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It sort of intuitively, I don't want to say marked the progress of the band, but it really seemed as if once we named the band it really seemed as if the music fit the name, as opposed to the name fitting the band. -Andy Goessling |
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Photo by: C. Taylor Crothers
In 2007, the band went back into the studio to record its first album of new originals in three years. Apparently, the record fell short of the band's expectations and was placed on the backburner. Later in 2007, Grubb, Sheaffer and Harmon all added new additions to their families. Instinctively and protectively, everyone clams up when questioned about how family has affected songwriting and recording. But, a soft-spoken Sheaffer shyly admits, "Songwriting wise, inevitably what you're living ends up in what you say and what you write about. Overall, maybe like a peaceful quality to the music?"
 Tim Carbone - RRE :: 06.05.08 by Ian Rawn |
Amen Corner's opener, "Been Down That Road," sees the narrator looking at life with new priorities. The up-beat and jovial foot-stomper "Bringing My Baby Back Home" takes on literal meaning giving the trio of 2007 births, while the eloquent "Little Bit O' Me" finds a new parent hoping aloud that his child will carry a little bit of him with him/her as he/she grows and makes his/her way through this world.
When they decided to get back to the recording in 2008, a new focus and tact was found. The band holed up at Lone Croft, Sheaffer's 300-year-old farmhouse in rural New Jersey, rather than the sterile confines of a traditional studio. Sheaffer had been gathering equipment and set up a home studio right where the band had begun writing songs in the first place.
"We were able to record everything as we rehearsed it and worked it out, and take it home that night, listen back to it and as we got deeper into songs and experimented with different arrangements, we chopped things up, extended things," Goessling explains. "We could go back and listen to the first, second or third take and say, 'You know, that's much better.' We'd work something to its utmost extreme, come back to the beginning and it was already on tape."
 John Skehan - RRE :: 06.05.08 by Ian Rawn |
The entire process of writing and recording twelve new tracks, with two leftovers from the previous recording session, lasted less than a month, with no clock watching or financial worries about how much was being spent and what was getting accomplished. It was, as described by everyone, a dream come true to write and record Amen Corner. Sheaffer and Skehan, in particular, get quite excited when discussing the "spontaneous creativity" that went into this session.
"It's all fresh material, and I personally like that about the process that we had," Sheaffer offers. "It's a coherent piece that comes from the same time, the same mood, the same place. I like that about it, rather than just a collection of songs that we happened to have around. They were all written together, recorded together, and I think it makes the album hang together real well because of that."
"Some of them were written as we went along," adds Skehan. "For example, 'Hard Livin' started one day as a guitar riff. We all started writing on it [and] Todd began playing early in the morning; things were fresh. We toyed with it for a little while, came back to it another day, added another part, and gradually over time it went from a jam to a song."
"One of the other nice things about having the setup we had going was waking up in the morning with a song in your head and bringing it immediately to the band, and recording it," continues Sheaffer. "That kind of immediacy is hard to come by. Sometimes you have a song around for ten years before you actually get a chance to record it, rather than, there's a song, 'Set up, let's record it.' The song 'Bringin' My Baby Back Home' is exactly like that."
 Railroad Earth by C. Taylor Crothers |
There were other influences beyond the new family members that inspired the new songs. A television documentary on a notorious outlaw group in Arizona called "The Yuma Six" spurred Sheaffer's writing of the cowboy lament "You Never Know." His lovely acoustic strums mix with Carbone's lighthearted fiddle accents, while Skehan's warm mandolin meanders somewhere between the two.
Carbone found inspiration a little bit more locally for "Crossing The Gap."
"I'm from the Delaware Water Gap area and every time I'd come home from New Jersey from a gig, it'd be very, very late and I'd see the morning star a lot of times, and I actually started talking to it. 'Oh yea, it's my old friend up there.' And then, 'Oh weight a minute, that's actually a cool little line. I'm going to write that down.' So, that song comes from the experience of driving home through a big canyon with a huge river alongside of you."
Railroad Earth thrives in the live setting, blossoming in front of a bunch of like-minded music fans that appreciate originality, improvisation and roots music. Similarly, they've built a name for themselves on the summer festival circuit. But, according to Sheaffer, with new priorities at hand, the band is looking forward to preparing for specific tours. The bands upcoming summer engagements will see them crisscross the country from July through mid-August, once again hitting the festival circuit. They'll stop at many usual spots, such as the All Good Festival and Floyd Fest. Sheaffer's also excited about being part of the lineup at Bamajam this year, where RRE will play alongside such country and rock greats as Hank Williams Jr. and Gov't Mule.
But perhaps the band's enthusiasm is best exemplified by Goessling, who rouses a huge laugh from the rest of the band when he states, "We're doing the big, tremendous, big boy on the block Rothbury Music Festival this year. I mean c'mon [in addition to Rothbury] we're going to be playing with Randy Travis, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Del McCoury Band, and [then at Rothbury] we're playing with Snoop Dogg!!!!"
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