Glen Mitchell On His New EP & Coming Home With SaraBeth – Interview

Glen Mitchell wanted to be the first British country star to make it on the American charts. It didn’t happen for him before he moved to Nashville just over fifteen years ago. But he says it’s likely we’ll have our first British country star soon and he’ll be rooting for whoever it is.

The writer, guitarist and producer is coming back to the UK in August for a two-week tour behind his new EPBroken which comes out a week before the tour begins August 15 in Basildon. The classically trained guitarist who started his career at six, joined his dad’s band at 13 and went on the road with his own band at 16, now comes back somewhat in awe of a country music scene spurred on by the explosion of C2C. He’ll play acoustic sets back to back solo and with collaborator SaraBeth and be joined by opening acts, including his sister Jodie McKay who he once toured with as a duo back in the day.

Mitchell begins recounting the path of his life to me having just come offstage at a summer show at Champions Billiards in Frederick Maryland, a sports-themed restaurant outside of the nation’s capitol in Washington, D.C. It’s part of the WFRE Random Act Of Country series being promoted by one of the country stations that is helping the Texas-born SaraBeth to slowly build an audience. While SaraBeth signs autographs and poses for pictures, Mitchell is running post on an adjacent pool table featuring a slew of t-shirts and copies of SaraBeth CD’s that he produced for her earlier this year.

SaraBeth had just told the crowd that the single she co-wrote with Mitchell and Gwen Sebastian was inspired less by a real-life break-up than a menacing guitar line Mitchell brought to the writing session. In the last frame of this revengeful love scorned tale, she can be seen throwing her ex-lover’s guitar out of the window in a kind of Lifetime television audition. The real fireworks will happen tomorrow on the 4th of July where SaraBeth is singing the national anthem at a nearby baseball stadium. Mitchell, who once played “The Star Spangled Banner” with Lonestar at Fenway Park, has been here long enough to celebrate Independence Day festivities. “Sometimes you might hear some redneck say ‘We kicked your ass,’” he laughs, “but that was a long time ago and I wasn’t here.”

On moving to Nashville at 28, Mitchell remembers how nervous he was when told there would be better guitar players on every corner. “I literally had someone come up to me and say, ‘What do you want to be? A big fish in a little pond or a little fish in a big pond?’” Although he was doing well in England, he didn’t think he could take it further. The country music scene then was like jazz in America. You could find it but you’d have to look for it. By the time he got to Nashville, he found the city was the opposite of what everyone told him it would be like. Instead of being intimidating, he found it inspiring, going into bars and meeting musicians, talking with them and sitting in. For anyone thinking about making the move, he puts it this way. “If the worst thing that happened is you didn’t get any work, the rate at which you grow as a musician would be tremendous.”

In this acoustic showcase, I’d just seen Mitchell’s guitar prowess give an extra kick to SaraBeth’s tight country pop. For a few seconds during “I’m Sick of It,” I thought I heard echoes of the great British guitarist Alvin Lee and frontman of Ten Years After, which might have harkened back to his classical training and was somewhat surprising coming from someone who has a portfolio of catchy, melodic and memorable gems.

Both he and SaraBeth emigrated to Nashville with different paths. Mitchell had secured a record deal in the mid-Nineties and had some modest success with three number one country songs on the European charts and a best album award in the UK. SaraBeth was pursuing an entrepreneurial degree at Baylor University before she decided on a music career. She hooked up with producer Dean Sams of Lone Star who also happened to be Mitchell’s producer. When SaraBeth was looking for a someone to join her in a showcase, Sams called Mitchell who by then had been working with Frankie Ballard for two years as his bandleader as well as Billy Currington and Darius Rucker. She writes nearly everything with him now and told me in Nashville in the Spring that Mitchell is her best friend.

Mitchell’s scored his biggest hit “Livin’ Our Love Song” somewhat unconventionally. It was a song he co-wrote with Tim Galloway and Jason Michael Carroll and released as the second single from Carroll’s album Waitin’ In The Country. “Livin’ Our Love Song” was written on a tour bus after Mitchell was woken up by a radio promotions person who said Carroll and Galloway were writing on the bus lounge and he should join them. The label was nervous they didn’t have a second single.

As Mitchell’s voice rises, he gets more animated about the sequence of events. He relates how they wrote the song on the way to the radio station where the promotions person suggested they play it live. It happened again and soon radio stations were calling Nashville saying “We want to play this song.” The band hurriedly rushed into the studio and it became a huge hit in 2007. Glen won an ASCAP award for “Living Our Love Song” being one of the most played songs that year.

As Glen and guitarist Christen Cole accompanied SaraBeth, the singer shared how moving to Nashville became a dream came true. “I never thought these things would happen and I’d have a song in the top 40 let alone two,” she said before playing “Nowhere With You,” a song written with Dean Sams.

For her recent EP, the self-titled SaraBeth, the two co-wrote all four songs produced by Mitchell. lAs I wrote back in Apri, the songs have the feel that this may be her break-out moment. “I’m Sick of It” has a really edgy Eighties retro dance feel that feels entirely contemporary. In my favorite song “Runnin’ Out of Lipstick,” Mitchell masterfully constructs a mix that deceptively seduces you into thinking you’ve heard the sound before. But Mitchell blends all off the string instruments (his guitars, mandolin, banjo and Travis Toy’s steel guitar and dobro) into a wall of sound that has you coming come back again and again trying to tease out the ways he’s put it all together.

Mitchell has been sampling his music on his website glenmitchellmusic.com and Reverb Nation. The new EP will be downloadable on iTunes, Amazon and Google Play. Mitchell is rather modest about it, saying, “It’s a bit of an eclectic mix of country songs I co-wrote. I wasn’t trying to be commercial in any way; just wanted my fans to hear some of the songs I’ve been writing. I played all the instruments on the EP, and co-wrote all the songs.”

