Western Textures, Eastern Light

With "Hills and Valleys," the Flatlanders shine delicate musical light on the idea of Impermanence

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, March 27, 2009

The Texas philosopher-troubadours known as the Flatlanders are about to share with us the most sublime album of their career — an existential gem, dappled with Eastern light. Imagine "All Things Must Pass" with a High Plains drawl and a musical saw, rich with whimsy and wisdom, a collection of songs that appreciates and honors the vast, delicate moment that is now.

The men who conceived it — Butch Hancock, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, friends and collaborators since they met in Lubbock more than 40 years ago — realize there's a particular sparkle in this recording, a creative promise fulfilled.

"When I listen to this music, it's like looking into an old rancher's eyes," says Lloyd Maines, who produced "Hills and Valleys," due for release Tues day . "You can look into that rancher's face, and see those lines, and know that he's been around the block. What these three guys have done on this record is taken everything they've lived, everything they've learned, and written it down."

"Hills and Valleys" starts with allusions to specific, literal things — Hurricane Katrina, for example, or Texas-Mexico border wall. Yet at its core, the album is about bigger matters, spiritual matters, interior matters. It considers humanity and humility, our preposterous smallness in a vast world, the idea of interconnection, the possibility of love, the breath of creation, the spiritual value of journey.

Impermanence. It's a word never uttered on "Hills and Valleys." Yet it's the breeze that ripples over every song.

We feel its presence from the first cut, "Homeland Refugee." The song is a modern "Grapes of Wrath" tale, told in reverse, in which down-and-out Californians pull up stakes — because "the pastures of plenty are burning by the sea" — and migrate eastward, toward Oklahoma, toward the Land of the Dust Bowl.

In the song's epiphanous moment, the displaced Californians encounter a family of Mexican immigrants in an abandoned gas station. And it's here that the Flatlanders elevate their hard-times song to a higher plane, building on the Dust Bowl metaphor. As Joe Ely sings it: "For everything this world is worth, we're all just migrants on this Earth, returning to the dust from where we came."

Uncaged songwriting

The Flatlanders composed the songs on "Hills and Valleys" over the span of four years — and it seems each time they met to write or record, there was an overarching atmosphere of international calamity. The tsunami. Hurricane Katrina. Fires in California. The escalation of war in Iraq. The collapse of the stock market. Yet the music they created and re-wrote during these sessions contained the most serene undercurrents.

"It's kind of like a bird in a cage," says Joe Ely, reflecting on the "Hills and Valleys" songwriting approach. "You can either sing about the bird in the cage or you can open the door. I think a lot of these songs felt like we opened a door." The idea wasn't to preach, or pronounce great truths. "We just wanted to open a door — to let the wind in, or the bird out."

The Flatlanders laugh warmly, knowingly, at the "bird cage" analogy as the three men sit together around the kitchen table of Ely's home in South Austin on a gray, winter's afternoon. It's damp outdoors. Inside, the kitchen smells of coffee and posole. A few minutes ago, the three friends were standing together on the sun porch, as Ely talked about a time, in another century, when teepees dotted the little valley below this house, when American Indians and migrant Anglos lived almost side-by-side on this land. Savoring the rare chilly day, the men — all in their 60s now — let their hands feel warm against cups of coffee and hot tea.

The Flatlanders insist they approached "Hills and Valleys" (their third collaboration of the decade) carrying no mission statement, no larger objective than to embrace the challenge of writing together. The key dimension, though, was they wanted to write together more than they ever have before. The Flatlanders wound up sharing equal songwriting credits on eight original songs on "Hills and Valleys." The songs turned out to be graceful. But the process was not.

"It's not easy writing together. And sometimes, not even fun. Sometimes, it was hair-pulling hard," says Ely, laughter all 'round the table. "One day we sat together for six hours without saying a word. And at the end of it, we said, 'I guess we're snakebit. Let's get out of here.' "

The Flatlanders groan in unison recalling the birth of "There's No Way I'll Never Need You," a wonderful puzzle of a love song that's full of double negatives and triple negatives. Its melody suggests Mexican polka and circus music.

Gilmore: I had the feeling, when we started, that this is a good idea, but I don't think we could make anything out of it. (Laughter)

Ely: Sometimes, we'd write no more than two lines to that song the whole day. I remember walking out of the studio feeling like I was tied in knots. (More laughter)

Hancock: The first day or two, I was thinking, "How am I going to tell Joe this is a bad idea." (Hearty laughter).

