An interview with a favourite country snger and songwriter of mine, Matraca Berg. I met her in London and the piece appeared in Mojo, December 1997. Nice little Neil Young anecdote in here, too.

"Yes," she says, quite firmly. "Nashville is still full of songwriters, same as it ever was. Hey, I got a question for you."
    Uh-huh.
    "It's a Nashville joke. How do you get a songwriter off your porch?"
    I admit my ignorance. How do you get a songwriter off your porch?
    "You pay for the pizza! Ha ha haarrgghh!"
    From the sleek and petite frame of Matraca Berg there erupts a laugh of delightful bulk and volume, sufficient to ruffle the hush of this pretentious London hotel, her HQ on a promotional visit to Britain and Ireland. "And I know all about it," she adds. "Hey, I made pizzas, too." She can afford to be nostalgic these days. Matraca ("Muh-trace-her") Berg is currently the hottest songwriter in country music, and becoming a star performer in her own right. It's time for the other strugglers to bring those pizzas to her – with extra toppings, if she so chooses. Born and bred in Nashville, Berg is emerging from a long obscurity and may soon be joining her home town's elite. And if she does, her revenge will be sweeter than pecan pie.
    Like her friend Gretchen Peters, Berg leads a wave of women writers who unite the disparate traditions of Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton: movingly confessional in one breath, shrewdly humorous, wickedly perceptive commentators in the next. At 34 she is young enough to accept the MTV culture as natural, but old enough to recall a time when country was imbued with a working-class glamour, rather than ruled by know-nothing radio programmers. "We're losing listeners," she says, "because country music has become so homogenised. Radio is interested in what their consultants tell them they should play, and it’s a small list. It’s usually songs that sound like commercials. But there is a subtle change on the way and in five years' time it's gonna be drastic."
    Raised by her mother, a Nashville session singer, Berg gatecrashed the Music Row scene by co-writing a Number 1 hit (Faking Love) when aged 18. The early success nearly ruined her: "It was so unsettling, people figured I was a child prodigy and came to me for songs. But I had nothing, so I froze up. I was like a deer in the headlights. I ran away with a musician to Louisiana." The elopement was a disaster, and she returned to her mother with a stock of experience that has fed her songwriting ever since. Her next break was a backing singer's gig with Neil Young: "He was in Nashville recording Old Ways. The first song I'd ever learned on guitar was Heart Of Gold. But we were doing a rehearsal one day and they were doing Helpless, and I could not bring it to my brain. So I raised my hand and I said, Could you play a few bars of that, so I’ll know what to do? He looked at somebody and said, 'Who brought this kid in here?'. I wanted to die. Still, he took me on the road with him. I did Live Aid. I was the 20-year-old girl to his right, shaking like a leaf."
    Soon Matraca was writing hit material for the likes of Reba McEntire, and made a 1990 debut herself, signed to RCA Nashville for a superb album called Lying To The Moon, including a title track and one other, You Are The Storm, that are slowly getting recognised as classics. Despite the chorus of critical acclaim, she says, the album only did well in US "yard-sales", equivalent to our car-boot affairs. A follow-up record was banned by RCA altogether. The company transferred her to their pop department in Los Angeles, where she made an album, The Speed Of Grace, that she hates: “They wanted me to be whatever chick was happening at the time, a rock chick. [Simply Red producer] Stewart Levine had A&R people whispering in his ear, VH-1, VH-1…” She left RCA, and survived by selling her songs to other singers: "Nobody would sign me in Nashville. I just said, Screw it, I'll pitch my songs instead of singing them myself. And they all got covered.” She wrote country hits for Pam Tillis (Calico Plains), Trisha Yearwood (XXX's And OOO's) and Patty Loveless (You Can Feel Bad) to name a few. Deana Carter's colossal debut, Strawberry Wine, has won awards, to its author's bemusement: "A five-minute waltz about losing your virginity is not my idea of a first single. Deana's obviously smarter than all of us."
    Nowadays married to Jeff Hanna of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and newly signed to the Rising Tide label, she has made an album that is just as good as her first, in Sunday Morning To Saturday Night. As the country world awakens to the star it has overlooked, Matraca Berg allows herself a smile of satisfaction. "I guess," she concludes, "they can call me The Artist Formerly Known as Songwriter."