BONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY - tHe PURPLE BIRD - NO QUARTER

I was nervous as hell, weirded-out and frazzled, fresh off the plane from Kentucky. It was Los Angeles, over twenty years ago, and I’d flown out west to witness a Johnny Cash recording session at the home studio of producer Rick Rubin. When I got there, Rubin was just getting out of bed (it was early afternoon); he immediately introduced me to Cash, whom I called “Mr. Cash” out of knee-jerk deference. The response from Cash was quick and firm: “Don’t call me Mr. Cash. Call me Johnny or J.R.” Rubin told him that I had written one of the songs they were working on and Cash said “Let’s work on that song now, then.” And we walked downstairs to the studio. And that’s where I met Ferg.

Ferg was at the board, in charge of the recording aspect of the session. There was something about David Ferguson that put me at ease. Cash was sweet as hell, and Ferg was gentle as well but also contained and charismatic. There was absolutely no detectable bullshit. Everybody did what he was there to do, fully and fantastically. I couldn’t know that this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, though I know a big part of me hoped that this would be the case.

I next saw Ferg a while later, maybe a couple of years. I gave him a call when I was passing through Nashville and he told me to meet him in a parking lot near Music Row. He ordered me into his car and drove me over to the house and recording studio of his friend and mentor “Cowboy” Jack Clement. We sat in Cowboy’s office and the two of them sang songs. It was heavenly.

At the time, Ferg co-owned a recording studio, with John Prine, called the Butcher Shoppe. On a subsequent trip during a Superwolf tour, we stopped in to witness some of a session Prine was doing with Mac Wiseman. It was a rough-and-tumble, exceedingly comfortable space for making music. Eventually I recorded songs there with Matt Sweeney for various Superwolfy projects, and with Dawn McCarthy and Emmett Kelly for our Everly tribute What the Brothers Sang. But Nashville was changing, growing, expanding, and eventually the building that housed the Butcher Shoppe was razed, the whole neighborhood rendered unrecognizable. Cowboy passed away, and for a while the fate of his studio was up in the air. Like all years, these were years defined as much by change as anything else.

My friendship with Ferg deepened. He performed (with Emmett Kelly and Sweeney) at my wedding. He hung out with our one-year-old daughter at my mother’s funeral. We toured together (Ferg is a fabulous musician and singer).

Then a couple of years ago I called him and said I intended to drive down and see him and he suggested that he set up a writing session or two for us. I knew about Nashville writing sessions but had never participated in one. The idea is that potential co-writers meet at a scheduled time with the idea that the result of the encounter ought to be recognizable as a song. Whatever, I was game, since he was suggesting working with Pat McLaughlin first and foremost, and Pat was someone I’d come to know and admire through Ferg. Ferg set up four different sessions over a couple of days, I drove down and we got to work. The first session was with McLaughlin and the song that came from the session is “Boise”. It felt right; it actually felt amazing. There was a little bit of agony and heaps and heaps of fun. We went over to Roger Cook’s house, then Tim O’Brien’s house. Each time, we all sat down with instruments, pencils and pads of paper and began with nothing but teeming brains and came out with something singable.

It was so much fun, and so productive, that we planned another couple days a little while later. I would drive down from Louisville and shack up in Ferg’s mother-in-law apartment above his garage. On the wall of the apartment was hung a framed chalk drawing done by Ferg when he was a second-grader. The drawing was called “The Purple Bird”.

On the second trip we went out to the house of country music great John Anderson, one of my singing heroes. John cooked us a late lunch and we sat in his magnificent living room, with the heads of big animals stuffed and mounted on the walls, and the three of us wrote “Downstream” and “The Water’s Fine” together. Together! With John Anderson!

Ronnie Bowman came over to Ferg’s house and, lord have mercy, that man has a sweet confidence about him. He started the ball rolling on “Turned to Dust” and everything that came out of his mouth and head over the next couple of hours felt like gold. Then John Prine’s son Tommy stopped by, Ronnie stuck around and together we all built the “Move It On Over”-on-steroids “Tonight With the Dogs I’m Sleeping”.

