Travels with Charlie
Track-by-track description

Broken-Heart Maker
I wrote this song in Tucson on my first month of the 10-town tour. I hadn’t set out on the tour intending to make a record along the way—it was enough to just think about doing the tour! But my main hanging buddy for the month, Sergio Mendoza, listened to the song and suggested we record it before I left town. Sergio plays keys with Calexico, so he suggested that we get together at Wavelab Studios and bring Joey Burns and John Convertino in for the session. My friend Tony Gilkyson also happened to be in town visiting from L.A., so I asked if he would come in and play some guitar. Once we had the basic tracks down, we added horns to give it a little more of that Tucson thing.

Whirlwind
This was one of the few songs written before the tour that I knew I would record somewhere down the road. L.A. seemed like the right place. But plans for the recording kept falling through. Dave Way, a friend and very good mixing engineer, came out to dinner with us one night during my last week in L.A. I was telling him about my failed plans to record that month and joked that I would just make the second track on the record 2 minutes of silence and title it “F*ck L.A.” He laughed and suggested that we do the recording at his home studio on my last day in town.

Dave’s home studio is not what you picture when you picture a home studio. When I walked in there for the first time, I saw triple-platinum records on the wall—Sheryl Crow, Michael Jackson, Christina Aguilera…you can’t really find a better mixing engineer. Or a nicer guy. The studio sounded great, and everyone was in a good mood. The guys are pros. Brian, Paul, Mike, Will (who was in town for a visit) and I played through the song three or four times, and it was there.

Undertow
I decided to do the month’s recording on Vashon Island at Ian Moore’s house as I toured regionally out of Portland. There was something really magical about this one.

All the kids had left the house to go fishing in the rain. There was a pot of chicken and dumplings on the stove. Ian and I sat down and talked about the song and set up to record at the piano in the living room. We were just about to start recording when everybody spilled back into the house. We tried to proceed anyway—we were in the zone!—but it was impossible to get the kind of quiet we needed. Each take we attempted that afternoon was foiled by something hilariously adorable—one of the kids whispering “Mommmm...?” or the dog’s footsteps on the wooden floor. So we gave it up and waited ‘til the whole house had gone to sleep. We hadn’t lost the zone. My amateur piano playing and the vibe of the day gave this song something different.

Shadow to Eclipse
I met the Navarro guys though my Austin friend and producer of Wilson St., Mark Hallman. Navarro was a hip Boulder band in the 70’s who were eventually recruited by Carole King to be her backing band. These guys were like my surrogate family during my month in Boulder.

James Tuttle was a member of Navarro who also turned out to be an incredible mixing engineer. I brought him and all the guys into the studio, along with Todd Ayers (Todd was the guy everyone in Boulder suggested to me when I asked for “someone who plays weird”) and Jeb Bows (a great fiddle player who tours with Brandi Carlile and had also just opened one of Boulder’s first legal dispensaries). We were recording on the day I was leaving town to drive toward Louisiana. We had to start early. Michael Wooten (drums) makes a living as a truck driver. He had gotten back to Boulder at 5 A.M. and slept for 4 hours before coming to the studio. I had just finished packing the car full of all my belongings for the next leg of the tour. But it was the only time everyone could do it. So we did. James worked some magic in the mix, for sure.

Bitterness
One of my favorite things about being on the road is running into other friends who are traveling too—crossing paths in a place that is neither your home nor theirs. One of my oldest friends, Laurel, was coming through Vermont while I was there. We hadn’t seen each other in years so we planned a visit.

I was walking down the street to meet her when the first few lines came into my head with the melody attached. I recorded it immediately onto my iPhone voice recorder, singing into the phone as I continued down the street.

I didn’t get a chance to record while I was in Burlington. I was sad about this because my Burlington band was one of the best of the entire tour. But I had some luck. When I returned to Austin at the end of the year, I found out that Bill Mullins, my Burlington guitar player was moving to Austin!

So we planned a day in the studio with Brian Standefer. I wanted it to feel intimate, like the laptop recording I had made of the song back in Burlington, sitting in my bed. We played it just a couple times live—and it felt right—intimate, like the laptop recording, but way better.

