Interview with Petunia

You need a powerful presence to front a band like the Vipers, a very talented bunch of players, two of who were in bands previously fronted by the dynamic Ray Condo. In the man called Petunia they have a equally striking frontman, one who is able to step back and allow his players their time in the spotlight. Petunia cut his teeth as a  busker who discovered classic country along the way and currently hosts a show that mixes his own songwriting talent with classic country songs that distill the essence of what is good and vibrant about the music. Lonesome Highway took the opportunity to talk to him prior to one of his recent Irish shows.

When did you started to treat music as a career?

I started playing music about fifteen years ago,  playing in the street for six or seven years. I played in every major city in Canada, every street corner. I played in New York City in the Subway and that got me an article written up in the New York Post, it was a whole page. I woke up one day and was taking the Subway to work and there was a picture and people were looking at me. I hitchhiked around Canada and did some shows. I used to make movies and I met a lady I feel in love with and she had a suitcase full of country music tapes. That was the first time I heard Hank Williams, Jimmie Rogers, the Carter Family and various others. They're the main three I started out with. From there I started playing on the stage every now and then but hitch-hiking you can't book regular shows. I moved all over Canada and played with different musicians and while doing that I meet a lot of the guys who are playing with me now. Jimmy Roy and Stephen Nikleva both used to play with Ray Condo. When I'd go up to Vancouver I would go up and see Ray and I'd see Jimmy and Stephen play and I thought "wow, I'd love to have those guys in the band". Then Ray passed away. Ray Condo played in Ireland in Kilkenny and Jimmy was also with Big Sandy.  Marc (L'Esperance) joined later and we used some different bass players and now Patrick Metzger is playing bass with us.

So your love of country grew from listening to those tapes?

I'd never heard country music before that, so yeah.

What had you listened to previously?

Immediately before, it was mostly classical music,  the year or two before I heard those songs.  But before that it was bebop music, experimental jazz and I was into punk rock before that in my teenage years. I had my hair all spiked up and a leather jacket with studs.  Most people I meet in country music now feel that punk rock and country are very closely related. It's so common that people that use to be punk rockers are now at our shows. Fans of regular country don't necessarily get what we're doing. They want to hear Hank Williams or Johnny Cash but the punk rockers they latch on and they know what we're about. They have the same roots that I do. 

There seems to be a fair amount of country now in Canada with people like Lindi Ortega and Daniel Romano.

I don't know those people but a lot of acts apply for grants which are available in Canada but I have never applied. I was brought up with a different attitude, not that it's wrong, maybe it's wrong in the sense that if you rely on a grant, and the key word is rely, which I call a hand-out, then what happens when it runs out? You don't learn how to make the money you need. If you tour and rely on the money that's available with the grant it can all fall apart when that ends. While if you have never applied for them in the first place and you go the harder road you learn how to do it. Even going into a studio if you have tons of money you can use a wonderful studio with great engineers and everything else but you haven't had much experience working in a studio. You haven't learned any tricks, how to mic something so that when an engineer is mixing something you can say "well, actually this is the way it should be miced". 

Do you know Greg Garing at all?

No, I don't know him.

I can see some similarities in what you both do.

You are writing a lot of your own songs now?

Well on the new album there are two that aren't mine. I wrote the rest. Forbidden Lovers is a Lefty Frizzell song. He's one of my favourites.

You draw inspiration from that era?

I draw from the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and so on,  whatever I hear. We're learning a Dead Kennedys song right now. 'Cause it sounded cool.  There's  a couple of my songs that are heavily influenced by Peruvian music. I spent time there. When you travel around you hear things. Now that I'm here in Ireland I'm sure that will be there too (laughs).

I heard about a great Scottish guitar player who learned from listening to the radio as there was no country music going on then. So he learned off the radio. In the Caribbean with Bob Marley and others there is a huge Grand Ole Opry listenership. There a lot of country music influence in early reggae. It was AM radio. 

You have released your album in vinyl too.

Yeah, it comes with lyrics,  a picture and a download card. It was recorded in Los Angeles in the Sound Factory which is next to Sunset Studios. We had a Grammy award winning engineer (Ryan Freeland). It was mixed by our drummer Marc. He's a top notch engineer and the proof is that when the mixes were sent to Bernie Grundman who said "who did the mixes?" He though they were brilliant as he barely had to do anything. He just ran it through his analog gear. 

Did you release it yourselves?

It's Trapline Productions, which is me and another fellow.

Is it your first album with The Vipers?

I have,  me the Petunia guy, eight or nine albums. We did another one before this one which was just done to have something to sell on the road. We did it in, like, four days. We were leaving in five or six days and we went into the studio, a room. We brought in our gear and laid it down. Spent a day or so non-stop mixing it and mastering it, then we were on the road. Just so we could have a CD to sell. This is kind of the official debut. 

How has Europe taken to you guys?

Excellent. 

Different feel from the audience?

It is the reverse. We have had to adjust. I'm not faulting anyone. They're just different. Here's the thing how do you respond?

LH: Well, we get into it, enjoy some real country and tap our feet.

Petunia: That's the level of understanding here while in America the level of understanding is people getting up to dance and drinking loads of beer. The two audiences see things differently. In a bar in America people make a lot of noise and they drink. That's the norm. There's no one telling you to shush. If some guys says ‘ shhh’  he's liable to get punched out. But here they listen. But there if the band is really good they do shut up and they listen because they are genuinely interested. But there are no rules and it's not like you are creating them. If they listen, then you're creating a scene. That's something special. So you know you're doing something good when that happens. You don't have that sense over here because everyone's quiet anyway. They're ready for things on a more intellectual level. It may even be the use of language. With the Irish or Scottish you have conversations on a different level. We have played in many theatre settings and when people are sitting and watching you they're ready for some that's a more intellectual kind of stimulation that the average American person. But I haven't been here long enough to say. I used to live in London for a year but I didn't go see too much music. I lived in Brixton, Leytonstone and Stoke Newington. I just spent time in all these places, in squats mostly. There wasn't much live music I could pay for. I played a little bit but didn't make any money playing in London. This is the first tour here with the band so I'm trying to add little side of the theatrical to the show. Talking between songs, things like that. We make some space for people to dance if they want to at the sit-down shows too. When people do that,  it helps, because when people are dancing you feed off that. 

Petunia: Do people here dance less?

There's a bit more self-consciousness about dancing with a band playing, everyone waits for someone else to start but once it breaks out it can spread quickly. These less inhibition in a dance club with a DJ though. 

How much of what you do is about being an entertainer rather than just a musician?

A bit of both.  If people are there for a good time,  then it's part of the job to give them a good time. But also as a musician, what it is historically to play music in front of people, then you have to look at your role. Its part spiritual and part entrainment. The spiritual part is wide and you have to consider too what's your responsibility as a musician? I could be operating on any level in trying to do that. If that includes politics or something sociological or religion or whatever I think people are interested. 

Well the origins of country music comes from the blues and a mix of different influences that reflected peoples lives to a large degree.

Take someone like Hank Williams. You think of him playing blues music or country blues. You don't think he's a rebel but if you're back in 1948/49 and you're in a place that's full of white people I can imagine that his playing a music that nobody was doing then as no one is doing exactly what he's doing and it's to a white audience so that's a socio-political statement without even talking about politics, just by the fact he's doing it. Johnny Cash told a young song writer "don't talk about politics" but he himself was a political figure I suppose. Yet he did songs like Don't Take Your Guns to Town. His songs don't usually talk about thing directly but they are stories that a relevant none the less. 

Interview by Stephen Rapid. Photography by Ronnie Norton

Interview with Ben Kyle by Stephen Rapid

 

Ben Kyle is a singer and songwriter who has just released his debut self-titled album after being a part of the band Romantica and releasing an album of duets with Carrie Rodguiez (We Still Love Our Country). Ben Kyke’s album was a surprise when I first heard it and became a firm favourite and one of the albums of the year. So Lonesome Highway to the opportunity to ask Ben about his background and his musical influences.

Ben, you left Ireland when you were 13. What memories do you have of living here before that?

Oh many, many very good memories indeed. I recollect a very rich boyhood; mostly memories of family and friends, schools and sports. I was the third of seven children. My father was a medical doctor turned ecumenical pastor, a sort of physician turned spiritualist. You could say he went from being concerned with healing bodies to healing hearts.

My mother played field hockey for Ireland. I like to say she was an international sports star turned head coach of 7 children. We were a Protestant family with a Catholic fertility ethos! We grew up in a type of community life, frequently engaged with not just our own friends but our parent’s friends, stopping in for tea, coming over for dinner, or often living with us.

It was a fairly routine life, with summer holidays on the same beach each year... I had four brothers with which to hone my football skills and 2 sisters with whom to enact faux weddings and living room concerts. 

Did you inherit any musical impulses or roots from your Irish heritage? 

I imagine I did although growing up, as many do nowadays, with an eclectic soundtrack, it's difficult to discern what really came from where.  But there IS something of the land, the air, the ethos of the place you are from, that remains with you in your soul and comes out through your music.  We did learn traditional songs in school and those melodies still resonate with me.  GK Chesterton once wrote of the Irish "All their wars are merry and all their songs are sad".   If there's a sweet mellowness or a melancholy longing in my music I think it may come from here. I think of the Irish poetic heritage too; Synge, Swift, Wilde, Yeats and Joyce among many, and their great concern with words. A reverence for words has followed me too.

What are your earliest memories of music and your initial influences,  and when did you start to play?

My grandmother was a pianist, organist and choir director.  My father was a songwriter himself and wrote a lot of music for the church. We used to have family 'praise times' where we'd all sing together and play our own instruments. I shared a room with my older brother and on Saturdays he would always be tuned in to the "Top 40 Countdown" on the radio. They would be giving away albums to the first 5 callers and he would just sit there with the phone on re-dial! That's how we built our first record collection!  I remember some of the spoils- Paul Simon, Lionel Richie, The Boss.  As I look back, I realize there were a lot of classic songwriters in rotation; Dylan, Van Morrison, Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel among them too. We had an old Dylan songbook lying around, so when I picked up the guitar, those were the first songs I learned to play. But in our house it was as natural to make up your own songs as it was to play somebody else's, so I began a sort of rudimentary writing right away. My uncle had a moderately successful duo group in the 70's called "Stewart and Kyle," so I joined ranks with my boyhood chum Ricky Higginson and formed "Higg and Kyle" - it didn't have quite the same ring - and we began gathering material for our first album by photocopying pages from the biblical book of 'Revelation' that seemed to provide colorful enough imagery to set some tunes to. The album was shelved by "Higg and Kyle Records" for obvious reasons, but the ambition was clearly there, and it would only be a matter of time before that aspiring songwriter matured and refined some of his own 'revelations'.

Some early years were spent learning and imitating songs that I enjoyed listening to, with less compulsion to write. But after my family's emigration to America at the tender age of 13, I was ripe and ready to coalesce and express some of the things I was feeling and observing about my 'new world' in the song form. These early musings came out in a sort of Dylan inspired, but adolescently awkward and youthfully self-righteous toned, socio-political commentary. Thankfully any demonstration recordings have been long-lost or burned and these early sketches survive only in the forgivingly nostalgic memories of a few teenage campfire companions!

Was Romantica your first band?

Yes. I continued to write and play through my teens. I tried to give up music while enrolled in Art School so I could give myself fully to the studies, but I was never able to really let go. I even showed up at a painting critique once with a song instead of a painting. (Thankfully, I'd a gracious professor.)  But after I finished the degree, I knew the next thing was to follow the music. So that's when I began Romantica.

There's a clip of you playing I Don't Want To Go Out Tonight with Romantica. Were some of the songs written over a period of time that feature on your solo album?

Yes they were. I had been playing a few of the songs with Romantica, but they just seemed to fit the feel and context of this album.  

The mini-album you recorded with Carrie Rodriguez quite obviously suggests that you have a love for traditional country. How deep was that?

I discovered traditional country through Gram Parsons. There's a purity and straightforwardness about it that I love, but there's also a charm and an easy self-consciousness about it, like "I take myself really seriously" but at the same time "I don't take myself too seriously."  As a band it was our favorite touring soundtrack. Many a highway mile was passed to the sound of Hank, Lefty, Marty, Buck, Merle, Porter, Dolly, Townes, George, Cash and co.

How did you decide what songs to record given you had a limited amount of studio time?

We each threw some ideas out and landed on the ones that we both agreed on, and felt we could give our own 'thing' to. 

Do you intend to record together, in that way, in the future?

It was a brilliant experience with Carrie and the band and I love recording that way... locked up, with the limit of a couple of days.  There's no plan at the moment, but if the stars align, I'd do it again, for sure.

Is your solo album a side-step or do you intend to continue as a solo artist?

It wasn't a side step, so much as a next step and I'm seldom aware of what's two steps ahead!  I imagine there'll be more Ben Kyle releases, but there could quite possibly be more Romantica releases too.  

Some of the songs suggest a weariness with traveling and need to be closer to your family. Is that an option for a working musician?

It's a great question. It's definitely a tension. I think it's all about finding the right balance. And also about defining what you do and hope to do. If you hope to be a sensation, then you probably ought to assume the kind of rigorous touring schedule that the industry demands. If you hope, as I do, to be open to a sort of spiritual navigation system, have a grounded family life, make beautiful albums and sustain a living by periodically traveling to perform and share that music in a meaningful live experience... then yes, you can be a working musician and remain close to your family!

You use the pedal steel as an integral part of the sound on the new album.  In one case you have four separate steel players. What attracts you to an instrument that was so integral to country music at one time?

I love the sound of the steel guitar. The way it bends and moves so fluidly from note to note, chord to chord. The way it swells in and gently departs. It's very analogous to a feeling.  To me, it sounds like spirit in its very timbre and tone. Especially when played with less 'twang' and more 'vibe'.  It carries longing. In a sense, the steel guitar is to American country music, what the low whistle or the uilleann pipes are to Irish music. It's not a wonder Daniel Lanois calls it his 'church in a suitcase'. 

This album is self-released. Is that the best path for you?

It's good for this moment.  I wanted to understand the benefits and drawbacks.  It allows me the autonomy to follow the sort of path I outlined before.  But it also gives me an appreciation for the role and function of a good label.

What is the best way to get to know Ben Kyle?

By reading this interview!  The new album is very personal, so that's a good way too.  

What is music to you?

Music is about feeling. It's all about feeling. Getting a feeling,  expressing a feeling. Expressing how we feel in this world in a medium that can be felt by everybody.

Do you have any plans to return to Ireland?

I love Ireland.  I don't imagine finding myself living there again, although I wouldn't resist her if she called - and gave me a good reason. But I hope to return often to visit and to play. 

Interview with Ryan Bingham

 

Ryan Bingham released his latest album on his own Axster Bingham Records , a label he formed with his wife Anna Axster, after three albums on Lost Highway. His most notable success so far has been with the song The Weary Kind that he wrote with producer T-Bone Burnett and which was featured in the Oscar winning film Crazy Heart. The Weary Kind is not indicative of the songs he is currently writing or playing. He has played in Dublin three times and his most recent Whelan's visit was without his band The Dead Horses, but with a new set of musicians and a shift in the sound which featured a mix of acoustic, roots and outright rock songs. We caught up with Ryan for a brief chat before the show.

Was it a good time to start your own label?

Well, it seems right. I have a good team around and we hired a publicist. We're working with Thirty Tigers in the US and we do separate deals for the album in other territories.

The songs on Tomorrowland seem to have  some anger and an amount of tenderness in them.

You know,  I never really thought about it while I was recording the record,  but after going back and listening to it I can hear a bit of that myself. After The Weary Kind and the film Crazy Heart it was the first time I'd taken any time off from the road, I took about a year off. There was a lot of stuff happening at the time. Right about when I made Mescalito my mother passed away and then right after The Weary Kind came out my father passed away. I was going through a rough time through all of that stuff. That and the way society is today for a young person growing up trying to deal with the world and trying to make sense of it both economically and with social issues is tough and that stuff just came out in my music. It comes from travel and the places I go to and the people I meet when I'm on the road and talk to. 

Playing the electric guitar had a lot to do with it as well. It was the first time where I had a place and could set up an amp and some pedals and experiment. The first time I played electric was when I did the first record and Marc Ford, who produced it, just handed me an electric guitar and said "I think this will fit your personality". But after that,  I never really had a chance to practice as we were straight out on the road and I was just playing rhythm guitar. I had to learn as I went along, so when I got home, as I say I set up and tried some different amps and began to experiment with the sound. I listen to a lot of stuff like The Clash, Zeppelin and Hendrix. I was learning about tone and just listening.

Did the perception after Crazy Heart that you were a county singer distract you from your natural course?

Oh yeah, totally. When I first started writing and recording I was still very much trying to figure it out, what direction I was going in and I still feel that I am. The more I learn and go on the road and tour,  the more I'm influenced by different styles, different music and different cultures. So when I get home I always feel that I'm experimenting and having some fun. For some record labels that's hard to market, especially when they need to put you in a genre, they need to find a place to put you so people can find a way to buy it. I had that country stamp of this is what it is. Any time I tried to veer in and out of that it was always something I had to deal with as I went along. I try not to worry about it too much.  

