Or maybe you aren’t familiar with him at all and just need something to read at work.  Whatever the case, we caught up with Radney recently and talked about his new album, his songwriting and his fans among other things, so now we can all be a little more familiar with Radney Foster.A good part of The World We Live In was recorded with the X-Pensive Winos, Keith Richards side project, how did that come about?  Was it something that you had in mind from the outset, or something that just developed?Well it’s kind of something that developed, uh, Darrell Brown and I had worked together on the See What You Want To See album, which was the last album I did for Arista Records, that I did for Arista Austin, which sort of ran and acted like an independent.  And then when I… you know, I’ve made a couple of records since then and I felt like it was time for me to go back and try to do something with Darrell again, he’s been a great co-writer and a friend.We didn’t really think about the band ‘til we picked the songs, that was sort of our feeling with it, you know, let’s find the songs and let’s find the thing that’s going to make all that happen and really not try to repeat ourselves, but pick up on something that is going on there.  So as it got around to, you know, we’re sort of going over things and we started to think about groove and he mentioned Charlie Drayton and I said the guy’s a great player and it would be awesome to use him.  And I said, "well isn’t Niko Bolas [who engineered This World We Live In] friends with Waddy [Watchel]?” and he said “yeah” and I said then you’ve got two of the guys from the X-pensive Winos right there, that might be the guy, that might be a great way to go.  So we called Niko and said do you think you could talk to Waddy and see if he would be interested?  The funny thing was that Waddy said “yeah, I can do the first day, but I can’t do the second day.”  And, uh, I said, well that’s cool, we’ll record him that way and then the second day I was going to record bass, drums, acoustic and keys and just overdub the electric guitars when I got back to Nashville.  I thought, well, that’s cool, we can divide up the songs that way and it will start to make sense.  We got into the second song and Waddy kind of leaned over to Niko and said, “man, if it’s ok, this is really, really cool, I can make it tomorrow.” (laughs) I think he just didn’t want to get into something he didn’t know what he was getting into, you know.  Then he thought, hey, this is cool, these are really pretty good songs, that guys a really good singer and it’s a cool thing and I want to do it.  So we did and it was pretty cool.You also used some of the guys like Mike McAdam, that you have used for a long time and some of your band members in the recording as well …Right.  Basically what we did was, we cut with me on acoustic, Waddy on electric, bass and drums with Charlie Drayton and Bob Glaub and then keys was, obviously, Rami Jaffe.  And we cut that way in L.A. and we basically cut the ten songs in L.A. in two days.  And then additional guitars we spent a couple of days when we got home just having guys like Mike McAdam come in and play six-string bass or slide on something or just the color parts where it would be a second guitar to whatever Waddy was doing.  And some of them, it didn’t make any sense to have second guitar since it’s really not there, you know, and certain things, like, “you know,  two guitars on this would sort of makes sense to get a different guy.”  Eric Borash did a really, really great job, I think he was so effective.  He plays so much like Waddy and that guy is so much his hero, he was like “I don’t know what to do because Waddy’s doing what I would do.”  (laughs)  then do what you think Waddy wouldn’t do and it worked out great.You’ve always had a knack for picking female singers that don’t get a lot of recognition or that might not be well known.  Of course, Kim Richey is well known throughout Americana circles, but where do you find singers like Emily West, Sarah Buxton and Ashley Arrison?They’re hanging around Nashville like crazy, you know! I knew Emily West and so did Darrell and she has that kind of angelic voice and Darrell said I just think she would be perfect for “The Kindness of Strangers” and for “I Won’t Lie To You”  and I totally agreed.  I didn’t really know Sarah.  Darrell said, “man, she sings like Bonnie Bramlet” and I was like ok . (laughs) Let her come sing on a song and if we don’t like it we can find someone else to sing, but if she sings like Bonnie, I’m ok with that.  And about that time I walked into my managers office and I said do you know anything about this girl, Sarah Buxton? And he said “Oh my God! I’m trying to manage her!” cause she’s about to sign with, oh, I forget which label it is, but anyway she is about to sign a record deal and she needed a manager, so he played me four things she had cut and I was like “Wow! Yeah”, I called Darrell back and said “Yeah, I wanna use her, let’s use her!”In my opinion, some of your best songs you do are the great stories where you look into the psyche of the characters.  Two of my favorites, one from the new record, “The Kindness of Strangers” and then “Old Silver” from Del Rio.  Do songs like this come fairly easily to you or do they require a lot of rewriting and time?Yeah, those are the kind, to me, that come out all at once.  I don’t know why they do, it’s kind of like I, you know… to me there are a lot of songs I have certainly labored over and there are probably a lot of songs I have labored over that I probably shouldn’t have. (laughs)  Most people don’t get to hear those.  