A Conversation with Suzy Bogguss (continued)

PM: And your partner and associate producer Doug Crider has four great songs, or co-writes on the record. What's he like?

SB: [laughs] Boy, that's a long story. He's a great person. I'm crazy about him. I wouldn't be married to him for 21 years otherwise. But he's so deep, and I'm privileged to sort of understand it. He sees things from a very deep attitude, but he sees them in a very simplistic way, and that is the beauty. The ultimate songwriter is somebody who can, without having to use ten million words, hit the crux of something, and just hit your emotional core like he did with "In Heaven" and with my song, years ago, with "Letting Go."

PM: Right.

SB: It's an amazing gift to be able to do that. I wish I had it.  Obviously you can tell that I've had two cups of coffee this afternoon, and I'm a talkative person anyway, so my songs are the same way. I write too many words, and I can't get to a beautiful rhyme like he can get to it with the clearest thought. So I'm a huge fan of his. And also, I love his shifting melodies. Because when we write, usually I end up taking the driver's seat when it comes to the musical side of things. But then he always has some little thing, a little tweak in there that makes it brilliant, where you take it from my Peter Paul & Mary-land, to either shift the key, and we change keys in the middle of it, or something happens that is just some brilliant little morsel of an idea that takes it from being my same-old chord progression, something that I always use, to having an extra little bit of character. I love that about him as well.

PM: Must be nice to have a wife that talks about you like that. That's really great.

SB: Well, don't tell him I said that. For heaven sakes, don't write that down. I'll be having to cook fancy meals for weeks.

[laughter]

PM: I was surprised to see bassist Will Lee on so many cuts, but then I realized that you cut the record in Engelwood, New Jersey, at the Bennett Studios. That must be part of it, right? That's more his stomping ground.

SB: Totally. And he and Jason are really good friends. So Chris Parker, and Will--all of the bass players are all real good friends of Jason's. And I'm a bass freak. I absolutely--I hate bass players and I love bass players, and there's nothing in between. [laughs]

PM: Wow.

SB: I either hate it or a love it. There are certain people's tones that just absolutely send a shiver up my spine, and then there are people who--there's nothing that I think is more beautiful than a beautiful bass tone. And of course, that's a subjective thing. I'm picking out my favorite bassists.

PM: Well, yeah. That's the idea.

SB: On most of my records, Leland Sklar was my bass player, who I think has one of the most ultimately beautiful tones in the whole wide world.

PM: Talk about a sound, yeah.

SB: And all of these guys just blew me away, and just for different reasons. I mean, each one of them had a completely different tone, and a completely different touch to the way they played, but I loved all of them. So it was just so great for me.

PM: Now, is that studio in Engelwood, is that Tony Bennett's place?

SB: It certainly is.

PM: Wow. How did that come about?

SB: And his son Dae was our engineer.

PM: I've heard about this guy, his son. What's the studio and the environment there like?

SB: It's so great. It's an old train depot. So it's a very long and skinny building. And one whole side of it is glass, because it's the waiting room. Then the studios are built off on one end, and there are some offices on the other end. And the kitchen and stuff all looks out onto the street there. But get this, two times a day you have to stop recording because the train is four feet from the door. It is four feet from the door. And the whole building is shaking. There's no way for you to be laying anything down while that's happening. You have a forced break. And it's great. It's awesome. You know it's coming, so you just figure out, okay, we don't want to take a take right now. "Everybody go get something to drink, come back in 20 minutes."

PM: Right. "It's 2:35, we got to break."

SB: Exactly. [more about Bennett Studios here]

PM: And I certainly know Engelwood and that area. I mean, it's nice to be able to get good pizza for a change.

SB: Oh, my God, you can get anything you want. I mean, the list of restaurants--I think that's the biggest challenge to the place is how are we all going to decide what restaurant we want food from, because we can have anything we want. And everybody has got their own little quirky tastes by this point in life. It's not just pizza, it's like, "Oh, I want Thai"--"Oh, I'm on an egg diet."

[laughter]

PM: And then there's a number of great guitar players on the record, but two of my favorites, Pat Bergeson and Jerry McPherson.

SB: Are they so awesome!

PM: It says so much about you that you picked those two guys. That really says a lot.

SB: Well, Pat has been my buddy for many years. Chet Atkins introduced us in 1992 and I started using him on my records back then. He and I did all the preproduction for my album with Chet.

PM: That's amazing.

SB: I have him play everything under the sun. Sometimes I have him play acoustic, sometimes electric, sometimes I have him just play harmonica, so it just depends.

PM: And he's unbelievable on the harmonica.

SB: He is absolutely unbelievable. And he plays with me on the road, too, so I feel like I'm the luckiest girl in the whole wide word.

PM: And McPherson is a real prince of a guy, too.

SB: Oh, he is a doll. And talk about walking into a groove, he just absolutely has so many beautiful transparent sounds that you don't really notice that they don't add any weight. And what they do is they make your track shimmer. You know? And it's magical. And that's another thing, I'm sort of hard on is electric guitars. [laughs] All the years of working with Brent Rowan, the two of us would just sit for hours because we'd be looking for something special that was going to be that thing that I was hearing in my brain. And he would always just pull out all the stops and do whatever is necessary. And Jerry is the same way. It just so happened that there are a lot of things that he came up with the first time that I just went, "That's it! That's what I wanted to hear!"

PM: God, talk about a prince of a guy, Brent Rowan. I haven't thought of him in some time.

SB: Oh, he is a doll. I actually have done some shows with him recently. He's been picking, getting out and--

PM: Oh, that's great.

SB: Yeah, he's made a bunch of solo records and stuff. He plays really good.

PM: Well, I've got to catch up with him.    continue

print (pdf)       listen to clips        puremusic home