(from the March April 2010 issue of LoneStarMusic Magazine)

by Michael Devers

An artist has a lifetime to write and prepare for their first record. There are very few expectations. There is no “mold” to break. The canvas is blank.

But the follow-up record? The sophomore album? That’s a completely different story — and a potentially terrifying one for artists who experienced some degree of success straight out of the gate. The jump from no or few expectations to “do it again, but better” is not for the faint of heart. But it’s while making that leap that the best — and boldest — of artists not only do it again, but spread their wings and show what they’re really capable of doing. That’s when the sophomore album transcends being just another record and serves as a signpost to fans and critics alike that there is far more to the artist than one four-and-a-half-inch disc (or 100 MB download) can encapsulate.

Artists have similar experiences on their first records: from all of the things they don’t know and learn about as the session unfolds to the thrill of holding the finished product in their hands and then, at last, sharing it with the world for the very first time – whether that “world” translates to only a few hundred listeners or multi-platinum success. It’s a unique experience, but it’s a shared unique experience. Similarly, for most artists, whatever their particular level of success may be, there’s not much difference between record three and record four or record five and record seven (for those artists lucky enough to make it that far).

In contrast, sophomore albums are musical snowflakes. Something happens that changes an artist between the time the debut album streets and the next series of studio dates roll around. They are no longer a rookie, but they aren’t yet settled into their careers either. They have some expectations based on the first record, but not so much to box them into a corner. Often, it’s when the musician begins to realize who they are as an artist. The sophomore album can be challenging and inspiring. At least, that is, when it doesn’t wind up paralyzing the artist with fear.

The technical definition of sophomore album is an artist’s second record, but that term can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people (Ray Wylie Hubbard, for example, thinks of Dangerous Spirits – his seventh full-length album – as his second record). Not all sophomore albums are created equally (do you count live records? what about EPs? glorified demos or even legitimate albums released independently before an artist signed to a national label?) And, of course, if the stakes are low, there’s no pressure at all, really.. Very few people choke when no one’s looking. The flip side of that, though, is that very few inspired performances happen under those same circumstances.

It would be impossible to cover every different sophomore album scenario in something short of a thick book. Instead, we’ll look at a cross-section of Texas sophomore albums. Sunny Sweeney and a record that promises to be a coming-out party. Hayes Carll and the reinvention of his writing process. Ray Wylie Hubbard finding himself in all-too-familiar territory. Ryan Bingham shifting gears, and finally, the 800-pound gorilla in the room: the elusive second album by Willis Alan Ramsey.

Debut redux

It’s been four years since Sunny Sweeney hit the studio to record her debut album, Heartbreaker’s Hall of Fame. Almost immediately after it was released in March of 2006, the record struck a nerve with Nashville mogul Scott Borchetta (the man behind last year’s biggest artist in any musical genre – Taylor Swift). Borchetta picked up Heartbreaker’s for his Big Machine label and things started to move fast for Sweeney. Everything, that is, except her sophomore record. She finally started the studio sessions for the record this January, but the past four years have been anything but play time for the Longview native.

Part of those four years also included a year of splitting time between Nashville and Austin before Sweeney made the move to Nashville full-time, with Radney Foster becoming her impromptu realtor and new neighbor. Once the move to Nashville was complete, Sweeney was finally able to focus on returning to the studio.

“I’ve been writing a ton,” she reports. “We started looking at making the new record when I was still on Big Machine, and then they opened an imprint label of Big Machine and moved me over to that [Republic Nashville]. After that we started picking out the songs and the producer.”

Sweeney tapped Brett Beavers (Dierks Bentley, Deryl Dodd, Lost Trailers) to produce. The two started working together on song selection, arrangements, and demos in early 2009. “Every demo we’ve done just rocks my face off,” Sweeney says proudly.

The time and budget being put into Sweeney’s new record sits worlds apart from the circumstances of her first album. “I started a band in September of 2004 because I wanted to see if I could do it,” she recalls. “And I didn’t want to have a desk job. At SXSW in 2005, people asked why I didn’t have a record. Basically, the reason I made a record was because my fans – who I never knew that I would have – wanted something to buy at my shows.”

Sweeney connected with Tommy Detamore and Tom Lewis to help her produce her debut. She only had a handful of original songs written at the time – three of which made the album – so they picked out songs to fit Sweeney’s already burgeoning style (classic Merle Haggard/Loretta Lynn-style honky-tonk wrapped in sassy East Texas leather and lace). The entire project, including photo shoot and artwork took 10 days. “I didn’t have anything to compare it to,” Sweeney says. “I just took out a loan and made the CD and did it how I thought I needed to do it. I didn’t have anybody to ask or anybody to answer to.”

Within 18 months of her father buying her first guitar, she had released a CD. Less than a year after that, she was a major-label artist with one of the most powerful men in Nashville on her team. “In March of ‘06 I released the CD and then in July of ‘06 I got an email from Scott Borchetta on MySpace saying he liked my record and that he wanted to talk to me, and I’m thinking, ‘Who is this guy?’” To this day, neither Sweeney nor Borchetta knows the person that connected them. Sweeney’s disc was left on Borchetta’s desk in a blank envelope.

The long delay between records for Sweeney was, in part, a Borchetta design. “He said, ‘Keep playing, you’re doing everything right. Let’s do this grassroots. I want to build this from the ground up,’” Sweeney explains. “I haven’t had a record in forever and it’s really hard to sell records at shows when everybody has the first record already. I’ve been very patient with everything he planned because I know he knows what he’s doing.”

In many ways, Sweeney’s sophomore album will be more like a debut than her actual first record was. For one thing, she’s had more time to write songs. As a result, the majority of the tunes on her next record will be Sunny Sweeney originals. She also realizes that, thanks to the team she’ll have promoting her this time around, her second album will be her official introduction to a previously untapped big swath of American country music listeners.

With Borchetta’s significant expertise and resources at her disposal, Sweeney has positioned herself for the kind of success that few artists get a real shot at. Will her sophomore album be up to the task? We’ll all get to find out together as the summer of 2010 gives way to the fall. Whatever the result, though, it’s a record Sweeney will be proud of and she realizes how lucky she is to have the opportunity. “I think it’s crazy,” she says, “that I had my first show five years ago and I’m even having this conversation.”

Scrambled eggs and jam

Widely lauded for the song-writing on his critically acclaimed Lost Highway debut, Trouble In Mind, Hayes Carll decided to do a complete 180 on the writing process for his sophomore major-label effort (and fourth album overall). “The record is mostly done,” Carll says. “We recorded all of the music, just need to do the vocals. We’ll knock the vocals out the first week of March and put it out in June – that’s what we’re shooting for.”

Released in April of 2008, Trouble In Mind landed on multiple critic’s Top 10 lists, took home an Americana Music Award (for best song – “She Left Me For Jesus”) and built a national audience for Carll’s music. There would naturally be pressure to try and outdo, or at least match, Trouble In Mind. But Carll begs to differ.

“Honestly, I felt a lot more pressure on the last one. I had a lot to prove,” Carll explains. “On this one, I have goals for myself – what I’d like to accomplish with it – but they’re sort of personal. I don’t feel I have to wow the critics. I just want to make a record that I like.”

Before Trouble In Mind, most of Carll’s shows were solo-acoustic affairs and as a result his songwriting often started with a lyric and built around acoustic guitar parts. Then when Carll went into the studio to record, the major-label budget allowed him more time to work out arrangements with the band, and “jam” on songs. “I really liked that,” Carll says. “It opened up the process to me of writing to the groove as opposed to trying to find the music to fit my lyric.”

It’s an approach that Carll embraced fully in preparation for the new record. So much so that most of the music had already been recorded before the first lyric was complete. “I’d take ideas into the band and we’d start playing and I’d just start singing and see what came out,” he says. “It was all stream-of-consciousness. I find if I’m on the spot and in the moment, it opens up a lot of doors. Images and ideas come to you that don’t appear if you sit around thinking about it. I’ve been doing that a lot more lately – recording myself … babbling. I use it to track down song ideas and lyrics. Then I take them back and refine them and craft them to where I want them to go. Just a writing trick I’ve been using to kind of free my head a little bit.”

By the time the new record comes out it will have been a wait of a little over two years. That’s a quick turnaround for a 21st-century artist, but when your label mates include the frightfully prolific Ryan Adams and Willie Nelson, the standard is a little tougher. Carll is more than okay with that kind of pressure. “I look at it as a compliment,” he says. “If they didn’t like me, they wouldn’t be asking for the records.”

For Trouble In Mind, Carll cut the record in Nashville and relied on studio musicians there. This time around, the band that was such a big part of creating the songs had the chance to record them as well. “It was fun,” he says. “I think it was good for me. Now I just need to go in and finish the vocals and we’ll be off again.”

Vaya con dios, rojo cuello

If you’ve been around the Texas music scene for longer than 15 minutes, you’ve probably heard the tale of the debut album of Ray Wylie Hubbard and the Cowboy Twinkies. For those that just walked in, a quick refresher: Hubbard and his band went to Nashville to cut the record for Warner/Reprise – as “major” as a label can get – and after they headed back to Austin, the label decided that Hubbard had delivered a folk-rock record that needed “fixing”. Warner/Reprise added layers of steel guitar and female backing vocalists to make the album more palatable for country radio. Hubbard and the band didn’t learn of what had happened to their major-label debut until it was in stores. They hated it, and decided to do nothing more until the label dropped them, which happened a few years later.

