Kristina Murray Interview

Kristina Murray is a Nashville-based country singer and songwriter. Over her fifteen-year performing and writing career, she has remained steadfastly loyal to traditional country music, avoiding the temptation of crossing over to the commercial crossover county/pop music currently dominating the radio airwaves. Kristina is also the Administrative Director at The Nashville School Of Traditional Music, a project established to promote and preserve ‘real’ country music. She has recorded two albums, UNRAVELIN’ (2013) and SOUTHERN AMBROSIA (2018), and is putting the final touches on her latest record, which is due for release in early 2025. We recently chatted with Kristina as she enjoyed a family holiday at Edisto Island, South Carolina, before packing her bags for a fourteen-date European tour.

You are about to reach a tenth anniversary since moving to Nashville. 

Yes, ten years in mid-June. It feels like ten years in some ways, and in other ways, it seems like that amount of time hasn't passed. So much has happened in that time span. Sometimes I feel like, 'What's next?' but I also feel excited, and Nashville is my home right now. I initially moved to meet other like-minded musicians and songwriters who were writing and playing the type of music I was into. I've definitely met that goal, which has made me a better writer and musician. Making my second record here and now with my third record ready to be mixed has been great. 

I have only recently become aware of The Nashville School of Traditional Country Music and your involvement in the project. How did that come about?

I started working for The Nashville School in the fall of 2022, almost two years ago. My connection was through a friend of mine and the school founder, Meredith Watson; I knew her as a musician. She was in a band called Locust Honey. I was leaving my job at Belmont University and doing a lot of bartending work. I met up with Meredith, and we spoke about what the school needed in terms of administration. Meredith oversees the grander vision for the school, and in 2022, she had a non-profit charter for the school. In 2023, she applied for official non-profit organisation status, which we were granted just a few weeks ago. Adult programming is mostly the focus, but we do a lot of kid's programmes with the local schools, some private schools and home school groups in Nashville. It is focused on learning music through the ears and community instead of through formal lessons. So, instead of learning through reading notation or one-on-one, it's more like getting together and trading music, bluegrass jams, writing songs, and playing country music. 

It's promising to hear that those traditions are on offer when what we hear on country music radio stations is mainstream pop music.

Popular country or radio country goes way beyond the bounds of what was traditional country or regional folk music. The idea is to preserve the original sounds that have disappeared from commercial country music, like banjo and fiddle, dobro and pedal steel. They, alongside soulful singing, define what country music is to me.  It is exciting because there is a desire out there to keep our music alive. The concept of an organisation attempting to preserve types of music is not new; there are folk schools in Louisville, Kentucky, and Denver has Swallow Hill. Meredith was just surprised that there wasn't an organisation encompassing all that in Nashville and decided to start the school back in 2017. 

Your role as Administrative Director sounds very posh.

It's not posh at all, just a necessity that has to get done (laughs). At the beginning of the school semesters, I mostly oversee the school and kids' programmes. Last year, I taught songwriting classes, and J.P. (Harris) taught clawhammer banjo beginner classes; we also had fiddle classes. My role as Administrative Director involves emailing, overseeing our website, registration, contacting parents about the kids' classes, and thinking forward with Meredith about potentially what type of classes students actually want. 

You mentioned album number three. How is it progressing?

It's finished. I even have the cover; it's sequenced, mixed, and ready to be mastered. It's ready to go.  

Your last album, SOUTHERN AMBROSIA, often addressed downbeat subjects, although the overall sound was upbeat. Does the new record follow a similar template? 

There are a lot of sad songs on it, one happy song and also one love song, which is good. Someone close to me who heard it recently said, “There's no bullshit on it,” which I never want to do, so it's a lot of sad songs and some strange aesthetic mind-warping stuff going on. I hope it doesn't come across as too dark, more so just true. 

Who did you work with this time around?

I recorded the album in two chunks, and Rachael More and Misa Arriaga both produced it. A lot of buddies of mine play on the record, I didn't have as much of a hand in the production on my last record, SOUTHERN AMBROSIA, which I was fine with at that time, and we used a lot of session guys on that record. It was fun this time to hand-pick the guys that I wanted, and all of these players are friends of mine whom I really trusted. Guys from my band played, James Paul Mitchell and Sean Thompson played the guitars, Jonathan Beam played bass, Eddy Dunlap played some steel, John Mailander played fiddle on a tune, and a guy named Ilya Portnov was on harmonica on a couple of songs: Jamie Dick, Dominic Billet and Tim Kerr on drums. I've also got a couple of guest vocalists that I'm not naming yet. 

Are you fixed on a release date yet?

I would like to find a label home for this record and be able to elevate this record in a way that my last record was not, given that it was independently released. I'm still looking at options, and I had hoped to put it out by the end of the year, but realistically, I'm hoping for early next year and would like to do a single unrelated to the album by the end of the year. I'm telling myself to be patient and that even though the songs may be old to me, they'll still be fresh to everybody else when the album comes out. 

