If Nashville is all about songwriting, as some observers believe, Americana music is one genre — far from the only one — that can have difficulty connecting good songs with interesting production styles. In many cases, the song remains at the forefront, which means Americana is, at its core, deeply stylistically conservative. Still, when the formula balancing song to sound works right, you can wind up with music that’s both conservative and idiosyncratic. Some artists figure out how to solve the problem, and you can hear that clearly on Nashville singer and songwriter Mando Saenz’s latest full-length All My Shame, out Friday. Produced by former Wilco and Uncle Tupelo drummer Ken Coomer in an alt-country-meets-power-pop mode, it’s a testament to the songwriter’s art, and perhaps Saenz’s finest record to date.
All My Shame is Saenz’s first collection since his critically acclaimed 2013 album Studebaker, which was recorded in Music City by producer Mark Nevers. Coomer’s production of All My Shame gives Saenz the aural signature his songs deserve — the layers of acoustic and electric guitars define a record of intense self-examination. Saenz’s latest music lives in a pop-rock-country zone that exists somewhere between, say, Marshall Crenshaw’s 1999 album #447 and Dwight Yoakam’s 2003 record Population Me.
For the Texas-bred Saenz, who first met Coomer in Houston when they were recording there in 2004, the fit between singer and producer seemed natural.
“We worked together before I moved to Nashville,” Saenz says from his Nashville home. He’s lived in town since 2006, when he made the move to Music City after spending seven years learning his craft in Houston. “We did some sides, or whatever, and we weren’t sure if it was going to be a record or not. So we had real good rapport, and I knew how his mind worked in many ways.”
Saenz was born in 1973 in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, where his father was attending medical school. His family settled in Corpus Christi, Texas, when Saenz was in the fourth grade, and he began pursuing a music career in earnest during his stint in Houston. After signing a publishing and songwriting deal with Nashville producer Frank Liddell’s Carnival Music Company, he released his second album, 2008’s Bucket, which was produced by R.S. Field in a country-rock style.
Bucket established Saenz as a songwriter whose tunes lent themselves to interpretation by country singers like Lee Ann Womack, who included his “When I Come Around” on her 2014 release The Way I’m Livin’. He’s also garnered cuts by Miranda Lambert and Jim Lauderdale, and his pithy songs seem endlessly adaptable. For all that, he says he wrote his latest batch of material without thinking about how others might interpret his songs.
“I definitely wanted to make a new record as opposed to just another record,” he says. “I always consciously wanted to write something cool, something I could dig. If other people sang the songs, that’s just happenstance.”
All My Shame is a remarkably consistent record — just when you think it may have peaked, Saenz hits you with another superb song. In classic singer-songwriter fashion, Saenz writes tunes that would be effective delivered simply, with vocals and an acoustic guitar, but Coomer’s production raises the emotional stakes of songs like “Cautionary Tale” and “The Leaving Side.” As is often the case in Americana, it’s the electric guitars — played here by Joe Garcia and Drivin N Cryin axman Laur Joamets — that make the difference between a very good demo and a fully realized record.
What this means is that All My Shame works as fusion music. If you’re a student of the subtle differences between alt-country and power pop, you might notice the way the record’s opening track “The Deep End” begins as a Celtic-flavored stomp, or how the New Wave-style organ in “Talk Is Cheap” echoes the song’s melody during its instrumental break.
Every song signifies, and Saenz’s lucent tenor voice seems a bit recessive until you listen closely. The aforementioned “Cautionary Tale” rolls through a maze of Beatles-esque chord changes, while “In All My Shame” builds in intensity over five minutes. Meanwhile, “As I Watch You Slowly Drift Away” contains one of the album’s finest couplets: “She laughed like a broken train / The cover of a magazine she used to read.”
All My Shame registers as Texas singer-songwriterdom — the sheer level of craft puts Saenz in the league of artists like his contemporary Hayes Carll or ones from a previous generation like Robert Earl Keen. It’s also a very romantic album, since Saenz casts himself as a passionate man who attempts to learn from his mistakes. The record’s emotional pinnacle is “I Can’t Stay Alone for Long,” which suggests the line between love and obsession might be blurry, as he sings: “Lord, what have I done? / But it ain’t the morning yet / The night has just begun.”
Saenz makes melancholia sound appealing, and nothing could be more attractive than being able to perform that trick. Still, it’s not really a trick, because Saenz means it. All My Shame takes you down a rueful avenue, and you might emerge from the experience feeling uplifted.
