Becky Schlegel finds her own voice, falls into her own niche

Interview by Katryn Conlin for Inside Bluegrass, May 2005

Raised in the central South Dakota town of Kimball (pop. 700), Becky Schlegel has been making music as long as she can remember. When she was still in junior high, she joined her mother's professional country band, The Country Benders. She sang and played keyboards for a country music show in the Black Hills every summer. When she moved to Minnesota in 1994 she took up the guitar and started showing up at bluegrass jams.

In 1997, Becky formed the bluegrass band True Blue. The group released This Lonesome Song in 1998 and showcased at IBMA in 1999. In 2001 she recorded Red Leaf, a collection of eleven original songs. Now married to banjo player Heath Loy and the mother of Tucker Heath Loy (born last August), Becky has been hard at work on releasing her third CD project, Drifter Like Me. We got together for a conversation in early April to talk about the direction music has taken her and the new project.

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Why did you start playing guitar? I had played piano for so many years, but it's not portable and you can't stand up and play it. It felt like it took forever before I could play guitar with a band. I just wanted to get to the point where I was pulling my own weight. Here I was playing with guys like Matt Thompson and I felt like I was just covering the basics.

When did you first start writing songs, and what got you started? I didn't start writing until I was about 27. One day I wrote a song and I was so excited that I wrote another one - I just had a burst of creativity. That first one we played a couple of times and it just wasn't that good. But we do play the second one now - in fact it's on the new album, “Tell Me Now.”

At the time I was playing with True Blue and it was so exciting to hear the band play one of my songs. It would just come to life. You don't know if it's going to work or not. It's so exhilarating when it does!

You've recorded three CDs now. Tell me about how each represents your progression as a musician. The first was This Lonesome Song with True Blue. For me, that album was really about getting my voice out there. I just wanted be a wonderful bluegrass singer. We had really good material, like originals by Becky Buller, Leo Rosenstein, Mark Kreitzer. It was really cool. But I felt like was singing so hard. I wanted to belt it out like a bluegrass singer, really put on a hard sound. It was almost like I was screaming. It was a hard way to sing for my voice.

About the time that I started writing songs, we were beginning to record our second album and we were looking for new material. But although we had started working on it, that album never happened. Things went in a different direction. Instead I ended up recording Red Leaf.

How did Red Leaf end up sounding so different from This Lonesome Song? I had a lot of help from the producer, Tom Tucker. We went with a completely different process. Instead of recording track-by-track, overdubbing everything, and taking weeks on it, the whole album was done in three days and everything was recorded live. We worked with some great musicians, like Peter Ostroushko on mandolin, Gordy Johnson on bass and Kenny Wilson on steel guitar. I had never played with any of these people before. They didn't have any advance warning of the songs; they just learned them right on the spot and played them.

The whole live experience in the studio was really neat. When you're playing and singing at the same time you can't go back and fix it. You have to accept a lot of things about your performance. You can't go back over and over things. You play it all the way through and that's it.

How did people react to Red Leaf? We have had a lot of radio play across the country and have sold about 5000 albums. I don't know if that's a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it seems like a lot to me. It's touched a different crowd. A lot of people liked it even though it didn't have all the elements of traditional bluegrass. We didn't use any banjo and I know that offended some people but others still feel it's a bluegrassy album. People don't really care about what category music is, they just want to hear good music.

The way you sing really seemed to change when you started recording your own songs. Well, when I started to write songs, I started singing in a higher register and started to lighten up and go falsetto. A lot of bluegrass standards were restricted to me; they just weren't in the right key or the right range, but when I started writing I could hit a lot of notes because I could go falsetto. I didn't have to struggle with the range issues anymore. It was like because I was the person writing the songs that I discovered my own voice.

How long have you and Brian Fesler been playing together? It's been three or four years now. We started out a few months after Red Leaf was released. You know, people think of him as a banjo player, but he plays guitar about 40% of the time. And he's adding harmony parts now to most songs. He's really taken it upon himself to do the parts. I guess he never needed to sing before in other bands, but he's a great singer.

When did you start work on Drifter Like Me? It was all done in about two days in April last year at Dik Shopteau's studio in Minneapolis. Kevin Bowe helped produce it. Then there were a handful of overdub sessions. I recorded all the basics with Brian Fesler on banjo or guitar and Gordy Johnson on bass.