We spoke previously about the additional hurdles women face trying to establish themselves in the music industry despite recording some of the best country and American music in recent years. Do you see any change in that regard?

I would agree with you. Over the past four or five years, most of my favourite country and American albums have been by women; some are on labels and elevated, and some are not.  But having been in Nashville for ten years and playing music for fifteen years on stage, I'd like to say it's changing, but it is still such a boy’s club, and whereas there might be room for women in the industry, there is certainly not enough room for all of us. It's just something that has been in the industry for sixty or seventy years. If you look at the Instagram account BOOK MORE WOMEN, where they show the lineup at popular music festivals, and, on the next slide, remove the small percentage of all the bands that aren't women-fronted or have a woman in the band. They have shown this over a number of years, and it doesn't seem to be changing at all. It just looks so seismic, and I really don't know what the fix is. We have some women in engineering and production, which is why I feel very proud and excited to have had Rachael More work on my record. 

Are you aware if Zephaniah OHora has made any more progress in bringing the Skinny Dennis brand to East Nashville and opening another traditional country music venue?

It has been a while since I have had an update on that, but as far as I know, they have plans for a space that they have on the east side. I hope so, as the American Legion, which is and always will be close to my heart, is insane now on Tuesdays. I hear there are over a thousand people there now on Tuesday nights. You can hardly two-step with people swing dancing on the floor, so the people that go there to two-step can hardly dance there these days. When I moved to Nashville, I really grew up there and was one of the people that got the Tuesday nights started; it wasn't even called honky tonk Tuesday then. But it's more like Broadway there now, so to have Skinny Dennis would be exciting. We'd then have Skinny Dennis, Dees (Cocktail Lounge), The Underdog and The Legion for country music; I'd love that.

You are about to come to Europe to play fourteen dates in eight different countries, including a slot at The Black Deer Festival in the U.K.

Pat Reedy and Todd Day Wait go to Europe yearly, so I'm lucky to be able to go with them. They have great fans over there, and I'm hoping that this tour will establish me in as far as I can go over every year. I was over in Denmark and Sweden in 2018 and was playing a tiny country festival over there, and someone came up to me with my 2013 album with them to be signed; it blew my mind that someone there would have my CD and probably paid fifty dollars to get it shipped from Nashville. 

What will the format be?

We'll probably do three 45-minute sets, with me sandwiched in the middle. Obviously, it's a shame we can't bring a band; that's for future years. 

Interview by Declan Culliton

Sarah Gayle Meech Interview

Winner of the Ameripolitan Music Award for Best Female Outlaw and christened The Honky Tonk Queen by Rolling Stone magazine, Sarah Gayle Meech has recently released her third album, EASIN’ ON. The Nashville-based artist has been part of the traditional country music fabric in the Music City for over a decade; her twice-weekly four-hour shows at the legendary Robert’s Western World continue to draw huge crowds, both local and tourists. Her new album, directed towards self-examination and forged from modern and traditional country roots, is arguably her most impressive work. ‘Putting the songs out there healed me; I had to put the songs out for myself, get them off my chest, and get on with my life,’ she explained when we recently spoke with Sarah via Zoom.  

Hi Sarah, how are things in Nashville today?

It's raining today, and we're experiencing a cicada invasion. Cicadas are enormous insects that typically emerge in summer, but they've arrived early this year. They've taken over outside, and you can hear them everywhere, buzzing around in swarms. They look like little aliens.

Whereabouts are you living in there?

I live in Old Hickory, about thirty minutes north of Nashville, right next to Old Hickory Lake. I bought a house here in 2020. We have a half-acre of land out here, and it's quiet. 

You arrived there over a decade ago by way of Longview, Washington and Los Angeles; why Nashville?

I was playing country music in Los Angeles but was obsessed with Nashville. I wanted to be immersed in it, learn the history and be around the fantastic players and writers. I figured it was time to step up my game and move on. 

How long did it take to get booked for your twice-weekly residency at Robert's Western World?

Getting into Robert's took me about a year and a half. I first started playing next door at Layla's, and some of the guys who played at Robert's, like David Tanner and Chris Scruggs, started playing in my band. They introduced me to Robert's owner, Jesselee Jones. He came and saw me play, and I started filling in for other people and eventually got my own spot there. I've been there for about thirteen years now.

Have you noticed a change in the audiences over the years at your shows there?

I have, yes. When we're playing the late shows at Robert's, 10 pm to 2 am, it's usually very crowded, and there are a lot of young people there in their early to mid-twenties. I started to notice in recent years that they were requesting all these old songs, and that hadn't happened before so much. If all the young people want to hear old country music, it must be coming back.

Do you have a free hand to play what you like, both covers and original songs, at Robert's?

