Up from earth’s center through the seventh gate I
rose and on the throne of Saturn sat And many hurts
unraveled by the road. But not the knot of human death or
fate.
- from The Rubyiat of Omar Khayyam
David Olney likens his new album to a tapestry. “Fabric
has the warp and the weft, the horizontal and vertical.
To me, the songs are like the horizontal threads, and the
characters in the songs the vertical. The two are
completely interdependent–if you didn’t have
the interweaving, you’d have have no tapestry, no
image, nothing. You’d have a bunch of string.”
Over the course of his defiantly independent– and
increasingly triumphant –career Olney has created
quite an amazing tapestry. On recent albums–from the
French Prostitute musing upon the likely impending deaths
of the young soldiers who are her customers, to Robert
Ford and Jesse James’ final conversation, to the
inner monologue of Barrabas, set free as Jesus dies–to
OMAR’S BLUES, his latest, most ambitious and finest
recording, David Olney has emerged as one of the
preeminent songwriters in America.
Ferociously intelligent and fearsomely unconventional,
Olney came to Nashville from the flinty coasts of Rhode
Island. “When I got to Nashville, I tried to play
the game. I tried co-writing, tried to write to a
formula, tried to write hit songs,” he shrugs.
“I found out that I just couldn’t do it.”
What he found he could do, however, was to get inside the
head of characters–or things–and report what he
saw.
In
“Titanic,” (written over a decade before
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett defied North Atlantic
water temperatures), Olney tells the story of the sinking
of the great liner—from the point of view of the
iceberg. Townes Van Zandt–one of the towering,
troubled figures of 20th Century songwriting–specified
his favorite musicians as “Bob Dylan, Mozart,
Lightnin’ Hopkins and David Olney.”
Olney is unafraid to salt his narratives with historical
figures, with lines overheard and lives assumed. In OMAR’S
BLUES, Olney introduces us to a fantastical orbit of
outcasts, misfits and shadowy characters whose lives may
not be all they dreamed of, but who take a seedy comfort
in what they do have. Some of the characters are
literally historical, some biblical, some archtypal–the
existential wanderer of “Lazlo” who comes to
life only during the course of the song or in dreams,
Inspector LeGarde and criminal Jean Paul Levesque whose
grudging acquaintanceship and mutual suspicion form an
uneasy pas de deux. “Those two are sort of like
characters from ‘Casablanca’ who just wandered
into my mind one day,” laughs Olney. “They
wouldn’t leave until I wrote a song about them.”
There’s Omar himself, an avuncular, slightly
down-at-the heels everyman, who can’t ever quite
shake a silver edge of optimism from his enveloping
melancholic wistfulness. There’s Fast Eddie the pool
shark, who, waxing eloquent about billiards as a metaphor
for life (“I’m rolling like a shot, fast and
hard and clean, ‘til I crash with all my strength
into my destiny”), is cut short by his partner, who
advises him to just shoot pool, “and save the talk
for later.” King David, as a boy relishing his
defeat of Goliath; to the man, priapic with lust for
Bathsheba, arranging for the death of her husband. “I
am the ruler of this kingdom,” King David cries,
Olney’s voice desperate with menace, “But I am
a slave to my heart.”
“The songs on OMAR’S BLUES form three
loose song cycles,” says Olney, “I came up with
the idea while I was reading ‘The Rubyiat of Omar
Khayyam,’ the idea of this character, Omar, at the
center of each cycle. So there’s ‘Omar In Love,’
‘Reverend Omar’ and ‘Omar in Hollywood’.”
“All I took from the Rubyiat is the idea of a song
cycle, two words (‘summer dresses’) and the
name of Omar himself,” Olney says. “The real
Omar Khayyam was a Persian mathematician of the tenth and
eleventh centuries. His last name means, literally,
‘tent maker,’ his father’s trade. No one
knows for sure just how many of the quatrains in the
Rubyiat were actually written by Khayyam. Some say all
600 of them, others just a fraction of that. But I’ll
tell you this,” Olney says, “Whoever wrote
them, they’ve stood the test of time.”
The moving finger writes, and having writ Moves on: nor
all thy piety nor wit Shall have it back to cancel one
half a line Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
–from The Rubyiat
More and more, it is looking like Olney’s work will
stand the test of time as well. Fellow songwriters shake
their heads in astonishment before his songs, coveted
festival slots dot his calendar and even the august NEW
YORK TIMES recently featured him in a profile.
“You know that if a line is in there in one of his
songs, it’s in there for a reason,” says Kevin
Welch, one of the founders of Dead Reckoning, Olney’s
new label. Emmylou Harris– no slouch at recognizing
a good song when she hears one– has covered numerous
Olney songs, including a harrowing reworking of “Deeper
Well” on WRECKING BALL, her highly lauded
collaboration with Daniel Lanois.
After a long stint with Rounder (for whom he reserves
nothing but praise - “they never once told me how to
make a record,” he says), he felt it was time for a
change and signed to Nashville maverick label Dead
Reckoning.
Formed as a musician’s collaborative, Dead Reckoning
has breathed new life into the sometimes staid world of
Nashville.
The matchup with Dead Reckoning seems like a natural for
Olney, who feels that now, as a 50-year-old, he is
finally hitting his stride as a recording artist. “I’ve
always found making records to be very hectic, very
unnerving,” he says. “I tend to doubt myself.
But this time, I knew what I wanted the record to sound
like, I knew what songs I wanted to put on it, and in
what order. It just came together effortlessly. And if I
have an issue I need to discuss with the label, I can
just meet them for a cup of coffee right in town, and we
all talk the same language, we’re all musicians.”
“Normally when I’m done making a record I can’t
stand to listen to it for months, years even. But I was
recently on a road trip and I had a rough cd of OMAR’S
BLUES with me. I got so excited thinking about
listening to it that I stopped and bought a Disc-man, one
of those portable cd players that you plug into the
cigarette lighter to draw juice. I got back on the
highway; the Disc-man wouldn’t play. Stopped at the
next town and bought another. Same thing. I ended up
having to buy three of the things in order to listen to
the record.
“But damn,” he laughs. “It was worth it.”
(bio ©2000, Charlie Hunter)
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