Recently I have been going through some of my audio interviews and having them transcribed, particularly ones with that include some kind of historical import. In June of 2020 I did a phone interview with Radney Foster. This was in the midst of COVID and the aftermath of the George Floyd murder. It did not get a lot of attention at the time, for obvious reasons, so I thought I would release it here in written form for the first time here on Americana Highways. – Darren Staley
Americana Highways: You live in Nashville currently?
Radney: I do. I’m actually sitting in my studio behind my house in Nashville, Tennessee.
AH: Very nice. I’ve never been to Nashville, but it’s at the top of my list. I get the same two recommendations every time I ask people what to do there: Robert’s Western World and the VFW. Are they steering me in the right direction?
Radney: They absolutely are, but I would also include the Country Music Hall of Fame. Having visited both – shh, don’t tell anybody – it’s actually a much better museum than the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. By far. Their curation is better, too.
But I’m a musicological egghead snob. I was staring at a guitar that was one of Duane Allman’s, and they were talking about the solo he’d played on some song, and I was like, “I think he played that on the Goldtop. I don’t think he played that on the Les Paul Standard.”
Sure enough, I was right.
But I digress.
AH: So I want to get into when I first became aware of your work. It was 1993. I was 19 years old and worked third shift. When I got off work, I would sit at home with my prized possession, which was a 1600-watt Pioneer stereo I bought through my grandmother’s Fingerhut catalog. I think it was 500 easy payments of $30, so I probably paid $5,000 for it.
Radney: That was the big boy, though. You had speakers the size of bears.
AH: At that point I was really into country music of that era. The sadder, the better.
I picked up Del Rio, TX 1959, and the sound was unique to me. Some of it sounded like what was on the radio – “Just Call Me Lonesome,” “Nobody Wins,” particularly – and maybe that’s because they actually were on the radio a lot. And then there were two really, really sad ones: “Closing Time” and “Easier Said Than Done.” “Easier Said Than Done” is probably top five favorite songs of all time, any genre, for me.
But what I’ve always found curious is that when I was listening to those songs, and loving sad songs and heartbreak songs, I wasn’t personally heartbroken.
What do you think attracts us to heartbreak songs even when we’re not actually sad? And as a songwriter, do you have to go to a sad place to write what I call a good crybaby song?
Radney: Merle Haggard put it best. They asked him why he wrote so many sad songs, and he said, “Well, when I’m happy, I don’t really feel like going off in a corner with my guitar.”
I think that’s part of it.
Country music has always been musical therapy, a form of catharsis. You could turn up the radio in your truck, or your car, wherever you were driving, and hear George Jones sing a sad country song like “The Grand Tour” and go, “I am so much better off than that poor son of a bitch singing that song. Man, that is low.”
I think there’s something appealing about that.
And the instrumentation – pedal steel, fiddle, dobro – lends itself to mournfulness.
I also think we inherited that from both continents.
Marty Stuart said it in Ken Burns’ Country Music: the influence of African Americans on country music cannot be overstated. It just cannot be overstated.
You have the pentatonic scale from Irish murder ballads, that white Appalachian side of country music and how much came from the Scottish, Irish and Celts and that five-note scale.
Then you combine that with Africans who were brought here as slaves singing in that same five-note scale, and eventually the creation of what we think of as American gospel music.
“Amazing Grace” – I defy anyone to tell me John Newton wrote that melody. He heard that melody in the belly of a slave boat he was captaining, and it haunted him so badly that he changed everything about his life, including his faith, and became an abolitionist who wrote a hymn we still sing today.
AH: I think there’s another aspect, too, with all that sadness and heartache we relate to in those songs. There was a line in your book – and we’re going to talk about the book in detail – that basically said, “Love breaks hearts. That’s what it does.” That was a little bit of a revelation to me.
You can never really love anyone or anything without experiencing some form of heartbreak within that love. Maybe it isn’t devastating. It could even be a happy heartbreak. But those two things are baked together. Would you say that’s true?
Radney: Oh, yeah. “Easier Said Than Done” is an example. I really wanted to write a song about the betrayal of trust. Of course, the ultimate betrayal of trust is this guy has slept with somebody else. But you can betray trust by telling a lie, or promising you’ll pick up the groceries on the way home and then not doing it.
It doesn’t matter what the act is. You still feel that sense of pain, either once you’ve done it and realized the pain you’re causing, or when you’re on the receiving end of it. I felt like I did a good job with that one. I knew I wanted to write a waltz. I was aware I didn’t really have a true waltz on the record.
There is this innate nature of love where we’re going to get hurt. You have to make that leap of faith.