So where do you think your music will take you?

A lot of times it depends on what kind of mood I'm in. I still love playing acoustic guitar with that feeling of just a guitar and a song. That's where I started when I played in those little dives in Texas, in the roadhouses and stuff. You can always turn it into anything you want after that. You could bring in fiddles and banjos and make it folk or country or you can have the electrics. For me, I don't like to be restricted as I'm kind a free spirit and like to roam around and be adventurous.

Your roots and stories still have their basis in that Texas tradition though.

Totally. My foundation is that. That's how I still write. Even though this time I wrote on an electric guitar, it was still just me and the guitar. The tones and tempos came from that and whatever mood or feeling you’re in. But it definitely starts with a guitar and a song. 

Does you process start with the words or music first?

I've always got to start with the music first it seems. It's always sitting and playing around with the key or the melody that brings out whatever emotion it is. Sometimes I don't know what that emotion is at the beginning. It turns into whatever it is and I have to go back and then try to figure what it's really about. 

Following the success of Crazy Heart and The Weary Kind,  did a lot of offers come in for soundtrack work?

I did get some offers to do some fairly straight pop-country stuff. Put the cowboy hat on and polish the boots up,  but I really didn't think that was a good direction for me if I want to be creative and experiment in the future with my music, so I just tried to stick to what I was doing. 

The fact you now have your own label gives you that freedom.

Yes it does.

How has this tour been going?

It's been great. I'd been off for about a year and a half so I just did some dates back home and with all the new music and new sound it was interesting. It's always an adventure and you never know what it's going to be like till you get out there. We're having a blast. 

Who's the band? 

Matt Sherrod, who plays on the record and (also) plays with Crowded House, and his wife Kelly is playing bass. Evan Weatherford is on guitar. I met Matt through Justin Stanley the album's co-producer. They played with Beck years back. So I met Kelly through Matt and Evan was living in Nashville too. We just started jamming and playing.

Did you find the songs changing as you began to jam and rehearse?  

When we did they always seemed to take on a life of their own.

Would you have liked to go back and record them again after playing them live?

Very much so. Next year I'd love to do some live recording. We have a bunch of songs out there, and to find the right venue and have the energy of the crowd, who take it back and forth and to record that and the new ways of doing the songs is something I'm interested in trying. We keep it loose. I mean, we rehearse the songs to an extent but we leave space in there for them to take on a life of their own.

With your own label and channels of selling your music, is that an effectives means of survival for an independent band?

I think so, if you're willing to get out on the road and tour. Because I remember when I first started and was doing home recordings and demos and playing small gigs in roadhouses and places that, the internet was around and websites were beginning and you could at least put your tour dates there if you had an savvy. Now with social media (you) can instantaneously let people know that you’re coming into town. You can sell your music off your own website so It's like worldwide distribution. So if you’re out there, it's easier than ever to build a fan base. 

How important is a physical CD for you?

I don't know. We still have a lot of people who like to buy them. A lot of people are buying vinyl, especially at shows. I can see there being more vinyl with a download card included or both together. But a lot of younger kids are buying vinyl. It's pretty cool to see. But in some cases labels will wait to see what the demand is before they go and print up thousands of copies. I think people still like to have something to hold onto. Some friends of ours - a band call The Americans -  a folk/jug band, who can play a set of music from the 20s or the 40s, all old-timey influences -  they did their own album and they bought decks of playing cards and put a download code on that . The cards had their logo on and they sold that at gigs.

How far do you think ahead as regards what you might do? 

It's such an adventure and it changes from one day to the next, so it's hard to have any expectations as to where you're going to be (laughs). I'm enjoy the journey and writing songs and I'm enjoying playing with this new band. They're a lot of fun and inspiring to play with and so has (been) setting up the new label and the creative freedom to know that I can get into it and see what I can come up with. There's the idea of the live album and also, maybe, a double album with one half acoustic and one half  electric.  Ten songs on each half.  It's nice to be able to play both ways as I still love to do acoustic shows too.

Interview by Stephen Rapid. Photography by Ronnie Norton

Interview with Ed Romanoff

Meeting Ed Romanoff one encounters a friendly and curious man who has had a successful backstage career in the entertainment industry, working on the staging and presentation of a wide range of shows and events. He comes late to the world of being on stage rather than backstage and is a talented writer and engaging performer in his own right. We talked to Ed before his first live show in Dublin. 

You were a late starter to songwriting I believe?

Yes, I was. It's something I became interested in in 2009. I had a thought that I really wanted to start writing songs, so I started to go to songwriting retreats. That's where I met Mary (Gauthier). She was teaching, as was Darrell Scott and Beth Nielsen Chapman.  I also met Josh Ritter there. He and I became good friends. I'm a curious person by nature so I wanted to know the craft side. Just what makes it work, how could you build a song that would hold up, before you get into the inspired side of writing, of what you're trying to say? 

Then there was another guy who I met out in California who was really interesting. He took apart a lot of the Beatles' songs and analyses why they worked. I don't know if they were aware of what they were doing and that they were doing it intentionally, but there's a pattern to a lot of Beatles' songs. I find that kind of stuff compelling. 

So I was a late starter and I guess you know my story? Which is; I thought I was tone-deaf and in the family I grew up in, my father was tone-deaf, so I didn't sing. But I liked music and I started to play the guitar and I wanted to write some songs so I started to take voice lessons. That was with a guy named Bill Riley who is a voice coach in the city, in Manhattan. He works with people like Celine Dion, Stevie Wonder and Pavarotti. The first time I went to see him (Riley) I was so nervous to be sitting in the same seat that Bruce Springsteen sat (in), I could barely breathe. I was nervously sitting there and he said "first of all, your posture's terrible and you have cleared your throat 20 times since you walked in the door and I'm not doing anything until you gargle". He took me in the kitchen a made a baking soda mixture with warm water which he had me gargle.

That was about two and a half years ago. Working with him I have extended my range dramatically. I could sing maybe within twelve notes and now I have three octaves. I had four notes in the low end I didn't know existed.  None of the high end too.  That was something I would never have even tried. So it turned out I'm not tone-deaf as I had thought I was. The father I grew up with I had discovered was not my father. 

Some people sing so great and they talk good. Whereas if you don't sing that good, and that's a category I put myself, you have to think about what you’re saying. I also come from the Mary Gauthier school.  I was taking her class and I knew her a little bit, but not that well, and I knew she was working on her record about having been adopted (The Foundling) so I sent her a demo of a song I'd written called Orphan King and she liked it and she asked me to finish it with her. I couldn't believe it, as a student for your teacher to say "I like your demo let's go work on it down in New Orleans". That, at the orphanage where I was left on the day I was born, and that was like as if John Prine had said "hey, do you want to go and get a sandwich". 

So we flew down to New Orleans and we stayed near the orphanage in a hotel, this was after Katrina, and the place was in bad shape. I literally slept with my boots on as there had been a power outage earlier and there had been people outside my window trying to figure out how they could get in. I figured that if they got in I could run down the hallway. We then finished the song The Orphan King and it got on the record, stunningly. Working on that song was an eye opener to me as it was the first time for me to see a person's process. Mary is the bar by which I aim to be. We went through probably 80 drafts of that song. It was so fascinating to watch how she worked. She's inspired and she's hard working. She comes at thing with an insight. She says amazing things, so I used to follow her around with a note book. Every single word was looked at and when we were done she said “if anyone asks you just tell them we wrote it in the cab on the way to the studio” (laughs).

Some writers spend a lot of time getting a song right.

It matters.  I'm pretty new at it as I've only been writing since 2009. I have found that for me, and my experience is limited, that it helps me to get close to where I think it's done and then to play it out at some clubs where I get a chance to play and I find out how the songs ‘grows up’ in a way. There are certain words you feel fall away and areas where you begin to feel that something else might work better. 

For those of us who are fascinated by the process of making music it's important to be involved in some way.

I agree. That's why I started to work as a producer behind the scenes. I produced entertainment shows for years and years. I did comedy with all kinds of people from Jay Leno, George Burns and a lot of country acts - Reba McEntire. I worked with a lot of Motown bands too, producing their live shows. I liked being around it. But I never dreamed that I would be on a stage, ever. A, I was terrified and B, I didn't think that I could do it.

The one cover on the album is the Harlan Howard, Hank Cochran song I Fall To Pieces.  How did that come about?

A friend of mine said why not do that Patsy Cline cover and I thought "mmm, a Patsy Cline cover? That's insane. Why would I do that?” but I played it and I really connected with the song. Then I found out that (co-writer) Harlan Howard had been in a lot of foster homes as a kid and it apparently ended up with him being in a foster home where his mother lived and so the legend goes that song is really about his mother, but who knows if that's true? 

When I started playing it and it started to go down well live and when I started to work with Crit Harmon as a producer, who's fantastic, he said let's move it down one and a half steps and swamp it up a little bit. I had a mixed sense about it and I was looking for something on it. In the studio Duke Levine was playing the riff and in doing it I had made a mistake on one of the words. When you have great writers like that you don't change the words and I said "Crit, I got to redo that as I sang one of the words wrong". He said "No. It's done, don't break it". That was our one pass. It was our practice run and he said "don't break it". I was thinking I've song a word wrong and people are going to think that I think I know better. So I said "Please let me sing it again" and he insisted that as I was playing it on the acoustic the mics were picking up everything and it wouldn't work. 

Crit Harmon is a believer in that there is a magic to certain takes, and it's hard to figure out which one it is, and if you start thinking too much you're just singing words. It now seems right to me that very often the first one has got a certain charm to it. So what he did was after we'd done the basic tracks, there are four tracks I believe where the vocal was the first take, and we went back and we took those basic tracks and every night we did one shot at each song. We had a candle lit and a cup of whiskey and we did it like a show. We did that four nights in a row and we picked the best first passes. So there's very little punching in. In the end it was worth it. And almost invariably it was the first one of the night that had it. It's one of the reasons why I Fall To Pieces went so well for us as it's such a perfect song. I feel if the writing's worked out in advance then the other stuff falls into place. If there's something not right with the song, then it can take a bunch of time to fix. 

Covers tend to say something about a writer by the choices that are made in picking a song.

Josh and I have talked about this as I was deciding whether to put a cover on the album and he said "You know sometimes it's hard for people to decide if they like somebody until they hear how you interpret someone else's song". I thought that was interesting. I have been opening for a woman recently called Rachael Yamagata. She's a really special writer - she's like, if this is possible, the female Townes Van Zandt of female piano singer/songwriters. She just says and does things that she doesn't know why she's doing them. She is so special. She invited me to go on the road with her and she's in that same place as Mary. I couldn't believe it when she invited me. 

I opened for her on one show and this is when I was working behind the scenes, about five or six years ago. And I didn't play piano but I started to take piano lessons when I was doing the voice lessons. So anyway I wanted to play a song of hers that I was there the day they recorded it as I felt a connection to it. So I played one of her songs opening for her and it was interesting because the people in the audience knew the song so they were able to sing along. It might have been a bit of a crazy choice to cover the song of the act you’re opening for, but that's the thing about being a little naive about it. I don't know enough to know when I'm doing something, so that allows me take some chances. Now I'm going to get to play it on tour with her and sing the song with her. 

What do you intend to do next?

I'm halfway through the next record. I'm working on two projects right now - one is a book and the other is the next record. The songs I did for this record are all basically true stories. Lady Luck is about my cousin. TwoYellow Roses is about my hometown. St Vincent is kinda autobiographical, Sacred Wrecks the same. But, to be honest, I'm over that,  but I had to get them out, I guess. They were sort of in the way. So now I've got one about a bank robber named Willie Sutton. He's famous in the US, he's was an Irishman actually. He robbed 200 banks but got pardoned by Governor Rockefeller. That was because he was such a popular guy and Rockefeller wanted to get re-elected, pardoned him and did get re-elected. I found that very interesting so I write the song about him and I really like it.  

The songs I'm doing right now they feel the same but their happy and they're kinda on the other side of things. Another that I've finished that I like a lot is called Less Broken Now. There was a woman in my office who got Lyme Disease and she almost died. But, thankfully, she survived and I went to see her and I went to give her a hug but she had wires hanging out and I said "I don't want to hurt you" and she said "oh, it's ok I'm a little less broken now". So I took that and wrote a song about a relationship. So I'm having a lot of writing about these different things. 

What's the book about?

The book is about... it started with the DNA test I took with Mary. We were on the road and she said she was going to take this DNA test because she don't know who her family was and so I said "I'll take it too". I woke up one morning and I looked in the mirror and all these years I thought I was a composite of my parents. So I saw my Mum and my Dad in the mirror and then I look and I'm thinking "ok, who's this half?". 

That was a weird feeling and as I like puzzles I thought "well here's one". So I wanted to solve it. I decided I could either hand it off and get someone to look into it or do it myself. So what I did was, when my mother died, I went through her address book and her scrap book and then I flew round the country and started to interview my mother’s friends. So the book is about the conversations I had with these elderly women and from that I found out what happened. It was amazing and these women were so funny. I didn't find out who my father was but I found out how it happened. Then I found a family who it could have been but the guy had passed away so I met his kids and we have since become really good friends. 

It also turned out that my DNA matched this guy Niall Of The Nine Hostages. I was like "this can't be right" so I sent it in and the science was done with this group who said "you're in". So my name is in now next to McCracken, O'Malley, O'Connell. A bit like a New York City fire department roster. (laughs). Then it's Romanoff! But it turns out we're related. This family who I have now become friends with, they have the exact same DNA, but not the same genome. So they are also related and they didn't know it either. We're actually distant cousins, not half-siblings. In the DNA breakdown there was 4% Ghanaese and I can't dance (laughs). I have to really practice with a metronome for tempo. I was told that this was over a very long period of time. But the majority was Irish. I didn't believe it at first. 

Meeting Ed Romanoff one encounters a friendly and curious man who has had a successful career in the background of the entertainment industry working on the staging and presentation of a wide range of shows and events. He comes late to the world of being in stage rather than backstage and is a talented writer and engaging performer in his own right. We talked to Ed before his first live show in Dublin. 

You were a late starter to songwriting I believe?

Yes I was. It's something I became interested in in 2009. I had a thought that I really wanted to start writing songs, so I started to go to songwriting retreats. That's where I met Mary (Gauthier). She was teaching, as was Darrell Scott and Beth Nielsen Chapman, I also met Josh Ritter there. He and I became good friends. I'm a curious person by nature so I wanted to know the craft side. Just what makes it work, how could you build a song that would hold up before you get into the inspired side of writing of what you're trying to say? 

Then there was another guy who I met out in California who was really interesting. He took apart a lot of the Beatles' songs and analyse why they worked. I don't know if they were aware of what they were doing and that they were doing it intentionally but there's a pattern to a lot of Beatles' songs. I find that kind of stuff compelling. 

So I was a late starter and I guess you know my story? Which is that I thought I was tone-deaf and in the family I grew up in my father was tone-deaf, so I didn't sing. But I liked music and I started to play the guitar and I wanted to write some songs so I started to take voice lessons. That was with a guy named Bill Riley who is a voice coach in the city, in Manhattan. He works with people like Celine Dion, Stevie Wonder and Pavaroti. The first time I went to see him I was so nervous to be sitting in the same seat that Bruce Springsteen sat, I couldn't barely breathe. I was nervously sitting there and he said "first of all, your posture's terrible and you have cleared your throat 20 times since you walked in the door and I'm not doing anything until you gargle". He took me in the kitchen a made a baking soda mixture with warm water which he had me gargle.

That was about two and a half years ago. Working with him I have extended my range dramatically. I could sing maybe within twelve notes and now I have three octaves. I had four notes in the low end I didn't know existed. None of the high-end too. That was something I would never have even have tried. So it turned out I'm not tone-deaf as I had thought I was. The father I grew up with I had discovered was not my father. 

Some people sing so great and they talk good.Whereas if you don't sing that good, and that's a category I put myself, you have to think about what your saying. I also come from the Mary Gauthier school. I was taking her class and I knew her a little bit but not that well and I knew she was working on her record about having been adopted (The Foundling) so I sent here a demo of a song I'd written called Orphan King and she liked it and she asked me to finish it with her. I couldn't believe it, as a student for your teacher to say "I like your demo let's go work on it down in New Orleans". That at the orphanage where I was left on the day I was born and that was like as if John Prine had said "hey, do you want to go and get a sandwich". 

So we flew down to New Orleans and we stayed near the orphanage in a hotel, this was after Katrina, and the place was in bad shape that I literally slept with my boots on as there had been a power outage earlier and there had been people outside my window trying to figure out how they could get in. I figured that if they got in I could run down the hallway. We then finished the song The Orphan King and it got on the record, stunningly. Working on that song was an eye opener to me as it was the first time for me to see a person's process. Mary is the bar by which I aim to be. We went throughly probably 80 drafts of that song. It was so fascinating to watch how she worked. She's inspired and she's hard working. She comes at thing with an insight. She says amazing things, so I used to follow here around with a note book. Every single word was looked at and when we were done she said if anyone asks you just tell them we wrote it in the cab on the way to the studio (laughs).

