It’s not often the true depth and beauty of an album is based on how well you know the musician or group releasing it. Such is the case for Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams’ latest album All This Time. On its surface, the album is a spectacular showcase of Campbell’s next level guitar playing/composing mixed with Williams equally next level vocals. If you knew nothing about one of music’s royal couples, this album stands solid on its own.
If you’ve spent five minutes in the company of Campbell and Williams, you’ll quickly realize All This Time is full of biographical tales of their decades long relationship that’s seen them frolic with the Mt. Rushmore of musicians… Bob Dylan, Levon Helm, Phil Lesh, and on and on. Not only does the album spotlight Campbell and Williams’ love story, it does so in chronological order. Amazingly, according to Campbell and Williams it was completely unintentional.
The album opens with a country flavored rocker Desert Island Dreams and ends with a beautiful cover of Jesse Colin Young’s Pretty and the Fair. In between, is the tale of Campbell and Williams’ long journey of music and love.
Their relationship moves from friendship to romance in the title track All This Time. “We started out as friends. Trying to pretend we can hold the line. Can we finally end this masquerade after all this time?” The dynamic duo’s tale continues until they’re reflecting on the good old days in, We Done Earned It. “So, let’s turn out the light, step out tonight. Show ‘em how to have a little fun. Cause we done earned it baby.”
It doesn’t take more than a few minutes with Campbell and Williams to realize they are two of the nicest and most humble musicians you will come across. Their list of credits and musicians they’ve shared the stage with is endless. Campbell is the Mt. Rushmore of music sidemen. He stood by Bob Dylan’s side for a decade before joining Levon Helm for years leading the historic Woodstock Rambles. He’s played with Cyndi Lauper. He played with Jorma Kaukonen. It doesn’t matter the style of music, there’s always an invitation for Campbell to record and/or tour. He even played the violin in the Tracy Chapman / Luke Combs Grammy masterpiece performance of Fast Cars earlier this year.
Once again, Campbell and Williams were gracious enough to give Slideandbanjo’s Marty Halpern an in depth look at the making of their latest album. Like their album, the duo dive deep into their relationship and the forces that turned a studio album into a biographical love story.
S&B- Hey Larry and Teresa. It’s great to talk with you again. Congratulations on the new album. I’m just going to belly flop right in. Having interviewed and met you with the last album, when I listened to this album for the first time, I’m like, oh my God, these two are just singing to each other. I mean, literally. That’s what I took out of it. This is unlike anything I’ve ever heard.
Larry- Wow. That’s huge to us. Yeah, whether it was consciously or not. This record is a testament to our relationship.
Teresa – Absolutely.
Larry- The songs. I don’t think they were set out to be that way. Not on purpose. I was just writing songs, and the songs are coming out of me. I’m not looking for any kind of thread. I’m not looking for a theme. The songs would come one at a time. After everything was assembled and recorded, I mentioned to Teresa, interviewers are going to want to know if there’s a theme, and she found it.
Teresa- I don’t remember him saying everybody’s going to want a theme… Well, maybe you did, but I didn’t care. It was when we had to find an album title, I started looking at it in that way. The guys kept picking song titles from the record. I started looking at what we’re really trying to find. Trying to figure out the artwork. It’s one of those things where it showed me what you just said about relationships. Every song on the record except for one is about relationships.
Once we picked All This Time as the title, it just completely fell into place. Our manager said something about clocks for the artwork. I said, I have these pictures of clocks from a place we stayed in Italy a few years ago. I started digging around and these photos were screaming at me, you have to use me. You have to. I kept thinking why would clocks be in the artwork? Once I realized the relationship theme, all the pictures that had been poking at me made sense. It’s like my subconscious is working with Larry. It all fell into place. I loved the artwork. It was both of our subconsciousness reaching out. Larry would send me the songs one at a time. One would come, and then weeks later, another one would come. A lot was based on Larry’s awful bout with Covid.
S&B- We talked about how difficult the isolation and lack of knowledge about Covid really threw you two for a loop for your Live at Levon’s! release. Larry was in bad shape at one point.
Larry- I was up here at our house in Woodstock all alone. All I had was Teresa on the phone every day because she was in Manhattan. That’s what kept me going. I was very sick and in and out of this fever delirium. As I finally got through this thing, the absence of human connection was stark to me. As the pandemic went on, you couldn’t socialize. You couldn’t be with your friends. You couldn’t perform. You couldn’t be in a room with a bunch of people. To the degree this record came out of my subconscious, that’s what was working around in there.
