We chat to Gabe Lee about his new album Honkytonk Hell, Imogene and why he’s still a fan of a solo write. The full interview is coming to the podcast very soon!
How are you doing? How’s quarantine in Nashville right now?
Nashville is alright, the state is pretty rural, but this part is pretty progressive. The rest of the state though unfortunately doesn’t really care. I don’t want to throw the state under the bus, but it’s the reality. Outside Davidson County, which is where Nashville is located, the counties live their life in a social distancing way anyway, so when it comes to shutting down restaurants and jobs, it’s not easy. I’ve been ok, I’m with my dogs. I really can’t complain.
Have you been able to be creative in this time and had that freedom?
Luckily, I have been able to write and take advantage of the gift of time, if you will. I can’t tell you how many times in the last couple of years, I’ve told friends and family ‘man if I only had two weeks, I just had two weeks where I could do nothing but write and dedicate myself to a good creative space,’ but that’s not always easy for folks. I empathise with those folks, because I also get inspiration and fuel from running about town and doing odd jobs. I bar tend, so I get a lot of energy from those interactions day to day too. Generally, when I write and I have a couple of days off, where I can sequester myself and just work on something, I’m generally pretty solitary anyway in those times. I’ve been faring ok, I can not imagine what it would be like to really be one of those folks, who just can not deal with not having some sort of social outlet.
You’re born and raised in Nashville, which is very rare. You must have seen it go through various phases and changed so much.
Absolutely, it’s definitely become a transplant town. There are folks from all over that are directing their attentions on Nashville and I think it deserves it, it’s a fun place to be, it’s got legendary history of all these great songwriters dating back to the 50s and the 60s.
Your music really has that traditional sound, but I know you also grew up surrounded by church and gospel. There are so many different elements in there, I know your mother was also a classically trained pianist, so has music just always been around from the beginning?
Absolutely, my mother was a pianist and when she moved to the States – her and my father moved here for school but ultimately ended up here in Nashville, by some blessing or stroke of luck. I came to love roots and folk and Americana music, but we weren’t a household that listened to a lot of secular music. I kind of had to go and explore and find it myself. A lot of it was in the community of friends that I had there, that’s when I started listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd, John Prine, Southern rock really. The classical element was a huge part of my life though up until really I went to school to be a concert pianist. I went to Belmond University, which is an awesome music school. I went through the whole thing of applying to conservatories and all that. Ultimately, I decided pretty early on that the vibe didn’t fit me, that’s when I took a new direction to maybe not study music for a degree – I took up literature and journalism.
It’s kind of applicable though! So have you always grown up songwriting?
Yeah, I’ve always been inspired by songwriting and being here in Nashville. A lot of my friends and I in high school, we had garage bands and stuff and we would play in talent shows and be embarrassingly bad, but we would feel like we were rockstars. A lot of these friends of mine are very talented singers and songwriters, though ultimately a lot of them didn’t go into the industry. That kind of goes into the picture of just being born and raised in Nashville, just to have that part of your life and be a regular thing. I think I was trying to emote through songwriting pretty early on, through high school and middle school, because I loved music and I felt drawn toward it, but not necessarily because I had any inkling of starting a career in it.
That’s the way it should be – that organic way. I can’t believe how close together you’ve released your two mammoth albums, ‘Farmland’ in 2019 and then most recently ‘Honkytonk Hell.’ Honkytonk Hell was the gateway to me discovering your music. In terms of creating the record, how did it evolve?
Some of the songs, because of the way ‘Farmland’ came together, I’d had about ten or eleven songs that I’d been working on for as long as four years. We call it ‘woodshedding’ which is basically being extremely and brutally honest with yourself, and working on a craft for as long as you thought it was ready to be showcased. In Nashville the round is a big thing, you get on stage and play with three or four other artists and swap songs. When I met Alex Torres, my tour manager and my producer, I had ten to eleven songs ready and in a good spot to where, if I met someone who could help me, I’d have a record ready to go. After we recorded ‘Farmland’ and the year that we spent promoting and playing out, by the time a year went by, I basically had collected another ten or eleven songs. The timing is great and also I will say that ‘Farmland’ itself was much more of a singer-songwriter project than ‘Honkytonk Hell’ bringing on the whole band.
