Songwriter/musician Ken Spooner Zoomed with singer Mandy Barnett and producer Fred Mollin on the making of A Nashville Songbook

[See our review of  A Nashville Songbook HERE].

Elmore Magazine: Mandy, is it a coincidence that this album, kicks off with “I Love A Rainy Night,” a song that was a huge number one when you first started singing in public?

Mandy Barnett: It just felt right and had good energy. That song, definitely from my childhood, holds a lot of nostalgia for me as do many country songs from the ’80s.

EM: It certainly feels great, and puts you in the mood for all good stuff that follows in a beautifully sequenced album.

MB: We are very proud of this, and so thrilled that Fred wanted to make it happen. He brought all the great players and his talent to the table.

EM: Can we speak a little about the very beginning of it?

Fred Mollin: At our first meeting to talk about possibly signing Mandy to record for Melody Place Records, I had a bunch of ideas on a notepad, but before I had a chance to discuss them (he starts laughing), she said, “You know Fred, I don’t want to do another country album.” And so, here we are in August of 2020, in pandemic land, and on August 21st we release a record that is NOT really another country album, it’s rather a traditional pop album. There are parts of it that are country, and all the songs have a strong Nashville connection. Mandy is truly a keeper of the flame of all that was great in country music. It is so rare that you can have someone like her, who is so astute as a curator in one sense, and has a voice that ranks with the best ever in many styles. When she sings, she is fearless.

MB: (Laughing) It helps when it all comes together and you have a great producer and a great band. You are all kind of on the same page. And it all came together really very quickly. I had done a few shows called the Nashville Songbook for some time. We changed out some of the songs I had sung a million times, and added some that were huge hits in both country and pop.

FM: There was a lot of preparation; she is very astute about the history of songs and knowing what a great song is.

MB: Song selection is tough. You can have a song you really love, but until you do it, you really don’t know how it’s going to play out. “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still I Love With You,” I’ve known inside out and done many times, but it’s a good example. We were going over what songs to do, and Sandy McGraw, Fred’s assistant, mentioned that his aunt Margaret Whiting, a big band/jazz/pop/country singer in the ‘40s and ‘50s recorded it. That set Fred to thinking about the song, and he went to the piano and started playing a beautiful chord progression under the melody that made me think about the song in a completely different way. It became a new song to me, a thousand times more mournful and soulful.

FM: In the studio, Gordon Mote, an amazingly musical blind pianist, took it to a whole other level. He only had my rough sketchwork tape to go on. They went into the booth together and got what you hear on the record is live in one take. We all were speechless in the control room. It was truly magical

MB: Gordon is so intuitive. Now this is pre-Covid, but when we came out of the booth, we gave each other a great big hug.

EM: Well I want to thank you both for talking with us at Elmore. One last thing: On my first listen, I’m reading liner notes and enjoying everything I hear, when around midway through, “The Crying Game” comes on. I wonder what’s the Nashville connection to this? I knew it by Englishman Boy George from a movie in the ’90s. Did he become Good Ol’ Boy George at some point? I looked at the writer’s name, Geoff Stephens, and it sounded English too. Checked his discography, he wrote pop tunes like “There’s A Kind Of Hush” and “Winchester Cathedral.” Looked a little deeper, and BOOM, there it was. In 1965, none other than “Little Miss Dynamite” Brenda Lee recorded it. It got buried on the charts by the British Invasion, but it was a great song then, and it still is. It was stuck in my head for days.

MB: Yes, Owen [Owen Bradley, a Nashville music industry pioneer who built studios, ran a label, produced Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty and many more] did that with her. That is one haunting tune.

FM: You can be sure when Owen cut that in 1965, the session players had to be thinking, “This is the weirdest thing we have ever done.”

BIG LAUGHS

—Ken Spooner

Raised in New York, Ken Spooner lives in Nashville. A musician, recording artist, concert promoter, author and songwriter, he’s written #1 songs for some of the biggest names in music, and is the proud father of Elmore’s Art Director, Erik Spooner.