Dehlia Low (L-R) Anya Hinkle - Vocals, Guitar, Fiddle; Aaron Ballance - Dobro, Pedal Steel, Guitar; Stacy Claude - Vocals, Guitar; Greg Stiglets - Bass; and Bryan Clendenin - Mandolin. Credit: Thorne Anderson

Dehlia Low's Stacy Claude, Anya Hinkle and Bryan Clendenin enjoy a lighthearted moment in the studio during the recording of "Tellico."

Greg Stigletts lays down a track during the recording of "Tellico." Photo by Frank Merenda.

Dehlia Low on the road

• May 23 @ 4:00 PM — Jammin at Hippie Jacks – Crawford, TN
• May 24 @ 4:00 PM — Jammin at Hippie Jacks (TV Taping) – Crawford, TN
• June 2 @ 6:00 PM — Wild Wing Cafe – Asheville, NC
• June 4 @ 7:00 PM — Appalachian Uprising – Scottstown, OH
• June 5 @ 4:00 PM — Blue Plum Festival – Johnson City, TN
• June 12, @ 3:00 PM — Blue Ridge BBQ and Music Festival – Harmon Field – Tryon, NC
• June 26 @ 7:30 PM — Burnsville Town Center – Burnsville, NC
• June 27 @ 8:00 PM — Purple Onion – Saluda, NC

In Part 3 of this series, Dehlia Low’s Anya Hinkle talks about the final weekend of recording “Tellico“, her reactions on hearing the rough mixes for the first time, the photo shoot and packaging as well as  paying your hero more than just respect.

Dehlia Low’s final recording weekend, Feb 20-22

It is interesting how in recording this material, it’s kind of a process of letting go and moving on from these songs. Although the listener might feel that this material is brand new, for me, the process of “officially” recording each song, very possibly the only time it will ever be recorded, is kind of like saying goodbye.

We’ve been performing and practicing these tunes for many months and to think that they will be crystallized, frozen, in this one performance, a single interpretation of something that is actually continually evolving, something that is somewhat different every time, is vaguely dispiriting. Now that they are recorded, they are “done.”

Time for new songs, new things to write and learn and share and work out. So it’s a sentimental process, and also a daunting process of looking to the future and hoping you can continue to create more material like this.

Today, we got an unmixed copy of the disk, minus a few parts we’ll be plugging in during this final recording weekend,. I drove to the next town over to eat dinner just to have the chance to listen to it in the car.

It’s coming together

Since we haven’t all been in the studio together, we hadn’t all heard what others have been laying down, and there’s enough down now to really get a feel for how each song is going to come out. Hearing each person’s breaks for the first time, or singing, or harmonies, all I can say is that it was irrepressibly exciting.

There were a lot of “Yeah!”s and “&^%^ Yeah!”s and “Nice!” mixed with minimal “ooh…gotta fix that.“ And of course a lot of naval-gazing speculation as to what the final product might be like, a topic toward which we gravitated throughout the evening.

I’ve really come to appreciate the rather strange art form of creating the songs in this way, assembled together completely free of how something would or even could be done live (although in most cases it is pretty close).

A recording is just a completely different thing than a live performance, just like listening to a CD in your car or at home is different from going to a show, and I think I’m beginning to kind of embrace this. Since the song is just frozen in time, and because you have this tool to go back and make things exactly how you want them, you can really consider the very fine details of your performance that will be listened to over and over.

And it’s also made us better, considering different, more interesting, and more accurate breaks, different phrasing in singing, better blending and different harmonies than we have done live. So instead of worrying about whether it sounds live, I’ve been much more interested in playing with the tools available to us and learning how to make each song as beautiful as possible, to communicate as much as we can to the listener, learning a lot about our own playing and singing in the process.

The photo shoot & packaging

Then there is the photo. We had a shoot and definitely got numerous good shots of four out of five people. We are trying to find one everyone can live with. Comments are “I’ve Photo-shopped the wrinkles out of my shirt” “he thinks he looks like some sort of Scandinavian yeo-man” “9 looks fake, and my head is misshapen in 35” “76 looks Olan-Mills-ish”.

Our packaging designer at Blue Barnhouse is ruminating over our stated desire for the CD art to convey “a sense of place” without a cheesy picture of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the background or something, and we have provided him with the text, credits, band pictures and template.

We decided on a six-panel folded cardboard Digipak package so it will have a spine on both sides, and are including just enough information about ourselves to offset a comment that Bluegrass Now made about our previous release, really just a sampler EP, that “the unfortunate side of this debut project is that it’s packaged in a thin cardboard sleeve that provides limited information about the band and members. However, the contents are surprisingly very good.” Definitely don’t want the next cd to be reviewed on its packaging.

Covering the cover

The last interesting tidbit to report from in and around the recording studio relates to royalties—there is a single cover song on our disk that we needed to pay the songwriter and publisher for. It is a tune called “Lord Won’t You Help Me” by Norman Blake, someone who I have absolutely loved since I was a kid. I had his LP records, and used to pour over the liner notes in “Home in Sulphur Springs,” “Fields of November,” and “Whiskey Before Breakfast” with that extra time I seemed to have back in those days.

His solo playing on “Live at McCabes,” with Tut Taylor on “Friar Tut,” and with John Hartford on “Aereo-Plain” just captures Norman at his best, really how the Seventies must have sounded in my imagination (being a bit too young to have experienced it completely), on the cusp of something old and wonderful and something new and rather unnecessary. But even his more modern recordings like “Meeting on Southern Soil” are just beautiful, and convey the pleasures of roots and acoustic music with original ideas and expressions of individuality.

There is just something so poignant about Norman and his humble but slightly self-righteous throwback tendencies and his sentimental songs of things now “dead and gone.” I remember seeing Norman just once, at Telluride of all places, and just sitting in the front row with tears running down my face—perhaps a bit dramatic (I was like 19!), but Norman just kind of chokes me up!

So Brian Asplin, our manager, with some effort, figures out how the royalties must be paid in this instance—not through BMI, ASCAP or some corporate office somewhere, by credit card, through a computer. After a phone conversation with Norman’s manager, it appears that I simply need to write Norman a personal check, and he also requests two copies of the disk so he can hear it. I absolutely flip when Brian tells me this—I haven’t decided whether or not to include a gushing letter with it—probably not, now that I think about it—I guess I just hope somehow our treatment of his song communicates a little bit of our feeling about his work through the years.

We’re getting close…