Alison: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. You know Jessi Colter as the Beloved First Lady of Outlaw Country and she is back with a brand new album called Edge of Forever, produced by a friend of the show Margo Price. Let's listen to the first track. This is Standing on the Edge of Forever.

MUSIC - Jessi Colter: Standing on the Edge of Forever

When I was loving you

I gave all I had to give

You took the love I gave

You took my will to live

You didn't want me then babe

What brings you back here now?

I hear you talking but just keep walking

It's all over now

We're standing on the edge of forever

Yeah it's now or never, that's what

I said to you

And what did you do?

Alison: Jessi Colter grew up playing the piano in church in Arizona, where her mother was a Pentecostal preacher. She became a singer-songwriter, known for hits like I'm Not Lisa and What's Happened to Blue Eyes, as well as her contribution to the classic platinum album Wanted! The Outlaws, which defined a new era of country music in the '70s and brought a different sound to the mainstream than listeners were used to. The album also featured Willie Nelson, and Colter's late husband, Waylon Jennings.

Fast forward to today and 80 years old, Jessi Colter is still making great music, her new album, Edge of Forever is out now, and she joins me for a listening party. Jessi, welcome to All Of It.

Jessi: Well, thank you. I wish I could be there with you. I do love New York.

Alison: Next time. Open invitation to come to the studio.

Jessi: Thank you.

Alison: We heard that song Standing on the Edge of Forever in the intro and the album's title Edge of Forever. What does that phrase mean to you at this moment in your life?

Jessi: Well, it actually happened with Lenny Kaye, when we were New York boys, and I were writing, and I had Standing on the Edge of Forever. It can say a lot. It can say you're making a major decision that is going to affect your life. You can say we're in a time of apocalypse, that we better make the right decisions, but mainly, it was Lenny Kaye who said, "Well, why don't you say it's now or never?" Because I didn't think I was going to make it that strong an ultimatum. I thought, "Okay, I'm going to try this," and so I did and explained whoever it is you're talking to isn't with it, so you have to move on.

Alison: It's a lot to think about that answer. You recorded the album in 2019 in Nashville. To what extent did the songs you wrote change throughout the recording process, once you got into the studio?

Jessi: They didn't change much, except Margo Price is more a percussionist than I am. I have a very distinct rhythm. She pulled up the tempo. It should have been listening, and she pulled it up on the song that I titled Lost Love Song, which I don't know who wrote that. I wish I did know, but she pulled the tempo up on those two and then she suggested that I write a song that was more current to my life. My daughter stepped right in, Jennifer Eddy Jennings, Duane Eddy's daughter, she stepped in and wrote The Early Life of a Widow or Loss.

That's what this song is. You've dealt with loss. Then Margot added to that, and so that's fine wine, was the current statement at that point, and that changed. That's the only thing that changed.

Alison: Let's talk about Margo Price. The story goes in 2017, around the same time you published your memoir. You said how you thought that might be your last album, but then Margo Price helped change your mind. How so, what did she say?

Jessi: Well, she and her husband Jeremy, who's very gentle, said, "We'd love to see you do another album." That was about the last of that meeting. Then she called me a while after that, and said, "I'd sure like to talk to you." When she came out here playing one night, she drove over to my house, I picked her up, and we drove over to my house, and she asked me to play her some of my songs that I had written, and so I did, and she loved them. She said, "We need to cut an album." That was the last of that.

Then the next thing I know, she calls me and says, "Can you come to Nashville because the players are here? I have a studio, let's just go for it." She's much younger than any of the producers that I've dealt with. I dealt Don Was, Jack Clement, and Chips Moman who are all incredible producers. Ahead of me, and production, all that, she's a very new producer. I didn't really know if she knew what she was doing. Also, she had always liked me and liked my music, and so forth. I just decided to say yes. I thought, "Well, we'll try it." It was such a different kind of direction, so I tried it.

Alison: What something from the experience that you think, "You know what? That was useful. Yes, I got something different out of it working in this different way with this new person in my life," Margo Price.

Jessi: Well, I've worked with very large companies and very famous producers, so what I got out of this is that I had to let her take the lead and deal with my reactions. We grew a friendship out of this. Then the best company, after we considered three different companies that she felt strong on, was a small company. In a way, it all went against my grain, my experience, my time in life, but I decided to say yes, and Shooter, who's out in the market, encouraged me and helped guide me because he's out in big world, so to speak, so he would help me along the way and say, "Mom, this is okay, go ahead." It worked. I'm delighted.

Alison: For people who don't know, Shooter Jennings, is your son, when you say Shooter helps you out. My guess is Jessi Colter, the new album is called Edge of Forever. It is out now. Let's play another song Angel in the Fire. Before we listen, you wrote this one for your friend, Lisa. Would you tell us a little bit about Lisa before we hear the song Angel in the Fire?

