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It's A Beautiful World
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Eliza Gilkyson’s career is at a high with an acclaimed album and two of her songs recorded by Joan Baez. By Brian Wise.
After more than twenty years of recording, Austin-based Eliza Gilkyson has nearly managed to outshine her family pedigree. Born in Hollywood, she is the daughter of folk-pop singer/songwriter Terry Gilkyson, who passed away in 1999 and was responsible for hits for Frankie Laine, the Weavers, Doris Day and Dean Martin. Her brother Tony became a member of seminal cowpunk band Lone Justice as well as being in X, with John Doe.
In the 1960s Gilkyson moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, raised a family, released her first album, Eliza '69. It was a decade before she released her next album Love from the Heart, which was followed by seven more albums (including one with harpist Andreas Vollenweider), prior to her signing with the esteemed, indie label Red House, part-owned by singer Greg Brown.
Gilkyson’s new CD, Beautiful World, has been labelled a ‘masterpiece’ in a number of reviews and, after receiving excellent reviews for its predecessor Paradise Hotel, it certainly marks a high point in her solo career.
While Beautiful World appeared in an election year and though she has written about political subjects previously, Gilkyson often tackles the personal rather than the overtly political.
Apparently, he seeds for the latest album began in monthly community forums that Eliza hosted in 2007 with University of Texas professor/activist Robert Jensen and Presbyterian minister Jim Rigby, held at various venues around Austin.
Gilkyson says that the song ‘Great Correction,’ was written as a way to ‘console myself as I grieve the devastation of the human and natural world.’ This spurred a cycle of songs about perseverance and hope for a more beautiful world.
Long-time collaborator, producer Mark Hallman is joined by Gilkyson’s Austin band - Cisco Ryder (drums), Mike Hardwick (guitars, dobro) and
Glenn Fukunaga (bass) – as well as guests who include her brother Tony, singer/keyboardist Julie Wolf (Ani DiFranco, Indigo Girls, Bruce Cockburn) pedal steel player, Cindy Cashdollar (Asleep At The Wheel, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Ryan Adams), guitarist David Grissom (Dixie Chicks), fiddler Elana James (whom we saw here last year) and guitarist John Inmon (Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmy LaFave).
For her forthcoming Australian tour, Gilkyson will be accompanied by guitarist Nina Gerber. When I catch up with her to talk about the tour she is at home in Austin, having a brief break after some heavy touring commitments.
“It’s always fun to do something for the first time,” she says when I ask her if she is looking forward to coming to Australia. “I have a lot of fun with Nina. We really throw it down every night, we give it everything we’ve got.”
Gilkyson easy that their show will probably comprise two sets and says that “we will probably to some of the newer material in the first set and the second set we really play around a lot. If there is any body that had requests we do them. It’s a little bit more spontaneous.”
“We’ve been touring a lot, we tour with her,” she adds. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t bring her dog with us! But we usually bring the dog with us and we set it up on stage in a little bed. Then we just come out and build this set.
“She is very, very musical and she hears it the way I hear it, musically speaking. I let her have a lot of room. We really jam and we build songs, and play off each other. So with Nina you will get to hear a lot of the variety of what she can do, from just volume stuff to serious rock. You really get to see a wide spectrum. I write in a lot of different genres and we can rock it amazingly hard and then we can get extremely sparse and folky. So it’s got real wide parameters and she is able to cover all the bases.”
After so many years of recording Gilkyson is finally getting to enjoy the fruits of her perseverance and she also must enjoy seeing her latest album referred to as a ‘masterpiece.’
“I think I have really been on a kind of a roll the last eight years since I have signed to Red House,” she says. “I think I understand better how to write a song. I think I really know what I want to say and I cut to the chase in a way that I didn’t used to do. In that sense I don’t write as many songs as I used to, unfortunately, but the ones that come I’m very satisfied with. I think I know how to write songs now.”
One of the highlights of 2008 for Gilkyson was finding out that Joan Baez was including two of her songs – ‘Rose Of Sharon’ and ‘Requiem’ – on her Steve Earle produced album ‘Day After Tomorrow’ (which has been nominated for a Grammy in the Contemporary Folk category.
I ask her if that was Steve Earle’s doing or her publishers forwarding songs.
“I really don’t know Steve that well,” she admits. “I mean we were both up for a Grammy nomination a few years ago at the same time and that was really the first time our paths ever really crossed. So I don’t really know him that well. So I don’t think it was through him but my agent is friends with her manager. So I have a feeling that she just dropped a few hints and said, ‘You really should check out Eliza’s CD because she took the songs off my last live CD, Your Town Tonight, because her renditions are very different than the actual album recordings earlier. So it really does help to know somebody, who knows somebody, who knows somebody!”
Eliza Gilkyson and Nina Gerber tour Australia in March.
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