I’ve seen both SaraBeth and Glen play on StageIt from the living room of Mitchell’s apartment. When Glen played a few months ago, he admitted he felt more nervous than he did onstage at Madison Square Garden with Frankie Ballard when Mitchell was Ballard’s bandleader on tour with Bob Seger. Mitchell describes how you play to a green light and where you can’t see anyone and when you come out of a song, there’s an odd feeling of silence. He’d brought along SaraBeth who he called his “secretary” and kept things moving along reading comments and instant messaging while playing a wonderful set that showed his great, descriptive and situational writing.

You can put yourself in his songs such as “Amazing Again,” a hopeful plea about finding the spark that once fueled a couple’s passion. Mitchell recounts a couple’s honeymoon in Malibu, his keen eye for detail drawing you in as he remembers the couple being covered in sand and staring at each other’s wedding bands. The melancholy of the chords and the longing in his voice make the listener wonder if it’s too late. In “Blue Chevrolet,” he metaphorically uses gasoline and freedom to describe coming of age. “Hellbent on Saving” is something that came out of a chat and picks up on a spiritual undertone, exploring how we blame ourselves for relationships that go wrong but how one person can come into our lives and turn it all around.

Mitchell says he is always writing, something he describes is part of “satiating the creative soul.” He’s never tried writing a song specifically for another singer in mind, something that’s common in Nashville. He says the greatest satisfaction he gets is looking out into the audience and seeing someone moved by one his songs, something which is worth more to him than having a hit song.

Mitchell says that the best songs start with a chat with another writer. When he comes into a writing session, he rarely has a specific idea. Or on those occasions is he does, he tries to keep quiet about it and let the conversation develop. “I’m a firm believer that the song is already in the room,” he tells me. “It’s already there. All you need are the skills and to be perceptive enough to be able to reach out and grab it.”

This reminds me of a comment SaraBeth said to me about having that “a ha” moment when someone says something casually. “If something is going on in your life and you talk about it, it always feels more fresh than something you’ve been carrying around a while,” Glen adds. This happened for SaraBeth when she was driving through backroads trying to get to a writing session. SaraBeth was cruising along listening to Shania Twain and one of the co-writers mentioned how she much she was smiling when she got in. The idea for “You Keep Me Smiling” came out of that random comment.

Glen said when he met SaraBeth, she was new to songwriting and today has got it down. “She’s got great stories and a great way of looking at things,” he relates. “A lot of times that’s the role she plays in the writing room. She comes up with scenarios and has a great perspective and the way she words things is very interesting.”

The beauty of writing, he believes, is that everyone has a different idea. Mitchell says the writing by committee approach works the best when someone says one thing and someone comes up with a better idea. He said that can backfire if you play it too safe. But then he adds that neither he or SaraBeth are very safe when it comes to songwriting. Mitchell also appreciates the counterbalance that emanates from SaraBeth’s positivity. “If I was left alone, I’d just write sad songs all day.”

SaraBeth who sang “Everything Is Possible” tells the audience she is a big believer in dreams and that the words speak for themselves. She repeats a story she told me about how when her brother, a professional baseball player in the St. Louis Cardinals system, hurt his arm there was no Plan B. She realized she wanted to go for a music career all in and didn’t want to look back.

These days she is one of the young women trying to be heard against backdrop of the lack of women being played on country radio. A few days before heading to the UK, she will bring a group of her friends for in Nashville. The theme of the night is “For The Love of Tomatoes” which is a play off of the infamous comments made in the Spring by radio programmer Keith Hill who compared the roles of men and women on country music to a salad where men are lettuce and women the lesser tomatoes. It’s also a charitable eventand attendees are being asked to bring canned goods to be collected by Second Harvest Food Bank.

SaraBeth was approached by a friend to put the event together which will have three hour-long rounds featuring Leah Turner, Sasha McVeigh, Jordyn Stoddard and a slew of others. “I just texted a bunch of my girlfriends and luckily, they weren’t all traveling on the date,” she told me. “We’re all really excited. I’m always up for any excuse to hang out with my friends, and I think I can say the same for them. When you get to hang out and play music, that’s a winning combination.”

I wondered from the time she first heard the comments about this issue until now, what has been her takeaway? Does she think some good has come out of it?

“I think people took it and ran with it,” she responds. “While it’s not what you want to hear, the statistics are what they are. I had friends not in the industry asking me about it, so I think it was great for bringing awareness to the issue. What people have been talking about in Nashville for a while was finally brought to the public’s attention.”

In the meantime, she continues trying to garner support from radio stations like WFRE and build on the strong fan base she has built on social media. Greeting fans, posing for pictures and interacting with her audience digitally and in person is a throwback to a time when Mitchell started playing long before the dawn of social media. These days music can be heard all around us. I met Mike Scott, a fan who lives in the D.C. area, and is the person who caught the Washington Capitals playing “I’m Sick Of It” on the arena’s public address system during a playoff game. He sent it to SaraBeth who excitedly shared the video footage to her extensive Facebook following. It all has a cumulative ripple effect on the grassroots excitement building around her rising star.

Mitchell says that in his lifetime he has seen tremendous changes in the music business. With the advent of streaming and revenue being miniscule, musicians are being forced to try and generate new ways to make a living and keep themselves on the road. For SaraBeth, it’s putting her entrepreneurial degree to work in real-life, one fan, one tweet and winning over one radio station at a time.

By the time she closes her show and thanks everyone, she has one parting thought for everyone who had a good time. There’s no reason not to share the pictures you took and post them on social media.

Originally posted here.