Relationships that last a long time figure out how to forgive that hurt.
My wife and I just had our 24-year wedding anniversary. You don’t go through that without having hurt one another somewhere along the way and then saying, “I still love this person, and I want to forgive them.”
The best compliment I ever got about that song was from Kim Richey, who’s a great singer-songwriter. She sang harmony on it, and of course she wrote “Nobody Wins” with me.
We did a little theater tour together, maybe ten dates down in the Southwest and then up through the Midwest. Just her and a guitar and me and a guitar, singing each other’s songs.
“Easier Said Than Done” wasn’t in the first few sets we did.
Then we got to The Ark in Michigan and somebody shouted it out. I said, “You know it?”
Kim said, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
We sang it and it just laid everybody out. Huge ovation. People went nuts.
Then we were smart enough to say, “What the hell were we doing? Why wasn’t that in the set to begin with?”
Kim told me, “I remember when Radney played me that song. I thought, if a guy came to me who had cheated on me and sang me that song, I’d take the son of a bitch back.”
And I thought, okay. I did my job.
AH: No doubt. Now, that was your first solo album. Do you think that’s still the one you’re most widely identified with on a mainstream level?
Radney: Of course, yes. I’ve got fans who have every record and remember songs I forgot twenty years ago. Those people are at the shows. But there’s almost always somebody at the merchandise table after a show who says, “Wow, Radney Foster. I loved that Del Rio, Texas record.”
Maybe their wife said, “We need something to do Thursday night,” and they see I’m playing some theater and go, “Let’s go to dinner and see Radney Foster. He sings his ass off. Didn’t he write one of those Keith Urban songs?”
Then they come to the show and they’re blown away by all this other music I’ve made. They hand over a credit card and say, “I want one of everything.”
That always makes me really happy.
There’s another record, See What You Want to See, that didn’t sell all that many because the label went belly-up and the record went out of print. But that’s the other one people mention.
Keith Urban has told me that record was game-changing for him. It really set him on a different path.
When I first met him, he said, “I’m going to cut ‘Raining on Sunday.’ That record changed everything for me. I started looking at the whole of what could be done with country music in a completely different way because of that record.”
I thought, well, that’s a huge compliment.
AH: Do you ever get something almost like jealousy – jealousy isn’t really the right word – because so many people hear “Raining on Sunday” now and identify it with Keith Urban? Do you ever get just a little tinge of, “That’s my song. I can sing my ass off, too”?
Radney: No. The check still clears. (laughs)
AH: That is true.
Radney: If you ever get that kind of jealousy, you’re really overthinking it. First of all, you’ve been incredibly blessed. Regardless of who sang it, to have a record be that successful and still have them playing it on the radio more than a decade later?
I have no reason to be jealous of anybody about anything. I’ve been incredibly blessed. And if I do get jealous, my wife will set me straight right quick.
AH: Before we move on from “Raining on Sunday,” there’s a video out there where you come out and sing the second half with Keith.
There’s something about that video. The way you come out of the audience, it’s shot almost in slow motion – it’s a really powerful scene. It’s your wrestler entrance.
Radney: Which is great. I’d never thought about it, but it really is sort of a World Wrestling Federation entrance for Radney Foster.
AH: Exactly. There’s something going on and then the big hero comes walking in unexpectedly. What’s the story there? Did people know you were showing up?
Radney: No. They had no idea. It was at the American Airlines Center in Dallas. I was in the middle of making the Revival record, which was really about the loss of my father, grief and forgiveness.
I had lost my father, I was turning 50, and my son had finally come home from France after living there for 13 years, from age five to 18.
There was a lot of emotion.
My wife and I, along with a great director from San Antonio named Jeff Horny, decided to see if we could make a short documentary about the making of that record.
It ended up being a 75-minute documentary.
Keith was playing in Dallas, and my videographer said, “I’ve spoken with Keith’s people and he’s totally cool with me interviewing him.”
I said, “Why don’t I just fly in a day early with my son? He can roadie, run sound on some of the video stuff. He’s young and smart, and he’s never seen Keith Urban live.”
The show had already started when Keith’s stage manager came over to me and said, “Keith wants you to come out and sing ‘Raining on Sunday’ with him.”
I said, “I do it in a different key than he does.”
He said, “I’m just following orders, boss.”
So they strapped me up, put a guitar on me, and out I went. Keith’s people were kind enough to give our director the footage from all six cameras they were using for the Jumbotrons. We synced it all to that live performance.
What Keith also didn’t tell me was what would happen once I got out there.
