Writer of the Week: Eric Brace

“I realized a bit more clearly what a big deal it is for people to commit to spending an evening with you, spending money to hear you play and to buy your CD. It’s a really important relationship, the performer with the audience, and I treat it with respect. I definitely learned that while covering music. I must have seen 1,000 acts in the roughly ten years I was writing about music, and I’m sure I learned something–good or bad–from each of them.”

Eric Brace started his band Last Train Home in Washington, D.C., where he also juggled careers as a independent record man and journalist for The Washington Post for ten years. Around five years ago he moved the band to Nashville, dropped the newspaper gig, and started a new label called Red Beet Records to focus on the talented musicians and songwriters in the burgeoning East Nashville music scene. For the July 20th 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, Brace wrote the song “Tranquility Base,” and made a video using footage provided by NASA’s public affairs office. Brace took a minute to talk to us about journalism, songwriting and recent and upcoming projects. Watch the video for “Tranquility Base” below and find out more about Eric Brace on AmericanSongspace.com.

How did “Tranquility Base” come about? It seems to be a topic you’ve given a lot of philosophical thought to.

I wrote it last fall, and I really was just looking up at the moon one night and thought, ‘Wow. Someone walked around up there.’ And I remembered hearing about how Neil Armstrong hasn’t ever talked about his experience up there on a personal level. The few interviews he’s given have focused on the engineering aspects of the mission. I know that if I had been the first person to walk on the moon, you wouldn’t be able to get me to shut up about it. I started reading a little bit about him, and he’s a really fascinating man. But except for conversations with his biographer a few years ago (where he again stuck to discussions of the engineering aspects of Apollo 11) he still hasn’t given any one-on-one interviews about the moonwalk. If I ever meet him, maybe I’ll sing this to him.

The line “You had the view no one else had” is a pretty affecting line. Was that one of the first images you had when writing the song?

It was indeed one of the driving forces of the song. We’ve all traveled, but how many of us have been somewhere no one else has been? It was an absolute first for mankind, and he saw it first. He’s the guy.

We loved the You Don’t Have to Like Them Both album you did with Peter Cooper. Describe the co-writing process that you guys have shared.

Glad you like it! I’m really proud of that CD. Peter and I had done some touring together — of Europe and of Alaska — and we really enjoyed singing together so we wanted to make a record that captured that. We didn’t have a lot of new songs ready to track, so we started going through our record collections and finding songs that had to fit four criteria: we had to love them; we had to feel that we could bring something new to them; we had to be able to work out a vocal arrangement for both our voices; and they had to be written by friends of ours. We’re lucky, because Peter is pretty good friends with Kris Kristofferson and Paul Kennerley. But we also found great songs by friends like Kevin Gordon and Karl Straub. As for the originals, Peter and I both have songs on there that we wrote individually, and we also each have a co-write on there. Peter wrote “Denali, Not McKinley” with Todd Snider, and I wrote “Lucky Bones” with Jim Lauderdale. Peter actually added a lot to “Lucky Bones” just before we recorded it, so that one’s actually a “tri-write,” a phrase that Peter coined, I believe, in an article he wrote for The Tennessean.

As far as writing with Peter, just the two of us, we’ve only done that a little bit, but we’re doing more of that, with an eye to our next duo recording.

You’ve probably been asked a million times already… but we want to ask again. Journalism and songwriting? How does one inform the other? Or are they totally unrelated?

Both Peter and I were music fans first, then musicians, and only later in our lives did we become music journalists. Those things definitely bleed into each other in interesting ways, lots of them are probably subconscious. But for me, when I started getting articles published about music and musicians, I think they maybe had a little more heft to them because they weren’t just my opinions about music I was hearing. I could understand the inner workings of bands and songwriting and performance, so I like to think that I brought a little more to the table than some music writers. Maybe I was more sympathetic to what they were trying to do. But then as my music career started overtaking the journalism career, I thought a lot harder about my own performances and turned a pretty critical eye on myself. I knew that as Last Train Home kept going, I wanted to always, always, always put on a great show. I never wanted people to walk out grumbling. I realized a bit more clearly what a big deal it is for people to commit to spending an evening with you, spending money to hear you play and to buy your CD. It’s a really important relationship, the performer with the audience, and I treat it with respect. I definitely learned that while covering music. I must have seen 1,000 acts in the roughly ten years I was writing about music, and I’m sure I learned something–good or bad–from each of them.

Who are some of your favorite songwriters and what kind of songwriting tricks or secrets have you picked up from them?

You have to start with Dylan, who gave everyone permission to be abstract. He’s still the greatest. I’ve probably spent more time listening to the Beatles than any other act. Their melodies, chord changes, rhythms, all are unbeatable. We could all steal from them for the next 1,000 years. Paul Simon is also in the pantheon of the gods. I think he shows better than anyone how you can be conversational and utterly profound in the same line. Then there’s  Chuck Berry, who’s is under-rated, I think, as a singer-songwriter. He’s added so much to the canon of American Song, using the vernacular to convey enormous truths. Hank Williams, A.P. Carter, Bill Monroe, Marvin Gaye, Carole King, Carter Stanley, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Fats Domino, Willis Alan Ramsey, Percy Mayfield, Tom T. Hall. One thing that I try to do that all of these people do, is write lines that are singable. When you hear a great song, almost all the phrases are easy to sing. And that’s harder than people might think.

You run a fine independent label called Red Beet Records and have been very active in the East Nashville music and arts scene. How much do you think being a successful songwriter in Nashville is about networking? How has it changed for artists in your community?

I think being a successful songwriter on Music Row in Nashville — meaning you’re getting songs recorded by major label country acts — is definitely about networking to a large degree. But it’s also a craft that I will never denigrate. I think it’s incredibly hard to write a big, fat, commercially successful country song. But I’m more interested in a different success, mainly coming up with great songs, and that’s more about artistry. The songwriters I look up to in East Nashville all work really, really hard at it. I’m thinking of people like Kevin Gordon and Todd Snider and Peter Cooper and Jon Byrd and Stephen Simmons and Elizabeth Cook and Tim Carroll… people like that. And the great part of this scene is that we all listen to each other, and we definitely each want our next song to be one that makes all the others say: “Wow, that’s a great song.” I know that Kevin Gordon is busy recording his next CD, and he has a song on there called “Colfax” that has all us east side songwriters buzzing. It’s just so good. He was influenced by Tommy Womack and he admits it, and then he comes up with something incredible in its own right. I wish Tommy lived on the east side so we could claim him as our own, but he doesn’t!

Red Beet was started with an eye to capturing some of the East Nashville magic, as well as putting out CDs by me, my band Last Train Home, and my duo with Peter Cooper. We’ve released two double-CD compilations of East Nashville music, and we’re working on a third. It should be out this fall.

Watch the video for “Tranquility Base” below: