At My Window (album)
| At My Window | ||||
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| Studio album by Townes Van Zandt | ||||
| Released | 1987 | |||
| Recorded | Cowboy Arms, Nashville, Tennessee | |||
| Genre | Country, folk, singer-songwriter | |||
| Length | 33:20 | |||
| Label | Sugar Hill | |||
| Producer | Jack Clement, Jim Rooney | |||
| Townes Van Zandt chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
| New York Times | (favorable) |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Washington Post | (favorable) |
At My Window is an album released by Folk/country singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt in 1987. This was Van Zandt's first studio album in the nine years that followed 1978's Flyin' Shoes, and his only studio album recorded in the 1980s. Although the songwriter had become less prolific, this release showed that the quality of his material remained high.
By the middle 1980s, with royalties coming in for "If I Needed You" (a No. 3 country hit for Emmylou Harris and Don Williams in 1981) and "Pancho and Lefty" (a No. 1 country smash for Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard in 1983), Van Zandt was enjoying what was for him a stable home life for the first time with his third wife Jeanene and their new son Will. He also acquired a keen interest in boating.
Nine years after releasing his last album, Van Zandt returned to the studio with producer "Cowboy" Jack Clement, Jim Rooney and a group of top shelf musicians, including fiddle and mandolin player Mark O'Connor and Willie Nelson's harmonica player Mickey Raphael, who all complement Van Zandt's subtle, poetic songs. Clement later told Van Zandt's biographer John Kruth that he felt At My Window was the best Townes album that he was ever involved in but Van Zandt's guitarist Mickey White offers a different perspective, telling Kruth, "The album sounds a bit tentative in spots 'cause we didn't use headphones and missed some of the nuances goin' on. And by the time of At My Window, Townes skills were not consistent...he didn't fingerpick as well as he used to. And he started getting a little lazy as a singer. As his voice matured, it got deeper and more resonant, but he tended to not sing with as much energy and lung power as he used to and started shaving off his notes and phrases more and more." White also adds that At My Window was mostly produced by Jim Rooney because "Jack was out of state, down in Florida."
Several of the songs that appear on At My Window had been written years before. "Buckskin Stallion" and the title track were originally recorded in 1973 during the sessions for an unreleased album called 7 Come 11 that would eventually surface in 1993 as The Nashville Sessions. In live performances of "Buckskin Stallion," Van Zandt would joke that the song was half about a woman and half about a horse, adding that he missed the horse. At My Window also marked the fourth time "For the Sake of the Song" appeared on a Van Zandt recording, having appeared on the singer's debut album in 1968, Townes Van Zandt in 1969 and Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas in 1977. According to the 2007 biography To Live's To Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt, the song "The Catfish Song" was written while Van Zandt sat by the Harpeth River, where the Battle of Franklin took place, when the singer lived in a cabin in Franklin, Tennessee in the late 1970s. The book also reveals that Van Zandt wrote the good-time country-blues romp "Ain't Leavin' Your Love" the day after his wife Jeanene brought their newborn baby home in March 1983. Van Zandt co-wrote "Gone, Gone Blues" with Mickey White.
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