Teresa- There’s plenty to be said for the greatest stuff comes from, not focusing on it. It just happens as opposed to trying to write a technical path to it. It takes some doing to get out of your own way, in your own head. Larry’s being so sick forced him into that place. It forced him to stop being busy. Larry is very busy. His brain needs so much stimulation. Got the TV going 24/7 until he falls asleep, and I turn it off. He’s emailing, texting, taking phone calls, practicing while he’s doing all of that. We haven’t really talked about this part, so this is interesting you’re pulling this into the air, Marty. But, yeah, for it for him to. Wow. I hadn’t really said this aloud, but being that sick allowed his subconscious to come up through all of that noise and crap that goes on every day.
S&B- Going back to our previous conversation, it was well documented how the covid experience cemented some life changes you were in the middle of making. Most importantly, the realization that Larry can still pick and choose the projects he wants to work on, but going forward, focus number one is Larry and Teresa.
Larry- We were headed in that direction before I got sick. Covid just solidified the whole thing for me. Out of everything I’ve done my whole career, Larry and Teresa is easily the most gratifying. You get to do the thing you love with the person you love, and the person you love to do it with. So, what more could you ask? I did an interview and they asked if Bob Dylan ever called and wanted to put that band back together again, would you go? In the spirit of never say never, I said, I don’t know, but I would not do it if it interfered in any way with what I’m doing now with Teresa. That was an easy, easy answer right there.
S&B- That’s an extraordinary commitment and it’s clear that’s your gameplan moving forward. Enjoy the fruits of your labor, cause you done earned it.
Teresa- There are different angles to look at this. I love to work, love working with Larry. That’s all great. I like being on the road. But I also like being with my family. I still have family around. And sadly, Larry does not. I feel it’s important for the art and my life to maintain those relationships. I want to enjoy my family while I have them. While we’re all young enough to enjoy that.
S&B- Given the time and commitment you’ve both put in for decades, no one is going to hold it against you if Larry wants to be more specific with his side projects or you want to find some peace and quiet in the country.
Teresa- Larry says, you need to find some balance. Traveling is fun. Performing is fun. It’s part of who we are. Our whole life. My whole life. If you don’t stop and do the other stuff, you’ve got nothing to give on stage. Or when you want to write your next song. Where is that going to come from if you can’t cut the noise out for long periods of time? Maybe if you’re used to noise, noise, noise, it’s uncomfortable to cut it out for a while.
S&B- This album has been in the works since before Covid. You did the live album as a placeholder to give this the proper time. What was the process of picking the songs that made the final cut? You’ve been playing several of them and others that didn’t make the cut in concert for years.
Larry- A couple of them just got to completion right before we started recording. There are seven originals on the album along with three covers.
Teresa- One of them is George Jones’s That’s All It Took which Larry played for years with Levon. As we did with our first and second record, we wanted to have a song with Levon playing drums on this one.
Larry- We did some rhythm tracks with Levon when we were working on his Electric Dirt record (2009). We also did some new tracks for what was supposed to be our first record. We used one track on the first record. We used another on the second. That’s All It Took seemed like the perfect candidate for this one. It’s a song we’ve been playing for years, and we love it. That was an obvious choice for one of the cover tunes. Then there was Pretty and the Fair. The Jesse Colin Young tune I’ve always been enamored with. Teresa and I sang that together, years ago, just kicking it around. We worked out an arrangement and put it on this one. The final one is I Love You, the Julie Miller tune. Julie handed that song to Teresa a few years ago and said, “I think you should do the song.” She was damn right. If Julie gives you a song, that’s like Christmas morning.
S&B- Jumping back to That’s All It Took. Any time you can put new Levon Helm music on a record in 2024, that’s a wonderful thing. You updated the song a bit in the studio, but most of the recording is untouched including Teresa’s vocals from fifteen years ago.
Teresa- It’s fun to hear my 15-year-old voice. I’m just guessing at the date. To this day I enjoy singing that song. I really love laying into that. And it’s stone cold country.
S&B- That brings up another point. I Love You has some uniquely twangy vocals on your part Teresa. How do you determine which style of vocals the song calls for? It’s completely different from your vocals on a song like Ride with Me.
Teresa- I don’t even think about that. I just get in front of a microphone and it’s like that other stuff we were talking about, it just tells you what it wants to be. It leads you down the road. That is not a conscious choice. I just jump in and see what it wants to be. That’s a fun ride.
S&B- That’s interesting. You can obviously hear the vocal difference between the two, and you’re saying that’s just how it comes out of your mouth? That’s unbelievable.
Teresa- Almost always, I’ll do a scratch vocal while they’re doing the rhythm tracks. I love to hear what’s going on with overdubs and stuff. That helps inform me where Larry is going down that road. He says he needs my vocal to tell him where I’m going with it. We kind of vie for the position of hearing what the other one’s going to do first, to inform our choices.
