Local tunesmith Van Eaton remains low key, even after writing for Del McCoury
by Joe Tarr
Van Eaton doesn't have great ambitions for his music. He doesn't want to tour, and he's not looking to be famous. He's happy with his family, his job at a check cashing service in Knoxville, and drinking a couple of beers every now and then.
But the 36-year-old is passionate about music, and his therapy is strumming melodies on his guitar and writing lyrics to go with them. Somehow Eaton managed to get a CD of songs to the Del McCoury Band, which liked one of them so much they made it the title cut of its latest album, It's Just The Night.
He's brought his family along for an interview at the Tomato Head—they sit at an adjacent table munching pizza while Eaton sips a Guinness and talks about how he wound up writing music. He's tickled that Metro Pulse would consider a story about him.
Eaton's an odd but endearing mix of good ol' Southern boy and music geek. His leather vest, cowboy boots, neatly trimmed mustache bump up incongruously against his fan-boy raving about Richard Thompson, Tom Waits, Nick Drake, et. al.
He played guitar as a teenager and learned a lot of other people's music—Springsteen, Waits, Dylan, Hank Williams, Billy Joe Shaver. "I could do [their songs] almost exactly like the original artist. Some people can do covers and make them their own. I couldn't do that, and it bothered me," he says.
So Eaton started writing his own songs. "I'm embarrassed to go back and read those old notebooks now," he says of his early compositions.
Writing songs and strumming by himself is pretty much where Van Eaton's music has sat for 18 years. Two years ago, at the urging of his wife, he contacted an old friend, producer Pat McInerney. McInerney got him a break on studio time and collected some pretty reputable musicians (guys who have played with Richard Thompson, Hank Jr., and Nanci Griffith) and recorded his songs over three days.
Most of the songs on the CD are basic in structure. "I was going for the simple songs. I had always gone for the big statement before. But with this I wanted to make what I call front porch music," he says.
"I look for feel more than anything in a song. Something that can touch a wide array of people. Something real, not surreal," he says.
Eaton started passing out CDRs of the recordings around Nashville to see if anyone liked the songs. He also happened to go to a bluegrass festival in Spindale, N.C., where he managed to get The Del McCoury Band a copy.
A year and two months later, Eaton discovered the band actually liked the CD and recorded "It's Just The Night." "I would never have thought Del McCoury would have touched that song," he says.
The other songs on his demo sound more typically like bluegrass, and Eaton was surprised they picked that one. But he's since learned Del's tastes. "Del doesn't record as many traditional bluegrass songs as other artists. He likes to take a non-bluegrass song and make it bluegrass," Eaton says.
The song came about when Eaton was sitting around in a hotel late at night in Nashville, after a Springsteen show. "What I was doing was practicing painting pictures with words," he says. "It became extremely descriptive."
He wrote the words in his notebook and filed it away. A few months later, he was looking for inspiration and came across the lines he'd written. He finished it in five minutes.
The final verse is: "A wicked wind blowing, makes the shadows dance around/ The cracks in the sidewalk look like snakes on the ground/ You see the lightning flash and you hear some thunder roar/ You walk a little bit faster/ trying to make it to your door."
"You're walking down the street late at night, you don't see anybody else, there's an owl hooting, there's thunder off in the distance. In reality, you're not in any danger. It's just the night," he says. The chorus continues, "It may seem a little spooky but it's alright/ Don't you worry none...It's just the night, It's just the night."
The McCoury Band recorded it with the legendary gospel group, The Fairfield Four, to give the song even more of a spooky, ethereal quality. They performed it this week on the Conan O'Brien Show.
Eaton says the producer, McInerney, wants to release the CD they cut as a solo record. Eaton is surprisingly indifferent. He loves music but doesn't want to live like a musician. "If he's going to ask for a tour and all this, I'm not into that. I like Knoxville," he says. He loves the fact that Knoxville's gotten both the Tom Tom Club and Webb Wilder playing here for free, or that you can go down to the Old City and find rock 'n' roll, bluegrass, jazz and blues all nearby.
Eaton has no idea how much money he's going to get from the song.
"They deserve more credit than me. I write songs as a hobby; I'm not a hit machine," he says.
October 9, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 41
© 2003 Metro Pulse
| 
