The case for Shooter Jennings as one of the premier producers in music grows more compelling by the day, and you’d get no argument from Tanya Tucker.
“He always listens to my heart,” Tucker tells Rolling Stone, offering a simple reason for Jennings’ rise behind the console.
For Jennings, such a sentiment has been more than enough validation for his 2022 decision to step away from his own touring and songwriting career to focus full-time on his studio work.
“I just realized I’m being used at my very best when I was in a situation where I was working with another artist,” Jennings says. “I was applying all of the stuff that I would normally apply to just my own records or whatever I was doing. Like, I would put all of my tastes and all that into a project with someone else, and it would become something special. There was a feeling that was happening with each project, and I just kind of knew: Hey, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Tucker’s 2019 album While I’m Livin’ — produced by Jennings and Brandi Carlile — won a Grammy for Best Country Album, one of three Grammys that Jennings has landed for his work as a producer since 2018. The other two were Best Americana honors for albums by Carlile.
“I knew I wanted to move into production by the time I had recorded that last record with Dave Cobb,” Jennings says of his 2018 album, Shooter. “We had already done Brandi’s record by then, and she was kind of the first one to give me this opportunity in a very serious way, and I knew right then that this is what I had been looking for.”
Another pair of high-profile Jennings productions held country music’s collective attention this year. In June, Tucker, fresh off her Country Music Hall of Fame induction, released Sweet Western Sound, once again produced by Jennings and Carlile. Then, in August, Turnpike Troubadours put out A Cat in the Rain, the band’s first record since 2017, which capped off a frantic 15-month return from hiatus for the Troubadours and marked Jennings’ first time working with the band. It was also an album that was started in early 2021 at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and completed a year later in Los Angeles, where Jennings lives.
“Shooter was a good voice to have in the room,” says Hank Early, Turnpike’s steel and accordion player, of Jennings’ work on A Cat in the Rain. “But he didn’t proactively drive us towards anything with the album. He just helped us steer the ship where we wanted it to go. I think that’s what a good producer does.”
Since early 2022, Jennings has produced a pair of albums that created major buzz, especially on social media, before their release. His 2022 rock collaboration with Yelawolf, Sometimes Y, was one. A Cat in the Rain was the other.
“It was very rare that I do this, but I listened to that record a ton,” Jennings says about the Turnpike album. “I felt there was such a message here that was so important. That record and the Yelawolf record are two that I just listened to all the time until they came out. I really loved them.
“In Turnpike’s case, there was a lot of anticipation of what was going to happen, in my mind. I’m not someone that goes out and reads a lot of reviews, because I just know that you’ve gotta believe the bad if you’re going to believe the good, but I just really did want it to be out there. It’s almost like there’s a feeling of, like, your child or something who you’re sending out in the world. You want them to do well, but you also want them to get out there and start their life, and that’s kind of how this felt. I was waiting for it to start its life, you know?”
Between the attention Tucker commands as a country music icon and the chatter surrounding Turnpike’s comeback album, Jennings may well find himself in the spotlight again this awards season, but he’s not wired to expect accolades. Most of his projects are in the business of pushing envelopes — such as Sometimes Y or the 2021 concept album about alien abduction by Jason Boland and the Stragglers, The Light Saw Me — rather than being written inside of them.
“First of all, awards are not important at all,” Jennings says pointedly. “The only way they can be important is in a sense like Tanya, after a whole career of being snubbed and nominated a million times. For her to win? That was amazing.
“Of course, I was grateful for the wins that Brandi brought me. But I feel like that stuff can’t really enter my mind, because — let’s get real — the Grammys don’t really cover most of what I do.”
Since Dave Cobb produced Jennings’ 2005 solo debut, Put the “O” Back in Country, the two have been nearly synonymous with top-tier independent country and Americana albums. Cobb’s profile soared first, buoyed substantially by his work with Jason Isbell, particularly on 2013’s Southeastern. Jennings’ rise followed, with artists such as Boland, American Aquarium, Jaime Wyatt, and Kelsey Waldon all putting out acclaimed records with Jennings as producer. While the music industry has fractured in an era of streaming and inflated ticket prices, both Cobb and Jennings built up enough cache in the studio to lend albums credibility before a note is even released. Jennings, for his part, says the attention he and Cobb get now was a hallmark of the best producers he’s known his entire life.
