Craig Carothers

Craig Carothers:
Multiple-Choice Musical Magic

By PHIL SWEETLAND
Music and Radio Contributor
The New York Times

Quick: How many artists can you name who have both recorded unforgettable albums and designed their covers?

It’s a very short list. Joni Mitchell did it several times in LA in the 1960s and 1970s, the Beatles famously turned the trick just once, with Sgt. Pepper. In Nashville, one of Joni and the Fab Four’s biggest fans – the Oregon native Craig Carothers – is proudly carrying on this exceedingly rare combination of talents.

And, oh yeah. Carothers has another completely different skill that neither Joni nor the Liverpool lads were known for: He has produced, engineered, and mixed records.

Phew. This guy must have had amazing teachers.

Fact is, he had two: Both of Craig’s parents taught music in Oregon.

So from the beginning, he heard and absorbed all styles of music: Mancini to Merle to Mozart to Motown to Miles Davis, with everything in between. Somehow, all these influences appear in Carothers’ hooky, strange and wonderful songs, along with his irresistible sense of humor.

At the University of Oregon, Craig quickly became a favorite in coffee houses. This success continued on Portland’s booming club scene, and by the early 1990s he had a record deal with Atlantic Records in LA.

As often happens, Craig’s champion at the label exited the company, and his fine solo album was never released. Neither was its first single, “Little Hercules,” a story song about a friend of Carothers who seemed to have the world by a string until a series of brutally bad breaks rained down on him, nearly all at once.

“There’s nothing brilliant about that title,” Craig explains over coffee one afternoon near Nashville’s famed Music Row. “This particular human dynamo is a very short man.”

In Portland, Carothers was exploring other areas of showbiz, including singing on commercials and working as a voiceover artist. One of his clients was Random House, for whom he read the books-on-tape version of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. Along with the acting background he acquired in countless school productions, voiceovers became yet another component of Craig’s totally unique skill set.

In large part due to Carothers’s exhausting tour schedule as a performing songwriter – he reckons that in the last few years he’s driven more than 80,000 miles to play shows in 20 states – word was getting around about Craig and his music.

Carothers first came to Nashville in March, 1995.

Fellow Oregonian Dave Berg, a top Nashville songwriter, was one of Carothers’ biggest early fans on the Row. It was Berg who told Craig: “Go play a song for Betty Rosen, she’ll get you.” She was at the time running Crossfire Entertainment’s day-to-day operations in Nashville. On Craig’s second Row visit, in July of 1995, he met Rosen. Once Carothers played her “Little Hercules” she told him: “I think I know who needs to hear this.”

Betty in turn got the song to Trisha Yearwood producer Garth Fundis. A month later Rosen phoned Carothers in Oregon and told him that Yearwood would be cutting “Little Hercules” – a major coup for an out-of-town writer. A Nashville publishing deal followed.

Trisha recorded the song for her Everybody Knows LP. The album went Gold and reached the Top 10. Four years later, in 2000, Carothers moved to Music City.

More top cuts followed, by artists including Lorrie Morgan, Kathy Mattea, and even the legendary folkies Peter, Paul & Mary.

Meanwhile, Craig continued releasing indy solo albums and designing remarkably innovative covers for these critically-praised CDs. Other artists even hired him to design their covers, or to produce, engineer, and/or mix their own recordings.

Craig’s newest solo CD is called Nothing Fancy, which includes “Schenectady,” a song about an emotional return to one’s hometown which Craig considers one of his finest compositions. It was co-written by the Grammy-winning Don Henry.

Once again, he not only wrote and performed all 10 of the songs, but produced and engineered the recordings and designed Nothing Fancy’s stark, black-and-white cover. Carothers finds that bouncing between these various art forms creates a wonderful synergy, an innovative technique Joni Mitchell also employs.

Eugene Strickland of the Calgary Herald wrote of this in 2007, after Joni spoke to students there: “When Mitchell was asked about the way she moves, creatively, from painting to music, she spoke of that process in terms of `Crop Rotation.’ One plants a different crop as to replenish the nutrients in the soil, or one lets the field lie fallow.”

The musical and graphic results of Craig’s own application of artistic Crop Rotation are remarkable.

So stay tuned.