Tish Hinojosa

It isn't exactly the record she thought she was going to make at this moment in her career. "I was working on an all-Spanish record," she said, "and I had some good songs for it, but I just wasn't writing or finding the songs I needed to finish it." Hinojosa maintains a strong presence in Austin, where she lived for more than a decade, but she's now based in Hamburg, Germany. "I keep traveling back and forth from Austin to Hamburg, and with every trip I clear out more closets in Austin. One day I found a whole box of my old Nashville tapes, back from the early- to mid-80s when I was a demo singer there, and I was also starting to write country songs. I started listening, and there were songs on there that I had absolutely, totally forgotten. They were half-finished songs, maybe just a verse and chorus, but I found three or four that were just real gems. I thought, 'Wow! This is great!' " That gave her the spark to start writing new material, as well as finishing up the songs she'd found. With the older songs, "I finished them, kinda rounded them out -- I think I'm a slightly better writer now than I was then," she said, chuckling.

Those songs, and the whole album, she points out, "aren't commercial country. We made it more basic, more in a folk or bluegrass vein. I wouldn't go so far as to say Carter Family, but sort of like that, with a lot of harmonies. That was one thing I really missed, and wanted for years, was a record that Marvin (longtime musical collaborator Marvin Dykhuis) and I could perform easily, and that has a lot of harmony. A lot my records had harmony, but it was arranged, and there was lots of instrumentation, horns and strings and stuff, which I really love in the studio, but we never get to take a band like that on the road. It's usually just a guitar, a mandolin, maybe another guitar, and our voices. So I kinda wanted to do a record that reflected a bit more of the simplicity of the show, real straight-ahead. It's all acoustic, except for some pedal steel. I've got a country shuffle on there, and a polka, some really nice duets, some bluegrass-sounding stuff, and a couple of the songs are in Spanish. I'm really happy with it."

The mix reflects where Hinojosa is now as well as elements from the paths she's traveled to get there. She was born in San Antonio, Texas, youngest child of parents who'd come from Mexico and kept strong family ties back across the border. She recalls hearing country music from the likes of Porter Wagoner and Tennessee Ernie Ford on the family television and Mexican music coming from her mother's radio in the kitchen. Though a cousin in Mexico tried to teach the young Hinojosa a few chords on the guitar when she was about 12, the idea of making her own music didn't really sink in until several years later, when she started high school.