Tim Easton: Exposition Interview & Gallery

Keeping It Simple

I I drove to Okemah in early December to see folk singer and song­writer Tim Easton. Easton was on the first leg of a multi-city record­ing tour for his new album Exposition. After we had lunch at the Hen House Café I took some pic­tures of him work­ing in his makeshift stu­dio at the Okfuskee County History Center, and then he very com­pe­tently art-directed an impromptu photo shoot that used the remain­ing frames on my roll of Tri-X.

We then sat down for a short inter­view, fol­low­ing which Easton sat for a for­mal por­trait in the style of my OKIE-X project. The weather was threat­en­ing to turn bad, so I dis­man­tled my photo stu­dio while he con­tin­ued track­ing songs. Easton helped me schlep the gear to the car and we said our good­byes, each wish­ing the other safe travels.

The fol­low­ing is the inter­view transcript.

Mercury Photo BureauTim — thumb­nail bio? How’d you get to be in this thank­less, remu­ner­a­tively skint vocation?

Tim EastonUm I don’t know what you’re talk­ing about; it’s just a prize of wealth and riches, at least emo­tion­ally […]. Well, I was born in upstate New York, and my dad worked for Goodyear, which is why I kinda grew up in Akron, Ohio. And then my broth­ers played gui­tar — I’m the youngest of four broth­ers and two sis­ters, two very impor­tant sis­ters — and those broth­ers taught me about Doc Watson and old blues music, and that kind of led me to Woody Guthrie […]. And then I ended up — because of Jimmy LaFave — […] com­ing to Woodyfest for the first time. […] I’d popped through Okemah before, of course, just to check it out, on my many cross-coun­try trips. And then I got to play Woodyfest. And then I got wel­comed into the fam­ily, and I decided, in order to ensure myself per­ma­nent sta­tus in this fam­ily I would come here and make a record, right here in Okemah — right here in the Okfuskee [County History Center].

MPBWhich brings me to my sec­ond ques­tion, why the heck are you record­ing an album here? Although I think you’ve already answered it.

Tim[Laughs] I did, I basi­cally — um, it’s a prac­ti­cal rea­son, right? I was like, I want to do another ‘field record­ing’ album! — my last album was done direct-to-lac­quer in Bristol, Virginia, and then I wanted to take to the road and record another album in his­tor­i­cal loca­tions. And I’m start­ing in Okemah pri­mar­ily because Woody Guthrie is from here, but there’s obvi­ously some­thing else good in the water here, ’cause let’s not for­get Mr. John Fullbright is from here, and a lot of great peo­ple I’ve met, over the years. So, I basi­cally, I came here to record because I knew I’d be able to find a big space and just use the town vibes to record some of these orig­i­nal songs. And next I’m going to go down to San Antonio, Texas and record where Robert Johnson worked, at the Gunter [Hotel], [Sidenote: The 1909 edi­fice was designed by St. Louis archi­tect John Mauran. Robert Johnson recorded ver­sions of twenty-two of his twenty-nine song cat­a­logue in Room 414 from 23 November to 27 November 1936.] and then I’m gonna mosey over to Clarksdale, Mississippi [Sidenote: Legend has it that Robert Johnson met the Devil at the inter­sec­tion of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in Clarksdale. The Devil re-tuned Johnson’s gui­tar in exchange for his soul. Other ver­sions of the myth posit alter­na­tive loca­tions for the leg­endary meet­ing place. Some blues fans inter­pret the lyrics of “Cross Road Blues” to be an account of that meet­ing. Additionally, Bessie Smith died almost a year later in the nearby Riverside Hotel fol­low­ing an auto­mo­bile acci­dent on Highway 61. The Mississippi Blues Trail has placed numer­ous mark­ers for his­toric blues sites around the city. The Delta Blues Museum, the Sunflower River Blues Festival, and Juke Joint Festivals all call Clarksdale their home.] and work there a lit­tle bit too. So this is a field record­ing project.

MPBOkay, so do you have a name for the album yet?

