blazing.
So a tremendous amount of thought, time and effort went into Big Dog Daddy.
Last year when we were finishing White Trash With Money, Tom Bukovac came in and played guitar. I told him I had a couple things that were going to be really rock edged on the next album, kind of a southern rock and blues thing. I asked him to take them from the guitar side and think about grooves and rhythms -- help structure these things. So he and I co-produced “Hit It” and “Big Dog Daddy,” and I produced the rest by myself.
I sang my own harmonies on this album and I’d never done that before. I’d let harmony singers come in and do their thing. This time we’d get through laying down a song and the engineer would play it back while I threw down a harmony track. Me singing with me. “High Maintenance Woman” is one of them. “White Rose” and “Love Me If You Can.”
You get out what you put in. I’ve always been the hardest worker, and prided myself on that. I may not be the biggest star around, but nobody will ever out work me. That’s my approach.
For the first time ever, I’ve made an album that I can listen to up and down and never go, “Man, I wish I didn’t let them do that.” If I didn’t like the way something sounded, I fixed it.
There’s a little piece on “White Rose” where the chorus says, “Now there’s plywood for glass where the windows all got smashed...there’s a couple of cars half out of the ground...” right in there you can hear the harmonies do a big swell. Well, when they comp’ed it down somebody lost that. I was already hearing it in my head and loved it, so I called back and told them to turn those harmonies up 25%. Ten years from now I’d have been wondering why the producer let that go.
Those intricate pieces are scattered all through the album, and they’re stamped with my approval. We break it down as far as turning everything off but the steel guitar and listening to the full three minutes of just that. When you’ve got 30 tracks it takes hours to listen to one song that way. But we went in there, cleaning stuff up, taking out all the unnecessary string noises and accidental pick sounds. All those decisions are my brand on this album.
Every song on here means something to me and a lot of effort went into making sure there’s no letdown whatsoever. Dean Dillon and Scotty Emerick wrote a couple with me, I wrote one with Bobby Pinson, whose music I’ve really gotten into lately. I picked up one from Fred Eaglesmith that’s been on my list for years and I’m glad to finally get on an album.