Tim O'Brien

By Brian D’Ambrosio

Tim O’Brien intended for Paper Flowers to be a lighthearted record, a pleasant distraction from worldly strife, following a period of more serious songwriting. Onstage, he playfully embraces the material's cheerful tone.

“This album and these songs just create a good time,” said O’Brien. “I think we were looking to just kind of have some songs that take people's minds off of the current troubles out there. I'd rather talk about puppies and places I've never been than talk about how bluesy it is around.”

O’Brien, one of the most trusted supplies of modern bluegrass, has been fully immersed in the songs on Paper Flowers lately. His live shows are a continuation and expansion of the good time that he had co-writing and recording them.

“Twelve out of fifteen songs are co-written with Tom Paxton,” said O’Brien. “Every week writing songs with Tom was like going fishing with your friends. If you caught something – great. If not, fine. As a result, we caught more than we could keep and we had to throw some back. Tom lives to do that. He does it all the time, and it's no big deal. That (Paxton’s relaxed approach) took the worry out of it (the process) in a lot of ways.”

O’Brien said that recent performances are grounded in the simple notion of expressing and sharing a sense of ease, giving audiences the liberty and free will to relax their minds and roam untroubled within the music.

Many of these new songs are autobiographical and specific to O’Brien’s relationship with his wife Jan Fabricius (who also shares the co-writing credits), drawing from various elements of their courtship and love, including the title track, “Paper Flowers,” introducing lines which O’Brien first wrote on a postcard about 13 years ago and re-discovered in a composition notebook in a desk drawer.

“I’ll make notes and tear out the pages that are good and save them,” said O’Brien. “Most of the notes are throwaways but every once in a while, it’ll turn into a song, like “Paper Flowers,” which is pretty much true. I didn't ride a train to get back to her, but that's the only part of the song that isn't quite true.”

One of the songs O’Brien said that he is having the most delightful time playing now is “Yellow Hat,” a reflective piece about the inevitability of empty nests and passing phases.

“Our kids have moved away but we're not packing up and moving,” said O’Brien. “But we have cleaned out the house and found some interesting items, like yellow hats. I don't know how it started, but Tom came up with it. And I wonder if he had a concrete image from his own true life. His wife, Midge, passed (in 2014) and they were really a wonderful couple. I think he's grappled with that.

“We didn't write it with the idea that we would trade verses, but it just seemed to fit well into that pattern. “Yellow Hat” is about a couple that's getting old and kind of reminiscing. They're downsizing. They're re-discovering things.”

“Hungry Heart” is entrenched in simple nostalgia and the yearning for the disconnected days of the past.

“We’re imagining when cell phones were way in the future,” said O’Brien. “You might get a phone call from long distance and it was a major event. In this case, we're thinking about a father. He's got to travel to work, and he's gone and couldn't afford to call…imagining the mom and the kids waiting for the call and being around the kitchen table and stretching the curly cord across the room to say hello.”

“Blacktop Rag Mop” draws from one of Tim and Jan’s first dates, a long road trip, approximately two weeks, stretching from Nashville up along the Eastern Seaboard to northern Maine.

“That one kind of fell together,” said O’Brien. “I didn't know that Tom would have written a rockabilly song, and I didn't know we were going either.”

“Father of the Bride” was written for Jan’s son, right around the time that he was about to marry off her granddaughter, and Tim and Jan wrote it from his perspective.

“The song has already been sung at weddings and it's brought tears to a lot of fathers' eyes,” said O’Brien. “It's kind of a simple thing to sort of mirror your life. It’s funny about how the personal becomes the universal. If you make it personal enough, people can identify with it more. When you talk about walking down the aisle, you're seeing that as a visual thing. Maybe you've actually done it or you're about to do it…they're common human feelings.”

“Down to Burn” is based on one of Tim and Jan's strangest, noisiest, and most intrusive experiences on an airplane.

“There were five women and they came on partying,” said O’Brien. “They were on their way to a weekend together and they were on their second flight. They'd been drinking on the first flight. This was their second. They had still one more. I don't know what shape they arrived in Savannah, but it's really their story. Everything that is in the song is what they either said or what they talked about.”

One song on Paper Flowers with a not so perky subject matter that O’Brien has been performing regularly is “Covenant,” which comes to grips with the emotional trauma from mass shootings twisted on the collective psyche of the American consciousness.

““Covenant” takes a stand about assault weapons,” said O’Brien. “But I think the best art is really just kind of illustrating what's happening as opposed to saying it should be this way or that way. And even in the case of that song, we tried to just get in the heads of parents of the shooting victims and the casualties…When it's so close to your home, you can imagine just seeing the people in the supermarket that may be affected by this.”

O’Brien said that he and Jan, who first met informally many years ago at a music festival, have been deepening and expanding their relationship musically, too. Married for four years now, “Paper Flowers” charts their interpersonal growth as allied artists.

“In the beginning,” said O’Brien, “I would learn new songs or write new songs, and Jan would be kind of humming along, and then pretty soon singing harmony. And then we started playing music together at the house playing mandolin tunes or fiddle tunes. And then she started playing and singing on stage. It made sense to start writing together.”

Indeed, like a superior piece of music, their association strengthened organically, and O’Brien said that he is extremely grateful for the advantages music delivers– traveling and performing with his wife, sightseeing together, sharing meals at good restaurants, visits with old friends.

“I’m living the dream,” said O’Brien. “Pretty much start to finish, it is just the two of us. Our lives are tailored around what we do together. And that’s what this record is. Music we would be able to do together. Songs that were comfortable to sing and play, and hopefully that shows.”

To send story ideas and suggestions, Brian D’Ambrosio may be reached at [email protected]