Nashville-based singer/songwriter Clark Paterson released his new album, Are You Lonely Like Me? in the late summer, and has been out performing songs old and new. Approaching this record is an experience in encountering refreshing directness and poignant emotions, but it’s also a celebratory and humorous experience steeped in songwriting traditions and Rockabilly energy. It’s an album that Paterson worked on with friend and collaborator Mark Cline Bates, but it brings to bear Paterson’s experiences of “heartbreak, illness, fatherhood, loss, recovery, and reinvention”. It’s a very brave album, and one that cannot fail to hit the emotional core of audiences.

Produced by Eric McConnell and Shawn Byrne, the album preserves human texture and imperfection but also has an awareness of lush sound spaces that create a reflective atmosphere. The album is replete with collaborators, including John McTigue (Dale Watson, Raul Malo, Rodney Crowell) on drums, Paul Niehaus (Lambchop, Calexico) on pedal steel and Billy Contreras (George Jones, Ricky Skaggs) on fiddle and piano, to name a few. Guest appearances even include Sierra Ferrell and Abe Partridge. I spoke with Clark Paterson about delving into this new emotional territory, the very real difficulty that poses for songwriters, the stories behind the songs, and what it’s like looking back over his own catalog of nearly 20 years via this new music.

Hannah Means-Shannon: Do you think on your previous albums, you’ve been possibly a little more light-hearted, but with this one, you were a little more focused on infusing your DNA, your life into the songs?

Clark Paterson: Oh, one-hundred percent. I recently got remarried, and I had a brand-new baby with my wife, and my dad passed away. It was just a lot of stuff, so I wanted to talk about the human condition, and maybe a first-hand experience of that.

HMS: Those are some very happy and very sad events, for sure. I think you co-write with Mark a lot, also, and this album is in that vein. So there is continuity in change, here.

CP: That’s right. Mark Clein Bates is awesome.

HMS: How did he feel about what was on your mind? Was he in a similar mindset?

CP: He really encouraged me to do it. If I’m being honest, he was maybe the proponent to do these, and then I opened up and said, “Okay, I think you’re right. Let’s really get heavy here.” Sometimes it’s good to have someone kick you a little bit, and say, “Let’s right some real stuff.”

HMS: To kind of hold you accountable for your own goals?

CP: That’s right. Someone to say, “Let’s get busy, let’s get digging.” And he’s good at that. I think it was easier for him, because maybe some of these things were stuff that I’d told him already, and he could excavate things out of me.

HMS: Knowing someone well can be the key.

CP: That’s the fun thing about co-writing is that you get some stuff out that you normally wouldn’t do because you feel uncomfortable writing about your life. He kind of made me, and I’m happy we did it!

HMS: Thank you for sharing that. That’s another angle on the positivities of co-writing. If someone knows you well, they can help you get to your own stories. Most of the time, people tell me that it helps them get out of themselves to co-write, but in this case, it helped you go inwards.

CP: Yes, and I felt okay because we know each other as buddies doing that. If it was someone I didn’t know that well, it might have been uncomfortable. We are both artist-collaborators with each other.

HMS: Do you think the subject-matter and the way that you were working together influenced the soud that came together for this album?

CP: Oh, definitely, because Mark plays the piano really well. And I play it like a child! So it was a cool way to make a record, since a lot of the songs have more of a piano sound. I definitely think it was a big inspiration and a change in the sound.

HMS: There’s something so robust about the piano that I kind of associate it with sounding a little more serious too, which goes along with the album. It’s got that emotional depth.

CP: It’s a beautiful instrument, and I’m trying to get better at it. It’s an uphill battle! It’s nice, too, because you can see those chords in front of you. My eight-year-old daughter and I are playing those straight-forward chords. It’s fun.

HMS: Are you someone who usually performs live these days?

CP: Yes, I just performed three shows this week. I was in Nashville, Illinois, and Kansas City. I was opening for Abe Patridge, which was fun.

HMS: That’s a lot! I’m familiar with Abe’s work. I recognize that your cover art for this album is a piece that Abe has done.

CP: Yes, that’s his work! He was out with his 11-year-old son this week, and that was a lot of fun. I like to be around kids. I like to be on the level of children.

HMS: It keeps that positive energy rolling. Is it tricky that these songs have piano in them, from a performance perspective?

CP: It is. And I’ve had to learn some of these pieces on the guitar so that I can perform them live. I’m kind of back-tracking, and learning some of these piano songs on guitar, and changing them up. It does change the mood, but I think people can still relate to the songs.

HMS: Are there some of these songs from the album that you’ve been playing?

CP: Yes, I’ve played “Put Me on a Train.” I’ve played “If I Didn’t Laugh” I’ve played, “It’s My Liver” I’ve played a brand-new song that I haven’t released yet, too. It was exciting to play some new songs, along with some old songs from 18-20 years ago. It’s fun to combine these different eras of my catalog.

Some of these songs are some of the first songs that I ever wrote, and at the end of the shows were some of the last songs that I’ve ever written, so it’s fun to do that arc of your career.

HMS: That must really clarify the continuity in your career to do that.

CP: Absolutely. It makes me think about who I was 18 years ago versus now, when I’m a 45-year old dad, who does school pick-up and drop-off, and my life has changed in all these ways. But I still have a sense of humor, and I’m still writing all these songs, even though I’ve changed a little bit.

HMS: How has it been performing these very emotional current songs? Do you feel the tension of that emotion?

