Mapping Gilmore

Everything’s Zen around Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

With tapping feet firmly planted in a striated bedrock of folk, blues, traditional country music and rock ‘n’ roll, but with his mind floating toward the ethereal realm of spirit and symbol, the Texas roots-music hero, at 51, has followed a path distinctly his own.

He first came into public view--albeit barely--in 1972 when he cut an obscure record in Nashville with a band called the Flatlanders, made up of some of his hometown friends from Lubbock. While fellow Flatlander Joe Ely went on in the ‘70s to forge a critically lauded form of boundary-hopping country music, Gilmore retreated to an ashram in Denver, where he studied under a famous guru, Maharaj Ji, immersing himself in Eastern thought and spirituality.

After deciding to be a musician after all, Gilmore kicked around the Austin club scene without much luck until 1988, when he finally made his first album with the help of old buddy Ely.

A second release on the independent HighTone Records label followed. Then Gilmore got a break--a major-label deal with Elektra Records--which he made the most of by cutting two exquisite, widely praised albums, “After Awhile” (1991) and “Spinning Around the Sun” (1994).

They recruited a cult following for his songs, which tend toward elusive, philosophic parables delivered in a strange, serenely beautiful, high-fluttering voice that plants a Zen garden on the austere expanse of prairies, canyons and riverbeds that serve as his main source of imagery.

As he began work on his new album late last year in Los Angeles, however, Gilmore had plenty of reason to be thinking along the lines of the sour, hit refrain by the English modern-rock band Bush: “Everything’s Zen, everything’s Zen. I don’t think so.”

Several months earlier, Gilmore had given up on almost an entire album’s worth of finished recordings, deciding they sounded too much like his previous release.

His aim was to move away from his established position to somewhere out past the warning track of country music’s deep left-field and into a different ballpark entirely, where the label “country” would no longer apply.

So Gilmore shelved that piece of work, hired a new producer, T-Bone Burnett, whom he barely knew, and commenced new sessions. Burnett selected a crew of ace musicians, among them Fullerton-bred steel guitarist Greg Leisz, whom Gilmore knew even less or not at all.

The result is his latest album, “Braver Newer World.”

As Leisz, tells it, the musicians--also including the accomplished, veteran rhythm section of drummer Jim Keltner and bassist Jerry Scheff and Beatlemaniac alternative-pop guitarist Jon Brion--literally didn’t know what to do at first.

The agenda was open-ended: find a striking new way to play Jimmie Dale Gilmore songs. As the first day went on, that assignment proved to be out of reach.

“It was all kind of improvised around [Gilmore’s] vocal,” recalled Leisz, who is now one of the leading steel-guitar session players in the recording industry, specializing in progressive country (Dave Alvin, early k.d. lang) and crunchy pop-rock (Matthew Sweet). “We tried various approaches before we would stumble onto a way of playing the song.”

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In such circumstances, with no clear plan and no good initial results, only somebody with a true understanding of Zen or some comparable philosophy would be able to maintain a stance of calm self-possession.

“I was really impressed with Jimmie,” said Leisz, who had worked with Gilmore briefly on two previous occasions. “He was probably really nervous in a lot of ways, but the way that he handled it was incredibly serene.

“As soon as the tape started rolling, things were happening that he was very surprised to hear, and he had to adjust,” he said. “It took a whole day of messing around” before the title track to “Braver Newer World” found its focus with a flowing, chiming guitar current from Leisz and distorted raga-style guitar from Brion.

“If Jimmie had a personality that was confrontational or sort of moody around people he didn’t know, or temperamental, or any of that kind of stuff had come up, it would have totally derailed the situation,” Leisz said. “Everybody had to discover [the right way to play the music] together, and Jimmie always lent a real positive energy to it.”

Gilmore, speaking by phone from a tour-stop motel in Atlanta, recalled that “at the very beginning, I didn’t think it was working. It scared me: ‘This is too weird, too off-the-wall; it may be missing the point.’ ”

But, Gilmore reminded himself, “even a lot of my favorite music, I disliked it when I first heard it. A lot of the Beatles’ stuff I outright didn’t like, and then as it grew on me, some of that became my favorite music in the whole world.”

Gilmore’s new studio band started growing on him with the playbacks of that first day’s work. Today, he says, he still listens to his new album repeatedly, more as a fan than as the artist who made it.

