No Rush: Famous Former Montecito Folk Singer Back at Lobero

“I’m in Maine, looking at New Hampshire across the Piscataqua River,” Tom Rush said over the phone late last month. “The leaves are turning and it’s gorgeous.”

Rush’s voice is unmistakable, and so is the approach; a laid-back sincere tone that sounds like a chat across the porch with an old friend. He’s not just sharing what’s in his field of vision, but aptly setting the scene, as so many of his songs have over the years, both his own compositions and the carefully curated ones he’s chosen to cover going back to the early 1960s.

Now 84, Rush is 57 years removed from his landmark 1968 album The Circle Game, which contained his take on three songs by Joni Mitchell (“Urge for Going,” “Tin Angel,” and the title cut) before she recorded them, as well as James Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves” and “Sunshine, Sunshine,” an early song by Jackson Browne before the future superstars’ own releases. 

All three artists credit him with immensely helping their careers, and Rolling Stone “accused me of ushering in the singer-songwriter era,” Rush said. 

“I wasn’t trying to do that. I was two years overdue for delivering an album and I’d run out of traditional songs that were interesting to me. Along come these three brilliant writers. Thank you very much.”

The album also featured Rush’s own compositions “No Regret” and “Rockport Sunday,” still two of his most requested songs in concert almost six decades later. We’ll very likely hear them when Rush – who spent several years living in a house inherited from his parents on Summit Road near the Montecito Country Club in the early 2000s – returns to town to play at the Lobero on a double bill with contemporary Judy Collins. 

The four-show mini-tour of California will be the first time in decades that he shares the stage with Collins, the singer who had a big hit with Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” 

“Joni told me that when she wrote it, she had me in mind,” Rush recalled. “But she gave it to Judy. It’s OK, I’ve forgiven her.”

Rush never reached similar commercial heights as either Collins or the singer-songwriters he helped along the way, but that was partly by design, he said. After five years of nearly nonstop writing, recording and touring, he headed back home in the early 1970s to New England rather than out to the burgeoning scene in L.A.

“I decided that I really didn’t want to be where the action was. I wanted to be where it wasn’t. That was a big fork in the road.” 

That brand of understated, often self-deprecating humor paired with his warm, conversational voice informs both the way he performs songs and the between selection storytelling, although to Rush they might be one and the same. 

“It seems to me that the songs are stories,” he said. “I used to tell the stories while I was re-tuning the guitar just to keep the audience from fading away. Nowadays, I get as many requests for old favorite stories as I do for songs. But to me I’m just the narrator of the songs. I’m singing notes, but it’s more about telling a story.”

That goes for ones he’s written, too. After eschewing new studio albums for 35 years, Rush released one back in 2009, and the songwriting habit has become almost addictive ever since. 

His latest record, Gardens Old, Flowers New, is all originals. 

“I’m being told it’s my best album so far, and I have to admit I think some of ‘em are pretty darn good… I don’t really know what’s going on, but I’ve written more songs in the past 10 years than in the first 50. Anyway, my view is that I don’t write songs. They already exist. They come drifting through the room, and my job is to catch ‘em before they drift away again.”

Meanwhile, Rush continues to appeal to fans of his age and decades younger, like the two women in their early 20s who stood in line for 30 minutes after a local show to meet him. He figured they must have grown up with grandparent who loved his music. Not so. 

“They told me they had gone to a used record store to get LPs to hang on the wall. But they thought maybe they should play them once first. They were so blown away. When they met me, they were just incoherent with glee, and they could hardly talk. It’s a crazy, crazy world.” 

What it proves, though, is that Rush’s music thrills generations of people, particularly in concert.

“I’ve come to the realization that the audience doesn’t want perfection, they want connection,” he said. “That’s good news because perfection has never been within a million miles reach. But I think I’ve gotten better at the connection part.”