“I kind of hit a wall,” Mark Stuart says reflecting on how he and Stacey became a duo. “I was out on the road 300 days a year promoting Stacey’s records and I felt like I wasn’t giving my record a chance. I needed a break to go out and do my own tour. But didn’t know how to find the time. Then Stacey’s brother, Steve, asked her if she wanted to go on tour with him for three months. It was really good timing. She went with him and opened his tour, and I set out on my own tour.”
It was early 2002 and the first time in years Stacey had really played solo, and it wasn’t one of her favorite experiences. She missed Mark on the stage and missed him off it as well while touring with her brother.
“I’d be standing on stage in front of all these people and someone would call out, ‘Where’s Mark? And meanwhile, Mark’s on the other side of the country, where someone in his audience is calling out, ‘Where’s Stacey?’ So many of our fans had never seen us apart, you know.” Stacey said recalling that lonely but very important period for the two of them.
By the time they returned home, they realized that together they made a sum greater than either of them could separately. They vowed to never perform solo again. But getting to that point took a great deal of life experience.
Stacey had grownup in a musical family that includes her older brother, Steve, and she allows that she played the guitar when she was young, mainly for her own amusement. By the time she was 20, however, she was the mother of two boys – Kyle and Christopher – living in San Antonio with little spare time in which to amuse herself.
Mark, meanwhile, growing up in and around Nashville, took to the guitar and got into the band scene.
In 1990, Stacey packed up her sons and their gear and headed for Nashville. The move wasn’t prompted by some dreamy idea of breaking into the music business, however.
“I went to Nashville to try to get Steve’s life and my life together,” Stacey explains. “He was needing me and I was needing him.”
The move was fortuitous for Stacey. Steve recruited her to do backing vocals on his album The Hard Way and then took her on the world tour that followed. Upon returning to Nashville, Stacey involved herself in songwriters’ nights all over town, eventually hosting one of her own weekly at Jack’s Guitar Bar. Another fortuitous decision, for it was at a songwriters’ night at Jack’s in 1992 that Stacey met Mark Stuart.
Mark recalls having first seen Stacey opening a solo acoustic show for Steve in Nashville. Several months passed before he saw her again. He explains that, “I saw she was hosting this open mic night at Jack’s Guitar Bar, so I went there to hear her.”
Mark ended up playing a few of his own songs at Jack’s that fateful night, and Stacey joined him for a couple more numbers. They characterize the night as love at first sight or, maybe, for guitar players, love at first tuning.
“We went to a Waffle House afterwards and sat there till five in the morning,” Stacey recalls, “and we’ve been together since.” This despite Stacey’s claim that, “I ordered one of everything. I was a very expensive date.”
They feel like the fact that they’re both artists following the same career path has made them especially simpatico. As Stacey observes:
“You can’t really say to a partner who’s not an artist, ‘I’d go work that straight job, but I really want to play this gig down here for $30 and expect them to understand. Mark and I had that out of the way immediately, however.”
Once Stacey and Mark got together in ‘92, Mark began to devote a good deal of his time and energy to Stacey’s music, despite the fact that for most of the 1980s and ‘90s he had his own band and was penning his own tunes. He hit the road with Freddy Fender (1990) and also toured with Steve Earle’s bands (1996-7). When he played with Stacey, he characterizes his role as supporting her, and the gigs were very much Stacey Earle shows. When he was off doing shows with his band, Stacey didn’t accompany him, so Mark’s thing didn’t involve Stacey.
Stacey and Mark were married in 1993 and by the end of the ‘90s they were, for all intents and purposes, performing as a duo. Stacey was beginning to learn Mark’s songs and singing them. Mark released an album in 1999 titled Songs from a Corner Stage. It was at this time that, according to Mark, he began to feel like he wasn’t devoting enough time to his own music.
So as Mark described earlier, they went out on the road in two different directions only to find each other. Stacey and Mark agree that their new collaboration has improved their songwriting and their musicianship. Mark notes that, although he’d always been a songwriter, he’d never really hung out with the songwriters in Nashville. Stacey’s influence led him to spend more time doing just that, which has helped in his craft.
They feel their new album, Never Gonna Let You Go, has greater breadth and appeal than anything they’ve ever released individually. With two songwriters coming from their unique perspectives, their collaborative effort offers something for everyone.
In addition to the new songs they’ve written for Never Gonna Let You Go, Mark and Stacey have drawn on older originals as well. They both have extensive song catalogs. Stacey, of course, was a staff songwriter for Ten Ten Music Group in Nashville for three years.
The title of the new album is, in itself, a statement. “The title of the new album is a strong statement,” Stacey says. “It isn’t Stacey Earle anymore. It’s Stacey Earle and Mark Stuart.
Philip Van Vleck, 2003
Source: http://www.staceyearle.com