The only thing I'm expected to play is old country. I've been playing my original stuff  since I started there; the owner encourages me to. We've been playing some of the new album, and it's getting a good reaction. I could play my whole albums if I wanted to, but I don't have four hours of self-written stuff. I get requests, and when you're working for cash and tips, and someone wants to hear Merle Haggard, I'll play it.

Does the residency compromise your tour options?

No, If I want to go out and tour, I can. There are other artists there who also tour. Joshua Hedley does a bit of touring, and I've got some dates coming up with my new record. I haven't been on the road for a while because I hadn't anything to promote, and I've been going through some changes in my life. Robert's has always been cool. I can go out and tour, and I'll always have a slot when I come back.

Have you missed touring in the past number of years?

I do like being out on the road, but not all the time. I'd love to come to Ireland; I've never been there. I love going to new places, but it can be difficult if you're not getting a huge bunch of people out, as it's very expensive to tour. 

The new album EASIN' ON is your live journey over the past few years. It's an extremely brave and open project.

Well, the whole album is about moving on and healing. It starts with the track Time For A Change, which is about things that needed to happen. With the songs, I’m moving on, rocking on, finding love again, and experiencing the pain of losing love again. At the very end, I just decide that it's time to party again with the closing song, Come and Gone. 

Were the songs written at the time you were experiencing divorce, the death of a friend and other trauma or written retrospectively?

Both, some of them were written spontaneously and at a time when things were happening to me. Others were written retrospectively because some things were too hard to talk about then. I couldn't even bring myself to play some of those songs live at the time; I'd probably start crying; they were too emotional. Putting the songs out there healed me; I had to put the songs out for myself, get them off my chest, and get on with my life.  As a writer, I definitely felt that the songs were therapeutic, and I hope that someone else might gain strength from them. 

Your debut album, ONE GOOD THING, has similar titles, such as Unlucky In Love and Drink Myself to Sleep. Were they also autobiographical?

Most of my songs are autobiographical; There are always personal experiences flavoured with a little bit of imagination. With that first record, I was so hellbent on making a badass honky tonk, rough and drinking album, and that's what it was.

EASIN' ON is a departure from your previous albums sound-wise. You've gone for a richer and bigger sound with this one.

The sound is exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to have a whole orchestra but couldn't afford that. I was listening to a lot of singer-songwriter stuff from the '70s and '80s and a lot of the countrypolitan stuff like Glen Campbell's music when he had string arrangements and Barbara Mandrell's stuff that also had strings and big arrangements back in the day. Eddie Rabbitt's ANY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE, is also a hugely lush track; I've loved that sound since I was a kid. I wanted the record to have a big, lush sound but wasn't necessarily a honky tonk album per se; I was looking for something that involved the production more than my previous records. We recorded it all at my buddy Shawn Byrne's Great Hill Studio and got some great sounds without hiring an orchestra.

Billy Contreras can take the credit for that. 

Yes. What a phenomenal player; Billy has played on all my three records: ONE GOOD THING, TENNESSEE LOVE SONG and now,EASIN'ON. He is one of the most amazing musicians I've ever heard; he came in and did all the string tracks on the album, one at a time. There were twenty-five fiddle parts; he did it with three different fiddles and one viola; the guy is just a master at what he does. He created all those big string sounds on the record. 

Eddie Lange and Tommy Hannum also have some classic pedal steel on the record. 

Tommy is my regular steel player; he's been with me for thirteen years. Both he and Eddie played on different tracks. Some of what Eddie did is layered and sounds huge; he did double and sometimes triple tracks on Time For A Change and Love Me. Shawn (Byrne) played almost every guitar track; he played percussion and did some background vocals and bass on a few tracks; he's a proficient and very talented person.  It took about a year and eight months. It didn't happen quickly because we were working on a tight budget, and we had a setback in 2023 as I had back surgery, which took me out for a few months. 

You staged the album launch at one of our favourite bars, the 5 Spot at Five Points.

Let me tell you what happened on the day of the album release show. A tornado happened. There was a tornado watch, and it touched down in a few places outside of Nashville. There was flooding everywhere and road closures on the day of the show. Sirens were going off, and alerts were on TV. Thanks a lot, Mother Nature, but despite the weather circumstances, quite a few people came out and travelled for the show. I had friends from Florida, Indiana, and the West Coast come over, but a lot of folks couldn't make it because of the downpours and road closures. 

In addition to your twice-weekly shows at Robert's and your recording pressures, you've also been performing on music cruises that have become very popular.

Yes, we did the Outlaw and Country Music cruises last year, and we're on a new one next year called Boots On The Water with Big and Rich, Gretchen Wilson, Jo Dee Messina, Pam Tillis, Lone Star, and Suzy Bogguss. It's good to break up the winter, which can be the coldest time in Nashville, so it's nice to get on a ship and go somewhere tropical for a while.