Some writers spend a lot of time getting a song right.

It matters, I'm pretty new at it as I've only been writing since 2009, I have found that for me and my experience is limited that it helps me to get close to where I think it's done and then to play it out at some clubs where I get a chance to play and I find out how the songs grows up in a way. There are certain words you feel fall away and areas were you begin to feel that something else might work better. 

For those of us who are fascinated by the process of making music it's important to be involved in some way.

I agree, that's why I started to work as a producer behind the scenes. I produced entertainment shows for years and years. I did comedy with all kinds of people from Jay Leno, George Burns and a lot of country acts - Reba McIntyre. I worked with a lot of Motown bands too producing their live shows. I liked being around it. But I never dreamed that I would be on a stage, ever. A, I was terrified and B, I didn't think that I could do it.

The one cover on the album is the Harlan Howard, Hank Cochran song I Fall To Pieces how did that come about?

A friend of mine said why not do that Patsy Cline cover and I though "mmm, a Patsy Cline cover? That's insane". Why would I do that but I played it and I really connected with the song. Then I found out that (co-writer) Harlan Howard had been in a lot of foster homes as a kid and it apparently ended up with him being in a foster home where his mother lived and so the legend goes that song is really about his mother, but who knows if that's true? 

When I started playing it and it started to go down well live and when I started to work with Crit Harmon as a producer, who's fantastic, he said let's move it down one and a half steps and swamp it up a little bit. I had a mixed sense about it and I was looking for something on it. In the studio Duke Levine was playing the riff and in doing it I had made a mistake on one of the words. When you have great writers like that you don't change the words and I said "Crit, I got to redo that as I sang one of the words wrong". He said "No. It's done, don't break it". That was our one pass it was our practice run and he said "don't break it". I was thinking I've song a word wrong and that people are going to think that I think I know better. So I said "Please let me sing it again" and he insisted that as I was playing it on the acoustic the mics were picking up everything and it wouldn't work. 

Crit Harmon is a believer in that there is a magic to certain takes and it's hard to figure out which one it is and if you start thinking too much you're just singing words. I now seems right to me that very often the first one has got a certain charm to it. So what he did after we'd done the basic tracks, there are four tracks there I believe were the vocals was the first take, and we went back and we took those basic tracks and every night we did one shot at each song. We had a candle lit and a cup of whiskey and we did it like a show. We did that four night in a row and we picked the bet first passes. So there's very little punching in. In the end it was worth it. And almost invariably it was the first one of the night that had it. It's one of the reasons why I Fall To Pieces went so well for us as it's such a perfect song. I feel if the writing's worked out in advance then the other stuff falls into place. If there's something no right with the song then it can take a bunch of time to fix. 

Covers tend to say something about a writer by the choices that are made in picking a song.

Josh and I have talked about this as I was deciding whether to put a cover on the album and he said "You know sometimes it's hard for people to decide if they like somebody until they hear how you interpert someone else's song". I thought that was interesting. I have been opening for a woman recently called Rachael Yamagata. She's a really special writer - she's like, if this is possible, the female Townes Van Zandtz of female piano singer/songwriters. She just says and does things that she doesn't know why she's doing them. She is so special. She invited me to go on the road with her and shes's in that same place as Mary. I couldn't believe it when she invited me. 

I opened for her on one show and this is when I was working behind the scenes., about five or six years ago and i didn't play piano but I started to take piano lessons when I was doing the voice lessons. So anyway I wanted to play a song of hers that I was there the day that they recorded it as I felt a connection to it. So I played one of here songs opening for her and it was interesting because the people in the audience knew the song so they were able to sing along. It might have been a bit of a crazy choice to cover the song of the act your opening for but that's the thing about being a little niave about it. I don't know enough to know when I'm doing something so that allows me take some chances. Now I'm going to get to play it on tour with her and sing the song with her. 

What do you intend to do next?

I'm halfway through the next record. I'm working on two projects right now - one is a book and the other is the next record. The songs I did for this record are all basically true stories. Lady Luck is about my cousin. TwoYellow Roses is about my hometown. St Vincent is kinda autobiographical, Sacred Wrecks the same. But, to be honest, I'm over that but I had to get them out, I guess. They were sort of in the way. So now I've got one about a bank robber named Willie Sutton. He's famous in the US, he's was an Irishman actually. He robbed 200 banks but got pardoned by governor Rockerfeller. That was because he was such a popular guy and Rockerfeller wanted to get re-elected, pardoned him and did get re-elected. I found that very interesting so I write the song about him and I really like it. 

The songs I'm doing right now they feel the same but their happy and they're kinda on the other side of things. Another that I've finished that I like a lot is called Less Broken Now. There was a woman in my office who got limes disease and she almost died. But, thankfully, she survived and I went to see her and I went to give her a hug but she had wires hanging out and I said "I don't want to hurt you" and she said "oh, it's ok I'm a little less broken now". So I took that and wrote a song about a relationship. So I'm having a lot of writing about these different things. 

What's the book about?

The book is about... it started with the DNA test I took with Mary. We were on the road and she said she was going to take this DNA test because she don't know who her family was and so I said "I'll take it too". I woke up one morning and I looked in the mirror and all these years I thought I was a composite of my parents. So I saw my Mum and my Dad in the mirror and then I look and I'm thinking "ok, who's this half?". 

That was a weird feeling and as I like puzzles I thought "well here's one". So I wanted to solve it. I decided I could either hand it off and get someone to look into it or do it myself. So what I did was, when my mother died, I went through her address book and her scrap book and then I flew round the country and started to interview my mother;s friends. So the book is about the conversations I had with these elderly women and from that I found out what happened. It was amazing and these women were so funny. I didn't find out who my father was but I found out how it happened. Then I found a family who it could have been but the guy had passed away so I met his kids and we have since become really good friends. 

It also turned out that my DNA matched this guy Niall Of The Nine Hostages. I was like "this can't be right" so I sent it in and the science was done with this group who said "you're in". So my mane is in now next to McCracken, O'Malley, O'Connell. A bit like a New York city fire department roster. (laughs). Then it's Romanoff! But it turns out we're related. This family who I have now become friends with they have the exact same DNA, but not the same genome. So they are also related and they didn't know it either. We're actually distant cousins not half-siblings. In the DNA breakdown there was 4% Ghanaese and I can't dance (laughs). I have to really practice with a metronome for tempo. I was told that this was over a very long period of time. But the majority was Irish. I didn't believe it at first. 

Welcome to the tribe Ed.

Interview by Steve Rapid. Photography by Ronnie Norton

JD McPherson, Jimmy Sutton, Jason Smay Interview

 

When JD McPherson and the band played in Dublin recently (see live review) we were able to have a quick Q&A with band members JD, Jimmy Sutton, label head, bassist and producer and drummer Jason Smay.

One quote I read was that you had an inclination to sound like Stiff Little Fingers on Del-Fi Records so I figured you guys had a wider musical upbringing that some might expect.

JD: I keep forgetting about these things that I say. They pop back up and I laugh. 

Jimmy: You know what when you say something it's signed sealed and deliver and may come back on you.

Growing up in a small town like Broken Arrow was music your link to a wider, weirder world?

JD: Completely. It was all I did. Draw and listen to music and read about music. I read every magazine I could get my hands on. Photo copied fanzines as well as Creem and Spin and whatever. It was all there was to do. That and getting into trouble. 

What was the range of music that you were hearing back then?

JD: My Dad grew up in Alabama and his music was rural black music. He listened to blues and rhythm and blues. He also got into jazz in the army. I liked his blues stuff. I wasn't so much into the jazz when I was I school. I just didn't get it. He was listening to some pretty heavy stuff like Thelonious Monk. I love that now but back the I didn't. My Mom listened to whatever was easy listening on the radio at the time. So my first kinda thing when I started to get into music was through my older brothers. They were into Southern Rock and Arena Rock - Zeppelin, Hendrix. Basically guitar music. That what I was starting to do - play guitar. I though that Eddie van Halen was the best thing that there ever was. As I got older I realized that Bo Diddley was more interesting. 

We talked about the way music comes from a lot of sources and how early country music brought a lot of different strand together and later sophistacaction with singers like Ray Price. JD felt he was like a country Dean Martin and Jimmy said he had elements of jazz in his delivery, depending on what part of his career you were listening to. Music for all of us was a wide open world.

Jimmy was your background similar?

Jimmy: I grew up on the south-side of Chicago by the University of Chicago. It was a real inter-racial culture surrounded by a ghetto. Literally one block from my house was the start of Brownsville. I had all kind s of stuff hit me from all angles. But I have to tell you my first concert ever was Count Basie. He used to play our church on the south-side. My first rock concert, which was the day my brother said I turned cool was The Ramones, before that he said I was just a pest. When I do these interviews I think about it and when you slam Count Basie and The Ramones together you got something there. But in Chicago the local station they were playing Joy Division before anybody else. They were playing everything before it caught on. It was pretty eclectic. I kinda learned a lot from that but as JD said when your young you can only digest so much. So I was really listening to jazz and things like that back then. My brothers were a hugh influence on me and The Beatles were a big thing. The along came The Ramones and DEVO and I had a crush on Debbie Harry. But then a lot of that punk thing came along and it was hand in hand with rockabilly. All the cats - The Stray Cats, The Polecats, The Rockats, the Bob Cats. That was like my Kiss when I was a teenager. That open the doors. I think we all shared that experience and we all wondered "who wrote those songs?". So that's me in a nutshell.

Was it similar for you Jason?

Jason: I grew up in a small town near Rochester, New York. It was small and there was no real music scene in it. So I grew up listening to what my Dad listened to. That was Jimi Hendrix and Deep Purple, 60's rock music. I was always interested in rock 'n' roll so greaser culture was something I found myself in real quick. That's what I was brought up on. 

Jimmy: Greaser Culture, that's a good one (laughs).

You guys got together after JD contact you Jimmy?

Jimmy: Yeah, he contacted me on MySpace. When you get approached as I was and I was getting tapes all the time it was "Ok, sigh, here's another". So when I listened to JDs I was definitely taken by surprise. It was "yep, he's got it, that's my boy" (laughs). It's funny you guys both talked about your parents and I should mention mine. My Mum is from Peru so she listened to a lot of latin music. She was disorganized and had this record collection and there were two Elvis records in it, one was a gospel record and I forget what the other one was. My father listened to whatever was on the old-time radio which was WGN and that was mostly big-band jazz and vocal harmony groups - whatever was happening. 

Jimmy: I think the soul resurgence has helped us a little bit. We're not soul but I think we're maybe soulful. 

You are still touring Signs & Signifiers even though it came out on Hi-Style two years ago. Is that a something that holds you back?

JD: It came out in October 2010. 

Jimmy: October 18th. on my small little label Hi-Style. Which was just me talking a big game.

JD: It's fun to go into a new town and play this stuff, like tonight. I just know tonight's going to be wonderful. I just can't wait.

Jimmy: We have a great feeling about tonight.

Jason: I was a good sign that when we were coming in  the immigration guy said "Oh, you're playing in Whelans so you must be good! - have a good show"

Jimmy: While in Heathrow they just gave us shit.

You had a vision about how this project would sound and also how it would look?

Jimmy: Well both JD and I are art school kids. We are both into visuals and concepts. I think that's what attracted me to JD. 

JD: It's the talking about the concept for a record, the packaging and all that stuff is just as exciting as everything because that was part of one thing that I really liked, well two things actually, that I liked about punk. That was the economic freedom - the do everything yourself type of thing. The other was that all the bands were like tribes. Bad Brains was this... not even punk, David Bowie had tons of stuff to look at. So I love coming up with the visual side.

Jimmy: I goes along with the fact that most of us like to listen with our eyes.

The demise of packaging is somewhat over dramatized.

Jimmy: It's fun. It's exciting, another one of our senses engaged. We listen but we also want to look. 

Ronnie: You have got the look right, so the first thing that people who don't know the music see is the styling.

Jimmy: Thanks.

Ronnie: You tour list is pretty tight. Is that how it works for you guys?

JD: You worry more when you look at the schedule but when you just do it it's alright. 

Jimmy: It's pretty exciting times right now with the recording coming out on Rounder. It's kinda a fun ride.

JD: A shot in the arm for sure.

How do you go about touring?

JD: Back in the States with our regular set-up were hauling around an acoustic piano, an M3 and a Leslie. We put everything into it. 

Jason: You get into a groove with it as it's just what you do. When you do have a night off it feels, for me, wow, aren't we supposed to be doing something tonight? What's going on here.

Jimmy: As Jason said there something to be said for lack of schedule but it takes a bit of time to get there. It's almost like your internal clock. So going back to what you said about the schedule being insane but, I think, at this point were just like on. The record has been re-released and it feels like it has fresh legs. But yes we'd love to put out another record and play some new material but at this point we can't even figure out when we can rehearse.

Do you think that the music will change when you do do the new album?

JD: It occurred to me that when I made this record, for me, I just wanted to make a real traditional rock 'n' roll record.That it could be indistingishable from something from another time. I just wanted to do that because it was something I'd always wanted to do. But then getting to know Jimmy and getting to know the studio and being there and listening to stuff it was about half way through that things began to change a little bit. Songs like A Gentle Awakening and Signifiers were written. That's when I got really excited because  I sensed that this was a new thing to me. 

Jimmy: It also developed early on when some key words that came when we first started talking about trying to put out a timeless record and as JD's a great wordsmith so I started to wonde if I could push him to be more contemporary yet still timeless. To sound like you're not trying too hard. 

JD: Our conversations were around that too. I was talking about the three or four songs I had going into it like Scandalous. That's a very Lieber/Stolleresque thing as I was totally aping on those guys. The new record I still want to be rhythm 'n' blues but I really want to open that up a lot and mess with that.

Your look, sound and recording process are all rooted in an earlier era of music making. Is that something that is important to you methodology?

Jimmy: Well, we recorded most of it live right to quarter inch. That being said you have to have a good performance in the space that you are in. The microphones are going to pick up the same things so we had to sound good right there and then. That also made me think who I was going to get on the session - what piano player, what drummer as not all drummers can play to a smaller envoirnment and yet still sound intense. A lot of drummers are very heavy handed. Once they try to play quiet they sound like they're trying to play quiet and that's the thing. You need to get over that hurdle. The drummer I originally got was Alex Hall who was very fluid and he also knows how to rock. Someone like Scott Leigon the piano player he just loves all kinds of music. He loves Johnnie Johnson and the first time I heard him play we had this wedding band and we were playing this song with a simple left hand piece (Jimmy hums the riff) and he said "Oh. that sound's great" and he was more than happy just to play those three notes throughout the song and that's rare. You don't find that many players that do that. As far as guitar I think JD's a great guitar player. I love his styling. I think he want's to play like Eddie van Halen sometimes (laughs). I love the simplicity, it's the way his brain is working.

What's the plan  to achieve world domination?

JD: I just want to keep playing and making records but right now things are happening that I can't really explain. Last night Nick Lowe was in the dressing room and at another gig Tom Waits was in the audience. Dan Aurabch from the Black Keys came to a show in St. Louis. That kind of stuff freaks me out. 

When you played I heard some comparisons between you to early Blasters.

Jimmy; That's great I love The Blasters. 

JD; I remember when I first started to listen to punk rock I used to think "this is it, I'm a punk" and it was punks listen to this and skinheads listen to this and rude boys listen to this thing, each segmented, and then I remember reading about shows in the early 80s with the Blasters, Dwight Yoakam and X on the same bill and I was like "ok, you can have this cross pollenation of people". So I like it when we get a mix with the opening act. We did a show recently with a New York punk band Lucious and it was great.

Jimmy: If It's all the same thing then it numbs the senses.

Thanks guys.

Interview by Steve Rapid with Ronnie Norton. Photography by Ronnie Norton

JD Wilkes

 

According to online information Joshua "JD" Wilkes was born in Texas in 1972. He later moved to Paducah, Kentucky a State where he acquired his honoury title of Colonel, something that was bestowed on certain residents associated with the State. Wilkes is a southern renaissance man best known for his musical endeavours but who is also a film maker, his Seven Signs was premiered in 2007 and is available on DVD. He is a cartoonist with his Head Cheese strip appearing in Nashville's Metromix and his work also featuring in other publications. He had a book Grim Hymns that  featured his artwork and his sideshow banners can be viewed at www.jdwilkes.com/banners.htm a site that features his artwork in general. 

He founded the Th Legendary Shack Shakers in the late 1990s in Nashville, playing the honky-tonks on Lower Braodway. He is now the sole original member of the band. Their album Cockadoodledon't was released on BloodShot records in 2003 though a live recording of an earlier line up was featured on Hunkerdown released on Spinout in 1998.

Believe, Pandelirium and Swampblood were released on Yep Roc between 2004 and 2007. Their most recent album Agri-Dustrial came out via their own label Colonel Knowledge in 2010.

The Dirt Daubers, the band formed with his wife Jessica have released two albums. The most recent Wake Up Sinners was also released on Colonel Knowledge in 2011.

