Photo by Michael Wilson
John Hiatt isn’t one of those musicians who works out full arrangements for songs in his head or on demo recordings as he writes music. Heck, he doesn’t even do demos and hasn’t for years.
As he sees it, too much planning misses the whole point.
“I don’t do demos anymore,” Hiatt explained. “I sing them into a little voice recorder thing on my iPad just so I can remember them. And then I just wait until it’s time to make a record and record them.
“All I ever hear in my head is the song,” he continued. “I don’t really have any kind of, you know, imagined arrangement or how it should go. My whole delight in recording is to see what’s going to happen when people start playing them. That’s the exciting thing to me. That’s what I call making music.”
Hiatt’s latest album, Terms of My Surrender, took that spontaneous approach to album making to a new level—to the point that the record started to get made before anyone could call what was happening an album.
It all started when Hiatt contacted his touring guitarist, Doug Lancio.
“I had just written this batch of songs and I was talking to Doug,” Hiatt said. “And Doug had a studio over in East Nashville for a long while, and I’d been over there many times and never done anything over there. It’s just a funky little place, in a little house. So it just seemed right. I said ‘How ’bout I come over and we just record some stuff.’
“I think we started with ‘Face Of God’ and cut two or three more [songs], ‘Long Time Comin’,’ and I can’t remember what else,” he said. “And then I said ‘This is good. So let’s just keep going.’ That’s kind of how it happened.”
Lancio ended up taking on production duties for Terms of My Surrender, which was released in July 2014, helping Hiatt and his band (Lancio, drummer Kenneth Blevins and bassist Nathan Gehri, plus keyboardist John Coleman on several tracks) create an album that contrasts notably with Hiatt’s previous record, Mystic Pinball. That 2012 album primarily featured plugged-in, rocking tunes that made the most of Hiatt’s melodic gifts.
Surrender, in contrast, is stripped back and bluesy, with songs anchored around Hiatt’s vocals and acoustic guitar. That approach will serve Hiatt well this fall as he does a run of solo acoustic shows. His new songs should translate easily to that format.
On Surrender, Hiatt’s vocals sit decidedly up front in the mix, giving the album an intimacy he’s never quite achieved before. Hiatt also sings in a lower register than on any previous album. The tone gives these bluesy, sharply written songs a lived-in quality that makes them feel that much more authentic.
The stripped-back sound means those songs should translate well to the solo acoustic format Hiatt will use when he teams up with Lyle Lovett for an evening of songs and stories with that other acclaimed singer/songwriter this fall.
The outings with Lovett have become a recurring part of Hiatt’s touring routine, and the two have grown very at ease with the song swapping format of the shows.
“Well, it’s just gotten looser and looser as we’ve become, I mean, we’ve always been friends, but we’ve done it so much now that it’s just so comfortable and we enjoy it so much that it’s, it’s not really a show,” Hiatt said. “I mean, I think it’s entertaining because people seem to enjoy it. But it’s so sort of unconstructed—and I think that’s the appeal of it. It’s just a couple of guys singing songs and telling lies pretty much. So it’s good.”
Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt play the Pabst Theater on Sunday, Oct. 18.
