A
country-music performer's decision to move to Nashville is
typically the product of a dream. For Suzy Bogguss, it was eminently
practical.
In the early 1980s, the Aledo native and Illinois State University graduate was knocking around the country, doing gigs at coffeehouses and ski resorts. She lived in the Quad Cities, Kewanee, Peoria.
She didn't envision a future as a respected and popular country singer. She didn't aspire to the gold and platinum records she would eventually earn.
"It just never really occurred to me that that's what my goal was going to be," she said in a phone interview last week, in advance of her May 12 performance with the Quad City Symphony Orchestra at the Adler Theatre. "It was just fun."
Fun, but not a stable living. She said that one morning in Montana, "I just woke up, started crying, and went, 'I don't even have health insurance. I'm 27, and I don't even have health insurance.'" And then she decided to move to Nashville.
The move happened in 1985, and since then Bogguss climbed to the top of the country-music mountain and returned to lower elevations.
But unlike many artists who try to recapture what they once had, Bogguss sounds comfortable with her diminished commercial stature. Being off the major labels means a smaller audience, but it brings with it freedom.
Her last record was a lounge-jazz affair with only hints of country in her voice and an occasional fiddle to bridge the genre gap, not unlike Lyle Lovett. The CD is a lovely, laid-back showcase for Bogguss' unaffected and true voice.
She's also worked with several symphonies in recent years. With the Quad City Symphony on Saturday, she'll perform hits and recent songs with her band and the orchestra. That will follow a symphonic set including the music of Copland and Bernstein, featuring fiddler Crystal Plohman. (The River Cities' Reader is a media sponsor of this Spring Pops concert.)
And her upcoming album is a collaboration with New York synthesizer artist Jason Miles that will almost surely surprise her fans. It's called Sweet Danger, and Bogguss plans to release it independently on September 4.
This new record, she said, "has nothing to do with anything I've ever done in my whole life. ... It's much more of a folkie pop record, like a James Taylor record ... . When I say 'pop,' I mean it's easy to listen to. One song kind of melts into the other."
As
a performer and programmer, Miles has worked with everybody from
Miles Davis to Luther Vandross to Michael Jackson. "He's a
classic New York, Jewish music guy," Bogguss said of Miles. "Talks
with a completely different language. Uses all the good jazz-cat
lingo. ... We're sort of the unlikely couple.
"Usually I make my records with guitar players, but this time I picked a synth player," she continued. "So many aspects of it I feel like I'm risking here. At the same time, it's still my material. It's still only the chords that I know."
The album features bassist Will Lee (of David Letterman's house band) and drummer Chris Parker (formerly of the Saturday Night Live band), both veterans of the Brecker Brothers. Bogguss said the band "play[s] my folkie little country chords, and it sounds different. ... It's got a vibe to it. Oooh, now I'm starting to talk like a New York cat. It's vibe-y! It does have a mood, for sure. ...
"I've been learning so much about my voice over the years," she said. "What is the gift that I've been given? How does it work as something pleasant for people to hear? That's one of the things I was really trying to go for with this album, and that's why I think it has this mood that it has.
"I'm curious to hear what people are going to think. Somebody in the jazz world would say, 'These are country songs.' And somebody in the country world might say, 'But the production sounds like it's jazz production.' To me, it's like we melted two things together."
Bogguss said that rather than trying to replicate past successes, she's trying to find new avenues to explore.
"I already know how to make my old records," she said. "I don't know how to make a new record with some players that really challenge me. ... These are the days of my collaborations."
She tells a story about Chet Atkins, with whom she worked on 1994's Simpatico: "Chet Atkins was asking this 20-year-old to show him a riff. That's how you keep going. That's how you keep growing and keep evolving. That's what I want to do. He was a great mentor to me."
Collaboration, Bogguss said, is also a necessity. "I co-write mostly," she said. "I just feel so much more confident. And I'm also kind of lazy."
She might start a song but won't finish it. She might have a lick or a title, and the back-and-forth with somebody helps develop it. "When I sit down and write songs [by myself], they're like 'Oh the beautiful butterfly / Floats in the sky.' You don't want to be in the room with that."
Her recent partnerships wouldn't have been possible without her past success. ("You can call it exploiting friendship," she said.) Her 1991 album Aces went platinum, which led to her 1992 Country Music Association Horizon Award. She also has a trio of gold records, including her 1994 greatest-hits collection.
But in spite of Bogguss' strong sales and loads of critical acclaim, the country-music industry changed around the time that she took a break to start a family in the mid-1990s. In 1999, her label dropped her.
She said that in 12 years at Capitol, she had four label heads. The first signed her, and the second - Jimmy Bowen - shepherded the careers of Bogguss, Tanya Tucker, and Garth Brooks. But after Bowen left, things went downhill.
"I was kind of like a leftover," Bogguss said. The final label head, she said, "botched up quite a few careers while he was there. I wasn't the only one. At least I had people to commiserate with.
"This even happened to Garth Brooks at the same time, 'cause we were on the same label. Both of these label heads, they really wanted to continue to grow Garth's career, but they couldn't. It had already reached its peak."
And therein lies some of the wisdom that Bogguss can impart: Stardom has a natural life cycle, and it's silly to reach for the top when you're on the wrong side of the summit. It's important to age gracefully.
"The bottom line is: I made all of my own choices," Bogguss said. "I am certainly not sour-grapes about it, because I had the opportunity to be the flavor of the month. ... I went to the show. I got to go to the show."
That journey started with grunt work, although Bogguss said she considers herself fortunate. ("I walked into the right places at the right times," she said. "Every door opened for me that could have ever opened. I'm one of the luckiest people on this Earth.")
When
she moved to Nashville, Bogguss patched together vocal work. She got
$10 a pop singing publishing demos. A friend offered here a gig three
nights a week.
"One day, one of the publishers said to me, 'What are you going to do?'" she recalled. "And I said, 'Well, I'm a pretty good harmony singer. I really think I might be able to do some backup on some of these albums that are coming out.'
"And he said, 'Well, if that's what you want to do, that's great. But if you want to be a singer or an artist, you can't ever say that again. Because that's going to hold you back, and you'll never be anything but a background singer.'
"So I chewed on that for about a week and a half, and all of a sudden I decided, 'I'm an artist. I'm a singer.'"
She got a job singing at Dollywood, and made a tape to sell. "And that's what got me my deal at Capitol," she said.
Her major-label days are long gone, and Bogguss is still trying to figure out her place in this new music-industry landscape. She's chosen the independent route for now, but she's also wondering how to reach the people who made her a hit more than a decade ago.
"A lot of people, we've lost touch with each other," Bogguss said. "They don't know that I'm even still making records, and I don't know how to get hold of them because I can't afford ... the kind of advertising that would put me on the front of everything."
So she's trying the Internet, with an e-mail newsletter and song downloads from her Web site (http://www.suzybogguss.com).
"I'm not trying to make a killing in the music business," she said. "I'm just trying to make a living ... and hopefully grow. ... I just want to be valuable to those people who like to hear me sing."
CLICK HERE to listen to the River Cities' Reader interview with Suzy Bogguss, visit (http://www.qcspan.com).
