Articles (about Betty Elders)

So, six years ago I get this self-released tape and it's real good and I effuse more than somewhat about it. Then two years ago I get this self-released CD and it's really amazing and I stretch myself severely trying to get that across. And now I get another CD and, well, actually words rather fail me, which, as you know, doesn't happen often. As a general rule of thumb, musicians, and especially singer-songwriters, go downhill, or at least rollercoaster, after the first album, artistically if not technically, having used up their best shots, but Elders defies all normal expectations by going up in an almost vertical climb, from good to amazing to fantastic, and about all that's left to me after being so enthusiastic about her earlier albums is to drool superlatives all over this one. Her voice gets better and better, her songwriting richer and more powerful and her mastery of production and arrangement makes virtually every professional producer I can think of seem cack-handed and inept. Notoriously a perfectionist, she's come up with an album, blending elements of folk, jazz, rock and country, that even she would be hard put to find fault with. A considerable acoustic guitarist in her own right, her supporting musicians are cream of the Austin crop, with her husband Gene Elders on violin and octave violin, Mitch Watkins on acoustic, electric, slide, and acoustic 12-string guitars and keyboards, Chris Maresh or Spencer Starnes bass, Paul Glasse mandolin, Mark Hallman tambo-drums and African talking drum, Dan Foster tin whistle and Bill Ginn piano, plus harmony vocalists that include Iain Matthews and his entire family, Abra Moore and Ernie Gammage. Marshalling this backup strength in formations ranging from a trio, in fact The Trio, with Gene Elders and Mitch Watkins, to the 21-stong lineup, mostly choir, of What Love Can Do, she's produced a subtle and varied masterpeice. From the mordant wit of Just To Have You Hum Along (The Futon Song) to the pessimism of The Long Night the intimacy of the title track, the unflinching honesty of Friend Of Mine, the hardwon wisdom of War Between The Fears and the playfulness of In My Dreams, the 13 tracks demonstrate that Elders is a marvellous and profound poet. For longtime fans, there's a radical reworking of Silver Wheels ( and yes, she knows - now - that trains don't run to Santa Fe), which dates from 1981 and was on Daddy's Coal, but apart from In My Dreams, familiar from perfomance but not previously recorded, this is all fresh material, which, considering that it's only two years since Peaceful Existence was released to universal critical acclaim, shows what a songwriting force Elders is. Looking back to my opening remarks, I feel heartened by the fact that all the other people who raved aabout that album are going to be reaching for their thesauri. Can you imagine what the next album's going to be like?

--©copyright: John Conquest/ Third Coast Music
reprinted by permission

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(photo of Betty by her dad)

After repeated listening, I remain amazed, enriched, challenged, and downright indebted to Betty Elders for what she accomplishes throughout the nearly 50 mesmerizing minutes of Peaceful Existence. Not only does this album represent the highest ground above the surging musical floodwaters of Urban Cowboy II that continue to ravage and contaminate country music, but the hope, tension, pride, humor, love, dread, and even uncertainty Elders is driven to share through her uncompromising artistry is an inspiration.

To refer to Peaceful Existence as a mere contender or a frontrunner is a disservice. Peaceful Existence is the Album of the Year.

And more. In terms of albums that never fail to seize my soul through their vision, risk, passion, and melody, Peaceful Existence merits "desert-island" status -- an all-time favorite I would take if I became marooned on a desert island with just 10 discs, along with: GP/Grievous Angel (Gram Parsons with Emmylou Harris); Guitar Town (Steve Earle); The Last Of The True Believers (Nanci Griffith); Elite Hotel (Emmylou Harris); John David Souther; The Complete Phoenix Concerts(John Stewart); Poor Man's Dream or Road To Bayamon (Tom Russell Band); Luninda Williams or Sweet Old World; and Warren Zevon.

Although this desert-island disc list excludes box sets and best-of albums, and limits each artist to one release to generate variety, give it a try -- and adjust the rules to suit your own musical needs. Just remember --you are alone, so don't squander your selections.

I was thinking it might be Armageddon itself. I was thinking it just might be WW III. I was just afraid; we were out of control. In a very brief period of time we were informed that this was going to happen, and even Congress itself couldn't stop it. Interstingly, the song doesn't have an Armageddon-type feeling to it. There's more of a melancholy, a sadness. I think that what happened was, I had begun to process the reality that it wasn't going to be Armageddon. Yet. In reflecting upon my church upbringing - which had put that germ of fear in my soul - maybe I'd come to muse somewhat over the possibility that, my God, as I understood Him in His infinite wisdom, wasn't going to end it all in a great loud boom with bombs and all that dreaded fanfare.

Looking at the structure of the song, I see you've put together five vignettes, each of which ends up in a contradiction of sorts. Essentially, these little narratives underscore the point you make about not controlling, not knowing; about life tossing us curve balls.

It's almost an anti-logic, I think. It's to prove a point, maybe. I am still trying to carefully avoid giving you such a literal translation, but, by giving you the events that led up to the inspiration, or the moment of inspiration, maybe I can steer you in the direction my heart had headed when I sat down to write. By taking "dogleg" turns in the last lines, it maybe insinuates that things are not necessarily as they seem.

When you created this song, how had you pictured audiences hearing it: on the record, live, or both?

I like one voice, one guitar.

Positive - live - almost always. There's a stillness that pervades the room during the song, and maybe a slight delay at the end of [the song], and there's always a strong amount of applause in my type of (listening room) crowd. However, I do find it (has) had a kind of jarring effect in other settings. I did have a woman yell at me in Houston that my songs didn't have to be so sad. And I think it was right at the end of the song. I had played it in the middle of my opening set, and it startled me to hear her remarks. We get that occasionally - all performers do - but I think this crowd was more geared to lighter fare.

