On the Record

"Alabama Song"

This series, “On the Record,” will be a weekly Substack exclusive in which I’ll go through my recorded catalog song by song starting with my first album, Alabama Song, which was released on MCA Records in 1998. Photos will be attached if available and tolerable.

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Las Vegas, New Mexico, 1996.

I was twenty-three and itching to get my music career started, so when a friend played the owner of American Harvest Records a homemade demo tape I’d made and he decided he wanted to try to make an album with me, I signed my first contract. The label was based in Las Vegas, NM — a dusty, tiny town in the Sangre de Cristo mountains that’s worthy of a John Ford film — so Butch and I moved out west from Nashville to live for a while thinking it would help the process of getting a first album together go faster, and he’d also been offered a sales job with the label. We often chased after geographical cures for whatever the current ailment was — and the ailment was often Butch’s ennui.

We moved in January of that year. I wasn’t used to such a brown, cold, hard landscape. Though I love that part of the country and think it’s magical and beautiful, my body has always felt better east of the Mississippi. I also felt quite isolated — I’d lived in Nashville for 2 1/2 years by that time and had established a life there. I missed my friends and my community. So it’s not hard to figure out I was a bit homesick — not necessarily for Alabama, but simply for a feeling of home. At that point in my life my parents hadn’t even been gone for ten years — it was all still fresh — and I was so young, but you couldn’t have told me that. I thought I was ready for the world and anything it could throw at me.

I remember writing the first three verses at the kitchen table in our stucco house that was down a dirt road (sounds like heaven now) and playing it for Butch not too long afterwards. The chord progression borrowed heavily from “Girl from the North Country,” and “The Weight,” but I didn’t really know it nor did I know I needed to care. Butch suggested we write a bridge so we did — one that was in a key a whole step lower than the rest of the song and with some chords that have confounded many a bass player! The form is a little odd — instead of verse/verse/bridge/verse it’s verse/verse/verse/bridge/verse — a lot of folks got thrown by that at first and now that I think about it, I don’t know why we didn’t cut one of the verses so we’d get to the bridge sooner. Oh, well — I still think it’s charming in its irregularity, and luckily others who heard it thought so too. “Alabama Song,” with it’s tender melody, loping/easy tempo, and visual imagery became what I and most everyone else considered one of my best songs.

The deal with American Harvest didn’t end up working out. In May of that same year, my friend, the brilliant singer-songwriter Walter Hyatt died on ValuJet flight 592 — the one that crashed into the Florida Everglades. Butch and I went back to Nashville for the service and I decided I couldn’t go back to live in New Mexico — I wanted to be where things were happening, where there was more of an opportunity for a social life and a real musical community, where there was greenery and the humidity to support it, where the best musicians and songwriters in the world were, and I was heartbroken at the loss of my friend. So against his wishes, we moved back. It was such a relief.

We stayed with Sissy at her house in Leiper’s Fork (just south of Nashville) for a few weeks while we found the apartment at Glen Manor. Soon after we got moved in, I was asked to perform at Walter’s memorial concert at The Ryman Auditorium. I was honored to be asked — I was completely unknown at the time — and I sang one of my favorite songs of his, “Tell Me Baby,” that evening, which led me to the attention of booking agent Bobby Cudd, who had been in the audience and shortly after our meeting that night, starting introducing me to music industry folks. I’ll never forget coming home from signing up with a temp agency to keep a roof over our heads a few days after the concert to a message from the president of Capitol Records — “Hey Allison, this is Scott Hendricks at Capitol Records. I hear you’re a great singer. Call me at…..” It was mind-blowing. Anyway, more on “Tell Me Baby,” and what happened after that tribute concert when I get to that song, which I recorded for my first album as well.

For whatever reason, we didn’t cut “Alabama Song,” on that demo session we did for Tony Brown and MCA Records. But we did later, as a publishing demo (I’d just signed my first publishing deal as a songwriter) during one of my first sessions for Windswept Pacific. A lot of those demo sessions we did for Windswept got upgraded to master scale (when you cut demos that aren’t going to be commercially released you pay all the musicians one fee, but for a major label studio album that will be released, you pay another, higher fee), and we used them on my first record. We recorded it at The Loveshack, a tiny studio just a few doors down from the Monterey Peninsula office, the agency where Bobby Cudd represented a stellar stable of artists and where I was by that time, signed as a touring artist.

The track felt really good really quickly, as we had a stellar lineup of musicians with Kenny Greenberg again at the helm. Here’s who did what:

Kenny Greenberg — acoustic and electric guitars

Rick Plant — electric guitar (and he played THAT SOLO, y’all)

Dan Dugmore — Pedal Steel

Michael Rhodes — bass

Chad Cromwell — drums (not 100% sure about that — it might’ve been Harry Stinson)

Tim Lauer — organ

Background vocals — me, Ashley Cleveland, Harry Stinson

I still love to sing this song. And I love that y’all love it so much. It was the third single from this album from the same name, and didn’t even chart, yet it was a favorite for most everyone and still is. The very talented Morgan Lawley directed the video, shot over two nights in Hollywood. Those pants I’m wearing were made for me by Manuel (he would later remake Gram Parsons’ Nudie suit with the pot leaves and pills on it for the “Send Down An Angel” video) and the leopard print dress belonged to the stylist. That video remains one of my favorite pieces of work — somehow it’s classic. As is the song and the recording. “Alabama Song,” is still one of my favorite songs to sing live. When I sing it now I always remember who I was when I wrote it — in some ways I’m the same and in some ways I’m not at all the same. What I can say hasn’t changed with 100% surety is my love of melody and a deep groove. And now we even do the song in the Sissy show, which is the best way it’s ever been performed, in my opinion.

I hope y’all are enjoying reading these installments as much as I’m enjoying writing them. It’s a good exercise for me — I clearly don’t have this stuff written down anywhere and it’s high time I remedied that, at least for posterity — maybe someone will want to know it all someday or maybe John Henry will. In any case, thank you for reading. More to come next week.

AM