He came up to me while everything was dark and they were playing incidental music and said, “I’m going to go out and sing the first verse, introduce you, and then you come on. Just you and me acoustic. My drummer’s back there doing a little loop thing.”
I said, “Okay, cool.”
What he did not tell me was that after the second chorus, when it goes into the solo, it’s like a bomb blast goes off.
The entire band comes in full bore. Somebody hands Keith an electric guitar and he proceeds to rip your head completely off.
But the best part came at the last chorus.
I had these little in-ear pods – not custom-fitted like everybody else had – and Keith pulled one of them out of my ear.
He said, “You hear that? I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “That’s 20,000 people singing your song to you.”
That was a pretty cool moment.
AH: I’ve heard Garth Brooks say that’s the greatest feeling for an artist. I’ve seen Garth a couple of times. The first time was back in the mid-’90s, right at the height of it, and I had never seen anything like that. Every person in that arena sang every word to every single song in unison. Do you agree with him? Is there anything quite like that feeling?
Radney: Oh, yeah. That’s the only time I’ve experienced tens of thousands of people singing one of my songs. But I’ve certainly had hundreds singing every word along with me.
There’s a place called Gruene Hall. It’s the oldest honky-tonk in Texas, 700, 800, 900 seats, somewhere around there.
I always have them sing the “Texas in 1880” chorus back to me at the end of the night.
It’s always a really, really good feeling.
AH: I think Robert Earl Keen does some kind of annual thing there.
Radney: Oh, yeah. He does a week’s worth. Four or five shows.
In that area he’s probably good for eight or nine thousand seats on any given night, but it’s such a cool place that he comes in and does a whole run there.
AH: I want to get into songwriting and process a little. I stumbled across a real beauty of yours called “Whose Heart You Wreck,” and it kind of blew my mind. At first I thought it was about writer’s block. Then it took on a different meaning the more I listened. I’ve heard songwriters say that sometimes they work a song out. They play around with it and fiddle with it. Other times it’s almost downloaded. It’s just there.
Radney: It happens both ways. And it doesn’t mean that either way the song is going to be great.
I’ve labored over things, and I’ve had things where I just couldn’t write them down fast enough.
My thought process on that song was that I think the Greeks got it right about the muse.
We think of them as angels or inspiration or whatever it is, but the muse comes and sits on your shoulder and imparts some wisdom – whether that’s Euclidean geometry or hillbilly songs.
There are these moments of inspiration.
I tell people all the time that I go to work as a songwriter – and now even as a prose writer or screenwriter – hoping the muse is going to show up.
Sometimes I’m just sitting there drinking coffee and staring at a keyboard, or looking at my co-writer’s shoes.
You have no idea whether you’re going to get anything that’s any good. But the discipline means you’re prepared when the inspiration does show up. I still keep a pad and pencil by the bed because I’m awakened so often at two in the morning by an idea.
Sometimes you write it down, go downstairs, work for half an hour, get down everything you think you need to get down, go back to sleep – and wake up the next morning and it’s absolute crap.
Sometimes it’s really good.
The muse is a fickle mistress.
Sometimes she’s drunk at three in the morning and just wants to mess with you.
There’s a famous story about Tom Waits driving on a freeway in Los Angeles while he was having writer’s block. Suddenly this great idea comes to him, but he’s white-knuckling it through eight lanes of NASCAR, bumper-to-bumper traffic with everybody going 75 miles an hour.
He looks up at the sky and says, “Really? Now? Can’t you see I’m driving?”
And then basically tells the muse, if you really want to come out into the universe, go bug Leonard Cohen. He’s really good, and he lives in an apartment in New York, and I know he isn’t fucking driving right now.
AH: I’m assuming that was about “Ol’ ’55.”
Radney: That’s what I thought, too.
AH: What I loved about the video for “Whose Heart You Wreck” is how dark the character gets when the muse won’t come. Have you experienced that? That feeling where you almost give up and think, “I don’t have it anymore. It won’t come. It’s gone”?
Radney: Daily. I have terrible self-doubt. Who the hell am I? They finally figured it out. I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I have no business doing this. I just need to get a job teaching English somewhere and be done with it.
I can’t write for shit.
That gets exacerbated by my tendency to be curious and keep trying to stretch myself.
The structure of royalties has completely changed. I make a lot less mailbox money than I used to.
One answer is, sure, you can tour your ass off three or four times as much.
But there’s an end game to that.
We aren’t all Willie Nelson. When I’m 80, am I going to be able to play a hundred shows a year?
That’s part of why I took the leap into stage acting, writing a book of short fiction, writing a screenplay.
