Esteemed songwriter and guitarist Pat McLaughlin will take the stage at 3rd and Lindsley Friday night and do what he loves to do more than anything else.
“Playing live is what I really enjoy doing,” McLaughlin says. “That’s the thing that comes most natural to me. It seems to drive everything else.”
Born in Waterloo, Iowa, McLaughlin first made his mark in Nashville in the late ’70s with performances at small clubs like Springwater, Mississippi Whiskers and Old Time Pickin’ Parlor. He had a hot band back then, and he still does. On Friday, he’ll be backed by a trio of musicians he’s worked with for decades: guitarist Kenny Greenberg, bassist Michael Rhodes and drummer Greg Morrow, all well-known session players.
“It’s a lot of fun to get to play with them,” McLaughlin says. “We’ve known each other for years, and it’s a really nice situation.”
Friday’s gig is one of the “regularly random” shows he does at the club with the band each year. He notes that he would like to play more often than the four or five annual appearances they have made there in recent years, but his bandmates are in high demand. “There are easier bands to get your calls returned from,” he quips.
Despite his love for playing live, McLaughlin acknowledges that is no longer his main focus, with writing at the forefront. Of course, one of the biggest reasons McLaughlin has been a mainstay in Nashville nightclubs for more than four decades is he’s one of the city’s finest songwriters. His songs have been recorded by an array of stars, including Jimmy Buffett, Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal, Trisha Yearwood, Nanci Griffith, Don Williams and Dan Auerbach. Delbert McClinton and Tanya Tucker earned a Grammy nomination in 1993 in the Country Vocal Collaboration category for their duet on his song “Tell Me About It.”
But one of the clearest signs of McLaughlin’s greatness as a songwriter is that he was one of John Prine’s regular collaborators for a quarter of a century. Prine’s acclaimed final album The Tree of Forgiveness includes five co-writes with McLaughlin. They also co-wrote Prine’s final single “I Remember Everything,” which won Grammys for Best American Roots Song and Best American Roots Performance in 2021. McLaughlin, who was also a member of Prine’s band off and on, humbly downplays the significance of his work with the songwriting legend.
“We were buddies, and I opened some shows for him, you know, just doing a solo thing, in the late ’80s,” McLaughlin recalls. “And then eventually we started to write together. He wrote with a lot of people. And then I don’t know if he got me in the band because he just wanted to hang out or what.”
The songwriting friends did hang out a lot. They famously would meet to write on Tuesday mornings so they could then go to Arnold’s Country Kitchen for the meatloaf special. As Prine explained during a 2018 appearance on NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts: “It’s kind of like the carrot on the stick. We get together early in the morning and try to write a song before they start serving the meatloaf, and then after lunch, we’d come back and record the song.”
“I’ve been really, really fortunate to get to work with the people I’ve worked with,” McLaughlin says. “There’s no doubt about that, man. I’ve worked hard for it, but I’m really, really fortunate.”
McLaughlin has released a number of his own recordings over the years, including a pair of albums he recorded for Capitol Records in the late ’80s. His 1988 eponymous debut for the label received critical acclaim and yielded a music video in regular rotation on MTV for his rendition of Allen Toussaint’s “Wrong Number.” Although his second album for Capitol, Get Out and Stay Out, was shipped to music journalists, radio stations and even some stores, it ultimately was not released after a shakeup in the label’s A&R department resulted in him being dropped from their roster. That record, which was considered even better than his first for the label, was ultimately acquired and released in 1995 by Austin, Texas-based Dos Records, which had released McLaughlin’s album Unglued the previous year. A few years later, he joined with members of The Subdudes and The Goners to form the group Tiny Town, which released a self-titled album in 1998. Since then, he’s released a few more solo records, the most recent being 2006’s Horsefly.
Asked when his fans might expect another Pat McLaughlin album, he says, “I’ve thought about it, and I might do it sometime, but I don’t have any plans to do it right now.”
Interestingly, the material McLaughlin and his band will perform Friday will not include many of the songs he’s best known for. “Most of the songs we play have never been recorded,” he says.
Which is one more reason McLaughlin’s live performances are so special — you get to hear songs from a world-class songwriter that you can hear nowhere else.
