Anything can happen on a cruise and at hours when you least expect.
Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale found this out around four in the morning when they opened the elevator to see Kacey Musgraves sitting down in a motorized wheelchair ready to bust out.
“What are you doing in that?” Lauderdale asked.
“I got tired of walking” she said of the scooter she borrowed from singer Brandi Carlisle’s grandmother. In the blink of an eye was off at forty miles an hour.
“Vroom….It was like something out of the Monkees TV show,” Lauderdale laughed on the Buddy & Jim Show in a special “Cayamo Edition” recapping the week-long cruise. The cruise featured over thirty acts including Musgraves, Rodney Crowell, John Prine, Lucinda Williams, Nikki Lane, John Fulbright, Doug Seegers and countless others. At one of the boat’s stops, they picked up Todd Snider of the Hard Working Americans.
Miller had been hanging out with songwriter Kate York in one of the ship’s bars when he looked down at his phone and realized it was nearly four o’clock in the morning. He headed up to his room when the encounter occurred with Musgraves. As York recounted in her photo travelogue in Rolling Stone, Musgraves proceeded to go to the casino on the seventh floor, with York hopping on soon followed by Nikki Lane.
Lauderdale was saying how much he liked the out of sync design of Musgraves’ blinking lights on her boots and band members stage outfits. But he was glowing over her impromptu set where she traded songs with veteran songwriter John Prine whom she once wrote about in verse: “My idea of heaven is to burn one with John Prine.”
“Of all the people I was most impressed with her,” Lauderdale reflected. “That’s really a lot for someone to get to know John Prine’s material.”
“She’s so special,” Miller added. “She’s so not trying to be anyone else than who she is.”
It has been an amazing year for Miler who, with co-producer Jim Lauderdale, just released an album by Ralph Stanley with a who’s who of all-stars. The album was recorded in Miller’s house where he also does his radio show. Miller talked about he was one track short of finishing a new album with York. While on the Cayamo Cruise, Miller set up a four-track studio and recorded the musicians in front of a small audience. Miller said an album will be released on New West Records sometime around August.
On the cruise, Miller recounted to the radio show audience how he had gotten a call three years ago from Callie Khouri inquiring if he’d be interested in producing the music for a pilot called “Nashville.” That led him to work with Kate York and Sara Buxton who have written individually for Little Big Town, Keith Urban and Big & Rich. They have since contributed nearly a dozen songs to the show and have formed their own band called Skyline Motel. The group also features drummer Ian Fitchuk, bassist Daniel Tashian and guitarists Tom Bukovac and David LaBruyera.
Tashian once ran an open mic in Nashville at 12th & Porter where you were only allowed to sing two songs before the next performer. York described meeting him there and trying to impress by bringing a press kit. Bukovac is the husband of Buxton who Miller describes as one of the biggest session players in the world. Today he also runs a vintage guitar shop in Nashville called Second Generation which Miller says is a fun place to hang out.
York recalled how they went on a night of binge writing and came up with a song called Skyline Motel.” The name came from a list of movie titles and sometime around five a.m., they decided to call themselves by the same name, feeling that it evoked a place for dreams to come true. The group joked that they have only played at home but with their gorgeous layers of Southern California-influenced vocal harmonies, we can only hope that we get to hear them back on land and in public.
Lauderdale, who sat in with Rodney Crowell during a set of covers, hosted his own “Throwback Thursday” set where he asked fellow musicians to play songs recorded before 1980. During the radio show, he talked of how important his co-host Miller is to today’s music scene. Before he could finish a sentence about how Miller was able to get Nikki Lane signed to his label New West Records, Miller interjected saying how her cover of his song “Gasoline and Matches” had “flipped him out.”
“Y’all see that movie ‘Pirate Radio’?” Lane asked the radio show audience. Lane described being in international waters as a place to behave as badly as we want. “I’m pretty excited. I can get in a lot of trouble here…there’s a lot of hiding places.”
Lane came on the cruise with her mother and sister and picked up musicians Sherry Colvin and Ian Fitchuk of Skyline Motel to form a makeshift band. Lane and Colvin’s harmonies on “You Can’t Talk to Me,” set against accompanying acoustic guitars, were hypnotic and intoxicating.
Lane had been on vacation for three weeks when she set sail and had a few things to contend with. First, she had to break her habit of going antiquing. More importantly, she had let her nails grow and now she couldn’t play a C chord. Miller wondered how Dolly Parton did it and Lane said she mostly plays bar chords but was trying to find her secret. Time for this and nail filing got thrown out the window when Lane went into a panic thinking she’d lost her passport. After a furious search, she found it tucked away in a purse in a dressing room. Wild fantasies of someone impersonating her and showing up on the news quickly passed. Miller summed her up best: “She’s a good nut.”
Outlaw Country radio host Elizabeth Cook found time to do her show from the foot of her bed but got her own cabin fever, saying there’s only so many white caps you can talk about. Cook debuted a new song “Methadone Blues” and seemed to take Miller’s cajoling for a new album to heart.
Another longtime friend of Miller’s played on the show named Doug Seegers. It’s hard to believe but just a few years ago, Seegers was a homeless musician playing on the streets of Nashville. When documentarian Jill Johnson filmed Seegers for a Swedish television special, Seegers became an overnight star in that country. It led to sixty sold out shows and a record on Rounder. Seegers found himself opening up the Americana Music Awards last September.
Seegers seemed taken by all the words of encouragement and was generally “just enjoying the heck out of myself” as he played “Going Down To The River” and “Angie’s Song.” It reminded me of something that minister Joel Osteen talks about often about how God puts people in your lives for certain reasons. Seegers story might seem a case study and the singer himself seemed to corroborate this when he ended his set with the following words: “Thank you Jesus.”
