Heartland -- UPI Arts & Entertainment

Country music has become such an established part of the popular music mainstream that it's a little too easy these days to forget where it came from. In a corporate world where decisions are made in boardrooms, not honky tonks, and success is measured by radio airplay doled out by faceless conglomerates that leave no room for the rich individual regional scenes that give character to America's heartland, the role of the songwriter has been relegated to the status of political flack.

Thankfully, the establishment last seen giving itself a strained arm patting itself on the back at the CMA awards has not driven the authentic regional scenes out of business.

The Nashville/Hollywood establishment may ignore great country music, but the rugged individuals who write the great country songs are determined to keep America's musical tradition strong, even if the true fan has to go to independent labels to find the real thing.

Right now the greatest living country songwriter is a man named Tom Russell. He grew up in California, spit Nashville out like a rotten peanut, spent a few years driving a taxicab in New York, and now hunkers down in the rural southwest outside El Paso. He has written brilliant songs that capture the essence of each of the regions, in which he's lived, a trait that can only be matched by the country's greatest novelists.

"Borderland," Russell's fifth release for the independent country label HighTone records, explores the mindscape of the territory in the southwest United States where the distinctions between the this country and Mexico become blurred into that mythical world that can only be called Americana.

"The night my baby left me I crossed the bridge to Juarez Avenue," Russell sings on the album's first song, "Touch of Evil," in which he uses the great Orson Wells film about treachery on the Mexican-American border as a metaphor for a relationship that falls apart. In the course of a few verses, Russell references his childhood memories of California, where the film was shot, against gorgeous details of the film itself and his own destroyed love. "Like that movie 'Touch of Evil' I've got the Orson Wells-Marlene Dietrich blues," he sings, describing the breakdown along "the borderlines between a woman and a man."

"Why don't you touch me anymore?" Russell laments in the chorus, turning the title around on itself. "Won't somebody roll the credits on 20 years of love gone dark and wrong?"

"'Touch of Evil' is my favorite movie; a sleazy film noir that takes place in a Mexican border town, although it was actually shot in Venice, California, not far from where I grew up in Inglewood," said Russell. "I kept re-writing that song to fit what was going on with my personal life."

"Borderland" was produced by Gurf Morlix and recorded at his studio in Austin, Texas. Morlix is perhaps best known for his guitar and bass playing with such artists as Lucinda Williams and Buddy Miller, but it was his production work (for Williams, Robert Earl Keen, and Slaid Cleaves) that convinced Russell he was the man for the job.

"Gurf works really well with singer-songwriters in my vein -- those with a rootsy, edgy quality," said Russell. "He also has a great sense of space and doesn't clutter up the songs."

As the recording began, Morlix put together a band that he's used frequently on previous albums, including Morlix himself on bass and guitars, Houston's Rick Richards on drums, and Austin's Ian McLagan (Small Faces, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan) on Hammond B3 organ.

The talented Joel Guzman (Los Lobos, Los Super Seven, Joe Ely, Aztex) joined in on accordion, and of course long-standing Russell collaborator Andrew Hardin on guitar.

For backing vocals, they chose Eliza Gilkyson ("I love her latest album. She's got such an earthy voice," said Russell) and Jimmy LaFave. "When all was said and done, it was Texas players across the board."

Tom Russell wrote all 11 songs on Borderland. Two were co-written with good buddy (and now Grammy-winning artist) Dave Alvin: "California Snow" and "Down the Rio Grande." One was co-written with Andrew Hardin ("The Road It Gives, The Road It Takes Away") and one with Katy Moffatt ("The Next Thing Smokin'").

The songs primarily examine Tom's relocation to El Paso-Juarez, but they also delve more personally into the emotional borderline between the sexes.

"The album started out being about geography and the terrain," said Russell, "but then my personal life started seeping in between the cracks. It became about the border between two people and how they resolve their conflicts."

Another memorable track is "When Sinatra Played Juarez," influenced by Tom's girlfriend's "Uncle Tommy" and his reminiscences of the notorious border town that became a Hollywood celebrity hangout and place to get a quickie divorce in the '50s and '60s.

"Uncle Tommy was a piano player in Juarez and observed a lot of what went on with the movie stars," said Russell. "Because of the laws down there at the time, it was a popular place for famous people to get divorced."

"What Work Is" is purely autobiographical. "It's basically about the three jobs I had and the characters I met living in Los Angeles in the 1960s: working at a butter creamery, handling a wood chipper for the City of Inglewood, and driving a truck for a rose company," he recalled.

"Borderland" is a testament to the American creative spirit, proof that great writers are still content to forego financial gain to save their craft from corruption. Too bad the entertainment industry has lost contact with that immutable truth.