Interview by Declan Culliton

Chris Smither Interview

When it comes to showcasing the wealth of Roots music and the Acoustic Blues traditions, there is no greater proponent than Chris Smither. Over a career that stretches back to the 1960s, when he first heard the Country Blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mississippi John Hurt, Chris Smither has been a huge influence and at the frontier of change in promoting Folk music and highlighting the timeless heritage from its rural origins. Chris took time to speak with Lonesome Highway about his  new album and reflect upon his storied career.

Congratulations on the launch of your new album. ALL ABOUT THE BONES was released in early May and represents your 20th album in a career that spans five decades and counting. How do you keep the fire burning brightly after all this time?  

Well, it helps to have a team of people who know how to get me going, my wife Carol, and my producer David Goodrich are the most important actors ... but I really do want to keep it happening ... it's what I do.

You have been on the Signature Sounds label since the release of LEAVE THE LIGHT ON (2006). What is your relationship like with the label and how much artistic freedom do you have in working with them? 

We're friends ... I have every freedom, if I make a record they'll put it out.

On the new album, you continue to fine-tune your enduring relationship with producer David (Goody) Goodrich. He also contributes on various instruments and can you tell us about your special synergy together?  

There's a mutual trust that has grown for decades now ... there's a mutual stimulus arrangement in which I trust him to understand what I'm trying to do and he trusts me to come up with something he wants to work on.

The new album has a very authentic feel to the ten songs. The interplay among the musicians is very organic and spontaneous. Did you record live off the floor? 

Pretty much ... my guitar, vocals and drums are live on all of them, and there are only a few overdubs ... the harmony vocals, sax on the tunes that it appears on, David's guitar part.

The songs deal with a number of topics including the passing of time, personal relationships, the legacy we leave behind when we die and the world we are shaping for future generations. How long did these songs take in the writing and did you have others that are sitting on the substitutes bench for future use?  

They took a surprisingly long time to get started, at least the lyrics did ... the musical ideas were in place for a long time before I got any words down, but when they started coming it happened pretty quickly ... about 4 months.  There's nothing left, though ... everything I wrote is out there now.

Do you see a theme running through the songs selected?

If there is one it's probably the perspective that old age brings ... of course I've spent my whole life thinking that I was finally getting the answers, only to find that they keep changing.

I wanted to ask about the song In the Bardo. Were you ruminating on the cycle of life, as I believe that the word ‘bardo’ refers to the liminal state between death and rebirth in Buddhist teachings?  

I was scribbling words without a real sense of where they were going and I finally stopped and realized that I didn't know where I was, that I was lost, and I jokingly said to myself, "we'll call this Smither In The Bardo," then I took it seriously.

The inclusion of songs by Eliza Gilkyson and Tom Petty are interesting choices. Both Calm Before the Storm and Time To Move On could be taken as personal goals in keeping a measured path when moving into an uncertain future. Almost a focus to live every day in the moment?  

I'll buy that, but I don't think it occurred to me until you said it ... I just like the songs ... David suggested the Petty song, and as soon as I transposed it from G to A I knew it would work.

The harmony vocals of BettySoo are really engaging on the new songs, adding greatly to the colour of the album. How did you come to work with her?  

BettySoo is a performer in her own right, and has played support for me on many occasions...I heard her sing harmony with a few people, including James McMurtry ... she generates an intimate quality in the vocals, almost like she's crawled into my shirt to sing with me, and it has exactly the effect on the listener that I look for ... a sense that I'm confiding something to the listener.

The addition of Chris Cheek on saxophone is an interesting choice. He brings great character to the songs and adds a very resonant sound in his playing. His jazz background apart, there is a real sense of the blues of Missouri in his playing. He was born in St Louis and did you want him to bring a fresh element to the song arrangements? 

Chris is a friend of Goody's (David), and the addition was entirely Goody's idea ... he said " how would you like some truly world class sax on this record?" and I said ‘bring it on.” One of my better moves as it turned out. I agree with you. Not really my doing, but I'm glad I said yes.

Your rich baritone is sounding as potent as ever and when you hit that special groove I find the music almost meditative. I get a similar reaction with artists such as the deeply missed JJ Cale and I wanted to ask whether you find yourself in that special zone where you are playing purely from the subconscious?  

Now you flatter me in a most agreeable way, JJ Cale occupies a special place in my pantheon. I once had a conversation with a shrink who attended one of my shows, and he said that in his opinion I dis-associated while I was in the song, and he wondered how I got back to reality so quickly in between numbers ... I'm not sure I completely understood him, but I know that when I'm playing well it feels like another world ... I leave it reluctantly.

Looking back over your impressive career, what are the key touchstones that stand out for you? 

I'd have to think about that for a year or two.

You have always found good people to work with and tried to focus on the music. Growing up in New Orleans you must have been influenced by the melting-pot of musical styles there. At what point did you decide to focus on Folk Blues as your real inspiration? 