CP: I do. This week, when we played in Illinois, it was kind of personal and real. I performed “By God” with Abe in Nashville, and that was really powerful. I think people relate to stuff, because I’m trying to create some of these poems that are put to music. There’s a sense that I’m trying to connect with people, and take them to a place that’s a little serious, but with a little bit of humor mixed in there. You kind of want to give people a mix of poetry, music, and life, but make it enjoyable too.

HMS: I appreciated your video for “By God”, by the way, which we premiered here on Wildfire. It has a great old cemetery setting for part of it, which gives an interesting accent to the song.

CP: That’s an old, historic Nashville cemetery, and I think it’s one of the first times that a cemetery in the South where Black people were buried with white people, and a lot of them were civil war soldiers. So there’s a lot of significance in that cemetery, and it’s old and gothic, in downtown Nashville. It has different Nashville notables buried there too, and it’s very special.

HMS: I assume cemeteries make us think of mortality, and time, but given that it’s Nashville, it also makes me think of music tradition. Do you feel like you’re in that tradition?

CP: Sure, I’ve lived in Nashville for 18 years, and I think that makes me part of the local community. My kids go to school there, and I feel really lucky to be there. There’s so much history, whether it’s Country and Folk, or Rock bands. I think I’m still thrilled to be there. The luster hasn’t really worn off, and I don’t really compare myself to other artists, I just compare myself to myself. What’s the saying, “Comparison is the thief of joy”?

HMS: One of the songs on the album, “Hospital Bed”, really impacts the album, I think. And it’s something so many people can relate to.

CP: Oh yes, that’s my life story, from when I was sick with heart failure.

HMS: Was that hard to write about?

CP: Yes! I didn’t want to write that one, and Mark made me write that song, so I said, “Dammit, let’s do it!” [Laughs] I went over the details with him. I was in heart failure, at the ICU, in Franklin, outside of Nashville, for almost a week. I didn’t really know that I was so sick, I just thought I was stressed out. When I was in there, they were considering doing a heart transplant, but while I was there, I was able to recuperate through medicine, God, and good luck, and very capable doctors. I’ve had several operations from that, but I’m in good health now. I’m very lucky to be alive.

So that was my story, and I just wanted to write what it’s like to be itemized in a hospital, and what it’s like to be all along when you’re sick. It’s a very lonely place and you’re hanging out with nurses and strange people at night. No one lets you sleep at night, because they are checking on you all night. It’s a very lonely place. It’s scary and overwhelming, and I had never heard anyone write about this. So I said, “If we’re going to do this, let’s do this son of a bitch in the right way. Let’s get it real.”

HMS: The only thing I can think of to compare are the occasional songs that people have written from rehab, with that confinement.

CP: Right. You’re stuck there, and there’s nowhere you can go. You have to ask when you can get a bath. I still have the scars on the inside of my arms from all the things that I was hooked up to. It happened eight years ago, but I still have those. They brought in a priest to pray with me every day, which was nice, and that helped me.

HMS: At least there was that. And the song doesn’t just talk about the scariness, it talks about the perspective that this brings. And unfortunately, it’s love lost, and a sense of abandonment.

CP: Oh, yeah, like you were just thrown away like a bag of clothes at Goodwill.

HMS: There’s the demoralization of a near-death state in a hospital, and then there’s that abandonment, also. It’s crushingly heavy. Someone you thought would be there for you isn’t there for you.

CP: Sure, someone was supposed to be your companion, your lover, your partner, and that’s all been thrown away.

HMS: I can tell that it took a lot of strength to come back from that, so I’m happy to be sitting here talking to you.

CP: [Laughs] I’m happy to be here, too! What a difference eight years makes! I’m celebrating it.

HMS: The title track of this album is important, I’m sure. It guides how the tracks fit together.

CP: I kind of came up with that chorus, “Are you lonely like me? Are you lonely, baby?”, as a nod to Elvis.

HMS: It feels like a classic, old Rockabilly song.

CP: One-hundred-percent, and that’s where I took that from. I listen to a lot of the old American Rockabilly songs, whether it’s Gene Vincent, or Elvis. I love all that real primitive American Rockabilly, and Rock ‘n Roll. That’s kind of a nod and a wink to the early American music.

HMS: I think that music reaches out emotionally to the audience in a really direct, unashamed, kind of way. This song is very vulnerable in that way, too.

CP: Yes. The thing I was thinking about when I wrote that song, too, is that everybody talks about how well they are, or how rich they are, or where they go on vacation, all this bull-crap. It’s like putting on a front, but everybody’s lonely. Even people who are fulfilled are lonely. That stuff never goes away. I’m not saying that everybody’s lonely all the time, but that’s a really relatable kind of concept.

HMS: I know it’s sort of a truism, but we see it every day in the news that these really wealthy people are miserable.

CP: Absolutely.

HMS: That’s young people, and older people, and there’s suicide, and there’s accidental overdose. We think, “How could that happen to them? They have everything.” But it almost seems like there’s more loneliness with wealth. It’s scary.

CP: It’s very scary.

HMS: There are natural images in the song that make it seem very old school, like the waves in the sea. It almost suggests that this is something as pervasive as nature.

CP: There’s a feeling of emptiness, whether you miss your parents, or your grandparents, or maybe you’re traveling and you miss your kids. Or maybe you miss your friend that has passed away from a car accident. It’s a human emotion that’s quite common.

Wildfire previously premiered and reviewed Clark Paterson’s video for “By God”, taken from this album, Are You Lonely Like Me? You can still view that right here.