Behind the Music: Producer and Carnival Music Owner Frank Liddell

Frank Liddell Headshot 1 (Photo Credit Blu Sanders)

It’s a sunny day in January, and producer and Carnival Music owner Frank Liddell is hard at work in his office on Music Row. The Grammys are a couple weeks away, but Liddell, who produced two of the albums nominated for Best Country Album – Miranda Lambert’s Platinum, which won, and wife Lee Ann Womack’s The Way I’m Livin’ – doesn’t seem particularly interested in chatting about awards.

“I’m lucky,” he says.

Liddell is known for working with incredible vocalists; aside from Lambert and Womack, he works closely with David Nail, who Carnival also publishes, and the Eli Young Band, and has album credits that include Kellie Pickler, Brandi Carlile, and Jewel.

“I don’t know how this happened, but I’m so lucky that everybody I’ve pretty much worked with in the studio has been a great singer,” he continues. “I think a lot of it is accidental.”

Liddell’s production style is subtle, delicate, and powerful, placing the vocal at the forefront and arranging a supporting bed of sound that perfectly complements both the singer and the song. Accidental or not, it’s a skill that makes him a perfect match for artists whose vocals deserve the spotlight.

“I do think that I’m attracted to artists I love,” he continues. “It’s not the purity of their vocals I love, it’s the fact that they can sing, you know? David [Nail] sat right there and played me a couple songs, and I mean, literally the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I know people say stuff like that, and I don’t get moved to tears a lot but it was one… it blew my mind.”

Artists like Nail exemplify the Carnival catalog, built around Liddell’s fervent love of writing – from “American Pie” to novelist Cormac McCarthy – and the voices that can bring those words to life.

“David’s a great songwriter,” Liddell says. “I don’t think he always gives his songwriting enough credit, and it bothers me a little bit.” He tells me about “The Secret,” a song Nail wrote with fellow Carnival writer Scooter Carusoe, and Nail’s insistence that they write through the truth of the stark topic. “I’d like to see more of those things come out of him over the next several years,” Liddell says.

While Carusoe has cuts including Kenny Chesney’s “Better As A Memory” and current Brett Eldredge hit “Mean To Me,” Liddell believes his moment in the sun is yet to come.

“There’s an element in Scooter’s writing, he doesn’t miss the forest for the trees,” he says.” You can hear that song and love it as a beautiful picture and go ‘Man, that’s awesome,’ and you can move in real close and start to look at the detail and go, ‘Golly, it’s really awesome.’ It unfolds and you feel like you’ve known it all your life, it’s unique and universal. He has high standards. He has a line, something like, ‘I was looking in my pocket for some change, I think I found one.’ That line, man!”

Liddell pays close attention to detail, something that translates to his work as a producer, and leads him to prefer songs at their rawest.

“I like to watch them come to life as opposed to undoing records that have already been done,” he says. “If I gave you a ball of clay and said, ‘Make a giraffe,’ you’d make a giraffe. If I shaped that ball of clay into an elephant and gave you an elephant and said, ‘Make a giraffe,’ you’d say, ‘Yeah but it’s an elephant.’ So how you take that elephant and boil it back down to a ball and then make a giraffe is sort of what you’re charged with on some of those things.”

Liddell’s passion for the music shines as he speaks, an enthusiasm on which he has built a business, and which very much guides what makes someone a good fit for the Carnival family.

“I tell every artist I work with, make something you’ll listen to the rest of your life,” he says. “‘Cuz the worst thing is to make a record you lose all your self respect and credibility with and then it doesn’t work. You know? Make a record you can listen to the rest of your life.”

“One day a song came on the radio and was starting to work,” he tells me, “and I remember somebody sitting in the car and they go, ‘Uh oh, that guy’s in trouble. He’s gonna have to go buy a truck now, the song’s working.’ I can handle just about anything if it’s genuine. The artists that know who they are, that know themselves, those are the ones that stand the test of time. They’re the ones who stand the longest, the loneliest.”

It’s those artists that Carnival seeks, from the soul-bearing Logan Brill to Mando Saenz, whose tenor has been described as “arresting, and has assumed a full, rich timbre that can still deliver lines delicately, but can also howl like a freight train.”

“When a writer comes into my office I sit there and say, ‘Hey man, who are you, what are you about?’” he says. “We sign people we like and love and our goal is – and we don’t get it perfect – but is to stick by ‘em and believe in ‘em and take the time. If you’re gonna sign somebody, don’t sign someone you don’t wanna be standing next to in ten years. I don’t want to be the company that gives up on people. It’s not a commodity.”

Working in the music business is inherently a balance between the financials of the business side and the understanding that you’re connecting listeners with an art, which can at times prove challenging. “I want it to work,” Liddell says. “What we can’t be is just like, hey, we’re the coolest guy in town, I don’t care if nobody records our song.’ I have to sit here and think, how do we make this financially more viable, and I’m working on that like you’ve never seen. But one thing I know that will never change is the talent we sign.”

“I’ve got a lot to think about and a lot to do, a lot to work on to get there. I love everybody in this building, they’re smart, all way smarter than I am and it’s a good place to be. We’re just lucky to do what we do.”

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