Marcia Ball presses rewind on her 1989 album, Gatorhythms.

“My songwriting seemed to coalesce on this album—it was the first one I wrote most of the songs on. When I write for an album, there usually has to be an anchor: I generally do the sensitive song, the most important one first. Then when I have that under my belt I can go on to the fun stuff. But with this one it was a little different. I had pieces of four songs that I was carrying abound—there was ‘Mama’s Cooking,’ ‘Daddy Said,’ ‘Mobile’ and ‘La Ti Da.’ And one day I just went into my rehearsal area and finished all four of them. It was just one magic day, the kind of day that every songwriter dreams of having. And those all became songs that people wanted to hear: ‘La Ti Da’ is still pretty highly requested. That was probably the first autobiographical song I did.

I wrote ‘Mama’s Cooking’ and then ‘Daddy Said’—I knew I’d be in a whole lot of trouble if I did a song for one but not the other. The story in ‘Daddy Said’ is true, at least I hope it’s true for somebody—I never know what twists and turns a song is going to take. ‘Mobile’ was a song that seemed to be popular everywhere but Mobile. They caught on eventually, but for a while I was thinking, ‘Why don’t these people take this song up?’

The ballad ‘Find Another Fool’ also seems to be a favorite of people’s. I had just met Sarah Elizabeth Campbell, who passed away two years ago; we became best friends from writing together. I had most of ‘Find Another Fool’ but not the chorus; she had one called ‘I Could Use a Little Tenderness’ that had verses but no chorus, so we got together one day and finished each other’s songs—they came out so fabulous that it just wrecked me. I tried to do a co-write with Lee Roy Parnell but we didn’t succeed in getting anything done. Then he went home and wrote two songs on the airplane, so they’re both on the record. The other cover is the Mac Rebennack song, ‘How You Carry On’—that’s one of his older pieces, I think he wrote it for Ronnie Barron who was originally supposed to be the Night Tripper. I’m a real digger when it comes to songs; sometimes people will say ‘I have a song you need to hear’ and occasionally that works.

The album was a real hometown production, we did it in Austin at a studio that Wink Tyler ran behind his house, it was one of the only professional grade studios in town. The producer wanted to get a guy named Jesse Taylor in to play guitar—a really rocking guitar player who worked with Joe Ely. He played the solo on ‘Red Hot’ and it really is red hot—he stood there drinking his beer and nailed the solo in one pass. Stephen Bruton was another big influence on that album, even though he wasn’t there for very long. He’s all over the album, but he’d come into the studio, play his part and leave—I didn’t know him very well yet, but he produced two of my albums later on.

I still had long hair on the album cover, I cut it three years later. And my hair looks like it’s blowing in the wind, but you can’t do that with a typical fan. So when we took the photo, my 12-year-old son was sitting in the corner pointing our lawn and leaf blower at me. That’s the magic of showbiz.”