Reverse Order

Steve Strickland knows what he’s saying. He means it, too. In the opening lines of “Too Weird for Words,” one of 33 tracks on his recently released double-disc career retrospective Reverse Chronology, the singer and songwriter speaks with unabashed forthrightness. After a disclaimer (I know this might be a bad idea/To state exactly what’s on my mind), Strickland immediately confesses desire (Maybe it’s because I truly need you/That makes the words so hard to find).

Strickland’s disarming candor stems from his regional roots. The Ottawa, Kansas, native claims that keeping things simple and straightforward is part of the Midwestern songwriting aesthetic, a point of view he shares with longtime collaborator Tim Cook.

“It’s about not bullshitting,” Strickland says. “You try to do that to a Midwesterner and usually they’ll call you on it. Tim’s from Indiana. You can’t get much more Midwestern than that. There’s been times I’ve come up with something and Cook’s said, ‘That’s great, Steve, but what the hell does that mean?'”

Reverse Chronology traces Strickland back to the late ’60s, when he first broke into songwriting as a teen-ager. “I grew up in Ottawa, went to college and dropped out,” Strickland recounts in clipped bursts. “I went to Memphis for a little while to try to make it as a professional songwriter, but that didn’t work out. I came back to Ottawa briefly before moving out to Colorado, then I came back to Ottawa in 1997 when my parents’ health started going down.”

Though he grew up in a small town, Strickland discovered a number of early influences thanks to his insatiable appetite for music and his first transistor radio.

“When I was growing up, it was Bobby Darin and Roy Orbison,” Strickland says. “I remember the first record I bought with my own money — not scamming my sister into asking Mom and Dad for — was Chuck Berry’s More Chuck Berry. The whole thing was so raw compared to what I was used to. Then, like so many others, I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and something inside me clicked, like, ‘Wow. I’d like to do that.’

“I was into Bob Dylan very early on, and I remember James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James,” Strickland continues. “You want to talk about some uncomfortably personal songwriting? Just listen to ‘Fire and Rain.'”

When Strickland moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1979, he discovered not only a town with a strong musical identity but also a few other musicians who shared his passion, including Cook. “He was looking for a songwriting partner when we met and pretty much conned me into it,” Strickland recalls. “He’s self-taught, like me, but he’s such a natural musician. With Cook, songwriting is more of a laborious process, refining and rewriting. He’s got a gift for coming up with musical lines — vocal harmonies and bass lines. I’ve watched him in the recording booth scat off some lines while someone else was notating them, and then they would run them in to a string quartet that was sitting in the studio.”

While Strickland and Cook developed a collaborative process, they also both spent a lot of time becoming a part of the local music scene. In 1987, the New Orleans-born blues-rock group the Subdudes relocated to Fort Collins. Strickland and Cook befriended the group’s keyboardist, John Magnie, who would later become another songwriting partner.

“Cook and I were writing a song at the time and thought it’d be great as a duet and were thinking of Liz Barnez — then Liz Barnes — who was dating the band’s drummer. We met John and the rest of the Subdudes through Liz,” Strickland explains. “Writing with John was always quick. It had to be, considering he was on the road so much. When he was around, we’d spend a day or two writing a song, and then he’d be off again.”

The extensive liner notes to Reverse Chronology catalog many such musical relationships. They’re also fascinating in terms of recounting the context of the genesis of many of the tracks included on the anthology. A handful of others offer more intimate insights into the songwriter’s life by offering diarylike detail. Cuts such as “Walkin’ Away” garner closer inspection given such personal revelations. (“We finished the lyrics, about friends of ours who’d just split up, on a Friday afternoon in April,” Strickland writes. “That night, I discovered my own marriage was kaput.”)

“It’s pretty ironic considering the song was written just before it happened,” Strickland says. “I’m sure some of those thoughts on my own marriage slipped in there subconsciously.”

Other portions of the liner notes only deepen the mystery of the subjects of his songs. Writing about “Sarita,” Strickland offers only that “she died in May 1985, purportedly of a brain aneurysm” before moving on to how the beautifully optimistic, uplifting tune was written.

“She was a high-school sweetheart of mine,” Strickland clarifies. “Like the song goes, my mother called to tell me she had died. Writing that song was a real flood of emotion. It was probably the fastest song I ever wrote.”

Such trails of details and relationships seem more important than any attempt to trace Strickland’s linear development as an artist, especially given that the entire anthology depicts his career, as the title suggests, in reverse.

“More than anything, it’s an attempt to do something slightly different,” Strickland says. “It’s also an interesting way of wrapping some things up, tying them together and finally setting them aside. It’s a chance now for me to move on to something new.”