23/09/2022
https://orcd.co/flatlandlullaby
release date October 21
Joe Ely has released a whole lotta records over the last 50 years, but not even half as many albums as he’s made. By the renowned Texas roots rock and Americana legend’s own reckoning, nearly every album in his official catalog has at least one alternate version — sometimes even his favorite version — tucked away in his vault. There are also piles of live recordings spanning his entire career, scores (if not hundreds) of stray songs in all stages of completion, and even entire albums never released in any version — many back-burnered, perhaps, for no better reason other than Ely’s insatiable creative wanderlust, his attention known to turn on a dime every time a new idea or sound flitted across his mind. But happily for fans the world over, ever since 2007, Ely’s made a concerted effort to release a steady stream of pearls from that vault on his own Rack ’Em Records label. And this October — the same month as Ely’s induction into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame — he’s finally sharing what might well be the mother of them all: Flatland Lullaby.
Now, to clarify: Flatland Lullaby is not necessarily what anyone, least of all Ely himself, would ever call a “big" record. So go ahead and exhale if for a moment there you were thinking it was going to be, say, some kind of previously never-even-heard-about, full-on collaboration with the Clash, or even another treasure chest full of long-lost Flatlanders gold along the lines of 2012’s The Odessa Tapes. That said, though, Flatland Lullaby really is a gift objectively more special by far than anything else released from Ely’s archives to date, because this one comes straight off the very top shelf of the family reserve. It’s the kind of passion project that could have only ever come into focus when the initial target audience extended no farther than the man’s nearest and dearest — namely, his daughter Marie.
“It’s basically a little lullaby album that I did for her when she was 2 or 3 years old,” says Ely. He started recording it in his Austin home studio in 1984 and gave it to his toddler the following Christmas, with no real thought at the time — or for years thereafter, really — of ever releasing it to the public. Or at least not the whole public. “All of the neighbors’ kids would borrow it,” he recalls with a laugh, “and we’ve kind of passed it around to different friends over the years, too — anytime they were bringing a new child into the world and wanted some songs to play, or when their kids were having kids.”
But of course, Ely would invariably hear back from a lot of those folks that it wasn’t just kids who really enjoyed the record, and little Marie (yes, the baby girl whose picture is now framed on the cover) never outgrew it, either — and not just for purely sentimental reasons. It was Marie, now an established photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist, who perhaps more than anyone has encouraged her father for years to share it with the world — knowing as well as he always has that it was never just a fun little album made for a child not yet old enough to talk. In fact, out of all the records that Ely has ever made — released or not — Flatland Lullaby may well be the one that’s tickled and sung to his muse on and off again the longest.
“I’ve just really liked it from the very beginning, which was back when the Flatlanders [Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and a whole happy mess of other hippie/artist/musician friends] all lived in this house together on 14th Street in Lubbock in 1971 and ’72,” Ely says. “We kind of had a rule at the time that was, ‘anything goes,’ which as far as songwriting went meant that you could start with any kind of story. I mean, you could write a song from like, a dandelion’s point of view, you know? And I remember Jimmie’s daughter had the first part of this song that she showed me, wondering if I could play it on the guitar for her. It went, ‘Oh the gypsy lady reads the palms as the sun goes down, and the earth turns around and around and around ....’ So was the first part of that song that got connected to any kind of melody or rhythm or anything, just that quick little catching of a verse, and after that we started adding to it and it just grew and grew over the years. We might add one line at a time, or maybe half a verse, just carving out little pieces here and there and recording it however we could as we went along. Sometimes it took years to get a verse down! And a lot of the other songs came along that way, too. So it was just kind of a labor of love that I kept coming back to, all through the ’70s and then into the ’80s, when I had my own studio. That was when I was able to really go through all of our old notes and everything to see and hear where we’d been and what we’d done, and figure out whatever seemed to be the next step.”
The birth of Joe and Sharon Ely’s daughter in 1983, two years after the couple’s move from Lubbock to Austin, of course had a lot to do with his determining what that next step would be. But so too did Ely’s experience making the original version of his fifth solo album, Hi Res, coloring way outside the lines of his acclaimed rockin’ roadhouse honky-tonk wheelhouse to play mad audio scientist with his brand new Roland drum machine, Apple II computer, and Alpha Centauri keyboard/synth rig. MCA would have none of that and insisted on having the album re-recorded with a full band, but the better-late-than-never release of Ely’s first pass (as 2014’s B484) revealed just how ahead of his time he was in the electronic music field — and not out of the blue, either. Because more than a decade earlier, before even the Flatlanders, Ely just happened to have had the opportunity to work with noted German composer, opera conductor, and early Moog synthesizer enthusiast Eberhard Schoener.
“About six months before the Flatlanders started up, I had been over in Europe playing music as part of a production called Stomp (And Now the Revolution) by this theater troupe from the University of Texas, and that was when I met Eberhard, who lived in Munich and led the Nürnberg opera,” says Ely. “He ended up inviting me and another guy from Stomp to work on this project with him for the Museum of Modern Art in Munich; he wanted to mix synthesizers with acoustic guitars, and we put together a piece that became this kind of ambient, avant-garde record called A Day’s Lullaby. Anyway, that whole experience was a big inspiration for me, and a lot of those sounds really stuck with me.”
Now more than 50 years later, you can very much hear the sonic imprint of that time and place in Ely’s life and career all over Flatland Lullaby. Ely actually started writing the opening song, “Milkmaid,” way back when in the German town of Mosbach, and in fact the entire album has as much of an old-world European vibe as it does one suggesting Lubbock or anywhere else in Texas.
“I just used a lot of different sounds that I had collected all through the years,” Ely says. “I really wanted the album to have an ethereal feeling — kind of like a distant memory,” And though it’s also packed with fun — with not one but two relentlessly catchy songs inspired by vintage cartoons (“The Cats and the Rats” and “Old Mr. Ghost”) and even a joyride in Woody Guthrie’s “Car Car” (with Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore both taking turns at the wheel) — there’s a delightfully haunting and surreal, creepy undercurrent running throughout, too, as might befit a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale or perhaps a Tim Burton film. “I’ve always loved those kind of cartoons that have a darker side to them,” says Ely. “And kids seem attracted to that kind of stuff, too! You know, ghosts and scary things like, ‘Who’s in the closet?’”
And as for who’s in the mix, well — in a word, everybody. For an album that he at one time intended to never be heard much outside of his own happy home, Ely wasn’t shy in rounding up a Hall of Fame-worthy roster of Lubbock and Texas music all-stars to help out. In addition to fellow Flatlanders Gilmore (who sings on the record) and Butch Hancock (with whom Ely co-wrote Flatland Lullaby’s title track), other musicians and singers who contributed to the sessions over the years include Kimmie Rhodes (singing on her own co-write with Emmylou Harris, “Love and Happiness for You”), guitarists Mitch Watkins and David Grissom, steel player Lloyd Maines, fiddle player Richard Bowden, violinist Gene Elders, mandolin player Paul Glass, drummer Davis McLarty, and bassists Jimmie Pettit and Roscoe Beck.
Around a decade ago, Ely started toying with the idea of turning the whole record into an animated film, going so far as to write a treatment and produce a two-minute sample video with artist Mike Shapiro. “It was just an experiment, really, and we kind of had to put it aside because it started getting in the way of finishing the album,” he says today. “But we might pick that back up again ... someday.”
For now, though, Ely’s just happy to have finally put the finishing touches on the weirdest, loveliest little album he’s ever made. And just in time to share it with a world that’s never needed the comfort of a good “Flatland Lullaby” more.
written by richard skanse