My wife and I are writing a screenplay based on one of the stories in the book.
Stretching those boundaries helps you find creative fire, but it also feeds that opposite fire:
I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
I’m making this up as I go along.
AH: Let’s jump into the book. The book is For You to See the Stars, and it’s amazing. I’ve read it twice now. It’s a book of short stories and, just by itself, it’s fantastic. Having the album as a companion takes it to another level. Where did the idea come from to pair the book with the music?
Radney: It really started because I got laryngitis. I had it so badly that bronchitis turned into bronchial pneumonia, and I literally coughed my voice away. I couldn’t speak for six weeks, then had to rehab my voice. I couldn’t sing for another six weeks after that.
It was three months before I could even start thinking about booking dates, and you can’t just book one for next week. You book months out.
So I spent a long time unable to really write songs or sing.
About a month in, I was going nuts.
I wrote a note to my wife and said, “There’s a song I wrote six months ago called ‘Sycamore Creek,’ and I’m going to write a short story based on it just to keep from going crazy.”
She didn’t say anything. She pulled the pencil out of my hand and wrote, “You should, because you’re driving me crazy.” I wish I still had that piece of paper.
The first short story I wrote was inspired by a song I had already written.
I gave it to my wife. It’s actually the longest piece in the book, almost novella length, maybe 12,000 or 13,000 words.
My wife had been a magazine editor and journalist for many years. She read it and said, “Babe, this is really good. You need to keep writing this way.”
So I did.
My second short story wasn’t inspired by a song, but my third was. I thought, I’ll just write another song. Then I stopped and thought, wait a second. I could put out an album of ten songs and a book of ten short stories to go with it.
Within about six months I met Sherry Smith, the brainchild behind the publishing house and art collective Working Title Farm. She really coached me. She’s a great editor and held my feet to the fire.
I learned that, just like songs, good short stories are written and great ones are rewritten.
Good songs are written. Great songs are rewritten.
AH: There’s something I’ve got to ask you about. In two different stories there’s kind of a theme involving lawyers and legal stuff. Is that just coincidence, or do you have some history there?
Radney: My father was an attorney. My great-grandfather was the first attorney and the first judge in Del Rio, Texas. I grew up in the house next door to his, which was my grandfather’s house. My grandfather went to law school, too.
His father sent every son he had to law school, but by the time my grandfather got through, there were too many lawyers in town because of all his brothers.
So he sold Chryslers.
But he could read his own contracts.
My father went to law school, and my dad taught constitutional law and the Bible at the dinner table on the regular. I come by that honestly.
AH: The first story, For You to See the Stars – if a book can have a title story the way an album has a title track – is beautiful. But what hit me really hard was the song. It’s light at the end of the tunnel, overcoming darkness, a song of inspiration. And yet, at this particular point in history, things just seemed to be getting darker and darker. I remember listening to it, even after reading the story, and thinking, “Dude, I’m ready for some freaking stars, man. How dark is it going to get?” Have you thought about the song in that context?
Radney: I have a little bit. There’s another song on there that’s very dark and has shocked a lot of fans, called “All That I Require.” I didn’t realize it would become as prescient as it has. Shockingly so. I thought I was making it up. I was writing fiction.
But I’m a student of history. I think about how dark it must have felt in 1942 when we were literally losing battle after battle. We were getting the shit knocked out of us. We’d been attacked and we were at war. And yet by 1943, we’re making more airplanes and going full tilt as a nation, even while we still have our own apartheid system in place.
The civil rights movement started long before World War II, but World War II was a fire and catalyst for those civil rights leaders. And look how long it still took. It wasn’t until 1964 that we got the Civil Rights Act. Are we still dealing with it today? Oh, hell yes. A man was shot in Atlanta for no other reason than- He was asleep in a parking lot.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been driving home from a gig and thought, “Man, I just can’t make it back to Nashville or San Antonio. I’m going to pull over at this truck stop, set an alarm and sleep in the car for 45 minutes.”
Was I ever worried that the police would come and try to arrest me simply for sleeping in my car?
And then if I got really scared and screwed up, that they might shoot me while I was running away because I was afraid? It doesn’t even enter my mind. But that’s the truth of what we saw this weekend.
AH: It just seems never-ending.
Radney: I think one thing about the COVID virus is that we’re not distracted. There’s no game on TV. Everybody has already been through everything on Netflix. That eight minutes and 46 seconds was devastating, and an entire nation saw it. Now you have housewives in my neighborhood, university professors, doctors and lawyers and their children marching downtown Nashville – people of every color and stripe, not just Black folks who, Lord knows, have suffered this for way too long.