But, you know, for some reason those kinds of stories are almost like you see the picture, you have the vision and you just can’t get it written down fast enough.  And they wake you up at 2:30 in the morning.  Or they are a catharsis unto themselves.  “Old Silver” was written on the anniversary of my Grandfathers death and it just poured out of me.  The same was true of “The Kindness of Strangers.”  It was almost like it was all there and I went down into the basement after Cyndi and the kids were in bed in the middle of the night and I don’t know that it was more than about an hour and a half to write it.I actually just interviewed Rodney Crowell this morning…(laughs) You’re kidding me!I know he was one of your influences and that is what he said, the songs come to him and tell him how they are to be written and the ones that he spent a lot of time trying to get out weren’t worth the trouble afterwards.I really think you have to go through … the thing about it is, you write songs in a lot of different ways, I do.  If you get together with somebody and you are going to write, you’re writing really from a team, that’s really a group therapy kind of session in a way, or a social occasion even almost, it’s all of the above wrapped up into one.  That’s not a bad thing, it’s a cool thing.  But it’s a very different thing when you write one by yourself, it’s just, it has to come out of you and I don’t know how to explain that, but they end up being very different types of songs, for the most part.You’ve had a lot of great co-writers, is it hard to adjust to a different approaches they might have?Only if they… not… the co-writers on this record are all people I know well.  So you’ve kind of gotten to know their style and who they are and h
ow they think and how they go through the process.  You know, what they do and what they don’t.  The thing I try to do is find people who fit that.  I get tons of calls these days from artists wanting me to write with them or from big names wanting me to write with them and just because two guys that are great writers get together, doesn’t mean they are going to come up with anything.  It really is… It’s got to click and I don’t know why it does or it doesn’t with certain people, but it’s just the way it works.Speaking of great writers together, what was it like writing with Harlan Howard?It was fun, it was always fun.  In addition to being fun it was always fruitful.  He was, you know, a great curmudgeon, it the best sense of the word, and a great guy.  And he really didn’t have any pretensions about what a song was or where it was going to go, no preconceived notions other than it needed to have a blue-collar, work your way through it conversationality [sic].  You can have a lot of complications with the characters in the sons, but you better be able to speak plain English.How many songs did you guys write together?Only four or five.We’ve heard “Scary Old World” on Another Way To Go, will we ever hear the rest?Well, there’s a possibility.  There’s a couple that I’ve thought about cutting.  And hopefully a couple somebody else might think about cutting.  I almost cut one of them on this album, but it just wasn’t the right song for the band that was playing in L.A. at the time (laughs) you know?You’ve had several songs recorded by other people, is there a song in your catalog that you look at and think “That’s a great song, why hasn’t anyone latched on to it?”Only about four or five hundred of them!  (laughs)  You know, I’m as egotistical as the next guy, I think everybody oughta cut all of my songs, thank you very much.  But I realize it probably doesn’t work that way and that’s ok.  There are ones that seem so perfect to me for certain artists, not that… the other side of that is I’ve never written a song for another person, unless I was writing with that person.  Well, I take that back, I did in the early part of my career when I wrote some of the worst crap I have ever written in my life and nobody will ever see those.  But I quickly found out, and it was great, I had a great publisher at MTM who… it was real old school back in those days at that publishing company.  You had to go to the writer’s meeting on Monday to get your paycheck.  Or you had to talk to your tune plugger and say, I’m going to be out of town can you mail me my check.  So they expected that and there’d be guys who’d say Dolly Parton is cutting the day after tomorrow and three guys would go into a room and come up with something that was absolutely stunningly perfect for her, you couldn’t believe it. And I would think, I guess that’s how you’re supposed to do this.  It was a disaster.  My publisher, Meredith Stewart said, you know, Radney, the songs that you bring me that wake you up in the middle of the night that you write all by yourself, those are the ones that are the most interesting and I want you to continue to do that, but also, the stuff that you write with that guy Bill Lloyd, there is something going on when you write together.  I just want you to concentrate on those two things and you write whatever it is that you want to write and don’t think a thing about who’s cutting it, we’ll figure out where it’s home is.  And it was really solid advice, ‘cause then I started writing things that I cared about.  Which is why they got interested in me in the first place.Jace Everett included “Half Of My Mistakes” on his new album.  