JD is a compelling frontman, a formidable harmonica player and musician, a distinctive singer and a rewarding writer and a honest interviewee. On his trip to Dublin with The Dirt Daubers Lonesome Highway presented these questions to him.

As the constant member in both Th’ Legendary ShackShakers and The Dirt Daubers how easy is to maintain a vision of what the both band are?

It’s easy to separate in my mind, since both bands have their own, separate, cerebral hemisphere deep inside my brain. They are separated by a synapse, with the Daubers on the right, the Shakers on the left. 

However, logistically, it can be tricky to “open up for yourself” night after night. And it’s tough keeping people hip to the differences between the bands too. Oh well. They’ll learn one of these days.

The Shack Shakers have had numerous members and you mentioned when we spoke that the band now has a new lead guitarist, can you fill us in on that?

Rod Hamdallah is our new guy.  He stepped in after Duane hopped off to play with Mike Patton’s Tomahawk project (and a new project with Einsterzende Neubauten members).

Rod’s great!  He’s got a bluesy, old soul that fits better with 95% of our material.  So expect to hear a more rockin’, bluesier/swampier sound from us in the future.

It would appear that, although the bands have members in common, the Dirt Daubers are a separate parallel entity rather than a side-project. Is that your intention?

It’s just easier using people you already know who are good.  Finding full time musicians, or “lifers” is a tall order.  LSS and DD have enough common musical roots that we can get away with such a thing.  And yes, the Daubers are a separate-but-equal act.

Have you any intentions to explore southern culture in any formats other than music following the film Seven Signs having done your cartoons as well previously?

Actually, I have more of the same...loaded up and almost ready to fire. New short films on southern musicians/visionaries have already been shot and are in the editing process. And Grim Hymns 2 is ready for printing, once some funds come in. No new media formats, just music, art, and film. Isn’t that enough?!!

Do the Shack Shakers have any intentions to record in the near future as you’ve written a bunch of new songs?

I have a whole record written for LSS. More swampy goodness and southern gothic lyrics. A bit of weirdness thrown in. You know how we are. It’ll be out late this year, early next year.

The Dirt Daubers old-time music still seems to edgy for some traditionalists, is it hard to get past the gate-keepers?

Screw ‘em. Old Time fans have already morphed into being as bad as Bluegrassers.  Funny how they don’t realize that, in Old Time music, it was quite “authentic” to be “wrong”...to play whatever and however the heck you wanted. There were no rules (except maybe those imposed by the limited technology of the day.)  Hell, if it made a noise and there was enough whiskey flowing, it was music, by God!   

“What’s that?  A jaw harp and a pump organ?  Let’s jam!” 

Looking back over the many fine albums and great gigs you have done what stands out for you?

Favorite records: Cockadoodledon’t and Swampblood.

Favorite gigs: Robert Plant tour, Bla Rock in Tromso, Unit D in Tulsa.

What would you rather forget?

Certain “former members”, if you know what I mean.

Agri-dustrial suggested a weary eye on the way rural/urban divide was heading. Do you still keep abreast of the political undercurrents in the US?

Yes, but Jessica helps remind me to not pay too close attention. What can I do about it anyway? I’m just waiting for the Big Meteor to hit.

Both your bands have developed a strong set of fans but how difficult is it for either band to reach a wider audience?

It’s difficult getting the right management. Seems like we’ve had a few duds in our days. Thank God the strength of the live show is what it is.  That is what continues to propel both bands, frankly. 

Despite the problems do you find your creative energies still need the music to express or exercise yourself?

Yes, but I have other outlets. Old Timey banjo playing is what consumes me now. Sometimes it distracts from my other interests and I’m sure I’m driving everyone nuts in the van.

You have built up a loyal following in Europe is that something you want to expand on?

Heck yeah. Especially England, Ireland and Holland. Those places are crackin’ for us, I tell you what.

An early champion was Robert Plant who had you support him on tour. Do you keep in touch now that he lives in Austin?

Not really, but his oldest friend and sound man is a very good pal of the band. They all have places in Nashville too, I think. 

How do you feel that the hillbilly underground is developing, there seems to be a lot of bands out there now?

It’s great as long as the song writing is literate. The whole point is too embrace what’s fun and wild about southern/Appalachian culture while still upholding its spiritual, lyrical and artistic integrity. Otherwise it’s just a belligerent parody that confirms the worst of those “Deliverance” stereotypes.

It’s about being a “wise fool”. Don’t forget about the “wise” part, though.

Any you have seen that have taken your fancy?

Ummm, how many times have I mentioned “Pine Hill Haints” over the years? Am I allowed to mention them again? Oh yeah, and I love “Serious” Sam Barrett, the English ballad singer from Leeds. The two tour together frequently.  

Do you like the direction that Hank3 is taking his music? In some ways his two sides are already reconciled in the Shack Shakers.

I like that he’s pushing the envelope in an experimental direction.  It’s not too terribly listenable to most folks (although I love auctioneering, I worked at an auction house for a year and it’s music to my ears) But, to most it’s challenging so, as a result, he’s got my respect.

What are your hopes for the future of both bands and given that you are doing joint gigs is that an ideal package, or is it hard to do both on the same evening?

As I said, it’s tough. We might need to put more distance between the two. Dirt Daubers should be seen as a parallel band, not a “side project.”

When can your fans expect to see you in person or on record next, or is that too early to say at this point?

Soon enough. Hopefully we’ll have a new record when we return this April. I think you’ll love this new guitarist’s take on things. Personally, it gives me goose bumps.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

Thank you!

Interview by Stephen Rapid. Photograph by Ronnie Norton

Glenn Frey Interview by Ronnie Norton

 

So here I am, Bluegrass Radio presenter, eZine contributor, and eternal  “Eagles” fan sitting, waiting for the phone to ring from Glenn Frey to chat about his upcoming solo album release. With “Desperado” on my mind and every “Eagles” CD on my shelves how do I approach an album called “After Hours “, which includes 14 late night piano songs that would do any of the white shirt and tux, boys proud.

It was very simple, I just listened to all the tracks, settled down on a very comfortable cloud nine and said “Tell me how this magic project came about”, when a very relaxed and wildly enthusiastic Country Rock Legend started chatting as though we had been pals since “Take It Easy” totally altered my musical direction in 1972. He loves to come to Ireland to play Eagle Concerts and even sneaks back to take low level helicopter rides to admire the wonderful Irish countryside, grab a game or two of golf and catch up on whatever Irish Trad he can get to listen to.

And then the bonanza. “After Hours” is the reward for two and a half years of dedicated fun, recording and nourishing the type of music that he listened to on the radio while helping his Mom with the ironing at home in his Grandma’s kitchen. He has dedicated this album to his folks who brought him up on a musical diet of Ella Fitzgerald, Teresa Brewer , Dinah Washington and all the white shirt and tux boys that I mentioned earlier. With fellow Eagles touring band mates  Richard F.W. Davis and Michael Thompson he has put together an album that is going to win him a lot of new fans and surprise all of his dedicated Eagles legions of die hards.

It started with providing a pal with eight hours of background music for a cool restaurant hangout in Aspen Colorado called “Andiamo” and then ten years later getting a request from none other than Clint Eastwood who was music organiser for the Wednesday nights at the AT&T ProAm Golf Tournament at Pebble Beach to sing one of his own songs and something from the 40’s for the volunteer party at the club. He remembered all his research CDs for the Andiamo project, discovered that he could sing Tony Bennett songs in Tony’s key and that lead to a regular gig every February with Jack Shelton’s band at Pebble Beach singing Tony Bennett classics. Apart from blowing the audiences away he found himself getting more comfortable and really enjoying this newfound musical outlet.

A few nights after one of these gigs his long time buddy Michael Bolton came over to him and said “Hey Glenn you sounded great doing that type of music. Have you ever thought of doing a record. “ So emboldened by this compliment and having already had the germ of an idea, when he got back to LA he hooked up with Richard and Michael as co-producers and did some trial recordings of “The Good Life”, I Wanna Be Around “ and “The Look of Love”.  He says “It sounded good and we would know, if it was good. So we went on and on and cut the records for real and two and a half years later with 14 track in the bag “After Hours “was born. And “It was fun doing it”.

When I remarked that I was impressed by the feeling that each track had an individual treatment, he  responded that putting the project together was like doing a thousand piece jig saw puzzle. You don’t do it in one sitting. You need to work on it for a while and then step away.  And because they were all working with the Eagles, they would do a few weeks in studio, tour for three or four weeks and come back with fresh ears. There was something nice about working on it over time, because “Distance brings clarity” “We worked on it very carefully and something that I learned from working with the Eagles and from the Beatles was that each one of these songs is like one of your kids. They need to be treated like an individual. Because I didn’t write any of the songs we were just caretakers and interpreters so we had to get it right and not do anything that is disrespectful to the material. It was so much fun working and finalising the record but in fact the “Journey was the reward”. This is a piano song album , it’s not a guitar song album so with musical arrangements from acclaimed New Zealander Alan Broadbent we’ve done a piano and voice album that has style, real style. And we’re really proud of it and looking forward to touring it.”

He hopes to play Ireland and other European countries in late June so it will be a pleasure to catch the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Famer in mellow mode with an album that I reckon will do for Glenn Frey what “Stardust” did for Willie Nelson.

Stand out tracks for me are the steel and guitar tinged “Route 66” and the very country flavoured “Worried Mind” but I think I’m going to have to battle with a certain red headed lady at home here for who gets ownership rights on this one.  And there will be many late night, head phones on , lights out  and totally chillin’ sessions for a long time to come. This album came to me out of the blue and I have no problem shifting loyalty from some of the finest new Bluegrass bands that are filling my airtime these days to listen to a potential classic from an Eagle who is really soaring to surprising new heights in this well chosen new direction.

Move over Vince Gill, there’s a new  “Voice” in town. 

Billy Yates Interview

 

Billy Yates is a gentleman in country music (though he should not to be confused with one namesake from bluegrass band Country Gentlemen) who has been through the major label wringer and emerged stronger to run his independent record company M.O.D. - My Own Damn Label. Through which channel he has released eight albums. Just Be You being the latest. He has toured in Europe and the UK and has now made the decision to tour and promote his work in Ireland. Billy did a series of gigs including one where he opened for Robert Mizzell and used his Country Kings band to back him up. Yates declared that he was "too country and proud of it" and his easy manner won him new fans. His set mixed his own material that included Flowers and songs that had a strong element of humour in titles like Daddy Had A Cardiac And Mama's Got A Cadillac as well as his song of tolerance American Voices and his George Jones co-write I Don't Need Your Rockin' Chair along side well received covers of songs from Merle Haggard, Gene Watson and George Strait. The audience immediately related to these choices and made sure his live set hit home. Yates will hopefully bring his own band on future gigs that will add an additional layer of energy and authenticity that comes from the experience of playing together over a period of time. On his gig and promotional tour Lonesome Highway took the opportunity to have a conversation with Billy.

There was a five year gap between your debut album on ALMO and your next release what has happening with your career during that time?

I was wasting my time trying to get another record deal (laughs). But actually when I was leaving ALMO Flowers was doing well. They were having a lot of problems with the label at the time as they had struggled for a long time to get the label off the ground in the Nashville division. I think that there was a lot of frustration in the promotion department. They were about to close their doors but they didn't really know it. But I knew it. I saw it coming. I had a call from Alan Butler, who was running Sony, and he had said "Billy can you get out of that deal?". I said I didn't know if I could get out of the deal or not but he told me "If you can get out of the deal I'll sign you here at Sony". So basically the time spent after leaving ALMO was the time spent trying to make something happen at Sony. That happens a lot of times, it's so not uncommon. A lot of people spend time with a label that doesn't work out. I have a lot of records in the can. I have one at RCA, one at Curb, one at Sony. So that's what I was doing at that time.

Is any of the unreleased material available to you?

I can re-record stuff of course, but as regards to those actual tracks I have no rights. But in all honesty I have evolved some and there were a lot of compromises forced upon me. So some of those works are things that I'm not that excited about. They're good. It's real country stuff because I fought for that. It's music I believed in but it was also a little watered down simply because you had committees that chose the material. 

When had you decided that being a singer and songwriter was your career path?

I grew up on a small farm in Missouri and I knew early on it was something I wanted to do. I didn't know how to dream as big as it actually got, even though it's not been hugh, I still didn't know how to dream that big being in a small town. I knew that the sky was the limit. But I was oblivious as to what was beyond the clouds. As a kid I knew it was something I wanted to do. I thought that that meant singing in some band locally. 

Was country your music of choice growing up or where there other influences?

That's kinda interesting as before I was born my parents house had burned down and they had loved country music and they had played it. So they had been given a gift from the radio station of a whole stack of records. It was Buck Owens, it was Jim Reeves, Carl Smith, Webb Pierce, George Jones, Lefty Frizzell. So you are what you eat so as kids we ate a lot of traditional country music. I always loved that. As I got older even when I was in high school country music was not cool. Not the think to do, you know, but I still loved it. I never lost my appetite for it. When I had my buddies in the car and I was driving round I would be listening to the local pop station just to keep everyone happy, but that didn't mean I liked it. When they weren't in the car I'd go to the highest point in the city and from there I could pick up the Grand Ole Opry. I would sit alone and listen to it a lot of nights and weekends when my friends were out partying. I had such a strong desire to hear that music and that never left. It's still there. I listen to a lot of different kinds of music but there's still only one type of music that gives me goosebumps. 

You wrote some songs with some great traditionally orientated writers including Paul Overstreet, Irene Kelley, Melba Montgomery, Shannon Lawson and Leslie Shatcher. Many of whom seemed to have fallen off the radar now, is it hard to find your self out of favour?

Yeah, one thing that Nashville is a little bit guilty of is that sometimes you're 'flavour of the month' and your lucky if you get to be that guy for awhile. For those guys, and obviously I'm not speaking for them, but I would guess that they would love to be back there. I'm sure they're still writing songs. I was recently at a songwriter's festival in Key West because I like to know what's going on and there were a lot of people there who have had a lot of success and I would love to be able to write with them. I've gone through a phase for the last two or three years were I've not been co-writing at all but have been writing by myself. Now I'm going back to a phase were I'm starting to co-write again. So I went to that Key West songwriters festival because I want to see who's happening. If you're going to co-write you might as well see if you can write with people who are having hits. 

Do you do that to learn something from their process?

I do, If you want to stay current you have to know what's going on. I don't want to live in a bubble. I try to do what I do best and as a artist I'm always going to be country. But I'm also a lyricist and when you write lyrics the way I do I love to hear a big pop melody and I consider how it would sound under one of my lyrics. I'm really broadminded that way. That's one thing that maybe sets me apart a little bit from most of the more traditional people that I know. Again, I know that it gives me goosebumps when I hear great music, 'cause I know it when I do hear it. So I really try to keep an open mind. 

In the 90s country seemed to have a way to particular edgy sound, a blend twang with the better aspects of rock. The way that artists like Dwight Yoakam and Bob Woodruff did for a time. Has that kind of innovation been purged from the mainstream?

That's was a really innovative time. It seems right now we're going through a phase where a lot of the writers are maybe trying too hard to get something on the radio. They're trying too much to get that rather than being innovators. I was writing at a big company and the president of the company came in and said "we have to talk about the songs we're writing and our direction. I'm talking to people at the record labels and they're saying that radio is want this and this and this". I raised my hand  and I said "well this is a promotion guy whose talking to some guy at the radio station and our job is to innovate. We shouldn't worry about what just got cut as when your chasing something you're behind it. If you're going to be a songwriter you need to be ahead and to innovate. I have to write today what's going to hit a year from now. 

In the way that Bill Anderson has been able to write songs that have worked through several decades. Country, but adapted to current trends.

Exactly. It's honest music. I think that's the key. What Jamey's doing is very honest. To me good music is honest. It doesn't matter what type it is if it has that quality. So I don't want to sit here and sound like I'm this big naysayer of what's happening in Nashville because it is what it is. You accept it if you're going to do business in that town. If I just sit and moan about it what good does that really do me? 

The Industry is changing a lot, what has the effect of that been in Nashville?

I think that some of the major labels have to be nervous, if they're being truthful, because the way the world works today is so much smaller with the internet and they way some artists are thriving. Independent artists are kicking ass. I want to be one of those I don't want to be the guy who has to fit in some mould. I sometimes explain it this way -there are acts and there are artists. If you're an act you need those people to tell you how to dress, how to sing and what songs to sing. If your an artist you don't need that. So with the independent world the way it is an artist can thrive and they find their audience and that audience can find them and that makes it honest music. All of a sudden you have a lot of great music out there. But you have to go and find it.  

Producing your music on your own label means that you are the one making those decisions. How does that effect you?

I haven't made any compromises. I don't have to apologize. If you don't like something then I take full responsibility. It was not something that was forced on me. As I get older (laughs), that's going to sound even older in print but I want to be doing this when I'm seventy and doing it my way - whatever that is. Whatever I feel compelled to do. 

You have made several inroads to Europe. This is your first visit to Ireland isn't it?

