lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: muscadine

2021-02-04: daemonrecords.com:

the new single, "muscadine" was penned by amy ray and recorded with her band remotely in their respective homes. the song was produced by brian speiser, and mixed by bobby tis who both helped create amy's most recent country release, holler. bobby and brian hail from the ranks of the tedeschi trucks band.

amy sings this story of love and loss over a landscape of haunting melodic keyboard drones, mixed with acoustic guitar, dobro, pedal steel, and fiddle, laid over a heartbeat of rhythm and bass. alt-americana, north carolinian, h.c. mcentire provides a whole chorus of backing vocals that are her own special flavor of sweet and devastating.

amy says, "i wrote this song after one of my oldest dogs passed. regardless of living deaf and blind for his last few years, he was always willing to go on adventures with me in the woods. he might run into a few trees along the way, or fall in a little ditch, but he always got up and carried on. i started the music from a riff on acoustic guitar, with some inspiration from brent cobb records, and the idea of simple parts that add up to capture a certain ache i was feeling. in the end, it's a country tune about learning to love and receive love in the purest way, and to not be picky about life, but to stay the course with curiosity and gratitude.

----------

2024-01-15: roots rednecks and radicals podcast (amy ray)

will houk: well, another artist that i really love is h.c. mcintyre and uh you did the duet with, with muscadine and i'd love to hear you talk about that song. and i want to know more about the dog in the story, it's a compelling character.

amy ray: oh yeah, yeah. that dog was a dog named sawyer. he was a little chow mix and, um, got, he came from the streets of atlanta when i got him, he was, couldn't even look me in the eye he was so abused. and he lived to be 17 and he, he turned out to be this amazing dog that just really just would go along with you and do whatever you were doing and never caused any trouble, you know. before he died he had gone deaf and blind, and he kept, he just still went on all my walks. i have seven dogs, and at that time, i had, i think i had five at that time and he was one of them and he would just go on the walks and, you know, he would run into trees and, you know, trip in the gullies or whatever, but he would just keep, keep on going really great attitude. and so i kind of wrote the song about that sort of unconditional love that he had for life and for me and loyalty and the way that you can learn from a dog, you know, like how to what love really is. and i, it was kind of a love song for someone for a person too and just kind of wishing i could be more like that kind of dog, you know, where you just take things in stride and you don't, you're not always looking for what's better, you know, or trying to have what you can't, you just work with what you have. so, it really is about that.

amy ray: and, and heather, h.c. mcintyre, she's, she is one of my very, very, very favorite artists and i've, i've been doing stuff with her since she was in a punk rock band called bellafea. a long time ago, she, i was on tour with my punk band and she wrote me and said, you know, can i open some shows, i'm like, she was really young, she's like, i, i'll work my, i'll work my ass off and i'll promote the shows and i'll do everything i can do to get people there and, and i was like, yeah, yeah, you can. and because i was, you know, small, it was, we were all in a small time sort of community diy world of that, you know, and she's like one of the only artists that i've ever played with that actually does all that stuff, which she says she's going to, it's amazing. like she's just such a hard worker, but she's also like, incredibly gifted as a songwriter and musician and just constantly reinventing herself and exploring new avenues. and so, and i love her voice, like, i love her voice. so i always, ask her to do, duets with me on, on any record i make. she did a, on my first country record, i actually had her sing a song of her own and i just backed her up on my record and it's called, uh, when you come for me, it's a classic song. it's one of the best songs she's ever written. and we just backed her up singing it and i featured it on the record and then i just sung back up to her. and then on my second country record, i can't remember what she did on that one. something. oh, she did a song called more pills on that one. um, oh, no, that was on the first record. that's right. i can't remember what she did on the second one. but anyway, she's always done stuff with us and we always play with her and, you know, i love her music. so that's, that's, you know, that one was, there was three during the pandemic. it was muscadine, tear it down, and, um, chuck will's widow, and that muscadine was one of the pandemic songs and i just sent it to her at her studio she works at, and that was another one that we transferred to tape. and, um, you know, we just, she just kind of, i mean, she really made up all that. we told her to do something that sort of was for lack of a better reference we were just like, can you do like a bee gees type thing because we, we like the bee gees and she totally did it, you know, it was great.