It did feel like a rounder sound on Honkytonk Hell. I guess that answers my question of how much changed within that year.
Yeah, some of the songs that didn’t make it onto the record, we saved for Honkytonk Hell, like ‘Heartbreaker Smile.’ Some of the songs like ‘Imogene,’ I wrote the day that we tracked that, I wrote it that morning. I think when I had understood that we were going to bring on some of these great session players and friends of ours for the record, I don’t think I wrote a lot of the songs with that in mind per se, but we definitely wanted to approach the production in the sense that we were going to have so much more to offer and hopefully capture even more of an audience and a broader audience with the voice of the pedalsteel, my friend Luciano on the dobro which people loved from the first record. Having that rounder sound and harkening back to the sounds of Lynyrd Skynyrd with the Southern rock guitar. It was a blast to cut and the guys made it really easy. Nashville session musicians are the best of the best and we had a lot of fun cutting it.
The response has been so positive to the record, I think it’s one of those records that will sit in people’s consciousness that people can sit with the whole record. One of my favourite tracks on the record is ‘Imogene’ – not because of my name – but can you tell me the story behind that track?
Thematically, the record discusses a lot of relationships and not necessarily relationships of the romantic kind or between two significant others, it’s more on a broader scale. These relationships include that between a relationship and a community, between traditions and new culture and also the conflict and resolution between willpower and addiction. We play with a lot of names of women, it’s a trope in a lot of these song titles but they’re not necessarily directed at previous relationships. I think a really easy way to talk about and understand these issues are through the guise of romantic relationships. ‘Imogene’ itself, I was up super early and I was looking up ghost towns in the States, just a regular morning… diving into their town histories and what they became. ‘Imogene’ was a small Midwestern town, it inspired me because it never surpassed a couple of hundred people, but the town kept burning every several years from the 1900s up until the 80s. I started playing with the imagery of this real place, but building a landscape of stories around it – just because a place is in the middle of nowhere doesn’t mean dramas don’t unfold there. Building off that, I had this song that also discusses an inner conflict, the narrator is running from something and is trying to find a place to land and can’t seem to do it. That song came together hours before one of our last tracking days, because our manager said ‘it would be nice if we had another Bob Dylan-esque, finger picky type of song to balance out all these other rocky songs.’
I think you do only get the power of this record when you listen to this record from start to finish. There’s just so many layers on it. I know the title track you wrote with Marcus King, are there certain people you gravitate toward to write with, or do you prefer solo writes generally?
The co-writing – I don’t participate a lot in co-writing, I think I’ve done maybe four or five co-writes in general. The Marcus King write was set up by one of his day to day managers, she is a fan of our work so she hooked us up. He recently moved here so it made sense for him, he’s on the road a ton – obviously is extremely successful. They’re bringing on different writers for Marcus – he could sing the alphabet backward and it would sound good because of his voice. Now, I’ve always been a fan of his, so it would have been stupid for me to say no and it was very exciting. I think he’s like 23 years old but he’s got centuries of soul, we wrote a couple of songs and he helped me flush out ‘Honkytonk Hell.’ I continued to work on the song and enjoy it and love it and it became the title track. We wrote a second song together which will hopefully make it on one of our records. That was a blast.
I know you were meant to tour a lot off the back of this record, but because of everything that’s happened, a pin has really been put in those plans. What’s next for you?
Yeah, we were obviously extremely excited to get on the road and we had some opportunities with The Luck Reunion… We were going to be in Texas through most of this month. I haven’t toured much at all and the fact that we had these things lined up, as well as plans to go to Scandinavia in October. We had all these things lined up. We’re being patient, we’re in a situation which is fairly optimal because the venues are fans and want us to succeed and we know most of them. It’s not like it’s a complete wash, so I’m very grateful.
Final Few
If a biopic was created about your life what would be the opening track? Probably Eveline.
The last record you bought on vinyl? It was Courtney Andrews, I believe, her most recent record.
Which song do you hate to love? Oh man, I do love some Taylor Swift songs (laughs), she has this song called ‘Mean’….
Which book and thing would you bring to a desert island? Thing – probably my dog, book – a collection of short stories called ‘Where the Light Ends.’
Song you wish you’d written? Probably ‘Take It Easy.’
Complete the sentence..
Music is… life.
Country music is… fun.
Gabe Lee is… just another guy.
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