Songwriter Scott puts down his pen for new album

NASHVILLE (Billboard) - Why would former ASCAP songwriter of the year Darrell Scott, who has penned hits for Travis Tritt ("It's a Great Day to Be Alive"), Dixie Chicks ("Long Time Gone") and Sara Evans ("Born to Fly"), record an album of songs he didn't write?

"My publisher wonders such things," says Scott, whose "Modern Hymns" is due August 19 via Appleseed Recordings.

Scott had long planned to honor some of his songwriting heroes, and the idea finally came to fruition. "These are just some of my favorite writers and artists -- they were when I was a kid and they still are," he says, citing Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan as examples. "I kept thinking, 'One of these days I'll get around to doing that.'"

He didn't know it at the time, but the Kentucky native first heard the songs of his idols when he was growing up. "I wasn't listening to Dylan, I wasn't listening to Gordon Lightfoot, but I would hear their songs in country music. Country artists back then would record songs from other fields, especially folk."

"I first heard Bob Dylan songs through an album Glen Campbell did back in 1968," he says. "All I knew as a kid was, 'That's a great song.' I didn't know it was Dylan."

Scott was careful to put his own spin on the covers. "I was mindful not to make a parrot record," he says. "What's the point?"

A straight-up bluegrass version of Mitchell's "Urge for Going" is one of the fresh interpretations on the disc, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers add a gospel flair to Adam Mitchell's "Out Among the Stars." Sam Bush, Mary Gauthier, Alison Krauss and Del McCoury also make appearances.

Scott and crew recorded Cohen's "Joan of Arc," Lightfoot's "All the Lovely Ladies," Paul Simon's "American Tune" and John Hartford's "Nobody Eats at Linebaugh's Anymore," among others.

Not all his heroes are represented -- "I didn't get any James Taylor on there or Townes Van Zandt," he points out -- but Scott says the vibe he had in mind dictated what he recorded. "Musically I knew it would be acoustic -- there's no drumming -- so the treatments I gave them arrangement-wise had to shake hands with that."

Meanwhile Scott is already working on his next record, which he describes as "a pretty full-tilt country record, pre-'Urban Cowboy' country."

Reuters/Billboard