John Adamian WTXX-LTV

11:26 a.m. AKDT, April 4, 2011
The singer, songwriter and guitar-player Richard Buckner has had some setbacks in recent years. He spent a while working on a movie score and then the project got tied up in financing and licensing problems. (“It got all screwed up,” he says.) His soundtrack work hasn't been released yet, and there's no telling when it will be. Then he and his girlfriend moved up to New York's Hudson Valley and Buckner started working on a new record. They were renting an old grange hall in what he says was a sketchy part of Kingston. It was a resonant room, great for recording. Then their place got broken into and some of Buckner's equipment got stolen. So he found himself working crap jobs to make some cash — holding a road sign for Con Ed up in the Catskills, driving a fork lift in a warehouse. For Buckner's fans this is a little like learning that George Jones had to take a job in an ice cream shop to pay the bills or that Bruce Springsteen had started waiting tables to buy a guitar amp. It just doesn't seem right.

Buckner has one of the most expressive singing voices around. It's a thing of grainy, smoky, natural beauty, like some weathered piece of limestone or driftwood: You can sense the work of time and the elements wearing away at it and making it what it is. His voice is husky and slightly worn, but when he sings it occasionally swoops, sways and wiggles to hit its mark or to create an ornamental flourish on a syllable. His music can sound right at home next to the best of Son Volt and Richard Thompson, but there's also a more thorny loner vibe, a stone-faced intensity that creeps in. Buckner's lyrics often seem to be about trying to duck outside into the open air, or leaving town, packing everything up and hitting the highway.

I spoke to Buckner one morning last week. He was out in the parking lot of a Howard Johnson's in Birmingham, Ala. He was looking for coffee. When I ask him about his voice and singing, he says that when he first started out, “It was about veering toward the note and hoping to hit something close.”

Buckner says he often gives himself little challenges and creative constraints that sometimes serve to spur the writing and recording process. “I like to give myself handicaps,” he says. For the recording of his most recent record — which is done and only awaiting a release date from Merge Records — Buckner says he mostly avoided using standard six-string guitars (removing strings, restringing the things upside down, etc). He would also reconfigure his studio space after each bath of songs, swapping out instruments and changing the placement of everything, to rejigger the flow. Sometimes, when writing lyrics, he'll also transcribe the words into prose form to make sure the grammar and logic makes sense on the page, independent of the song's phrasing and melodies.

Even after all that, Buckner still sounds like he has an artist's never-ending sense of frustration about end results. “Records never turn out the way I think I hear them in my head when I start,” he says. Buckner refers back to the sound of his canned film project score. “When I was doing the film score, I found myself getting a certain sound — airy and huge,” he says.

For the forthcoming record — his ninth album, and his first proper solo release since 2006's brooding Meadow — Buckner plays most everything himself, with a little help from a pedal steel player and a sprinkling of maracas by Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley.

One other little challenge — and one that extends into this tour where Buckner is opening for Sebadoh (they play Northampton's Pearl Street this week) — is that the songs were basically written during the recording process. He's never really performed them before, and he's having to learn them for these shows. At 46, Buckner jokes that he's not sure how many more years of gigging he's got in him. “I think my touring days are numbered — I don't know if I can do this much longer,” he laughs, comparing himself to his truck, saying it's the same old parts but sometimes you start hearing funny noises or feeling a mysterious shaking when you start it up or get up to a certain speed.