Asking songwriters about songwriting is a lot like asking novelists where they get their ideas — you're apt to get a different answer from every person you ask, and none of them really addresses the topic in a satisfying way unless you've done a little songwriting yourself.
Brent Best, the singer for the late, underexposed Texas roots-rock band Slobberbone (and current leader of The Drams), came as close to putting his finger on it as anybody has during an interview with the Planet two or three years ago.
"Some songs take six minutes to write," he said, "and some take six months. That's just the way it is."
Best went on to admit he'd stolen that particularly poignant line from another Americana-associated songwriter:
Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven principal David Lowery.
"Yeah, I said that, or something like it," says Lowery. "I think it was five minutes and five months, but six actually sounds better. I appreciate the poetic license."
Camper Van Beethoven's quirky, eclectic, folkie fare helped define the transition from college rock to alternative music during the late '80s, and the band was reactivated around 2002. But Lowery is probably better known to contemporary audiences for his role in Cracker, the wry, genre-ignorant rock act that achieved mainstream radio ubiquity back in '93 with "Low," from the album Kerosene Hat.
The group has yet to equal that record's widespread success, but unlike many great artists who unfairly end up in the One Hit Wonder category, Lowery isn't bitter about the bygone blip on the pop-culture radar, or the music that garnered it.
"I think that record really sums up who we are," he says. "It was a nice balance between some alt-country roots, alternative and sort of the great rock bands. It's sort of a nice combination of all three of those, and that's why it still gets played on so many formats, whether it's classic rock or alternative or whatever alt-country stations. It's not really been a problem at all. It's a problem for a band that had a hit that doesn't sound like the rest of their stuff. But our biggest record, if you listen to another Cracker record, you get a lot of the same kind of stuff."
Musically, yes. However, Cracker's eighth proper full-length, the brand-new Greenland, evinces a conspicuous lyrical shift. While Lowery's trademark wit and descriptive observations of human nature are still present, they're balanced by the most introspective writing he's ever done. Trading in the impressions of vast barrenness and loneliness evoked by its icy titular land mass, Greenland is an intimate and at times uncomfortably cathartic listen, particularly coming from a singer known for cunning, cutting and often wearily detached wordplay.
"I think, first of all, I wanted to make this record a little more personal," says Lowery. "The songs that make up the record were recorded in several batches over four years, because we did a Camper Van Beethoven record and tour in the middle … I had been through a lot in the last two or three years personally, and I just sort of started noticing that the songs that were me dealing with that, they were creating a theme. They're not all dark, there's some black humor in there too. I just wanted it to be a little more autobiographical than it had been in the past."
Longtime fans needn't worry, though — Greenland is full of the same ambitious yet roots-reverent rock 'n' roll that has endeared Cracker to them over the years. And Lowery scoffs at the idea that it's an introduction to an enduring new side of him as singer-songwriter, that he's fading out the smartass commentary on the human condition in favor of plumbing his own pain.
"No, no," he says. "This is just a record I had to do for where I was in my life."
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 4, 2006.