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Reached by telephone from his Nashville home shortly before Fiddler’s Green was nominated for a Grammy as the Best Traditional Folk Album of the year, O’Brien talked about recording two albums at once; growing as a musician by playing guitar, fiddle, and mandolin; and putting his original stamp on traditional tunes.

Whether playing bluegrass standards, Irish fiddle tunes, eclectic original songs, or "House of the Rising Sun," Tim O'Brien brings his own distinctive voice to the music. The wide-ranging multi-instrumentalist shares his keys to finding a personal sound and explains how playing fiddle and mandolin sharpens his guitar skills.

When did you realize you were recording two different albums?

O’BRIEN It wasn’t until I got about 19 tracks started. I was trying out all these different things, and they were all coming out great. Rather than make a double disc, we split them in two. Cornbread Nation turned out to be more electric, more southern, with a little more country and rockabilly, and Fiddler’s Green became a little more Appalachian, with some Celtic, old-timey, and bluegrass. Even though it’s got more gospel, Cornbread Nation is actually lighter in tone, more light-hearted, whereas Fiddler’s Green is much weightier, with songs about death and war and hard times. I’m not sure why, but I’m definitely at a more reflective stage in my life, and the writing is more about that. In “Look Down That Lonesome Road,” one of the few originals here, a guy is looking back at the end of his life and realizing where he went and what he did.

What styles of music did you play at first?

O’BRIEN When I was starting out, I wanted to be like Bill Monroe. I wanted to invent some kind of sound that was my own, putting all these different elements into my own stew. But first I had to apprentice, and the years with Hot Rize were like college for me, until I needed to go figure out what kind of music I really wanted to play. Back in 1990, when I went out on my own, the way to get a record deal was to be either a traditional bluegrass artist or a commercial country artist, and I didn’t really want to be either one. I wanted to find something that was freer, more my own.

Luckily, the bluegrass audience gave me the benefit of the doubt while I experimented, and while some of the records have been better than others, they’re all kind of eclectic. Yet, if you look at them together, they’ve all been headed towards a certain place—bringing the past up to date, covering the various roots forms from this country and a few others, and letting them cook down.

What first drew you to guitar?

O’BRIEN In the early ’60s, people started playing guitars, at least in my crowd, because it was a very social instrument. You could carry it around and play with other people. It was like a common language. Music was something I could do, and it helped my self-esteem to hear myself improving, so it fed the fire. Guitar was a safe place for me, and I got lost in it really easily, just sat down with it and hours would go by before I’d look up again. After a while, if you let it, that becomes the definition of a career. You just keep doing something you like doing and the time flies by.

My oldest brother was in Vietnam, and before he was killed there in ’68, he encouraged me to continue with music. When he died, my sister and I inherited his record collection, and he left some money to each of his surviving siblings. I used my potion to buy a Martin D-28. I was only 14 years old and I had a Martin D-28! I remember going down to the music store, looking at all the Martins, and the guys there didn’t think I was serious enough to play it. But I bought that thing, and it was like getting the Holy Grail. I thought I was the coolest guy in the world, and I was going to do my brother right.

How long had you been playing guitar before you decided to learn another instrument, and then another and another?

O’BRIEN When I was about 16, I’d been playing guitar for about four years. Country-rock was starting out, and my aunt gave me a fiddle that had been sitting in the attic for 25 years. I couldn’t make much sense of it, but I learned a few licks to play in the band I was with, because we already had another guitarist. And even though I was really bad at it, I realized that other instruments would be really good for the band. It’s all about being valuable to the group, so you can add the right color, vary the textures. Then the banjo and the mandolin and the bouzouki came along, and it was all-consuming. At that point, I wasn’t thinking about being the singer, I was thinking about being the instrumental guy.

How does playing the mandolin affect the way you play guitar?

O’BRIEN You can’t play chords as complex on the mandolin, because there are only four pitches. One way to expand your sound is to sing the note you’re not playing, so if you have two or three notes on the mandolin along with one note on vocals, it fills out the chord. You don’t have as many notes to choose from, so you’ve got to pick them wisely. It carries over when I get back to the guitar—I’m not playing all the way across the fingerboard, I’m playing three or four notes at a time, and filling out the sound with my voice.