I was seventeen when I heard Lightnin' Hopkins and realized that he was playing rock and roll all by himself ... that's how I heard it ... and I wanted to do that. I've learned to work with other musicians, but in the beginning I was embarrassed that I knew so little about how music worked, I was self-taught, and I didn't want to expose my ignorance by being in a band.

I lose count of the many cover songs that are included on your albums, dating back to the debut, I’M A STRANGER TOO in 1970. What is your process for selecting a song to cover? 

Often I'll cover a song that I wish I'd written myself ... when that happens it's sometimes because I think there's something else in the song that I can bring out that wasn't emphasised in the original ... a chance to add something.

Can you remember when you first started to mic your feet in order to provide that tapping rhythm to compliment your fingerstyle guitar technique? 

I've always tapped my feet ... I can't NOT tap my feet, and if I can't hear them it messes up my playing ... I realized in about 1985 that if it was important for me to hear it, the audience should probably hear it too.

Was it a challenge to keep everything in time when you are picking those intricate guitar progressions while trying to keep the beat? 

Not really, it's just what I do.

You have always been prepared to bring new elements in the recording process, using musicians that can bring variety to the songs. When you play live the dynamic is so different however. Do you have to work hard at reinterpreting the songs for solo performance? 

Again, not really, if you could isolate my part on the recording you'd find that it's very close to what I do live, the genius is that of the other musicians who find a way to complement my part without stepping on it.

How did the Covid-pandemic impact upon your creative process? 

It stopped me ... I thought initially that it would be a great chance to get a lot done, but I got almost nothing done ... I had to get back out with people, with the world.

Is touring something that still brings you great satisfaction or do the years bring a sense of wanting to slow down the merry-go-round of airports, hotels, venues and continuing the lifestyle of a road warrior?  

I still love performing, the travel is more wearing now than it was, but I travel more comfortably now and stay in nicer places ... I still want to do it.

You have been honoured by your peers with the release of a tribute album, LINK OF CHAIN, back in 2014. As a songwriters tribute, how did you feel about the songs chosen and did you accept their acknowledgement of your talents with pride? 

I was amazed ... the songs are like my children ... they grow up and go out into the world, and it's amazing to see them come back home to brag about what they've been up to ... I love it. I'm happy for them, and I approve of the friends they've made.

In the past, you have had songs included in both film and television productions. Is this an area that can bring greater reward in the future or do you see these opportunities as more like a one-off? 

They're lucky happenings ... I don't see them coming, it's another world out there, I'll welcome them when they come along.

You are also a published author. Do you continue to explore this medium?  

I scribble some ... I don't like to talk about it because it raises expectations.

Are you working on other new projects that you can share with us? 

Nothing right now, but stranger things have happened.

Hopefully we can see you play in Ireland again in the future. I know that you were a regular visitor in the past and you also played a role in introducing a young Peter Mulvey to Irish audiences when he was starting out? 

Mulvey's still one of my very best friends and we still work together, and you will see me in Ireland in 2025, that's pretty certain.

Is it important to you to empower new generations of  young musicians that are looking for a foothold in what is a very difficult industry these days? 

I do my best to give them support slots and advice if they ask for it ... it's what was done for me, and I try to keep it going.

Interview by Paul McGee Photography by Joanna Chattman

Jesse Daniel Interview

Californian Jesse Daniel's devotion to the country music of his home state continues with his 'about to be released' fourth album, appropriately titled, COUNTIN' THE MILES. Jesse has been on the Lonesome Highway radar since his self-titled debut album in 2018, and his foot has remained firmly on that Bakersfield-sounding pedal on his subsequent recordings. We caught up with Jesse before he headed back on the road, crisscrossing across the country to support the new album. 

You are enjoying a short break before you get back on the road for another six months. 

Yes, we've just done the whole Western side of the United States. We're now gearing up for the Midwest, the South, the East Coast, and then back out West. We're zigzagging across the country a bunch of times. The West Coast is our best area to play because that's where I'm from. It's been really good to see that growing, and it's only going to get better and better with this new record coming out. 

You have some artists who are very close to our hearts supporting you on the tour.

Yes, Alex Williams is joining us on our Midwestern and Southern dates, Brit Taylor was with us on the last run, Tyler and The Train Robbers are going to be supporting us on some dates in their neck of the woods, and then we have Two Runner from California who are joining us for our east coast tour. 

Before we discuss the new album, I'd like to ask about your live album from last year, MY KIND OF COUNTRY: LIVE AT CATALYST. That must have been a milestone, given that you used to work as a stagehand at that venue in Santa Cruz.

That was one of those lifetime moments for me. A lot of people have the goal to play The Opry or The Ryman, and they are goals of mine too, but to sell out the Catalyst and make a live record there was up there for me because, as you said, I used to work there and saw my first concert there as a young kid. It's been a place I've been involved with for so long, and being able to go back there and fill it up and make a record there was a dream come true. 

Growing up, were you tuned into California country music, particularly the Bakersfield sound?