Yes, I've never come to Ireland before. This is my first tour here so I'm excited to be here. I've tried to be strategic about touring in Europe and Ireland is different as there is a big following for country and if you're going to do it I think you need to try and do it right. There are full time country stations here, you don't have that anywhere else in Europe. I see the future for country music in Europe as something really bright in Ireland and I want to be a part of it if the people will accept me. 

You have had covers from George Jones and George Strait but also by David Allen Coe and Dallas Wayne. Both ends of the scale, that must be satisfying?

You know the David Allen Coe thing is a funny story. He was in the studio working on this record and a buddy of mine was producing it, a guy named Danny Mayo. He called me as I knew Coe from the past as I used to promote shows and I had him on one, and that's another story, but  he's a character and he can be very intimidating. So Danny had called and said can you come to the studio as I'm cutting this record on Coe. So I went to the studio and they had already cut the tracks and Coe was doing his vocals and Danny walked out of the studio and said to me "I'll be right back" but he went out and never came back. There had been some sort of row and so Danny had just left. Coe comes out of the vocal booth and says " where did Danny go" and I said "I don't know" and it was just me and the engineer and he was being real quiet so I didn't know what had happened earlier and Coe says "Hell, do you want to produce this record?" (laughs). I told him I could help home get vocals. So I ended up producing his vocals. He asked me then to sing harmony so I did all the background vocals. I love that fringe stuff. That outlaw thing. There's a little bit of that in me too. I am the nice guy but I'm a rebel at heart. When it comes to my music I'm very rebellious, sometimes to my own demise. Dallas Wayne, that's a cool guy. 

At this point Ronnie had a couple of questions he wanted to ask Billy:

Ronnie: My world is more in bluegrass. Where is that in your world?

I said I grew up doing music with my family and bluegrass was our thing. I've always said I wasn't good enough to do bluegrass and started doing country. I was never that great on the guitar. I could never get that down. Bluegrass is another kind of music that gives me goosebumps. I've never had any bluegrass cover and I'd love to. There's starting to be more bluegrass people in Nashville now. Rhonda Vincent is an old friend of mine. That's been on my mind actually. I've even though about doing a bluegrass record myself. I love to sing it. There was a time when Ricky Scaggs took bluegrass into country and put the drums in there. 

Ronnie: Have you ever interacted with the other Bill Yates (Country Gentlemen)?

No, I've never met him and it's funny as a lot of people get us mixed up. I've had e-mails saying "I'm a huge fan", but it's for him. I'm old but I'm not quite that old (laughs).

Interview by Stephen Rapid with Ronnie Norton. Photograph by Ronnie Norton

Lindi Ortega Interview

A Canadian born singer/songwriter Lindi Ortega has self-released two albums and an ep, this was followed by an EP on Cherry Tree Records. Since then her current album Little Red Boots and a Christmas EP were through Last Gang Records. She spent time touring the US and Europe as a backing singer with the Killers Brandon Flowers behind his Flamingo solo album. She is now concentrating on her own career.

Your Irish/Mexican parentage must have given you a interesting musical heritage. What are your memories of the music around your house growing up?

My mum listened to a lot of old country when I was growing up, lots of Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Dolly Parton. She was who first got me interesting in the genre. My dad was listening to a lot of latino music, I recall hearing Santana and Gypsy Kings in my childhood and I think this may have had an influence on my rhythmic guitar playing.   

You mentioned the guitar on the wall at home as an object of desire. What finally made you take it off the wall?

I was starting to sing at around age 15, I knew if I was going to write songs I would need an instrument and that guitar seemed like the perfect fit.  

There was a self-released album prior to Little Red Boots, I believe, did it feature some of the same songs or a set of older ones? 

They were all older tunes, I didn’t start writing the newer songs till about 2008. 

A new album later in the year, how different will it be from Little Red Boots, given the  Christmas EP took a more acoustic approach?  

I believe with every record there is a bit of an evolution. I don’t anticipate a drastic difference, but I am constantly being inspired by new things which I’m sure will have an impact on my music. As well, I will be working with a new producer and recording in Nashville. I’m really looking forward to seeing what we cook up together! 

You voice seems perfectly suited to the blend of traditional country, rock and the other influences you incorporate. Where do you see your music taking you in the future or is that open to possibilities as you mentioned that you listened to a wide range of acts growing up? 

I feel very connected to country music because the lyrical content of the genre speaks to me. Its a language I understand. So I feel country will always be present. Its a good thing that country embodies a wide range of style and I can draw from those styles for future recordings. I’m sure I will continue to explore.

You obviously love Johnny Cash, including two of his songs in your set, who else would you see as primary influences? 

Leonard Cohen, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Robert Johnson, Janis Joplin, Mazzy Star, and Wanda Jackson. 

Have you ever wanted to do anything else other than be a singer/songwriter? 

Yes, I have always been fascinated with Storms and Tornadoes. I would most definitely be a storm chaser if I wasn’t a singer/songwriter! 

You seem to have found a second base in Europe, is that an important career step? 

I think its wonderful! I love Europe. I have had a wonderful time touring. I didn’t expect to do well in Europe but I was pleasantly surprised at how excepting of my music people were and I’m thrilled that I have opportunity to cross the pond and play my songs for everyone!   

Heartbreak is at the heart of many of you songs and you mentioned a failed on the road relationship. Do you think that building a relationship while you are an active performer is something you have to sacrifice? 

Sometimes I think its a sacrifice, but not one I impose upon myself as I feel very strongly that I could make it work, its just a matter of finding someone who could make it work with me.  That’s the hard part. For as many heartbreaks as I incur, I somehow remain hopeful in possibility.  

On the other hand aren’t failed relationships  a great source of songs? 

Yes, that is the blessing/curse of my fate. But maybe a great love song is yet to be written in my books. So I guess we’ll see! 

You had a great band with you in Dublin, but you also play solo. Do you have a preference for either?

  I actually love both. I find it a great challenge to convince an audience armed with just my guitar that I am worth their attention. I like that challenge. The band is a lot of fun though, and its great to rock out! 

Being Canadian do you have a different perspective on America. Do you have any political interests? 

I don’t really pay mind to politics. One could drive themselves mad with it. Instead I chose to be inspired by beautiful landscapes and history. America has some of the most beautiful and varied landscapes I’ve seen. likewise, Europe has so much to offer in that respect also. 

As it is currently is your music may find it hard to get a place on mainstream country radio, is that something that annoys you? 

No, I’m very happy with what I do and how I get to do it. If I were to ever make mainstream radio I suppose that would be nice to get that kind of exposure. But the underground is a place full of some of the most interesting and unique sounds I’ve ever heard so I’m proud to be there. 

Finally what would you like to be doing in ten years time? 

Ah.. a whole decade. Well if I make it to ten years I would hope to still be singing and creating. I very much live in the moment with my life so I don’t plan too much ahead. My only hope is to continue doing what I love and that it brings me the same great joy that I feel now. 

Interview by Stephen Rapid. Photography by Ronnie Norton

Audrey Auld Interview

 

Building a reputation in the Australian roots music scene in the 90s was Tasmanian native Audrey Auld's initial goal. After she established Reckless Records in 1998 she released a series of albums beginning with Looking Back To See, a duet album with Bill Chambers, then the ARIA nominated The Fallen in 2000 and the 2003 album Losing Faith. The latter release found critical favour in the US and she made inroads there by extensive touring before moving there on a permanent. She has since married and become an American citizen and continued touring and recording. She currently resides in East Nashville with her husband and pets. There she grows food, writes songs and is recording and touring. Audrey has just released a career overview in Resurrection Moon, it features two new tracks with fellow Australian Anne McCue. It follows her Mark Hallman produced Come Find Me which was recorded in Austin, Texas.

The albums you made in New South Wales in Australia seemed to have their antecedents in a more classic traditional country, since then you have moved the US and have a developed a folkier/rootsy sound, with Losing Faith being a cross-over point. How has location influenced you in your music making?

My first two albums Looking Back To See and The Fallen were influenced by my love of traditional country music. In 2002 I made Losing Faith, hot on the heels of a horrible relationship breakdown. I found the songs I wrote reflected the range of moods I went through. Sometimes rock or punk lends itself to the expression of anger better than country music. I decided long ago to honor the song that came to me, not to confine myself by sticking to one specific genre. I prefer to use a broad musical palette to express the emotions and experiences I want to write about.

Moving to the US later in 2003 created a shift in my perspective. I was less concerned about the state of my heart and very aware of the state of the world, politically and environmentally. The US is such a huge presence influencing the global community. I couldn't help but find different things to write about.  Also, in California there's a very healthy acoustic music scene which I became part of. I'd played with bands in Australia and shifted to solo and duo performances in the US. So, the song selection changes to suit an acoustic setting.

 

What would the other major influences and motivations on your writing be?

I'm always interested in discovering the universal aspect of what I'm feeling. I'm influenced by Buddhist texts, motivational and inspirational books and poetry, nature, human behaviour. I'm honored to receive songs as gifts. My motivation is to stay true to the muse. I meditate sitting and walking in order to keep the channels open, calm my mind, and let the words come through in a truly honest way, so that a song is created, not 'made-up'.

Is living in the US a scary time now with a more liberal outlook, the hopefulness of the Obama presidency seems to have dissipated somewhat with the reality of recession?

The media would have you believe it's a scary time, but as I travel all over I meet friendly, warm people who work to create community, help the needy and stay connected. Extremists are scary, religious maniacs are scary, reality TV shows are scary, the power of the media is scary. But face-to-face contact and connection through music balances it all out for me.

What role can the independent musician have at a time like this?

I feel my small but important purpose in this life is to provide a few hours during a live show where everyone in the room feels connected through music and laughter; that they feel their experiences and emotions are common and shared. Through writing and recording I can hopefully express for others what they feel and want to say, but may not have the tools to do so.

The economy and changing times has a direct effect on a musician's life, from a simple thing like travel right through the methods of delivering music. How have you been affected?

Yes the price of gas affects the bottom line of a tour and the weaker economy affects how many people turn up to a show.  I hope more media and radio people accept mp3 delivery of my music as an alternative to the ever increasing cost of packaging and mailing a disc. The Indie musician's life has always been one of richness of life-style and experiences rather than huge riches in the bank.  So a weak economy for everyone makes me think "welcome to my world!"

You are now a part of a roving band of singer/songwriters delivering their songs to small, but appreciative audiences. Is there a strong affinity between artists like your self and say, Anne McCue or Mary Gauthier whom you dedicated a songs on Come Find Me?

Anne McCue and I are neighbors, friends and we sometimes tour together. She's truly a road warrior. Amelia White is another East Nashville musician with whom we party and jam, when we're all in town at the same time. Nashville is full of indie artists, working alone or with a little help to tour, record and keep the wolf from the door.  Mary Gauthier's a friend too, who's also out touring full-time. She's had the benefit of being on a major label and management so her story would be a little different to those of us who are the Underbelly. People like Anne and I will be playing music, with or without support for the rest of our lives.  We know how to survive no matter what.

Speaking of which are you still feeling gorgeous as you say in that title song?

More than ever! Late last year I went to a 10 day meditation retreat called Vipassanna. It's a silent time of purification, giving time to one's higher self. It has a remarkable effect, like a spring clean of your psyche! I feel the most confident and alive I've ever felt. I've never had a drink or drug addiction problem but now live a sober life.  I spent much of my life 'out of it' and now enjoy being 'in it'.

Forty, is a song about aging how do you come to terms with that in your writing and approach to life?

I love aging. Sure, there are times in front of the mirror where I wish some line would disappear, but I also look with amusement at the same lines. I see my mother's face and my father's face, I see the story of those lines. I love the wisdom I've gained, the certainty of some lessons. I reckon the 4th decade is truly great and really look forward to the revelations of the future. I'm very comfortable with who I am. As an artist and just plain human I strive to be truly me and surround myself with people who dig me.

There's a different, heavier sound, and an almost rap style vocal section on Petals, are you keen to explore new direction and have you ever considered doing a straight country style album again?

I love going with the song as it's being written. I've been taking djembe classes in Nashville so I guess it was natural that a rhythm-based rap song would emerge. It also suited the subject of the song, Jon Dee Graham. I do plan to record a hard-core country album whilst I live in Nashville. I hope that Kenny Vaughan will produce it. He is cool, talented and totally understands genuine country music.

You have just released a career overview album Resurrection Moon how has that encapsulated your feeling about the music you have made to date?

I chose the songs based on those that I continue to perform live and the songs that people request. I felt proud to look at the collection of 18 songs and recognise that they touch and connect with people.  I included two new songs recorded with Anne McCue, which I love for their delicacy and femininity - a new sound for me.

Where will the muse and music (and life) take you next?

I'm working on finishing a bunch of songs for the country record I'd like to make next.  I'm touring as much as possible. Australia in March then all over the US later this year. I've been playing with a band in Nashville, in a bar on Broadway which is great fun. They're the bass player and drummer from Paul Thorn's band and Anne McCue on guitar. It's great to play loud and rock it out a little. But I'm pretty much a country singer, despite my forays into different styles. 

You haven't played in Europe and Ireland in particular in a while, any plans to come this side of the pond?

I'd love to return, but at this moment I don't have an agent or promoter in Europe or the UK to help me with a tour. I hope to tour there again, for sure!

Interview by Stephen Rapid. Photograph by Joseph Anthony Baker

Moot Davis Interview

Naming two Hank Williams Snr. songs among his all time favourites sets the tone for the music that Moot Davis makes. He makes it to suit nobody’s taste but his own. Moot released a gig sale CD that was recorded in Nashville and was part of the scene that included Chris Scruggs playing in the bars of Lower Broadway in Nashville. He subsaquently moved to Los Angeles and signed with Pete Anderson’s Little Dog Records where he released two albums (his self-titled debut and Already Moved On). Former Dwight Yoakam producer Anderson helmed both albums and also played in Moot’s then live band in the US and in Europe. His new album was recorded in Nashville with renowned guitarist Kenny Vaughan as producer. The results are perhaps the best album that Moot Davis has released and follow a brief period of dissillusionment with the music industry. During that time Davis honed his acting skills on a visit to New Zealand. He is now back living in his native New Jersey. Man About Town is to be released on Highway Kind a label Davis founded with Paul W. Reed. Lonesome Highway spoke to both Davis and Vaughan to find out more about the album and its origins. 

I asked Kenny when he had first been aware of Moot. “I met Moot 11 years ago on Broadway in Nashville. I liked his style and dug his songs. I played guitar for him down there for a little while. He was cool.” He decided that time was right to work together after they were in touch again. “He contacted me about a year ago about producing a project. We met in NYC and discussed the details. I chose the studio (George Bradfute’s Tone Chaparral Studio), and the players (pedal and lap steel player Chris Scruggs, drummer Harry Stinson and bassist Paul Martin as well as fiddler Hank Singer). I listened to the demos he had made with his band, which were quite good, and made notes about individual songs. A lot of the arrangements came about on the floor as we were recording. There was some overdubbing, but a lot of the stuff is live. I take these kind of projects on a song by song approach, as things can change when the players get involved. It’s good to let everyone do their thing and play off of each other. Some songs changed when we experimented with the feel. A lot of quick decisions were made on the spur of the moment. We were on a tight budget and had very little time. There are always things that I’d like to do over, but, to quote the great RS Field,“I’ve never finished a record, I just ran out of time and money” . Overall, I’m very happy with my choices, and I know that I used all of the right people. As an aside I asked Kenny about the current state of country music given his love and involvement with playing and producing the real thing. “Country music has always been plagued by horrible “artists” and unfortunate recordings and material, but it remains my favorite music. Ernest Tubb, Hank, Red Foley, Acuff, Honky Tonk, Bakersfield , Hag and Buck, everything Jones did till about 1970, Tammy , Porter & Dolly, Loretta, Dwight, Warner Mack, Paycheck, Waylon and Willie all can’t be beat. Fantastic. I’m sure that a lot of Pop Country artists and Americana artists are very talented and good at what they do, but I’d rather listen to Howlin’ Wolf, thank you. Should I have try to like something? I like Jerry Lee! I like Dr Feelgood. I like The Animals. I like The Velvet Underground. I like Muddy Waters. I like The Sonics. Life is too short to listen to stuff that I have to try to like. When I play or produce anything, I’m trying to make something that I can listen to. Sometimes I succeed” .

Where did your love of classic country music come from?

Well, both sides of my family are from West Virginia, so I guess it was always there playing low in the background.  As I got older, I watched as my father and his brothers would write and play their own songs in the basement.  The songs were not country but they were originals and really catchy.  So somewhere along the way those two things came came together and then I found Hank Sr. and Johnny Cash, then it was off to the races.

Like a lot of people where you further influenced when some real country emerged in the shape of Dwight Yoakam and Steve Earle or even Rank and File - that this was something hip?

Early on I was very aware of Dwight, not so much Steve Earle or Rank & File. I loved the totally different sound Dwight had and it did seem way cooler then anything else on the country stations. So it gave me hope that not all modern country music had to be lame, you know with no teeth.  