Jessi: Yes. Lisa Mary Kristofferson, about the time that we were in Montreux, France, Sweden, we were all over, we were doing the Johnny Cash Show. She had just begun with Kris. I saw her eyes as she realized the company that she was in because she's 20 years, she's junior, and she was so soulful from the start. It encouraged me to make a friendship with her and we have a marvelous friendship. She's got such a great strength about her purpose and her mindset. She always can turn the battery on. I'm sure you have friends like that.

I say this as my girlfriend song because I only make girlfriends with women who know how to stay up in life and its trials. Lisa and I both had husbands that were not the easiest to handle. Our lifestyles were somewhat similar. It's just been a great friendship and I wrote it for her, but it applies to all my girlfriends.

Alison: Here's the girlfriend song, Angel in the Fire from Jessi Colter. MUSIC - Jessi Colter: Angel in the Fire

Today I turned around

Thought that I saw you

Your key, it turned the lock

Just the way you always do

You hold your head so high

After all that you've been through

Angel in the fire

I love to talk with you

Angel in the fire

Your eyes, they burn so bright

No matter how high the flame

You always see the light

The troubles they go round

But in your smile they're never found

Your wings they touch the sky

But your feet stay on the ground

Alison: That is Angel in the Fire from my guest, Jessi Colter. The new album is called Edge of Forever. It is out now. Jessi, as a songwriter, it's a tough question to always ask, what is your process? Are you somebody who scribbles down notes and ideas when you get them? Do you set aside time to write? How do songs come to you?

Jessi: It's definitely from the sky shooter because I'm non-mechanical and I'll sit at the piano and I have a thought I'm working with right now, but that kind of I stew and brew. Only one song did I take from a title that I saw written, and that was Storms Never Last. I was in a doctor's office and it was in a magazine. I thought, "That's a really cool statement." I wrote that song. It's pretty much inspiration.

Alison: You know the country saying three chords and the truth make a great song? Do you believe in that?

Jessi: I cannot box anything. If I plan it, it won't work. It just doesn't work. I have keys. I really like to play it. I'm a student of music theory and I know a lot about it. I read, but there's a saying that a wonderful pilot friend of mine said, "I shift on the fly," and that's how I do it.

Alison: You know when you know, you know.

Jessi: Yes.

Alison: You can hear it or you can feel it, and you know it's intuitive. That's why you're creative person. Creative people, it's part of it is intuition, I think.

Jessi: Yes, yes. You write?

Alison: I do write, actually. I do write and I play guitar poorly, but I play.

Jessi: Awesome. Have you ever submitted your songs?

Alison: I never have, I never have. Maybe that'll be part of my to-do list, my bucket list to submit a song or sing one somewhere.

Jessi: Yes, because you know the story about Margaret Mitchell who didn't think she could write when she wrote Gone With a Wind, and she hid all of her pages under her piano when this man came to town looking for songs and she was very hesitant to come with anything. It just so happened she had a book and he asked to read it and that was the beginning of that. Sometimes the writers aren't always driven to show their songs, especially if you don't start out real early. Maybe you need to show me sometime.

Alison: You know what? My guitar's upstairs, but I won't do that to you at the moment. It's upstairs in my office.

Jessi: Put it on a voice memo. That'll work.

Alison: All right. Wow. Jessi Colter, offered to listen to one of my songs, best day ever. My guess is Jessi Colter, name of the album is called Edge of Forever. Let's listen to another song, With or Without You, and you wrote this song for a friend who had an unfortunate day at the altar, the day of her wedding.

Jessi: Yes.

Alison: Let's take a listen and we can talk about it on the other side. This is With or Without You.

MUSIC - Jessi Colter: With or Without You

With or without you, babe

I'm going to live my life

Because I've done everything I know

I even said I'd be your wife

But you've got something going, babe

You just can't see the light

You know what Bob Dylan says

It must be wrong if it's not right

With or without you

I'll go on alone

I'll sworn these sleepless nights

And I'm right after the storm

Remember how I found you, babe

I can find another one

And looking back some days we'll see

Who's been right and who's been wrong

Alison: That is from Jessi Colter's new album, Edge of Forever. We heard that lyric that you said you saw in the doctor's office about the storm running out of rain.

Jessi: Yes, storms never last.

Alison: Storms never last. When you think about-- you've been in the business for a long time. As you said, you have worked with the greats like Don Was, tremendous producer. What is a change you've seen in the music industry that is positive, that gives you hope for young creative people?

