Interview: Rumer’s Nashville Tears

English song stylist Rumer has just released Nashville Tears, featuring a collection of songs written by a severely under-rated songwriter.

That songwriter is Hugh Prestwood, a gentleman from El Paso, Texas who has had some success thanks to Judy Collins, Randy Travis and Alison Krauss.

Until recently, Rumer (Sarah Joyce) hadn’t heard of him either. But when she did, she immediately went to work creating this album full of Prestwood’s songs.

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The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to Rumer just as that album, Nashville Tears, was released last Friday. Listen to their conversation here:

Or read the transcription here:

M: Your album that’s actually being released today here in New Zealand is Nashville Tears.

R: Yeah.

M: It’s all very American and country sounding and yeah, it’s pretty exciting. My understanding is that all those songs were written by a guy named Hugh Prestwood right?

R: That’s right.

M: And I’ve got to admit, I was not aware of who he was until I heard this album and heard these wonderful songs.

R: Me neither. I didn’t know him. That’s the thing, I couldn’t believe it.

M: Really? So how did you find out about him?

R: I found out about him through the producer, he sent me one song, Oklahoma Stray, and I was like, ‘wow’! And then he sent me another song and I looked at it from the start a few of his other songs and I as I kept digging I realised, oh my God, he’s a great master songwriter than I’ve never heard of. It’s so exciting.

M: It’s quite a commitment to go from not knowing anything about a guy to recording an entire album of his songs.

R: It easily felt like it was important to share with everybody in Europe and beyond Nashville because I didn’t know how well known he is beyond Nashville and the music lovers in the United States. The general public and even music aficionados in Europe probably don’t know the extent of his catalogue so I felt like it was really important…I just immediately just wanted to share it with everybody, what I found.

M: My understanding is he actually attended some of the sessions, is that right?

R: He did. He came to the string session. If you go on YouTube you’ll see this, it’s called Nashville Tears introduction, it’s like a little EPK and there’s video footage of when he came down for the string session and I was talking and there’s interviews. Yeah, it was great when he came down and experienced it all. He was really surprised, he wasn’t expecting it to be such a big session and have the full string section and for it to be so…he wasn’t expecting something so fancy you know? And he was blown away.

M: Yup. And so what did you and he talk about?

R: What did we talk about?

M: Yeah.

R: We talked about everything. You’ll see in the clip we talked about when he first heard, when I first got in contact with him about doing the album and how he felt about it and as he got sent music he was getting excited about it. And he actually said that when he heard that we were doing fifteen of his songs, he said that he was a little worried because he said, ‘A little of me goes a long way’.

M: That’s quite humble of him I suppose.

R: As you can hear on the record it goes a long way. I think he may have felt a concern about whether we could pull it off, because he is very picky about his songs and how they’re expressed. But my aim was to make him happy as well, so we made a huge effort to make sure that we…I worked with his original demos as templates for the record production. So as we were developing the songs, we were going from the production, we were going from the demos, his demos so they’re not anyone’s version of the song. So we were trying to see what he wanted, how we wanted to express it and putting as much of his spirit into it as possible.

M: Was he familiar with you and your career up until that point?

R: No. He didn’t know me from Adam either.

M: So the both of you kind of got to know each other, that’s interesting.

R: Yeah, he didn’t know me.

M: So what did he tell you about how he wanted his songs to be presented?

R: He didn’t say anything specifically but you know, you could just tell it was important for the work, he wants the emotion and story’s so beautiful, beautiful way. But what he didn’t know about me was that I had been studying this for years, how to do that and I’d learnt through Boys Don’t Cry and Bacharach, I’d really gotten good at it. So when I approached his work, I knew what to do. I knew how to study the work, I knew how to get emotionally attached to it, I knew how to honour the writer, I had experience at that point and knew how to do it. So my aim was to make him happy and he was really happy.

M: I have to say that one of the songs that stood out for me was Deep Summer In The Deep South and it kind of had a Bobbie Gentry kind of feel to it the way it was written and the way you sang it. I was wondering if that was something that was a touch stone for you at all.

R: Definitely, it was intentional. I was definitely using Bobbie Gentry as a template. She’s sexy you know when she sings and percussive. It was sexy and it was percussive in the same way and so I was definitely using her as an influence when I was performing that song.

M: And the band really cooks at the end of that tune. You guys are working up a steam there.

R: They really do.

M: Did you record it all live or was it overdubbed? How did you get that sound?

