Carrie Rodriguez' Storybook Beginning

2002 story about Austin violinist teaming with Chip "Wild Thing" Taylor

Originally appeared in Austin American Statesman

For more than an hour, Carrie Rodriguez played her violin with her stomach in knots. The crowd in this Dutch nightclub cheered her every solo, but the noise barely registered. When singer-songwriter Chip Taylor started telling the story about how he met the petite fiddler with the hair of black ringlets, she started sweating through her shirt. She wasn't sure she was ready for what was supposed to happen next.

They had met -- the legendary fiftysomething writer of such hits as "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning" and the then-22-year-old graduate of Boston's Berklee College of Music -- at South by Southwest two years ago. Rodriguez played the fiddle long enough for Taylor to hire her for an upcoming European tour. He asked if she also sang, and, wanting the gig, she fibbed, "Yeah, a little."

About five shows into the tour, Taylor decided he wanted to work up a duet with Rodriguez on "Storybook Children," a hit he wrote in the '60s with Billy Vera. She finally admitted to him that she'd never sang in front of an audience before. "I was hoping he wouldn't remember I said I could sing," she says. The daughter of noted Texas singer-songwriter David Rodriguez (who lived in Holland until his 2015 passing), Carrie always felt too intimidated by her father's easy stage presence and early on started concentrating on becoming a violin virtuoso.

That night in Holland would mark her vocal debut, and her apprehension was almost paralyzing when Taylor started off the song, "You've got your world and I've got mine/ and it's a shame." As Rodriguez stepped to the mike and opened her mouth, the butterflies flew out. "Two grown up worlds that could never be the same," she sang, and the crowd, which had been dazzled by her fiddle playing, erupted, almost drowning out the chorus, then going pin-drop quiet as it came to Carrie's next part: "Why can't we be like storybook children/ in a wonderland where nothing's planned for tomorrow."

A year and a half later, Taylor is telling the story and trying to rub the goosebumps away. "It was like a 'Rocky' movie," he says. "In all my years, I've never seen an audience go nuts like that before." Taylor started writing songs with Rodriguez in mind, especially "Extra" with its "I've been rollin' with the flow/ Now I'm reaching for the stars" couplet.

Taylor came back from the tour with half a dozen new duet songs and blocked out some studio time to record Let's Leave This Town, which finds him and Rodriguez trading verses on songs that seem to be always in motion. "Texas fiddle!" Taylor calls out on several tracks, and the classical whiz who thought she couldn't play country saws away like she grew up next door to Johnny Gimble. There's an unmistakable chemistry in the sound.

The grizzled songwriter from Yonkers, N.Y., and the petite kid with the MTV looks, get along just as well offstage. "Chip's like going to graduate school," she says. "The main thing I learned from him is to always keep working, to keep moving forward on things."

Despite the differences in experience, Taylor yielded a lot of creative control on "Let's Leave This Town" to his young charge. "He treats me like a full partner. We wanted this record to be a true collaboration, so we used some of the musicians I suggested and did it in Boston instead of New York (where Carrie's lived for a few months), where I was more comfortable."

Taylor describes Rodriguez as a trouper who's almost always on time and keeps any whining on the road to a minimum. "Unless I'm hungry," she chimes in. "These guys can go all day without eating, but not me. They've learned that they'd better pull over when I'm hungry or I get more and more cranky."

Family photo, with Katy Nail and David Rodriguez in photo above.

Always a bundle of energy, Rodriguez began playing violin in kindergarten at Casis Elementary in West Austin so she'd be exempt from nap time. Her father and mother, Katy Nail, a painter, split up when Carrie was 4.

"I guess I had a different childhood than the norm," she says. "I remember my father singing me to sleep with 'The Ballad of Ira Hayes,' which is not exactly a bedtime lullaby." She grew up with her mother in Tarrytown, where their front yard of weird sculptures and ornaments was in contrast to the circular driveways and manicured lawns of the tony neighborhood.

In junior high, Rodriguez was bused to East Austin, where the tough girls chided her for living on the west side and the kids in Tarrytown taunted her with racial epithets. "I always felt like an outsider. Was I Hispanic, was I white? It was a confusing time."

She immersed herself in something she was fluent in: playing classical violin. As a teenager, she also started sitting in with her father and other folk/country acts. "I was pretty awful," she says. "The Austin Music Network plays this one clip of me playing with Don Walser, and it makes me cringe. I'm haunted by how terrible I was."

Rodriguez fared much better as a classical violinist, appearing with the Austin Civic Orchestra as winner of its Young Artist contest. After graduating from Austin High in 1996, she attended the Oberlin Conservatory on scholarship, then transferred to Berklee the next year.

It was while sitting in with her father's friend Lyle Lovett in Boston in 1997 that Rodriguez finally found confidence to perform nonclassical music. "He had this wonderful, beautiful band, and they were so supportive," she says. "Plus the song I played fiddle on was one of my father's -- 'Ballad of the Snow Leopard,' which he wrote for my mom, so that made it all the more special." Rodriguez says that when she walked offstage that night she told herself, "This is what I want to do with my life."

Five years later, on the stage of a sold-out Cactus Cafe, where Lovett got his start, Carrie Rodriguez looks very much in her element. Like the night in Holland when she realized she could sing, the crowd explodes in appreciation every time she opens her mouth. On this hometown return, the audience is filled with relatives, including her grandmother Frances Nail, the author, in the front row. Bill Dick, her violin teacher from age 5 through high school, is also there. But the audience also includes many strangers who've maybe heard Carrie and Chip's first single, "Sweet Tequila Blues," on the radio, with its line about missing Austin, and picked up the album.

It's a sensational night, the best show the two have ever played, Rodriguez says afterward. On "Let's Leave This Town," a tune about trading the comfort zone for the inconsistencies of adventure, Taylor sings, "You've got no cause to feel ashamed," then looks at his protegee and continues, "You know something girl, you're amazing." The hoots of agreement last through the closing chorus.

"She's such an all-round great kid that you can't help but root for her," says Taylor, who beams as Rodriguez steals the show night after night. "I'm just proud I played a part in her finding her voice."

After three duet albums with Taylor, Rodriguez made her solo debut in 2006 with “Seven Angels on a Bicycle,” dedicated to Andy Morgan, her friend since childhood who was killed riding his bike to work in Manhattan in June 2005.