INDY'S WEEKLY ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER HIGHLIGHTING ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Tim Grimm sketches characters, himself on new CD

A friend of Tim Grimm’s said he could describe Grimm’s new album, Holding Up The World, with one word: perseverance. It seems an apt description, even for the cover art, which depicts Atlas struggling under the weight of a world populated by familiar rural Midwestern sights and symbols: a windmill, horses, an American flag, a pitchfork. The music itself is a collection of character studies and at least a couple autobiographical pieces, most of which depict people struggling along: a freed slave who lives to teach, a farmer who still pitches hay after his wife and vitality have left him, a soldier who’s trying to climb his way out of the mess he and this country have dug themselves into. It’s all set to a slightly electrified folk background that Grimm says he tried to keep “bare-boned” and “stripped-down,” with Jason Wilber contributing atmospheric electric guitar and occasional flourishes on piano, organ and strings by an ensemble cast.

It’s Grimm’s first release in three years, and fifth since 2000, which is a pace that suits him just fine. He’s not a writer that sits down to write every day, nor is he someone to whom ideas come sailing out of the ether, although he did write the title track over one night on the road from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque. The Southern Indiana songwriter, actor, theatre director and hay farmer has also been involved during the past year with the stage show Wilderness Plots, performing songs based on short stories by IU professor and writer Scott Russell Sanders along with Krista Detor, Carrie Newcomer, Tom Roznowski and Michael White. One tune on the new album — “Rebecca Versailles” — was composed for Wilderness Plots but wasn’t used in the show.

Grimm says he started out writing more autobiographical (read: self-centered) material when he first started playing in his late 20s in the Chicago area. But he’s gradually become more interested in writing about things outside himself, in inhabiting another character than himself when writing from the first person.

Take “So It Goes,” about that farmer mentioned earlier, who’s trying to make a living on an outmoded model of family farming, without wife or family by his side to help fight off loneliness or despair. Grimm, who plants some hay on an old 80-acre farm he shares with his wife, ran out of his only crop midway through one winter, and picked up a paper to see if anyone was selling some surplus. Sure enough, he ran across a “Hay for Sale” ad, and made his way out to a farm near the Edinburgh outlet mall to pick up a truckload-full (about 30-35 bales). After chatting 35 minutes with the elderly farmer, he had the raw material for a song, with only a name change and a little creative license taken.

“One man’s story really captures a lot of what’s going on in pockets of the rural Midwest,” explains Grimm, who, like any fine storyteller, can elaborate on and illuminate any track on the album, explaining inspiration, creative process, and anything else. The song’s unexpected twist — the farmer’s wife left him after she retired — might not have been so easily invented out of an idle imagination; Grimm’s engagement with his community enhances his stories and storytelling, and brings the listener and performer to some unexpected places, even when travelling a familiar landscape or working in a traditional idiom.

The first of Grimm’s CDs will be available internationally when the Dutch label CoraZong (which also includes fellow Wilderness Plotter Krista Detor on its roster) releases Holding Up The World. The label has also become Grimm’s international management, and he’ll likely take his first European tour in 2009. But for now, he’s sharing the new album with friends and fans, playing release shows this weekend in Bloomington and Columbus with most of the album’s contributors performing alongside.

What: Holding Up The World CD release shows
Where: Bloomington: Friday, July 18, Monroe County Historical Center (202 E. 6th St.), 8 p.m., $12
Columbus: Saturday, July 19, Americana Music Series (7850 Goeller Rd), 8 p.m., $12