S&B- That’s another example of you two operating on a level higher than the standard consciousness. Obviously, you’re speaking to each other in some form other than just words.
Larry- That’s right. That’s so true Marty. Very perceptive and astute. It’s really the glue of our marriage what you just described. We will end up not talking verbally about a lot of stuff. Things that probably should be aired. We can get around it by communicating in these songs.
S&B- That’s a beautiful thing. No one’s ever brought that angle up. Music makes up for Larry didn’t take out the trash?
Teresa- (Laughs) Or I spent my last dollar on a top for the next show.
S&B- Let’s just go sing to one another and all is forgiven. You’ve cracked it. You’ve cracked the musician’s key to a happy marriage. That’s beautiful. As I mentioned earlier, anyone who knows you two will instantly see a lot of the themes of this album are biographical. It has such a personal feel to it.
Teresa- I wouldn’t take it completely literally, because some of this stuff I hope is not specifically about me, but all relationships. It covers the good, the bad, and the ugly. The beginning, the middle, and the end. Hopefully not our end yet. We’ve been around long enough to say we’re in the last phases of our lives. This album, I just love how it presented itself to us. We didn’t concoct it. It was there on a platter.
S&B- We discussed the “unintentional” biographical element to this album. It also has a chronological flow to it. All This Time is the tale of friends taking their relationship to the next level. Exactly your path. This is followed up with songs titled, Ride with Me, The Way You Make Me Feel, That’s All it Took, A Little Better, and I Love You. Not very relationship subtle. By the time you get to the jubilant We Done Earned It, looking back at long roads traveled, it feels like a Broadway play about your lives. Or the soundtrack to one.
Larry- It was totally unintentional, and that’s it. That’s the beauty of music. When people see things, the creator doesn’t see.
Teresa – That’s why you should never tell people what it is about. Let them have their own experience.
S&B- Looking at the song All This Time. There’s a great contrast between the mandolin and your vocals Teresa. It’s a happy song that rejuvenates the listener. I think it’s an underrated song on the album.
Larry- That’s great.
Teresa– Yeah. I enjoy singing it too.
S&B- That brings up another area of discussion. You have a lot of songs where Teresa’s the main vocalist. Some with Larry. Some with both. I’m curious, do you have a set percentage of the vocal distribution based on who is singing? For example, when it’s the two of you is it 70/30 Teresa or 60/40? There’s definitely more Teresa than Larry on the songs with combined vocals.
Larry- She’s the singer in the band.
S&B- Obviously, I’m not taking anything away from your voice, Larry. But Teresa’s vocals are in a class of their own.
Larry- She is the voice. She absolutely is the voice. I’m fine with what I contribute as a singer. I’m proud of it. That’s who I am and what I do. Like the song, A Little Better. That’s me singing, but it’s not necessarily a song that’s a showcase for a singer. It’s me telling a personal story of mine. So it works on that level. When you want to get the song across, and the melody is important. The presentation of that melody and the lyrics are important. It feels right Teresa would be vocally dominant in that situation.
S&B- Thanks for the insight. With everything you put into the production of the record, it didn’t seem far-fetched that you had a set Larry/Teresa vocal mix for those songs.
Teresa- I don’t. Do you Larry?
Larry- Not really. Sometimes when I’ll sit there with our engineer Justin (Guip), and before we put that on the final mixes, I just want to make sure that what Teresa is putting out is not hindered by anything.
S&B- Exactly
Larry- That doesn’t necessarily mean bringing down my volume. Especially if we can accomplish that with an even volume. What Teresa is doing has to be prominent.
S&B- Thanks so much for the time guys. As we wrap this up, there are songs you’ve been performing that aren’t on this album. You’re still on the road touring behind the release. What is the plan moving forward? Are you going to make another studio album? Or do you not even want to think that far ahead?
Teresa- I feel like you should start working on your next album, or at least writing it as soon as you finish the last.
Larry- After I get through a project like this. I’m an empty shell. Recently, I’ve been starting to feel the twinges again. From a lot of inspiration. Songs always start with the melody for me, and these melodies are beginning to come again right now. I’ll let them ruminate for a while which will eventually turn into a complete melody for lyrics to be superimposed over. Then, part of that melody will evoke some little phrase that will keep going through my head. That phrase, if I choose to accept it will hopefully work its way through a song that would the subject matter worth writing about. We are doing another record. When it’s going to happen, I can’t tell you. But, we’re doing another record.
Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams All This Time Royal Potato Family Records 2024
Photos – Gregg Roth