TimI do; I’m call­ing the album Exposition. It’s maybe not wise to name an album, and/​or do the pho­to­shoots before the album is done because it starts to take on a life of its own. But also, I also — I’ve never done it like this before, where I started a [PledgeMusic] cam­paign to help raise the money just to help pay for the trav­el­ing, and then for the even­tual mix­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing of [the album] to vinyl. But I decided to to give it a name, and expo­si­tion is a word, you know you see it a lot in Europe [about] art exhibits, you know, an expo­si­tion of art. And I got it from a Walt Whitman poem, [Sidenote: Whitman, Walt, “Song of the Exposition” in Leaves of Grass (The Deathbed Edition), (New York, Book of the Month Club by arrange­ment with Simon and Schuster, 1992), 148 – 155.] and I, um — just the word itself jumped out, and I thought it’d be a good title for an album. And it means a lot of dif­fer­ent things, but right now it’s just about show­ing what it’s like to be a trou­ba­dour record­ing on the road.

MPBYou keep antic­i­pat­ing my ques­tions. I was gonna ask about the cre­ative fundrais­ing you’ve done for this; you showed me some [dis­pos­able] cam­eras, ear­lier?

TimYeah, part of the thing I do at Pledgemusic​.com is you give incen­tives away to get peo­ple to come with you on this jour­ney […]. [Sidenote: Since this arti­cle orig­i­nally posted the crowd­fund­ing plat­form PledgeMusic has under­gone a very pub­lic implo­sion. Easton issued a state­ment in late May; in it he said If any­body you know wants this album, all they have to do is go to TIMEASTON​.COM and write me on the CONTACT page and I can get them vinyl or CD. The dig­i­tal ver­sion is avail­able at my Bandcamp Page. You can lis­ten, stream, or buy it here https://​timeas​t​on1​.band​camp​.com/​a​l​b​u​m​/​e​x​p​o​s​i​t​ion. Thanks for spread­ing the word.] This is the first time I’ve invited peo­ple to come along while I do it. The [dis­pos­able] cam­eras are just a thing I offer, you know — you donate a cer­tain mon­e­tary thing, you know, and you get a cam­era that I took pic­tures on […]. So, who knows what you’re gonna get? I do know that they are ana­logue, so you as a pho­tog­ra­pher know that they’re the cheap­est ver­sion of that, but, in fact, if you get the right light, and you get the right thing — an image, a moment — it’s nice to know that there are sur­prises, what­ever they’re gonna be.

MPBLike open­ing a present.

TimYeah, yeah, this room we’re sit­tin’ in right now has got a big reverb in it, right; maybe you can hear that on the tape? And — and that’s part of sound; now, light is a whole other gig there, and this room’s got some inter­est­ing light in it. I gotta say, it’s got one big win­dow at the end; it’s fac­ing a grand piano. And I’m kinda using the light and the sound of this room to make my record.

[Brief digres­sion on Northern European painters’ use of north-fac­ing win­dows and sky­lights omitted]

MPBTell me a lit­tle about that song you were just track­ing and work­ing on dif­fer­ent ver­sions of.

TimOh, I got a song that’s called “Broken Brain,” and it’s flat-out — you know, Cory Branan, the great song­writer from Memphis, Tennessee, he and I were on the road once, and he said that he hated when song­writ­ers rhyme the word brain, with any­thing; any rhyme with brain was annoy­ing to him. So I decided to write an entire song where the word brain was at the end of every cho­rus, in a blues for­ma­tion. […] It’s easy to rhyme brain, you know, all the words are easy to find. And I wrote a tune; it starts off I mar­ried a redhead/​And she’s a fighter/​Smokes more weed than you or Todd Snider. I wanted to have […] a com­edy song on this record of some­what seri­ous tunes.

MPBAny other songs you want to talk about?

TimWell, there’s one called “Saint Augustine” that I started down in Florida, and I fin­ished it in Spain a cou­ple of weeks ago. There’s one called “New Year’s Day” that I wrote a year ago on New Year’s Day. There are a cou­ple tunes that are a lit­tle bit older […].

