TEMPLE OF TONE

John Hiatt and the Jerry Douglas Band record Leftover Feelings at Nashville’s country music shrine.

- ART THOMPSON

A LOT HAS CHANGED since John Hiatt recorded The Eclipse Sessions in 2018, and his latest release, Leftover Feelings (New West), is all the more significant for a couple of reasons: It was made during the 2020 pandemic, and it was recorded at Nashville’s legendary RCA Studio B, during a time when tourists had virtually stopped visiting the historic site. As Hiatt explains, “If the pandemic had any plusses, it was that we were able to get in there and record during the day. Normally you can only record at night at Studio B, and you have to break your gear down after each session. We got in there last October and we settled on four days. Every day we got tested, and when we were in the control room we wore masks and stayed apart and all that.”

It was worth the precautions to bring such a confluence of talent to bear on the project. Between the richness of Hiatt’s songs and the awesome musicianship of Jerry Douglas’s band — which includes Mike Seal on acoustic and electric guitars, Daniel Kimbro on bass, and Christian Sedelmyer on fiddle— Leftover Feelings is a superb, live-in the-studio album that has the atmosphere of a very special room and the sense of togetherness that can only happen when players are in it as one. However, it wasn’t a given that the project would actually take flight. “I think like everybody else I was initially just staying home, and I wasn’t terribly creative at all,” Hiatt says. “I was just fumbling around in the dark, doing some reading, but not really writing much.