Interview: Mac McAnally Joins The Band

SB: Are you happy with the end result?

MM: Oh yes, absolutely. The nice thing musically is that it was truly a labor of love for the artists and the musicians who all took part. Behind the tail of that comet involves management and labels and clearances and lawyers and that sort of stuff. At the point were at now, my most recent memory is more that aspect of it. But the music is the joy of all of it. The band is so great and everybody did great work.

When Inara George sang the song [Trouble] that her mom sang to her as a lullaby which her dad wrote, you can’t buy that. And Dave Matthews setting the bar with all that vocal stuff, that’s a big pile of him on Fat Man, he just worked his butt off. The band really lit up and enjoyed tracking in Key West at Jimmy’s studio down there. We had a great time and then we came to Muscle Shoals to my place and overdubbed and sang and continued to have a great time. Even though it stretched across three years everybody smiled the whole time. Any time the music came across the headphones it made you smile. I’m a happy camper.

SB: You’re on the road a lot with Jimmy and Little Feat’s always on the road themselves, how did you find the time to work together?

MM: Well we certainly weren’t sitting and knocking heads in the studio for three years. It was a combination of that and then the many artists who were like “yes absolutely, I want to take part in it I can do it in this window of time.” Getting those windows of time to line up between all of those artists was a trick. After the music has been done for a while then you have all the legal clearances and the label to clear. It’s not diry work, it’s just not as much fun as music. But everybody involved was really generous with their time and really generous with their efforts. I think you can hear it’s people having a good time when you drop the needle. That makes it all worthwhile.

SB: How did putting the album together work. Let’s take the case of Dave Matthews. Did the band lay down the tracks and then send them to Dave?

MM: The band went in for a week, and in some cases some artists were committed early on and they were like “this is the song I want. We’re talking about doing it in this way, and this is my key.” Some of those things we knew in advance and some of those things were just hypothetical.

We cut about 25 tracks over the course of a week in Key West and the band was having such a good time in the studio it wasn’t like we were hurting ourselves. We were still going out and having a great meal every night, high fiving one another and doing it again the next day. We happened to know Brooks and Dunn wanted to sing Willin’ and they knew what key they wanted to sing it in, so we discussed the general feel of the thing before laying it down. In the case of Dave, he told us “I like these couple of songs and this would be the key I’d do it in.” Fat Man was his first choice and I can see why when I hear him sing it.

Bob Seger was more of a hypothetical discussion. He liked that song Something in the Water. He’d heard it from Jeffrey Steele, who was one of the writers of it, and he told us a key. We cut that without him being there, but with him involved on the phone.

In other cases, we just called Emmylou Harris and told her we’re gonna do sort of a bluegrass raveup of Sailin’ Shoes, would you be inclined? And she said yes. It didn’t come to pass for like two years, but we cut the track with our hearts in the right place. It all ended up working.

SB: What was your role in the production of the album?

MM: Well, I think I was the luckiest guy in the room to be there. The nature of Little Feat is that they’ve been together for a while. It’s doesn’t mean as much to them to be in the room with each other as much as it does for me to get to be in the same room with them. I sort of got to be an extra band member.

I’m more of a hands-on producer. I tend to make stupid decisions unless I have something in my hands like a guitar or a mandolin or something. I was playing on most of the tracks and that was a joy for me. The reverence that I hold so much of their work may have rejuvenated their own appreciation for what they’ve done as we were revisiting some of those classics that we wound up cutting on the record. As opposed to playing a set that they’ve been playing for 25 years we were actually looking at those songs in a different way. In the same way that you do in Church you sing a song that you’ve been singing for your whole life and someone comes in and makes you pay attention to the words in a way you never have before. The band touched base with some of those songs that they may have just been playing and not thinking about. So I think it was good for everyone.

SB: When the band members would lay down the new versions of their classic songs, would they get nostalgic and talk about the original recordings?

MM: Oh yeah. They’d talk about the different ways they’ve done it over different periods of time because we’re talking about three decades of playing some of these songs. They’d joke and say it went through this phase for a while where we going Miles Davis in the middle of it or Bob Marley. The nature of that versatile of a band is that they can pretty much point the truck in any direction and do a pretty believable job of going jazz or going reggae or going ragtime or dixieland. They’re a talented band, so when they take off in a direction, any direction, it’s pretty impressive.

[youtube]vzO2Vljtae0[/youtube]

SB: I caught the Coral Reefer Band for the first time at Newport back in August and I was really impressed with the show. Talk about a band that can play a bunch of different styles well. What did you think of playing at Newport?

MM: It meant a lot to me. I grew up in the Deep South and I’ve read about Newport. I have a reverence for it, I’m not saying that people that are up there all the time don’t, but in my case it’s always been a watermark event in my psyche having never been there. I was looking forward to it, as was Jimmy. We we’re like little kids. That’s one of the cool things about the music business. In his case, be sixty years old and have never not toured in forty years and he’s as excited as a teenage kid about playing the Newport Folk Festival. Even when that’s for probably less than half of what he makes for a regular Jimmy Buffett show. He was so pumped for it, we were talking about the setlist for it months in advance. Anything that lights you up and makes you giggle like a little junior high kid is a good thing. When it’s something like music, it’s also good for the people who hear it. Also, you couldn’t look in a place that didn’t look like a postcard to me.

SB: After every song you’d hear almost more applause from all the people on boats out on the water than from the crowd in front of the stage. I was surrounded by such happy people who were enjoying every minute of it. It was a beautiful thing to see.

MM: That’s something that over the years I’ve actually heard Jimmy be dismissed as just simply a guy who makes everybody happy. Maybe in this particular piece of time that we’re living in, it’s maybe a little easier to realize that’s not the simplest thing to achieve. Being nothing more than a guy who walks around making people happy is not the worst scenario.

He is a big part of this Little Feat project having happened. I don’t think it would’ve happened without Jimmy. I’m sure the guys probably told you the same thing. Jimmy just offered himself up in any form or fashion. It was never a business deal, it was just like “I want to hear a Little Feat album, and I’m willing to go to whatever lengths to make it happen.” He loves the band.

Related Content

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

New to Glide

Keep up-to-date with Glide

Twitter