Lee Yankie performs at a recent Brown Bag lunchtime concert in Bienville Square. (Mike Brantley, Press-Register)
MOBILE, Alabama -- At least one lost art came into play during the making of Lee Yankie's new album "The Leavin' Sound."
That’s the art of sequencing, the trick of taking a collection of songs and putting them in an order that makes them more than just a collection of songs.
This is an age when the instantly downloaded single has become the dominant unit of musical currency to such an extent that people regularly ask why artists even bother putting albums out any more. Yet every once in a great while, one comes along that restates the case forcefully. Yankie, a Mobile native based in Gulf Shores, has produced one such disc, and that is merely one facet of its overall excellence.
“We concentrated hard on the sequencing. We definitely talked about it a lot,” Yankie said of time spent with Trina Shoemaker, the Fairhope-based Grammy winner who mixed it. “Because this was meant to be an album ... Sequence was important, especially considering that some of the songs were so different from others.”
The payoff is an album that pulls you in and then keeps pulling you onward. It starts with a high-spirited bang of “The Salt Life,” a romping call to head down to the beach and celebrate life. (It also hits the listener right up front with outstanding musicianship, particularly the organ work from Chris Spies, which continues throughout the project.) Then it segues deep into broken-heart territory, gradually climbing out, and then at track six it hits a big fat tent pole in “Just Wanna.”
Yankie’s lurking R&B tastes surge to the fore here, complete with sultry guitar licks that would’ve fit in well on a Marvin Gaye track.
“There’s definitely a significant shift in the sound of the album right around track six,” Yankie agrees, laughing when the song is mentioned.
It’s not just the sound, it’s the songwriting that stands out. Yankie nails a certain moment in a blooming relationship: “Just wanna kiss you again/ why won’t you let me back in/ don’t worry about love don’t think about sin/ cause I just wanna kiss you again.”
In the classic book “How to Speak Southern,” Steve Mitchell defines the phrase “All Ah wanna do is hold you a little, is all” as “One of the most brazen, outrageous lies Southern men tell women, and always with the utmost sincerity.” Yankie has provided a vivid musical illustration.
“It’s a big lie,” Yankie agrees, when this is brought up.
A lesser album would be done at this point, tapering off with filler. Yankie just keeps shifting to new gears. “I-10 W” introduces some syncopation, and looks from Mobile to New Orleans. On “Tired and Wired” he laments the bleary working musician treadmill of running from gig to gig.
Singers singing about being singers can be awfully tedious, but somehow Yankie soars over this pitfall.
“I always say that’s the musicians’ song. It’s dedicated to all the musicians out there,” he says. But a line such as “I drink on the beach in the morning/ but my morning’s not morning at all” can be relevant to anyone tired of burning the candle at both ends.
“I always feel a kindred spirit sort of thing with people who work in the entertainment industry or the restaurant industry,” Yankie says. “I play so many restaurants. The servers, the bartenders, the cooks, we all kind of relate that way. We’re out there trying to just pay our bills, and make some money, in the night life.”
The disc spins on, and soon Yankie’s getting into some nicely nasty blues on “Exit Man” and the even more wicked “Tuscaloosa.”
There’s a lot of “Little Red Rooster” in the latter, which swaggers in with the line “I love my girl, I don’t care for her boyfriend.”
“Oh, it’s in there,” Yankie agrees. “There’s definitely some Howlin’ Wolf. ... Kevin [bassist Kevin Scott; Derek Jones plays bass on most of the album] was really trying to conjure up a Willie Dixon kind of a bass line.”
How better to wrap the whole thing up than with “Faded,” one of the best broken-heart ballads to come out of these parts in quite a while?
“Has it faded now/ have you gone to sleep/ is nobody there/ to wipe tears from your cheek/ do you wish I was there/ do you wish it was me/ or am I gone from your heart, your mind, your everything/ has it faded yet/ what you hoped was new true love/ but you know that it ain’t what we had/ and the lord up above.”
Lee Yankie will play a CD release show Friday, Oct. 5, at the Brickyard, 266 Dauphin St. The approximate start time is 10 p.m. (Keep in mind that Oct. 5 is the opening night of BayFest.)
Online: www.facebook.com/lee.yankie
Recorded by Andy Cloninger at Dancing Dog Studios in Daphne, mixed by Shoemaker at Hard Sauce Studios in Fairhope and mastered by Eric Conn in Nashville, the album sounds great. That's a conclusion easily reached.
Harder is pinning down what it sounds like. Yankie has spent years working toward his own sound, and he's definitely found it.
One touchstone that comes to mind is the early-70s music of Charlie Daniels, which was so massively R&B influenced that you wonder how he got away with calling it country. Yankie appreciates the reference.
“The R&B is definitely there,” Yankie says of his own sound. “This stuff is a little more country influenced than most of what I do, but there’s definitely that part of my sound (as well).”
One big difference: Where Daniels had an untamed country drawl, Yankie’s voice is more neutral. His husky tone and phrasing let him summon up a wistfulness reminiscent of Ray LaMontagne, with flashes of Van Morrison’s emotional nimbleness.
Another difference: It’s sometime subtle, but the thing he uses to lash his country and R&B leanings together is the blues.
“I think the blues is the common thread of the album, in my mind, on any song,” he says. “That’s just where my main influence is always coming from.”
“I’m not shooting to be hard to define,” he says. “My thing is just, I like a lot of kinds of music, particularly Southern music ... I mix ‘em all together in the way I would find interesting as a listener.
Fair enough. But in doing so, he’s come out with one of the year’s gems. More than just a good album, it’s one that seems to capture some uniquely coastal aspects of life’s ebb and flow, without ever being obvious about it. What does it sound like? It sounds like the Gulf Coast.
Having accomplished this, he’s not about to rest on his laurels. He says he’s already at work on the next album, which will be more rock-oriented.
“My whole thing has always been, I’ve always just said, I want to make good records and leave behind good records,” he says. “Because that’s the only thing I really can leave behind.”