Songwriters Night: John Egan – Mando Saenz – Lise Liddell

McGonigel’s Mucky Duck presents Songwriters Night: John Egan – Mando Saenz – Lise Liddell.

John Egan  – When John Egan shouts the blues, he’s hard to miss. Still, it can be difficult to find physical evidence the musician exists: He performs only about once a month, his three CDs are tough to find, and his most recent recording was for a buzzy movie that never had a real theatrical run.

The soft-spoken Egan seems fundamentally disinterested in engaging with the music business. He’s at his most comfortable going about his days quietly while cutting loose on stage, pounding his foot on a percussive stompbox and being just as combative with his steel resonator guitar.

“He’s got a way, especially when he plugs in that resonator, of really coming almost completely unhinged,” saysDavid Rice, an Austin musician who has worked with Egan for more than 15 years. Most recently they collaborated on the score for the documentary film Crawford, about the Texas town that became home to President George W. Bush.

Egan has made three records that don’t lend themselves to easy categorization. He fits somewhere on an power blues arc that includes Jimi Hendrix and Chris Whitley, artists who put a powder keg under the venerable genre. He cops to taking in a lot of Prince as a young listener, which explains the funkier moments on his first album, The Gin Diaries. Houston’s rich singer-songwriter history seems to have also found its way into his mix.

As he puts it, “it’s kind of a hybridized thing. It was originally songwriter based, but it evolved into something louder.”

He’s also well acquainted with old Southern soul — evident in his singing — from his mother’s music collection. He says an early record by soul-singer-turned-disco-smoothie Johnnie Taylor made an early impression.

Mando Saenz – Mando Saenz has made a career out of watching people, haunting places, and asking questions. Studebaker, his third studio album, is a snapshot of an artist who has grown not only comfortable, but also confident in who he is and the value of what he has to say. Recorded in sessions that began late last fall and spilled over into early 2013, Studebaker is a 12-song deep trek, the longest of any of Saenz’s albums thus far, propelled by his self-deprecating wit, careful observation, and empathetic ability to make heroes out of outcasts.

Mark Nevers (Lambchop, Bobby Bare, Jr., Andrew Bird) produced Studebaker in his home studio, Beech House Recording, in Nashville. Nevers helped Saenz assemble an ace core cast of players, while Saenz also called on friends including Kenny Vaughan, Pete Finney, Jedd Hughes, Kim Richey, and Bobby Bare, Jr. for cameos.

The studio environment was raw and relaxed, prompting Saenz to feel both reinvigorated and nostalgic. “I felt like I was back in Houston or somewhere in Texas, where I recorded my first album,” he says. “It felt far away from Nashville. I’m not knocking Nashville. It was just a nice change for me.”

While it’s been five years since the release of his critically acclaimed second album Bucket, the path to Studebaker has been even longer. Born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, Saenz moved to North Carolina at just two months old. Another move in fourth grade took his family to Corpus Christi, where his father, recently retired from the U.S. Army, set up a medical practice. Corpus Christi became home.

Before pursuing music professionally, Saenz earned an MBA in San Antonio, and when he sighs and tells you the white collar trophy was a nice get but a misguided one, it’s not a humble brag. “I was just kind of lost,” he says. But even after his soft-spoken brushoff, it’s easy to imagine Saenz, who is somehow simultaneously loose and precise, as a top student.

MBA in hand, Saenz found the call to create music too strong to ignore. When he chose a move to Houston over Austin because his brother set up a studio in the former, he was exposed to another world. “It was a good time to be a musician in Houston. A lot of us, like Hayes Carll and John Evans, were there together. I was in inner city Houston, and it was just so cool—huge and unlike anywhere I’d ever been.”

The pace, faces, sticky beauty, and musical camaraderie of Houston stayed with Saenz. And while Nashville has surely offered plenty of inspiration, characters and experiences from Corpus Christi and Houston take their turns on Studebaker as well.

Dabbling in pointed folk, hushed pop, honky tonk, and rock-and-roll, Studebaker combines the acoustic pensiveness of 2005’s Watertown and the full-bodied bravado of 2008’s Bucket. Saenz’s tenor, which has always been arresting, has assumed a full, rich timbre that can still deliver lines delicately, but can also howl like a freight train.

Saenz’s first two albums were often sharp-eyed studies in wanderlust and self, and while Studebaker picks up the torch, it carries it differently. His need to keep moving is now its own safe haven, and the fluidity or even duality of identity is a salve instead of a threat.

“I’ve been happy, I’ve been sad, I’ve been lucky, I’ve been unlucky. I’ve been spoiled, and I’ve also been whatever the opposite of spoiled is,” Saenz says. “Maybe I’m just getting to the age where I feel more comfortable talking, indirectly, about what I’ve been through.”

As he snarls, “Where’s my Studebaker / I’m nobody’s pocket change” in new album track “Pocket Change,” it’s clear that Saenz is not only comfortable, he’s enjoying himself. “I’ve been playing ‘Pocket Change’ for a few years now,” he says. “The song has gone over so well live. One of the reasons I decided to call the album ‘Studebaker’ is people ask at shows, ‘Hey, what album is that “Studebaker” song on?’”

Five co-writers—Kim Richey, Shelly Colvin, Ryan Beavers, Wade Bowen, and Justyna Kelly—contribute to five songs on the album, while the other seven songs are all Saenz.

“Breakaway Speed,” co-written with Richey and featuring her harmonies, beautifully chronicles a breakup with a toe-tapping pop melody. Fiddle in tow, “Tall Grass” swings through a classic boy-begs-girl-for-a-chance storyline, with a twist. “It kind of has a criminal element,” Saenz says. “I feel like there’s a little of that in me. I’ve never broken the law or been in jail, but I think there is a little bit of that criminal element inside of a lot of people.”

“Colorado” is an elaborate narrative that transports listeners to John Ford’s West. “Hard Time in Tennessee” is a character-defining list of things the hero wishes he could do, but just can’t. “Nobody” and “Battle Scar” grapple in different ways with the concept of identity, while “Sweet Marie” and “Smiles at the Door” are tender love songs.

“The only time I speak out is when I sing,” Saenz says. “I am more comfortable musically now, but in a lot of other ways, too. Maybe that comes through in the songs.”

Lise Liddell. Laced, by the artist: We are laced into our DNA, environment, families of origin, friends and lovers, all of mankind, the unfathomable mystery of being. Life is both a conscious and unconscious lacing of the heart, mind, and body to people, places, rituals, philosophies, and objects. Ultimately the lacing impresses upon the soul, even as it remains pure in its original form. When we believe we are undoing the laces, even severing them, there are knots that will withstand not only our singular will, but also eternity. And what we perceive as “good” is always laced with what we perceive as “bad.” Beauty is laced with pain. Our pain is laced with grace. Lise Liddell – 2011

Lise is a regular on the Houston music scene and has played in Australia and Austin’s coveted SXSW. With a growing fan base and a popular album gaining press, Lise will soon be playing more regional shows and has had discussions about touring along the Eastern seaboard. Truth be told, Lise is not easy to bottle. She’s honest enough. But that doesn’t mean simple. She’s got her demons and her angels. Struggles and successes. Center stage love affairs and back stage stories.

In the end, Lise has a vision that is worth seeing, a voice worth hearing, and music worth remembering. She’s the kind of girl you want to hop on a freight train with, ride over to the next town somewhere down the line while she strums her guitar, shoot pool in a honky tonk and walk back along a dark country road trying to grasp the magic of stars that still shine luminously, but no longer exist.

And that’s how her music will live on. Shining with insights long after we have all moved on as well.