It was the kind of music I heard growing up in a small town near Santa Cruz. A lot of other types of music also influenced me. Punk rock was big among my generation, and my dad played in blues and classic rock bands and also played in some country bands. There was a time when I was young and into punk rock that I would look at country as 'my dad's music', but in high school, I started to really identify with country music in general; the songwriting was something I could relate to. I particularly loved the sound of Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and all the Bakersfield stuff. When I realised that those guys, who were famous country singers, were from my home state and not far from where I grew up, that was a big deal to me. That gave me a lot of pride and encouraged me to make country music.

You've stuck consistently with that sound on all your albums.

That's important to me and makes me proud to represent my home state. Nashville, Texas, and Appalachia all have great music with amazing history. Great music is still coming out today, as well as in the past. They have plenty of representation and don't need an outsider like me trying to jump on their bandwagon. 

Is the age demographic of your audiences changing as the numbers attending your shows increase year on year?

I've especially noticed younger audiences and new fans coming out during this year's tour. People are starting to catch on to this music in their early twenties, possibly newcomers to country music or at least newcomers to old-school country music. A lot of them tell me that they used to mainly listen to what was on the radio but more recently have been discovering artists like myself and others. It started slowly back in twenty fourteen and fifteen when guys like Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton and Tyler Childers began to turn the wheels in that direction. The tide is really turning now, and I'm trying to contribute to that. 

The first thing that struck me when I listened to your new record, COUNTIN' THE MILES, was the quality of the production. You took full control this time, having previously co-produced with Tommy Detamore and Henry Chadwick.

The production was a big deal for me on this record; I wanted it to reflect the Jesse Daniel sound and what people have come to expect from my music. I also wanted to return to the rawness and grit of my first record. I made two records with Tommy Detamore producing; he's incredible and taught me how to make a more complete-sounding record. With this fourth album, I wanted my true personality to come through, with a bit more rock and roll and punk edge while also having good production mixed with the Bakersfield realm of country music. I think that's exactly how it has turned out, with certain songs clean and polished and others with a bit more grit. I think it's also a cohesive record; one song blends into the next without any outliers. 

Was working with producers like Tommy Detamore and Henry Chadwick rewarding? 

It was. It was good working with them both because I co-produced with them, and there was give and take. They were both very cool to work with and would defer to me on a lot of the ideas; at the end of the day, it's my record, and they respected that. In other cases, I would defer to Tommy because he's been making great records, and I wanted my records to sound like one of his. It was nice to have ultimate control over the new record. There was one moment when we were tracking in the studio, and we all had our headphones on; I looked around, and I had George Strait's keyboard player directly across from me, my steel guitar player is across from me, my drummer is in the other room, Kevin Smith from Willie Nelson's band is on bass. We finished the song, and they all looked at me. I almost looked into the control room to ask, 'Was that good?' but I was the one who had to make that call. It reminded me quickly that this was all on my shoulders. 

You also had Gene Elders, who is now sadly deceased, play on the album.

Gene and I got in touch through Ronnie Huckerby, who played on my last record. Gene just played fiddle on one song, Comin' Apart At The Seams. He called and told me he was sick and could not do the rest of the record. He was extremely apologetic and one of the nicest and most professional guys I have ever worked with. He actually put me in touch with Jason Roberts, who played fiddle on the rest of the record. I'm very sad about Gene, and working with him in that capacity was a huge honour. 

In keeping with the Bakersfield tradition, Merle Haggard's son, Ben, shares the vocals on the track Tomorrow's Good Ol' Days. How did that contact come about?

Ben and I had been following each other on social media. I'd been a fan of his for a long time, back before his father passed away. I'm a huge Merle Haggard fan, and years before I started playing country music for a living, I would watch YouTube videos of Merle and video recordings of him and Ben performing together. I had been in touch with Ben in recent years, and when I wrote the song Tomorrow's Good Ol' Days, Jodi (Lyford), my songwriting partner, manager and fiancé, thought that Ben would be a great person to sing the song with. That clicked right away, and I texted the song to him. he loved it and came right back to me to say he'd love to sing on it. We made it, and it all seemed to come together in a way that was meant to be, and when I listen to the song now, I can't imagine what it would be like without him. 

How important has Jodi been both in your personal life and professional career?

She does everything. It's really hard to convey all that she does and has done from day one. Jodi and I have built our business ourselves; Jodi has been there co-writing the songs with me on every record, going back to the first record when I could barely afford the gas to get to the studio, staying up late after work when we both had day jobs to record those records. She moved out to Texas with me; we built our touring business together. She handles all the day-to-day management, which has become a big job; we have daily things to deal with. She oversees all the bookings with our booking agent, oversees the design of all the merchandise and ships it. She also tours and sings in the band; she really does everything. Without her presence in my life as a partner and as a business partner, things would not be the way they are without her. We're getting to the point where I'd like to delegate some of those tasks and take some away from her. Getting to travel together is a blessing; other artists don't get to be with their wives or partners when they're out on the road. Despite all the hardships and obstacles we have had to overcome, we've been all over the world playing country music.

