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Listen to Randall Bramblett's Rich Somday on Rhapsody!
By Scott Pilgrim
Randall Bramblett |
There are bean fields in Randall Bramblett's songs, miles of emerald-green shoots covering acres of red-clay earth. There are old sedans, primer gray, humming down two-lane rural roads on bald tires well past midnight, on their way to God knows where. There are riverbanks, slick with mud, hedgerows thick with wind-blown trash, and that smell, that steamy stink peculiar to Southern summer nights.
These images may not be found in Bramblett's lyrics, but if you listen to his albums long enough, those pictures will form in your mind. They haunt his songs like the ghosts of Confederate war dead, providing the landscape through which his characters travel on their journeys to nowhere special.
"Most of it is kind of abstract and indirect... throwing up some visuals with some conversation mixed in," Bramblett said. "Somehow I'm just looking for that mysterious combination of things."
"That mysterious combination of things," neatly describes Bramblett's nearly 40-year career in rock & roll.
Randall Bramblett |
From his earliest saxophone credits with Elvin Bishop and Gregg Allman's solo band, Bramblett has built a reputation as one of the most versatile and talented sidemen in the business, adding horn, guitar, keyboards and vocals to dozens of albums by a ridiculously diverse cast of artists: From B.J. Thomas to Warren Haynes; Steve Winwood to Widespread Panic.
But unlike many of his peers in the elite fraternity of world-class session players and sidemen, Bramblett is also a songwriter of considerable skill. It's that rare combination that makes him a welcome addition in any situation, said Dave Schools, bass player for Widespread Panic.
Bramblett has been a frequent collaborator with Panic since he first joined the band onstage at Atlanta's Fox Theatre on January 2nd, 1998. After establishing a warm relationship, the members of Panic asked Bramblett to accompany them on the tours book-ending the death of founding guitarist Michael Houser to lend both musical and moral support.
"He did an incredible amount of work in order to help us out of a jam," Schools said. "Also, Randall is an incredibly positive person and it just feels good to be in his presence. I have always leaned on Randall in times of personal distress."
"What was especially great for me was being able to incorporate some of his tunes into the repertoire: 'God Was in the Water' and 'Get In Get Out.' I have always had such respect for his ability to mix pure songwriting with interesting melodies and instrumentation."
In May, Bramblett returned to the Fox for two nights with Widespread Panic, but he has spent the summer on the road in support of his sixth solo album. Rich Someday (New West) is a collection of 13 songs that explores the emotional currency of the modern age: disconnection, isolation and loss.
"To me the emotional content of the song is more important. I've just never been a storyteller," said Bramblett as he drove north through familiar territory leaving his home in Athens, GA, for a gig in Wilmington, NC. "Some people are great at doing that; I just don't have that in my background, so what I'm looking for is the feeling for someone who's lost or someone who is comforting someone who is lost and that is the song.
"That leaves a lot of people cold I think, but that's the way I write. I'm just looking for that combination that will have some power, so that the song is capable of conveying that feeling."
Bramblett is not a storyteller in the literal tradition of the folkies and country stars who form a portion of his musical root system. That lack of coherent narrative has drawn harsh criticism in the past from reviewers who have called his records "thin on clear, direct communication." But Bramblett is a poet of small moments glimpsed through the cracks in a weather-worn wooden fence. What he chooses to reveal is subtle and incomplete, but at its best it's evocative in a way that resonates with the listener on a visceral level.
As lyrically abstract as they may be, Bramblett's newest songs are some of the most musically focused of his career.
Bramblett credits the sound of Rich Someday to drummer-producer Gerry Hansen, who conjured the spirit of the great rooms – like Chips Moman's American Sound Studio in Memphis or the old casket factory on Jackson Highway in Muscle Shoals – from his small home studio in Lawrenceville, GA.
"He's spent years getting his drum sound together in that studio... and we wanted to start with his drum sound," Bramblett said. "It's just built around the songs and his sound."
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