Q: But it feels good to listen to "Now Again" and get somewhat disconnected. There's, you know, the elements on the record. It's the moon, it's the stars, it's the breezes, it's the winds, it's the river. And it's the universal things that strike our hearts.

There's something -- well, there's probably a lot of things strange about "Now Again", but one thing that's strange is that we begin an album by three singer/songwriters with Going Away, a song that you sing the lead on, Jimmie, and it's a song written by another writer, Utah Phillips. What's up with that?

JIMMIE: It's a song that I love. You know, I learned that song from Bruce Bromberg, of all strange things, from my old label, Hightone Records. In fact, another thing that Joe produced was my first record on Hightone. But Bruce taught me this song. And I just loved it. And we had always, all three of us had been Utah Phillips fans all along. We used to do lots of his songs in the old Flatlanders. So one night when we were sitting around kind of, you know, being back together again and just trading out songs and actually recording -- we recorded a bunch of -- you know, scratch recordings of old songs we knew. And I threw that one out. And Butch and Joe hadn't heard me do it before. And we started messing with the harmony on it that night. In fact, later on, Joe ought to maybe explain some of that process, but you know, working on harmonies was new for us, too.

Ever after that, just almost every time we played, Joe would say, "Let's do that, let's work on Going Away again. You know on the old one, I did nearly all the singing. There was almost an imprint there that was my voice and sort of that style. And this one was like kind of a thing that's sort of halfway in between the old Flatlanders' sound and this new record.

Q: The Flatlanders toured for a year or two before they began recording "Now Again". Why in the world would you do that?

BUTCH: Well, we actually got some offers to do so. I think, after we did the Horse Whisperer song we wound up doing a gig at Central Park in New York. And the New York Times did a big splash on us. And I guess people around the country read that. And the next thing we knew, we had some offers to go out and play. And about the same time, we were beginning to write a few more songs. And we accepted the offers to go play some gigs and began to think, well, are we going to play strictly our songs or is this going to be a rehash of the old Flatlanders. And we instantly felt that, no, we want to give them something new, because that's what we've been doing all our lives. And it just proceeded right into that touring world.

Q: One thing I've noticed about "Now Again" is the vocal arrangements and the harmonies. They're absolutely beautiful. It seems to me those would be hard to evolve on the road. Did they, or are they like pieces of a puzzle that you had to fit together when you got to the studio?

JOE: The road really helped us actually sing together and everything, because we'd do it every night and we'd actually change -- sometimes change the parts. And then when we'd come back off the road, we'd come in and re-record the songs again. So we actually re-recorded some of them several times because the road helped the song kind of come to life. And then we started realizing that each of our voices are so different that we could -- when different combinations of them were singing, it made it almost like orchestral instruments. When Butch and Jimmie would sing harmony together, it's unlike anything I'd ever heard before. And so a lot of those things helped just us understanding the songs themselves and who should be singing what part.

BUTCH: That same process was actually at work in the songwriting. It was like the funny combination of three of us. Sometimes it would be kind of two of us working a little harder and then the other one would come in and double check us on it and take it to another level. We've described it before as like, it was like -- you know, when it's one person writing a song, there's always several people inside your head arguing about it. You know, like, don't do that line. Go this way with it. Well, a similar kind of thing kind of happened as we bought it out right in the middle of all three of us. And then Joe figured out it wasn't just three of us writing, it was about nine of us writing it (laughter).

Q: It sounds like the Flatlanders had a great time making this record. It's fun. It's off-the-cuff. I always think of this band as Texas' equivalent to the Traveling Wilburys, because strong personalities, but no one taking things too seriously but yet coming up with, you know, something that means a lot.

But, I mean, there's a song like Pay the Alligator. I don't know how in the world you guys came up with that. And also, (how you came up with) I Thought the Wreck was Over. Let's talk about those two songs a little bit. Pay the Alligator, anybody?

BUTCH: Pay the Alligator, Jimmie was hollering something from another room about -- I think he said something about the radiator. And Joe and I were just trying to figure out the instrumentation on a song we had all just finished writing. And I said something like, "Oh, that would be a good idea. Maybe Jimmie could play the radiator." And then Jimmie thought -- he stuck his head out and said, "Did you say Pay the Alligator?" Which he said he knew it wasn't that, but it sounded registered like that on his -- in his brain. And when we all heard that, it was like a statement that our granddads had told us or something. And we just took off running with it. It was a hard song to write.

Q: What about I Thought the Wreck was Over, where did that come from?

JOE: I had just been out in the desert out in Arizona. And I was working on a thing with a bunch of cowboys around. And late at night, everybody was sitting around a campfire and there was this one bull rider who started telling this story about getting thrown off a bull. And then he turns around and the bull keeps coming. He jumps over the fence and the bull keeps coming. And in rodeo language, when you get thrown off a bull, it's called "a wreck." He kept saying, "I thought the wreck was over." And he looks over his shoulder and here it comes again.

And when I threw that out to Butch and Jimmie, we all realized that -- sometime in our life, we'd all had relationships that had been kind of like that.

Q: Not only are the Flatlanders Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, but there is an amazing band of musicians who made this album. Jimmie, who's in the core group that made "Now Again" along with you?

JIMMIE: Basically, it was us and then Robbie Gjersoe on lead guitar. You know, his imprint is on everything on the record. And lead guitar and dobro slide, slide banjo on one song. and Rafael Gayol on drums. There were several other percussion people, but he's the mainstay and the one that was on the road with us the most. And Gary Harmon on bass on all of it.

