Radney Foster talks about his new album and compilation of short stories, For You to See the Stars, and his upcoming performance at Dallas’ historic Kessler Theater on September 6.
Texas musician Radney Foster is a household name in the country music world for his intricate storytelling and soulful prose.
A seasoned singer-songwriter, Foster’s diverse music has been recorded by artist like Keith Urban, Sarah Evans, Hootie and the Blowfish, Jack Ingram, and Gary Allen. As a solo artist, he’s produced more than 10 albums, four consecutive Top 40 hits, and over 10 tracks featured on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts.
Foster’s latest endeavor, For You to See the Stars, is a compilation of songs and short stories. For every song on the 10-track album, an imaginative and immersive short story is uniquely paired with it, giving listeners a new way to approach music.
Recently, we chatted with Foster about the album and his upcoming performance at the historic Kessler Theater in Dallas.
Cowboys & Indians: You’ve been in the business for about 40 years and have so many accomplishments. What have been some of the stand-out moments?
Radney Foster: There’s a bunch of them. Mostly, they’re sort of personal things that don’t have a lot to do with accolades. You know, getting to meet your heroes is always a really good one. Getting to sing with Merle Haggard; getting to sing with George Jones; meeting and having dinner with Kris Kristofferson … I look back and I think my life was really blessed because right after [my first group] Foster & Lloyd … Guy Clark heard it and said he wanted to write songs with us. That changed a lot for me. It was such a songwriting lesson. So I think they fall more into that than, you know, “I played in front of however many hundreds of thousands at Farm Aid” or any of those kinds of things. So really, it was getting to interact with your heroes and maybe learn something from them.
C&I: How do you think you’ve evolved as an artist since that first album?
Foster: You know, that first album I was in a duo. It was the band Foster & Lloyd, so that really was as much about writing songs to a particular sound as much as we wrote songs about a particular idea, and I think that’s a big change for me. I think I just have done it so long. I made three albums with Bill. I think of it like, Well that’s the first record. But then there’s the first solo record and that one sort of hit it out of the park, too, Del Rio, TX 1959. But I think in all of those instances, I was just trying my best to write the best songs that I could and to let the audience have a little bit of a window to my soul. That’s still true today with For You to See the Stars, but for the most part I don’t pay as much attention to what genre differences there may or may not be, you know? I’m just going to write and produce the song in its own little world of what it feels like.
C&I: For You to See the Stars has a companion book. What were you most excited for your fans to see with this compilation of work?
Foster: I think it’s exciting for me to expand the boundaries of storytelling and I think it’s fun for the audience to go “Wow.” The song is one part of the story, but the written short story piece is a whole different animal, and yet it gives them a different perspective on the song. So it’s really kind of a fun, you know, fun surprises. They’re not necessarily a retelling of each of those songs. A really good example is the first one I wrote. It’s the last song on the record, “Sycamore Creek.” The song “Sycamore Creek” starts the summer after high school and runs, really, through 15 years of these people’s lives, which you can do in a three-and-a-half-minute story song, right, which is kind of cool.
But the short story is really about the last year of high school, so it really is almost the prequel to the song. And so just little things like that were really fun to do to sort of play with the story itself and the storytelling aspect of it [in terms of] “What can I add as a layer, or what tangent can I think of?” There’s another song on the record called “It Ain’t Done With Me,” and the hook of the song is “I’m done with the past but it ain’t done with me.” And the short story is about a pub crawl for one night in New Orleans with a retired spy.
C&I: You delve into so many different creative stories and it’s so fun to read and to listen to the story of the retired spy in New Orleans, or the Dallas lawyer in the mountains, or the post-apocalyptic war. … What inspired those stories and where did you come up with the idea for the whole project?
Foster: Well, it started because I got pneumonia and laryngitis so bad that I could not speak for six weeks. Then I had to go through another six weeks of vocal therapy before I could start playing again. So for a guy like me, that’s an existential crisis, really. And it wasn’t like I knew I wasn’t going to be able to speak for six weeks. I would go in every week and they would take a look at my vocal cords and they’d go, “Nope, you still can’t talk.”
