Lauderdale first came to Nashville in 1979 from his native North Carolina and recorded a bluegrass album with Marty Stuart, who shares both Lauderdale’s purism and his taste for retro-country clothes. The album probably rocked, but it never got released (and Lauderdale, in fact, is still looking for the tapes). Then he moved to New York, worked as a messenger and got parts in country and retro musicals-“Cotton Patch Gospel,” “Diamond Studs”-back when that was a thing, and ended up in L.A. with a road-show version of “Pump Boys and Dinettes,” about the time Dwight Yoakam and Lucinda Williams were ringleaders of the “Town South of Bakersfield” scene. Lauderdale did a cut on the second “TSOB” anthology, then went back to Nashville in 1989, where he recorded a debut country album that’s still unreleased.
His follow-up album-or start-up album, depending on how you look at it-the 1991 “Planet of Love,” got lots of respect, but only pulled its weight in the marketplace because Strait covered two of its songs. And so forth and so on, for five more records, on and off major labels, plus a Grammy-nominated bluegrass collaboration with the revered Ralph Stanley, “I Feel Like Singing Today.” As a songwriter, he’s a reliable Nashville content provider, with the occasional hit, like Loveless’s “Halfway Down” or Mark Chesnutt’s “Gonna Get a Life”; as a performer, he’s too smart and too much of a hard-country purist to break out of “Americana”-that is, countrylike music that doesn’t get played on commercial radio. And, it has to be said, Lauderdale isn’t a weird genius like Williams: his classic country voice makes him sound like Everyhonkytonker; his songs (about drinkin’, heartachin’, even truck-drivin’) are genre pieces, sometimes inspired, sometimes simply competent.
All that having been said, if you were serious about country music, whose career would you rather have? There in Americana limbo, you’re in the best possible company: from Merle Haggard to Lucinda to Steve Earle to Wilco to the whole “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” crowd. You can play the Grand Ole Opry and get a bang out of it, or-as he did on Memorial Day Weekend-appear at Ralph Stanley’s low-key bluegrass festival in the mountains of Virginia with an acoustic band, and not have your record company begrudging the time that might be better spent schmoozing. And when you land on an indie label like Nashville-based DuoTone, you can do an album like Lauderdale’s latest, “The Other Sessions”-surely the smartest and most satisfying new country record I’ve heard all year. (Given the amount of new country I can bring myself to listen to anymore, that may not be saying a lot. But there it is, and DuoTone’s welcome to quote me, as long as they understand it probably won’t help.)
Tonally, much of “The Other Sessions” sounds like a valentine to Buck Owens’s Bakersfield sound: achy, twisty vocals, lots of steel guitar (by the likes of session veteran Sonny Garrish and Bob Dylan’s ex-sideman Bucky Baxter) and fiddle and an intensely warm recorded sound. The few deviations-the Jordanaire-like ah-uhm backup vocals on “First Things First,” the Waylon Jennings-like country-rock groove on “Just to Get to You,” the old-school Nashville tic-tac bass on “Merle World”-don’t deviate far. And even two songs he fancies up with minor chords (“You’ll Know When It’s Right,” “It’s Not Too Late”) don’t sacrifice country credibility. When Lauderdale’s not singing like Buck, he’s evoking the bluesier Jerry Lee Lewis and Gary Stewart (“Honky Tonk Haze”), George Jones (all over) and, oddly enough, Van Morrison (“You’ll Know When It’s Right”). (I don’t know, maybe I’m hearing things. Check it out.)
The songs themselves, all Lauderdale originals, are textbook examples of how to combine musical hooks and verbal ingenuity. He wrote three of them with Melba Montgomery (who wrote for and sang with Jones in the early ’60s on such songs as “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds”), one with Harlan Howard (the legendary songwriter and mentor who wrote “I Fall to Pieces”) and one, “Merle World”-which almost lives up to its wish-I’d-thought-of-that-title-with the arch-New-Nashville songwriter Kostas (who wrote Patty Loveless’s “Timber, I’m Falling In Love”). But the most affecting may be “Oh My Goodness,” the plainest and simplest, the only one Lauderdale wrote without a collaborator, and guaranteed to take you down: “Oh my goodness/Who’d’ve thought it would be like this?/Oh my goodness/Don’t you want to stay?” Three chords, two minutes, one hook, no tricks.
You probably won’t hear stuff from “The Other Sessions” on Top 40 country radio stations. But you don’t bother with all that anyway, right? You can get this CD, hop in the car, program your player to skip track 10 (“Diesel, Diesel, Diesel”; a truck-drivin’ song as redundant as its title), find the nearest two-lane and pretend you don’t live in such a wretched time for country music. And sure enough, you won’t.
