S4 E10: Dave Cobb on "Time Of The Preacher"

One by Willie

John Spong

Music, Music Commentary

4.8 • 833 Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2023

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, Nashville super-producer Dave Cobb, whose work with some of the true artists in
modern country music—Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlisle, Jason Isbell—has earned him nine Grammys, talks about “Time of the Preacher.” It’s the overture/aria to Willie’s classic Red Headed Stranger, an album that Dave calls a beautiful, barren landscape, and it gets him thinking about Pink Floyd, the real definition of “outlaw,” and the most important instrument an artist can take into the studio: A belief in themselves.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Texas Monthly.
0:10.7	Hey there, I'm John Spong with Texas Monthly magazine, and this is One by Willie,
0:16.3	a podcast in which I talk each week to one notable Willie Nelson fan about one Willie song
0:22.0	that they really love. This week, we wrap up season four of the podcast with Nashville's
0:27.3	super producer Dave Cobb. He's a nine-time Grammy winner, best known for working with the true
0:32.7	artists in modern country music, singer-songwriters like Chris Stapleton, Brandy Carlisle, and Jason Isbell,
0:39.3	and he's going to get into Willie's 1975 breakthrough album, Red-Headed Stranger,
0:44.2	and specifically its opening track, Time of the Preacher.
0:47.6	He's an extremely cool guy to get to talk to about this record.
0:50.6	For most of us, Red-Headed Stranger is an Old West myth about revenge and redemption.
0:55.5	But for Dave, an old-school obsessive who works out of the historic RCA Studio A, where Willie
1:01.3	recorded in the late 60s, it's a study in how to make a lot with a little and how the most
1:06.3	important instrument that an artist takes into the studio is a belief in themselves, with brief cameal
1:11.9	appearances by Pink Floyd, Brian Wilson, Dolly Parton, and the late John Prine. So let's do it.
1:20.3	It's hard. And what's the time of the preacher
1:32.3	When the story began
1:38.2	Well then the first question is always
1:42.5	What's so cool about Time of the Preacher? You know what's so cool about time of the preacher you know what's so cool
1:48.1	about it i think at a time and and much like parallels and Nashville over and over again there was a way
1:55.3	to make a record and you had to do x y and z to be a commercial artist you had had to do X, Y, and Z to be on TV or radio.
2:02.6	And that record is none of those things. That record is somebody going like, you know what,
2:06.1	I'm going to do it my way. And if you listen to that record, it is so raw. I mean, there's really
	...

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