A NEW TUNE

Banjo’s the same, but Steve Martin’s branching out with Edie Brickell collaboration.

‘I feel like these are banjo songs I’ve always been meaning to write’

Oct. 13, 2011, was a pretty significant day in Edie Brickell’s household. The main event was a party to celebrate the 70th birthday of her husband, the songwriter Paul Simon. But the by-product was an unlikely musical union with one of Simon’s guests.

Brickell was a fan of The Crow, the 2009 bluegrass album from long-time family friend Steve Martin. “At the party, I was brave enough to say to him: ‘If you ever want to make up a song together, I’d love to,’ ” she recalls of that night. “And he said: ‘ As a matter of fact, I have a tune without words.’ ”

So began the journey that’s led to Love Has Come for You, a delicious album of deep-rooted Americana that marries Martin’s elegant fivestring banjo to Brickell’s fragrant Texan twang. It signals a real departure for both. This isn’t like Martin’s bluegrass records. Nor is it like the keening folk-pop of Brickell’s time with the New Bohemians, or the jazzier end of her solo work. Instead, it’s an album of vivid story songs set to thoughtful arrangements and dipped in rural mountain tradition.

Rising jazz-bassist Esperanza Spalding, guitar veteran Waddy Wachtel and Martin’s most recent back-up band, the Steep Canyon Rangers, are among those lending their charms, though the subtle playing and sparse beauty of the music gives Love Has Come for You an almost confidential hush.

Martin attributes the feel of the record to producer Peter Asher. “The first thing he said was: ‘I don’t think this should be a bluegrass record,’ which was a little scary at first, because that was all I’d done,” he says. “It turned out to be a real advance for me on the banjo.”

We meet in the library room of a swish hotel in New York’s Soho dis

trict. Brickell looks chic in a floral print dress and tan boots, Martin ever so natty in blazer and matching homburg-style hat. With his white hair and round specs, the 67-year-old has the avuncular look of a benign academic.

We’re just a few blocks shy of Greenwich Village, where Martin once played at a tiny club during his stand-up days in the early ’70s, supported by the largely unknown, pre-Fleetwood Mac duo of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Martin gave up his anarchic live comedy show decades ago, setting out on a film career that proved equally successful. Music has always been important, but mostly it’s been a secondary pursuit.

Until now, that is. Love Has Come for You is his third album in less than five years, following the Grammy-winning The Crow and 2011’s Rare Bird Alert. There’s also been a debut spot at the Grand Ole Opry and several tours with the Steep Canyon Rangers. The new album even finds him duetting with Brickell on the old-timey refrain of Yes She Did.

“Don’t forget I have already had a hit single, with King Tut,” he grins, referring to 1978’s millionshifting novelty tune that he first unveiled during one of his regular stints on Saturday Night Live. “But yeah, I was very reluctant on this one, because Edie’s such a perfect singer. There are only two singers I’ve worked with who have this pitch. One is Edie and the other was Karen Carpenter. I opened a show for Karen Carpenter in the ’70s and it was just amazing. Her voice was so pure, and Edie has that same quality.”

It’s been a less precipitous career curve for Brickell. She hit big as a 22-year-old in 1988, when What I Am, the debut single from Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians, made the Billboard Top 10. Parent album Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars sold nearly three million copies, punting the bashful singer into a spotlight she never craved.

“That first splash of fame was embarrassing,” she says. “I didn’t feel I’d earned it. I knew there were lots of better singers, better writers and better musicians, yet we were right out there. Somebody once asked about my accent on the first two Bohemians records and I remember I tried to hide where I was from. I just knew it wasn’t me.”

After marrying Simon in 1992, Brickell devoted most of the next 10 years to a life of domesticity, bringing up the couple’s three children. Only very recently has she returned to recording in earnest, issuing solo albums, plus projects with The Gaddabouts (featuring Steve Gadd and Andy FairweatherLow) and the Heavy Circles, with stepson Harper Simon.

She’s a far more assured singer these days. “I think that having children and being surrounded by really loving people helped me to relax,” she says.

Tellingly, Brickell’s overriding lyrical theme on Love Has Come for You is familial. The title track tells of a child born out of wedlock but lovingly raised by a single mother. Sarah Jane and the Iron Mountain Baby relates the true tale of a man who found an infant in an old suitcase and took it home for his wife. Remember Me This Way finds its lonely protagonist willing herself a life surrounded by “kids and dogs and babies all around.”

“I was reminded of home when I first heard this music of Steve’s,” she explains. “I remembered all the people I knew when I was growing up in my grandmother’s big family. She was one of 11 and we went to Paris, Texas, a lot, to a little house up on stilts with cool sand underneath. All the old folks sat under the trees in those old aluminium chairs and told stories. They cussed, they were funny and they were inappropriate. So I was just reacting to what was in his melodies. The words flowed out.”

A fellow Texan whose family left for California when he was young, Martin feels that his formative years play into the album “in some subconscious way. I moved when I was five, but there was an emotional link to Texas when I was growing up. Edie took the music I’d sent her and made it explicit for me.”

Martin has an enduring fascination with American roots music. As a teenager, he was smitten with records by the Dillards and Flatt & Scruggs, instantly falling in love with the distinctive pluck of the banjo: “When it would come on the radio, my brain could part all the other instruments aside so I could focus on that sound. I was not musical, but I just thought, ‘That’s for me.’ ”

The banjo was a regular part of his stand-up routine throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Martin offsetting his absurdist comedy with bluegrass staples like Sally Goodin. Now, finally, he seems to have given free rein to those creative impulses.

“I’m essentially very much a naif in the music world,” Martin explains, “and I think this record is so different for both of us. I feel like these are the banjo songs I’ve always been waiting to write. It’s the most completely organic thing I’ve ever done.” So there’s been no grand plan to this late-blooming new career? “Absolutely not,” he laughs, with a genuine sense of incredulity. “It was a total accident. My whole life is an accident!” ‘Love Has Come For You’ is out Tuesday on Rounder Records.