The day after publication of my less-than-glowing review of Willie Nelson's Countryman disc – a high concept Willie-goes-reggae scheme from 2005 – the album's proud producer Don Was decided to ring me up for good old fashioned dressing down. The call came as a complete surprise since I'd never had any prior contact with Was and it's not typically the producer of an album who takes the initiative to hunt down a writer and angrily voice a complaint. That's typically handled by a publicist, someone from the artist's label, management or immediate family – right Mrs. Millan? Producers are usually too busy working on their next project to concern themselves with personally sorting out a critic who may have a conflicting opinion about a previous release. Not Was, oh no.
After he finished shouting up a storm in a lengthy rant about how music critics know nothing about the difficult task of making albums, he growled about hoping to run into me some day. When I responded without hesitation that I'd very much look forward to a meeting, he grunted "Huh?" apparently aback by my interest in a face-to-face confrontation. "You know that Chris Gaines album you produced with Garth Brooks in a wig? I've always wanted to find out what the fuck you guys were thinking." Click. Dial tone.
It appears that I'm not the only one to be honoured with a cold call from Mr. Was. Also receiving a similar call from Was out of the blue was Pieta Brown, the Iowa-based singer/songwriter sidekick of guitar slinger supreme Bo Ramsey, only I'm guessing there was a lot less cursing involved in hers.
So the story goes, our man Was just happened to be listening to radio station KCRW in Los Angeles when he heard an amazing voice that stopped him dead in his tracks. He phoned into the station to find out the name of the singer, then traced her to Iowa and called her up at home to proposed a recording session. That might sound like some slick record label PR crap to hype the resulting Shimmer (Red House) CD but based on my own Was experience, I'd say the entire scenario is entirely plausible.
There have been some questionable choices made by Was in the studio over the years, not confined to the aforementioned Willie Nelson and Garth Brooks head scratchers, but he gets it right with Shimmer, wisely paring down the instrumentation to just Ramsey on guitar with himself on bass – no drums – to keep the focus on Brown's bluesy crooning, giving her all the room she needs to vocally stretch out and work her seductive charms. The other sharp move here was to cut Brown's vocals dry, almost completely free of reverb on the majority of tracks, which gives her singing a wonderfully intimate pillow-talk quality that's immediate striking since most recorded voices you hear today are saturated in reverb and heavily filtered. Shimmer's only shortcoming is that it contains only seven songs but don't worry, you'll definitely be hearing more from Brown.
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