Catching up with the soul legend ahead of his new LP Living on Mercy
In recent years, several major pop artists have released what might be called late works — music that is richer than what they would have attempted in their youths. Looking along these lines, you could mention the late Chuck Berry’s 2017 full-length Chuck, which sums up the massive achievement of a great American songwriter. On a global scale, the 78-year-old songwriter and singer Dan Penn, who splits time between Nashville and Northwest Alabama, stands with any pop figure working today.
As Berry does on Chuck, Penn maps out the contours of a highly influential style on his new full-length Living on Mercy, a quintessential late work that is Penn’s first fully produced studio album in 26 years. Recorded with a crack band, and featuring Penn in collaboration with a crew of first-rate songwriters, Living on Mercy may be Penn’s finest album to date. He helped invent soul music in the 1960s, but his latest music aims straight at pop, and doesn’t miss.
Penn cut the 13 tracks that make up Living on Mercy in 2019 and early 2020 at Nashville’s Creative Workshop and The NuttHouse, a studio in Sheffield, Ala. Living on Mercy sports a band led by keyboardist Clayton Ivey, whose embellishments define the sound of Penn’s latest music. The record represents soul-pop as a well-defined, idiosyncratic musical language — one that Penn helped invent as a songwriter for performers like The Box Tops and Arthur Alexander.
“Well, I wrote two new songs last year, and I had some other songs that I had kind of put away,” Penn says from his Nashville home. “They’d never been cut, so I felt like it was time to cut another record. I’m proud to get something out. I was about ready to quit, but it looks like I’m ready to take another shot at it.”
At nearly 51 minutes, Living on Mercy gathers together the strands of Penn’s art. Like much of his solo work — the magnificently baroque 1973 album Nobody’s Fool and his ’60s singles for labels like FAME and MGM Records — it’s an experimental record that works perfectly as addictive pop. Penn and his co-writers lay out a harmonic language that continues to influence musicians around the world.
Penn grew up in Vernon, Ala., and listened to ’50s pop singers like Patti Page before turning to bluesman Jimmy Reed, whose simple, effective songs the young songwriter took as an early model. Penn cut his teeth singing Elvis Presley and Gene Vincent hits in Sulligent, Ala., and in the early ’60s began working for producer and FAME Studios owner Rick Hall in nearby Florence. By 1967, Penn was in Memphis, producing and co-writing hits for The Box Tops, a group that featured the young Alex Chilton on vocals.
As you can hear on Box Tops tracks like “I Met Her in Church” and “Fields of Clover,” Penn’s vision made room for idiosyncratic song structures. Although he’s known for co-writing now-classic tunes that have entered the repertoire of soul musicians — among his credits are the much-covered “The Dark End of the Street” and “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” — Penn doesn’t look at his work in terms of genre.
“I don’t ever think about country, and I don’t even think about soul anymore,” he says. “You know, I just walk on in there. We all had a good time with soul music. That’s what they finally called it, but to us it was R&B pop, and it still is.”
Living on Mercy ranges from the Beatles-esque pop of “Things Happen” to the country-soul-pop of “Clean Slate.” Meanwhile, “What It Takes,” written with Nashville tunesmith and Creative Workshop owner Buzz Cason, is a piece of unclassifiable music that reminds me of prog rock.
What’s most impressive about Living on Mercy, apart from Penn’s supremely casual vocals, is the quality of the songwriting. Listen to “Things Happen,” which Penn wrote with Bucky Lindsey and Wayne Carson. You’ll hear how Penn & Co. use modulation, just like The Beatles did throughout Abbey Road, to make the song more interesting. Every tune on Living gives up a beautifully written bridge or chorus that opens up the composition.
What he achieves on Living is, simply, living music. Like Allen Toussaint, and Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Penn is an R&B-pop master. He’s looking ahead, as he tells me.
“I just can’t hang around and think about the old days. Just going down the road living, I don’t think much about that.”