She was recently kind enough to chat with me about the new album, her time with Nickel Creek, and how going solo has changed the way she makes music:
Kim Ruehl: So I'll start with the obvious question you've probably been asked a hundred times, just to get it out of the way. Over the course of Nickel Creek's run, Chris and Sean both released a handful of solo albums. What took you so long?
Sara Watkins: I just didn't really have anything I thought was worth saying. During the whole course of Nickel Creek, pretty much my musical identity was that band. Over the last six or seven years, I've been playing out with a whole lot of different people. I've had these gigs in Los Angeles with my brother called Watkins Family Hour. I think having the additional outlets has allowed me to experiment and find a musical identity outside of what the band did.
Although I like all kinds of different music, my role as a musician was primarily to be the third person onstage, to play fiddle on all those songs, to sing on all those songs. I didn't really know a lot of other material besides Nickel Creek songs for a long time...for most of my life, really, until the last six or seven years. Since then, I've made much more of an active effort to learn other songs, to see what it is that I like about different songs...to give a variety of songs and music a chance. They do sink in a little more than I expect them to. That's been a really fun process and, through that, I realized that I have these other things to say.
More than a few reviews of this record have talked about how it's hard to call this album a solo debut, because you've been on the scene for so long and there's such a great Who's Who of Americana on this album. How much of that was just you calling your friends into the studio? Do you feel this is more of a solo debut or is it more of a culmination of your friends and collaborators over the last several years?
To answer your first question, I know it's a Who's Who, but it felt like I was asking my friends to play on my record. I just happen to have some really talented friends. [laughs] A lot of these guys are a big part of my musical life outside of Nickel Creek. A lot of them live in LA and they're people I play with on a weekly or monthly basis. They're a big part of my musical life now.
I definitely have a whole lot of help on this record, but it still feels like a solo project. I don't think it sounds like a Who's Who record. It definitely reads like one. You read all those names and it's a pretty ridiculous list of musicians, but I don't think it necessarily sounds like that. I feel like they played for me and for the songs, they played for the lyrics. They weren't playing for themselves. Other than that, I know a lot of people do solo records that are absolutely solo and that's amazing, to their credit. But I really love playing with other people.
There are some great covers on here—you've got the Tom Waits tune and John Brion, Norman Blake, Jimmie Rodgers...what went into choosing the songs that you didn't write for this record? Are there any you recorded that didn't make it onto the disc?
There were a couple I started to record that didn't make it on. At the end of the day, we didn’t need them. These covers are songs that I've sung for a couple of years. Most of them I've sung for at least a year. Some of them we learned for the Watkins Family Hour in Los Angeles. If you play weekly, you get tired of your own material so you're always bringing in fresh material to play. Because of that you get a hang of which songs are sinking in more than the other ones, which songs are worth working on and keeping around for a while. Most of these songs have been around, they've proven their staying power for me. They've sunk in and I've come to identify with each one of them. They don't just feel like other people’s songs.
They're also a lot of songs written for men to sing—is that something you think about? For example, your voice is so antithetical to Tom Waits' on "Pony" (purchase/download)...
Oh thanks. You know, I like to not change lyrics if it's sung from a guy's perspective. My theory is, I don't want to distract the song. If someone knows a song lyric well—say it's a Dylan song that everybody knows, or a Beatles song—if I change the lyrics to "he" instead of "she," people, I imagine, would be so distracted that it would take away from their experience of the song.
On the other hand, there are songs that people don't know quite as well where I can tweak the gender a little bit and it'll probably help people be less distracted by thinking, "She's singing a song about a she," and start wondering about my sexuality. So my whole take on that is just to make it less distracting. Sometimes songs are just made for guys to sing. And that's fine. I won't record those songs.
