In a California motel room overlooking the Pacific Ocean, singer-songwriter Jim Lauderdale struggles with a question about his inspiration for the recent George Strait hit, “We Really Shouldn’t Be Doing This.”
In the song, a man reminds a woman that their romantic inclinations run counter to their obligations.
“Uh, gosh, mmm . . . well, I don’t know what to say about it,” Lauderdale laughingly stammers into the telephone. “It’s just a . . .”
Perfect country song?
“I guess so.”
Lauderdale is the writer of a number of country songs that, if not perfect, have proved close enough to become hits. He is scheduled to perform Saturday and Nov. 14 at Schubas, 3157 N. Southport Ave. (The Nov. 14 performance is with bluegrass pioneer Ralph Stanley.)
He has written nine other Strait tracks as well as the Patty Loveless-George Jones award-winner “You Don’t Seem To Miss Me,” Loveless’ “Halfway Down,” and Mark Chesnutt’s “Gonna Get a Life.”
Just in the last few months, he provided the bulk of two oversized albums, his 15-track RCA package “Onward Through It All” and a Rebel Records 16-cut collaboration with Stanley, “I Feel Like Singing Today.”
These by no means exhausted his supply.
“I’ve been working on four this afternoon,” he says.
Lauderdale isn’t just set apart by his grueling writing regimen, which complements an also-substantial concert itinerary of 130 to 150 shows a year, often in tandem with such diverse notables as Stanley or folk-rock star Lucinda Williams.
There is also his style, which seems akin to that of the celebrated country songsmith Kostas in its tendency to flit from one idea and context to another, creating deliciously unexpected images and changes of direction amid verses and even lines.
The opening lines of his RCA CD paint a cataclysmic picture: “If rain fell until there was no pavement/And history was all but washed away.” But then comes a sudden switch in direction, with an observation that while everybody else “would swim upstream,” the song’s female subject would be found “rising like the cream/As she travels onward through it all.”
A minister’s son from North Carolina, Lauderdale first came to Nashville in 1979 to try to make it in bluegrass — and failed. Having majored in drama at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, he began supporting himself by acting in musical dramas in California and Texas as well as Chicago, where he had a role in “Pump Boys and Dinettes.”
He eventually made another run at Nashville, and his song demos caught the ear of Renee Bell, then an assistant to MCA Records executive Tony Brown.
Bell, now Nashville vice president of A&R at RCA, recalls that Lauderdale “immediately became my favorite songwriter,” and her influence helped make such mainstream performers as Loveless, Vince Gill and Strait aware of his left-field talent. After Strait picked two Lauderdale songs for the soundtrack of the 1992 movie “Pure Country,” Lauderdale found himself moving in Nashville’s in-crowd.
His cachet has staked him to recording contracts, and his association with RCA is ongoing despite the fact that his first RCA album, released in 1998 and titled “Whisper,” was flatly rejected by mainstream country radio. It did, however, win critical raves and an alternative country award or two.
Lauderdale and Bell say he was given total creative freedom to do whatever he wanted on “Onward Through It All.” Bell explains this unusual luxury by saying Lauderdale has “such a following and fan base” and “having him around” is an end in itself.
Lauderdale agrees that RCA’s treatment of him isn’t the norm. He says that he would still love for mainstream success for his records someday and is not closing any doors, but now thinks his general stardom may have to await some “fluke.” So he is going a different route with “Onward Through It All.”
Meanwhile, he good-naturedly grapples with personal questions. In regard to the fact that he has said his private life has been “stunted” by devotion to song creation, he’s asked why he rarely discloses the roots of his lyrical ideas.
“Some things are things I draw on from personal experience and some of ’em are totally fiction,” he replies. “I think (not talking about songs’ origins) leaves more to the imagination of the listener.”
