No Limbo for Rush

Singer-songwriter Tom Rush notches nearly 50 years of consistent musicmaking 

After more than 48 years of performing, musician Tom Rush is on the road again with a show that includes old favorites and new originals from his 2009 album, What I Know. 

A staple on the “folk boom” scene of the early 1960s, Rush began his career as an English literature student at Harvard by playing coffeehouses, including the venerable Club 47 in Cambridge, in the Boston area. A singer, guitarist and songwriter, Rush quickly developed acclaim for interpreting and promoting the careers of other performers including Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and James Taylor, as well as influencing more recent figures such as Garth Brooks and Shawn Colvin. 

A prolific songwriter as well, Rush has issued 22 albums and two DVDs, one of which is a guitar tutorial, How I Play (Some of) My Favorite Songs (Homespun), with Rush playing with both open and conventional guitar tunings. His own material, in turn, has been interpreted by country, rock, heavy metal, and even rap artists. Often including storytelling and humor in his shows, Rush warms audiences with wistful peeks at relationships, nostalgic profiles of lives in transition, and homespun wit, often tinged with bittersweet melancholy and carried by his rich and resonant vocals. 

Tom Rush will bring his music to Utica’s Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, 310 Genesee St., on Saturday, Nov. 14, 8 p.m. Adult tickets are $30, while students pay $20, and are available at (800) 754-0797 or www.mwpai.org.

Rush hour: Utica’s Munson-Williams-Proctor hosts a concert with Tom Rush on Saturday. MICHAEL WISEMAN PHOTO

Q: What are you bringing to Utica, and what will you perform?

A: Nothing, except a couple of guitars. I just put out the first studio album I’ve done in 35 years. I will be doing a fair number of tunes from that, and some old favorites. I think people come to hear the songs that they’re familiar with.

Q: What I Know is your first studio album since 1975. What’s that about?

A: I don’t like to dash headlong into things. {Laughs.} I’ve been thinking about the next album {since then} and I’ve made several false starts. I thought I had a really good collection of songs—it’s been revised several times—and I wanted to get on a major label, but that’s like getting on board the Titanic. They’re not doing well and what they are doing has nothing to do with me or my audience. I didn’t want to put it out on Night Light, what I call my nonexistent label. What I Know is on Appleseed Recordings. Several of my buddies, Tom Paxton, Dave Bromburg, Pete Seeger, are on the label.

Q: What are you writing about and what is your writing process?

A: Well, it’s schizophrenic as ever, all over the lot. On the CD there’s a tender introspective ballad, there’s a raucous, strutting, country-rock thing that should be done by some guy with a big hat and tight pants. {Laughs.} I’m channeling that guy. And the title song is a bouncy love song. Songs just kind of arrive. I’ve heard Arlo {Guthrie} say, “It’s like fishing in a stream, you never know what you’re going to catch.” He also said, “It sucks to be fishing downstream from Bob Dylan.” 

To me it’s like listening to a distant radio station: It fades in and out, you get a few lines and then you lose the station. It comes back in a day or two and you get a couple more lines. It’s an incremental process. I work on a song that’s evolving, I get a few bits of music, then I stall out. Then I come back the next day and revisit it and get a little further. You have to write the song, then you have to learn to play the song, then you have to learn to perform the song. You keep polishing it until it fits. And then you take it on stage, and that’s where you really find out if you’ve got something good or not.

Q: What’s so interesting about the relationships and conditions of peoples’ lives in the songs that you write and perform?

A: I’m probably too close to that to give a coherent answer. The things that resonate are the things I go for. Why that kind of stuff resonates, I don’t know. I’ve written a couple of things that could be construed as political. There’s a song about shooting coyotes {“A Cowboy’s Paean”}; it’s a spoof on a coyote shooting contest in Wyoming on Trolling For Owls, one of my live projects.

Q: Is there a lasting legacy from the folk boom of the 1960s?

A: I don’t know if that’s the right way to look at it. Music is a continuum, and you lose track of that with all the noise that the pop industry puts out. What happened in the 1960s is that a very ancient art form, the folk song, became pop music. And then it ceased being pop music. The traditional music is a well that writers have gone to throughout history. I borrow lines and concepts from that music all the time. It’s really powerful stuff.

Q: How has the Internet affected your music?

A: In the past, if you didn’t have a record deal, you didn’t exist. The record industry controlled the connection between artist and audience. Today the Internet is the connection. There’s a video clip of a song from Trolling For Owls {the 2003 live-concert CD on the Night Light label} that’s on You Tube that went viral. Four million plays. Now 4 million people are reminded that Tom Rush is still out there. It’s having an effect on album sales and at traffic at the Web site www.tomrush.com.

Q: What’s next for Tom Rush?

A: I had such a good time making this album, I think I won’t wait another 35 years. I’ve got about six songs in various stages of development, but the next project will be entirely someone else’s music: Woody Guthrie. I have not yet put any of his lyrics to music, but that’s what I’m thinking might be an amazing opportunity: the opportunity to co-write with Woody Guthrie.                                            

—J.T. Hall