A Conversation with Kim Richey (continued)

KR: Then I was trying to figure out, well, what am I going to do? And Ang and I had demoed--we wrote together all the time, and we would make these demos, he and I, at his publishing company. We'd go in there after they'd close down at night and work in a little recording room they had.

PM: Where was that?

KR: In Nashville, at Polygram--which is no longer Polygram.

PM: Right, sure.

KR: So then, that just seemed the logical place to go, to me, for a producer--even though Angelo had never really produced anything before. We did the demos together, and I thought they sounded great. But I had to do some talking to the label to get them to go for that.

PM: No doubt.

KR: But they did. And we made that record [Bitter Sweet] with the band that we'd been touring with.

KR: Kenny Vaughan was on that.

KR: Yeah. I absolutely love him.

PM: One of my favorite guys, yeah.

KR: He's just great, isn't he?

PM: You should hear him talk about you. He'll just go on and on about you in a very beautiful way. Yeah, he really loves you and your music.

KR: Out of all that gang, Kenny and I have stayed good friends. I still hang out with him and his family a lot, with the girls and Carmela and stuff. And besides being a great player, he's just--I turned to him one time, when we were out on the road and we were eating or something, and I just said, "Kenny, you bring me great joy." And he really does. He's so much fun to have on the road.

PM: Yeah, I've been on the road with him, when he was doing the Sweethearts of the Rodeo. I was teching for him.

KR: Yeah?

PM: Just really because we were friends, you know. And we had so much fun on the road together cruising the thrift shops in Canada and that stuff. People don't know how funny he is.

KR: Yeah. Yeah.

PM: So he was in that crowd. And who played bass on that record?

KR: A couple guys from Boston were the rhythm section. They had played in bands with Angelo up in Boston.

PM: That was a great record. It had a real loose, very bandy feel to it.

KR: Uh-huh.

PM: And then, to cross from that vibe over to Hugh Padgham. Let's hear that story, please.

KR: Well, it was time to make another record. And I didn't have a manager at the time, so I was trying to figure all that stuff out myself, which was really hard. And a woman at the label who's no longer there, Lisa Wanek, was the one that really helped me get all that together. Also my publisher, Bluewater Music at the time, had a list of all these producers and what they'd worked on and everything. But it was really hard to get anybody outside of Nashville to even talk to me, because they didn't know who I was. And I didn't have a manager, so I didn't have any people to talk to their people.

PM: [laughs] Right.

KR: But Hugh's manager, just by coincidence, happened to be the same guy who repped Richard Bennett. And he lived out in Franklin [a town south of Nashville], so he knew who I was, and he put us together. And I sent Hugh some songs, and he liked them. Then I went over there to London to meet him. And we just ended up working together.

PM: And one is led to believe that your interest in him had something to do with the fact that, like me, you're an XTC person.

KR: Yes.

PM: He produced English Settlement with them--is that the only one he did? I think it's the only one he did with them.

KR: I think he might have done one other. He also produced Split Ends.

PM: Oh, and they were even more poppy than XTC.

KR: Yeah, pre-Crowded House.

PM: And so what was it like with Padgham then? What was that chemistry about?

KR: That was really different, because he was the first person I'd worked with, producer-wise, who wasn't a musician per se. He came from an engineering background, and he didn't play anything. And then we worked with a lot of musicians that I didn't know. Most all of them--I'd worked with Shawn Pelton, the drummer, one time. I asked for Shawn, and he said that'd be great, because he'd worked with Shawn too. I worked with Shawn on that John Leventhal tune ["I Know"] that we had on the record.

PM: Right.

KR: We ended up recording half of it in New York, and then the other half in London.

PM: And that was Glimmer. Are you still strong on that one?

KR: Yes.   continue

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