"We are a cottage industry, and we have the cottage to prove it!"
Kimmie Rhodes is giving an enthusiastic tour of her new home studio, writing room and far-out inner sanctum, a one-room structure behind the house Rhodes shares with her husband, Joe Gracey, and daughter Jole.
Out in Briarcliff, within sight of Lake Travis, the cottage is the home of Sunbird Records, the couple's independent record label, and it sees plenty of industry. Their son Gabe is his mom's producer. Another son sings on her recordings. And high schooler Jole is wowing assemblies with her own band.
A perfect artist's retreat, the cottage is a tidy, light-filled space scattered with funky, mismatched furniture. Enormous panels of hand-painted glass (salvaged from a renovation of Willie Nelson's nearby domicile) dominate the room.
On a massive desk in the corner sits a computer, alongside a few racks of digital decks; what once was a recording studio full of outboard gear and tape decks has been squeezed into a package that fits in the trunk of a sedan.
On the wall are platinum discs from Trisha Yearwood and Wynonna Judd -- artists who have cut Rhodes' songs, providing royalties that, one may presume, helped bankroll this little slice of Shangri-La.
The interior walls, hand-smoothed stucco all around, are painted yellow, which is appropriate given Rhodes' sunny disposition.
She is happiest when she is busy, and she has been a busy woman lately.
Besides putting the finishing touches on her new album, "Rich From the Journey," she has been working on a play titled "Doing God's Chores" with another neighbor, Joe Sears, of "Greater Tuna" fame.
And Rhodes, 46, has been working on books. One is a cookbook, in the form of a magical-reality novel (it's a long story. . .). The other is what Rhodes describes as an "autobiographical how-to book."
"It's a fun way for me to work through different things," she explains. "One day I decided to write a chapter about every dog I ever had in my whole life . . . It started with this doctor that told my mama if she got me a chihuahaua, it would get rid of my asthma . . . and then the dog died! I was convinced I had horrible dog karma."
Here's where the how-to aspect comes in: Rhodes says she has taught dogs to speak English. "Your dog really knows everything you say, they just can't talk back," she explains.
Plays and books aside, Rhodes' bread and butter is songwriting -- the songs she writes for herself and the songs she writes as, for lack of a better word, commerce.
For those, she commutes to Nashville, where she collaborates with some of the cream of Music City's creative community, including Beth Neilsen Chapman, Gary Nicholson, Pam Tillis, Tom Petty keybordist Benmont Tench, and Emmylou Harris.
The latter collaboration yielded a song on the soundtrack of "Happy, Texas" that garnered a Grammy nomination for Harris' performance. Another song wound up on the soundtrack to the "Babe" sequel. Yet a third, "One Love," surfaces on Trisha Yearwood's new album. David Letterman called her out of the clear blue sky last month to come up to the big city and sing on his stage. Willie Nelson is cutting duets with her.
Did anyone mention she's been a busy woman?
There's a trick to it, of course. Or, if you prefer, an art: "What you have to do is learn to focus," she says with a, well, focused gaze. "If you're writing a play for six hours, that's what you're doing. You're not answering the phone or promoting a record. Do whatever you're doing when you're doing it and then move on to the next thing. I love it! The trick is not to do anything you don't like and that way you don't waste any time or get bogged down."
She sounds like some kind of goofy West Texas Zen master of time-management. Pausing to hear herself, Rhodes erupts with peals of laughter. "You get a lot done if you stay really busy!"
Right now, she is busy talking about her new album. For Rhodes, the creation of "Rich From the Journey" entailed loss and pain yielding to acceptance, revelation and joy. In its own way, this song cycle is as spiritual as her neighbor Willie's "Red-Headed Stranger."
"I don't like to call it a gospel record, because to me that has a connotation of preaching, which this record doesn't do. I would never preach, 'cause I don't like to be preached to." But, she adds, "I am testifying!"
In the past, she has been known as a honky-tonk gal, as previous albums like "West Texas Heaven" and "Angels Get the Blues" will attest. But on "Rich From the Journey," she sounds in spots more like Joni Mitchell than Loretta Lynn. Harris' influence is evident in songs like "Big Ol' Train" and "There Is A Place." Her performance on the ghostly, ethereal "Yellow Sand" evokes Sarah McLachlan or Suzanne Vega. And "Thank You For Another Day" is nothing but a pop hit waiting to happen.
The songs, she says, are the residue of a period in her life when people began leaving it. One died in a car wreck, another of AIDS, still another succumbed to cancer. Famed steel guitarist Jimmy Day turned in what may have been his last performance on one song, before he died of cancer.
"A lot of my friends started dying," she says with hard-won detachment. "It was like, what is going on here? But it caused a metamorphosis in me, because the more I grieved the more grateful I became. It raised my gratitude level a lot -- to open your eyes to a new day is the most sparkling, gracious gift you could ever have!
"I became profoundly grateful for my life and the richness of the journey that I'm on. If I got to Heaven and Heaven was a shack, I would still be rich from the trip to get there."
Speaking of her AIDS-stricken friend, Rhodes recalls a pivotal moment. "I came in one day and he had just died, his hand was still soft and warm, but he was gone.
"Something happened to me in that moment . . . I just went, `Oh now I get it!' And suddenly it was like, `Oh, let's open this bottle of 15-year-old wine! Oh, let's get out these fancy tablecloths -- what are we saving them for?'
"All the time you're waiting for something special to happen, and something special is happening -- your life."
Rhodes has too much West Texas sand in her soul and too much taste for the here-and-now to ever live the detached life of a mystic. She likes the neon lights and a glass of wine and the twang of a guitar. Even her writing room, the womb of her creativity, is all surface textures -- stucco and brick and old wood polished with wear.
But on another level, her heart, spirit and imagination responded to the intangible cycle of life and death in which she found herself revolving. "Rich From the Journey" is a postcard from her travels, a chronicle of a trip to a faraway country that turns out to be home after all.