Well, it does have a sad and melancholy effect, but as you study it, "They were both the same" could almost be con strued as an affirmative line; if not affirmative, at least transcendent. It's not necessarily melancholy in its conclusion.

Not really. I always try and employ the same tools: simple wording and "less is more." I read a George Orwell essay once; I wish I could paraphrase it and do it justice, but the essence of it was "less is always more;" there's never any need to be verbose. "Less" always seems to be more effective, although I have a problem with being verbose when I converse with people--I never can edit myself quite efficiently--but on paper I take great pains to see that I'm not verbose beccause I believe a few words - well-crafted, well-placed - have lasting value. And if you leave enough breath around a song, people will be able to read their own meaning into the space. They will have a visual interpretation - they may have an image which strikes them in the blank space that's left where maybe a few extra adjectives might've gone. I don't think there's any harm in adding more but for (my songs) I prefer to leave the spaces that simplicity and spareness create, because it lets other people interact with the material. "Less is more" is the big rule. Also,each line should be able to stand on its own. In that sense, I think all of my songs are connected from the crafting standpoint.

It would seem she has. The last time we looked in on the Austin singer/songwriter, the dark role came upon her pretty naturally - - she was still struggling with the fresh experience of several friends and family members dying (separate but successive incidents), and her last release, Peaceful Existence, was clearly a somber attempt to pick up the pieces in the aftermath. It was a powerful album, and a painful one as well.

Therefore, the whimsical "Just to Have You Hum Along," which will doubtless be remembered more by its subtitle, "The Futon Song," may come as a shock. A life that once was solid black now has some brightness, shades found on Crayons, her new album on Flying Fish, and her first that hasn't been self-released. Elders has come through the pain, the stress, and what she says were some nasty rumors about her personal life, and apparently is now ready to get on with life. If you expected to continue leaning on her musical shoulder to wallow in your own troubles, then perhaps you'd better move on, too.

"Writers are affected by all we perceive, and eventually that information gets collated and becomes output," she says. "When that happens [to songwriters] we get songs. Because life appears to be full of cycles and valleys and peaks, one's songwriting - -when an artist is true to him or herself - -reflects all that terrain. If this [album] seems a little brighter today, that's not to say the next one might not be a little darker. I don't know what's in store. But I'm always glad for the songs I get, regardless of their nature. It's just a joy to write.

"The whole purpose of Crayons was that (I had become aware that music stimulated an internal visualization of color for me) I wanted to be able to create a color image, so that people can turn on their stereos or come to gigs, and have the songs create in a moment in time; a momentary impression where these people are transported to a[(color] place of their own device. That picture becomes the canvas, my playground."

Crayons is a forward-looking album, rather than reflective. A desire to move past paralyzing trauma - and indeed, Elders' run of bad fortunes almost ended her career as a writer - and to start grappling with the aftermath. "The album speaks to problems and solutions," Elders says. "If there's a theme to Crayons, it's diversity and acceptability, and within that there are going to be problems and solutions. Problems human beings encounter - loneliness, relationships, communication problems - and what I perceive as solutions."

"War Between the Fears" is emblematic of this theme, a very angry yet schizophrenic criticism of the political and social landscape - and one that relates strongly to the crossroads in which Austin now stands, although Elders didn't describe it as such. The song was born, she says, "of a desire to understand what's happening to the world, a desire to understand what's happening to my neighborhood, to my family, churches, to communities. It's me struggling to understand, desiring to point a finger, and blame just like the next guy, yet knowing I am just as responsible as everyone else for making the necessary changes to enable the world to stop deteriorating.

"I was profoundly affected by my first trip to Detroit. The inner city looks like a ringworm, like the original problem began right in the center, and then Detroit moved out from that, moved away from it. There's nothing there. There's a bombed-out shell where the city used to be. It's just desolation, it looks like something out of Blade Runner. Everywhere I have lived, there werethe seeds of that occurring. Some cities are taking real responsibility for their towns. Yet, my awareness of this began when I was a PTA mom. I got to thinking about all the parents that were at PTA meetings - who was home with their kids? While they were trying to solve the neighborhood's problems, the school's problems and the community's problems, they were in effect neglecting their kids to take care of the masses. I thought there was an ironic twist to that, and it occurred to me that if I skipped a couple of PTA meetings and stayed home with my kids that I might make an investment that would have an effect on the future."

Elders has also moved through some musical changes, as well, which she takes pains to point out. "Rarely do I ever get asked about melodies," she complains, which necessarily prompts one to ask her about the radical reworking of "Silver Wheels," one of her best-known songs, which is now titled "Silver Wheels3" on Crayons to denote its third incarnation.

"The music had progressed to a point where it was so spare and atmospheric" - as opposed to the version on Elders' first album, 1989's Daddy's Coal, which had a movement much like the train ride it describes - "and those holes said more than the actual notes did; the spaces between the lines melodically spoke so much that I really got into studying that spatial quality, that atmospheric quality. I kept the song because I think if I had been able to understand my craft musically at the time I wrote `Silver Wheels' in 1979, I would have put that atmosphere in there immediately. It never quite gratified me, never said what Iwanted it to say. So when it finally got to a place where it did speak the way I wanted it to - high and lonesome - we decided to put it on the[new] album."

Ironically, this song's contrast to the brighter spots of Crayons and contradiction with them draws attention to it. "It's a song about despair - of change and loss. Since so many years have passed since that song was conceived, I've learned how much more there is once that change has been moved through. Yet, being faithful to the song, I couldn't give it a happy, smiley-face ending."