Brace says that while he was growing up here in the '60s, Cash was a part of the landscape through his television show, his radio hits and seminal albums. One of Brace's new songs, "Train of Love," takes its title from a 1956 Cash song when he was at Sun Records and races along like one of Cash's rockabilly romps with the Tennessee Two.
"It's absolutely the fastest song I've ever written," Brace says, "and also the first song I've written entirely in the van. I just pulled out my guitar and started noodling around -- I was not driving that day," he adds, pointing out that Last Train Home put 50,000 miles on its van last year. "At a certain point, you realize you're wasting time if you just stare out the window; you've got to start being productive."
"I love the sound of a big band," says Eric Brace, leader of the roots-rock band Last Train Home. The group's eight-member hometown lineup can sometimes expand to add six more musicians.
(Matthew Worden Photography)
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Brace's "Dogs on the East Side" is about the wild packs that run around the Nashville neighborhood where Lynds and Gray live, but it, too, touches on Cash. "The last verse is kinda melancholy, with a woman waiting for her man to come to her and I thought, 'I'm writing another song about Johnny and June.' " As is "Hendersonville," after the town just outside of Nashville that was the Cashes' longtime retreat, written after Brace visited their shared burial ground at Hendersonville Memory Gardens.
"There was this patch of fresh dirt and right next to it was June Carter Cash's grave," he recalls. "It was very odd standing there, not really knowing what I was doing there. There was no one else around, no piles of flowers, no shrines set up. It was just dirt, and you couldn't help pondering a little bit about the arc of a life lived and here it ends, or does it?
"A couple of weeks later driving along Highway 81 in Virginia, it started coming out of me, the way songwriters hope and dream that songs will come out of them, without any effort or labor. . . . By the time I got to D.C., I had sung it to myself 100 times . . . didn't know what the chords were, but I had the melody and the words."
The seven Brace originals on "Bound Away" include "Gravedigger's Blues," a tribute to the late John Jackson, the Virginia bluesman who was for decades a gravedigger, but there are also several tunes from the Washington songwriter circles Brace has always supported. Kevin Johnson's "Marlene" is an old favorite dating to the early '90s when Brace and Williams were in Johnson's band, the Linemen. Brace, his brother Alan and steel player Dave Van Allen also performed it in their early '90s group, the Beggars. Another is Karl Straub's "They Dance Real Close There," a song Straub never played with his old band, the Graverobbers, which included Last Train Home's current rhythm section.
Brace says, "The reason I started Last Train Home was not to showcase my songs; it really was for me to sing songs that I liked. Living in Nashville, I've seen some great songwriters, but people like Kevin Johnson, Karl Straub, Mary Battiata and Alice Despard are world-class songwriters."
The large-scale Last Train Home shows inspired 2001's "Americana Motel," with local artists covering each other's songs. Last Train Home sang former Rosslyn Mountain Boy Joe Triplett's "Been Awhile" while Seldom Scene alumni John Starling, Mike Auldridge and former Country Gentleman Jimmy Gaudreau sang Last Train Home's "My Sally." Brace, Auldridge and Gaudreau are now working on a side project as the Skylighters.
Brace says it is all part of the continuum of the area's roots-rock scene dating to the '70s, "with Emmylou Harris, the Rosslyn Mountain Boys, Good Humor Band, Joanne Dodds, Liz Meyer, the Nighthawks, Skip Castro Band and the Seldom Scene -- seeing all of them made me want to play music because they were having so much fun on stage and making such good music."
LAST TRAIN HOME -- Appearing at Iota Friday and Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. • To hear a free Sound Bite from Last Train Home, call Post-Haste at 301-313-2200 and press 8103. (Prince William residents, call 703-690-4110.)
