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Arts & Entertainment

Chatting with John Hiatt—Songwriting, Storytelling and Nonsense

The longtime singer-songwriter launches his tour with a sold-out night at the Troubadour, talks music and career.

In town to support the release of his 20th album, Dirty Jeans and Mud Slide Hymns, John Hiatt launched his summer tour with a sold-out show at the  Thursday.

Always considered a “songwriter’s songwriter,” he went from being what Elvis Costello called “L.A.’s best kept secret” in 1983 to the songwriter that every singer from Bonnie Raitt to B.B. King was going to for good material. It happened when he got sober, moved back to Nashville, and settled down.

Hiatt met with Patch early on the morning before the show to talk about this transition and how he succeeds in writing great songs year after year.

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West Hollywood Patch: You’re up early for a musician.

John Hiatt: Hey, I live on a farm. Been up for hours.

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Patch: Has writing songs changed for you over the years?

Hiatt: I think I get more out of it than I ever had. It means more to me. I’m more passionate about it. As you get older, the things you love the most become more important to you. It gets distilled down, and more delicious and more meaningful.

Patch: You’ve been writing songs now for 48 years—

Hiatt: Man. That’s a long time.

Patch: What have you learned about songwriting, having done it for so many years?

Hiatt: I think the main thing I learned is just to let go of the whole thing. When I was younger, there was a time I tried to employ various devices to write songs. As I suppose we all have. Like I got an office once when I came back to Nashville in ’85, because I thought, okay, I got a 1-year-old daughter. I was a single-parent at the time and I needed some money, because frankly, I didn’t know what was gonna happen. So I had an office for about a year. But that didn’t work out so well. But that was a long time ago.

Patch: It’s a romantic notion, going to the office every day and churning out songs.

Hiatt: Well, I knew that model, because when I came to Nashville when I was 18, I was writing for Tree Publishing. I was not that kind of writer at all, but I was surrounded by those kind of writers. Bobby Braddock kind of took me under his wing a little bit.

Patch: How was writing alongside Braddock?

Hiatt: He wrote hits all week long for George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Curly Putnam. I saw him do it. I was in awe of that kind of writing. I didn’t know how to do that. Back in those days, they came to work every day. But they also just wrote all the time. They kind of lived and breathed it every day.

Patch: Where do your two disciplines—guitar and songwriting—converge?

Hiatt: What I do everyday is play the guitar . . . That’s my main songwriting tool, so if a song is gonna happen, it’s because I picked up a guitar and started playing. About 99.9 percent of all the songs I write come from a chord progression, a riff, a melody. Lyrics are always the last thing I get to, so to me picking up the guitar each day is sort of like running the lightning rod up and seeing if anything is gonna strike. But if it doesn’t, it’s not a big deal.

Patch: How do you come up with new music – new chords and melodies – after all this time?

Hiatt: I just keep playing the same four or five chords I know, and I sing with it, and when something catches my ear, it’s usually something a little different. Enough different from what I’ve done, unless it’s patently obvious I’ve just lifted something verbatim from me or from somebody else.

Patch: Are you actively trying to do new things with chords you’ve never done?

Hiatt: No. [Laughs] No. I’m just cop a riff or something, but within what I know, I’m trying to do something different. I like the limitations, and I’m trying to find something within those limitations that sounds different to me. Like how can you play E, A and B, but make it sound a little different from how you’ve played it your whole life.

Patch: It’s interesting that you mention limitations, because what you can do within those limitations is  –

Hiatt: Pretty amazing. I’m happy in my little ball of primitive stuff. It pushes me enough to try to figure out something different. I’ve never tried to go for the odd chord for the odd chord’s sake, though the bridge of “Love That Girl” is unusual. The melody kind of took it there, and I thought, whoa, that’s interesting.

Patch: So you’re singing with it while playing?

Hiatt: Yeah, nonsense usually. Nonsense is a good place to start. [Laughs] A lot of my lyrics are just trying to make some sense out of nonsense, write something that’s kind of interesting, try to tell a story. The melody and the chord structure evokes an emotion. It’s all about the feel. If you’re lucky, while you’re singing your nonsense, you’ll actually pop out a line or two.

Patch: Can you give an example?

Hiatt: In “Damn This Town,” I had that riff – it’s a riff with two chords – I had that going and I just kept trying to find the melody, and I came in one morning and I got that line: “They killed my brother in a poker game/Damn this town.” That just popped out and I thought, “Here we go.” Thank you and good night.” That, to me, has everything. We got trouble. And if you got trouble, you got a story. We got a guy who has got a problem, and he’s a little cracked by it, and he’s about to move.

Patch: You’ve always been a great story-teller.

Hiatt: I always felt that if you’re going to sing words, why not tell a story? It’s what holds my interest, too. This is really selfish. I want to enjoy it myself by discovering some new way of telling a story.

Patch: So many songs of yours have been covered by other artists, from B.B. King and Eric Clapton to Bonnie Raitt and Bob Dylan.

Hiatt: It’s been a nice surprise. I’m so glad so many people have wanted to record my songs. I’m proud of that. But it was not by design. I’ve never written for someone. I’m not a Brill Building-book-an-appointment-cowrite-have-a-hit kind of writer. And not being that kind of writer, I’m very fortunate to have had so many of my songs covered.

Patch: Your songs have always been great, but in the mid-80s, it seemed everyone started to notice.

Hiatt: Yeah. Before that, I had never really been able to separate the songwriter from the performer. My personal life was a complete mess. But once I got healthy as an artist, I got healthy as a human being. Or healthier, I should say. [Laughs] And when that happens, you start firing on all eight cylinders and things start to happen.

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