Catchy and evocative, The Eclipse Sessions is a good title for John Hiatt’s new collection of songs, but the famed Nashville songwriter and singer doesn’t attach any profound meaning to it. The wary tone of Hiatt’s latest songs suggests he has observed various moral and figurative eclipses. But “The Eclipse Sessions” just sounded good, he says, for an album he cut in the country near Nashville over a period that included the total solar eclipse that happened on Aug. 21, 2017.
“The first four days were the week of the eclipse,” Hiatt tells the Scene via phone from Nashville. “We did [Aug.] 18, 19, took off for my birthday on the 20th, came back in the 21st and 22nd. The 21st was the eclipse. I didn’t cut it in response to the eclipse. I cut it during, and I named it that ’cause I needed a name for the record.”
Hiatt, who is now 66, speaks like a down-to-earth Midwestern hipster, which is what he may have been when he moved to Nashville in 1970 as a fledgling songwriter who had escaped his Indianapolis hometown. The Eclipse Sessions was cut live on the floor with help from a superb band and producer Kevin McKendree during an interesting meteorological-cultural event, but it isn’t particularly hip. It’s well put together, but it shows cracks, like a baseball glove that needs oiling. It’s the work of a man who, like his former Little Village bandmates Ry Cooder and Nick Lowe, loves to goose old-time rock ’n’ roll.
Hiatt is easy to talk to, so we discuss music lore of the mythical past, a subject that seems appropriate in a piece about an album that might be spooked by the spirit of the eclipse in Nashville, even though the songs are about other things. I had boned up on Hiatt’s career before our conversation, so I know he had caught a break when Three Dog Night turned his “Sure as I’m Sittin’ Here” into a hit in 1974. But I didn’t know until he told me that Nashville rockers Mother Earth had given Hiatt his first cut by including his “Thinking of You” on their 1972 album Mother Earth/Tracy Nelson.
The lore seems important to Hiatt, and I’m fascinated. He tells me about living in San Francisco in 1977, after his songwriting deal with Nashville’s Tree Publishing had ended and he had been dropped by Epic, his first record label. Taking a breather from Music City in one of America’s hippest locales, he soaked up some of that lore.
“We did a residence at a club, and I was opening for Michael Bloomfield, of course, and he had a favorite TV show,” says Hiatt, laughing at the memory of the famed blues-rock guitarist, who was a legendarily avid television fan. “And about the middle of the week he told me, he said, ‘Hey, do you mind if I open for you, because this interrupts me watching my favorite show.’ ”
The Eclipse Sessions is simple rock that Hiatt plays with a twist, like the measures of 2/4 he adds to “One Stiff Breeze,” a syncopated riff-rock tune. Unlike his contemporary Elvis Costello, to whom Hiatt has often been compared, he’s not a satirist. Graham Parker sings in a style similar to Hiatt’s, but there’s little of Parker’s rancor in Hiatt’s work, and none of
Parker’s venom. Although the young Hiatt flirted with Band-like songwriting and sometimes sounded like Randy Newman (listen to the bridge of Hiatt’s 1975 track ”Overcoats”), he broke through with the superb 1983 retro-rock album Riding With the King.
Hiatt’s latest music is similar to Ry Cooder’s new full-length The Prodigal Son, on which Cooder chronicles the death of the old ways — a process that includes gentrification. Hiatt explains the Eclipse track “Aces up Your Sleeve” to me as a song about “a fuddy-duddy old man wondering where his city went.” In the song, a man cruises the boulevards of his youth and tries to remember a woman he once knew. It’s a shrewd look at the pull of class in America.
Hiatt underplays its implications, but “Aces up Your Sleeve” is about how people outgrow you when you aren’t looking. Listening to the song, you might think that the aces up the sleeve of the person Hiatt has created are things like real estate, and Hiatt tells us that she has enough money to be seen eating at restaurants where it’s good to be seen. “Aces” is about being eclipsed, and the way money can make the light look funny is something he makes you think about, whether you want to or not.