It was just incredibly frustrating. About three weeks in, I wrote a note to my wife and said, “I think there’s a short story in this song I wrote six months ago called ‘Sycamore Creek,’ and I’m going to write that short story to keep from going crazy.” And she didn’t answer me. She pulled the pen out of my hand and wrote down on the same piece of paper, “You should because you’re driving me crazy.” And I really wish I still had that sheet of paper. I don’t, but, man, I really wish I had that sheet of paper. So that was the impetus and that’s really the longest. It’s really novella length. It’s about 12,000 to 13,000 words, and I gave it to her [to read]. She was a journalist and a magazine editor for many, many years and was a great writer in her own right. As a matter of fact, she and I are working on a screenplay — we’re almost done with it — based on the story “Isabel” from the book, which has been kind of exciting.
But when I got through with that first story and I gave it to her, she said, “Babe, this is really good and you need to continue to write this way.” And by the time I had written about the third or fourth story — two of them were inspired by songs, and then two of them it’s like I thought, Oh, I’ll just write a … Okay, wait a minute. This could be a project. And that was when, after about the third or fourth story, I thought, Ah, OK. I could do a project of a song and a short story and make an album out of both.
C&I: What’s it like having your voice back and getting back on stage performing? It must have been quite a process. …
Foster: Oh, I’m having a blast. It’s been really fun. The recovery process — once I got through that 12 weeks, I was pretty good to go. And that was three years ago, so the book and the album really started there. I think I wrote two stories during that time period, but then I spent about another year writing the book, just because I kept looking and waiting, usually, for a song to inspire me or if I got a story idea, of trying to figure out how I was going to weave a song into this thing.
But most of them, the song came first and then, you know, since the book has come out, I really love performing even more. Not with all the new songs from the record, but with maybe three a night or four a night, I will read a little excerpt before we play the song. And that just set the room on fire. I mean, people just seem to really love it. They go nuts for it. And so that’s been really fun and people at the Kessler can definitely look forward to that. And I still play the other hits and stuff, but it’s been different and interesting to weave the stories and the other songs and all my other hits into a setlist that makes sense. So it’s come out a little differently because of that.
Also, I think one of the cool things has been reading in bookstores all over the country, as well, and playing songs to go with it. And that’s been a whole different space and place than being in a listening room, like the Kessler Theater.
C&I: Can we expect anything really special for the performance at Kessler Theater?
Foster: Yeah. I mean you always can. You might even get a new song out of me. But Eddie, my guitar player, and I are playing that one together and there’s a possibility of a special guest, but I can’t reveal who — don’t want to talk about that because I don’t know if it’s really going to come together yet, but I’m working on it. Also, I think if people haven’t heard the new record or they haven’t read the book, they should come with some expectations of that. It’s really been fun. In addition to that, I think it’s made me tell and look at different stories for the other songs that I do during that night. It’s kind of jarred my memory into really thinking a little more theatrically and how do I weave the whole story together from start to finish through the night.
C&I: You’ve performed at the Kessler before. What’s your favorite thing about the venue?
Foster: Two things: When you’re playing and singing, you could hear a pin drop. People are really paying attention. It’s awesome. But then when you get through, they explode and they’re very lively. So it’s not like it’s a hush-hush-y crowd in that sense, but it’s a very attentive crowd, and it’s one of my favorite places to play in the world, for that very reason. They all come expecting to have a good time and they all come expecting to listen. And it’s an awesome combination.
C&I: And Kessler is sort of home turf in that you’re from Texas. …
Foster: I was born and raised in Del Rio.
C&I: What are some of your favorite things to do when you’re back home?
