Yoakam Keeps His Cool On New Album

Nearly two years ago, Dwight Yoakam’s road manager walked into a hotel in Manchester, England, to a bewildering reception.

“A guy in the lobby spotted him,” Yoakam remembers, “and said, ‘Hello, I think I’ve seen you somewhere: in striped pants bouncing on a trampoline.’

“John,” Yoakam says, “had been the Great Bambini bouncing on a trampoline in the video of (the Yoakam hit single) ‘Pocket of a Clown,’ and CMT has been broadcasting it over there for about three years now.

“It’s starting to have a profound effect, too. I saw a change between the last two times I went. When we played in Glasgow, Scotland, and Dublin, Ireland, the audience recognized the songs, and I know that CMT is one of the sources of that.”

Yoakam is doubtless correct about the developing transatlantic power of CMT, but the fact that his international recognition has progressed to a point where even his road manager can be randomly recognized in an overseas hotel lobby may also be an indication of the continuing development of his own professional stature.

The new year will bring the 10th anniversary of the ascension of this high priest of Alternative Country Cool to mainstream stardom, and he says he plans to open 1996 with his fifth international tour. The tour will include stops in Australia and New Zealand in February and possibly Europe in March. He says he then expects to come home to tackle an 85-city American itinerary beginning in May and continuing into September.

Abroad and domestically, he will hawk his most diverse album to date, a subtly complex group of songs about emotional loss that he has succinctly titled “Gone.” It opens with a riveting laughter he calls “Sorry You Asked?,” a loping lyric that profiles a fellow who can’t shut up about his love troubles - and corollarily pokes fun at the singer’s own occasional tendency to wax lengthily semi-eloquent on matters close to his heart.

“You know, you’re leaving a hardware store, crossing a parking lot,” Yoakam explains, “and you look over and say, ‘Hey, Bill, how you doin’?’ ‘Ahhh, OK.’ ‘How’s Mary?’ And there you go. An hour and a half later you’re still standing there with your hand on the door handle of the car and your key in the other hand and you can’t get in and get away from this guy.

“I’ve been on the delivering end of some of those conversations, too. Some poor guy asks me the wrong question the wrong day and an hour and a half later he’s running down the street to get away.”

Don’t expect to want to run away from this album. This time Yoakam, one of country music’s most prolific writers and most individualistic performers, has created some exceptionally unique instrumental combinations and lyrical fare ranging from the funny and uptempo “Sorry …” to such others as “Near You,” a Beatles-esque ballad of faithfulness to an ex-lover; “Heart of Stone,” about the effects of too much grief; and “This Much I Know,” about reflections on what the departed one leaves behind; and the title song.

It seems obvious from these themes that the singer, a very private man, suffered a problem in his romantic life around the time he was writing the songs. While acknowledging that that was indeed the case, he says the writing of this album was far more than a simple exercise in the purging of emotional hurt and gall.

Even the way he wrote it differed radically from the way he constructed its predecessors, he indicates. “The writing of these songs came in very rapid succession, but they remained incomplete,” he says. “I was writing them simultaneously, almost all of them at once.

“This was the most disparate collection of songs that I felt I’d created for a given album, yet ironically this is the most connected album I think I’ve ever done in terms of how the individual songs play to each other.”

Their overall theme is loss as studied from multiple perspectives, thus magnifying the depth of emotion.

But the emotion was magnified by something else, too, as Yoakam says he realized after it was all finished.

Having endured “the breakup of a love relationship about the same time,” he says, he didn’t realize until he first began to talk about the album publicly that another loss suffered at the same time had greatly “intensified” his feelings.

“‘Sorry You Asked?’ and ‘Never Hold You’ were the first two I wrote for this album,” he remembers, “and that was around the first of the year - December, January.

“But the rest of the album came after that, in the spring, and I’ve only realized in the last several weeks how much I was influenced at the time by the loss of a family member: my aunt, my mother’s older sister, who was a surrogate mother for me, growing up.

“It was probably the most profound loss in my life to date.

“They lived in Columbus (Ohio, where Yoakam spent most of his formative youth), and she was married to my dad’s older brother.

“They didn’t have children, and we were raised in close proximity to them all of our lives. She’d be embarrassed to have this much attention focused on it, and, as I said, it was not something conscious.”

The singer says his aunt’s cancer was discovered in February and had run its course by May.

He returned to Columbus twice during his aunt’s struggle, and after she died, he tried to write a song about her. But he couldn’t finish it.

“I couldn’t bring myself to do it at the time,” he says, because of a feeling that he “wasn’t in the right place” to do it, then “because of perspective.”

“And, ironically, I look back now, and every song, she’s there.”

Yoakam wrote eight of the 10 songs on “Gone” by himself and the remaining two with Kostas, the Greek immigrant who nominally resides in Montana yet is perhaps Nashville’s most prolific hit writer of the past five years.

Why, Yoakam is asked, didn’t he choose one of the eight he wrote by himself to be the album’s first single, rather than the string-backed, non-mainstream-sounding “Nothing,” which is one of the two co-written ones?

“Because I liked it and it comes from a very different place musically,” he says.

“I felt that ‘Nothing’ (musically) epitomizes this album. I wanted it to say that this is this album. ‘Sorry You Asked?’ could have easily been the first single, but I didn’t want it to mislead; musically, ‘Sorry You Asked?’ could have come - perhaps - from (the previous albums) ‘This Time’ (1993) or ‘If There Was a Way’ (1990).”

The rise of “Nothing” in the mainstream country hit charts has been slower than many Yoakam singles.

His next one, “Gone (That’ll Be Me),” will follow the strings of “Nothing” with wildly pounding drums.

Meanwhile, his magnificent “Dwight Live” album, the recorded result of a blistering San Francisco performance that was released in the first half of ‘95, hasn’t burned up the hit charts, either.

It should be noted, however, that Yoakam has been off the road so far during the shelf life of both “Dwight Live” and “Gone,” so neither album has received the benefit of tour support yet.

The last album to get such benefit was “This Time,” which was certified as a seller of more than 2 million.