© 2024 KMUW
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Same Old Hiatt: John Hiatt Connects To Audience With Direct, Relatable Songs

Michael Wilson
Singer-Songwriter John Hiatt

John Hiatt’s a songwriter’s songwriter whose tunes have been covered by everyone from Bob Dylan to Bonnie Raitt, but he’s also made a string of critically acclaimed albums that spotlight the disparate threads of American music which comprise his own work. Watershed efforts such as Bring The Family (1987), Crossing Muddy Waters (2000) and Beneath This Gruff Exterior (2003) run the gamut from R&B, to the kind of folky blues made famous by Mississippi John Hurt, to soulful rock. Hiatt also has a loyal fan base that embraces each of these changes and allows the Indiana native to do more than just sing the hits.

Having left behind his family home in Indianapolis at 17, Hiatt sought out someplace where he could make a living as a musician. He made a brief pass through Nashville where he met singer-songwriter Bob Frank, who had a contract with Vanguard Records, home to the likes of John Hammond, Jr. and Charlie Musselwhite.

“Bob Frank was kind of a bluesy folk singer, and he wrote for Tree Publishing Company, but he was kind of an odd man out at the time,” Hiatt recalls, speaking from his manager’s office in Nashville.

The budding singer-songwriter figured that if he could land a gig at Tree, a recording contract may not be too far behind. When he circled back to the city a year after his initial visit, Frank was gone, but he soon had a job writing songs and waiting for someone to record them. It was, to some degree, an odd fit.

“I didn’t know much about country,” he says. “I knew the music of Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, people like that. But that was about it.”

He was impressed with the music of the Nashville-based group Area Code 615. The outfit consisted of several players who’d backed Bob Dylan on his Nashville Skyline LP, and several who would go on to form the core of the influential country-rock unit Barefoot Jerry.

“They were making these records and playing Beatles’ songs and stuff but with traditional country instruments,” Hiatt recalls. “That drew me to Nashville as well, these people coloring outside the lines, so to speak.”

They weren’t the only ones coloring outside the lines. Hiatt arrived at a time when a new breed of songwriters was coming to the city. The late Guy Clark, whose marriage of humor and heartbreak, as well as an impeccable sense of narrative, guided pieces such as “L.A. Freeway” and “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train” into the lexicon of popular music, was one. Rodney Crowell, who, like Clark, had come up from Texas was there too. Chris Gantry, writer of a number of well-received but somewhat obscure tunes, penned “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife” for Glen Campbell in the late 1960s and stuck around. “He used to bill himself as The Bald Psychotic Mouse,” Hiatt says.

Although rock and R&B were still part of the Nashville scene, they were not part of the city’s dominant image, giving this new wave of writers a reputation as outsiders.

“There was this kind of convergence of the young singer-songwriters,” Hiatt recalls. “We were all looking to write songs and make records.”

Hiatt got his chance to do just that in 1974 when he signed with Epic Records. His first album, Hangin’ Around The Observatory, featured “Sure as I’m Sittin’ Here,” which became a Top 20 hit for Three Dog Night. Hiatt’s record was less successful and started him on a series of solid but under-heard records. He shifted labels in subsequent years, landing at MCA, then Geffen.

In 1983 Hiatt delivered what some might consider his first classic album, Riding with The King. Though both sides of the record were tracked in different countries with different producers, it was the most consistently great record he’d made up to that point. It featured not only the titular piece, later covered by B.B. King and Eric Clapton, but “She Loves the Jerk,” “Love Like Blood” and “You May Already Be a Winner,” all of which crystalized—or seemed to—Hiatt’s artistic voice.

“I had started to put some things together, but I was still a horrible drunk and drug addict, so I couldn’t get much traction out of it,” he says. “I kept shooting myself in the foot. I was my own worst enemy. So, I got worse and worse in my addiction so I couldn’t get forward momentum.”

He made another album, Warming Up to the Ice Age, but it and Hiatt’s life were in shambles. “I was so messed up I don’t remember making it, frankly,” he says.

He’d become a father by that time (his eldest daughter, Lilly Hiatt, is now an accomplished singer-songwriter) and through a series of events in his personal life, made the decision to live days as a sober man.

“That was a huge difference in terms of getting some insights into just who this critter called John Hiatt was and who he might be as an artist,” he says. “The result of that first blush of looking at who I was really dealing with was Bring The Family.”

Released in 1987 that record saw Hiatt teaming up with legendary session drummer Jim Keltner, guitarist Ry Cooder and bassist Nick Lowe. Recorded over four days earlier that year, the album was a critical success and included “Thing Called Love,” which would become a massive hit for Bonnie Raitt when it was released as a single from her 1989 album Nick of Time. It ushered in a string of classic albums including Slow Turning (1988), Stolen Moments (1990) and Perfectly Good Guitar (1993). The last of that run saw Hiatt turning toward a heavier sound that remained a critical element of releases such as Little Head (1997) and Walk On (1995).

In 2000, he presented Crossing Muddy Waters, an album that was in tune with the kinds of releases the Vanguard imprint issued in the late 1960s. In fact, it was the first of two records Hiatt was to release on that label and one of his most well-received recordings of that decade. Fans responded to the directness and poignancy of the lyrics, with songs about loss (“Mr. Stanley”), love (“Only The Song Survives”) and both in one place (the title track).

“I try to tell a story in the clearest possible way,” Hiatt says. “Whether it’s conversational, or a simple, direct kind of story or it’s a little more mysterious, as life can be. I still want people to have something to connect to.”

Listeners continued to connect over the coming decade as Hiatt sang about depression in “The Nagging Dark” (from Beneath This Gruff Exterior) and hard economic times in “Damn This Town” (from 2011’s Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns). There was even some time to reflect on his own life in “Old Days,” which appeared on the aptly-titled 2008 platter Same Old Man. The lyrics find Hiatt recalling his apprenticeship as a singer-songwriter, rubbing elbows and sharing rooms with legends such as Sonny Terry, John Lee Hooker and John Hammond, Jr. At first, it appears as a simple autobiographical sketch but quickly reveals itself to be about life lessons that catch up to us at the most unexpected time.

“It’s these little moments that you have, and you kind of can’t believe that you’re there,” Hiatt says. “Those were the kind of things that ‘Old Days’ referred to quite a bit. You know, being at a gig with Mose Allison for goodness sake, and then remembering something he said years later, not realizing the significance at the time, but suddenly realizing what he was trying to tell me. Those kind of things. They often slip by at the time.”

That sometimes happens, Hiatt notes, with his own songs. His most recent release, 2014’s Terms of My Surrender, is an example.

“Those songs are revealing themselves to me as I sing them out on tour. It’s amazing,” he says.

Hiatt performs at Wichita’s Orpheum Theatre on Sunday, Sept. 25. His music is featured all throughout September on Strange Currency.

--

Jedd Beaudoin is the host of Strange Currency. Follow him on Twitter @JeddBeaudoin.

 
To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.

 

Jedd Beaudoin is host/producer of the nationally syndicated program Strange Currency. He has also served as an arts reporter, a producer of A Musical Life and a founding member of the KMUW Movie Club. As a music journalist, his work has appeared in Pop Matters, Vox, No Depression and Keyboard Magazine.