You're back now in New Jersey do you feel more at home there?

Well all my family is here in New Jersey and I can live anywhere and do what I do. I don't think this will forever, it's just for now.  

How does it compare to Nashville and other music centers you've lived in?

It's very different and for the most part, there is no music scene here for music like mine. Again, I leave town to go to work. Same thing when I lived in Los Angeles.  

Your last album Already Moved On was released in 2007, has it been difficult getting a new album recorded and released in the current uncertain climate?

I was still under contract to Pete Anderson's label, Little Dog Records until just a few months ago. Once I was free, the album and the new record label, Highway Kind Records came about very quickly. But there was a few years where I was just in limbo.  I also think the climate is always uncertain. 

Will you get the opportunity to tour behind this album?

Yes, we are setting US and European tours right now. All date will be updated regularly on www.mootdavis.com. 

Do you have a live band that you're currently working with or is it more economic to tour solo?

Yes we have a four piece that I travel with but I also do solo acoustic shows. Well, you have to watch your pennies but we try to do as many shows with the full band as possible. Although, I really enjoy the solo acoustic shows and I am used to traveling alone.  

Are encouraged or disheartened by reach that many of the current crop of Music Row/Country Radio pop orientated acts seem to be achieving?

A lot of people love the current Music Row/Country pop music and I don't turn my nose up to it at all. Musically, it does not do very much for me but again, people love it. What I do is a little different, that's all.  Where songwriters get "country stars" to cut their songs in Nashville, I get song placements in films and television shows. The music is different and so is the business. 

You have worked with guitarist/producers like Pete Anderson and now Kenny Vaughan is that a co-incidence or do you find that that combination of talents draws them into your work?

I am really into the guitar sounds both Pete and Kenny make. I'm also terribly lucky to have worked with either of them. I think my songs are my passport to working with the guitar gods. If the content was not there, then I doubt very heavily that Kenny or Pete would have been there. It's a good fit, my songs and a guitar wizard.   

The first album I have is entitled The Essential Moot Davis on Ditch Digger from 2002, which features Chris Scruggs as does your new album. Was that your first album or had you recorded before that?

Wow, I had forgotten about Ditch Digger Records. Yes, that was my first collection of songs that I recorded in Nashville.  

It was that demo that got me the deal with Pete. Chris Scruggs has always been great. I met him in 2001. Just killer player and a sweetheart of a person. 

Are you fired up by your latest album release or are you more cautious regarding its potential to break through?

This is my favorite album that I've made. I'm very amped up about it and if ever there was an album of mine that could break through, this is it!

You have been playing country music now for over ten years do you see yourself playing anything different in the future?

I'm not sure, one thing at a time. We will see what happens.   

What do you hope for you and your music now?

I am trying like hell to make up any ground that was lost during the past few years. I am also, at the same time, trying to break new ground and crash through any road blocks. I hope we are very healthy, busy, respected and liked.  

Finally, what's the best thing about being Moot Davis?

My family, my friends, traveling and the very personal/private songwriting process. 

Interview by Stephen Rapid.  Picture by David McClister.

Paul Burch Interview

When you decided to do a whole album of Buddy Holly songs what did you think that you could bring to them that would make them equal parts tribute and testament to yourself? 

I’m not sure I ever sat down and thought deeply about what it would mean to do an album of someone’s songs, as strange as that might sound.  My reason to make Words of Love was that it seemed like a fun thing to do.  And in the past, I’ve recorded Holly’s songs and always loved the mood it put me in. I do think a lot of interpretations of Holly's music are missing the drive I feel belongs there.  I'm not sure I ever thought if Words of Love should or could be a sort of blend of Holly’s music and my own.  It may have come up in conversation that the album might be how I imagined we would sound if Holly produced us or if we could sort of be an older version of the Crickets.  Whenever I've been at my most relaxed as a musician or feeling especially rusty, I turn to musicians like Holly as a way to fire up my imagination.  I think some performers might have to gird themselves to approach older music.  But rock and roll is sort of like my street music—it’s the soundtrack to my childhood. Singing Holly’s songs for me is just like riffing with an old friend or a relative you only get to see once a year. You pick up where you left off and fall right in.  Your personality changes, your language changes—you get transformed, in a good way.  Holly's music has all the elements that I always wanted in my music--lovely words, lovely melodies, and a great beat.  I'm not sure I'm moved by his music more than I am by great Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, or Benny Moré records. For me what makes Holly stand out is that he's approachable. When you get into it, there's a lot of substance to his work but from the outside he's very inviting. In some ways, Tim O'Brien is like that. Tim's singing and playing seems very effortless when you're hearing it from the outside. But once you get on stage with him, you discover that he's a champion and if you're not ready to rock, he can cut you to pieces. That's a long answer—and all true, but really this seemed like a fun idea and we went with it and before we knew it, we had a platter.

What do you think is the lasting appeal of Holly's music and do you think that the multi-artist released in tribute to Buddy Holly are they're the best way to bring a new audience to his work?

 I think few Holly fans can really say what it is about his music that is so attractive. You can argue that Elvis and Bo Diddley and the Everly Brothers made better sounding records. Most Holly fans I know have confessed to falling for his music pretty hard and listening to everything he did which is a bit unusual. There are some artists - like Muddy Waters or Hank Williams or maybe Elvis -where you feel so at home with their sound that you can listen to them non-stop until it becomes a kind of meditation.  Neko Case has that effect on me. We can listen to her for hours in our house and I'm just at home with it. Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker are a few others. Holly was able able to express himself with an instrument besides his voice. He also intuitively - it seems - knew that the recording medium allowed him some opportunities as a composer.  If you were to list all the instruments you hear in Holly's catalog, you'd include strings, celeste, horns, organ, gospel choirs, chairs, boxes, cymbals, handclaps, and piano along with guitars, bass and drums.  That's an impressive collection of sounds for what many of his generation think of as just a simple rock and roll singer. And though he didn't get to develop as a writer, the ambivalent streak in his writing voice is a dead-on picture of how it feels to be 20 and - as it turns out - how it feels to be 40 and probably 60. 

You have gone into the studio and recorded the songs in spirit and style that Holly may have approached them himself. Was the intention to capture that spontaneity that was a part of the recording process in the past?

It was intentional but that’s the way we work anyway. I think the WPA as a group and myself as a composer are probably most at home with the kind of atmosphere that Holly, Elvis, and Little Richard worked in where you record live. You rehearse for a bit and when you think you're getting there, you roll tape and play it a few times. If you're there, you know it. Sometimes a song gets better with age and you have to live with it and come back to it a few weeks later. I stress to the WPA that we might have to record something a couple times under different circumstances.  But you can tell if you’re getting there. Sometimes one musician can turn you left or right and make or break the arrangement you have. There's no substitute to performing in the studio when you’re playing rock and roll. I think most musicians who love that classic sound you’re talking about are not really trying to turn back the clock as much as they're connecting with that kind of method. It feels daring and exciting to record without a lot of hassle and just live with what you’ve created as it is.  Every musician I've met - on the big stage and small - have tried making records in a very formal precise way. And all of them are now back in the mode of just cutting live as your studio allows you.

Did recording those songs give you any insights into your own writing?

I’m sure it did but I’m not sure I can say how yet. Sometimes I feel very inarticulate to say what it is I'm doing. I really go on feeling. I do think the frame that I put Holly in is a very flexible and dynamic one. He recorded all kinds of songs and made it work. If you were to make a mix of a couple dozen Holly songs you'd probably have "Everyday" and "Well...All Right" and "Think It Over" - maybe some solo songs from his apartment tapes he made before his last tour. And from that cross section you'd hear many different kinds of styles. I think Holly's ability to freely reach for any instrument that would keep him going forward is in my thinking too. That's how I read him - I may be completely wrong but since I’ll never know, I'm ok with living with that fantasy. I just like him. Few artists seize the day and he did. So did Sam Cooke.  

After several albums of your own songs, a music journey that started out on the resurgence of Lower Broadway and a attempt to reclaim the music of the past, where do you see your music now in the overall scheme of things?

I wish I knew honestly. There's a part of me that every musician can relate to probably that feels like I've been trying to get to the Americana party I see happening just over the hill but the bridge is washed out and I can't quite get there. The business is what it is. I don't fight it. If anything, I've kind of ignored it but it keeps knocking on my door for which I'm really grateful. I'm also really pleased that the band has survived and thrived and that it can also break off into duos and trios and go in various directions. When fiddler Fats Kaplin and I play together, we can get down on some good blues like the Mississippi Shieks and Charlie Patton. When I'm with Dennis Crouch, he's a huge fan of honky tonk country and all the great heavyweight bassists like Ray Brown and Jimmy Blanton, so we can get into some very expressive melodies. With the rock and roll trio, we're a little of everything. I will say that I don't think any of the Lower Broadway performers thought about reclaiming the past. We were all fans of what we thought was a very vital form of music and that Nashville really need a kick in the arse. The motives were punk. But we all wanted record deals - there’s no hiding the ambition. But we choose the path we did because we loved the music, we felt it was important, that we had something to say through it, and that producers like Tony Brown and Mike Curb had made a private party out of country music that only the chosen few were welcome to. We found them a bit ridiculous. I still do. They couldn't care less about what Nashville had to offer outside of what might impact their legend. But we cared about the people who came to see us. And I still do. I think music can save a life. I've seen it happen.  

You are going to release a new album on Bloodshot Records, a collaboration with the Waco Brothers, how did that come about? 

A few years ago Jon Langford and I became good friends and he just invited me to play with the Waco's one night. I think they're wonderful and it's such a jolt of electricity to be on stage with them. I do feel a different kind of power with them and at the time I first met them, I was in need of that. I think my experience with them really helped me get my own group together in such a way where now, the WPA we can create a really powerful sound that defies description when we're so inclined. I give my experience with the Waco's full credit for that.I think it might be possible they were seeking a different kind of recording experience and they thought I might be able to help them.  When you're from Nashville, you tend to be ready at a moment's notice - in tune, ready with songs, ready with arrangements - and I think that slight bit of seriousness about record making was something they thought might be good for them.In reality, I wanted to get away from that and get back to something a bit freer. We met in the middle. It's a fine record but I think live will be the way to hear it. 

Your Buddy Holly album is a vinyl and download release. Do you think that the CD is now not a viable format?

I like albums and one part of my opinion thinks however albums can be delivered is ok with me. I love LP’s but digital is here to stay. I'm not that torn up about digital except when I'm in the studio. In the studio, tape still sounds pretty fantastic but once things are mixed I tend to just groove on whatever I'm listening to. It's a shame that there are so many bad sounding CDs.  We're probably just on the cusp of getting them to sound quite good and now they're going to go away. What I don't understand is why we can't find a great physical form of delivery that can't be scratched. If something is going to be scratched, I just assume use a record so I can at least pickup the needle. Digital skips are total drag.  

How have the changes within the music industry affected you as a working musician? 

The changes have affected my ability to perform quite a bit and I think everyone is probably in the same boat. I miss the labels and most artists do. The labels miss the labels. They don’t know what to do. My writing and my music choices haven’t changed. Business wise, I'm in a constant harassed state where I'm hoping or begging to find someone with a vision to do the hard labor to get the music out. I would like to perform on a more personal level at house concerts, small theaters, schools, art centers - all of which are great places to play. If things can move away from bars, I'd be very happy. I don't really want to go on at midnight anymore.  I kind of like the scrappy-ness of the modern music industry. For artists like me that never sold very much to begin with, it’s kind of nice to see some of the superstars humbled.

Country music now seems to further than ever from it's traditional roots. Has the time come again for the kind re-energising that saw yourself and performers like BR-549 and Greg Garing playing the music of Hank Williams Snr for a old and new audience or has that time past?

Perhaps. Country music sort of thrives on that ebb and flow. And it wouldn't surprise me if it might come from within. There are some real talents in the pop country field. It will be a brave artist who breaks the mold and they'll suffer for it like Hank did probably. 

Have you any long term plans for your music and your studio or is now a case of taking each opportunity as it comes?

Both.  

Do you have any regrets about your career path?
I do, but I don’t think I’d make them public. One funny moment I’ll share. Chet Atkins heard my first album and thought at first that I was from the 50’s. He told a mutual friend: “how did I miss this guy?” I saw him walk into the Station Inn in Nashville that very same day I heard that story and I wanted to blurt out “I’m that guy” but I just held the door open for him. I’d have that moment again but otherwise there are not too many. Hopefully I’m still getting better and the people who thought I was no good when I started might come back and be surprised.

What have been the high-points?

I’m too young to talk about high-points but I appreciate you asking. I’d say singing with Ralph Stanley and finding that so easy to do was important for me personally. We instantly had a good rapport and a good sound together. Ralph told my wife that the tone of my voice reminded him of his brother. Every time I write something I like or make an album, I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m thankful I still have verve for recording and performing. A lot of people I started with have faded out.

Interview by Steve Rapid

Lynn Miles Interview - October 2011

 

Canadian singer/songwriter Lynn Miles is a frequent visitor bringing her literate and lean songs to the listening rooms of Europe. This year she released what is arguably the best album of her career. She was born in Quebec to parents who loved music, ranging from jazz and opera to country. She started to write at an early age and to perform in her mid-teens. Later she took took voice lessons before becoming a teacher herself in Ottawa. She began to release her songs in 1990 with a self-titled debut album. In the late 90s she released two albums on Rounder and in 2006 Love Sweet Love came out on Red House. She is now recording with True North records who have released her Black Flowers album as well as her current album Fall For Beauty. We spoke to her prior to her appearance on Sandy Harsch's live Country Time concert. She was as open and honest as her songs are.

When did the process of writing your own songs start? 

I started writing songs when I was 10 and this (Fall for Beauty) is my eight studio album. I have written about 650 songs. I tour the USA and also come to Europe to Holland and Ireland probably about once every two years or so. This is my third time over here.

Is there any difference that you perceive with an audience in another country?

No, I think singer-songwriter audiences are the same. They're people who care about the lyric and their usually pretty well read in terms of other song writers, they're listeners and they seem to care about the words. I think they're an educated bunch. They seem very passionate about this style of music. So, in the end I think they're similar. I mean there might be some place were they're a bit more reserved in their responses but always at the end of the night it's the same as people come up and say to me thanks for doing a particular song, or "I love that song".

You seem to have a very clear theme in your songs. Do you have to work at that?

I think I have a very clear voice. There's not a lot of rough edges on my voice and I also think I work very hard on the lyrics as I want people to know what I'm saying. It's kinda the main part of what I do. I love to sing but I love to express the feelings I have as I want to connect with people. And in order to do that they need to know what I'm saying. 

Do you then start a song with lyrics or is it an open process?

It works every different way. Because I've written a long of songs they come from different ways of writing. Sometimes I come up with the title and I'll go on to write the song or I can come up with a melody and I'll add lyrics to it or I have books and books of lyrics, little pieces of lyrics, that I go back to. Sometimes a melody will come into my head and I'll think "oh, I have some words that will go with that". 

Three chords and the truth is a Harlan Howard expression and he often used to go into bars to pick up phrases or expressions that he would later turn into songs...

Melanie Howard, his widow, told me that he would go to bars every night to listen to people talking and I thought that was brilliant because there's a lot of wisdom spoken in bars. I lsten to peopel when I travel, when I'm on the train or at an airport or sitting in a cafe. I do listen, but I don't go to bars as much as I used to because I quit drinking. So that kind of a hard place for me to go (laughs). But I did get some inspiration from bars when I was hanging out in them. I get a lot of inspiration from literature because I'm a voracious reader. I'll read fiction by somebody and something that is said in that will make me think "that's an interesting concept and I'll try to expand on that". 

The song Little Bird on the album about addiction being a case in point?

That was a book by Gabor Mate (In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts) who this amazing doctor in downtown Vancouver, one of the worst neighbourhoods in Canada, where there are a lot of heroin addicts and crack addicts and prostitutes and he works at the needle exchange clinic which is the only one in Canada. He's constantly battling the government but he wrote that most compassionate book about addiction that I've ever come across. He loves these people and he knows where they come from and why they end up where they end up. It's a very compelling book and it was very inspiring so I wrote about it. 

We most of us have addictive possibilities in our own lives.

You know I have song that I just wrote that I haven't put on an album yet that has a first line that says "everyone is addicted to something" and I think that that is true. Somebody said to me when I was trying to quit drinking that "it's just a way of avoiding the void". That hugh void that we all have and all carry with us. Something we're afraid to look at - shopping, sex of food or whatever it is that you use to avoid the truth about yourself to deal with your darkness or aloneness or whatever it is. That's the truth about it.  

Is age a distraction for you?

Why, because I brought it up a couple of times? You know I wrestle with it but sometimes you see a band and they're old people and it doesn't quite work. I wrestle with it but I'm in a music where it's ok to be a bit older. It's because I'm a woman and I think there's a thing when you're a woman that it's more difficult to age. You're not supposed to age and there's hair colour and facial surgery and all that stuff and your not supposed to put on weight. There's a lot of pressure from mainstream society. I wrestle with that and I wrestle with my own level of exhaustion fro touring which is much more profound now that when it was when I was thirty. It's just harder.

