Veteran folk singer-songwriter John McCutcheon will perform at Plymouth Congregational Church on Saturday, Feb. 24.
In 2023, he released the album "Together" with folk legend Tom Paxton. The album consists of songs the two wrote together, via a series of weekly Zoom sessions.
McCutcheon recently spoke with KMUW about the process of writing that material and about the art of songwriting itself.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You put out this album, "Together," with Tom Paxton last year. I know that he's one of your musical heroes. What can you tell me about the process of writing with him?
Writing with him is the easiest writing I've ever done. We finish one another's sentences. We have the same way of what we want to do with a song. We're old, old friends, so we really cut one another a lot of slack. I think to be a good co-writer you have to be humble; you have to be willing to turn loose of the ownership of your idea and say, "Well, OK, that was a left turn I didn't expect to make. But let's follow it. It could be a dead-end alley, or it could be a real cool way to end up with something I wouldn't have thought of." That's the point.
There's a couple of songs on the album [of which you could] say, "Oh, that sounds like a Tom Paxton song or that sounds like a John McCutcheon song." Then there's other stuff that I listen to and say, "I don't think I could have written that song by myself. That's better than what I could have done." Plus, he's a lovely guy. He's one of my best pals, and he's an elder.
Recently, I came back from a tour in California, and I saw my oldest friend, the guy I started playing guitar with. He was raving about this album and he said, "When we were 14-years-old, just starting to play guitar, if I had told you [that you were] going to be writing songs with the guy who wrote 'Ramblin' Boy' and 'Last Thing on My Mind' and 'I Can't Help but Wonder Where I'm Bound' and 'Bottle of Wine' and even 'My Dog's Bigger Than Your Dog,' would you have believed it?" And I said, "Not on your life."
But the folk music community is a small community, relatively speaking, and it's really collegial and fraternal. Hell, Pete Seeger treated me as a peer. There was no way I was his peer. But I guess you find someone who does the same kind of work you do, and you say, "Either I'm not crazy, or I got company."
As you collaborated with Tom, were there things that you learned about the process, things that you learned about the process of collaboration itself?
Both Tom and I come from a pretty strong spiritual background. We both know that there are times when you are guided. We both also know that there are times when you surrender to the process. That sounds kind of "woo-woo" I know. People who are listening to this and have seen me at Winfield [might] say, "No, I am not a woo-woo guy. At all. I'm a meat-and-potatoes guy." But you do get to this point where you say, "I don't know what's going to happen. I'm just going to surrender myself to this process. How about if we do this?" I'm going to be turning the page with the listener, too. We don't start with a storyboard. "We're going to go A, B, C, D, and we're going to end up here." We often don't know what the ending is.
There really is something to be said, then, about trusting the process.
Yeah. The great poet Billy Collins once said, "You use your pen as a flashlight rather than as a mere dictation device." It's a lot more fun. That's one of the things I discovered during the pandemic. [At the start of it] I came back from being in Australia for a month and the only responsible thing to do was quarantine [away from my wife and mother-in-law]. So, I went up to a little cabin that my wife, who's also a writer, and I have up in the north Georgia mountains.
I would get up in the morning and there would be prayer and meditation. I'd get poetry in my email box from "The Writer's Almanac" and from "The Paris Review." So, I [had] all this completely right brain stuff happening. I'm not reading the news; I'm not having to form opinions. It's like you're completely clearing the deck of all left-brain activity. And then you write. It's sort of like if you're into meditation at all, [there's that time] when you realize, "Oh, that's what this is about. I want to that again."
