If not for the barrage of 9/11-anniversary news footage on his hotel TV, odds are Billy Joe Shaver wouldn't have known what day it is. That week in Nashville was something of a blur for the sixty-three-year-old Texas outlaw songwriter. But a very productive blur.

"I think we set some kind of record . . . for us, anyway," says Shaver on the speed in which his latest album, Freedom's Child, was recorded. "We've been working so hard, I haven't hardly raised my head up. The first day we recorded five songs and the next day five more and then the next day, three. We've now got fifteen songs all told. Some of the songs I can't remember even doing, but there they are."

Freedom's Child, set for release November 19th, will mark Shaver's debut with the tiny, Houston-based independent label Compadre Records, following a four-year, three-album stint with New West that ended with last year's The Earth Rolls On. That was also Shaver's last recording featuring the honky tonk/hard rock guitar playing of his son Eddy, who died of a drug overdose on December 31, 2000. Freedom's Child will be the first "solo" Billy Joe Shaver album since 1987's Salt of the Earth, as all subsequent albums prominently featured Eddy and bore the band name "Shaver."

Following the death of his son -- which came shortly after the death of his wife Brenda -- Shaver says he doubted whether he'd ever record again, which led to his decision to leave New West. On top of depression, he also faced serious health problems, which culminated in a heart attack last summer at a show at Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, Texas. "I thought depression was why I was dragging around so bad, but then I come to find out it was my heart," says Shaver, who had bypass surgery to clear out all four of his arteries. "I actually had five arteries, because my heart had grown an extra one, trying to heal itself. That happens sometimes. So I'm running on five now instead of four, and I'm doing fine."

After his health and spirits improved (the later in no small part due to his friend Kinky Friedman's insistence that he join him on tour, first through Texas and later Australia), Shaver decided to find a new label and return to the studio. Freedom's Child reunites him with producer R.S. Field, who last worked with Shaver on his widely acclaimed 1993 "comeback" album, Tramp on Your Street. "I'm glad to get back with him," says Shaver. "He cares about what he's doing and I do too. It's just pretty easy to work with somebody like that." Players on the album include guitarists Will Kimbrough and Jamie Hartford (son of the late John Hartford), fiddler Chris Carmichael, organ and piano player Steve Conn, drummer Jimmy Lester and bassists Keith Christopher and Dave Roe.

Shaver says the very first song recorded for the album, "That's Why the Man in Black Sings the Blues," was captured on the first take in what was actually a practice run. "We were just rehearsing it, and it was so good we just didn't have to do any more. It was like a godsend," says Shaver. That song, of course, alludes to Johnny Cash, who recorded Shaver's "Lately I Been Leanin' Toward the Blues" on his recently reissued 1979 album, Silver. "I've been trying to reach him, and hopefully he'll come in and sing it rather than myself because there's just no substitute for Johnny Cash," says Shaver. "I couldn't have wrote that song without him."

Another song Shaver's had filed away for a long time is Freedom Child's title track, about an unknown soldier. Because of its age, Shaver notes that the song is not specifically 9/11-themed, but nonetheless he believed it was topical enough to feel compelled to finally record it and get it out before the end of the year. Also in a patriotic vein is the more light-hearted "Good Ole U.S.A.," the only song on the new album which Shaver has previously recorded (albeit very differently -- for the new version, he says, "we jazzed it up real good.")

The rest of the songs on Freedom's Child include "Corsicana Daily Sun" (about Shaver's hometown), "Hold On to Yours and I'll Hold On to Mine," "Honey Chile," "We," "That's What She Said Last Night" (a co-write with Eddy Shaver), "Deja Blues" (a co-write with Todd Snider), "Day By Day," "Drinking Back," "Wild Cow Gravy," "Melody," "Magnolia Mother's Blues" and "Merry Christmas to You." Shaver says the styles range from "kicking rock & roll" to barroom country to "bluegrass-sounding stuff." "It's just got about every kind of music you can think of in it," he says.

While Shaver's last album, The Earth Rolls On, featured several songs that dealt head-on with the loss of his wife (and eerily, the imminent loss of his son, who died shortly after it's recording), only one song on Freedom's Child addresses them specifically, "Day by Day." "It chronicles all the things that happened to us, and it says how their deaths affected me," says Shaver of the long, "intricate" narrative. "It's about how [their deaths] knocked me to my knees and how my heart broke. But I got up. I'm still living with this thing -- it's something that don't go away, but you just try and live with it each day. I'm a lot stronger than I thought I was. And the songs that came from me and my family, they'll never die."

And, he says, he's not about to stop recording them. "I've got plenty more in me," he says. "I've got hundreds of songs I could go through and fill several albums."

RICHARD SKANSE
(September 26, 2002)