Gilmore: I don't remember exactly what got said or done, but something happened. And all of a sudden I said to myself, "This is going to be a great song. Not only can I accept the idea, but that there's something really good about it."

Building songs

The Flatlanders assembled most of their songs "like blocks" — word by word, line by line, or in some cases, note by note. There was deep attention to craft. In collaboration, every song was dramatically re-written, in terms of theme as well as words. "We didn't intend to write the songs that we did," Ely says. The finished works are rich, lyrically — but the tunes have been re-crafted and refined so many times that it's rare for any one of the Flatlanders to say, "I wrote that line."

But my, what lines.

"A wall is a mirror that can only reveal/one side of a story that passes for real/But break it all down, it all becomes clear/it's the fearless who love and the loveless who fear." That's from "Borderless Love."

"I don't need no world wide web to show me how it's done/I don't need no finish line to tell me that I've won." That's from "There's No Way I'll Never Need You."

"The average person is afraid to talk about death — but not afraid of driving a car." That's from "It's Just About Time."

Ely: I think a lot of new bands get together nowadays and come up with a blueprint about what they want be and do and look like. They develop the blueprint (before they start). But the total amount of ambition we have between the three of us could fit into a thimble

Hancock: (laughing) I was sitting here wonderin' if a matchbox holds my ambition

Gilmore: Yet we still have a love for things happening!

Ely: (All the same), we never know what's going to happen day to day. A song is not a rational thing. You can't really be rational while writing a song. Instead of telling the song what to do, the song pretty much tells us what to do.

Spiritual undercurrents

"Hills and Valleys" is a distinctive Flatlanders album on many levels. As a band, the Flatlanders have never sung harmonies so extensively — or sung them better. Lloyd Maines, the producer, suggested that they change the keys of several finished songs to create an environment for richer harmonies. Maines also championed a more acoustic approach, cutting back on electric instrumentation in favor of accordion, cello, harmonica and guitar.

Yet the most striking aspect of the album is its understated spiritual undercurrent. As solo artists and collaborators and late-night conversationalists, the Flatlanders have always delved deep into matters of philosophy and spirituality. You can see it way back, in a song like "One Road More," on their debut album in 1972. But on "Hills and Valleys," it's a part of every song.

The album approaches its ethereal peak on "Thank God for the Road" — a love song to life, a love song to journey, even the part of journey that involves hardship. Playing off the Buddhist and Hindu notions of life as a river, Hancock crafts a song around the idea of life as a road:

There's the sky, and here's the earth.

This is the road, for all it's worth.

It's a ribbon. It's a river. It's a wave.

It an arrow, and it's a snake.

It's asleep and it's awake.

And it stretches from the cradle to the grave.

The Flatlanders follow this with the album's masterpiece, "Free the Wind." The song is as delicate as a prayer, presented in three different melodies, each as sleek and focused as a mantra. The middle verse, sung by Hancock, paraphrases a couplet by the eighth-century Indian philosopher Shantideva: "From wanting happiness for others, comes all the joy the world contains/From wanting pleasure for yourself comes only sorrow, only pain."

In sum, The song is a prayer to the creator, as well as a summoning call to the god within. It is an acknowledgment of nature's power, man's insignificance, and yes, the larger notion of impermanence.

"Those three guys are very much of the philosophy, 'To each his own,' " says Maines, who has known the Flatlanders as friends since the early 1970s. "They've never tried to force their philosophy or a way on thinking on anybody. But they definitely transcribe it into their songs."

Joe Ely takes it a step further: "We've never leaned toward organized religion, even when we were living in Lubbock in the 1960s and 1970s. But the three of us have always had a desire to understand everything we can understand — and to be very awake and conscious of everything that's going on. That's all you can really do in this universe. You can't be certain of anything. But you can be present. And I think that's the most you can be — not the least you can be."

As the afternoon light turns to dusk, the Flatlanders pause for a moment to search of summing words — words to describe what this record means to them, what this 40-year friendship means to them. Jimmie Dale Gilmore is in midsentence when Butch Hancock rises from his chair. "Look," he says. There are deer, a half-dozen deer, roaming in the rain-softened earth in front of the house. Quietly, the three men rise from the kitchen table and move closer to the front windows to watch. It's something they've seen a hundred times before. But here they are again, alive in the sacred moment.

bbuchholz@statesman.com 912-2967