Sleeve notes for "Gateway Songs":

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Some songs wait a long time to find the room they belong in.

 

The trail that leads to Gateway Songs starts in the early 1970s, in and around Hemel Hempstead, when Roger Knott was writing for a band called Lifeblud. At the time he described the group, half-serious, as “poetry rock.” It wasn’t just a clever phrase. The songs really did come from that place where folk music, English pastoral imagery, and the elaborate lyricism of early progressive rock crossed paths.

 

Looking back now, Knott can hear the younger writer inside those songs, though he recognises the shift that came later. “I think my writing became less self-consciously poetic and more mainstream in character, in keeping with the times,” he says. “My earlier lyrics were partly influenced by who I was listening to at the time with writers like Peter Sinfield and Pete Brown. I continued to maintain a certain wordplay and complex rhyming structures, however, which I think has become my hallmark.”

 

The circumstances surrounding those early recordings were about as far from Nashville polish as you could imagine. Lifeblud sessions happened wherever a tape machine could be set up. A barn loft at Trusound. A cold winter day at Gooseberry Studios in Gerrard Street, London. Two tracks. Maybe four if you were lucky. Tape spinning while the meter ran. “In the past when the clock was against us,” Knott remembers, “we’d often ‘make it do’ rather than spend time doing multiple takes.” That world never completely leaves a songwriter. But decades later Knott found himself somewhere very different. Nashville.

 

The first step toward that unlikely destination happened far from Tennessee. Knott had been living in Spain, recording simple demos in a spare room that doubled as a home studio. “Having recorded the tracks, I realised they had potential,” he says. “I played them to a songwriter friend from England, who agreed. He suggested running them by our mutual friend Pat McInerney and he gave me Pat’s address.” McInerney, once part of the same musical orbit, had by then become a respected Nashville drummer, working with artists like Don Williams, Nanci Griffith and Doc Watson. Knott mailed him a batch of demos. Twelve songs. “There wasn’t one in particular,” Knott says of the material that caught his attention. “I sent him a dozen demos and he only rejected one song. He knew he could do something interesting with them with the skills and the contacts he had acquired in Nashville.”

 

Those were the gateway songs. They opened the door to sessions that would unfold gradually between 2005 and 2021, bringing Knott’s writing into the orbit of Nashville’s deep well of musicianship. The first studio he walked into was Puresound, run by Frank Goodman. “It wasn’t intimidating but it was exciting,” Knott says. “The musicians were all unassuming and friendly folk. They were seasoned professionals who made the process go without a hitch.”

 

Anyone who has spent time around Nashville studios knows the strange disguise they often wear. A small house. A porch. A quiet street. “You can pass what look like typical ‘Ma & Pa’ houses which are actually studios inside,” Knott says. When Goodman later relocated to Colorado, the recordings shifted to the home studio of guitarist and producer Thomm Jutz, out in Mount Juliet just beyond the city. That move changed the atmosphere. “This was a much more relaxing space with no pressures on time and very conducive to creativity.

 

Jutz became the guiding hand across most of these recordings. A musician whose credits stretch across the modern Americana landscape, he has worked with Nanci Griffith, Mary Gauthier, Kim Richey and many others. Knott trusted him with the songs almost immediately. “My belief is, if you’ve chosen a producer for his skills, you should let him get on with it,” Knott says. “I pretty much gave him a free hand. Thomm never made any fundamental changes to the songs themselves or their structure and he likes to act instinctively and not ‘over-think’ anything. That seemed to keep the sound fresh.” Jutz also appears all over the album as a multi-instrumentalist, shaping the texture from inside the band rather than from behind the glass.

 

Around him gathered a cast of Nashville players whose résumés stretch across several decades of American roots music. Drummers Pat McInerney and Lynn Williams. Keyboard master Kevin McKendree. Justin Moses bringing banjo, fiddle, mandolin and dobro. Jeff Taylor on accordion. Britt Savage adding backing vocals. Musicians who have worked with Alison Krauss, Marty Stuart, Emmylou Harris, Delbert McClinton, Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, George Thorogood and plenty more besides. Yet the way Nashville works is disarmingly simple. No fuss. No drama.

 

“They respected the song and knew instinctively what was needed to support it,” Knott says. “I would supply a chord chart which the producer would convert to the Nashville numbers system. They would get some basic direction from the producer, hear the demo and decide what the feel should be. Once that was established, the basic track was usually recorded as a live performance very quickly.” For someone who had grown up in the slower, trial-and-error world of small British studios, that efficiency came as a surprise. “Nashville players tend to get it right first time,” Knott says.

 

What makes Gateway Songs intriguing is how easily Knott’s material slips into this environment, even though the songs were never written with country music in mind. “By most measures, my songs are not obviously Country songs and were not written as such,” he says. “But as soon as you add a pedal steel, fiddle or banjo to a track, it automatically assumes a Country feel.” That connection runs deeper than instrumentation. British folk music sits right at the root of Appalachian tradition, a point not lost on the musicians involved. “The Nashville musicians were very knowledgeable about all genres of music,” Knott says. “Ever since the so-called British Invasion of the 60s there have been plenty of examples of the cross-fertilisation of trans-Atlantic influences.”

 

Some of the songs here date directly back to the Lifeblud years. Revisiting them decades later meant rethinking certain details. “I thought they could do with a re-evaluation,” Knott says. “Some lyrics were revised because they were originally conceived as poems, and words that read well in poetry don’t always sing well.” Sometimes the change was tiny but telling. “In ‘The Journey Home’ I changed ‘globular’ to ‘circular’, as an example.” Other songs went through more radical transformations. “Echoes in Time” reappears here in waltz time, drifting along in three-four. “It was my idea to try it in ¾ time signature,” Knott says. “It was a case of seeing what else can be done by experimenting a little”. “Oakenshade,” one of the most recognisable titles in the Lifeblud catalogue, gained an entirely new colour once Nashville instrumentation entered the frame. “It was great hearing the instrumentation of accordion and dobro bring an unexpected Americana element to it.”

 

Across the years these sessions gradually developed their own character. Arrangements became leaner. More space crept into the recordings. “Most of the tracks were produced by Thomm,” Knott says, “and his production values have shifted over time to encompass sparser and more focussed arrangements.” One track strips things back even further. “Laugh At The Rain” is just Knott and his guitar, recorded live. That idea came from producer Clive Gregson. “He had me record the song solo at the end of every day and choose the best take,” Knott says. “The thought was I would be suitably relaxed at the day’s end and it would make a nice contrast to the rest of the album.”

 

Listening across Gateway Songs now, the collection carries a quiet thread running through it. “I’ve noticed there’s often an overriding theme of redemption of some kind,” Knott says. “Though I don’t really know where that comes from.” Maybe it comes from the journey itself. Songs written decades apart, finally landing in the same room. From barns in Hertfordshire to a house in Mount Juliet. “It’s good,” Knott says, hearing them gathered together at last. “They all seem to belong together despite their disparate origins and time-frame. A near-constant studio and producer helps to bring a certain cohesion.”

 

Sometimes music waits patiently until the right door opens.

 

These were the songs that opened it.

 

Klemen Breznikar

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