Tamara Saviano’s latest book is “Poets and Dreamers: My Life in Americana Music.”
The book covers a wide span of time, serving as both a memoir and a historical account of the Americana genre and its sometimes uneasy relationship with its sister, country music. Along the way, we witness her career unfold as she moves from radio broadcasting to journalism to Grammy-winning music producer, filmmaker and a host of other roles.
Saviano also worked closely with the legendary songwriters Guy Clark and Kris Kristofferson, becoming close friends with both of them during the final decades of their lives as each attracted a new audience eager to celebrate each writer’s prodigious gifts.
Saviano recently spoke about the origins of the book, some key moments in her career, and how her maternal grandfather planted seeds that helped her navigate some challenging moments.
“Poets and Dreamers: My Life in Americana Music” is available wherever books are sold.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ll start with an obvious question but what I also think is a necessary one: Why this book now?
It is an obvious question. But a good one. When I was writing the Guy Clark biography, I was trying to set Guy in context of musical genres, and I ended up writing two chapters about Americana, setting Guy up in there. While I was writing those two chapters, I thought, “Oh, well, there’s my next book.” I knew that this was a story that I wanted to tell. That was a long time ago, but I was making a film about Guy and then the pandemic hit. It just wasn’t happening, although I did spend time in 2017 interviewing people about Americana. A lot of the interviews in the book, I did back in 2017.
Then when the pandemic hit, everything got thrown to the back burner. I did not feel creative at all during that time. I went to Europe, the summer of 2023, with my husband. He works for Bruce Springsteen and wandering around Europe for six weeks, I just felt so inspired with all the arts and literature and everything, and I came home, and I just started writing. I started writing in July of 2023, and I turned the book into my publisher in February 2024.
I will say that in the fall of 2023, I fell and broke both my ankles. If anything will keep you in a writing chair it’s not being able to walk. That did give me some dedicated time where I wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything else.
To set part of the book up, I should mention that early on you write about this period in the late ’60s/early to mid-’70s when there are these songwriters arriving in Nashville -- Kris Kristofferson, who we’ll return to, of course, Rodney Crowell -- and they are writing a different kind of song. This is post-Dylan, post-Beatles. They are rooted in country, but it’s undeniable that there’s something different about their approaches.
Absolutely. What Vince Gill says very sweetly is that they’re not writing little darlin’ songs. They’re writing more poetry and with more depth. Literature, really. Kristofferson really paved the way for people like Guy Clark and Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle to come to Nashville. They all say that. They all thought Nashville was a place for them because Kris had been there.
There is also a point where country is dead to a lot of people. Writers like Kristofferson and Crowell have this crossover. Rock artists are covering them and respect them.
There was that time prior to Kristofferson where the Nashville Sound was really big and everything was lush with strings, and I love that stuff. But now when these new guys come in, there’s different people running the record labels, there’s different people working in radio. The younger generation is coming up and that’s not for them. They want something different. The rock ‘n’ roll generation is now taking over in positions of power in the music business. Every time that happens things change.
How did you find your way into the music industry?
I worked in radio first. I worked at WMIL in Milwaukee, my hometown radio station … from ’90 to ’95 before I moved to Nashville. The class of ’89, which was Vince Gill, Travis Tritt, Garth Brooks, Clint Black, Alan Jackson [and to a lesser degree] Mary Chapin Carpenter. They just came through like powerhouses, those hat acts did. Radio, when I was in it, tilted that way hard. In that response to that, even though record labels at that time were making lots of money, were signing artists like Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith on MCA, Rosie Flores and Kevin Welch and Bela Fleck on Warner Bros.
They were signing all of these artists we now would put under the Americana umbrella but none of them were breaking out in radio. So that is the time when this group of people -- Rob Bleestein in California, Brad Paul in Boston, John Grimson in Nashville -- decided there needed to be a place for those artists along with the Johnny Cashes and Willie Nelsons who were no longer being played on country radio but who were still creating new work and were legendary artists. So, those three men put their heads together and talked the Gavin Report into starting an Americana chart, and then they found the radio stations to play that stuff.
I don’t know that that’s ever happened before that. I was looking during my research to see if it had, but I couldn’t find it. Pretty innovative.
Yeah, Lyle Lovett shows up with “Creeps Like Me,” which is a great tune but it’s not going to sit well beside traditional country acts necessarily.
