Taking notes

David Olney tells stories of life and loss

by Chris Flisher

< There's a couple of ways you can try and make it in the music business. One is to blatantly throw yourself into the marketing hit machine and try to come out with your sanity, pride, and integrity intact. The other is to quietly craft your songs, putting the emphasis and thrust of your efforts into the art instead of the game. The risk in the former, of course, is loss of artistic honesty. The benefit of the latter is the pride in remaining true to yourself and your craft.

Nashville-based singer/songwriter David Olney, who performs at the Iron Horse Music Hall on May 20, chose the later. As such, his songs may not be on the lips of every country- and roots-loving music fan, but you can be sure his name is revered among fellow artists.

"There are two kinds of writers in this business," he says. "The ones who write commercially and those who do what I do. You can rarely do both. In fact, when I'd try and force myself to be more commercial, I'd have these visions of writing this song that I thought was great and then walking into some publisher somewhere, and there'd be this old guy looking like George Burns with a big cigar sitting behind a desk saying, `Nah, they're not gonna go for that.' It used to really fuck with my mind. So I stopped worrying about that aspect."

Even though Olney has had some of the best cover his songs, most notably Emmylou Harris who recorded "Jerusalem Tomorrow" and Linda Ronstadt who covered "Women 'Cross the River," his songs and style are more notable for their storytelling qualities. "I like a good story. I don't like hearing about somebody else's arguments with their boyfriend or girlfriend. I just don't want to know that stuff. It's too much detail, and it's not entertaining. You have to write about emotions that you know. If I'm listening to someone else's songs, I want to feel like they are trying to communicate with me, not at me."

Olney's songs do just that. But to the extent that they include his emotions, his approach is more as a recorder of events, where the emotion evolves through the actions of the characters. "I see myself sometimes like a court stenographer," he chuckles. "I see or hear these great stories, and they take me to a place where some emotion is uncovered through the story. It's important to concentrate on the story."

The appeal of story-songs lies in their telling and the conflicts they reveal. It's the difference between art and product. Often sad, often disturbing, Olney's songs are stories of lives wrapped in conflict or loss.

The title of his last release, High, Wide and Lonesome (Philo), kind of says it all. In "My Family Owns This Town," he recounts the story of a privileged heir to a local fortune whose happiness and charmed existence crumbles with his wife's adulterous nature and subsequent murder. The same overarching sense of drama and pathos punctuates the "Flood of '93." In that sense he's a storyteller as much as a songwriter. Like Bill Morrissey, Guy Clark, or the late, great Townes Van Zandt, Olney chooses this far more challenging path.

"Whenever I'm driving by myself," he recalls, "and I'm trying to stay focused, I recite the words to Townes's `Pancho and Lefty.' It always amazes me what a perfect song that is. Not a word wasted, and yet you develop this whole sense of events and emotion. That's the essence of good songwriting."

Olney is quick to point out that although songwriting has many sides, no one is better than the other -- just different. "Both types of writing are valid, and both require skill sets, I just choose to write the way I do and let the hitmakers write the way they do, that's all. Very few can do both."

Surely Bob Dylan straddles both the heavyweight and the lighter side of songwriting. According to Olney, Dylan stands alone, like an exception, like a god. "How can you not be influenced by him? It's like what Dizzy Gillespie said about Louis Armstrong, `Thanks to Louis for inventing my job.' It's like that with songwriters and Dylan."

Olney has a new release scheduled for this summer titled Real Lies. With more trenchant observations and plenty of chilling stories, he has obviously found his niche and to hell with the hits.

"Writing a good commercial song, and I have done that, usually with a co-writer, is like fishing for hits, so you have your days when you strike and those you don't," he says. "But writing a true masterpiece, something that does a lot more that bounce around your head like a radio hit, is like looking for the great white whale. In that sense, I am more like Captain Ahab looking for Moby Dick. You know how hard that can be, but when you strike, man it's like nothing else on earth."

David Olney appears at the Iron Horse Music Hall, in Northampton, at 7 p.m. on May 20. Tickets are $15. Call (413) 584-0610.