Matraca Berg (photo: Glen Rose)
Aspirations tend to change the moment they become accomplishments.
Matraca Berg grew up wanting to write a big country hit, and she did so in 1983 at the age of 18, when she penned a chart-topping song with Bobby Braddock called “Faking Love.”
“As I got older, what I wanted morphed and changed,” Berg says over late lunch (peas and potatoes she says are “like if British food were good”) at East Nashville’s Marche, where she talks about a new album called The Dreaming Fields that is as good an illustration of those changes as anything.
In the 14 years between Berg’s last album and Fields’ release this week, she has written hits for the Dixie Chicks, Gretchen Wilson and others, adding to a list of past smashes that includes “Strawberry Wine,” “Wrong Side of Memphis” and “Wild Angels” and securing a resume that landed her in the Nashville Songwriters Association International Hall of Fame.
But Berg had also penned a contemplative and complicated batch of songs, many of which she was afraid to show anyone and most of which seemed to fly in the face of contemporary country radio’s positive, up-tempo proclivities. The songs were full of open wounded emotion, rooted in autobiographical truth of the sort that inspired Joni Mitchell’s 1970s confessional classic, Blue. Berg has a notion that pinprick specificity can provide for something akin to universality.
“The ones I’m most scared to play are the ones people want to hear the most,” she says. “And making an album was a vehicle to get these songs out there. No matter how long I was away, I felt that pull of wanting these songs to see the light of day. So how am I going to do that? I couldn’t find some cool, young artist to produce, so I did it myself.”
For Berg, “by myself” takes a village, and her collaborators on The Dreaming Fields include husband Jeff Hanna (of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band), musicians Randy Scruggs, Harry Stinson and Richard Bennett and co-writers Gary Harrison, Marshall Chapman, Gretchen Peters, Jessi Alexander, Jill McCorkle (yes, the novelist) and Mary Steenburgen (yes, the actress).
“I’m very self-critical, and I hate writing by myself,” Berg says. “Me alone in a room with myself is a very dark and insecure thing, and writing with my friends is a comfortable, wonderful, warm thing. I need interaction and validation and inspiration from these people.”
In spite of the communal nature of Berg’s process, the songs retain a singular sensibility and an honesty that can be bracing at times. On “South of Heaven,” a mother’s wartime lament written with Sharon Vaughn and Troy Verges, she sings, “God, you gave your only son/ But you are not the only one,” while “A Cold, Rainy Morning in London in June” — written with Harrison — is a nearly disconsolate rumination on time spent away from loved ones while her family was in crisis.
“Even though she usually co-writes, I can often pick out a Matraca song,” says Braddock, who will enter the Country Music Hall of Fame on Sunday, May22. “It’s an attitude both lyrically and melodically that I can’t consciously define. Though Matraca is basically shy, her music is both intelligent and self-assured.”
Recalling his first experiences writing with the then-teenaged Berg, Braddock says, “I didn’t think of her as a diamond in the rough at all. I thought of her as a diamond, period. An already developed, great talent.”
That talent went public in 1990, when she made her major-label country debut with Lying to the Moon. Two more albums followed before her long departure from the record-making business. It’s not as if she discontinued making music for 14 years — she wrote often for others (including Kenny Chesney’s current single, “You and Tequila”), co-wrote songs for musical Good Ol’ Girls and made regular in-the-round appearances at the Bluebird Café — but it’s also not as if she wasn’t asked repeatedly about her lack of a new album. Her Sunday Morning to Saturday Night made Top 10 1997 albums lists in Time, Entertainment Weekly and other publications, and most people tend to follow up on such successes with… something.
“If you have a presence and then you went away, it’s nerve-wracking to put anything out there, and it’s hard to explain why you’ve been gone so long,” she says. “But time hits the accelerator. Things kept happening to slow the process down, like taking care of family at a time when lots of things were going wrong. A lot happens when you’re not a kid anymore.”
The Dreaming Fields is about those happenings, though Berg found room for embellishments in writing the wry cheater’s romp “Your Husband’s Cheating On Us” and in creating the somber, album-opening “If I Had Wings,” in which a battered wife enacts her revenge.
“I wanted to make sure everybody knew what this album was going to be,” she says. “I thought, ‘Don’t just ease into it, open up with the killing song.’”
Reach Peter Cooper at 615-259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.
IF YOU GO
- What: Matraca Berg album release show for The Dreaming Fields
When: 9 p.m., Thursday, May 26
Where: Station Inn, 402 12th Ave. S.
Tickets: $15, available only at the door