Michele Shocked Just Fiddles Around

Expect the unexpected from Michelle Shocked.

Given the talented songstress’s unorthodox bent--her first album, “The Campfire Tapes,” was recorded on a portable Sony Walkman around a real campfire--it’s no wonder that her record label, Mercury Records, keeps a close eye on her recording techniques.

“They were a little worried about what I might do,” she said the other day. “So they put a clause into my contract saying I had to use state-of-the-art equipment, or some equivalent, when I made my next record.”

You could say Shocked kept her word. She’s been recording her new album, titled “Arkansas Traveler,” on a fancy, 48-track digital Sony recording deck. But here’s the twist: The 48-track deck is riding on an 18-wheel tractor-trailer that’s followed Shocked’s Winnebago around the country as she records with a host of her favorite musical influences.

So far, the ambitious pop odyssey has taken Shocked--accompanied by her dad, who plays mandolin on a few tracks, her fiance and their cat--across 3,000 miles of highway. They’ve recorded songs on a riverboat along the Missouri River (where Shocked cut a fiddle tune with Uncle Tupelo); Woodstock, N.Y. (where she recorded “The Secret to a Long Life” with Levon Helm and Garth Hudson); Memphis’ Sun Studios (where she did “Hold Me Back” with Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown), and Mountain View, Ark., where she recorded a song with 84-year-old fiddler Jimmy Driftwood.

Leaving her truck behind, Shocked flew to Ireland, where she did a fiddle tune, “Over the Waterfall,” with Hothouse Flowers, and Australia, where she recorded with Paul Kelly & the Messengers. She has also cut tracks with Pops Staples and Taj Mahal--and is still hoping to woo her hero, Merle Haggard, into her Winnebago long enough to play fiddle with her.

“I really got the inspiration for all this from my dad,” explained Shocked, a pop vagabond who was living as a squatter when she first signed her contract with Mercury. “I’d taken him on his first hitchhiking trip to see a friend in the Ozarks and when we got snowbound there, we came up with the idea of taking a riverboat ride down to Baton Rouge, paying our way by playing tunes together.

“We ended up playing fiddle tunes in the pilot house of the boat, getting this wonderful sense of motion from the ride on the river. It was so exhilarating that I thought, ‘Hey, I could do a whole album like this.’ ”

A pop traditionalist whose albums have explored various country, folk and minstrel roots, Shocked sees the album, due out later this year, as a way to expose her fans to some of her biggest musical influences. One of her favorite sessions was with Band mainstay Levon Helm.

“Levon is the original Arkansas Traveler,” she reported. “He has such an air of melancholy that it seeps into everything--the whole studio felt melancholy by the time we were through.” She laughed. “I might’ve been a little intimidated working with Levon and Taj Mahal. I guess I got to learn to be a little more relaxed when I’m around my heroes.”