Obvious to Me
Often I write a song and then think to myself, “Well what am I doing to do with THIS??” A pop song? It wouldn’t fit with the rest of my material. But then again, I thought, that’s what this record is for. I would just wait until I found the right place to record it, and the band who naturally had those pop sensibilities. I found them in Milwaukee.

Don Moore was my Milwaukee guitar player, and a real treat for me that month. I had also met Steve Hamilton, through my friends Pat McDonald and Melanie Jane. Steve did the recording for their Steel Bridge Music Festival every summer, and I dropped by his studio in a funky part of town where he was working on some Timbuk3 mixes for Pat. We all took a shot of whiskey together (Milwaukee is a drinking town, and don’t you forget it!) and Steve offered to do the recording at his studio for me at the end of the month.

Two-Timer
This song had been around for a while by the time I recorded it. Again, it didn’t seem like it “fit” with the rest of the stuff I was writing, so I had a hard time imagining it belonging on one of my records. But this record was different, and this song was perfect for Nashville.

Chris Scruggs is an old friend of mine—we met through Greg Garing who we had both toured with, and then, for years, he stayed at my apartment when he was playing in New York and I stayed at his in Nashville. The funny thing is, usually the other person wasn’t even home when we were passing through. Neither of us is home all that much.

Chris brought in an all-star cast of Nashville musicians. I told him I wanted to do it real old, classic country style. Chris played drums first, and then overdubbed steel and piano. Kenny Vaughan, Mike Bub, and Buddy Spicher played the song just as I’d imagined, giving it a real old-school Loretta Lynn vibe.

Lone Ranger
The idea for this song had been in my head for a few years. It came from something I overheard a little girl say to her dad. “Daddy, you’re a lone ranger.” I think she was just trying to say he was kind of a loner. It got me thinking about my dad, who was also kind of a lone ranger, and then, well, here I was driving the roads of this country all on my own…so maybe I had grown up to be a lone ranger too.

My dad passed away just a few months after I recorded it. I never did have the chance to play it for him. But he was more of a surf-rock guy anyway.

This recording session was just me, Will and Malcolm Burn. I’ve always enjoyed Malcolm’s work, so it made sense to try to get into the studio with him during my month in New York.

It was a snowy day in Kingston—we recorded the song live and that was it—it was there.

Girl Who Cried Love
During my month in Louisiana, on my way back from a gig in New Orleans, I stopped in Lafayette for a night out at the Blue Moon Saloon. It was there I met CC Adcock, who gave me a CD that would become my Most-Played Record of 2010—Lil’ Band O Gold—The Promised Land. I didn’t make a recording during the month I lived in Shreveport. So at the very end of the tour, I decided to swing back through Louisiana to record with these guys, who by that time I’d become a huge fan of.

The song I decided to bring to the table was called “Girl Who Cried Love.” David Egan, the Lil’ Band O Gold piano player, had become my new favorite songwriter. When I played it for him I could tell he really liked the song. So that meant a lot to me. Warren Storm, the Lil’ Band O Gold drummer, was a trip and a half. He had a big goofy mustache, a crazy Louisiana accent, and some wild stories. So there I was with my new favorite songwriter and my new favorite singer, getting ready to lay down the parts for my song. That was really something.

Heartaches and the Old Pains
This is one of the few co-writes on the record. I wrote this one in Nashville with Trent Summar. We usually start our little sessions by just talking about what’s going on in our lives, and what we’ve got coming up. On this particular writing day, I was just getting ready to start the 10-town tour, anticipating being on the road for 10 months, and what that was going to feel like. We put down the basic structure of the song that day, but sent lyrics back and forth via email over the next six months before it was finished.

It’s a song about being on the road, what you leave behind when you drive away from home, and what you don’t. “The heartaches and the old pains seen through rearview mirrors shrinking aren’t really any smaller in your heart.” There’s some stuff you just can’t shake no matter how many miles you drive. I recorded this the day after the tour ended at Darwin Smith’s cottage a few doors down from mine.

For more information, please contact Mary Moyer, Asha Goodman or Carla Sacks at Sacks & Co., 212.741.1000.