John Cowan

"JOHN COWAN"

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"It has taken me a long time to finally arrive at this place," Cowan admits. "Two years ago I went out on the road with some acoustic players and realized, this is what I should do. I'd run away from the legacy of New Grass Revival for so long; and I finally realized that for some reason me singing with these instruments makes sense."

"I've finally arrived at home where I've needed to be; and I couldn't be happier. I'm totally excited. All the things I've done are finally summed up on one record."

From the fiddle-and-banjo driven "My Heart Will Follow You" to the soul-drenched "Mississippi Delta Time." John Cowan's album is a tour de force of stylistic breadth. "Wichita Way" is a story song with a feisty shuffle rhythm, while "This River" is a touching, melodic meditation. Cowan leaps from the country classic "Dark As a Dungeon" to the flink rock of "Roll Away the Stone" with ease. The moody love song "I Want You To," the mid-tempo spiritualism of "High Above the Power Lines," his blues tune "Nothing But the Blues," the instrumental jazz/rock of "Sligo," the gentle sentiment of "The Last Rose of Summer" and the solid, rhythmic grooves of "Gotta Get Go" and "All I Wanna Feel" make the John Cowan CD one of this year's most colorful and listenable recordings.

"The greatest compliment I've been getting from people is that it's the kind of album that they listen to again and again, that it really holds up to repeated listenings," says its maker. "And the feedback we get when we play this stuff out on the road is just unbelievable."

It's a measure of his reputation that the album's credits read like a musical who's who. Pop's Karla Bonoff, country's Jon Randall, gospel Grammy winner Ashley Cleveland, bluegrass stars Ronnie McCoury and Scott Vestal, dobro king Jerry Douglas, Cowan's former New Grass cohort Sam Bush and Sugar Hill's mufti-instrumental singer-songwriter Darrell Scott are all in the John Cowan cast.

Not the least of the participants is producer, singer, keyboardist and songwriter Wendy Waldman. Her musical resume includes seven solo albums as an artist, record productions in L.A. and Nashville and songwriting for Kim Carnes, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Don Johnson, Linda Ronstadt, Crystal Gayle and dozens of other top stars.

"She produced the last New Grass Revival album, Friday Night in America, and that's how we met," Cowan recalls. "That was in 1989, but she moved back to L.A. in '91 and I kind of lost track of her. About three years ago I got Wendy's number from somebody and we began to write songs together. On one of those writing trips I asked her if she would produce a record on me; and she said, 'I thought you'd never ask.' As we started making this, the basic idea was, 'OK, what if New Grass Revival existed in the year 1999. What would it sound like?"'

John Cowan's history is inextricably bound up with that legendary group. A professional music maker since age 14, he was a veteran of Louisville rock bands such as Everyday People and Louisville Sound Department (LSD) by age 20. He auditioned for New Grass Revival in 1974.

"My father passed away a month before I joined New Grass. I'd been struggling to do music against my parents' wishes. He dies and suddenly I'm in this great band. I always thought, in a way, that was no accident; it was him saying, 'OK, go for it.' That's just my own sweet thinking about my father.

After several personnel shifts, Pat Flynn and Bela Fleck joined bandmates John Cowan and Sam Bush in 1982. Then New Grass Revival took the acoustic-music world by storm with a string of sizzling albums, internationally acclaimed concert appearances, a musical collaboration with Leon Russell, Grammy nominations and reams of ecstatic press notices. When Fleck embarked on a jazz career at the dawn of 1990, the band called it quits. Its only reunions have been to back Garth Brooks on such hits as "Callin' Baton Rouge" (1994) and "Do What You Gotta Do" (1999), both of which were band originals.

Cowan recorded a mini-album of soul oldies for Sugar Hill Records in 1986. After the breakup he was signed as a rock act by Atlantic, but was dropped two years later without putting a record out. Then he became the lead singer of The Sky Kings, which spent five years in development as a country act at Warner Bros., issuing its CD in 1996.

'New Grass Revival had been my life for 16 years. I think that's why it took me so long to find myself I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I made a lot of mistakes along the way --I really didn't know what the heck I was doing."

He does now. The John Cowan album is the summation of a lifetime of music making and the record that his fans have always known was in him.

"With me, it's always been about the music. John Cowan has never had any 'hits.' New Grass Revival didn't have any 'hits.' But you know what? If your career rests on radio records, once your radio time is over, so are you. The people that adored New Grass were involved in the music on a deeper level than just turning on the radio."

"And the people who come to see me are those same folks. I'm the luckiest guy in the world. And I'm having the time of my life."

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