Tim O'Brien & Darrell Scott
Real People in Real Time
by Maureen Brennan

Have you every been on a blind date that worked? Your mutual friends think you would be "just perfect" for each other, and you are. In Nashville, musical partnerships are created like that every day. And sometimes, as in the case of Tim O'Brien and Darrell Scott, they really do work.

"Our publishers in Nashville thought it would be a good idea for us to get together," said Scott. "Publishers do that a lot in Nashville, just kind of get together and think which of their writers that they're representing would have a common ground or who they think it would be interesting to put together and see what comes out. That's how we actually met. Although I had known of Tim's music through Hot Rize and Red Knuckles, we'd never met. So our publishers put a date on our calendars for us, and we just got together and came out with a tune."

"The tune we wrote that day was kind of telling, too," O'Brien added, "if you look back on it. I had the start of a lyric and Darrell said, 'This sounds like a song that you and Mollie sing called "Papa's on the Rooftop." ' And we wound up writing this song, 'Daddy's on the Roof Again.' A lot of times you don't want to copy something. As a songwriter you're kind of self-conscious about it; it's a real no-no to plagiarize. But with us, it was like, let's use that as a jumping-off point. It's kind of telling the same story, in a way, as the other song. It's the conscious desire to make the traditional music and the newer music stand side by side, and kind of link together. It helps it all to make sense. It's a continuous line. Utah Phillips was talking about it earlier [at the Kate Wolf Memorial Festival, where this interview took place]. You know these people who sing a song that no one else sings; it's just their own signature song. You're kind of off there on your own, sort of segmented from anything else. It's lonesome out there. It's better to be part of something."

O'Brien and Scott first went on the road together for a tour of England and Ireland in the spring of 1998. They had already worked on one recording together and done the odd local gig. O'Brien described the tour experience: "The idea was that we both had records out on Sugar Hill at the time, and we could go and play. Darrell could play a set, I could play a set, and we could play a little bit together. We could help each other with chores and stuff, instead of going off on our lonesome. It kind of led to much more stuff."

This is an excerpt from issue #91.