Jessi: Well, the best I can say is I watch my son, Shooter, who has a great love for rock and so forth, and yet he's now nominated for producer of the year. This will be his third Grammy if he receives it because he knows he's a music man and not everybody is, but that's something that is encouraging me. Some of the records he's cut and it's just not singular, of course. There's others. Margo was definitely feeling her own weight and recording, and doing what she feels like and doing a great job of that, but Shooter has the ability to combine some of his father's gift, Waylon, and take it so much further at his production level.

It's exciting. He's able to work with rap, Yelawolf. They cut a great album with. He's now working with Turnpike Troubadours. Logan Ledger is a major artist coming on. I love Tyler Childers. Those are just some of my favorites, but they're figuring it out because the Americana genre as such has grown out of country and they're using the outlaw brand, which we began, but nobody thought of it as a brand. We didn't really want it as a brand. It created a path for new artists to try things that they hear that weren't so carefully guarded by the studios like they were in our day in beginning, in Waylon's day particularly, it was like Hollywood.

They governed the actors and actresses, and Nashville did the same, but Austin, a new film that I'm executive producer on, will be coming out in 24 called, They Called Us Outlaws, and it's produced by Eric Geadelmann and partnered by Country Music Hall of Fame. It's opening the eyes of the younger people to see where it started and where it's going. Austin and Nashville were enemies. Austin was the live music. Nashville was a recording capital and nobody could get in.

Things happened and it continues to happen but this film is really under the radar, different than Ken Burns doing 20 years of country music. Americana has grown into a wild field.

Alison: Do you like that that it's grown?

Jessi: Yes, I do like that it's grown, and yet the old guard will come in there and still try to diminish it. Many of their awards are not filmed for the Grammys, things like that. It's politics. I go back to Jack White, who I love, Seven Nations Army, they had to create a genre. They didn't have one. It took, I think, five years for them to call him modern rock. Progress is always difficult.

Alison: I'm excited to see this documentary about outlaw country. This sounds amazing. When you have to explain outlaw to somebody, what's an example you give, what are some of the adjectives maybe you would associate with outlaw country music so that people could understand its really true essence?

Jessi: When the term began as a marketing term, Jerry Bradley, RCA Victor, putting out the Wanted! The Outlaws. It was a marketing idea. Waylon really wasn't for it because, and he was the one that engineered putting that whole album together because he found out that we all had tapes in the RCA vault. It was one of the most inexpensive albums that were cut and broke all records of country music up till that time. An answer to your question, the original term was operating outside the system. Hazel Smith, who was a great publicist in Nashville, very country, actually was with Bill Monroe for many years.

She coined, she looked it up for Jerry Bradley because he was wondering in those days. You didn't even put packages together in those days. I had been with Duane Eddy in LA and saw how LA rock operated. I couldn't figure out in Nashville what they were doing, but they were holding the thumb on the artist. I supposedly for the big thing that RCA was, keeping it in the black, cutting cheap, I know a lot about this and I don't want to tell you all about it. In any case, outside the system, outside the norm today, I don't know, I would call it more maverick type of music.

Part of what Waylon had to start using other studios and using his musicians instead of the highly paid session musicians, which were cliques, great musicians, but you couldn't use your own musicians. Waylon had developed his own sound. That's what this is opening up. The term outlaw has opened that up for a chance. It gives him a chance. We'll see who goes long-range. We'll see.

Alison: If you don't mind me saying so, you celebrated your 80th birthday this year and you got married on Valentine's Day.

Jessi: You can say it, but I don't say it because I look at life as phases and I've had the greatest surprises from the big six-oh on, that I never would have dreamed. It is what it is. I'm very thankful for every day. I wouldn't mind having the skin of a 20-year-old, but I wouldn't want to learn those hard lessons. I'm just thankful, and you have to be careful not to get into it, to get into the category of somebody else's thoughts. I've always been a little outside the box, so I plan to stay there.

Alison: Which is the perfect segue into our last song. We're going to go out on fine wine. My guest has been Jessi Colter, the name of the album is Edge of Forever. Jessi, it was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for giving us so much time.

Jessi: Thank you, honey. I enjoyed you and I hope we meet.

Alison: Me, too.

MUSIC- Jessi: Fine Wine

Never thought I'd be here without you

Big shoes to fill you on the moon

Your clothes are in the closet

I keep them there for you

But you've been gone so long

I have to pick up and move on

Like a fine wine

I'm getting better with time

Alison: The former Bronx native Shari Lewis always came with a plus one, the puppet, Lamb Chop. Starting in the 1950s, Lamb Chop and trans millions of children, and children and said thanks, Shari couldn't. A new documentary talks about how she changed the face of children's television. I'll speak with the director of Shari and Lamb Chop next.

 

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