Blaze of Glory is yet another great album from you. I don't know why I even act surprised anymore. Well, I'm surprised
You are? Well, yeah. I really wasn't gonna do music anymore because the lifestyle is so hard, man. I was writing books, and promoting books it's so much easier than promoting a CD. When you're promoting a book, they fly you in and send a car to pick you up at the airport. They pay you something called an honorarium. Then my best friend in music died—Tim
Krekel was diagnosed with cancer and died three months later. So I started writing songs that became Big Lonesome. It's, like, in his passing he gave me back my love for music. Now all I wanna do is music. My husband wanted me to write another book. He prefers the literary scene when we're out on the road. It's just a lot easier. I don't know. I just real- ized, at age 64, that music is my first and last love. That’s it. And I feel like the ante went up after we did the Big Lonesome album. At the time, I felt like that was my best work. With Blaze of Glory, I don't know what happened, Buffalo. We had the same crew that played on Big Lonesome, and with that one, we were kind of feeling each other out. And it turned out great. But with this one—I don't even know how to describe it. It's like a miracle. Blaze of Glory is something I could never have imagined and it's everything I ever dreamed of.
Where did the album title come from? Well, I was writing songs and I knew I was gonna do another album. I'd been spending a lot of time in Mexico. A lot of the songs on the album were written there. In fact, I was away so much that it was starting to put a strain on my marriage. So I had to pull back. And when I did, it was like a little death.
All of the sudden I'm looking at my own mor- tality, like I'm looking at my hand right now in front of my face. I had just written "Not Afraid to Die" after listening to the Louvin Brothers on YouTube singing "Are You Afraid to Die?" I'm thinking, Hell, no! The only thing I'm afraid of is not living while I'm alive. So I'm sitting at the dining room table one night getting ready to have supper— I had this little Tascam recorder at the table— and these words came to me, "I never intended to make it this far/ I never had a fall back plan/ I always thought I'd go in a blaze of glory/A blaze of glory." So I sang just that little snippet into the little recorder. Then supper was on the table, and then we were off on the road. So about a month later, I got back to it. That's when I wrote that second verse about burning like a comet across the night sky. Then I came to the bridge, and I started writing about all the musicians who died in a blaze of glory, like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass, Jim Morrison, and so on. But it didn't feel right. I thought, people are gonna think I'm comparing myself to them, and that ain't right. So I went for a walk around the neighborhood. When I came back, it was like "Bam!" "I saw Elvis Presley back in 1956/ The world was different then, every- thing was fixed/ When he walked out on stage it shook us to the core/ That colored balcony came crashing to the floor." And I thought, Shit! That's it!! So that line about the colored balcony raised the bar, and I'm think- ing, now how the hell am I gonna get out of this thing? So I just took it down to the most simple image. Something I could've only writ- ten at my age, I'm sure you know what I mean, having nearly died twice yourself. "Now every morning at the break of dawn/ I brush the sleep out from my eyes/ I've got to see that sun rise up in a blaze of glory." The minute I wrote that, I knew this would be the final song on the album, and it would be the
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