This feels different.
I see hope. I know it’s dark. You’re right. It feels really, really dark. But I think the arc of history does move toward the light.
AH: You mentioned that, since you haven’t been touring, you’ve been doing Facebook Live performances. Something you said during one of them sticks out now.
You said one of the most requested songs you were getting was “Half of My Mistakes,” which is a very introspective song. Maybe that’s part of what’s happening.
We’ve actually had time to sit back and think instead of just flipping through the news. They used to call it the 24-hour news cycle. At this point it’s the 30-second news cycle. This has also been a very introspective time. Maybe that has some impact.
Radney: I don’t disagree. Having that time for self-reflection, and maybe pulling away from the tyranny of media at your fingertips, has hopefully spoken to the nation some. It certainly has to me. It’s actually been a very creative time.
Not as much on the music side, but definitely on the prose side. I have written some songs, most of them things I think may actually go into the film my wife and I are writing.
I’m also working on a novel in my spare time. I’m constantly challenging myself to stay busy. There’s a pace to writing prose that’s very different from writing songs. It’s slower. You have to think through who this character is, what part of you is in that character, how you really feel about this.
Why are you writing it?
What’s the purpose?
If a song is worth singing, it has to be about something that makes you feel. Even if the feeling is, “I give it about an 85. It makes me want to dance.” That’s a legitimate emotion.
If we cut “Just Call Me Lonesome” and it didn’t make you want to dance, we did it wrong.
It’s all another form of storytelling, and I’m really enjoying it.
AH: You’ve mentioned acting. You’re screenwriting now. You’re acting now. Are you ready to make the move to Hollywood, or are you pretty set there in Nashville? What are your ambitions in that world?
Radney: To be as successful as I can. In 2017 I was the lead in a brand-new musical at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, which is a Tony Award-winning theater. All the music was written by Kristian Bush of Sugarland, and the story and dialogue were written by Janece Shaffer, an award-winning playwright.
It was a big leap, but it was a lot of fun and a great reintroduction to acting for me.
The year before that, my wife asked me, “What do you want for Christmas?” I said, “Acting lessons.” She said, “Okay.” I figured that if nothing else, maybe my stage patter would get tighter and I wouldn’t ramble on so much.
I’d done some acting back when my hair was brown. Those lessons ended up helping me get the job.
I was writing the book the entire time I was living in Atlanta doing that play.
I think that was also one of the things that inspired me to think, “I believe we could make a movie out of one of these stories.”
Then I fell in with some guys who said, “We think you could make a movie out of one of those stories.”
AH: Honestly, you could probably make a movie out of most of them.
Radney: Thanks very much.
AH: The last thing I’ve got to ask you about is the Working Title Farm Radio Hour you told me about.
It’s going to happen about thirty minutes up the road from me. What exactly is it going to be, and when do you expect it to happen?
Radney: I feel really good about it. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise – and assuming we figure out how to make it work with disease and social distancing – we’re going to shoot the pilot episode in October. We have contingency plans for everything.
It’s essentially a variety show.
I’m the host.
We’ll have musical guests and literary guests. There are also sketches written internally, based on funny things that have happened at some of our Working Title Farm writing retreats or other life experiences. It’s delightful. It’s funny. It’s poignant. I really love where the first episode is going. I’m thrilled with it.
Our focus for presenting it to the world is public radio and television. It’ll be filmed and recorded, then edited in such a way that you can listen to it on the radio and still “see” it. But if you’re watching on television, you realize you’re watching the making of a radio program.
It’s an invitation inside what happens with this merry band of pranksters – authors, poets, visual artists, bluegrass pickers and singer-songwriters – who meet up on that mountain in Boone, North Carolina.
AH: Is the plan eventually to film this in front of a live audience?
Radney: Yes. We have contingency plans for doing the first one without an audience. We have plans for moving the date if things are so bad that we simply can’t safely be together in a workspace.
We had already been workshopping this when the pandemic hit.
We’ve continued working in isolation – lots of phone calls, Zoom conversations, sending writing back and forth. We feel really good about it. We’ve found a director. We have the ear of some people in film and television who seem very excited about it, particularly for public television.
AH: I wish you the best of luck with all of it. And I really want to thank you for doing this. It’s been a wild ride getting to know Radney Foster. There was so much out there I hadn’t found. I hadn’t read the book before. I found a lot of new music. It’s honestly been a beautiful experience for me. Thank you for that.
Radney: Thank you so much.
Enjoy some of our previous coverage here: Show Review: Radney Foster and Eddie Heinzleman were Spellbinding at OKC’s Blue Door