Move Gives Mattea More Room

It seemed risky when country star Kathy Mattea stepped away from her 17-year relationship with Mercury Records to join the smaller Narada/Virgin label.

She’s pursuing an acoustic, less commercial sound, in keeping with the tradition-bound soundtrack of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” which not only topped country charts for half a year and sold 3 million copies but also won coveted Country Music Assn. Awards recently for best album and single. “It is a picture of a market that’s out there that the country music industry is not paying attention to,” Mattea says.

She was speaking from her native Charleston, W. Va., where she had just put in her 14th performance on public radio’s “Mountain Stage.” Mattea says she feels at home on the long-running radio show.

Of her move to Narada, under which she will release her next album in the spring, she says, “I think that it’s wonderful to be in a place where you’re really wanted.”

At Mercury, where she scored such No. 1 country hits as “Goin’ Gone,” “18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses” and “Life as We Knew It,” “I was [the] flagship artist for a while,” Mattea says. “They had to keep me around.”

But increasingly she was butting heads with producers.

“Country music instrumentation can be narrow. Even the interpretation of how a mix should be, can be something that can be very narrow,” she says.

“Sometimes I’d turn in a song, and they’d say, ‘You need to turn the fiddle up and the electric guitar down.”’

Not that she’s eager to do weird things. “I’m still doing acoustic-based music, and it’s still all song-driven. It’s still all about the song.”

But, she adds, “for me, on this record, I feel freer to play around with world music instruments.”

That means a penny whistle here, a Celtic accordionist there.

“I have to be mindful of this being a progression for me and not a huge left turn,” she says. “And that’s something that has to come from the inside out. My job is to keep on track. I don’t want the people who have followed my music to feel I’ve abandoned them. It’s more a matter of being freer to be who I want to be.”

Country music is skewing younger and younger, says Mattea, 42. “And I’m a grown-up. I want to sing grown-up songs. I want the freedom to not have the tummy tuck and the pierced bellybutton.”

On her current acoustic tour, she’s surrounded by three players. “It’s actually been really fun. It’s very eclectic,” she says.

“We do old songs, some songs from the last album, and we do some songs we do on the new album,” she says. “It’s been a really interesting process distilling what we do in a small group.

“It’s playing a different way. Instead of playing to a drummer, it’s much more about listening to each other and playing off each other. It’s been just a great experience for me. I have to step up to the plate and hold my own as guitarist, because if I make a mistake on the guitar, you can really hear it.”

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Roger Catlin is rock music critic for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune company.