Just before Liz Durrett left for a recent tour with Tin Cup Prophette and Hope For Agoldensummer, she and her longtime partner Ben McCormick got hitched at the Athens-Clarke County Courthouse. They didn't take time off for a honeymoon, opting to go on tour instead. Some new brides might object to a working honeymoon, but they haven't created the Mezzanine.
Honeymooning or not, Durrett finds touring a welcome interruption from her day job, scoring Georgia high school essays. "I felt like I was going to lose my mind if I had to read one more essay about high school kids and curfews," she says.
It was when she was a high school kid, though, when Durrett's folk-rocking uncle Vic Chesnutt gave her her first guitar. It's the one she still plays. "I used to buy cheap 3/4-size classical guitars from Chick Piano and put a pickup in them," remembers Chesnutt. "They would only last a couple of years before the intonation would warp too much for me to use them, so I just gave her one of my old ones. She of course said something like, 'Oh, you can't give me that,' like it was some precious thing that she didn't deserve."
Durrett immediately proved her worth by putting Chesnutt's guitar to use, writing several songs which would eventually be released on last year's debut album Husk. "They were recorded in high school by me and Tina and Vic," she says; Tina is Tina Chesnutt, who often drums for husband Vic and niece Liz. "We never planned to put it out. Vic recorded some in the garage behind this house," says Durrett, talking in the house owned by the Chesnutts in which she currently resides. "I used to come to Athens as a teenager and stay here."
Vic remembers those visits. "I think Liz was 13 when I first met her," he says. "She was such a meek little scrawny thing, and I knew she had taken violin and piano lessons. I remember that she came to Athens to spend the night with Tina and me and I was a little freaked out, thinking, 'What the hell am I going to do with this kid around here all day while Tina's at work?' So we recorded on my four track. She played violin on some stuff, and we even made up a song together. It was really fun and kind of successful. She was a cool kid. I could tell that the wheels were turning."
When she was 14 years old, Durrett contributed violin tracks to Chesnutt's second album West of Rome. After she completed high school, Liz attended the University of Georgia for a year in the '90s, but wasn't focused on academics. She played a few shows, but ended up eventually graduating from Georgia State in Atlanta. Soon after, she and McCormick moved to San Francisco so he could attend the San Francisco Art Institute. "I knew so many creative people working horrible jobs that didn't leave them time to do their art," she says. "We were hemorrhaging dollars every day, living in a tiny apartment in Oakland." Luckily, the apartment had an attic which with the addition of a Tascam four track became a makeshift studio. While there, she wrote half the songs that make up The Mezzanine.
When she moved back to Athens in 2003, Durrett began playing violin in The Good Ship with coworkers Rob Lomax and Jesse Flavin, overcoming her stage fright in the process. "Playing with them helped me feel more comfortable on-stage," she says. Durrett also finished writing The Mezzanine, recording the lot with Andy Baker. "It's mostly me playing electric and sometimes acoustic and singing," she says. "Vic added extracurricular sounds in his studio, distorted guitar, singing into a hand-held tape recorder run through a distortion pedal. Who the hell knows what he did in his attic?" She laughs, continuing, "He was also very careful about not overdoing it. He was very considerate, making sure that I was okay with what he was doing." Whatever was done in the many attics, houses and apartments, it was done right. Sparse arrangements highlight Durrett's throaty voice. She confronts the collusion of Christianity and politics in the track "Little Ascendant," singing, "Your birth was a mystery / your life was exposed / they took it and twisted it / and made it their own."
Depression sounds almost appealing with Durrett crooning on the title track "In the yard / small things beat you down / til you cannot / leave the house." Her voice resonates with a challenge to Bible Belt precepts in "Cup on the Counter": "Why try to lie to me? I'm not a child / I know what I've seen."
"I feel like I really came to terms with being raised Southern Baptist while I was making this record," she says. Taking a brief break from touring, Durrett is focusing on what she enjoys: making music. "I love that living in a small town like Athens means that making money to survive doesn't necessarily have to be the focus of your life," she says. "I love being surrounded by people who are doing what they want to be doing."