by Mick Rhodes | editor@claremont-courier.com

“This is the way I look at it: if you learn ancient music, you’ll be able to play music forever.” Though this axiom sounds as if it might be carved into stone somewhere in Appalachia, it’s actually from veteran singer-songwriter Tim Easton, who returns to Claremont this Saturday, September 28 for a show at the intimate, artist-friendly Folk Music Center.

“Oh, I love it. I love it so much,” Easton said of playing “The Folk.” “I wish we all could grow up with a Folk Music Center down the street from our house. Like, how cool is that?”

The New York born, Nashville-based Easton will be in town promoting “Find Your Way,” his 16^th solo album. He goes on at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 at the store or the door. More info is at folkmusiccenter.com/events.

Reached by phone last week at Nashville’s sprawling, 24^th annual Americanafest, Easton was clearly energized after having played a handful of shows, with more to come, and catching some of the inspiring young talent the festival is known to showcase.

“It really kind of restores my faith in the amount of amazing, especially up-and-coming generations of songwriters that are still out there not using the artificial side of all the technology and really just writing songs about their life’s experiences and emotions,” he said.

Easton’s career might also be described as sprawling: he busked throughout Europe and the U.S. in his 20s. He returned to the U.S. in the mid-1990s and embarked on a solo career, beginning with 1998’s “Special 20.” Since then he’s become a hard touring, well respected singer, musician, and songwriter, releasing 16 acclaimed records, including his latest, “Find Your Way,” which is among his best work.

Some of  the 10 tracks on “Find Your Way” are distillations of hard won truths about freedom from fear and self-doubt. Easton explores these themes with admirable restraint, and without the bravado or bluster less confident or less experienced songwriters often lean into.

“I’m just another fellow traveler that is susceptible to fear and anxiety about the state of the world,” he said. “But I also have my own little toolbox I can use to cope with it. And a lot of it involves … using the catharsis of songwriting to help my peace of mind.”

Singer-songwriter Tim Easton will be at the Folk Music Center at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, September 28. Photo/by Chad Cochran

“Little Brother,” perhaps the hardest hitting track on the new record, is one of those rare visceral, lump in your throat songs that immediately feels personal and intimate. It took shape with the idea that he wanted to write Bangor, Maine into a song, a la Roger Miller’s 1965 classic, “King of the Road.”

“Little Brother” begins with the evocative opening line, “Up in Bangor, Maine, I did drain a thousand lakes of gin.”

“It’s a fun sounding phrase … but I had no idea that it was going to turn into this story,” Easton said. “And when it started to be like that, it was easy for me to kind of find lines and things that went along with these two brothers that took their dad’s van out of town and just went on a bender. As soon as that started — a verse into it — I saw that happening, and it just came out so fast. I was kind of shocked myself.”

The next line is, “When you came back from the war, you helped me drain a thousand more.”

“Then all of the sudden we have a veteran,” Easton said. “We’ve got two brothers, one’s a veteran. They’re going to hit the town. And it was easy for me to take it from there. It was easy to draw from a little bit of experiences to then paint the rest of that story.”

The chorus is resolved with the kicker line, “Mama won’t you come back to us now.”

“So, obviously their mother is gone,” Easton said. “And that’s another thing you’ll find with tragedy, you’ll often find a tragic parental situation as well.”

The vivid imagery and specificity in “Little Brother” would seem to have come from direct observation, but in truth it’s a fiction. Its genesis was that first line about Bangor, Maine and all that gin, and it just blossomed from there, Easton said. How does a songwriter create these rhyming short stories set to music?

“I wish I could really answer that in a clear way, but sometimes it just happens,” Easton said. “If you do a lot of reading and watching of films, and taking in of culture, then it’s easier to … then create a fiction later on from an amalgam of many things.”

“Little Brother” is among a handful of tunes in Easton’s catalog of more than 100 compositions that seemed to have arrived fully formed, without the weeks of prodding and massaging that songs sometimes require. Easton recalled a quote from the late, great Leonard Cohen, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.”

“It’s so true,” Easton said of Cohen’s oft-referenced quote. “I stayed still long enough for that to fall out of the sky onto the page. So, I feel lucky, I feel grateful. Every songwriter is going to tell you that the ones that are the best are the ones that arrive in some mysterious way of inspiration. There is crafting; you can sit down and craft out a song and take time and say, ‘We need something here. We need a bridge.’ That’s something that has to be done every now and then. But we songwriters do prefer that it drop out of the sky, almost in one moment of blasted creativity, where the majority of the song arrives.”

Easton, 58, has lived in Nashville for over 10 years. Along with his Folk Music Center show on Saturday, this week he returns to Joshua Tree, his homebase for seven years prior, to teach a songwriting clinic at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center in association with veterans’ support nonprofit Mil-tree.

“The story of our veterans and that they’re taking themselves out in a remarkably tragic high number every day, it’s really upsetting, and it really needs to be addressed more in this world, I believe,” Easton said. “Part of what I do now with my traveling and songwriting is also to try to be of service, just with entertainment, or helping people think about something else, or look at something differently.”

With our conversation winding down, Easton returned to its overarching theme: songwriting. Though he’s certainly steeped in the classic traditions of folk, country, and blues, his ears remain open.

“There’s all these 20-something-year-old songwriters that are just brilliant, doing really good work” at Americanafest. “It’s nothing against drum machines or anything like that, but it is kind of cool to see younger generations coming up and working with ancient tools.”

Tim Easton appears at the Folk Music Center, 220 Yale Ave., at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, September 28. Tickets are $20 at the store or at the door. For more info, call (909) 624 2928 or visit folkmusiccenter.com/events.