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Steve Martin showcases bluegrass artistry on ‘Rare Bird Alert’

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Steve Martin

Steve Martin (Photo/Sandee O)

Steve Martin doesn’t think it strange that he can excel at acting, comedy, novel writing, magic, art collecting and banjo playing. After all, he says, normal people excel at disparate activities.

“They raise kids, go to work, do all that stuff,” he says.

If Martin’s multitasking isn’t amazing in itself, then the skill level he achieves in each of those crafts is. The latest example: his second bluegrass album, Rare Bird Alert, released Tuesday on Rounder Records, which features ace acoustic band The Steep Canyon Rangers and guests Paul McCartney and the Dixie Chicks.

Filled with deft musicianship and inventive wordplay, the album would seem the product of a long life devoted to writing and recording music. The instrumentals are precisely constructed and performed, and Martin’s lyrics to “Best Love,” “Jubilation Day” and “Atheists Don’t Have No Songs” often offer an oblique, convention-tweaking humor that will remind longtime fans of some of his standup routines from the 1970s. (Another calling card from that period is here as well, as Martin and the Rangers present a banjo-laden version of Martin’s Top 20 comedy hit “King Tut.”) Martin does a little singing on the album, but he leaves most of the vocal duties to the Rangers and his guests.

Martin, who with The Steep Canyon Rangers will play the The Woods Amphitheater at Fontanel on May 27, called from his California home to discuss Rare Bird Alert, bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs and other musical matters.

You were a California kid. When did you first hear the banjo?
Unlike sex, it’s hard to remember the actual first time. I probably first heard it during the folk music craze, probably from the Kingston Trio. But when I heard Earl Scruggs play the five-string banjo, I completely flipped out. Hearing the song “Fiddle and Banjo” on the Flatt & Scruggs album that they recorded at Carnegie Hall, that was thrilling. I remember when I was studying philosophy in college, a young student described listening to (Andres) Segovia play the guitar and he said, “It was like I was lying on my bed and the perfect circle rolled into the bedroom.” That’s something impossible, a perfect circle, and that’s what hearing Earl was like. The fact that I actually know Earl Scruggs now is like a neon sign that I see over my forehead.

You quit doing standup comedy in 1981, because you weren’t enjoying performing. Why are you enjoying touring now more than then?

The big difference is that there are other people onstage with me, so the show is not my sole responsibility. It’s more pleasant to say, “Here’s a song I wrote” and then you play the song, instead of, “Here are 19 jokes I wrote, and you may like one, may hate the next, may like another ... ” The Steep Canyon Rangers are so good, and their sound has a great naturalness to it, and that makes things more comfortable. Doing standup was going out to do battle, and this is going out to have fun.

On “Best Love,” which Paul McCartney sings, you wrote, “Thanks for solving Friday’s crossword/ Who knew Ivan was a czar?” That reminds me of something John Hartford (the late Nashville singer-songwriter and banjo player known for humor-filled, literate songs) might have written.

I worked with John on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and he was someone I greatly admired. I never understood how he could play so freely, and I loved his voice. He had what might be my ideal sound for the banjo.

You play a lot of claw hammer-style (which involves striking the strings with the thumb and one finger) banjo on Rare Bird Alert, and that’s a style that’s quite dissimilar from the three-fingered “Scruggs style.”

I started with Scruggs style, but then a couple of years later I heard a couple of compilation albums that had claw hammer, which is a style we called “frailing.” I thought, “Oh, (darn), I have to learn something else now,” but it wasn’t an option for me: I had to learn it. Learning a whole other style that is completely backward from what you’ve learned before is like going from tap to ballet.

Right, or like a different language. And there are some guys, such as Tim O’Brien, who seem to effortlessly shift between styles and instruments and tunings.

When we finally take those artists and line them up and shoot them, Tim O’Brien will be at the head of that line. I mean, come on, we’ve had enough, you guys.

When you first started playing bluegrass shows a couple of years ago, you didn’t improvise onstage at all.

Things have loosened up as I got a little more confident, but I still don’t want to be improvising and wind up a fret off. I look at these songs as orchestrations. To me, these are the melodies, and I’m playing the melodies as I wrote them. But when I first started playing onstage, I’d come off and be depressed about a mistake I’d made on the third song of the night, or a chord I’d screwed up. But I finally realized, it’s almost the same as with comedy: Nobody notices the mistakes. When you finally learn that, mostly, nobody notices, you relax and then you stop making mistakes.

After shows, the compliment musicians seem to hear most from audience members isn’t, “You were great,” it’s “You looked like you were really having fun up there.”

Right, if they only knew.

You used to write very slowly, and yet here you’ve written 12 new songs for an album, while also touring, writing a novel and making movies.

Well, when you’re shooting a movie, you act for five minutes and then spend hours in your trailer playing the banjo. I wrote about three of these songs on a movie set. I’m devoting more headspace to music now than I ever have. It doesn’t feel like I’m trying to prove anything, and I’m not filled with angst trying to get it done. It just feels like what I do.

Reach Peter Cooper at 615-259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com.

IF YOU GO

What: Steve Martin & The Steep Canyon Rangers
Where: The Woods Amphitheater at Fontanel Mansion & Farm, 4225 Whites Creek Pike, Nashville
When: 8 p.m. May 27
Tickets: $39.54-$74.80, available through www.fontanelmansion.com


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