It all
starts with a song, but for Julie Lee’s seventh album out March 6, it
actually started with babies - not her babies, but the offspring of some
of Nashville’s best musicians. As a longtime respected
singer/songwriter, and Nashville being Nashville, Lee’s occasional side
job of babysitting was for the likes of Kenny Vaughan and Mike Bub. They
continually offered their services if she would get out and play again,
and thus The Baby Daddies were born at a live show in 2010, inspiring
her to get back into the studio last year.
The
writer, whose songs have been recorded by Krauss, Pam Tillis, Block,
Mark Erelli and more, has been a visual artist longer than she’s been a
tunesmith. Those two lives have remained mostly separate until a
mysterious scrap of paper she used in one of her pieces inspired the
beginnings of a song.
“It’s
been a long time coming, the marriage of these different sides of my
life,” shares Lee. “I kept asking myself, ‘How do I get from all this
babysitting and making art back to music?’ But as fate would have
it...the babysitting brought about the incarnation of "The
Baby-Daddies,” and the art had already begun to inspire some of the
songs.”
That mysterious scrap of paper simply said, “Does the road wind uphill all the way?” It
eventually worked its way into her collage-art, but it also became the
first track on the album. “I gather scraps and bits from a variety of
sources, I couldn't remember where I got it and for years I believed it
was an old hymn. Every time I saw it, I was frustrated, wanting to turn
it into a song myself. Years passed and I discovered it was not a song -
but the first line of a poem by Christina Rosetti called 'Uphill.'
Written in 1885, the poem eerily expressed how I was feeling at the
time, while touring for the Stillhouse Road CD and cutting thru
mountain roads late at night alone. So I put it on my blackboard in my
kitchen and in a matter of weeks I had put it to music."
Though
Lee has toured extensively as a solo artist in Europe and in the States
(also opening for artists from Over The Rhine to Krauss), had a
publishing deal, a record deal, released six albums, and has made a
humble living as a songwriter -- it can sometimes feel as if ...the road
does wind uphill all the way.
Because of the lessons that come from such a journey, Julie Lee & The Baby-Daddies
is quite a ride. With eight originals and two covers, each song is a
snapshot of various landscapes within Americana, deftly painted by some
of the best in the genre. There’s the vintage country of “Time Enough,”
telling the story of a young girl anxious to experience everything in
life – then the playful jazz influenced homage to sibling envy with
Carly Simon’s “Older Sister.” And the intimate promise of "Unto The Hills,” where Alison Krauss and Tim O'Brien join Lee on every mountain gospel refrain.
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