A chat with Melissa McClelland April 11, 2009

Posted by Ron Warnick in Movies, Music, People, Road trips.
add a comment

Singer-songwriter Melissa McClelland is set to release her third album, “Victoria Day,” on Six Shooter Records and is playing concerts with her musician husband, Luke Doucet, in England and her native Canada in the coming weeks. But after that, she’s heading to the Mother Road (with her mother, natch).

It’s not McClelland’s first time on Route 66. A few years ago, she journeyed down Main Street of America with her manager and a tiny film crew. The voyage produced a music video (“Passenger 24,” seen below) and a one-hour documentary, “Pedal to Steel,” that mixed scenes the people and places of the historic road with acoustic performances from McClelland’s then-current album, “Thumbelina’s One Night Stand.”

During a recent phone interview from her hometown of Burlington, Ontario, McClelland talked about two new songs on “Victoria Day” inspired by experiences on the Mother Road, drinking moonshine at the Luna Cafe, jamming with Harley and Annabelle Russell during McClelland’s song “Passenger 24,” kicking back at the Blue Swallow Motel, and returning to the Mother Road this June to research her family’s roots.

Q: Your publicist said that much of your new album, “Victoria Day,” was written during your Route 66 trip. Is that correct?

A: Some of the songs, yes. A handful of the songs were started during that trip, and I finished them afterward.

One of them that I wanted to ask about is “Glenrio.” Is that one inspired by the Route 66 ghost town on the Texas-New Mexico border?

Yes, definitely. … We stopped at most of the ghost towns along the way. That was one place where we pulled over, got out of the car, and it just seemed like a really abandoned place. I don’t know that much about it … we were only there less than 10 minutes. The guys we were with, they walked down the street, and there was a pack of wild dogs. We got back in the car and left, and that’s when the song started taking form. It seemed like a mysterious place, and I just started writing that song right away. And I like the ring of “Glenrio”; it’s a great name.

You’ve had some time to digest your Route 66 journey. What sort of lasting impressions did it leave you?

The interesting thing is that just recently, my mom has been doing a lot of research on my family tree. What I’m finding out is that a lot of our family history runs along the route. It’s funny that I didn’t know this at the time, but apparently we have tons of family from Illinois all the way to California, a lot of them in the small towns we were in, such as Cuba, Mo. And I’m actually going to be driving the route again with my mom in June to research the family history. My mom and I are going to start in Chicago and drive across the country together. We going to do as much research as possible on our family history and bring it to my grandmother, who is 95 years old and living in California.

So the route has definitely stuck with me. It was a trip I loved taking. Doing it as a documentary, it was kind of hard to take it all in because we had to do it so quickly. We did the whole drive in nine days and were filming stuff the whole time. There were so many things I saw along the way where I kept thinking, “I really need to do this again and take my time with it.” So I’m glad I’m going to have that chance. We going to have three to four weeks to get across the country.

During your performance of “Skyway Bridge” on the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, it reminded me of a term movie critic Roger Ebert used called “the voodoo of location,” where a location becomes almost its own character in a film. Did you get that same sort of vibe when you were performing the song?

Absolutely, yes. That was my goal with this trip. I was just getting really tired with the way of doing things as a musician — driving from one city to the next, not seeing anything between, and being inside some stinky club. So I really wanted to make the documentary about the surroundings and the environment, and let that play off of the music. And that absolutely happened, because we were totally at liberty to choose what we wanted to do on the trip. On a whim, we would pull over, we’d see something really cool: “Hey, let’s do a song right here.” It was really great to do it that way.

Did you have a set plan with that documentary?

We had to, to a certain extent, because of the time constraints. We only had nine or 10 days to go from Chicago to L.A. We had to pick and choose what we wanted to see and what we could leave behind. So we did have it somewhat planned out, but we did leave room for spontaneity, too. That’s the charm of the route; it’s a mystery, and you don’t know about it until you’re actually on it. We wanted to learn from it.

The look of the film is so good.

The director, Luke Hutton, is such a talented guy. He’s from Winnipeg, and my husband, he’s known him since they were kids. So that’s how I met him. He lived in L.A. for years and went to school there and made films there. The first time I saw his stuff, I knew I wanted to work with him.

Was it his idea to do the documentary, or was it something you wanted to do?

It was my idea. I’m trying to remember how it took form … the seed of the idea was me not wanting to do a regular tour and wanting to do something different. And I thought of Route 66, and I always wanted to do that. It’s the Mother Road, the road trip of all road trips.

I read on one of your online posts about drinking moonshine at the Luna Cafe.

Yes (laughs). That was amazing. They had this moonshine in a jar, and it looked pretty awful. But it tasted pretty great. … There’s a song on my new record, called “God Loves Me” …. Although that song has transformed and has been rewritten to be a bit more mysterious, the beginnings of that song were definitely inspired by that place.

The stories they told me there about the history … They have that fantastic sign out front, with the cherry (neon). In the motel (upstairs), they would have prostitutes there. When one of the prostitutes was available, the cherry on the sign would light up (laughs). That was such a great story, and the song started off being about that. But I ended up cutting the verse about the Luna Cafe and the cherry lighting up … I can’t remember why. I guess I wanted to make the song a little more mysterious. But the Luna definitely inspired that song.

I’ve talked to Harley and Annabelle Russell, and they’ve spoken quite fondly of you.

They were so awesome, and they put on such a great show for the cameras, obviously. It was so funny … I love that part of the documentary. But once the cameras are off, you get the feeling that they’re totally down-to-earth and sweet, sweet people. I’ve kept in touch with a few e-mails. I’ll have to go visit them with my mom.

On the songs in the documentary, how many takes did they require?

Some took quite a few. Some took just one. It all depends. The one song we did in front of the diner (in Tucumcari, N.M.), we were lent this amazing car, and we parked it right in the middle of downtown. We had my manager standing at the end of the street, redirecting traffic, so we could record the song. It was totally illegal. There weren’t that many cars. But there were irate drivers who’d give her the finger and drive off. So it took a few takes because of that (laughs).

It looked like you were ready to melt from the heat during some of those scenes in the film.

Oh, man … it was so hot. In some of those scenes, you’d have someone holding the boom mike and someone fanning me so I wouldn’t be pouring sweat. It was hilarious, trying to look put together but feeling like you were falling apart. It was hard to work in that heat. We got up really, really early, because we couldn’t shoot in midday; the heat was too intense. For our performances, as soon as the sun came up, we were out there.

It was a lot of work and not very much sleep. But a lot of fun.

You mentioned the Blue Swallow earlier. You really liked it, yes?

That place … like I said, we were really working from dawn until two in the morning. It was crazy hours, and when we got to the Blue Swallow, it was the first chance we had to just take a night off. So we really enjoyed ourselves there, relaxed and had a good night’s sleep. It was our first chance to sit back and breathe.

And there are so many hospitable people on the route. People are so kind … they just take you in. It’s such a wonderful energy.

I take it that the Blue Swallow is on your itinerary in June?

Absolutely. It’s such a charming place.

No film crew in tow this time?

No, not this time (laughs). We’re going to just do a lot of research (on the family tree) at libraries, go to graveyards and just talk to a lot of people. But I’m going to write a lot, do a journal and a lot of songwriting, hopefully. This time, I want the trip to be personal and take it in on my own without cameras.

But I’ll definitely put something about it online at some point. My mom’s a great writer, too. Maybe we’ll do something together and put it out there.

(Photos courtesy of MelissaMcClelland.com)