When he recorded Into The Woods, Eric Congdon had come out of a dark place. Photo by Rimas Zailskas
Hendersonville guitarist Eric Congdon has been recording and releasing albums since 2006, when he made his solo record debut, Green River. Over the years, the roots-blues musician has built up a solid reputation as a sterling musical interpreter, yet one with his own style. But in 2015, he was involved in a serious car accident that left him unable to play guitar at all. Happily, he worked his way back to a full recovery, and that period of convalescence also yielded a new album, Into the Woods.
“I just couldn’t play straight for about two months,” recalls Congdon, who suffered a severe concussion in the crash. He says he tried to pick up the guitar just a few days after the accident, played a few chords, and then blacked out and fell over. He didn’t understand what was wrong, so he asked his doctor. “He told me, ‘You think you’re not doing anything when you’re sitting there strumming, but your brain is working really hard to process all that. But your brain can’t process that right now.’”
So Congdon set his guitar aside while continuing his recovery. Eventually, he says his brain built up the ability to process the music. “It took me about a year to get to the point where I could play a good evening’s worth of music again, and feel comfortable,” he says.
Eric Congdon is well known for his accomplished string work. But when he first started playing again after his car accident, just a few minutes of strumming exhausted him. Photo by Rimas Zailskas
Along with working his way back to instrumental facility, Congdon started taking long hikes in the Western North Carolina woods, reveling in the grandeur of the region. “After being laid up for a while and not being able to do anything, it was part of my recovery process,” he says. And the experience was as inspiring as it was therapeutic.
“Just being out there in nature and being influenced and inspired by North Carolina informs a lot of what you hear on Into the Woods,” Congdon says. “The stories, the sounds, and the rootsy flavor of the music are all tied together.”
Eric Congdon’s latest album, Into the Woods.
Some of the best songs on Congdon’s latest album are directly derived from these hikes. One of them is “The Legend of Blowing Rock.” Congdon says that he “wrote out a story lyrically first, and then made the music to match up with the words.” But other tunes, like “Smoky Mountain Medicine Man,” are a combination of new and older, previously unused works. “I actually wrote the music for that song almost 10 years ago,” he reveals.
Then on one of his hikes, he had a moment of inspiration. “That phrase jumped into my head — ‘Smoky Mountain medicine man’ – and then pretty much on the spot, I scribbled down the lyrics and finally completed the song,” he says.
Several of the tracks are stories about real people. “Ballad of Brando” is one such song. “That’s a childhood friend, and those are real things that happened to him,” Congdon says. His goal for the album was to create a unified collection of original work. “I had some stories I wanted to tell,” he says. “When people hear the CD, I want them to think of North Carolina, and the woods, and the things around here. That’s what I was shooting for.”
Remarkably, considering the richly evocative lyrics, the new album is the first in nearly a decade to feature Congdon’s vocals. “For a long time, I felt I didn’t have anything to say lyrically, so I focused on music,” he says. But then after the accident, he found that his lyrical muse had returned. “And they kind of tied together,” Congdon says. “It just happened naturally.”
Another goal Congdon kept in mind was making Into the Woods a “performance album,” one that could be duplicated onstage. “When people come to see me live, I want to give them a pretty reasonable facsimile of what’s on the CD,” he says. His guiding principle in making albums is straightforward: keep it simple. But that doesn’t mean rushing things. “It took a while to complete, and I really sweated over the details,” Congdon says. “I have my little humble recording studio here at home, and I pretty much assembled everything here.”
Into the Woods is deeply personal: “I have a lot of my heart and soul in it.”
Eric Congdon’s CD-release show is Thursday, July 6, 7pm at Sanctuary Brewing Company (147 1st Ave. E., Hendersonville), with Billy Cardine and Lisa Tyler. He also plays Friday, July 7, 6pm at Wine Down on Main (28 E. Main St., Brevard). For more info, see ericcongdon.com.