We accumulated a sweet little pile of songs and I had a few odds-and-ends lying around, enough to flesh out a full-length record (if we played our cards right). We started talking about making this into a real thing, we picked a date and Ferg started to assemble the ideal recording session: Cowboy Jack Clement’s place had been bought and restored by his nephew Bob Clement, and Ferg had been cutting there and was happier than hell about the way things were feeling and sounding. He called in an ensemble of A-list session musicians (“the best band in Nashville” he said…and it was true) including a couple of people I’d worked with (Stuart Duncan and Mike Rojas), a couple I’d met before (including Russ Pahl) and an awesome rhythm section of Fred Eltringham and Steve Mackey. Mackey was great but I’d like to note that in most previous sessions with Ferg we’d worked with Hawaiian-born and bred master bassist Dave Roe. Roe had recently passed, and his spirit was in the room with us. Pat McLaughlin showed up and played some mandolin and sang, especially on “Boise”. And behind the board was Ferg’s longtime right-hand man Sean Sullivan, the award-winning Sean Sullivan who’d just won another Grammy in the days leading up to the session.

There’s so much to say about all of this and I’m trying to distill it, but it’s hard.

Ferg had built a small building on his own property in Goodlettsville that he outfitted into a mixing-and-overdubbing studio that he calls the Butcher Shack. That’s where we went to add the singing of Brit Taylor and her husband Adam Chaffins; the horns of Roy Agee; the washboard percussion of Leroy Troy; Mark Howard’s banjo.

Tim O’Brien turned 70 during this time and had a couple of celebratory gigs at the Station Inn in Nashville. Sean Sullivan was running sound, and Ferg and I went down one night to enjoy the show. O’Brien did a set of traditional Irish tunes on which he was joined by Irish penny-whistler and Uilleann piper Eamon Dillon. On the drive home that night, Ferg said he thought “Downstream” could use a little of Dillon’s playing so we called him in. Tim O’Brien himself came to the shack to sing and play on our shared “Our Home” and on “The Water’s Fine”. Once again, it was good times, it was great times. Life and music felt right, which it doesn’t always and I will be eternally grateful for how things proceeded.

The coup-de-grace came when John Anderson drove up to the shack to add his voice to one of the songs he and Ferg and I made up together, “Downstream”. My daughter (now 5 years old) drove down with me for the session. It was the middle of a beautiful day, and there we all were in the tiny shack: Ferg, John Anderson, Poppy and me. One of my favorite recorded John Anderson performances is a duet he sang with Merle Haggard called “The Winds of Change” on Merle’s 1996 record. It’s a minor-key ballad about climate change and over-development, the compromise of our environment’s integrity at the hands of humans. “Downstream”, though in a major key, hits on the same ideas. I don’t know how to explain how it felt to witness this master of song bring, beautifully and humbly, his experience and expertise to bear on this little recording we were making. I wish I knew how to say more. The song kind of says it all. Anderson’s singing on the final verse has weight in it, and concern, and love.

I’ve made records with friends, collaborative records like The Brave and the Bold with Tortoise; the two Superwolf records with Matt Sweeney; The Wonder Show of the World with Emmett Kelly; Get on Jolly with Mick Turner. These collaborators get top billing because that’s how this business works. This record, The Purple Bird, is similarly a collaborative effort but the collaborator is the producer, David Ferguson. He’s a giant of a man, an epic musical force, a dear friend. Our work together on this record was the result of years of sharing hard times and great joys, songs and stories, of making music together and apart. There’s a lot of trust in this record on Ferg’s part and on mine, and the trust was hard- and well-earned. When I listen to the record, oftentimes I can’t help but laugh in wonder that life allowed me to participate in such a thing.

Thence you for listening.

W.O., Sept 2024