What have you learned from working with Irish musicians?

O’BRIEN The first thing is that the chords to a tune are arbitrary. There’s a melody and there are chords, and there are just as many chords that can go to a given melody as there are melodies that can go to a given set of chords. A lot of times, when you ask Irish players, “What are the chords to this song?” they don’t know. They may not even know what key it’s in, they just play and it sounds great. Another thing I learned is that you don’t need a lot of chords. You can play 16 bars on one chord in Irish tunes, and it works fine. Then, when you get back to those same 16 bars, you can do a whole different thing and nobody minds. It becomes really liberating, because it’s up to you to invent something, and as long as it’s in the same key, anything works. That’s very different from bluegrass, where, for example, there’s an unwritten rule that the chords to “Old Joe Clark” start from the root chord and drop down a step to the first change. Playing Irish tunes, you have more responsibility, but you have the freedom that goes with it, and that’s a wonderful thing.

Once you decide to record a song like “House of the Rising Sun” (on Cornbread Nation), how do you start arranging it?

O’BRIEN I sang that song when I was in bad rock bands in high school. Then, for the album, I was looking for something I could put a bluegrass sound on, so that’s where Dan Tyminski comes in. He adds the harmony vocal, which is really lonesome, and that makes it different. With a song like “House of the Rising Sun,” you really can’t mess it up, because it’s too good. But you have to find something that will stamp it as yours. There are a lot of songs out there, but you have to find a way to make them your own.

How do you do that?

O’BRIEN What works for me is first to take the melody and figure out the right key to sing it in, the one where my voice fits most naturally. Then, to make it my own, I have to learn it, forget it, and learn it again. Because there’s usually something else I have to learn before I’m ready to perform it. Maybe it’s a chord form, or a picking pattern, or even just a tempo. With a traditional song, you don’t need to play the chords somebody else played, and you don’t really need to sing the same melody. But you should start from the melody and go from there. The good thing about forgetting it is that when you learn it again, you’re really learning it from memory. A lot of times, when you check the original source, you find you’ve gone in another direction. And that’s actually what you’re after: to come up with your own sound.

If you’re going to write a song, what instrument do you reach for?

O’BRIEN The guitar. Sometimes it helps to tune it in a funny chord, so you don’t know what the heck you’re doing. That has the same effect as taking up another instrument. I used to use the bouzouki that way, but I got to know the bouzouki too well, so if I’m going to write on it, I tune that differently, too. It’s all about getting away from the normal state of things. Retuning your instrument draws you back to making a simple melody and a simple rhythm.

Writing has so much to do with the instrument you play, but it’s also rooted in where you are in life, what you’ve been thinking about. But it takes awhile to get in that zone where everything you’ve been thinking about can finally come out. I gave up on the idea that I could come up with something completely new. I realized I wasn’t going to do anything that hadn’t been done before, but along with that came the realization that even if I tried to do something exactly like somebody else, it would still sound different. That liberated me to just let music come out, and there’s really nothing more exciting than that—when the music is pouring out of you.


EXPERIMENT IN YOUR PRACTICE TIME
You might not become a triple or quadruple threat as an instrumentalist like TIM O’BRIEN, but making an effort in that direction, practicing frequently, and having fun while doing it can pay big dividends, he advises.
• “If you play guitar, get a cheap mandolin and learn the way the melodies play in a different tuning on a different instrument.”
• “If you’re going to play more than one instrument on a gig, play each of them a little bit every day to keep your technique up.”
• “Don’t keep your instrument in its case. Leave it out on a table, and every time you walk by, play 32 bars of a tune.”
• “Even if it’s just for a few minutes, practice a little bit every day—it really builds up a feel for your instrument. Four hours of practice one day can’t replace 15 minutes every day.”
• “Find any way you can to enjoy making music, and you’ll keep getting better, because you’re doing something you love.”

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