Foster: Oh, there’s a million things. Go fishing with my friends. See my family in San Antonio. Drive over to Luling City Market and buy sausage, because it’s the greatest barbecue sausage in the world, period. I mean I can get barbecued brisket, all you want to, you know, in other places, but I will drive east to Luling from San Antonio every chance I get to go buy sausage by the pound. I’m a foodie, so I love going up to Dallas also. Getting to see old friends. I know that, in particular, I’ve already gotten a call from one of my dearest high school buddies. He and a bunch of folks are going to be at the show at the Kessler. Texas is home. It always feels good to get home and be reminded of why it’s such a special place.
C&I: You’re an acclaimed storyteller. During the creation of your latest project, were there any moments where you just got total writer’s block?
Foster: Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. One interesting story was that the title of the book — because the book was supposed to have a different title and that song was so good … I bought Jack Ingram, who is a very, very dear old friend, a nice bottle of whiskey, and I said, “Jack, will you A&R?” And A&R stands for “artist and repertoire.” At the record labels, they have A&R staff that help you figure out the best songs to choose to put a record together. So I said, “Will you A&R my record?” And he’s like, “You’re kidding?” And I said, “No, man.” It’s hard for me to get someone who’ll tell me, it’s like, “Radney you could’ve done a better job on the bridge,” or “You should choose this song over that one,” and he kept after me, but he knew that he couldn’t just say, “This song beats out that one,” because it had to have a story to go with it.
And he stayed after me and stayed after me about “For You to See the Stars.” He said, “Radney, that is an incredibly special song and you need to find the short story in it.” And it took a long time. I mean, it took six months for me to – you know, that was the project. Every conversation he’d go back: “Have you found a short story idea for ‘You to See the Stars’ yet?” And I was like, “No.” And finally, when I did he was really thrilled. And then when I turned that story in to my editor and we got through — actually, after we had edited the book — she was like, “Man, I really think we need to change the title of this book and your first story needs to be ‘For You to See the Stars,’ because it’s a really special story. It’s something really important.” And she said, “It and ‘Sycamore Creek’ are your bookends, and we can talk about what should go where in the middle, but that would be two really great bookends to a collection of fiction.” And the interesting thing on that was that she didn’t know any of the songs. She refused to listen to any of the songs until after the book was edited.
She kept saying, “You’re too good a songwriter and if I’ve heard the song first, then I’ll be influenced and I won’t be hard enough on you as an editor.” So she waited for over a year until I finally had finished the book and we finally edited the whole thing. And it was actually kind of a sweet moment. She and our friend Eric Erdman, who’s a singer-songwriter out of Mobile, Alabama — I had been up at her house, which [is] the epicenter of Working Title Farm, which is the book publisher, but it’s also her home. So we were driving from there to an airport to get me back home, and she heard all those songs coming at her and just was floored by the whole thing and got real emotional. It was really cool to watch, her shock and surprise at the songs after she’d been, you know, editing this book with me for 10 days.
C&I: Is there a song or one of the short stories that you’ve written that you’re most proud of?
Foster: There’s plenty of songs that I’m really proud of. The fact that they’re still playing “Nobody Wins” 25 years later is kind of crazy. There’s not a lot of songs you can point to and say, “Oh yeah, they’re still going to be playing that song on the radio more than two decades from now.” It’s called popular music for a reason, you know? It comes and it goes, so that always felt really amazing to me. But I think for songs, it’s really different for me. I love each of those short stories for lots of different reasons, but to me there’s something really special about the short story “Bridge Club” because it’s a laughter-to-tears arc. It’s really one of the shortest ones in the book and every time I read it in public, it’s really amazing to watch them take that roller coaster ride with you and watch them just guffaw at the mishaps of being a 4-year-old boy. No spoiler alerts — peeing on trees, you know, and all of the things that go along with that. But then the shock of the ending. People always want to know how much of that one is fiction and how much of that was the truth.
For more information on Radney Foster and to order For You to See the Stars, visit his website.
To get tickets to his upcoming show at the Kessler, visit the theater’s website.
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