“When I first started working with Dave, he had just moved to L.A. from Atlanta and was getting some records, and he really grinded his way to this position. It got to a place where almost anything he produced, you would check it out, because you knew it was going to be good, and I knew that he cared so much about the music,” Jennings says. “It was that way when I was a kid too, with, like, Rick Rubin. I would buy anything that Rick Rubin produced. I bought Danzig, and I bought Andrew Dice Clay. He was like that. Trent Reznor was also that way. He was an artist, and he goes and remixes David Bowie, and he had his label, and I bought everything he put out.”
For now, expect Jennings to model Rubin a little more than Reznor. He’ll always have something to say, but do not expect him to jump back in a bus for a 50-city tour anytime soon.
“Once I got to this place, I felt really renewed,” Jennings says. “And there’s a lot of other things that play into this. Here I was given this other chance to be with my kids and with my family. And, at the same time, I saw that people were starting to trust me, and that I had a different approach to doing records than people in the past had with these artists.”
That’s not to say he’s avoiding the microphone altogether. For the past year, he has made a point of performing the late Warren Zevon’s music with the Werewolves of Los Angeles. It started as a simple suggestion from his wife, Misty.
“Over the last probably five years, I became like a Zevon nut,” Jennings says. “I was already like a big fan. I knew a lot of songs, but I had never really done the full, complete deep dive, and I went way down the rabbit hole. I just fell in love with the songwriting and the piano playing.
“Well, after I had made my announcement — I’m free. I don’t have to go tour anymore — there was this festival in California that made an offer [to perform], and it was one that I could do whatever I want with the show. And I was struggling, because I don’t want to be an asshole and turn down everything just to make a point. But I’m really not in the headspace to go do ‘4th of July’ and all my songs and be really pumped about it. So, Misty just said, ‘Why don’t you do a show of all Zevon’s stuff?’ And I started messing around and thinking, ‘I really could do this!’”
It led to Jennings leading a campaign to land Zevon in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When he plays a set of Zevon’s music on Nov. 1 in Brooklyn, it will be more of a middle finger to the fact Zevon was left out of this year’s Rock Hall class.
“I started finding these groups online that were trying to lobby for him to get in,” Jennings says. “Then Billy Joel wrote a letter to the Hall of Fame saying they should nominate him. So…the nomination happened, and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ Then we’re out there trying to help pump up the cause and get people to vote, and… they don’t accept him. Willie Nelson gets in, and as much as Willie Nelson is a part of my family, I felt like that was cheating and that Warren should have been in. There’d be more time to put Willie in, you know?”
At that point, Jennings hit up the Werewolves and booked a show to protest the Zevon snub. He also plotted the release of a live album, Shooter Jennings and the Werewolves of Los Angeles Do Zevon, for Nov. 3 — the same day as the Rock Hall induction ceremony.
Such an attitude can come across as refreshing, putting to rest any notion that a change in professional direction for Jennings has also brought a change in perspective. As a musician, he’s always been a thorn in the side of mainstream country music. In covering Zevon, he’s managing to be a thorn in the side of a rock institution too. Put it in the context of a genuine desire to lift up other artists and draw attention to their creativity, and suddenly his move into the studio is just a natural next step for Jennings, rather than a pivot.
“Working with Shooter never feels like work,” Tucker says. “Mostly, it feels like coming home. He has one leg in the past and all the music we both grew up on, and he has the other leg in the future with his windows wide open. He lets what’s really good stay. Whatever’s not is gone.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author of the 2020 book Red Dirt: Roots Music Born in Oklahoma, Raised in Texas, at Home Anywhere and the 2023 book The Motel Cowboy Show: On the Trail of Mountain Music from Idaho to Texas, and the Side Roads in Between.