There was so much real creativity, real artistry happening and it wasn’t happening in three-minute pop-country songs. Nothing against that. I love that stuff. The class of ’89, I love all of them. This is just a very different thing and there wasn’t room on radio for them.
That moment in the early ’90s was interesting for a lot of reasons. I joke that when I was growing up, I felt like I had to hide my Randy Travis albums from my heavy metal friends.
[Laughs.] That’s funny. I had to hide my Bee Gees albums but that’s another story.
[Laughs.] But all of sudden you buy a Nirvana album and a Garth Brooks album and there wasn’t the same kind of tension.
Music fans just became very bold and said, “Look, I’m going to listen to whatever I want to listen to. Whatever I’m in the mood for. It doesn’t have to be in one genre.” You and I are probably around the same age, and we grew up collecting 45s and collecting albums and had all different kinds of genres of music that we listened to and Top 40 radio played everything from The Beatles to Buck Owens, so I grew up loving all kinds of music and was never a one-trick pony. It was never, “Country is my thing. Pop is my thing.” I loved a lot of different kinds of music, and I still do.
Throughout your career there have been these moments when you’ve acted with integrity and paid a price for it. Those around you weren’t ready for the pushback.
Especially pushback from a woman. My wonderful grandfather who was in my life daily, he lived in my neighborhood, my mom’s dad. He taught me that you have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror when you go to bed at night and feel happy with the decisions you’ve made and how you’ve treated other people. He was my main man. He was a big influence on me. I always ask myself, “What would Grandpa do?” [Laughs.] And then I follow that advice basically.
You worked extensively with Kris Kristofferson and the thing that I think of first when I think of him is the moment at Madison Square Garden in 1992 at the Bob Dylan tribute concert when the audience booed Sinead O’Connor. He embraced her and apparently said, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
That’s who he was as a man. He was kind and so open hearted and so generous, and he wasn’t going to let somebody be crucified in front of him.
I was blown away by the performance that he gave in the 1996 John Sayles film “Lone Star,” which is still a favorite of mine, and then when I saw him live in late 2019, which would have been one of his last live performances. He had this incredible charisma and commitment.
It’s true. He was very charismatic. It was always funny to watch him walk into a room and everybody would sort of gather around him and he would say, “Why is everybody coming by me?” He didn’t see it in him although everybody else did. I think it was that warmth and that kindness and that humanity. He was really a unique and special individual.
You also became friends with him while working for him. That doesn’t always happen. Is that just down to the kind of person he was, that he wanted to surround himself with people he could also trust as friends?
I think so. Everybody that worked with Kris was friends with him and he, again, going back to what a kind human he was, he just enveloped people into his orbit. We spent so much time together for so many years that it just sort of happens organically. But we were fast friends. It’s so weird, I remember that I was also working with Guy Clark. I was out with Guy, and I had to fly from Austin to New York to be with Kris, and I was kind of whining to my husband about how I was tired, and I didn’t want to go to New York. He said, “Look, you work for these two amazing songwriters, and this is not going to last forever. You need to be there while you can be present.” I said, “You’re right,” and I flew to New York, and I think about it now that they’re both gone and how quickly those two decades flew by with both of them and just how privileged I was to be there in the moment, present with them for whatever was going on.
Your work with Guy Clark is also central to this book. You wrote “Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark,” and then made the documentary film “Without Getting Killed or Caught” with Paul Whitfield. I love the story of making the film. There’s a moment where you think, “I want Sissy Spacek to narrate this,” you’re talking to Rodney Crowell and he says, “Let me text her.”
[Laughs.] It was meant to be. Some people call those God winks. Or the right thing happens and with that film it just kept happening. Sometimes I look back on that and think, “Wow, did that really happen?” Yes, it really happened. Sissy Spacek was our Susanna Clark. She voiced the film from Susanna’s point of view. She came into the studio and knocked it out in one day, became Susanna before our very eyes and was such a pro and was so warm and wonderful to work with. I love that we got her.
She tells you this story about how when she was younger, she was learning to play guitar, this young woman shows up, shows her how to Travis pick and that person turns out to be…
Guy Clark’s first wife! [Laughs.] Yeah. I know. You can’t make this stuff up. This really happened. That was really mind blowing.
