Blackberry Smoke Will Be Right Here
Talking with frontman Charlie Starr about the band’s electrifying new album
It’s been a while for Blackberry Smoke, coming up on a quarter century of playing together.
But you wouldn’t know it by talking to energetic frontman and songwriter Charlie Starr. He doesn’t know how they’ve had such longevity, but if he could figure it out, he “could bottle it and sell it.”
“In some ways, it’s flown by,” Starr said, looking back. “In other ways I feel like, ‘Yeah, well, we’re grizzled.’ It’s a bit surreal. I watched the Stones play and they don’t sound like grizzled old vets either. They don’t need the money, they love it. They love the magic that happens when a handful of people strap on instruments and play together.”
Blackberry Smoke still feels that excitement, and for their new album Be Right Here, they found ways to blend their traditional approach to making music with some fresh ideas, aided by the help of producer Dave Cobb.
“We always record live,” Starr explained. “That’s what bands do. The difference this time was we put everything in one room.”
Cobb suggested that the band “bring little amps … to make a little amp record.” He wanted to “put everything in one room.,” instead of taking the usual approach of having different amps in different rooms.
“It was like we were rehearsing,” Starr said. “It was really cool That lends some looseness to the proceedings. We’re sitting in a circle jamming, when something feels good: ‘We got it!’ I can hear the sound of the room. It makes the drums sound bigger. Space makes everything sound bigger. You can make a record with little bitty amplifiers and they sound big.”
The technique isn’t new; Starr highlights Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs as an example of an album made in a similar fashion. Taking a fresh approach within their regular framework helped draw something new out of the band.
Another Cobb suggestion – “Don’t make demos” – added some excitement to the process.
“I always make home demos and send to the band,” Starr said. “You can do that now thanks to all this technology. Before I would make cassettes – maybe an acoustic guitar and my vocal. I’d already made demos for half the songs. [Cobb] said, ‘Don’t send anymore and don’t rehearse. I want to capture spontaneity.’ As far as not playing the songs for the guys, he said, ‘I like to capture people’s knee jerk reaction musically. Usually the first thing you play is the best thing.’”
Starr liked the idea, and the band ran with it, even though “sometimes you have to work through some things that might be a little complicated.”
The other members of the band had never heard “Whatchu Know Good,” “Barefoot Angel,” “Other Side of the Light” and “Little Bit Crazy” before entering the studio. Starr would just grab a guitar and say, “It goes like this.”
“It’s a little like a Bob Dylan session from the mid-’60s,” he said. “That is really interesting to me because it does add a little bit of tension to the proceedings that might not be there otherwise.”
VIDEO: Blackberry Smoke “Whatcha Know Good”
Musically, the album continues to broaden the sort of Southern rock that the band’s been noted for, and lyrically it expands some of the serious optimistic searching that took on extra urgency around the time of 2018’s Find a Light. Starr describes Be Right Here as “the luck album,” acknowledging that while he didn’t have that theme in mind as he was writing the songs (although one might surmise, “Be So Lucky”), “it does pop up a few times.” Luck may circulate through the album, but, if so, it does so largely thanks to a call for introspection that can lead to the right perspective.
“Everything from Find a Light to now has driven a lot people to be more introspective, to take personal inventory,” Starr said. “COVID did that for a lot of people. I do know people who have come out on the other side of it for the better, really. They’re taking better care of themselves spiritually, physically and mentally.”
Part of that new line of think should lead us to being more present in the moment, more engaged with our immediate context.
“It’s sort of a Ram Dass kind of thing,” Starr explained. “Just be present within yourself. Be right here. I’m patting my chest, my heart. Be right here. Home will always be right here.”
That presence can have a centering effect in our divisive times. The album opens with rocker “Dig a Hole,” which Star wrote because he’s “sick of the division caused by social media, or even the media.”
“Every day if I open a web page, everything is so left or right,” he continued. “I know a whole cross-section of people who don’t feel that way or that way. Everybody I know kind of lives in the middle. That pendulum swing is so hard to the left and to the right, it’s a fight every day. That song is the guy who’s sick of it. We’re not going to live very long. We’re only here for 80 years on the average. Maybe I don’t want to waste time getting mad about everything. That guy’s probably me!”
With that attitude, we can find some relief from the way partisan fighting is presented to us.
“It’s left hates the right and the right hates the left and there’s no in-between,” Starr said. “The way it’s presented to us, there’s only two choices. Hold on a minute. I’m a great big grown man, I believe I can make up my own mind, and find some middle ground. Find some gray area. And it seemed to really heat up to the boiling point around covid. I’ve got friends I’ve known since high school and we can’t even get along anymore. This is ridiculous. Not to say that those people don’t have the right to have that opinion, because we all do, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend the rest of my life fighting with everyone. I have my opinions, and I don’t let social media tell me how to feel about things. Do research and make your own mind up. Don’t let a TikToker tell you how to feel. I used to feel like we had a pretty good handle on right from wrong. Apparently we don’t, but I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of it. I was taught by some good folks. Being kind is a great place to start.”
Thinking through difficult situations comes up on album highlight “Hammer and the Nail,” a track about the way life’s trials can forge us in to something stronger.
“The idea is life has made me tough enough to be the nail,” Starr said. “I can handle it. That’s the punchline of the chorus. ‘The whole world swings a hammer and I’m the nail.’ It’s a guy – the decks are stacked against him just from his father’s life. That’s the way it starts. From there on, it’s an underdog song.”
And “underdog song” suits Blackberry Smoke just fine, because that’s how they’ve seen themselves for most of their career. Starr points out that they’ve never had real interest from a major label. The going line – which even made its way to a t-shirt design – was that their “music was either too rock ‘n’ roll for country audiences or too country for rock ‘n’ roll audiences.” At one point they did meet with a friend from a major label, but the rep said he didn’t think he could offer the band much in the way of marketing, even though they’d like to try. Blackberry Smoke simply said, “No, thank you.”
“We had already worked hard enough to solidify opportunities to continue to work. We could continue to go and play shows and make a living,” Starr explained. “We’ve got that part covered. We don’t need a bank because we have okay credit. I think we’ll just continue to do this ourselves. Everything is recuperable.”
He considers now that “a lot of young kids get blinded by that idea – here comes boatloads of money and drugs and girls, but there’s not one cent that gets forgotten when it’s time to pay up. You might want to look at it from a different perspective. I think when we were 18 we might have been like, ‘Whatever you can do to help us!’ This was a decade into their career, though, when they were well set on their path.
With fresh ideas and new perspective, that road looks endless, especially with home precisely located right here. Starr certainly wants to keep rolling, and his parting words are gratitude for his fans and hope for the trip to come.
“I hope they continue to hang with us on this journey that we’ve all been on musically for 24 years,” he said. “I hope they enjoy it.”
[Note: Just before publication of this article, Blackberry Smoke drummer and founding member Brit Turner passed away at age 57. He had battled with glioblastoma since his diagnosis in 2022. Turner not only excelled as a musician, but he notably helped raise around $500,000 for children’s hospitals after his daughter had been diagnosed with cancer. The band has asked that anyone wishing to help his family can visit here.
In their statement, Blackberry Smoke described Turner as their “True North.” We will feel his loss on and off stage, and we wish the best for his friends and family.]
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