Well, yes. I'm sure you've heard that from other [artists]. Yes, but the beauty of this is that I love my band so much and their interpretation of these old songs is new. So it's fresh, and that's why I wanted to record [those songs] with them.
So were there any songs that wound up on here that you were surprised to see people wanted?
Yes, "Friends for a Lifetime," perhaps. Because I don't play it out very much at all. It's a song I wrote for my son. It's like a mother's dream. He's suckling, and it's this mother's dream of all her idealistic expectations for him. He turned out the opposite of everything I wrote about in the song [laughs]. And then again there's this ideal that I've held up to him and maybe someday he'll aspire to it [laughs].
People stand and cry when they listen to that. A man, a grown man, like in his mid-60s, told me he was in his garage working on his car when he first heard that. [He said] he stopped and stood and cried when he first heard this. All the way through the song. Ain't that cool?
When the song came to me, I was honestly nursing and Ricky Skaggs called me and said, "Hey Claire" [imitating Ricky Skaggs' voice]. He wanted me to go on the road with him and the baby was six weeks old. I looked down at this [baby] and had to turn him down ... it was this fabulous opportunity. That was his country music ride. Post-bluegrass and pre-bluegrass. Oh well, at least I got a son who didn't live up to the aspirations [laughs] ... just kidding.
You said you're sick of the retrospective. So, are you working on new material?
Yes. I'm Only [sick of the restrospective] because the album before this one, like a year and a half ago, was called New Day after a six-year hiatus away from the music business. So when I came back, back with a new vengeance and a new attitude and a new life, at that point I turned around and looked at my career and went, "Oh my gosh!" I didn't know I was doing all that. It's really good to walk away and come back. So I already had that attitude for that album and now here's this. I'm writing a lot toward my next record.
Can you talk about that at all?
Well I've written about three or four [songs]. I just moved to Nashville from ... my whole life has been in Alabama. And my daughter, my baby, is in college this year for the first time. So I moved up here two weeks ago and I've got a list of people to write with. I'm just at the beginning, besides the ones I have written, I don't know what I'm going to write.
I've written one about Granny. And, oh no, another grandmother song. But really it's just her writing from beyond life about her home. So it's not really like a Granny at the kitchen table [kind of] song ... I wanted to put an Indian flute on it because her mother was half Cherokee. Her mother's father actually didn't get pushed off into the Trail of Tears. He stayed around and married a white woman. He was a peddler. He had a wagon and peddled and, according to Granny, he was murdered because he was an Indian. That's Walker County, Alabama, for you. So there's that.
She was crazy in love with her home. It's really a God-forsaken place. It's one of the most God-forsaken places in central Alabama. It's very backwoods redneck ... it's actually, the county she's from, is known for its violence. When I teach the songwriting class, I have this picture of two politicians in a fist fight on the front page of the newspaper. And one of them is from Walker County, so it's just that kind of thing. If you hear about knife fights, it's usually Walker County. It's people who are like, we're happy with who we are, leave us alone. She's happy with that.
[But,] the soils not good, it's coal mining country. There's no money there anymore. And she's just in love with it. She's dead, she died this year. So, she's a huge inspiration, huge. But it's not my grandmother, it's my ex-husband's grandmother, Granny.
I can't wait to hear that song, hopefully it makes it onto the album.
Well [laughs], that's what inspired it, but they always turn out different than what you want it to sound.
Claire Lynch's tour schedule and information can be found at her Web site.
