The place was Real World Studios, a sprawling studio compound that looms tasteful and impressive in the tiny village of Box, where sheep and cows graze the misty expanse of pastureland largely unimpeded and Peter Gabriel has been known to turn up for a meal on a moment's notice. Real World is, after all, Gabriel's home away from home, which was the main thing that made Rice -- an acknowledged sucker for early Genesis -- so uncomfortable.
"It's his hub," says Rice. "I decided to go there at the last minute. I don't think I was really prepared to see Peter Gabriel sitting across from me at dinner. Because if my day was anything less than brilliant in my mind -- and it usually was less than brilliant -- then it was just hard to pass the potatoes to others. It took me too far away from my roots, I think."
After spending nearly three months of 1996 working with co-producer David Bottrill and a host of session men, Rice found the pressure to excel (much of which was self-imposed) too much to bear and abandoned Real World, returning to Texas with only four usable songs to show for his discomfort. Those tracks -- scattered throughout the ultra-poetic, sonically complex greenelectric, which is due in stores Tuesday -- reflect Rice's feelings of detachment while in England. The rhythmically hypnotizing, hauntingly sad tone poem "I See You" is saddled by its obvious likeness to So-period Peter Gabriel; "Good Life Alone," its angular, unstrung qualities defined by Rice's alternate 12-string tunings, sounds as if its emotional edge was sanded smooth by too much elbow grease in the control room; "Telephone" is all abrasive mood swings, confounding prose and abrupt transitions at the expense of substance ("Your hypothetic Hollywood is putting me to sleep," the singer spews cryptically); and the nine-minute, album-closing "Watching You Remembering" simply rambles on too long -- a fitting metaphor, perhaps, for a studio stay that should have been cut short weeks earlier.
Simply put, the Real World material shows signs of an artist trying too hard to measure up to his surroundings, an interpretation Rice won't dispute: "Every time I'd been in the studio [before], I'd been in a place that was sort of my domain, whether it's been at Loma Ranch [in Fredericksburg] or at Sugar Hill in Houston, or making demos at home," he says. "Going into this enormous studio every day that was clearly someone else's -- it was just a completely different energy. At first, it was intimidating. When that wore off, I felt like I was playing and singing for the tape or the place."
Fortunately for the 11-song greenelectric, that still leaves seven tracks. And they more accurately convey the quirky likeness of an unconventional Texas singer/songwriter familiar to many here via his early gigs around town and his output on the local Justice Records. Self-produced at Loma Ranch, the remaining greenelectric tracks readily display Rice's skill for incorporating the most basic pop elements (acoustic and electric guitar, keyboards, orchestration, drums, bass) into elliptical, larger-than-life soundscapes so aesthetically challenging you might be inclined to hang them on your living-room wall if it were possible. Most notably, "Thirsty Girl," "Another Sign of Life" and the album's first single, "Father," all utilize sinfully catchy choruses, lush, unexpected instrumentation and a good bit of restraint to cushion painful subject matter (At the time they were written, Rice was suffering through the breakup of a four-year relationship.) The all-too-brief CD intro, "Baptistry," is another standout, alternately touching on the sparse, neo-blues leanings of Chris Whitley at his most intimate and the impressionistic high drama of early Gabriel at his most epic. Like a compelling graphic or a wrenching series of televised images, the best parts of greenelectric stay with you longer than you realize, dangling just outside consciousness until the mind is at its most vulnerable.
"[Columbia] stood by me," says Rice of his label, which could have pulled the plug on his increasingly expensive venture a lot sooner. "They allowed me to go down a bunch of roads to get the record done."
Originally, the rolling hills of Austin were to be the sole setting for the making of greenelectric. After Rice was signed by Columbia in 1995, he made up his mind that he would record at home and went about collecting equipment for the job. He had recently moved to Austin after a short stay in Los Angeles, a city he couldn't wait to leave after tackling the logistics of his contract with Columbia.