Another song on his album, “The Other Kind,” was co-written by Stephany Delray, who you have co-written with …Stephany is one of my long time co-writers, yeah.And Brian Nash also wrote on the song.  Jace said when they sat down to write that song he said to them “I want to write a Radney Foster song.”  How does hearing something like that make you feel?That’s a huge compliment and it’s … I’m always astounded, I have so many times that, especially when I am at home in Texas that someone will come up and say “I started a band because of the first Foster and Lloyd record” or “I started a band because of Del Rio, TX 1959” or “I moved to Nashville because of it” or whatever it is, and that’s always unbelievably complimentary, I’m very flattered by it.  But it’s funny that Jace would say that because I’ve written so much with Stephany that Stephany knows…  She would’ve gone, ok, I know where to go with this one (laughs) I know how the guy thinks, I’ve only written about 25 or 30 songs with him.At what point in your career path did you decide or did you decide that you wanted to steer more toward the songwriting as opposed to touring constantly and jumping through the label hoops?Well, I think I had a couple of things happen.  One is that I had my oldest child, at 5, moved over to France with his mom and that was very emotionally devastating.  And it’s how I wrote the song “Godspeed.”  I wrote it for him and put it on a cassette five times in a row so that he would have something to listen to at night so then he would know that his Daddy loved him.But it also changed a lot of my priorities.  It was when I began to move in an independent direction.  Tim Dubois steered me from Arista Nashville to Arista Austin, back to a more alternative and Americana side of things.  As that began to happen I felt a creative freedom but I also knew I was never going to tour 150 dates a year again, ever in my life.  Then when that album got caught up in, the See What You Want To See record got caught up in the arguments between Strauss Zelnick and Clive Davis, not because of records, but because they were arguing over Clives’ retirement age with the heads of BMG.  So that ended up closing the division where my record label was.  You know, it was like, this doesn’t make any sense, I don’t want to be caught in those types of circumstances again and I’m going to do this my way and I am going to try to do and make independent records.  And I got a call, after I got out of my contract with Arista… ‘Cause even though the division had closed, I was still signed to the label, by the way, (laughs) but I went to Tim Dubois and Tim was great.  He said, man, I’ll let you make another record and let you take your chances with whomever ends up here after me or I’ll let you go, I’ll do anything you want.  So he let me go and as I started to try to figure out how to do this independently and how to start my own record label if necessary, I got a call from Dan [Herrington] and Scott [Robinson] and they said we hear you are starting a record label in your basement?  And I said, well, yeah.  And they said, that’s good, ‘cause we’re starting one in our basement and we want to talk to you (laughs).  And pretty much we have worked on a record by record basis the last three with the guys at Dualtone ever since.  It makes sense, it works for me financially, I sell enough records that I can make a healthy living, but the publishing side of things, because of that has worked out real well for me too.  I think people cut more songs outside of, you know, from a different perspective because of that.Between this new record and the last you released And Then There Was Me (The Back Porch Sessions) as an internet exclusive.  What was behind that decision?Traditionally, “me and my guitar&rdq
uo; records don’t sell that well, but I’ve always had fans who … about half of my shows are with a band and half are me and my acoustic guitar and I just thought, I need something to sell at those shows.  People always ask me, how do I hear what I heard tonight? How do I hear something like that? And I thought, Ah, I can make an acoustic record in my basement, print them up, put them out and then realized I could sell them on the web site as well and that was my whole thought process.  Then the darn thing blew up so much that, we got all these press requests and radio stations calling the house not the management (laughs) trying to figure out how in the Hell they could get a hold of one.  I had to hire a guy to work radio and a publicist to work the dang record! (laughs) and I’m not even putting it in the stores!  But it sold a bunch on our web site and then it made me realize it’s not a bad thing to have some music on your web site, stuff that’s only available at your web site.Speaking of which, you have a track up now, “Ease Up On The Rain” which is only available on your web site, another kind of gift to the fans?Yeah, it’s a way to keep track of the fanbase.  If somebody wants that song bad enough and doesn’t mind getting an email, I don’t abuse the privilege, but if they don’t mind getting an email from me maybe 3 or 4 times a year or especially, it’s sophisticated enough at this point that it they are 100 miles from Philadelphia, and I’m playing at a 200 seat, what I like to call the “black turtleneck bars” they would really love to hear about it, so it kind of works out good for everybody.  