
I spoke to Mark Engleson from Lyric Magazine about Mickey Newbury, the new album and a lot more recently:
One thing I will say is that you don’t really know the DNA of a song until you take it apart and try to put it back together again to record it. I’m a longtime fan, since my teens, but I didn’t really know these songs inside and out the way I do now. Some of the things that I took away is how much he played with structure. Some of these songs have decidedly weird structures.
The other thing is, he would re-record them or play them live, and sometimes take a piece of a song and put in the middle. He’s constantly playing with it. It wasn’t set in stone. I worried about that a little bit when I was recording, and I actually reached out to a couple of people who were very close to him, who played with him, played music with him. I talked to Wayne Moss at the studio where we recorded. I even talked to a couple of family members to get permission, I guess, to rearrange some things to suit me in the songs.
To read the interview in its entirety, visit Lyric Magazine.