While Hubbard waited out his freedom, he recorded demos all over the state of Texas. “We went down to Tyler, and we recorded in some studio out in Garland where Willie had cut Red Headed Stranger, and some other ones – all over the place,” he says.

Around the same time, Willie Nelson’s contract with Columbia was close to expiration. In an attempt to get Willie to sign with them, Polydor Records offered Nelson his own imprint on the label – Lone Star Records. “Willie called me up and said, ‘I got my own label and I want to put out a record and I need one really quick. How quick could you get me a record?’” Hubbard told Willie about all of the demos he’d recorded and asked for one more weekend of recording and mixing to finish things up before he delivered the record. All under one condition – that for the next album, Hubbard would receive a real budget and be able to do a real record. After the disaster of his debut and this second album recorded under severe time constraints, Hubbard viewed his potential third album (and second album on Lone Star Records) as the chance to finally put out the record he wanted to. Willie agreed and Hubbard went to work on sorting out his demos for the album that would become, Off the Wall.

“I went down to Tyler and got all the tapes, came up to Dallas and got Larry White [steel guitar] and my band and we went into the studio and spent the weekend mixing these demo tapes,” Hubbard recalls. “Willie called me up and said he needed me to put ‘Red Neck Mother’ on it. I said, ‘Willie, I really don’t want to do that.’ I explained it had already been recorded and was already kind of an albatross and wouldn’t fit with the rest of the songs on the record. Willie listened and then said, ‘I really need you to do “Red Neck Mother.”’ How do you say no to Willie? So we cut ‘Red Neck Mother’, but my band refused to play on it. Buffalo was my lead guitar player, and he said he’d play drums on it. My bass player said he’d play guitar. My drummer said he’d play bass. We got Mother of Pearl [a Dallas band] to sing on it since none of my guys would.”

The band shot a photo over the weekend during a break in the mixing, and on Monday headed out to Dallas Love Field and handed off the tapes and the photo to someone from Willie’s camp. While the album was being mastered and pressed, Hubbard and his band prepared for a 38-city tour with Willie to promote the record. The tour started in February of 1978 in Fargo, North Dakota. Hubbard made every one of the shows. Off the Wall, however, missed all 38.

Less than a year after Off the Wall finally made it into stores, Willie resigned with Columbia Records, leaving Polydor holding a vanity imprint for an artist signed to another record label. “Once that happened, Polydor had no use for me or Steve Fromholz [another Lone Star Records artist] or anybody else,” Hubbard says. According to Willie, his Lone Star Record executives saw it coming and ran off to Mexico with all of the money left in the account. Nelson called Hubbard to deliver the bad news, but was also able to offer up a silver lining. Hubbard remembers, “Willie said, ‘I feel really bad, but you can play all of my picnics.’ So that’s why I’ve been at all the Willie picnics for the last 30 years. I guess the record was one of those dead-end, underfunded projects that I was so known for.”

Hubbard’s sophomore album may have been almost as much of a bust as his first one, but ultimately it didn’t matter. His real second act was still to come. Hubbard would continue to attract more “dead-end, underfunded projects” throughout the ’80s before getting sober, discovering the work of the poet Rilke, and reinventing himself. He came out of his self-described “honky-tonk fog” in the ’90s with a string of the best records of his career – so good, in fact, that only his most diehard fans have ever heard those first two albums, both of which are long out of print and forgotten. Well, mostly forgotten. Like Willie Nelson before them, some people still insist he play that “Red Neck” song.

One record is enough the second time around

The question of what constitutes a “sophomore” album is particularly confusing when it comes to Ryan Binghan – even after tossing Wishbone Saloon, a very early record that is no longer available, out of the equation. This is because Bingham recorded his “real” debut album, Mescalito, three different times. The first time was an aborted version cut in Nashville with many of the overdubs occuring while Bingham was in Europe. The end result was very similar to Hubbard’s debut album and Bingham made sure it never saw the light of day. (Disclaimer: the author of this article has one of the few copies still out there, and no, he will not make you a copy.)

Shortly after meeting producer Marc Ford, Bingham revisited the record and with Ford’s help stripped it down to the basic tracks and added more of his own gritty sound back in. The resulting record was titled Dead Horses and released by LoneStarMusic briefly before Lost Highway signed Bingham, sent him back into the studio again with Ford and released a new version of the record as Mescalito, removing one track from Dead Horses and adding six new ones (including the hidden track).

When it came time to record Roadhouse Sun, Bingham’s band felt they finally had an opportunity to show what they could do. Guitar and mandolin player Corby Schaub states, “We had twice as many amps, guitars, and time,” states Bingham’s guitar and mandolin player, Corby Schaub.

