CJW: How long has this CD been in the works?
TLC: The day after we finished recording Home Sweet Road, I was taking Kemper Crabb to the airport, he said, “Time to start working on the next one!” So kind of since there. But more or less, I had been planning it for… well, it’s really, as this is my job, it’s kind of something you think about all the time. You’re writing songs and you’re going, “Is this album worthy? Does this fit anywhere? Is this something I can play for people?” You’re always thinking about that. But Donnie and I have been getting together, meeting, doing pre-production stuff for about a month and a half now. I came to the table with about 25 songs, and when we started recording this three weeks ago, we had 14 songs for the album. Now we have 11, ‘cause we’d start working on it and be like, “I don’t like this anymore. I don’t love this.” Or “This is good, but it’s totally not the direction of this album.” It’s just sort of a process of weeding out the bad and trying to make the good even better.
CJW: Do you have an anticipated release date?
TLC: We’re anticipating June 8th.
CJW: That’s the same day as Derek’s house show CD.
TLC: Oh really? That’s what we’re anticipating. And tentatively, it will be called Things You Can’t Stop with Your Hands.
CJW: Why the title?
TLC: It’s a song on the album about my family losing their land. It’s some land that’s been in our family for generations, and basically imminent domain allows the government the opportunity to seize your land to build highways and things like that. So it’s sort of about that and about being frustrated over not being able to stop that, about being frustrated over anything you can’t control – death, loss, pain – all those things.
TLC: (after Jett, a musician on the album, came through the room) I met Jett two or three years ago on tour in Kansas. He was touring with Bebo at the time. We got together to have dinner – the people that I was on tour with and Bebo’s tour. I met him that one night and saw him a few years later, almost present day now. He was like, “We met in Oklahoma!” He starts describing what we had for dinner that night. Holy moly! Great memory! It was pretty amazing. (“I Wonder” playing again.)
CJW: I think the aforementioned best friend will appreciate that. Her family may lose their land – it’s not imminent, but she’s afraid that her dad’s going to sell it. She grew up on a farm in Green Cove Springs, Fla. They have all these acres, I don’t remember how many, but they’ll take us on hayrides at Thanksgiving, there’s like a big bonfire… he’s the sheriff of the county, so everyone’s invited.
TLC: That’s awesome!
CJW: She’s afraid he’s going to sell it or that something’s going to happen to it… so I think she’ll get a kick out of that. Not in a happy way, but…
TLC: The initial reason I wrote the song is because we had all this land and the middle piece of the land – the valley in the middle – our neighbor sold it. The company that bought it built a big factory on it where they manufacture test bombs for the army. Right in the middle of my family’s plot of land is this factory surrounded by all this rural farm community. So the reason they’re building the road is because it’s so important to get the freight to and from the factory. In the process of doing that, five families – and our family – will lose their homes. Part of it was my neighbor had the land and sold it. The other part of it was the government’s taking the rest of it. It’s been a frustrating process for sure.