Cheryl Pawelski explains how the Stax demos collection Written in Their Soul came to life

Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos released last week on CD and digital via Craft Recordings. The seven-disc box set “includes 146 demos (140 previously unreleased) from Stax’s legendary roster of songwriters, including Bettye Crutcher, Homer Banks, and William Bell. From early sketches of classic ’60s and ’70s hits to never-before-heard songs with full-blown arrangements, Written in Their Soul offers fans a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of the storied Memphis label.”

Be it demos of classic cuts like “(If Loving You is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right” or “634-5789 (Soulsville, USA)” or the could’ve-been-a-smash “Everybody Is Talking Love,” the seven discs are a treasure trove of the songwriting and music-making process. The curatorial expertise of Cheryl Pawelski, combined with stellar liner notes from Robert Gordon and Deanie Parker, make this something equally worthy of a place on the music shelf or the bookcase.

We reached out to Cheryl Pawelski about her nearly two-decade process of bringing these songs to life. Given her time bringing records back into print via her own Omnivore Recordings, along with her work for Rhino Records, she’s definitely responsible for you knowing songs which might’ve otherwise been lost, and Written in Their Soul stands as her masterwork.

The Pitch: As excited as we were to read about Written in Their Soul when it was first announced, given the almost two decades worth of work you’ve put into this, you’re probably more excited than we are.

Cheryl Pawelski: I kept telling everybody–because people ask you when you do this work, and they’re like, “What are you working on?” and I’m like, “Working on the Stax thing,” and they’re like, “Still?” and I’m like, “Yeah! And guess what? All these are hits in my head.”

So yeah, I’m thrilled about that. I just kept working on it. I didn’t know if it was ever gonna get done and if it did, if it would be able to come out because I left working at Concord so long ago, and they would own the repertoire.

The work you put into is really noticeable. We can’t imagine like what it’s like to have to winnow down to like the 600-plus songs to the 140 or so that are here. What was that process for you, in that killing your darlings situation?

Yeah, exactly. Some of them killed themselves because you need audio that’s viable and releasable. I worked with Mike [Graves], my engineer partner on this, really extensively because some I just wasn’t willing to let go of. I was like, “You gotta make this work, man.” We worked really hard on those kinds of tracks that I felt like it’s important to the overall story: “It really has something special about it.”

But some of them weren’t saveable and they also weren’t to the point where they would be releasable and some of the songs just weren’t necessarily as good as some of the other ones. That was helpful. I was actually relieved sometimes when there was a problem we couldn’t solve because it allowed me to leave it off. But you know, the hardest thing was figure out how to structure it because I just didn’t wanna put out a big glut of songs and not have any sort of unifying concept to some of them, which is how you got those three buckets. The first three discs are songs that got cut and then released on the Stax family of labels. The fourth one is stuff that got cut and released on other labels, and then the last three are completely all unissued. They, to the best of my research and knowledge, didn’t get cut and released anywhere and don’t tell me if one of them did.

You mentioned some of these songs have become hits in your head and that’s like the fun thing about things this box set or a lot of the things that Numero Group does, like the Eccentric Soul compilations–these are songs that you hear and think that, in an alternate timeline, this gets played on oldies radio to this day.

Robert [Gordon] and I talked about that a lot. The liner note writer. He’s one of the first guys I talked to about this when I was in Memphis so many years ago. There had to be so many great songs being written at the time that he kind of imagined it as like, “Oh, there’s probably a box of demos over in the corner, and maybe something like ‘Too Much Sugar for a Dime’ just got covered over by someone else and somebody picked the next one off the stack, and maybe that song was a hit instead.” But you look at songs like that one and I’m just like, “Holy cow. If that had been cut and released and marketed the way the other Stax tunes had, how could that not be a hit?”

Courtesy Craft Recordings.

Robert Gordon has written extensively on Stax and Memphis, as well, and his liner notes for Written in Their Soul are integral for putting all of this music into context. How closely did you work with him on this?

When I started gathering these things up I went and visited him. We’d just been friends working on Big Star things and, and whatever and he said, “I’ve got a couple tapes of things.” He had a Mack Rice compilation of demos that people had been passing around and compared notes on that. But, you know, really, as I started going through all of this stuff, it just was an overwhelming amount of material and so I couldn’t really keep him in the loop for too long.

It was just too much with all of his work and all of my work, and I just figured, I’m just gonna keep putting these on a pile and every now and again, we’d check in on it. I’d see him somewhere, and he’d go, “How was the Stax thing going?” I’m like, “Well, I got more songs.” It wasn’t like he was riding along, but what was important about working with him on this is he’s there in Memphis, as is the person who designed the set, Kerri Mahoney. They’re both there. They knew–Robert especially–a lot of these people and I knew I was gonna need that because I’m not there.

We kept in touch on it and every now and again, I would share something that I had found with him. The hard thing was, until 2019, I really didn’t know if this was gonna have a shot at ever being released. I’d left Concord, and it just so happens that somebody I worked with at Rhino wound up at Concord and we’re at a Christmas party, and I said, “I think I finished this thing. Can we talk about it?”

I was very grateful. I knew this stuff was up his alley anyway, but you never know where a company is. They might not wanna put out big box sets. I’m just so glad that it is coming out, and everybody went along for the ride.

Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos is out now from Craft Recordings.