Oklahoma musician Travis Linville releases new album
After producing John Fullbright’s first album, teaching Parker Millsap to play guitar and performing as sideman to Hayes Carll, Travis Linville’s career as a solo singer-songwriter is looking “Up Ahead.”
That also happens to be the title of the respected Oklahoma indie musician’s first full-length album in a decade and his first to garner big-name distribution.
“I think this may be the ninth album of original music I’ve made under various names and bands and whatnot,” Linville told
“But after I made it, I reflected and realized that I’ve done a couple of EPs recently in the last few years, and then I did back in like 2007 a 20-song acoustic kind of CD — it’s more like 20 demos of new songs or whatever. So, it might have been since like 2005 since I made a fulllength, full-production record of original music.
“It’s kind of a cool thing. There are people sort of paying attention to this one in the music business —and that is a first for me.”
A fixture on the Oklahoma music scene, the Norman native will drop “Up Ahead” Friday on Travis Linville Music via CEN/ RED Distribution, a division of Sony Music. He will mark the occasion with a release show Friday night at the Blue Door.
“The Blue Door’s always great for musicians. It’s sort of the ideal setup for a songwriter,” he said. “My schedule’s really busy now, but last year, it wasn’t as much. I had a lot of time off, and I was making the record and sort of cooking up plans for this record and planning to get busy again in 2017. And now all of the sudden it’s 2017, so here we go.”
Collaborative effort
A seasoned producer and multi-instrumentalist, Linville has the skills and the means to create an entire album without ever leaving his couch. Just ask fellow Okie songwriter Carter Sampson, who spent a lot of time in Linville’s Norman living room when he was producing her 2016 album “Wilder Side.”
“It’s amazing to watch him swap instruments out," she recalled. "For him to sit there and say, 'This song could use a banjo. Hang on, I’ll go grab a banjo' and just kill it. I’m so inspired by that."
Although Linville performed all the vocals, guitars, lap and pedal steel, mandolin and dobro on “Up Ahead,” he said it never would have occurred to him to make the album all on his own. He recruited a group of top-flight Okie musicians — Ryan Jones (Oklahoma Opry) on keys, DavidLeach (Fullbright) on upright bass, and Matt Duckworth (The Flaming Lips, Miley Cyrus) and Mike Meadows (Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson) on percussion — to play on the 10-track collection.
“When I make the records, I build a lot of it myself from the beginning. I start with the songs, and I strum and play the songs and sing them. Then, I add some guitars … and then I will take it to other great musicians that I like and that I sort of trust to do their own thing. I sort of try to reach for some detachment. Typically, it’s normal for me to just sort of be really active over every single part of the making of a record. But I’m sort of getting to a point where I like to not be involved in some of the things,” he said with a chuckle.
“When I built the songs up to a certain point, then I would send them over to Ryan Jones — he’s played with me on and off longer than anyone, 20 years now —and he’ll add a lot of keys and things on his own. … I really was stoked to bring in other musicians and it really paid off.”
Subsequent sessions with Duckworth and Meadows gave the tracks different sounds and textures than he could have come up with on his own, Linville said.
The singer-songwriter also reteamed with longtime collaborator Trent Bell, of Norman’s Bell Labs Recording. He even went on vacation to New York City while Bell mixed the album.
“When I’m making somebody else’s, I do get a little bit more involved with every detail as much as I can because that’s my role,” Linville said. But when I’m making my own, I like to give myself the luxury to say, ‘Well, I’m going to hire someone with a really great studio and great ears to mix this record. Here you go, Trent, it’s all yours.’ ”
Reverse engineering
Travis Linville’s “Up Ahead” album release show
Lauren Barth and Jesse Aycock 8 p.m. Friday Blue Door, 2805 N McKinley
www.bluedoorokc.com
The contributions of his fellow musicians were especiallya vital since Linville essentially reverse engineered the songs on “Up Ahead.”
“I had them all started. I had some seeds for the ideas. Some of the songs were finished, some of the songs were half-done, and some just had maybe just a verse and the chorus,” he said. “And we went over to Trent Bell’s, and we recorded tracks for these songs like as a band before the songs were even finished. So, what I did was I sort of recorded the blueprint for the songs, and then I continued to write the songs over the next several months or a year.
“Some people find that a sort of backwards process: going in without finished songs and recording them in a way that sounded finished and then continuing to write from there. But that was a cool thing that I did this time that I really liked.”
Using the technique allowed him to apply a lesson he teaches in his songwriting classes at the Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma: Songs are about more than lyrics.
“One of the big points that I like to make is go read some song lyrics of whatever you consider to be great songs without any music — and they’re pretty darn flat. Sometimes they’re just downright silly. The point being, the music is really important. The music is a really important ingredient, you know, in music. … The meaning can completely change depending on what kind of music is happening,” he said.
“It’s all still songwriting, I just happen to do it in the studio or with my recording tools — and I find that a more enjoyable process.”
The process resulted in one of the most cohesive albums to come out of the Oklahoma indie scene in recent memory, a mellifluous collection of folk songs richly layered with steel guitars. Pleased with the results, Linville tried crowdfunding via PledgeMusic for the first time, exceeding 160 percent of his pre-sale goal, and shopped the album around to get the distribution opportunity with Sony’s RED. He left behind his sideman gig with Carll to focus on doing his own touring, including opening shows for Carll and Millsap.
“I decided not to release it right away, and I just decided to start sending it out to people to see if I could gain some interest in it and see about maybe getting it out there a little more than I have in the past,” he said. “That’s not always been the goal with me. Sometimes the goal … has been to just make the music and drive it to the bar and start playing and selling it. But I think this record deserved a little bit more than that, so I’m trying to spread the word a bit.”