R: No that was actually one take what you’re hearing for the band. What it was, was that song was never meant to be recorded. I liked it but it wasn’t on the list and then on the first day of recording, I was in the corridor, in the hallway with Mike Johnson the Pedal Steel player, and we were talking about Hugh Preston and he said I think Hugh Preston’s family is from Andalusia, Alabama. And he said, ‘and I have family in Andalusia’, really that’s crazy. I said you know he has a song about Andalusia called Deep Summer In The Deep South and I stood there and I said we need to do it, I said you’re here, we’ve got to do it so I said to Fred, Fred I want to do Deep Summer In The Deep South and he’s like, he didn’t even know what the song was. I said there’s no time, there’s no time so I called my husband who was on tour with Dionne Warwick in Honolulu and I said, ‘can you do a chart for me for this song, do a number chart’? So he did the chart overnight and in the morning I had the assistant print me a tiny copy and I put it on the side and I waited for an opportunity and I said, ‘Fred if we have time could we do Deep Summer?’ He goes we haven’t got time, we haven’t got time and then we had twenty minutes left at the end I said I want to do Deep Summer and he said you’re crazy, I haven’t got  a chart and I went, ‘I got em, I got em’. And I gave out the charts to everybody and I was like, ‘Ook we’ve got twenty minutes’. And that’s why it sort of sounds frantic cause we were just like, it was like ok, we’ve got to nail it.

M: It sounds like they were energised.

R: Yes, absolutely. It was fun and Mike Johnson, he knew that I had kind of done it…not for him…but I was like Mike I want to do this because you’re here and you’re from Andalusia and it was special. Like he really, really leaned into and afterwards when we were mixing, Fred said, ‘that’s not Mike’. I said, ‘That is Mike’, he said, ‘That doesn’t sound like Mike’. I said, ‘I am telling you’…and he made me go and look at the date to make sure it was Mike because Mike’s such a shy guy, he’s such a sweet, shy guy and he didn’t believe that he could be like that expressive. It was really fun, I’m just really glad that we did it because it’s a nice mood on the record.

M: And then the song after that also reminds me of a different singer, Heart Full Of Rain, and I hope you don’t mind being compared to Patsy Cline but that’s who I thought of when I heard it.

R: Oh God, I love Patsy Cline! I’m a huge Patsy Cline fan, in fact, I had a Patsy Cline greatest hits tape when I was ten years old. I used to play it all the time. I loved it and I didn’t know any, it didn’t have any context when I was young, I was just fine taking records lying around that my brothers and sisters left or just finding old tapes in a drawer and play it. That was kind of where I found it and I just loved it. My karaoke song is Patsy Cline.

M: Which one?

R: (Sings) ‘Oh I go walking after midnight out in the moonlight’. I did that in Arkansas in a karaoke place and this drunk girl at the end went,  ‘You rocked it!’

M: That’s fantastic. Did you enjoy your time in Arkansas?

R: I love it. In fact I’m gonna write a song called Arkansas Was Good To Me because it really was good to me. It was a good place for me. It was a really good time.

M: You just moved from the states back to England, the times are crazy everywhere, what’s your take on the difference between one place and the other these days?

R: Well, I think here in England people follow the rules a bit more cohesively. Everybody’s like, ‘Ok, these are the rules, let’s follow the rules,’ and they’re a bit more officious about it and the admin is good and the organisation is good compared to America where it’s all like every state doing its own thing and it doesn’t work the states doing things in isolation because everything’s open, you know how it is so it’s like one state’s doing this and the other state’s doing that and everyone can travel. Where I was I think people took it very seriously. I saw people every day taking it very seriously. I don’t know what it was like in other places but in Macon, Georgia where I was living everyone was locked down and people wore masks and everybody was pretty good about that.

M: That’s good. So you were living in Macon, Georgia, there’s a musical town.

R: Well that’s why you know? That’s why. I was drawn to it because of the music history and I was there helping to produce A, the memoirs of Alan Walden, who’s Phil Walden’s brother who’s…I was writing management and tour….

M: Capricorn records and all that.

R: That’s it. It’s not actually Capricorn, it’s more the early Otis Redding tales of how Otis Redding was a really, renaissance man. He was a businessman, he was running his own career. And it’s just some anecdotes about that and about his excellence and how he became who he was because of his own drive and everything. And it also touches on Lynyrd Skynyrd and that whole era because Alan managed was the first manager of Lynyrd Skynyrd, he signed them when they were still in school. It’s a music memoir and we have a book deal.

M: Oh, good.

R: Yeah, so I’m not writing it, I have a writer who’s writing  it but I’m just guiding the process, sort of overseeing the process so that was what brought me to Macon.

M: It’s interesting, a book like that coming out at this time because, I mean let’s face it, the music that Lynyrd Skynyrd made, I mean I’m old enough, I was buying those records back in the day, but they’re very Southern orientated and all that Confederacy stuff is not going over so well these days so it’ll be interesting.

