This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen Magazine #97 (December 2001/January 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

Dave Carter &Tracy Grammer
Karaoke &Confucius
by Pamela Murray Winters

It starts with dreams.

"Most of the beginnings of my songs come in dreams, or in a waking state that is very similar to a dream state," mused Dave Carter. "That is, I wouldn't want to be driving when I was in this state." He was cocooned in an air-conditioned trailer with his musical partner, Tracy Grammer, while outside in the Philadelphia summer heat the WXPN Singer/Songwriter Festival got underway. Rangy, sort of a beardless Lincoln, with deceptively simple lines to his face, he struggled to translate this inspiration: "And I will hear, just out of the blue…almost…not that I hear voices!"

He flashed a slightly abashed smile and continued. "I will imagine a certain turn of phrase which, for me, has great meaning. And I will hear the basic little musical part that goes with it. So the motif, both lyrically and musically, will hit me at once. Very often, it'll be like I dream it, but a lot of times I'll just hear it.

"And from there, I think about the crux of the meaning of that phrase, both lyrically and why it sounds good to me with that music. So that I understand the motivation, in part, for grasping onto that lyric. And from there I work."

Next move: hit the pedals. "One way I have of [working] is, if I have time, I'll get on a bicycle, and I'll ride the bicycle for, like, 20 miles. And I let my pedaling fall into the rhythm of this turn of phrase. And at the end of it I'll have sheets and sheets and sheets and sheets of lyrics from which I will pare down the stuff… I just pare it all down so I can get it into a song. Some songs I feel call, aesthetically, for a whole gob of lyrics. Like [Dylan's] 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.' There's a song that would not be right unless it had about a hundred verses.

"Chuang-Tzu tells this story, about this woodcutter, and he's supposed to be a great sculptor. What he would do was go out into the forest, and he would find the particular piece of wood, the particular stone, and he knew that inside the stone was this shape he would see. So depending on whether I get a stone, or a log, or what the stone's made out of, or maybe it's just a dirt clod, that depends on how much paring down that's gonna be. But you have to start by bringing in the whole uncut block."

Carter's is not the only voice that interprets his lyrics. Asked whether there are differences between "Dave songs" and "Tracy songs," his partner on the sofa, a bird-boned woman with arresting green eyes, shrugged: "He puts more words in my songs!"

Tracy Grammer, too, knows something about dreams. "When I was in the third grade and fifth grade, I got parts in operettas at my elementary school. And in one, I was the modern major general, and in the other, I was the Duke of Plaza-Toro. I don't know why I got these boys' parts! I think it was because at that time I had a loud and booming voice relative to all the other kids, and also because I was kind of a stage hog all the time. I was fearless! I would just get out there with my feather in my cap, and my knickers on, and just strut around and do anything. And also I could memorize a lot of lines."

She tossed off a snippet of classic Gilbert and Sullivan in a clear, earnest voice. "When I think about those parts that I got — the wordplay and the density of the lyrics — it so goes with what I'm doing now.

"I always wanted to sing in the musicals in high school but never got to." Instead, she played violin in the pit orchestra, returning to singing only after college at Berkeley. "Really, I got my start as a public singer in a karaoke bar in Modesto, California." Carter's eyes were closed, and a long-suffering smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as Grammer continued: "My brother and I would go to a place called the Early Dawn, which was right down the street from where we were living, very convenient. And every Sunday night they had karaoke night… I would sing 'Love is Alive' by the Judds. And there was a guy named Marshall there, and we would sing 'Up Where We Belong' by Joe Cocker—"

Carter murmured, "Are there any more nails you can hammer into the coffin of our reputation?"

Grammer replied impishly, "I haven't even mentioned John Denver yet! But, yeah, so I started singing this karaoke, and I just loved it. And I even won a prize! I won a free dinner for my karaoke singing."

Around that time, she also met Curtis Coleman, a former member of the New Christy Minstrels, and started attending his gigs. "At some point he got me up on stage, and I remember that first time so clearly — it was terrible. I opened my mouth to sing, and it was just something else altogether that came out. It was this noise that I had no control over at all. I was just totally gone with nervousness. But we did it over and over all through the summer, four nights a week, and I eventually got more comfortable up there, and started to figure out how it all worked. And after that I was just hopeless, you know?"

This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #97 (Dec. '01/Jan. '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.