By Larry Schwartz
She was singing at a music convention in Boulder, Colorado when she was approached by one of her favorite artists. Mollie O’Brien had taken the title of her latest album, Big Red Sun, from a track by the singer-songwriter. Lucinda Williams wanted to hear her sing the song.
“She came up to me later and said that she cried,” says O’Brien, who tours Australia this month with the guitarist Nina Gerber. “I think that she was telling me the truth. In fact, she brought a little note to me later. She told me she liked it.”
Williams’s Car Wheels On A Gravel Road was hailed as one of the strongest albums released last year. O’Brien’s latest album may have encountered less fanfare, but it won over its share of critics and fans.
The new album has invited comparisons with the blues singer Bonnie Raitt. “It’s because of the white girl thing in blues,” says the Denver-based singer. “But I don’t mind being compared to her. She’s one of my big-time influences.”
O’Brien, who’s in her mid-40s, has long enjoyed a strong following. But the new album has excited an unprecedented level of attention. “It was certainly flabbergasting to hear that it was doing so well in New Zealand and Australia,” O’Brien says. “It was voted No. 1 in New Zealand by the Christchurch press. It was like, Whoa, I have a parallel universe there down under. It was kinda cool.”
Big Red Sun is her seventh album, if you count three collaborations with her brother, Tim, a singer-songwriter who plays instruments including mandolin and fiddle.
Comparisons with Raitt or Maria Muldaur, whose name frequently crops up, are interesting in that O’Brien has until recently been regarded primarily as a bluegrass player. The new album presents a more diverse artist, adept in interpreting blues, country, folk or gospel. From Memphis Minnie’s In My Girlish Days at the start of the album to Randy Newman’s Rollin’, the twelfth and last track, she brings something special to each song.
“Probably the feel to the tune and the overall sentiment,” she says when asked what attracts her to a particular song. “It doesn’t matter if it’s just three verses long.”
It may seem a vague answer. But O’Brien was certain enough in her choice of material for this second album for Sugar Hill to stand her ground when others suggested it might not be appropriate.
“All the tunes that I had on this record I had to fight for with the label,” she says, “because they said I had a bluegrass-buying public. They said it was too blues. A little more rock’n’roll and blues.
“I said, ‘Well, this is the stuff that I want to do and I think that people will listen to it. You’re short-changing the audience. They like something good. They like anything as long as it’s done well.’ “
One concession was to agree to a request by her producer, Charles Sawtelle, to do Chuck Berry’s Brown Eyed Handsome Man. “He said, ‘You have to do this,’ and I said, ‘Oh Charles.’ Chuck Berry. It’s like trying to do an Aretha (Franklin) tune. It’s kind of embarrassing. Or a Beatles or a John Coltrane tune. It’s so well done the first time. It’s hard.”
O’Brien is wary of being typecast. How then does she characterise the music on this album? “It’s certainly roots music. It’s certainly coming from our forebears. Memphis Minnie and Judie Roderick, who wrote Denver To Dallas, was a pretty big influence on a lot of people in the big folk revival of the ’60s. I think, Yes, it’s good stuff. It’s pretty hard to ruin it. And to try and reinterpret it makes it a little more fun.”
Some of the songs are powered by electric guitar, drums, electric bass and Hammond-B3. Others have little embellishment beyond the precise acoustic playing of Nick Forster, from the band Hot Rize.
Among these, Gambling Man is a Staples tune: “They do it really, really slow.” No Hiding Place was from an old record by the black gospel singer, Dorothy Love Coates. “I think she’s still alive. She’s probably in her 80s. She’s only on vinyl here. She’s kind of off the record when she sings. She’s a wailer.”
John Hiatt’s Love Like Blood was taken from an album he put out between major labels. She’s a big fan of his songwriting – “That kind of visceral thing”.
One of five children, O’Brien grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia, “50 miles west of Pittsburg. It’s kind of in a no-man’s-land there,” she says. “Southern West Virginia is known for its old-timey music. The northern part where I’m from is nebulous territory. Its big claim to fame is a country music station called WWVA. It’s kind of the order of WEF Chicago Barn Dance. They would have a live music show every Saturday night. That’s pretty much its musical heritage.”
As a brother-and-sister act, whose first big gig was a Mothers Day concert, she and Tim invited preconception. “A lot of people think, they’re a brother and sister from West Virginia, they must have played music around the pot-bellied stove …”
Early influences included Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot “and the Beatles, of course”. Albums by Tim, 15 months her junior, include Red On Blonde, a collection of bluegrass versions of his favorite Bob Dylan songs that was nominated for a Grammy a few years back. Mollie sings back-up on some tracks.
“That’s a great record. The concept is genius. I don’t mind singing back-up with Tim at all. Any time he asks, I’m flattered. He doesn’t do anything that’s in poor taste.”
Mollie O’Brien has proved her point that her audience is not just after bluegrass. So what’s next? “I think just more on the same idea and maybe more in traditional things that are done in a blues vein with electric guitar and drums and electric bass.
“Those songs are so good, you can’t really improve upon them lyrically or melodically but arrangements can make a difference.”
She doesn’t agree the interest in her work is belated. “I don’t think it’s late. I’m not that old … I feel I’m just starting to hit my stride a little bit here.”
The Sunday Age, 04-Apr-1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 