And I’m sure after three or four months I’ll change that one out of there.You seem to be one of the few fortunate artists who have such a supportive fanbase that when somebody else cuts your songs, they are as excited about it as anyone else…It took some education to get them to do that, by golly they were pissed off a long time at first!  I had to make them understand that babies need shoes, you have to pay for college education. (laughs)We talked a second ago about the acoustic album, and “Half of My Mistakes” was on there before you cut it for the new record. Will we ever see studio versions of the new songs from Are You Ready For The Big Show?You know everybody always asks me that, uh, maybe.  The only reason I cut these new songs was because I always thought the cool thing about live records was just the energy and the best ones were awesome, really something else, but they didn’t have any new songs on them, so they were a greatest hits package in that respect and that part was kind of boring to me.  I even thought about that Frampton Comes Alive record had new songs on it that you hadn’t heard – not that I listened to that when I was in the Camaro in 1976, I’m not sure I can own up to that.  But that was my whole thinking, there’s four or five songs, you know, we are going to have thirteen or fourteen songs on this live record.  And then the guys at Dualtone were like, it’s hard as Hell to get live songs played on the radio, it was totally a commercial thing on their part, but would you be opposed to doing two bonus tracks that are studio tracks.  I said not if I take one of the songs that’s one of the new songs off the live record and do a studio version, I think that will be cool and then let me figure out something like an old chestnut. And the reason we thought about “Texas in 1880” was because it was the one song for whatever reason that we didn’t hook as well both nights.  I’ve played it live for a long time and I played it live at that show, but we just didn’t hook it.  There was stuff that was played better out of the sequence, so I decided I would like to do that one and that’s how we ended up with the two extra studio tracks.  But I have no idea, I might go back and revisit one of them.  Or two of them.  Who knows.How did you come about contributing background vocals on Willie’s new record? Fred Foster [producer of You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker] is one of the first guys that ever really believed in me and helped me in my career in Nashville, TN.  He was always unbelievably good to me and still is a dear friend and he just called me up and said “Do you want to come and do something fun and sing on a Willie Nelson record?”  Yeah, I do!  He said I want you and Buzz [Carson], because I think you all sound great together, to do it.  I was supposed to write that day with my buddy Jay Clementi, a young writer who wrote “Fools That Dream” and “Sweet and Wild” that’s on this record with me and he’s really a great young writer.  I just said hey man, do you want to hang out, just hang out in the studio, he was like “Oh my God!  I get me meet…” because he is a big Roy Orbison fan “I get to meet Fred Foster?  I gotta call my Dad!”  So he was over there and Fred said, this part really needs a trio more than it needs a duo sound on the background vocal, I’d love to have a real three part.  I said, well Jay’s a really good singer and Fred said “Well, son, walk on in there!  Try one out, I’ll tell you if it sucks.” (laughs)  So he was really thrilled, it was a really fun day.And I am a huge Cindy Walker fan.  I’ve really felt badly for her and her family that her death was so overshadowed by Buck, that you don’t see any… there was almost no mention of it in the press, it was just… I couldn’t believe it, she was, and rightly so, a Hall of Fame member, just an absolute monster inspiration of a songwriter to me.And as I say that, then I gotta turn around and mention Buck because he was such an influence on me and a great guy.And you’ve said that “Big Idea” was kind of your Buck Owens inspired song…Yeah, pretty much, I think writing the song, Darrell and I were thinking Buck Owens and Harlan Howard, just trying to write something that’s that much fun, where wordplay is as important as anything else.  And at the same time, when we got in there [in L.A.], I was like these guys ain’t going to … (laughs) so it was more NRBQ.  So it was kind of Buck Owens/Al Anderson thing.Are you producing anything right now?I just finished, and I mean this week I just finished the Randy Rogers Band’s new record which is going to come out on Mercury Records instead of as an indie.  Which I am really happy for them, I think that’s a great situation where the band got big enough on their own where they really do need a partner rather than someone to tell them what to do.  Luke Lewis told me, he said, you guys made a perfectly great record without any help from us, so would you please just go do it again?  Which I proceeded to drop the phone, bang on it a couple times and go “do what?”  (laughs) Can you run that by me one more time?  He said, no, I’m serious, we’ll stay out of your way and they did.  And I’m really proud of the thing and I think the guys really stepped to the bat, Randy as a writer.  It was a lot of fun to make.And I’ve got a couple of things that I’m doing.  I don’t know that any of them are ready to be talked about yet.What a tease.  (laughs)  Thanks for talking to us Radney.Thanks, I’m the luckiest guy on the planet.  There is still a part of me that gets astounded that anybody besides my family likes this stuff.