Up until now, Claire Holley has been known as a soft, folksy singer. But with the release of her latest project, Dandelion, she’s rocking a little harder and letting more of her Mississippi roots show through. “I do think its rootsier than any of my other records,” the singer said recently from her Greensboro home. “I was listening to more folks like Robert Johnson, and listening to some of those Oxford American samplers. There are just some treasures on those albums. I just found that I was kinda going back to my roots a little bit.”
Simplicity is the key in songwriting, says Holley, whose husband is a writer. “Some of those songs on the Oxford American samplers, they’ll just say the refrain over and over as opposed to six-minute stories,” she explained.
But Holley’s songs are character driven, to the point that they’ve been described as character sketches. The singer admits she’d given some thought to expanding those character sketches into a book. “But at this point, I’m not that crazy or ambitious to try to start with fiction,” she laughed. “I sometimes think “oh, wouldn’t it be nice to do that,’ but knowing a writer very closely, I think it’s much easier said than done.”
Some of her fans would disagree. For her first release, Night Air, the singer used aural snapshots to create character sketches that fans could easily recognize and identify with. Her 2001 self-titled release was more of the same — vignettes from her childhood mixed with road tales and a song called “Sea Boy,” a wistful ode to a lad so enamored with music he’d “trade his shoes for a simple tune if that’s what he had to do.” She also found time to record a gospel album, Sanctuary in 1999.
But for Dandelion, Holley has gone in a different direction. You can trace elements from some of her peers in the music — shadings of Lucinda Williams, some Julie Miller and some Stacey Earle. The record’s producer, Steve Graham, says he’s heard people list Sheryl Crow as well.
The album shows Holley’s more assertive rock side. Graham explained, “With Claire being able to relax, turn the reins loose a little bit, and let other people come in and pull some weight, it allowed her to work in a different rhythm. Once everybody starts finding their way around inside a song, it’s gonna inspire her to be a little different because she has more room to play. That might be why you’re hearing the Southern drawl and the reserve, and the slink of it is a little more predominant. She had all that and I wanted to see more of it,” he added.
Holley starts off hard from the beginning. The opening track, “6 Miles To McKenney” is a hard rockin’ road trip. “I knew when we started doing things that had this particular kind of sound we could either be loved or hated by the people that would hear this record and know Claire Holley,” he said. “So we took a chance and she was bold enough to put it up as track one.”
Holley and her band tried to record live as much as possible for the project, too. Graham calls it the organic approach — all the musicians in one room playing together and working off one another. The producer, who also played bass on the record, said he used “musician interpreters” for the sessions — people he knew he could put in a room together and they would interpret things properly with their instruments.
Dandelion was Holley’s first collaborative effort as well. “I just really don’t know that if I did every album by myself it would be as good as it could be,” Holley admitted. “Because what others bring to it is where the magic comes in. I have had a really good experience with the collaborative thing. This record especially was fun to make precisely because we just talked through it as a band. I think we all had a pretty positive experience with it,” she opined. Graham says he values Holley as a person and a musician because of the honesty in her work and “just the integrity and warmth she has, and the conviction. And the fact that she can convey a story.”
To Holley, the story is the thing — and not losing your innocence as a songwriter by staying true to yourself as far as your motive for writing the story in the first place. “What I mean by that is maybe you’re not writing a song just for the pure sake of enjoyment. Maybe you’re putting pressure on yourself like “will the label like this, or will I sell a lot of CDs, or how will I do on the radio.'” Holley says the way she combats this is by staying in touch with the people she loves and not getting so caught up in the music that she forgets her motives. “The way I stay grounded is continuing to talk to my husband about these things, and just praying that God’ll help me.”
Claire Holley plays a CD Release Show Friday, July 25, at the Evening Muse. Call the club at 704-376-3737 for more details.
This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2003.