Four albums in six years is a prolific output, given the time you spend on the road. Was it part of a game plan to release a record every two years?

We've taken it year by year, and as far as albums go, there was no real blueprint. I aim to just keep making music and increase the quality of my songwriting. Now that we have gotten into the routine, I would like to make records more frequently; it keeps me on my toes creatively and is beneficial for my career. We are at a time right now when there is so much output and competition, and it's smart to keep recording. When you look at artists like Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, those guys were prolific putting out two records a year. 

Will we get the opportunity to see you play over here in the near future?

We went to Europe last year and played Belgium, France, Spain, England, and Wales. We didn't have time to play Ireland and Scotland, but I want to play both of those next time. Nothing is confirmed, but we're hoping to be back in 2025.

Interview by Declan Culliton 

George Ducas Interview

George Ducas was born in Galveston, Texas. Later he moved to and performed in the Nashville area clubs by night and set about honing his songwriting skills by day. To date Ducas has released four studio albums: 1994's George Ducas (1994), Where I Stand (1997), 4340 (2013) and Yellow Rose Motel (2019). He is about to release his fifth album Long Way from Home. Produced by Pete Anderson (who is perhaps best know, in this context, as the producer of Dwight Yoakum’s earlier albums; as well as working with another roots/country artist Moot Davis). It is likely to be a high point today.

He has also achieved success as a songwriter gaining a hit as co-writer for Just Call Me Lonesome in the Billboard charts when it was released by Rodney Foster. Later he penned songs for the likes of Garth Brooks and George Jones, Gary Allan and Trisha Yearwood. He had a hit under his own name when Lipstick Promises made the top ten in the country charts. As an artist he has remained true to his personal vision and looks ready for continued acclaim with his latest album. Lonesome Highway took the opportunity to ask him some questions recently.

It’s great to see an artist like yourself continue to be engaged with the music process and to making such a strong album. Was there ever another option for you?

I’d like to believe there are always options for all of us to grow, learn, make mistakes, and go in a new direction. I know that isn’t always the case for everyone in the world, but for most of us in the US, the options are there if we really want them. That would be the case for me. But from an early age, creating and performing music has always been my first choice.

When did you decide that Pete Anderson was the man to produce the album?

Pete and I first met by phone during the darkest days of the pandemic. We hit it off immediately.

When did you start the pre-production and writing process on Long Way From Home?

Most of the songs I wrote for this album were created the past couple or few years. Pete and I started sifting through the songs with me sending a few tunes over to him one by one, and we’d set up a zoom meeting and talk through them, play through them. I’d send him songs all along the way, Pete with a guitar in LA, and me with a guitar in Nashville - talking through the songs, the vision for each, trying them on in different tempos and different keys. Looking back, I believe that unique remote process allowed us to really take our time, and crystalise our collective vision.

In the past you have often co-written with other writers. Do you prefer that to writing a song on your own?

I do enjoy the collaborative process - I also enjoy the solitude of creating on my own. I will say, when you’re creating with someone who is also truly on the same page, there’s a collective energy that’s hard to beat.

How hard is it to find a co-writer who is compatible with your aims?

I typically keep a fairly close knit group of collaborators; I’m aware there are so many talented writers out there, but not all have the same understanding of the musical landscape I prefer to traverse.

In the past you have worked with writers like Angelo, Kostas, Radney Foster, Tia Sellers and Michael P Henry - all are names you don’t see in the writes credits too much these days. Is that inevitable as trends and demands in music change?

Yes, and they are great writers, all. I do think growth and change is somewhat inevitable; popular styles certainly are. But I’ve always tried to maintain a sincerity and truth to what I record - not necessarily every single song I write, but every song that I choose to commit to as part of an album, part of my collection of recordings.

You co-produced your last two albums why did you decide not to do that this time?

I enjoyed the co-production process on previous albums, but when Pete and I met and began the discussion of working together, I really wanted to allow him the freedom to do what he does. Whether it’s been his work with Lucinda Williams, Jackson Browne, Dwight Yoakam, k.d. Lang, even heroes of mine like Buck Owens, Pete’s musical landscape, his recordings, guitar playing and production have been instrumental in influencing much of my own musical direction since I first heard his music as a teen.

You have previously worked with another excellent guitarist/producer for your Capitol Record releases in 1994 and 1996 in Richard Bennett. How would you compare those experiences?

As I’ve told Pete, I do see some similarities between him and Richard. Richard is a wonderful friend and an amazing, truly unique talent. And Pete is every bit of all of that as well. Both have an unrelenting drive for collaboration with a goal of revealing the artist’s and the album’s true self. I was fortunate to experience that with Richard at the start of my career; few artists have access to that kind of freedom and vision so early on in their career. I wasn’t aware of that at the time. Now as a more seasoned artist, as I collaborate with Pete, I’m able to appreciate that much more.