Horns, an old-fashioned Chamberlin synthesizer and Leisz’s pedal steel guitar providing a moody, spacious, ambient wash of sound instead of the usual country-style filigree--these touches make “Braver Newer World” a very different sort of record for Gilmore.

Gilmore says that a management shake-up at Elektra a few years ago forced him to explain himself to a new team of executives at the label--and to reconsider the direction his music had taken.

“I had a feeling of having shortchanged myself in leaving out a lot of my influences. I had sort of pigeonholed myself without meaning to,” Gilmore said. “I had sort of artificially limited myself to a certain area of the music I loved and left out some things that were equally as important.”

Gilmore says wanted to get rid of the tag “ ‘Oh, he’s a country singer,’ ” country-rooted though he might be, and make an anything-goes record in the tradition of fellow Texans Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly, who had roots in country but explored a wide range of pop possibilities.

Gilmore may write about a hard-to-touch world of thought, feeling and spirit, but he’s well aware of the concrete realities of the music business. Without a major-label deal, he could not have gotten the financial backing to shelve a completed record, then hire expensive studio names to help him realize his new vision.

“Money is definitely tied up in the whole thing. It’s ironic and strange,” Gilmore said, given his stance as an exemplar of artistic purity and individuality. “Having a good band on the road is also extremely expensive. You don’t have to be greedy to still want a whole lot of money, just to do the things you want to do.”

What he wants to do with his songwriting is “to be evocative rather than explicit, just evoke images that have some kind of internal meaning, but it’s almost like a dream.”

In fact, he says his writing tends to spring from “dreamlike” experiences, which can include meditation sessions, long drives and watching movies.

But ask him whether he places more value on the best kind of elusive, oblique writing or on the best kind of simple, direct writing, and Gilmore doesn’t hesitate to rank his own approach second to simplicity.

“The catch in that is that the truly great simple songs are very rare, and the mediocre simple songs are truly abundant,” Gilmore said. “I think the truly great simple song is the pinnacle of songwriting--something really accessible but that has a depth to it. I think that’s what is so great about Hank Williams. He could take the simplest thing, and, by some quirk of wording or melody, he could drive it in like a stake. But I still prefer something complex and meaty to something simple and vapid.”

Gilmore’s songs often speak of quests for a higher understanding, but his searchers often proceed bearing a profound sense of loss as well. Rather than gnashing his teeth at this fundamental tragedy, he makes the quest and the loss seem like inevitable, necessary parts of a whole.

“There’s so much of that in actual life that it makes no sense to gloss it over. It’s part of the sadness of life,” said Gilmore, who sees his songs as “coming to some understanding that sees this not as a horror but part of the beauty of how it all works.”

“I’m not totally resolved. I experience all kinds of ups and downs and sadnesses,” added Gilmore, who is on his third marriage and went through a period of hell-raising and heavy drinking in the early ‘80s. “At one time, I think I was pessimistic in that regard, [thinking] that there was some final sadness and tragedy” at the heart of life’s ultimate meaning.

“I’ve changed my outlook on that, seeing life as a great and wonderful blessing instead of a terrible burden,” he said. “But when I don’t devote some effort in keeping that fire kindled, it’s easy to lose that perspective.”

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Gilmore is touring with a band of four Austin-based players--guitarists Rob Gjersoe and Mary Cutrefello, bassist Brad Fordham and drummer Rob Hooper--who he says have come up with their own take on his new style.

He says that there has been no substantial backlash among his fans and that sales, while still modest by hit-act standards, are moving faster than for his previous releases. He thinks Emmylou Harris’ 1995 album, “Wrecking Ball,” may have helped prepare fans of country-based roots music for approaches that cast a familiar voice in unorthodox, unusually textured settings. (Gilmore said he didn’t hear Harris’ Daniel Lanois-produced album until after he finished recording “Braver Newer World.”)

Gilmore quoted an old saying from Elvis Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, about the need for equal measures of talent, hard work and luck to succeed in the music business, and decided at least some measure of all three are operating in his own favor.

“I’ve believed in my own talent for a long time. I’m not modest about it,” he said. “I think I’m real good at a certain thing. I think I was given a real gift of a certain sensibility and capacity, and [since] I decided to truly be a professional, I’ve worked at it really hard, consistently and for a long time. I feel I’m a success, even though I don’t have any giant sellers or a radio hit. I think it’s uncanny where I’m at.”

* Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Alejandro Escovedo and Shadowhawk play Wednesday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $15-$17. (714) 496-8930.