ISSUE #42 MMUSICMAG.COM SPOTLIGHT Emily Joyce

DWIGHT YOAKAM Hillbilly music’s top hat records a new album the old-fashioned way

“THIS ALBUM OCCURRED VERY collaboration with Beck on 3 Pears—which spontaneously,” says Grammy-winning has become one of his most critically punk cowboy Dwight Yoakam of his latest, acclaimed albums—as being infl uential on Second Hand Heart. “There were unique, his latest project. spontaneous moments in the studio, even “Beck was also a catalyst for that though there were some things I had carried spontaneity,” he says. “I went to his house, with me—the song ‘Second Hand Heart’ was and we were talking and I said, ‘I’ve got this something I began writing before I started idea for a song.’ He began running around 3 Pears,” he adds, referring to his previous plugging in things and setting up. We laid it record, released in 2012. “But for whatever down, I thought, as a guide. Beck said, ‘Are Issue #42 reason, it didn’t make that album. I’m really you going to put some electric guitar on top glad, because it was meant to be: It became of that?’ I said, ‘Isn’t that a demo?’ Beck M MUSIC & MUSICIANS the springboard for this record.” said, ‘No, we’re going to keep what you just MAGAZINE The 58-year-old Kentucky native—whose did.’ I understood why. It was a throwback to celebrated 1986 debut Guitars, Cadillacs, the way bands would have singles recording Etc., Etc. established him as a leader in the sessions, right through the ’60s.” new traditionalist movement—claims this Second Hand Heart also includes two organic style is not always the way recording covers, one of which is the Appalachian has worked for him. “Being spontaneous classic “Man of Constant Sorrow.” Yoakam’s became more the case when I started self- bristling version rivals the George Clooney- producing,” he says. “There is a burden to led rendition in the fi lm O Brother, Where Art that, but it also creates freedom, because Thou? “The Soggy Bottom Boys!” Yoakam you’re not on someone else’s schedule. The says with a laugh. “This is an homage to their burden is that you don’t have the sounding absurd rendition of it. I thought, ‘Let’s see if board of someone you trust as a producer.” we can reinterpret this and go back to the Yoakam counts the seasoned ear of cowpunk scene I was a part of in L.A.’s early former Warner Bros. chief Lenny Waronker punk days.’ I really admired what the Coen as being crucial during the Second Hand Brothers did with that.” Heart sessions. But he also credits his –Linda Laban

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