‘So much heart’: Why Shooter Jennings is bringing his father’s old recordings to life

3 hours ago 3

Shooter Jennings’ real name is Waylon, like his dad, who sang a bit, played a bit, generally did the legend-of-country-music thing a (fair) bit, and is a name to reckon with, to cast a shadow.

The son-of is a singer-songwriter, too, with quite a few albums under his belt but even more albums out there as a Grammy-winning producer. So, would Shooter Jennings, producer, have liked working with Waylon Jennings, singer-songwriter?

Shooter Jennings has found a treasure trove of his father Waylon’s unreleased music.

“Oh my god, of course. Yes, of course,” says Shooter. “I would love to have worked with almost anyone from that era but, gosh, no one has ever asked me that, which makes me think, what would I say if I didn’t know him? Man, I don’t know. I would just be in awe of his journey and what he’s been through, and encourage him to do what he is doing. Keep going!”

Fate has made this almost real now as Shooter, having dived into the vast vault of his father’s independent recordings from the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s – a time when Waylon, now owning his work after breaking from the major labels, recorded non-stop – has found enough unreleased songs that, with a bit of a finessing by him, they are about to come out as a three-album release, beginning with Songbird (named after Waylon’s cover of the song from Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie) this month.

“I did not expect to find what I did in there, it was really awesome. It was like getting a window in this period of discovery when he found his freedom in music and he was surrounded by people he loved,” Shooter says.

“There was so much heart and effort put into it, and beauty in it, I just felt like it would bring so many people joy. I thought about the old guy that was there from the beginning, 81 years old somewhere, that would love to hear this.”

Some of the songs Shooter found were ready to go, others had the principal parts down from Waylon and his core band, including now-giants of country like steel guitarist Ralph Mooney and drummer Richie Albright, and maybe needed a piano part or an extra guitar or backing vocals.

Trawling through session notes, a comprehensive discography by music historian John L. Smith, and the memories of the surviving members of Waylon’s band, The Waylors, Shooter would suss out his father’s plans and, where possible, call on some of the original musicians to overdub their parts.

The results were mixed through period-specific analogue equipment at the venerable Sunset Sound studio in LA. But Shooter insists this was never about some perfect replication, so at times he pulled back the reverb a bit, beefed up the bottom end a bit, focused on the voice, “because I wanted it to feel like he walked in off the street right now, just like Charley Crockett or anyone I’ve worked with, and did his thing right there”.

Hopefully he was sipping from a period-appropriate glass of something dark and potent sitting on the console while he worked. For atmosphere and authenticity only, of course.

“Man, you know, sometimes I’d pull out a Jack and Coke when mixing,” Shooter says with a chuckle.

“The greatest part about mixing those songs is it starts at noon, and you’re great, then you get it to a place where you are so excited about how it sounds that you save that, and then you drink and you just listen to that over and over and over again, making little adjustments, then you come back the next day and listen again.

“I will say that spending all the time mixing those songs, being in the studio alone doing it, being alone with the music in the moment and all that, it was such a beautiful experience.”

Songbird is out now.

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