Move Gives Mattea More Room

It seemed risky when country star Kathy Mattea stepped away from her 17-year relationship with Mercury Records to join the smaller Narada/Virgin label.

She’s pursuing an acoustic, less commercial sound, in keeping with the tradition-bound soundtrack of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?� which not only topped country charts for half a year and sold 3 million copies but also won coveted Country Music Assn. Awards recently for best album and single. “It is a picture of a market that’s out there that the country music industry is not paying attention to,� Mattea says.

She was speaking from her native Charleston, W. Va., where she had just put in her 14th performance on public radio’s “Mountain Stage.� Mattea says she feels at home on the long-running radio show.

Of her move to Narada, under which she will release her next album in the spring, she says, “I think that it’s wonderful to be in a place where you’re really wanted.�

At Mercury, where she scored such No. 1 country hits as “Goin’ Gone,� “18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses� and “Life as We Knew It,� “I was [the] flagship artist for a while,� Mattea says. “They had to keep me around.�

But increasingly she was butting heads with producers.

“Country music instrumentation can be narrow. Even the interpretation of how a mix should be, can be something that can be very narrow,� she says.

“Sometimes I’d turn in a song, and they’d say, ‘You need to turn the fiddle up and the electric guitar down.�’

Not that she’s eager to do weird things. “I’m still doing acoustic-based music, and it’s still all song-driven. It’s still all about the song.�

But, she adds, “for me, on this record, I feel freer to play around with world music instruments.�

That means a penny whistle here, a Celtic accordionist there.

“I have to be mindful of this being a progression for me and not a huge left turn,� she says. “And that’s something that has to come from the inside out. My job is to keep on track. I don’t want the people who have followed my music to feel I’ve abandoned them. It’s more a matter of being freer to be who I want to be.�

Country music is skewing younger and younger, says Mattea, 42. “And I’m a grown-up. I want to sing grown-up songs. I want the freedom to not have the tummy tuck and the pierced bellybutton.�

On her current acoustic tour, she’s surrounded by three players. “It’s actually been really fun. It’s very eclectic,� she says.

“We do old songs, some songs from the last album, and we do some songs we do on the new album,� she says. “It’s been a really interesting process distilling what we do in a small group.

“It’s playing a different way. Instead of playing to a drummer, it’s much more about listening to each other and playing off each other. It’s been just a great experience for me. I have to step up to the plate and hold my own as guitarist, because if I make a mistake on the guitar, you can really hear it.�

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Roger Catlin is rock music critic for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune company.