The Flatlanders

McGlohon Theatre
345 North College St.
Charlotte, NC 28202
Tickets can be purchased in advance at the Box Office (Belk Theater Lobby), online at CarolinaTix or by phone at 704.372.1000
Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock have been friends for almost 40 years, and members of that not-really-a-band, life-of-its-own musical entity known as The Flatlanders for nearly as long.
But when the trio decided to collaborate on songwriting for Hills And Valleys, the fourth in a rather elongated string of Flatlanders albums, they realized it wouldn't be easy. They'd done it before for one thing, first for the soundtrack to the 1998 film The Horse Whisperer, then for their "reunion" album, 2002's Now Again. So they already knew they'd be as likely to spend hours trading tales and laughing uproariously as they would trying to agree on a lyric.
And they knew how long that could stretch out, too. "Sometimes we'd work on one line of a song for several days," Ely reveals. "That's just one line, not a verse. It's hard to please all three of us at once."
But for Hills and Valleys, they not only managed to come up with eight eloquent joint efforts, they added Ely's "Love's Own Chains" and "There's Never Been," Hancock's "Thank God For The Road," one by Gilmore's son, Colin ("The Way We Are"), and, for good measure, their arrangement of Woody Guthrie's "Sowing on the Mountain." That one serves not only as an homage to one of their musical guideposts but, as Hancock notes, a representation of the album's general theme: "the ups and downs, emotionally, of peoples' lives these days."
One moment you're sitting on top of the world," he explains, "and the next, you're 'sowing on the mountain and reaping in the valleys.'
They didn't set out with an agenda, but what Ely calls "the heavy-dutiness" of the last eight years-9/11, Katrina, Iraq, border walls going up while the economy careened downward-all were definitely on their minds as they wrote.
"Even though all of us are very active politically, a lot of times we don't want to bring certain things into our songs," Ely explains. "This time, we had to say, 'Hey, let's look at this, not in a pushy way, but really figuring it out in our own heads. Putting it into a song and trying to unravel it.'"