I can’t stop writ­ing songs. I keep work­ing on tunes, and I gath­ered a bunch of songs that would work in a “folk” set­ting, a folk album stripped-down set­ting, which is what this album is gonna be.

MPBSo, you’re record­ing the entire album by your­self. You’re over­dub­bing instru­ments and vocals as needed?.

TimI’m keep­ing it to a min­i­mum; it’s mostly me and the gui­tar. But every once in a while I’ll throw in a man­dolin or another gui­tar or another voice. But, very stripped down. There’s a rea­son for that. I want to keep it sim­ple when it comes to mix­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing this album; I’m not gonna go down the big pro­duc­tion hole that I’ve gone before. That’s fine; that’ll be for [a] future album, but for this one, we’re keepin’ it simple.

So all those folks that are out there read­ing that have gone to TimEaston​.com, or check out what I’m doin’, this one is gonna be another in a series of stripped-down folk albums.

MPBExcellent. Let’s redeem a song. Name a song that doesn’t get much respect, and con­vince me that I should really love that song.

TimWell, you asked me this at lunch, and my mind imme­di­ately went to all these hits that are on the radio that peo­ple kinda like to make fun of or what­ever, but it turns out that they’re all great songs. So just now, it occurred to me that there’s a tune that Paul M^cCartney wrote that nobody really knows, and peo­ple that do know it make fun of it [Sidenote: M^cCartney is on record as being one of those peo­ple.] because basi­cally, it’s just this lit­tle coun­try-blues stoner thing that he prob­a­bly wrote while quite baked, walkin’ around in Scotland. And it’s called “Bip Bop,” and it’s on his first album or some­thing like that. [Sidenote: It’s actu­ally on M^cCartney’s first album with Wings, Wild Life. In October M^cCartney announced the album would be reis­sued in a deluxe edi­tion.] It’s just one of those songs you can tell M^cCartney wrote kinda walkin’ around the house, and didn’t write to0 many lyrics to it and just kinda went with the vibe. It’s like:

Tim Easton Plays “Bip Bop.” Words and music by Paul M^cCartney, pub­lished by MPL Communications.And — I think it just — I love it because he wasn’t afraid to just record the crazy thoughts in his mind and wasn’t going to sit there and worry about peo­ple jud­gin’ him for it. This guy had already […] writ­ten some clas­sics; you know, Paul is just one of those Beatles that gets poked fun at a lot by us Beatle-freaks and Rolling Stones-freaks, for good rea­son; he’s kind of super self-conscious.

But he’s also not afraid to expose him­self and let you see that he’s workin’ on some­thing. Or just let­tin’ a sound be a thing, you know. And Exposition is the name of this record, and I’m kinda just — kinda just look­ing at things in a dif­fer­ent light of goin’ with a vibe and goin’ with a feel instead of wor­ryin’ about cre­at­ing this mas­ter­piece.

That’s just what holds peo­ple back, you know, I’m wor­ried about what the world [is] gonna think of me, you know, he was just tryin’ to have fun. His band was bro­ken up; his best friend was mad at him; he was just in a mess, and he had yet to come along. He was still gonna cre­ate lots more great tunes […].

MPBAnything else you wanna tell the folks out there?

TimI just want to thank all Oklahomans for wel­com­ing me into the state and kinda giv­ing me some hon­orary Okie sta­tus. It’s just kinda good to be around […] peo­ple who are doin’ art for art’s sake. A lot of inde­pen­dent artists workin’ hard.

MPBTim Easton, thank you so much.

TimThank you, Chris.

Gallery: Exposition Recording Sessions

Before Before I inter­viewed Easton [Sidenote: After this arti­cle pub­lished Easton licensed sev­eral of the images from the shoot for the Exposition LP and CD, which he com­mis­sioned me to design. I also designed a pro­mo­tional poster. You can see the final designs here.] I took some pic­tures of him track­ing songs for the album. Afterward he art-directed an impromptu photo shoot tak­ing advan­tage of the unusual sur­round­ings. Who know the Okfuskee Historical Society had a bas­ket­ball court upstairs?

Technical