Clay Hess happened to be in town that weekend, and we figured, why pass up the opportunity? He did some cool stuff, like he got the harmony line to “Cheyenne” in one take. He was able to pick things up and lay them down right now.

Later on I came back in did some harmony overdubs with Jim White. He's a fantastic singer who used to play electric bass with us. Larry Beem came in one afternoon and did a Dobro part. Dick Nunnelley added some mandolin. The whole process felt so easy.

Let's talk about the songs on the album. What's the story behind the title track? I wrote the song “Drifter Like Me” about two months after Red Leaf came out so we've been performing it for ages now. It's got an easy kind of feeling - sit back, take a deep breath. The message is simple - money can't buy happiness. I saw this guy waltzing down the sidewalk, singing to himself. Here this guy was happy, even though for all you could see, he didn't have a thing to his name.

Do people always assume your songs are autobiographical? Yeah, a lot of people think so. And I guess there is a little bit of me in each song I write. Like the song “So Embarrassing”: I don't even know who it's about - I just made up this situation. You don't know if you should go or if you should stay, you feel stupid. But there's something liberating about admitting that, “You know what, this is embarrassing. I'm really humiliated, what can I say.”

“I Never Did Fit In” is another made-up story about being sad and lonely and leaving town. But every year, you have to admit it, it's February and you ask yourself, “Why am I still living in this cold town? Why does anybody even try to live here?”

I can't believe “Tell Me Now” is just the second song you ever wrote. It has all the makings of a great country standard. I was listening to Hazel Dickens and I got the vibe for the song. I took it to Heath and he played banjo on it and it was so beautiful. So I brought it to the band and John (Niemann) and Matt (Thompson) sang harmony on it - when they would come in it would bring tears to my eyes. Now that song is kind of different. Normally when you go to the chorus, you move up to something, but in this song when you get to the chorus, everything shifts down. Lyrically, it's an early song, but I just love the melody.

Are any of your songs are based on true stories? “These Hard Times” comes from my grandma. She will be 100 years old in August. It was back in the dust bowl era. They had to sell their farm and move into town because there was no water. The government paid these farmers $2 a head to bring the cattle into town and they were put down. My grandparents sold the farm and then they brought the same farm back ten years later. The way she talks about it, it's like it wasn't very dramatic, but to me it's an amazing story. I don't think that people realize that if you have one bad year of a drought that's one thing, but to have eight or nine years in a row, well, we just can't comprehend it.

“Windmill” is about the remnants of an old homestead down in southern Minnesota. I always wanted to see the place. As were walking there you could hear the windmill creaking about a mine away. It stands over an old family cemetery. In the middle there is a big stone with list of the children who had died and they were all under the age of 10. It's so moving. So I imagined that nobody could remember these people who had lived so long ago, except the windmill. And the windmill is standing guard over the graves of these children. I get goosebumps just thinking about it. When you die, in 150 years, who's gonna remember you?

“No Angel” is the show-stopper on this album. It is just so beautiful! Some people take might take their relationships for granted. Maybe this songs reminds them to realize that they have it good and should tell the people the love how much they love them while they still have the chance.

I've seen you do“No Angel” in concert with Brian, and it's the one song you don't play on at all. I can't imagine singing in front of an audience without an instrument. I don't want to clap my hands or dance around. But I don't play on that one - I just hold on to the guitar. It's really hard. You should see my knuckles, they're white!

The song “Let it Ride” has come out twice in the same year, on Drifter Like Me and on Phil Nusbaum's new album. I love the way it came out on Phil's album. It's about how you start out in a particular category and after a while you fall into your own niche. It's one of those songs that just about having a good time, getting into the beat and the melody, that's the idea.

Another one that's all about the beat is “Cheyenne.” There's not much of a message but “Let's get out of here!” I love traveling west into the scenery and the history. There are so many places in America that I want to see and they are all out west.

That makes me think of “California Night.” We were at this great festival in California pretty high up in the mountains and we were freezing but we had so much fun! I was hearing all these great musicians jamming but I was just too cold. So I climbed into this SUV we had rented and sat in there with the heater on and wrote the song.

Are you writing a lot of new songs? Yes, I am. Being around other musicians is what inspires me to write. This summer I'm hoping to write more because we're going to be at a lot of festivals and I'm going to hear a lot of great music.