Liz Durrett

Works Well with Others:

Athens’ Finest Help Liz Durrett Craft Her Third Release

By Deirdre Sayre; photo by Mike White

Even in a town of more than five hundred bands, Athens, Ga.’s Liz Durrett stands out, with her arresting husky alto grabbing so many local music fans’ attentions.

“The first time I heard her sing, she was still a teenager,” remembers 40 Watt talent broker Velena Vego. “All of our jaws dropped-that voice!”

With Outside Our Gates, her third release in as many years, Durrett has proven the adage the third time is the charm to be true. Formerly simple songs are now fleshed out with enchanting arrangements of strings, horn and piano, causing her work as a whole to become more stirring and energetic.

What sparked Outside Our Gates’ euphonic vault? Several factors, Durrett says, the main change being her increasing collaboration with different musicians from the Athens scene.

After the release of her last album, The Mezzanine, Athens-based Ham1 backed Durrett on tour. Collaborating with other musicians changed the way Durrett approached songwriting.

“I started thinking about playing with a band and trying to write songs that might be more fun for them to play and thinking more in terms of how songs affected audience members,” says Durrett. “When I’d write songs, I’d think about what it would feel like to hear that song or play that song as a part of a band.”

Durrett’s goal for Outside Our Gates was “to bring people into my world, instead of pushing them out.

The other records sort of sound like isolation to me, whereas this record feels a lot more inclusive sonically and thematically and structurally,” she explains. “The songs [on Gates] are a lot more filled out and lush than the other two were.”

When writing songs, Durrett writes “a lot of lyrics in the shower and in the car when I’m driving, which is dangerous,” she says. “I write a lot of things when I first wake up in the morning. That tends to be some sort of not-quite-awake and not-quite-asleep state where I think about words, semi-conscious.”

When Durrett was ready to go into the studio, she enlisted the help of legendary indie rock musician Eric Bachmann (Crooked Fingers, Archers of Loaf, Azure Ray) as producer.

“Brian Causey [formerly Man or Astroman?, who owns her label, WARM Electronic Recordings] introduced me to Eric, who is a longtime friend of his,” says Durrett. “I had demoed all my songs. Eric came in and listened to the demos. For about a week we talked about the songs and listened to the demos, and figured out what our vision was for the record and for each song individually. After that, he went back and wrote arrangements for the songs and showed them to me, and we kind of bounced ideas off of each other.”

Working with Bachmann was “really easy. He’s a really smart, really talented guy with a lot of experience and confidence who knows how to make things happen in the studio,” says Durrett. “He’s very structured in his thinking - I’m not like that at all, so it was good for me to have somebody like that to work with. He has a huge catalog of ideas and influences to pull from and draw from and as we would talk about the songs, he would think about where the songs and sounds fit into music history. He was a music student and I think that plays into what he’s doing when he makes his choices, which is not something I have access to, so it’s cool for me to have that around. There was definitely a kind of push and pull between us and our different ideas for songs. There was give and take. Sometimes I would win and sometimes he would win and sometimes there was a compromise. If I were steering the whole thing, I think it would be a lot more limited sonically. He brought into the songs a lot that I would not have thought to or could not have done.”

A wide mix of styles populate Gates, each accentuated with special flourishes, like the ebullient horns on pop-rock anthem “Wild As Them,” the minor piano on the slow waltz of “In the Eaves” and the enigmatic loops, mournful cello and violin of “All of Them All.” “Not Running” has a simplicity that highlights the exquisite beauty of Durrett’s voice, accented by a stunning flamenco style guitar solo in the background.

“We went into the studio and started trying to find people that could play the instruments we needed and started recording,” She says about after Bachmann and she had the album’s vision intact.

Altogether, 13 Athens musicians appeared on the album, including Amanda Kapasoucz (Tin Cup Prophette), the members of Ham1, Mamie Fike-Simonds (Jackpot City), Jay Nackashi (Empire State), Rob Lomax (The Lovers), Lucy Ralston, David Osborne, Brian Causey and Durrett’s uncle Vic Chesnutt, who played omnichord and sang backing vocals on Durrett’s Ode to collaboration, “Bridges.”

Ever since he married Durrett’s aunt Tina when she was 12, Chesnutt has been one of her biggest influences.

“He was always encouraging me,” Durrett remembers. “He had me play violin on [“West of Rome”] and had my sister play cello. I stayed with them a couple of times as a kid. Vic and I would write songs together and practice together while Tina was at work, so he was always kind of showing me what it was to be a musician and a songwriter. Obviously I listened to his records a lot during that time and just was amazed by him. I was a teenager and studying literature and to me Vic was a Southern writer like a lot of the writers I read in my classes, of that same caliber.”

Like Chesnutt, Durrett takes care crafting her lyrics, which contain sublime gems such as “Not Running,” with “Eloquent phrase / Turns my heart / In its cage,” that often resonate with imagery from the natural world.

“It seems like a lot of my lyrics lately are influenced by my external surroundings,” says Durrett, who recently moved into a house that has “a big swath of woods behind it, so I started exploring back there,” explains Durrett. “I started hiking a lot around that time. Getting out in the world more and getting closer to nature affected the lyrics on this record because I could wake up and see a coyote at my fence, or a family of owls in my backyard, or a six-foot rat snake slithering across my front yard.”

www.lizdurrett.com