Like the Wizard of Oz, or Harlan Howard for that matter, Matraca Berg has been quietly hiding behind Nashville's rhinestone-studded curtain, cranking a creative wheel that rumbles with the sound of hitmaking thunder.| Not since Howard has Music City had a scribe this reliable and popular among its stars. But while Berg's songwriting touch is golden, her recording career has been cursed. Few listeners have bothered to look behind the curtain, but with the re-release of her debut, Lying to the Moon and Other Stories, and the recent attention cast upon Nashville's talented fringe writers, Berg's name may break free from the brackets that surround a songwriting credit.

The daughter of a Nashville session singer, Berg was on the fast track to country music stardom. T.G. Sheppard and Karen Brooks took "Faking Love," a song Berg co-wrote, to No. 1 on the country charts in 1983; she was just eighteen at the time. "It was a terrifying experience to have a hit that young, when you've written maybe twenty songs and maybe two that are worth a s---," Berg says laughing. "I wasn't prepared for that."

Seven years later, Berg recorded her debut album, Lying to the Moon. It yielded a Top 40 single, but faded out of print. Berg's follow-up was shelved by RCA, and her third album, the bluesy, pop flavored Speed of Grace, vanished quickly after its release in 1993. Four years later, Berg got a taste of solo success with Sunday Morning to Saturday Night. Pushed by the sing-songy, yet tawdry "Back in the Saddle," the album started selling close to 4,000 copies a week despite tickling some Bible Belters below the Bible Belt.

"We got all kinds of letters. TNT got all kinds of letters," Berg says of the song. "And they [TNT] said, 'Hey this is working' and they kept playing it. It's a raunchy song and if your mind's in the gutter, it can be even worse." Though there's no such thing as bad publicity, the single and album were bucked by other forces: Berg's label, Rising Tide, went belly up, leaving 40,000 units worth of reorders in the dirt.

So despite making Time, Newsweek, and Entertainment Weekly's "Best of 1997" lists, Berg remained best known for providing others with hits: Deanna Carter's "Strawberry Wine," Suzy Bogguss's "Hey Cinderella," Reba McEntire's "The Last to Know" and Patty Loveless' "That Kind of Girl" -- and that's just the short list. Her song "If I Fall You're Going Down With Me" on the Dixie Chicks' new Fly is another sure-fire hit waiting to happen.

Today, Berg conveys a weary wisdom when talking about music that belies her thirty-five years. "I was talking to my younger sister about something I did when I was eighteen," Berg says. "And she deadpanned, 'You were eighteen?' So I was sort of born old, I guess."

More like forced to grow up fast. Berg had to raise her younger siblings when her mother died in the mid-Eighties. That and a divorce at the end of the decade helped shape Lying and proved Berg to be a writer capable of making small lives seem epic in a mere three minutes. From lost innocence ("Strawberry Wine") to memories of vanished youth ("Back When We Were Beautiful") to lifetimes in between, Berg's characters and vignettes strike a chord with listeners, even if they don't know (or care) who wrote the song. Such verisimilitude probably stems from Berg's tendency to base characters on the people in her own life.

"Every character that shows up in my songs is in my life at some point or another," she explains. "I think that if you're going to be a writer, what you write is going to reflect what you're going through. With Lying to the Moon I was going through a divorce ... it really shows."

Two years after Sunday Morning vanished, RCA has given Lying to the Moon a second life with the release of Lying to the Moon and Other Stories, featuring eight tracks from the original album paired with three songs from Sunday Morning and one new tune. "I was very surprised. I thought it was a dead issue," Berg says of the re-release. "But I felt like it should at least be out there for the people who've bought my albums since then and wonder about it. We were shocked at how current the tracks did sound and how they stood up over a decade. It was a magic record for me and I'm so happy it gets another chance to fly."

Suddenly, Berg's solo career is looking brighter. "Along for the Ride" is featured as the end credit song for A Cool Dry Place, an upcoming feature film, and a video for "Lying to the Moon" is ready for release.

From there Berg is testing waters for a future project. With the success of Nashville indies E-Squared and Dead Reckoning, the DIY prospects are much brighter than ten years ago. "I think that's probably my next move," Berg says. "It's too hard to work with the majors. They're not what they were when Springsteen was making records. Even Randy Newman, those records would not have been made now. There's a whole audience out there being left out by the labels."

If Lying fares well, Berg might also hit the road for the first time in years. "What I want to do is get my old band together and go out. Get a bus. Because we're bored. We're so tired of hanging out here. We want to go out and have some fun."

ANDREW DANSBY
(September 30, 1999)