Is that sense of being alone is very much part of who you are as a traveling troubadour?

Yes. I'm on the road alone a lot. So I face it every day. I have to get up and say "well. I'm alone here, who am I and am I good, you know". I have to check myself and say "I'm good". I've struggled with depression and all those things that a lot of people struggle with and it is a one day at a time thing. I have days when, like last week, when I'm in England and I had a first class ticket and I was crying in first class. I had my sunglasses on and I wasn't happy. I was sad. So I was crying on the train and sometimes that's what you have to do. 

Does the actual performance then help to exorcises the demons and those feelings?

I don't know if it exorcises the demons but it connects me to other people who have the demons. That makes me feel not as alone in my own experiences as a human being. I always that it woukld be a more compassionate world if more people confessed their frailties and insecurities. The more sharing there is the better off we'll be as a human race. So I'm not afraid to express those things. And I know, as I said earlier that when I finish a show I will get people coming up to me and saying that " that song really helped me with my divorce" or " I lost someone and that song got me through it". I use music for the same reasons. When my father passed away I listened to Patty Griffin and Tom Waits. That's all I listened to. Everyday when I would come out of the hospital, where he was dying of cancer, I would put my headphones on and that's what I would listen to and it got me through. So I understand about that, it's the gift of music. 

You have to have that fearless heart.

I wish I had a fearless heart.

There is not much music around today that can draw on those negative aspects of life and turn it into something that is positive and inspiring. Especially modern day country music or what passes for the genre.

There's a fear of it. A fear of looking at that stuff. But I think that it's imperative that we do. How do you get through a difficult time like that unless you go through it? If you van have something like music to help you and soften the edges then more power to it.

Leonard Cohen used to be accused of making downer music but I found it very positive.

I love his music and I have his set list from his last tour as I sat in the second row of a show and it's hanging in the bathroom and I read it everyday when I go to the bathroom. It's so beautiful. The poetry is so beautiful. It's so profound and it's not suicidal music. It's actually very hopeful and joyful.

He would perfect his lyrics over a long time to get the rhythm just right.

Oh my god, that's what he does. I think every single word is chosen for its beauty and its place in the song. Every word in every single line is absolutely correct. He's the master of that.

Your last album has a great sound...

That's really just me and Ian (LeFeuvre) we like to have a sparse studio and not too many people around he plays a lot of instruments. 

Do you get the opportunity to use a full band in Canada?

I have a guitar player that I use a fair amount. When I release the CDs I have band shows in a couple of cities but I can't really afford to do that. It's hard.

Do you have good label support?

True North is the oldest and largest independent label in Canada. It was started by Bernie Fingelstein in the 60s in a hippie village in Toronto with Bruce Cockburn. They started it and it's been going ever since. They have been very good to me. I signed my first record deal in Canada when I was in my forties. Which I love (laughs). I love that I'm 53 and I get to still be doing what I'm doing. I just think it's a very cool thing.

Do you gig in the States a lot?

I did, when I was on Rounder I did a lot of shows. I don't have a label in the States right now so it's not as easy for me to do. The US government makes it quite difficult for artists to cross the border. It's expensive. They charge you money and you have to apply for your visa three months before you go. So it's complicated. So if i go it's a big deal. I have to put a lot of effort into it. There was a band from Vancouver who just tried to get in a van and drive across to play and they got caught and deported for 5 years. I'm not a good liar so I know I'd get caught if I tried that.

Are you think about where your next album might go in musical terms?

I am. I have some new songs and I've talked to my label about that and we're going to have a discussion when I get home. I'd like to put one out sooner that later. The last one took about 5 years which is way too long so I'd like to start recording in December but I don't think that's going to happen. In a perfect world that's what I'd do. 

Will you do more voice and guitar albums like Black Flowers?

I will, I love doing them. I do play a lot of shows solo and people come up and ask me if I have anything like I just did.

Well, both work.

Yeah. I love the idea that you can take a song and do it with just voice and guitar or you can go and put make-up on it and dress it up. Then you can also take that version and change it if you want. That's the beauty of songwriting. You can have a song but you can change the groove, the pace of it you can change so much about it. I love that. 

Are there any aspects of your music that you haven't done that you would like to try?

I would like to do a more pure country album. It's something that I've been thinking about and writing some more pure country songs. I'd also like to explore bluegrass. So I'd maybe do a record that has a bit of both on it. I have a real thing about country music and where it comes from, the real stuff, like bluegrass and I'm not a pure bluegrass artist but I love that music and country music and I been listening to it my whole life. So I'd like to explore that a little. But what it is now is pop music it's not country, but it doesn't have anything to do with me. I don't really listen to mainstream radio. I just find artists that I like. But the truth is that when I listen to country music I listen to Hank Williams. When I listen I listen to Dylan, Leonard Cohen. I listen to the master of the craft because I don't like background music and I want it to be exceptional. So it's Hank Williams or Del McCoury or back to Dylan or Neil Young or Tom Waits, people like that.

Who's your favourite contemporary artist?

I'd say Patty Griffin, she's the one I go to. She's a great songwriter.

Eilen Jewell

With the release of her fourth full length album (Queen Of The Minor Key) Eilen Jewell has reinforced her status as a country/roots artist of the highest calibre. Since she came to notice with her official debut Boundry Country in 2006 - there had been a live demo album Nowhere In Time prior to that - she subsequently released Letters From Sinners and Saints. and Sea Of Tears. These three albums featured Jewell's emotive songwriting and her distinctive vocal performance. She also has released a tribute album Butcher Holler featuring the songs of Loretta Lynn and was a part of the team that released a gospel album under the name of the Sacred Shakers. All of these album feature members of her excellent band which includes guitarist Jerry Miller, Johnny Sciascia on upright bass and drummer Jason Beek. With these musicians Jewell is as inventive and rewarding live as she is on recorded album and should not be missed when she plays at the Sugar Club for her Dublin debut on Thursday November 3rd. Lonesome Highway has a chance for a brief chat with Jewell from her East Coast home. 

At what point when you started out did you decide what your musical direction would be?

I've always just wanted to play music that I like and the music I like is pretty limited to 60s music and earlier. Classic country music and rock 'n' roll, rockabilly. So I just go with mu gut and make the kind of music that I would want to listen to. 

You have mention influences like Creedence Clearwater Revival how do they relate to you?

The influences I have are artists that have gone before me that I really love when I was growing up in Idaho in the 80s I listened to the oldies station on the radio. At that time the oldies was 50s and 60s music, that's since I was 7 years old. Of course now all these stations just play 80s music. 

Would you have come across the Idaho Cowboy, Pinto Bennett growing up?

That's a good question. I knew him as a local legend. I think he quit playing for awhile at time when I was in Boise. I also heard that he was reclusive. But I heard that he's been playing out agin lately. They say he's all reformed and everything.

When you're writing you have said that location, especially of the west, plays its part. Is that from your local experience or from the culture of the area?

It's on my mind all the time as I have a lot of love of the American west and I really miss it. I grew up there and went to college in New Mexico. I pretty much consider it to be home out there and when I moved to the East Coast I got very home sick and one way I got to deal with that was by writing about the places that I missed. I've been on the East Coast now for 8 years and I still get very homesick. So, as I say one way to eleviate that is to write about home.

What other parts of your life are you able to draw from fro your songwriting?

Traveling does to some extent. But I really like sad songs. I like to write about lonliness and trying to find a sense of place in the world. I suppose homesickness and heartbreak. That's just my personal preferences. Those are the topics that I like to hear.

Yes, and it seems that heartbreak is a topic that we hear less and less on country radio.

I can't stand those happy country songs. Most of the stuff coming out of Nashville is about "I'm driving around in my car and I got my girl by my side". I really can't stand that stuff. It's very superficial. 

You play with a great band, How did you come together?

We got together to record Boundry County and we've been together ever since. It's been the same guys and they keep getting in the van with me for some reason (laughs). 

When I first saw the list of band members I at first thought that it might have been the same Jerry Miller from Moby Grape, but it isn't.

No it's not. We tend to get that a lot. Sometimes people assume that it is the same Jerry Miller and they print that it is in newspapers and everything. So it just goes to show you can't believe everything you read. We've seen pictures of him (Moby Grape's Jerry Miller) and he wears a cowboy hat like Jerry does and under the hat they look similar.

You guys do a great version of Shakin' All Over. I'd imagine that it cones from Johnny Kidd rather than The Who or some other source.

From Johnny Kidd. As soon as I heard that version I though that that was a song we need to do. I never realizied that it was originally a rockabilly song. Maybe three or four years ago when I heard it I felt that we should do it. We wanted to being it back to its rockabilly roots. 

On this album you recorded with some other vocalists. Zoe Muth on Over Again and Big Sandy on Long Road is that an experience that you would like to repeat some stage down the line?

Yeah, I really would. I enjoyed it a lot. I think it's really good for musicians to colloberate as much as they can. I gets easy to live in your own bubble on the road, existing in your own van space. You coincide with other artists sometimes by chance and after the show's over your gone and you go your separate ways. So I really got a lot out of working with them and it kind of united us in a way. I'd like to do something like that again. It was my first time collaberating with another artist, at least on my own material,and it was very scary at first but it was well worth it. 

Would you think of doing a duets album?

Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, I never though of that before but it could be fun.

Do you see your music developing beyond its currently wide boundries in the future or is this where you want to stay music wise?

It's hard to say. I know were pretty comfortable doing what were doing now. But I never want to put limitations on anything that we're doing. If something comes up that seems like it makes sense for me and the band then we should feel free to do it. I don't want to feel that I've made any promises and that we will just play rockabilly, country or rock 'n' roll. It has hard to say and we take each album as it comes. I try to just follow my gut and go with that instinct. But I don't see myself doing a hip-hop album or anything but I guess you never really know.

Well I look out for a hip-hop duets album.

(Laughs) I find that unlikely. 

Finally, if your the Queen of the Minor Key, who's the King?

Oh, um... you know maybe Johnny Kidd. Because Shakin All Over is a minor key thing and he's got this great song called Restless and maybe on the merit of that alone he deserves the title. I love his minor key stuff. He was never part of the British Invasion, he was before that. But maybe Roy Orbison too.

Rick O’Shea Interview by Stephen Rapid. Photography by Ronnie Norton

Rick Shea found he had an affinity with the guitar from an early age. This was the start of a life as a noted guitar slinger, singer and songwriter which has seen him release seven albums, either under his own name or joint albums with Patty Brooker and with Brantley Kearns. He also has produced a number of albums as well as playing guitar with California roots artists like Dave Alvin, James Intveld and Heather Myles. When not playing, Shea works in a music shop. His life is surrounded by music and he continues to make a living from his music. His love for his music means he continues to record and perform even though he has never seen the financial rewards he should have. Lonesome Highway caught up with him on his recent visit to Dublin.

When you’re thinking about making a new album  what’s the starting process for you?

Basically it’s just coming up with the songs. The recording process sorts itself out pretty easily as I’m recording myself these days and I know so many other people that record and have studio set ups. So the biggest step is coming up with the ten to twelve songs that I want to record.

In order to get twelve do you write more to get those?

I’m not really like that, I usually just write the ten or twelve songs but there may be five or six songs along the way that I don’t complete as I might get sidetracked with them.

Do you write to a particular theme or just take them as they come?

I generally can’t think that broadly. I tend to focus on one song at a time. They can come from a little guitar part, that I like, where I think “that’s a nice little guitar part” and then I need a reason to play it. That’s a good source of inspiration. Quite often I think of myself as a guitarist first and so often in the writing process that can seem like excuses for me to play the guitar. They come from different places. I can have a general idea and work from there or sometimes it’s a melody or a chord progression. For me it’s any angle that gets it done is ok.

Do you find the lyric writing hard in that case?

It can be. But it also can fall into place very nicely which sometimes surprises me and some times makes me nervous.

Is co-writing an option then?

I like to co-write but I generally don’t sit down with a person and say “let’s write a song”. I usually come at it from where I already have something along to a certain extent and I’m either having trouble completing it or I think this person writes in that style and that they could bring something complementary to it. That’s usually my approach to co-writing but I’ve also been brought in from the other way. People have had songs where they feel that they’ve gotten to a certain point and they’ll say “what do you think of this” and we can then complete a song together. They way they do it in Nashville where they sit down to write by appointment is not the way I do it though I have done that with a few people and one girl in particular Jann Browne, who did a lot of writing in Nashville. She was very good, she had a lot of ideas and she was fast. I get nervous with that as I feel I need to sit down and mull things over.

You have worked with Jann and Rosie Flores and made a duet album with Patty Brooker...

Yes, I was very happy with that album. She and I did some co-writing for that. We also sat down and worked out all the vocal arrangements. 

She plays bass doesn’t she?

She does. She’s learning to play the bass. It worked out well for a lot of the smaller shows we did together.That made it easier to do some things. 

You mentioned earlier that the California country scene isn’t as strong as it used to be. What to you attribute that to?

It’s kinda fractured, But the people I tend to see moving on were people who, while not making a judgement or anything, had moved to California at some point from somewhere else. They were trying to get something going and had worked for a certain amount of time there and got to a certain level and maybe then felt that it had stalled and maybe thought “I could have a little more success in another place”. People who I work with a lot, who I know, are people who grew up there and their families are there and are probably not going to go anywhere else. They’re pretty deeply tied to California. 

You moved around a lot growing up as you came from a military family. How did that affect you?

I’ve been in California since I was twelve years old. The story of California is of people coming there for different reasons and so the rarer thing is those who have roots going back generations. It is a place that people seem to be drawn to and in that sense I do feel very much a part of California.

When you settled there what inspired you to first pick up a guitar?

Just being a kid and being attracted to it. Music always appealed to me and I had played a bit in the school band and then just through friends. I seemed to be able to pick parts pretty quickly and I recognized that I seem to have a natural thing for it. Then, fairly quickly, I picked up an old Fender guitar, my parents got it for me and at that time having a Fender guitar was the greatest thing.

So was it Beatles, Stones and British Invasion through to Bakersfield and Buck?

That is pretty much how it happened. I have to say I wasn’t as much of a Beatles fan when I was younger but I did like the Rolling Stones and some of the grittier and blusier based groups like The Animals. I pretty soon began to discover band like Buffalo Springfield, The Grateful Dead and Byrds which led to the Flying Burrito Brothers and then I got really into country music radio. That’s when I was in high school. That when I first really listened to Merle Haggard and I understood it but not in a way that I could verbalize it at the time but I knew that a country music song in the hands of someone like that was a very real expression.

That may be why Music Row tries to move the core audience to a younger audience as usually it has been appreciated by people who have lived a little more.

That’s what it really was for such a long time and that was one of my favourite things about it. You’re right the commercial country music today is youth orientated and market driven. I don’t think that’s good or bad that it’s just what it is. The music that I listen to and that I’m involved with is pretty far outside of that. 

Does that affect your career?

I’m very, very happy to be doing this for as long as I have. It is a tough life and I heard someone describe it as, something that never occurred to me before, “a blue collar job”. It then occurred to me that it really is. The aspect of being onstage has some glamour to it and everything but beyond that it’s hard work, traveling especially. But, as I say, I’m fortunate to be able to do this.

When you play onstage solo or with an artist like Dave Alvin you seem to be totally absorbed by the music.

That’s the place I would try to and want to be. Depending on the situation I might be work very hard just to try to remember where the songs are going. I do a lot of shows were there’s no rehearsal. You listen to songs and try to learn them and then jump in and do the show. 

Is that exciting or terrifying?

There’s definitely some excitement involved but if I don’t feel I’ve prepared enough I can be pretty worried.

Who do you enjoy playing with?

It’s hard to really nail down but I really enjoy working with female vocalists. I love the songs and for me as a male singer their themes and sentiments work within certain boundaries. To work with a great girl singer opens up the whole feeling of what songs can be about.  

That’s a favourite thing of mine and I guess I get to do it plenty with women like Heather (Myles) and Patty (Brooker). I’m not doing anything like that currently. But otherwise working with Dave Alvin has been great as he was truly one of my musical heroes and still is.

Getting to play with him was a real highlight for me.

Is it difficult playing in a band with another great guitarist?

I’ll tell you that nothing has really felt much better to me than when I would play a solo part on the guitar and Dave would turn around and give me a little smile or a wink. He’s gets very wrapped up in his performance and even communicating with him on stage can sometimes be difficult as he’s so focused so that’s a wonderful thing for me.

You also play pedal steel guitar, do you get asked to do that much?

It just depends, there have been times when I’ve played it more often than not but I’m making less effort to focus in that as I think that in the past playing guitar or pedal steel in other people’s bands has made it a little confusing for people who come to see me play and sing my own songs and define just what exactly it is that I do. Is he an multi-instrumentalist, a guitar player or is he a singer/songwriter. Maybe playing guitar is not as confusing but the whole nature of playing pedal steel guitar is different as a lot of people don’t really understand the instrument itself. How it makes the sounds it makes so I’ve been playing that more in the studio. If people want me to record I’m happy to do that. Aside from that it’s a very heavy instrument to carry around.

