CAROLYN WONDERLAND HITS THE MARK WITH PRODUCER RAY BENSON
Carolyn Wonderland hits the mark with PrFOR Asleep at the Wheel frontman Ray Benson, hooking up with Houston-born blues rocker Carolyn Wonderland was pure kismet.
“Louis Messina from AEG in Houston recently told me I had to see her,” Benson recalls. “He was concerned her recordings just weren’t translating how good she was onstage. So I went to one of her shows and we started talking immediately about working together. Not long after that, Bob Dylan asked me about her, too, and the rest is history.”
Dylan inquired about Wonder-land while he was in Austin for last year’s Austin City Limits Music Festival, and Benson made the introductions. Talk about a confidence boost.
“In a way, I’ve got Bob to thank for this record,” Wonderland says of her latest, the Benson-produced Miss Understood (released in February). “He took an interest in me just when another record deal fell apart. And Ray took it home from there.”
Dylan doesn’t actually show up as a guest on Miss Understood, Wonderland’s first album in five years, but if capturing Wonderland’s stage magic was the goal, both artist and producer hit the bull’s-eye. Filled with screaming slide guitar, chunky horn tracks and a ’70s Bonnie Raitt vibe, the album includes a handful of Wonderland’s songs, Terri Hendrix’s “I Found the Lions” and “Throw My Love,” Bruce Robison’s “Bad Girl Blues,” Rick Derringer’s smoking rocker “Still Alive and Well” and a ripping version of the J.J. Cale nugget “Trouble in the City.” “We went into the sessions with 25 songs in mind,” Wonderland said. “Didn’t matter if they were mine or someone else’s, just get the best songs we could find. That’s how we ended up with two of Terri’s songs.”
For almost a decade before moving to Austin after the release of Bloodless Revolution in 2003, Wonderland was a perennial winner of the Houston Press award for best vocalist, and also won awards for best guitarist, best entertainer and best album. Her long-running Tuesday night residency at Houston’s trippy Last Concert Café was legendary.
Besides being an accomplished guitarist and a vocalist often compared to Janis Joplin (to whom she bears more than a slight resemblance), Wonderland also plays piano, lap steel, mandolin and trumpet.
“I was in band briefly in junior high,” Wonderland says, “but I really learned by playing the piano at our house. Then I picked up guitar and later the trumpet.” But not in the high school marching band. “I was too busy trying to sneak out to smoke a cigarette,” she laughs. “Eventually, I was barred from every school in the district.