Q: On the song we just heard and the one we're going to hear in a minute, there's an accordion player named Joel Guzman. Joe, how did he wind up playing squeeze box with the Flatlanders?

JOE: I'd been working with Joel on different projects. And his particular brand of accordion just brings the -- kind of the wild west or, you know, New Mexico or something, that whole feeling. And I just thought, on Butch's Julia, he's always kind of -- the chorus comes in "I was on the mountain," you know. And something about the accordion, to me, anyway, just sounded like it -- kind of opened it up, you know, in the middle of it. And he kind of let it in...

Q: There's also a bit of continuity from your very first sessions 30 years ago. Steve Wesson, once again, plays the saw -- that's right, the saw, as in the took that cuts wood. Butch, perhaps you know how a guy winds up playing the saw and have you all been in touch with Steve all these years?

BUTCH: Pretty much. He lives up in Salado, Texas, right up I-35, which has probably kept us from seeing him all that often. But the saw, it's got that eerie UFO sound, which once Steve figured out that he could make that sound, he knew he was in the band -- we needed a UFO in the band out there in Lubbock.

JOE: Steve was a carpenter when we first met him. And the Flatlanders' house in Lubbock was kind of this open house where we just sat around and played all night. And the neighbors would come in and some of them would bring instruments. And Steve started just bringing his saw from work with a mallet and started playing it with the band at these all-night jam sessions.

JIMMIE: And Steve was -- also, he was an art teacher, too, and an actual cowboy, rodeo cowboy. Amazing guy. And he -- when he started playing the saw, it turned out that he -- it's like he had such good pitch that -- you know, it's not just a weird novelty thing, it's like he plays it really well. So it works.

Q: That's different. And also, it's great that it ties back to the very first things that the Flatlanders ever did 30 years ago.

Butch, as a connoisseur of songs, you know that there's dozens of songs written with a woman's name as the title. It's got to be hard to bring something new to that concept. But in this song, all of nature's wonders are present, but the guy can only think, of course, of Julia.

BUTCH: Well, there you are!

Q: Butch, over the years, you've had a lot of interests. Songwriting, architecture, farming, photography. As a matter of fact, some of your pictures are on the CD booklet. And like the music, these pictures, they seem desolate. They smack of a time gone by. What can you tell me about the photos that you took?

BUTCH: Well, most of those pictures were taken by Sharon Ely. I have billions of other photos way backlogged. We were just up in Nashville and there's a bunch of them on exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame, which is the last way I ever expected to get into the Country Music Hall of Fame, a bunch of photographs of the West Texas broken trees and sandstorms. But I've just been real lucky. You know, we were all born in a century where there was a proliferation of guitars and cameras. And I kind of picked those two up as my main tools of the trade. And on all these music tours we've done and getting to travel around the world with the music, I've always carried a camera with me and kind of used it like -- a little bit like part of my songwriting technique, just snapshots of life on the planet.

Q: Joe, your wife, Sharon, took a lot of the photos. Were you with her or did she present some to you? Because they -- they really are of a piece with the record as a whole.

JOE: I guess we probably took about equally number on that of photos. Really, we didn't even realize that we had those pictures. We had just a certain amount of time to get the record together because it was like a two-week period that if we didn't make that deadline, the record wouldn't come out until six months later or something. Which made us dig into these old archives of photos and found all these pictures that we'd taken when we lived up in West Texas.

Q: Jimmie, in your earlier days, you brought your interest in Eastern religion to West Texas. I'm sure you've been told before that your voice has an angelic quality. I'm thinking that somebody has to lead a life of darkness to sing with such light. Is that true for you?

JIMMIE: Well, I think it's kind of what it turned out to be. Going back to that thing I said earlier, in lots of ways, I didn't have a real realization of that until much later on.

Q: The first person thanked in the liner notes to the Flatlanders CD "Now Again" is the late Texas songwriting legend, Townes Van Zandt. Joe, since Townes has been gone more than five years, why was he the first person thanked?

JOE: When we were first getting together, I was out driving around Lubbock and I pick up this hitchhiker out way on the edge of town. And he's got a guitar in his hand, backpack on. And I carry him all the way though town. He was in a terrible spot. He would have never gotten a ride there. And meanwhile, he tells me that he's just coming from San Francisco making an album there. And when he gets out, he -- we talk briefly. And he gives me an album and it's Townes Van Zandt. That record became just kind of a centerpiece while we were getting together as the Flatlanders. And we always kind of think of Townes as kind of being the Flatlanders' patron saint. And so he's kind of showed us that you can actually make records. Here was a guy in the flesh that made these beautiful songs. And it inspired us.

And then, of course, years later, we all got to know Townes.

Q: Joe, your past has included train-hopping, joining the circus, pool-sharking a little bit. To me, you're a guy that knows about living in the moment. The song that is this album's centerpiece and sort of its title track is Now it's "Now Again". It first appeared on a tribute album to a Buddhist monastery. Was that tribute disc what brought about the song or how did it come about?

JOE: No, the tribute disc didn't bring about the song. The song was actually, I think Jimmie had a little melody and that line from something that he had started before. And we were all sitting around the table in my kitchen and Jimmie sings this amazing melody that opens it up, with that line. And it just made us feel like -- it was almost like a déjà vu. Well here we are again, you know. This is kind of something that was almost like it had to be.

(End of interview)