Lucille died in 2004, and Miller died on January 1, 2015, the same date, Lucinda points out, that Hank Williams died 62 years earlier. “I’m still grieving,” she adds. “Maybe it never stops.” She started writing “Death Came” right after her mother’s death, but she couldn’t wrestle it into final shape until last year.
Inspired, she says, by Ralph Stanley’s “Oh Death” and Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “Death Came A-Creepin’” (aka “Soon One Morning”), it was an effort to come to terms with mortality by confronting it directly. “I tasted the fruit from the tree of knowledge,” she sings, but she was “not satisfied, until I carved my name in the bark.” The companion piece is “Doors To Heaven,” written right after Miller died.
“That’s also a hard one to get through,” she admits; “I broke down and cried when we tried to record it. It just came to me in that traditional form, like an old hymn. It’s not saying there is a heaven; it’s wondering if there is a heaven. Even people who go, ‘I’m an atheist,’ must question if there’s something else out there.’ Struggling with my dad being gone, I wondered about that myself. The sense of him being gone is still so raw. It’s something that a lot of people have dealt with, losing a loved one, that eternal question.”
The final third of “Doors To Heaven” is an instrumental duet between Frisell and Leisz that takes Lucinda’s unanswerable questions into territory where words can’t go. After she has repeatedly sung, “Open up the doors of heaven, let me in,” Frisell’s chiming high notes suggest what might lie beyond those pearly gates, while Leisz’s bluesy slide guitar suggests someone banging on the front door, demanding entrance.
“I just love a guitar-sounding record,” she says. “I’ve always been drawn to those bands like the Allman Brothers or Z.Z. Top, where the guitar is the main thing. Different guitar players bring out different things in me.”
Frisell and Leisz have pulled from her a renewed commitment to the visualization of past worlds and traumatic scenes recaptured in words as well as amplifier dreamscapes. Frisell is a major figure in the jazz world, not only from his more than 30 solo albums but also from his collaborations with Joe Lovano, Cassandra Wilson, McCoy Tyner, Jim Hall, Ron Carter and more. But in the second half of his career, Frisell has made repeated forays into the Americana world, recording with Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, Buddy Miller, Jerry Douglas, Carrie Rodriguez, Bonnie Raitt, Norah Jones and Laura Veirs.
Like a lot of folks, Frisell first discovered Lucinda through 1998’s Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, but he first heard her live when he learned that his former Denver guitar student Kenny Vaughan had grown up to become her lead guitarist. Frisell was captivated by the show. He met Lucinda in Nashville and added overdubs to her 2007 album, West, which was co-produced by Hal Willner, a previous Frisell collaborator. Then at a show in Seattle, he agreed to join her band onstage for one song, only to be caught off-guard when she insisted that he do the entire show.
“I played the whole set, mostly songs I’d never played,” Frisell remembers. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is the real shit, that trust and that willingness to live on the edge.’ Those guys were so open and her attitude was so positive that I felt like could do no wrong. I could feel the effect of what I was playing on how she sang. I wasn’t just backing her up; there was a real interaction.”
“Bill is so ethereal,” Lucinda adds. “He can play anything. I just love how he doesn’t just play your classic rock guitar; it’s so emotional and fluid. The tones he gets; it almost doesn’t sound like a guitar. Besides that, he’s an amazing sweet and humble person. He’s so quiet and kind of shy, not a big talker. Then he starts playing, and you go, ‘Wha?’”
“Then she asked me to play on this record,” Frisell continues. “Now we were really in it from the ground up. We all learned the song together in that moment. She has this big briefcase filled with stuff she’d written, and she’d just pull stuff out. It wasn’t even fully formed yet. That’s the most amazing feeling: to be in the studio and watch the song come to life and record it right in that moment.”
This is especially obvious on a song like “I Know All About It,” a slow, slow blues about an old friend down on her luck, too embarrassed to acknowledge the narrator when their paths cross. Once again there are arresting visual images: the scuffed leather of the friend’s boots, the tattered lace of her blouse, the lonely apartment with the peeling paint, the pain “in her back pocket like a sharp-edged knife.” With knowing sorrow, the narrator keeps telling the evasive friend, “I know all about the pain,” and those wounds are evoked by several spooky, wee-hours guitar duets.
“When Lucinda wanted space,” Leisz says, “she just wouldn’t sing, and Bill and I would fill up that space. We’d be looking at lyric sheets and listening to the words, but we’re also hearing the spaces between the words. There was very little talking about what we were going to do; we just did it. You don’t get a lot of chances; it’s like catching lightning in a bottle. It’s only when you listen back to it that you hear a connection between the lyric and what you were playing that you didn’t know you were creating.”
“We have so much in common,” Frisell says of his partnership with Leisz. “We’re practically the same age; our first guitars were both Fender Mustangs. We grew up hearing the same songs on the radio. We each took different paths: he fell in love with Hank Williams while I was falling in love with Thelonious Monk. Almost 20 years ago we met, and I felt a super-strong connection. When I’m playing with Greg, so much goes unsaid; it’s like a code.”
Leisz, the former steel guitarist for Dave Alvin and k.d. lang, has worked with Frisell since the latter’s 1999 jazz-Americana album, Good Dog, Happy Man. They collaborated on 2014’s Guitar In The Space Age, an album that reimagined songs by the Beach Boys, Kinks, Byrds, Duane Eddy and Merle Travis as jazz instrumentals. But Leisz’s relationship with Lucinda goes back much further than that.
“We were playing in the same little clubs in L.A. in the mid-‘80s and moving around in the same circles,” he recalls. “I wasn’t in her band but I was friends with the guys in her band and I would occasionally play with her. I worked with her in the studio on some stuff that was never released. The quality of her songwriting impressed me even then. Everyone was writing songs, but hers and Dave Alvin’s stood out from everybody else — up to level of anyone writing songs at the time.”
Lucinda called in Leisz to work on 2011’s Blessed. Not only did he play a lot of the guitar parts, but he was the one who hung around afterwards to massage the spontaneous performances into finished tracks. When he did the same thing on the sessions for Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone, Lucinda and her husband decided it was only right that Leisz be listed as a co-producer. To help out, he brought in his old friend Frisell.
So much music was recorded during those sessions that it was decided to divide it into two albums. “We decided early on that there was something going on with the stuff that Bill and I recorded,” Leisz explains, “that needed to be separated out as its own thing.” They decided to hold 10 of the dozen tracks with Frisell for the album that would become Ghosts Of Highway 20. Only four newly written songs (“Dust,” “If There’s A Heaven” “If My Love Could Kill” and the title track, the latter two with Lucinda’s road guitarist Vince McCallum replacing Frisell) were added to those 10.
The new album opens with Lucinda once again adapting one of her father’s poems to music. Over the rumbling momentum of her longtime rhythm section, drummer Butch Norton and bassist David Sutton, Lucinda drawls her father’s vivid description of a depression so deep that “you don’t have to try to keep the tears back,” because “even your thoughts are dust.” She repeats each line in the poem multiple times, as if chanting a prayer, while Frisell and Leisz tease out the implications of the chords behind her.