R: That’s what’s so interesting about the book because half of it is early Otis Redding which is what Alan was involved with and then the second part was Lynard Skynrd, the same guy doing both. He’s an interesting character and you know, Southern men are very, you can’t stereotype them. Otis Redding was a Southern man, Ronnie Van Zant was also a Southern man. So it’s different, there are all types of S outhern man.

M: Getting back to your record, there was one other song I at least wanted to touch on which is Learning How To Love because it’s got that kind of twangy vibe to it that I love myself and a really nice pedal steel solo in there, so what’s going on with that one?

R: Yeah, I love that song. That was…lyrically I love the vulnerability in it, I loved that it was about a man who was just damaged and didn’t have any…as a child about what relationships are and how to be in a relationship and kept making mistakes and was just…yeah it’s appealing for understanding and that you are shown the I don’t know, I was never taught and it was just a very vulnerable song from a man’s perspective and I really liked it and Ty Herndon actually did a fantastic version of that. But again, that never really got out or it didn’t get out to people so they could hear it. He’s got a fantastic voice and actually I really liked what they did on that record which I tried to take a little of what they did and the spirit of what they did on that record and bring it to this version.

M: I’m curious, you’re a song interpreter and you obviously have to do something in order to get inside the song and take your version on it. What is that process? Is it just studying it? How do you do that?

R: Well you have to study the work and especially Hugh Prestwood because like Bacharach, it’s very deceptively difficult. So you’ve got to learn the melody, it’s not something you can just hear once and just know it, you have to study it. And then you study it from a musical point of view but what I do with the songs is that I just put the music on when I do dishes and I put the music on when I go for a walk, I put the music on and I drive and then I just let the emotions connect, start connecting with my own past and my own pain and my own emotional experience and then I find a way to feel it in my heart. Every single song I feel, like Bristlecone Pine I love because I love the way it’s weirdly about mortality in the natural world, I love the natural world, I’m a nature lover, I love trees. I love the song…..it’s a song about a tree and the magnificence of a tree that really connects with me.

Learning How To Love connects with me because I didn’t have a very good childhood and I didn’t know this brokenness inside me that makes me unable to understand a lot of things to do with matters of the heart and so I relate to that. I mean, if you pick any of the songs, I’ll find a way to create a narrative in my own mind and heart where I can connect with it as a narrator, as a singer, as a storyteller.

M: I was going to mention the song Remembers When cause it kind of reminds me of my favourite Elvis Presley song which is Kentucky Rain.

R: Yes, I love the song Remembers When. I mean, the song Remembers When is widely regarded as the songwriters’ song…. the song that all songwriters wish they had written. When Hugh Prestwood goes to Nashville and people, he plays that, that song other songwriters just go oh. You know, damn. Hot damn!  (laughs)  I mean I love them all that’s the thing. The Snow White Rose Of Arlington is an interesting one because even on the session, one of the musicians said, ‘I don’t think an English girl can sing this song’. And I said. ‘Well I think the challenge is,’ I said, ‘I think I can’. I said, ‘I think the challenge is to become the storyteller and to be a narrator without agenda and without an identity in terms of national identity and just tell the story’. So that was my challenge on Arlington to tell the story without it being.an issue.

M: I would imagine if somebody tells you they didn’t think you could sing that song because of who you are or whatever, that’s just like laying down a gauntlet.

R: Definitely and I understood his point of view and I appreciated him for bringing it up but it was very much like, ‘With due respect, I think I can do it. Let me try and do it. I think I can do it.’ But I understood why he thought I couldn’t and I think I did it ok. I think I did it and I laid the emotion, I told the story and I don’t think my identity really mattered. What do you think?

M: Yeah, I was right in there with you you know? And I did kind of have that thought in the back of my head cause it’s a very specific, Arlington as an American, we know what that means.

R: Yeah, again, these are stories. They’re not my stories. Storytellers should be able to tell any story if you tell it well.

M: So now that the record is out, I assume you’re locked down like the rest of us are, you can’t go out and perform, do you have a plan of action or are you just gonna talk to poor schmucks like me all day long?

R: Well I’m going to hopefully do a global live stream concert. I’m gonna do a really high end one with really high production. Global live stream so that everybody can tune in from around the world. I think I’m gonna do that, I’m gonna make plans to organise that and I’ve got other work, studio work to do. But no, it’s a bit tricky, it’s a bit tricky. And I’ve seen some people who are, other people who work in the live sector, people who work in festivals and stuff like that.

M: Well thank you very much for doing this for me and good luck with the record. Hopefully we’ll all be back living normal lives soon and enjoying live music, but in the mean time, at least we have the records.