Kim Richey’s life has moved little by little to London but she still has deep roots in the United States.
Consider her latest album “Wreck Your Wheels,” the first she ever recorded without a label’s involvement from the start. Rather than adding to the stress of the process, Richey said that it was truly one of the most stress-free recording processes she’s ever experienced.
“I’m not the kind of person who has a road map or game plan,” Richey said about the latest album recorded in Nashville and distributed by Thirty Tigers. “I always have a number of songs to choose from and these songs are on the album because the songs just flow together.”
The two-time Grammy Award nominee clearly understands her sound, as evidenced by a 15-year career in which she has never been stuck in a single genre. The songs on “Wreck Your Wheels” are a perfect example of the diversity she brings to her music. Richey wrote or co-wrote all of the songs with such well-known songwriters as Mark Olson (of the Jayhawks), Will Kimbrough and others.
Combine that with Richey’s lush, expressive vocals and you understand why her music is revered. Still, she says that her process — which has resulted in music sung by Mary Chapin Carpenter, Trisha Yearwood and other household names — isn’t for everyone.
“If I ran a [record] label, I wouldn’t make any money at all,” she said with a laugh. “I think I choose songs for specific reasons [central to the singular tune] rather than because they end up going together. Songs on an album capture a period of time for me. They are something like a photograph album.”
In this case, her latest album tells the story of her “relentless travel back and forth from London to Nashville,” she said, bringing to mind her latest song “When the Circus Comes to Town.”
“This is really the most rootless I have ever been. It has been almost two years [of trans-Atlantic commuting] and … I didn’t have a place in London,” she said. “Just before I left [for my last trip to the U.S.] I found a flat and I’m really excited to have my own place. This album tells about me being kind of up in the air and rootless.”
Not that the songs on the album are sad or meandering. Yes, they occasionally take on wistfulness, but that can be interpreted in many ways, Richey said. In fact, the name of the album and title song came from one of her co-writers’ word play that set the tone for the album.
“I just find it interesting,” Richey said about the word play. “It seems a lot of times [songwriters] come up with these phrases and say ‘I’m not sure what it really means. Let’s figure it out.’ ”
