February 12, 2002
Beaver Nelson Sticks to the Song
By Andrew Dansby, Rollingstone.com

Amid Texana and drinking songs, Austin songwriter keeps it about the lyric

Beaver Nelson pushed his third album, Undisturbed, out into the water late last year with a sole stipulation: that no press materials contain the words "Texas" and "twang." That's not to say that Nelson isn't a Texan; he was raised in the state and has lived in Austin for the past decade. And that's not to say his voice doesn't have a comfortable drawl in conversation and song. But Austin has become something of a Roswell for a new breed of "singer-songwriters" who are selling records by the hundreds of thousands. Trouble is, the interest is focused on pure entertainment with little attention paid to lyrical substance.

"I have a real love/hate thing going with the Texas songwriter thing," Nelson says. "There used to be some really great songwriters that were coming out of Texas and had been for years. But these people just happened to be from Texas. And every once in awhile in a song they'd mention something about Texas. I'm sitting here, writing songs, and I'm watching people to my left and right, and Texas is in every fourth title of their songs. Or Lone Star beer is in the chorus, and these people are 'Texas songwriters.' It's just not my thing."

Instead, over the course of three albums (1998's The Last Hurrah, 2000's Little Brother, and Undisturbed) Nelson has found himself riddled with questions of life, death, fatherhood, time and time again, and working out said issues through song. "I'm pretty obsessed with the notion of time," he says. "It's the basic human problem. What time means and its effect on us and the fact that you can't own it. It's here, then it's gone—you fuck up and you don't get it back. And as much as those are cliches, this is really a powerful concept. Seeing yourself doing this or that, and then realizing that there come points in our lives where I can never do that again. Sometimes I'm walking down the street and I feel like I got all the time in the world, and there are other moments where I look at people and all I can see are bones. That's fine, though, I have a pretty healthy Christian hope in things, but at the same time there are physical realities that we have to deal with and one of them is no matter what we do with our selves, there are limitations we cannot overcome. Sometimes I'm relatively wistful, and sometimes I just feel downright rotten about it, you know? [Laughs]"

It's a concept with which Nelson should be familiar, as the Nineties proved to be a decade of hot and cold highs and lows during which the hands of time started and stopped with the abandon of a drunk driver. Ten years ago, at age nineteen, he was touted for next-big-thingdom in the pages of Rolling Stone. He landed a major-label deal, was ready to record his debut album and was engaged to be married. Only one of the three worked out. As Nelson recounts, even then, he felt like a square peg. When his A&R contact asked him about his career goals. "I wanna make twenty records," he answered. "He was pretty confused by that," Nelson says a decade later. "It wasn't sell this or win that, it was just that I wanted to make twenty records."

That youthful energy was hastily snuffed with the dissolution of his label deal, which was followed by a second deal gone bust. It's an inevitable line of questioning, seeing as Nelson was forced to sell homemade cassettes at his shows and didn't get around to releasing a debut record until almost seven years later, with The Last Hurrah in 1998, but it's one that he'd rather leave in the past. "I don't know, if those records would have come out, I could have sold a million copies, or 10,000 and got dropped," he says. "What I can know is that for a very short period of time, I did not deal with it very well. I was very upset and thinking that the sky was falling. And for seven years, in a career sense, the sky did fall . . . right on my head. I can say that I did everything I knew how to do to turn it into a positive. After a short period of time, I just tried doing that again. You can look at the last ten years and you can say, 'Holy shit, this guy, this is his nature, that's his character.' And you could also look at the last ten years, and think, 'This guy's just got to be tired of this shit now.' I don't know which one it is. But I can talk all day about business and bore everybody. Let's talk about songs."

And then there's the songs. Nelson has a shark's appetite for songs and songwriters. An early interest in Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Lou Reed was the bugbite, and Nelson later happened upon the work of one of Texas' finest tunesmiths, the late great Townes Van Zandt. "I discovered Greetings From Asbury Park, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, Born to Run and Nebraska in that order, found them, bought 'em and listened to them," he says. "Any young man who's a romantic who doesn't like those records needs to redefine his term of romantic. You just don't get more defiant than those records. Not that there wasn't plenty of thoughtful reflection in 'Wreck on the Highway' and 'Drive All Night.' Springsteen was talking about how you don't like where you are. Dylan was saying there are better places to be, and you can go to them now. Townes felt like my little secret. He was a person that I could find. As far as his craft of writing, I don't think you get any better. Obviously if you're talking body of work, Dylan's put out over forty great records. Even his records that you talk about being bad, I love them all, but because I'm fascinated by the man and the way he thinks. Why would you just say, 'That's just a load of crap?' instead of asking 'Why would someone who wrote the 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll' write 'Wiggle Wiggle?' And you get to the fellow was just trying to have a good time and there's an enormous amount of validity in that too. I'm just interested in people's voices."

It's a comment that might make Nelson the first person to defend Dylan's Under a Red Sky. "It's not like it's is in my heavily rotated CD pile," he says laughing. "But when I was in high school, we were reading a Shakespeare play, I don't remember which one, and one guy said, 'This guy sucks.' And this teacher stopped dead in her tracks and said, 'Let me give you a piece of advice. Don't ever say that. You might think that you're not interested in what he has to say, but when you say that Shakespeare is not any good, you're announcing to the world that you're an idiot.' People just don't go from genius to idiot. If the writer has made a real connection to you, then chances are there's something of value in anything they do."

As for Nelson's own songs, the range on his three albums (and he's currently at work on his fourth) is broad without resorting to patchwork. With a nimble, raspy voice that at times suggests Hank Williams with a sandier set of pipes, Nelson found his mark with Little Brother. From the monstrous hook on the shuffling, melancholy-tinged "Little Brother Blues," to the more contemplative fare like "Don't Bend, Just Break" ("I know a promise is a young lie/Waiting to grow old") his music benefits from a amorphous dynamic. Undisturbed finds him again breaking stride somewhat with some Kinks-y melodies and keyboard flourishes, yet still playing with some of the same old thoughts, feelings and anxieties turned like a prism, revealing different lights as the end result. Nelson's guitarist/producer "Scrappy" Jud Newcomb's snakey slide winds its way through "Mad River," "Eleven Again" looks back to childhood wistfully, while "The Beauty in Store" taps a glint of optimism and possibility.

"That was written for my boy," he says. "Every opportunity I've wasted, you've got sitting in front of you, and isn't that great? And it's gonna be sad and it'll be wonderful. And then you'll do it again. That is how it works. And that's the bright side."