In the most recent Randy Travis movie to hit theaters, “Black Dog,” Travis plays Earl, a self-appointed singer and songwriter who is terrible at both roles.
Yet playing Earl wasn’t as difficult for the long-term country star as might be assumed, confides Travis, who is scheduled to perform Saturday at the Rosemont Horizon.
“That’s the easiest thing in the world,” he says of singing badly on-screen. “You just don’t worry about tempo, and you don’t worry about pitch. What I also did was find a key so high that it was almost out of my range, so it sounded more like screaming.”
For the benefit of moviegoers more familiar with the “Black Dog” marquee’s other big names, suffice it to say that Travis sings well enough to have sold tens of millions of cassettes and CDs in a recording career dating back to one of the most memorable albums in country music history, “Storms of Life” in 1986.
His rich, supple voice delivers at least a couple of more incipient classics in his latest CD, “You and You Alone” on the Dreamworks label. One, a humorous vocal masterpiece titled “The Hole,” is now heading up the country hit charts in the wake of the collection’s first single, “Out of My Bones,” which reached No. 1.
Of his striking performance on “The Hole,” the 39-year-old Travis confides that since taking a year and a half off the road in the mid-’90s, his first prolonged throat rest in the more than 15 years, “it has been easier for me to sing.
“I’ve had more range and more control vocally,” he explains. “It had been a long time since my throat had really had a chance to heal up.”
“You and You Alone” is the first collection in his career that contains no sample of his own writing. The only songs of his own that he has recorded in the past year are a religious one for an “Inspired by the Prince of Egypt” CD, which is linked to a forthcoming animated film about the biblical character Moses, and one for the “Black Dog” soundtrack.
Ever since taking that prolonged vacation from the country concert trail, Travis has been gathering a lengthening list of Hollywood credits. Last year he was accorded a small part in the Francis Ford Coppola production of John Grisham’s “The Rainmaker.” That was followed by a more substantial role in “Fire Down Below,” a Steven Seagal action epic.
“Black Dog” is another action effort. Travis says he sought the part of Earl because the character “had so many different sides.” In addition to being the unskilled singer-songwriter, Earl starts out as a fairly unprincipled guy when Swayze’s character blows into Atlanta to drive a truck to New York, ignorant of the fact that the rig is loaded with arms, ammo and explosives.
Accompanying Swayze on this dangerous run, Earl initially focuses only on the money to be made, and he and Swayze are at odds for a while. But after they hit the road and run into an attempted hijacking, Earl undergoes a change of heart and sees the light.
“You see him (as) really redneck at times, funny at times, somewhat goofy too, and downright mean once in a while,” Travis says. “So he had a lot of different sides to him, which is why I wanted to do it.”
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