Meet St. Sugar Britches
Busy Oklahoma musician Kyle Reid releases a new album made in New Orleans
Kyle Reid is taking an “all-of-the-above approach” to making music these days.
The Norman-based singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist is staying busy playing with his band The Low Swinging Chariots, performing as a sideman for his musician pals and doing solo shows, including a one-man “Tiki Tuesdays” summer residency at Scratch Kitchen & Cocktails in Norman.
Reid, 30, also is releasing Friday a new solo album, intriguingly titled “Love and Trust (In the Age of St. Sugar Britches),” on which he created all the instrumentation, with the exception of one trumpet part.
“There’s space and time for all of those things, and I still enjoy them. I still try to just explore and play and have fun. Especially in terms of recording, I’ve been moving more so into the realm of recording and producing music and building out a home studio space to do that. So, this album was kind of the beginning of that, of wanting to record my own music and record music for other people,” Reid said in a recent phone interview from the Blue Door, where he was getting ready to play sideman for fellow Okie musician Levi Parham.
“It was a fun process. Very different from the
Chariots’ (2014 album ‘Alright, Here We Go …’), which was also immensely fun, but it was much more in the spirit of live collaboration. This was very much a science experiment with songs.”
In advance of several upcoming shows sure to feature his new songs, Reid fielded some questions about his new “science experiment.”
Q: A title like “Love and Trust (In the Age of Saint Sugar Britches)”, I’m sorry, that just has to be explained.
Reid: (Laughs) Sure, and I’m afraid that the explanation may be disappointing. It’s just “Sugar Britches” is what my girlfriend calls me, and so these are all songs — and actually, the album is chronological — that I’ve written since the Chariots’ record came out in 2014. (It’s) my favorite songs that I’ve written in the time period in chronological order, and so it’s kind of just a funny way of marking a period of time
for me . ... It also is kind of just a nod to New Orleans because that’s where I recorded it, and “Sugar Britches” became “St. Sugar Britches” down in New Orleans.
And then the “Love and Trust,” it was kind of one of these fortunate accidents when I was walking around New Orleans like I would do when I was down there — I didn’t have a car, so I would just walk everywhere — and I came upon some graffiti on this old house that was in disrepair. But that’s all it said, it just said “love” and then over to the side it said “trust,” and I thought it was really neat. Thematically, it kind of worked with all the songs on the record anyway ... and it all seemed a little cosmic to me.
Q: Um, did you saint yourself there?
Reid: You know, I don’t know if you’re allowed to do that. I did. I guess I did. There was no official ceremony, but I feel like I was baptized in the sweat, as it were.
Q: While you recorded this in ol’ New Orleans. So, how and where did you record it in New Orleans?
Reid: I have a friend who
lives in New Orleans, and she was going on tour and needed someone to sublease her apartment. So, I volunteered and that was the thing that got me to New Orleans. So, I essentially converted her apartment into a recording studio for the two months that I was there, and I brought all of my guitars and synthesizers and keyboards and my tape recorder. I recorded it all onto a four-track set tape recorder while I was down there, and that was a really cool, really fun process.
So, during the day I would record, and then at night I’d just go wander around and listen to other musicians play. So, it was a great experience. But it was very much a DIY kind of thing . ... There was a piano in the kitchen, and so everything was set up around that piano.
Q: Your music always has a sort of jazz vibe to it. Does recording in New Orleans only sort of ratchet that up? Or what does it do for you to record in New Orleans where jazz music is just everywhere?
Reid: Oh yeah. It was
great. It was a great inspiration, and it kept me humble for sure . ... I think that there’s a lot of people in New Orleans who subscribe to that idea that playing music is just kind of — just what you do as a human. It’s just one of the most human things to do, and it was really refreshing to see that. There are definitely people like that all over who have that idea, but New Orleans seems to be a gathering place for a lot of them.
Q: I was surprised whenever I listened to the album that it’s not a lot of “When the Saints Go Marching In” and that kind of brassy jazz. A lot of it is waltzes, sort of a folky kind of music with some jazz influence to it. Do you like kind of informing people that there’s more than just that one kind of jazz that you hear in the movies when they are trying to tell you that you’re in New Orleans?
Reid: I’ve always loved that kind of jazz, I always will, but, you’re right, that’s not really what this album is. But it is definitely influenced by that kind of jazz. Actually, there are two artists that I had in mind for my production style when I was recording this record.
They’re both artists who I think to a good job of taking influence from early jazz and New Orleans music, but they don’t necessarily lock themselves into a traditionalist’s mindset where it has to be performed like it was before or it has to have this swung beat or the horn section. And these two artists are M. Ward and Tom Waits . ... On ‘Transistor Radio,’ M. Ward did a Louis Armstrong song, he did ‘Sweethearts on Parade,’ and when Louis Armstrong does it, it’s all New Orleans. But when M. Ward does it, it feels like some kind of fuzzedout electric-folk ballad — and it works. It works in both of those contexts.
So, I definitely went into this recording with that in mind ... of trying to stretch that boundary just a little bit. I haven’t done anything groundbreaking, I’ve just done what I’ve heard other people do and done it in a way that I knew how. But that was definitely in my mind: the genre, the influence and just to have fun and explore and to not necessarily put too many constraints on myself in that regard.