How does that fit in with having your own studio?

People send me tracks and I’ll record on those and send them back which is nice and I do that without having to leave the studio but that doesn’t happen enough for me to just do that. But along with all the other things that I do it keeps me going. 

Your production is that something you enjoy as much?

I do. I don’t think in terms of my being a producer out for hire though, taking on any projects. For me it’s usually someone I either know or whom I’m familiar with who I have a lot in common with musically. Then I can see really clearly from when I first hear the song what I can do with it. Maybe not entirely 100% but I know that I can produce that album. That’s the way it works for me. It’s kinda on a selective basis. It’s another part of the handful of things I do.

Who have you most recently worked with?

The Good Intentions from Liverpool. Their album is just completed. They came out to my studio. I had played on their first album through a friend of mine Charlie McGovern who was producing that. They had sent vocal tracks over and we had played to that. I got friendly with them through e-mail after that so when I was over in Europe last year I took a side trip up to Liverpool and played with them. We then talked about possible ways to approach doing a new album. So I set up sessions with people like Dave Ravens and we tracked for about four or five days with them (R. Peter Davis and Gabrielle Monk) and they then took the tracks back to Liverpool to have some of their guys play on it.

It opens you up to working with musicians anywhere in the world.

It’s the magic of the internet. It’s amazing to me as I’m technically fairly proficient and I understand all that I’m working on.

Do you miss the set-up of a group of musicians playing together in the same room?

We still do that to a certain extent, sometimes more than others. The recording I do with Dave Alvin is done getting everyone in the studio at the one time and to play the song until we have the arrangement and the performance that he or whoever is producing is happy with. It’s not always possible. The more common thing is to have bass and drums and an acoustic guitar and maybe a vocalist to get a performance at that stage and then to continue to add the other things at a later time.

Has it helped you to sell your own music?

It has. What I think the internet has done is to open up the whole playing field to everyone. Put’s them on a more equal basis so that almost anyone can make an album now and promote it on the internet. It has meant that there is a tremendous amount of music and albums out there. You have to do everything you can to draw attention to your self.

Which means, as you were saying that there needs to be less confusion about what it is that you do.

That is very important. It’s something that I should think a little bit more about.

Having played in Europe a lot is there, for you a difference, than in the U.S.?

So far there is. The audiences have been very attentive and they’re there to hear the songs and music and there’s not any real distractions. I have had a great time.

Kenny Vaughan Interview

 

It would be easier to say who Kenny Vaughan has not played with rather than who he has played with. He has appeared on numerous recordings and on stage with a hugh range of artists. He played with Sweethearts Of The Rodeo in the 80’s. He also played at the beginning of the resurgence of Lower Broadway with Greg Garing. Later he met and played with Lucinda Williams. In one memorable week in Nashville we saw Kenny playing four nights in a row with four different bands playing four differnt musical styles. That’s how versitile and inventive player he is. In 2007 he was voted The Americana Music Associations Instrumentalist of the Year. He is currently a member of Marty Stuart’s Fabulous Superlatives. Two words that readily apply to Vaughan’s guitar work. 

When we spoke in Dublin you mentioned playing punk in New York. Obviously you grew up listening to a lot of music can you let us know what music forms you initially were inspired by other than country?

My father’s Jimmy Smith records featuring Kenny Burrell were an early influence. He listened to a lot of cool jazz and R&B. The British Invasion was the tip off for me and the guitar. Beatles, Stones, Animals, Kinks,Yardbirds and Them. The garage rock scene from ‘65-’66 provided the bulk of material for my first band. We also dug surf - Dick Dale, Link Wray. 

About the same time I listened to a lot of Buck Owens, Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash with respective guitarists Don Rich Roy Nichols, Luther Perkins. To me, they were as rock ‘n’ roll as anyone. Jerry Lee Lewis was (and is) my favorite country singer.

In ‘68-’69 I saw Hendrix 3 times, saw The Cream twice, saw Howlin Wolf with Hubert Sumlin, Johnny Winter, Captain Beefheart, Buck Owens and The Buckaroos, The Grateful Dead, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, and John Mayall featuring Mick Taylor. I listened to the first Butterfield record with Mike Bloomfield on the Telecaster, also Muddy Waters and Slim Harpo. All before I was 17!

In the 70’s I listened to the Stooges and the Velvets, I saw the Dolls, Roxy and Mott, loved everything that John McLauglin did with Miles and I really liked The Feelgoods with Wilco Johnson. I saw Television, The Cramps and the Ramones early on, as well as early Weather Report, Miles, Abercrombie, Tony Williams with Larry Young, Billy Cobham featuring my friend Tommy Bolin, and took lessons from a young Bill Fissell. Seeing Waylon and Haggard in the 70’s was a revelation and I was way into 50’s and 60’s George Jones . I became friends with a record collector that tutored me in southern rockabilly. By ‘76 I was working with country players twice my age in West Denver playing 50’s & ‘60s country 7 nights a week . I did have a band that played to the punk audience ‘77-’80 in Denver, Chicago, and NYC. I continued to play the country Honky Tonk scene until moving to Nashville in the mid ‘80s.

How do you filter the various musical influences into your own style? How much, for example, of Jeff Beck is there mixed with Don Rich? In other words is everything you have heard a part of an unconscious data bank that you draw from on occasion or are you more specific when drawing on a particular style?

I would say that I am influenced not to play a certain way by things that I dislike. I like early Eddie Van Halen, but have no interest in playing like that.  I love Jimi Hendrix, but can’t play like that. I love Jeff Beck, though he what influence I had would have been from  his first year with the Yardbirds. I’ve been to several of his shows recently and am mostly influenced by his overall attitude. I’d love to be able to play like Django, but I’ll leave that alone. James Burton, Roy Nichols, and Ralph Mooney are about the only guys I’ve actually tried to cop note for note, that was because I loved those Haggard records so much. Luther Perkins as well. People try to play like him but always get it wrong. The early Stones, Bo Diddley, Slim Harpo , Johnny Guitar Watson, Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, Guitar Slim, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Vaughan and Hollywood Fats are all, and continue to be, influences. BB, Freddy and Albert King should be counted as well. Then there’s Link Wray, Hank Marvin and Duane Eddy! Sterling Morrison! John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Hank Garland and Grady Martin. Jimmy Martin. Who played the intro on Stay Out All Night by Billy Boy Arnold? Who played guitar on 6 Days On The Road by Dave Dudley? I’ve tried to cop both of those.

Although you are now with Marty Stuart and the Fabulous Superlatives on a long term basis you continue to work with other artists. Is it difficult to find the time to take on these projects?

I don’t have to much trouble juggling my time. Work is welcome!

Any news of a solo album?

I have a record coming out September 13th on Sugar Hill. I enjoy doing my own thing as well as being a Superlative. Marty is a huge influence. I’ve learned more in the last 10 years than you could imagine.The Superlatives are the greatest. Our best work lies ahead. My solo album consists of three instrumentals and seven vocal numbers, two of which written with Marty. I wrote the others. The Superlatives backed me and we tracked most of them live with no headphones. The vocals were then overdubbed. Five of the tunes are things I do on stage with Marty. I wanted to get a live feel on the tracks. There are a few overdubs. Brandon Bell recorded, mixed and co-produced at Minutiae in Nashville.

Sartorial style is a part of your performance mode. At what point did you consider how you looked alongside your playing?

I saw the Stones in ‘65. Watched James Brown on TV. Saw Buck Owens in ‘68. Watched Roy Rogers as a kid. What was the question?

All too often country music guitar players tend to be overlook against other genres which is a shame. Who in the genre continues to inspire you?

Nashville is full of killer players. How about Redd Volkaert, Brent Mason, Vince Gill or Guthrie Trapp? To many to mention. My hero is the late, great bluesman Hollywood Fats.

What do you think of the state of both mainstream country as against Americana in these times?

Mainstream country and/or Americana doesn’t have much to hold my interest. The best that Americana offers falls into the “ I like it ‘cause I don’t hate it “ category.

Are there any areas of music that you haven't explored that you would like to?

I’ve done a prodigious amount of exploring. I will continue, I’m sure.

You have, through the years, played with a lot of different artists, which of those performances are you proudest of?

Certainly Marty Stuart!

How do you prepare for a project, either live or in the studio?

I try to keep my fingers moving and my mind open.

Finally, you are a family man, so are there things outside of music you love to do? 

I would like to be a better cook.

Interview by Stephen Rapid. Photograph by Ronnie Norton

Mary Gauthier Interview

 

Though Mary Gauthier is reported not to have written her first song till she was 35 she spent the time before that on work experience. In other words her work and life, leading to that point, was full of adventure, misadventure and a little melancholy. Her songs are informed by that life and have the ring of truth that the best songwriting has and are universal in many of their themes, not least, her own story of her adoption and her search for her own birth mother. A story which she has told so well on her current album The Foundling. In person, as onstage, Gauthier is open, honest and charming. We sat and talked before her recent performance in Dublin.

When we last met you played me an song you had just written with Carrie Rodriguez (Absence which was released on her album She Ain't Me).

Yeah, that's right and I just wrote another one with Carrie recently.

Do you still like and seek the co-writing process?

A little bit, I like it. With certain people it works.

 

When you start that process do you have an early sense that it will work?

I have no idea. I never know. 

How does the process usually work?

It's different every time. It's very mysterious really. There's no way I can predict what's going to happen or if anything's going to happen. There's people I've written with who I would have said "that's not going to work in a million years" like Liz Rose. She's only a lyricist and I fancy myself as a lyricist as well. She doesn't play any instruments so why would I do that but it was fantastic working with Liz. I would never have predicted that. Then there are other people whose songs I don't think are the greatest songs in the world but they click with me, then something good happens. It's mysterious ... I never know. I stay open minded about it. You have to go with it.

The Foundling was a very personal album but it must have triggered a response with many listeners.

I had a lot of response. People need to tell their story. All over the world I'm finding that people in an adoption situation, people who have given up a child or those who have lost their parents, at birth or along the way, they need to tell their story. It's a very fundamental human need. 

Have made that album and other albums based on your own story do you have the freedom then to expand away from the personal?

Yeah, I think so. I don't know what's next. I got the song I wrote with Carrie and I'm working on a couple of things. I've been on the road so much that right now that all I seem to be doing is clubs and cars, trains and planes and hotels. I haven't had a real chance to sit down and write but I'm not thinking about that. The way it's always been is one song at a time. Then I see what happens. I don't have an overview I let it happen one song at a time. 

With The Foundling is that the way you wrote it?

I always new there was going to be a time to write a concept record called the Foundling. I didn't know I had started it though in retrospect it looks like Goodbye Could Have Been My Family Name which came out on Filth And Fire CD was the beginning of it. I pulled that in and then I had a couple of songs that I had written that fitted in and then I intentionally tried to write for that concept which was the first time I had ever done that. It was quite a challenge really. 

Did you enjoy the recording with Michael Timmins in Canada?

I loved it. I loved the whole process of working with the (Cowboy) Junkies. Recording with him in his garage studio was great fun and easy. Low stress and he's very calm. I need that as I need to be reassured.

That album was on a new label Razor and Tie. Are you working with them now?

You know I let my manager handle that. I'm lucky to have a good manager so I let him handle that stuff. That stuff makes me crazy. The business part is maddening. 

How is your touring situation these days?

The same. It's always been no easier or harder. It just is. The economy doesn't seem to effect me. I don't have a tour manager. I don't have an entourage. I keep expenses low and make a decent living. I don't notice the big changes out there. I read about it and see them on the news but it's always been about the same for me. There's been the same recession in the States too. The same financial industry collapse. We seemed to have bounced back fairly well now but people are saying it's not stable and people are screaming that it's not sustainable but the life of the troubadour doesn't change much as the same 100 people come to see you in every town and it's never going to be 10,000. Probably never going to be 1000. Where ever I go it's usually between 100 and 500 people. I play, usually, in small theatres and arts centres, basically wherever people sit down and listen. It's for people who listen to words, they save their money to come see you. I'm not going to quit the way I do it because I think it's working. I'm not going to try and make commercial radio songs. I wouldn't know where to begin with that. It's not what I do. But that's how you grow it, by getting a commercial radio hit.

When you come back to Ireland there always seems to be a few more fans here.

There is but it doesn't grow by thousands. It gets bigger rather by dozens (laughs).

Well at least it's growing.

Well it's going the right direction so I'm not going to complain (laughs).

When to you next intend to go into the studio?

The songs have to come first then I'll be able to think about that part. The process is to get ten good ones that I play and if I get a good response then I go make a record. The songs also determine who should produce it. I don't go into a project thinking who the producer should be before I have the songs, it's always after.

Ok, so at what point did you decide that Michael Timmins should produce the album?

I knew it should be minimal. It seemed like it made sense to have a Canadian artist on it. I felt a kinship with Canada at the time and Michael is also an adoptive father. He has two daughters from China and Margo has a son from Eastern Europe. So they understand the story. Also my manager manages the Cowboy Junkies so it was put together and it was easy. 

Did the minimalism of the backing allow you additional scope as a singer?

It allowed me to sing softly and these songs needed to be sung softly. It's a fragile story. 

Although there hasn't been that major breakthrough for Americana there seems to be an audience for the overall genre even if the audience tends to be if a certain age. Do you find that?

I don't know. I just want to connect with the human heart. I don't want to look at people's age or all of the things on the outside. If the audience is listening and appreciating the words and bear with me through the songs that good. I wouldn't want a bunch of younger people coming in and getting drunk and not listening. I 'm just trying to connect with people who will listen. I don't care about age. There's some sort of a spirit that comes through us (songwriters) that connects us. I don't understand it but it's bigger and smarter than us. I just know it's a most important thing. Maybe it is what we are. You feel that pull to that spirit in art. We confuse it with the artist but really it comes through us. Talk to any artist you love and they will mostly tell you the same thing. In that movie Country Strong, which is ridiculous, it's fun to see some friends on the screen but the film is bad. 

We talked about Marshall Chapman who appears in the movie.

Ain't she something. she's a good friend. 

You were doing dates in the past with people like John Prine, do you enjoy that?

Yeah, but I had to slow that down. I'm doing my own thing now. I have toured with Carrie Rodriguez and I'm doing some shows with Lori McKenna - she's amazing - these are singer/songwriters who play the same kind of places that I do. I'm going to play a lot of dates in Canada this summer, from east to west were playing.  As long as the work keeps coming in I'll stay on the road. I've been on the road for a long time (laughs).

While we are speaking Mary's touring partner Tania Elizabeth begins doing the soundcheck in the background.

Do you like touring together?

I like having an accompanist. It's easier and I like having someone doing that shit [the souncheck](laughs). It makes the songs more powerful. The songs that I'm playing now really need that violin sound. She has a cello string, a low C, on her violin and it just adds to it. It increases my ability to connect with people. I love the company. The three of us (including opening act Ben Glover) get along well. We share meals and things and it's really nice. 

In your shows do you ever do cover versions at all?

I don't ever know what I'm going to do. I don't ever write a set list. The big challenge with this job is to stay open. Stay as open as you can without being sloppy. You have to know the words of these things your going to pull out of thin air. The openness is where the beauty can happen. That's where the magic is. I think artists are open in general, open to everything not just to what song to do. I'm in tune with my intuition, my life is run by my knowing and that is something more than my brain. Intellect can confuse me but my gut generally gets it. 

How do you hold a song idea?

I write it down. If you don't write it down you never remember it. I was in Austin two, three weeks ago and my guitar was acting up so I went to the guitar shop and guess who's guitar was getting worked on there. (Mary shows us a picture on her phone of Willie Nelson's guitar Trigger). I got to hold it when I toured with him. The electronics in his guitar were broken, he was on the David Letterman show and it wouldn't work. The only guy who works on it is in that guitar shop in Austin. 

Mary then shows us a file she shot on her phone of a rattle snake with sound.

I was walking on a trail in Nashville a little while ago and I saw this rattlesnake. Isn't that crazy? That sound if you hear it walking you know it, it's a warning sign. Just like when you look at the sky you know a storm is coming. If a tornado is coming everything changes. It happens so fast that by the time you know you better be active.

You're living there now?

Yes, I live in Nashville and when I'm home I try to relax. I have dinners at the house as I don't go out much. 

Anything else planned?

I'll probably go and teach songwriting in Costa Rica, something I've done in previous three or four years. So I'll probably do it again. People come from all over the world. There's usually from ten to twenty people coming for a week. We work on songs with them, help them to improve what they've written. Mostly I try to help people get to their own personal truths. A lot of people don't have the courage to do that but I pull it out of them. I get them to embarrass themselves and that's when it starts to get good. It's painful but they thank me. People want to be told why their songs are not connecting and I can pretty much get to it. They need to reveal a little more and the walls have to come down. You're not a journeyman in any craft unless you've done it for ten years. Everybody thinks they can be Bob Dylan right off but it takes time. There's people who showed me the way like John Prine certainly, Steve Earle, Hank Williams, Harlan Howard, for sure. I like country and folk, I like them both a lot.