The band had only five days to record the extra tracks and overdubs for Mescalito, but the recording for Roadhouse Sun was broken into two different sessions – two weeks in March of ‘08 and then a session in October of ‘08. The separate sessions gave the band time to live with what they’d recorded during the first sessions and time for Bingham to further hone the direction of the record. The break was productive as the second recording session yielded some of Roadhouse Sun’s high points, including “Dylan’s Hard Rain”, “Day is Done”, and “Endless Ways.”

While some critics took exception to the invocation of Dylan’s name in a song title, the variety of songs on Roadhouse Sun served notice that Bingham wasn’t interested in simply cutting a new version of Mescalito, instead choosing to work on expanding the scope of what he and his band have to offer.

Bingham’s musical career has continued to evolve since the release of his sophomore album, largely due to the stamp he put on that record. His high profile (and critical) contribution to the film, Crazy Heart has earned him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. The attention has found Bingham gracing every conceivable media outlet in the U.S. [from the Los Angeles Times to, honest to God, The View], as well as having music fans – both casual and hard-core – anxious to see what he does next. Those sessions start on March 19 at the Village Recording Studio with T-Bone Burnett at the wheel.

No More Shelter

Though it’s usually true that artists have a lifetime to write their first record and then a very short time to write the second, that rule does not apply to Willis Alan Ramsey. Ramsey decided to give himself another lifetime.

When his self-titled debut was released on Leon Russell’s Shelter Records in 1972, Ramsey was only 21 years old. The album has been hailed as a landmark by critics for decades, and the songs from the record have been covered by a host of legendary artists, including Lyle Lovett, Waylon Jennings, Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Jeff Walker and many more. The most famous cover version (or infamous, depending on whether you’re the one cashing the checks or the one forced to hear it on oldies radio) from the album remains Captain & Tennille’s Top 5 version of “Muskrat Candlelight.” They recorded it under the name “Muskrat Love” instead of the original title, just as the band America had done three years prior.

It’s been 38 years now since the record was released, which is 17 years more than Ramsey had to record his initial record. With such a landmark debut, the questions regarding his sophomore album were persistent, and, as the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, increasingly awkward. Ramsey began to respond to questions about the next record with his now trademark line, “What was wrong with the first record?”

Over the years, Ramsey has achieved notoriety as a perfectionist, sometimes spending as much time during a live performance adjusting the sound as he does playing his songs. His reputation for perfection in the studio is even more widespread. A story typical of Ramsey has him inviting a fellow artist to his private studio in Wimberley to listen to a new song. The guest arrived to find an excited Willis ready to show off his new track. He then proceeded to play him five minutes of a drum beat. Asked about the song, Ramsey replied that was as far as he’d gotten with it. A few weeks later, the guest bumped into Ramsey again in Wimberley and asked him how the song was coming along. Ramsey responded that he’d grown unhappy with it and scrapped it the week before.

Over the past year, however, word has been spreading of an imminent next record from Willis Alan Ramsey. There’s even a title – Gentilly. Financed by himself along with a group of private investors, Ramsey intends to release the album on his own label later in 2010. The tracks have all been recorded, and all that remains is some final mixing and the mastering, according to co-producer Jamie Oldaker.

“Willis lives in Colorado now, but we did all the recording when he lived here in Wimberley,” Oldaker reports. “It’s down to the mixing process now, but we did get it all on tape. The recordings done so that’s all staying there, nothing’s going to change on that end. Now it’s down to making sure that sonically he’s pleased with what he’s listening to – that both of us are.”

Though the album seems close, no one is ready to commit to a street date just yet. “People hear that Willis’s record is coming out and they go, ‘Yeah, right’,” Oldaker says. “I think probably within the next six months though it would be out. I think he wants to get it out. He wants to go to work and do some shows.”

Of course, the legendary status of Ramsey’s eponymous debut guarantees that even though close to 40 years have passed, comparisons to the first record are inevitable. “It’s a little different from his first record,” Oldaker says. “I’m proud of it. I’ll either be a hero or people will hate me.”

It’s a situation the producer has found himself in before, back when Eric Clapton was recording his sophomore solo album, 461 Ocean Boulevard. “People slammed that record when it came out,” Oldaker notes. But history has been kind to the Clapton album (which, after all, featured his hit cover of Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff”), and Oldaker hopes the same holds true for Ramsey.

When – or rather, if – that second Ramsey album finally sees the light of day, though, don’t hold your breath waiting for a quick follow-up, a la the Flatlanders’ sudden prolific streak after releasing their sophomore album, Now Again, 30 years after their own 1972 debut. Ramsey already seems to be giving himself plenty of wiggle room after he finally sticks a fork in Gentilly. He recently told a Memphis reporter he wanted people to be able to listen to the new record for a long time, “Because I don’t know when I’m going to make another one.”