{"id":5061,"date":"2012-02-29T01:25:24","date_gmt":"2012-02-29T08:25:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=5061"},"modified":"2012-02-29T01:25:24","modified_gmt":"2012-02-29T08:25:24","slug":"the-little-willies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2012\/02\/the-little-willies\/","title":{"rendered":"THE LITTLE WILLIES"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"THE LITTLE WILLIES<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Norah Jones, Richard Julian and company take a side trip into the country\u00a0 \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like eating a big bowl of my grandma\u2019s macaroni and cheese,\u201d jazz-pop superstar Norah Jones says of her childhood love for country music. \u201cIt feels nostalgic.\u201d Today she expresses that fondness in part with the Little Willies, the group she first helped form in 2003 with singer and guitarist Richard Julian, guitarist Jim Campilongo, bassist Lee Alexander and drummer Dan Rieser to perform country tunes at a small New York City venue. The Willies\u2019 new sophomore album, For the Good Times<\/em>, features affectionate renderings of country classics and obscure nuggets\u2014including songs by Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, \u00a0Kris Kristofferson and Loretta Lynn\u2014as\u00a0well as one original.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What was country to you as a kid?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JONES: It was huge. These songs go deep for me, in a historical sense. I grew up in Texas and my grandparents lived in Oklahoma, so singing this material reminds me of my childhood.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How did you name the group?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JULIAN: The band was conceived out of a conversation about how Willie Nelson is acknowledged for his singing and personality but less so for his great songwriting. It seemed like a cool idea to cover his original tunes, but every time we got together we ended up playing songs by other people as well. The name stuck, but the concept didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How do you choose the material?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JONES: We just do songs we love, without any consideration of how well-known they are. For a listener, hearing someone cover a famous song is a different sort of experience. People often ask if it\u2019s daunting to cover the well-known material. The thing is, we don\u2019t think of those songs in that way, so it\u2019s not daunting or weird at all. We think of it more as piecing together a puzzle. We get a bunch of good takes and then figure out what we need to round out the album. Does Richard need a ballad? Do I need an uptempo song? We approach all the material with love and respect. We\u2019re just enjoying ourselves.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Who acts as bandleader?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JULIAN: Each of us offers suggestions, but no one bosses the others around. It\u2019s very democratic without being overly polite. We know one another\u2019s strengths and weaknesses, and we help each other out.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Does response vary in different areas?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JONES: We hadn\u2019t played outside New York until recently. It\u2019s fun playing in the South, but we also know that in the South some of these songs are stapled into people\u2019s brains. We were a bit nervous about playing in Nashville because we weren\u2019t sure how well the performances would go down.<\/p>\n

JULIAN: It is different. I remember an instance where we played [Kristofferson\u2019s] \u201cFor the Good Times\u201d in Manhattan. A really prominent songwriter who was there asked me whose song that was. He had never heard it. That\u2019s when I realized there was a sharp divide between audiences in the North and South. People in New York ask a lot of questions about the songs, which actually is very cool. I think it\u2019s because the songs tell such great stories.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Will you do more originals?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JONES: That depends on how much time we have together in the future. The biggest surprise about the new album is that it actually happened\u2014a couple of the guys had moved out of town, and we had all gotten busy with other projects. Still, in the end all it took was Jim sending an email, saying, \u201cHey guys, I miss this band. When are we going to play again?\u201d It took some planning, but everything turned out great.<\/p>\n

\u2013Russell Hall<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE LITTLE WILLIES Norah Jones, Richard Julian and company take a side trip into the country\u00a0 \u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s like eating a big bowl of my grandma\u2019s macaroni and cheese,\u201d jazz-pop superstar Norah Jones says of her childhood love for country music. \u201cIt feels nostalgic.\u201d Today she expresses that fondness in part with the Little Willies, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[3032,1178,970,3154],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5061"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5063,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5061\/revisions\/5063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}