In a similar light, you released your next two albums independently. What are the main differences in those two options?

From a business perspective, the difference is marketing dollars. As a major label artist, you’ve got a million dollar marketing budget and immediate access to corporate radio, which is closely partnered with corporate (major label) music. I experienced the true power of that early in my career, during my first two albums on Capitol Records. The advantage is obvious - it’s all business.

You have had success in finding cuts with other artists, so was there a time when you were writing with other artists in mind or where you just continuing to write?

To me, writing is about serving the song. Always. I have never had any other artist in mind when writing a song. To me that’s entirely disingenuous.

Your body of work since 1994 has been to a certain allowing for the changes in the perception of country music. Yet in this new album you have chosen a sound more related to your 90s albums. Was that a very conscious decision given that there has been, recently, a shift back towards that era in sound?

Some might say there’s been a “shift back”, but then again there’s Beyoncé and there’s still the “bro country” thing happening, so I see it as more of a broadening of the genre than a definitive “shift back”. As for me, beyond some allowances for occasional production experimentation, I’ve never been one to chase trends - I see that as not being genuine. To emphasise that further, for this new album, I took it a step further, getting out of any Nashville mindset and choosing instead to record in Los Angeles. In doing so, I was able to connect even more with the roots of my earlier influences, ones I was so connected to when writing and recording my very first album for Capitol Records.

What motivates and inspires you now?

Motivation and inspiration are a funny thing. More than anything, I think we all have some level of internal motivation. How much of that we have is what determines how hard we are willing to work, to build - something. For me it’s always been creating my best self, musically speaking - country music but also just genuine music that’s able to cross boundaries that are too narrowly defined by labels and corporations, music that stands on its own and stands the test of time.

I’m not sure if you were able to play in Ireland UK and Europe that often in the past. I fondly remember a brief set in Whelans in Dublin during a CMA sponsored visit. Do you have plans to play outside the US again or is that a financially difficult option?

Financially difficult? No absolutely not, with a reasonable offer! Without that? Yeah, that’d be difficult to achieve, for any of us. I’ve really enjoyed touring abroad - I still fondly recall performing in Whelan’s in Dublin, along with Marty Stuart, Clint Black, Garth Brooks - even got to spend some time with Kris Kristofferson - during that CMA sponsored trip. My most recent performance in the UK was at Wembley Arena, along with Reba as well as a number of British artists. More recently I’ve enjoyed headlining festivals in France and Brazil - and most recently, I headlined a 3-day festival in Japan, along with Dierks Bentley and Asleep At The Wheel. I’d go back to every single country, in a heartbeat.

What were your major influences when you were growing up? I hear a number of different sources that sat alongside that of traditional country, as there was in a number of your contemporaries, at that time - something that made the music seem fresh and inclusive without being something that you would be hard pressed to identity as country.

Well thank you for that - fresh and inclusive is a great space to be creating in. Genres are rigid; I didn’t say it first but I certainly hold to it - good music is good music. And yes many of my influences are defined as “country” traditionally - guys like Willie Nelson, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard - but once you do a deeper dive, you’ll discover how Willie was influenced by jazz and swing, and Buck by his own admission was greatly influenced by Chuck Berry. Mr. Berry’s records, in fact, were an early influence on me as well. As were the blues greats, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins. I see them all as a - dare I say the - foundational bedrock upon which modern day music has evolved - both rock and roll as well as country.

Finally, how does the George Ducas starting out releasing his self titled debut in 1995 relate to the man releasing his new album?

(Laughs) I would hope that the ‘90’s me would look up to the 2024 Long Way From Home me, and say “I’d sure like to make music like that...” But hey, kids like me these days, who knows, right?

Interview by Stephen Rapid

My Darling Clementine Interview

With a combined back catalogue of over thirty albums, husband and wife team Michael Weston King and Lou Dalgleish have been at the forefront of the UK's Americana, roots and country music scene for over two decades. They put their solo careers temporarily to one side and combined their talents to launch My Darling Clementine in 2010. That liaison has resulted in seven studio recordings from their debut album, HOW DO YOU PLEAD? in 2011 and, more recently, their interpretation of a selected of Elvis Costello songs, COUNTRY DARKNESS. After their successful run of shows last year, they come back to Ireland to play ten shows between the 2nd and 12th of May. Included in that roster is a return to Kilkenny Roots Festival, a relationship that goes back twenty years since Michael performed solo and where My Darling Clementine last performed in 2017. 

Your latest project, COUNTRY DARKNESS, is a reworking of Elvis Costello's songs. Your association with his work goes back several years including your play, THEY CALL HER NATASHA. 

Lou - Yes, it's funny how things have come full circle. I was working with a full band doing a show of all Elvis Costello songs, then Michael and I collaborated and wrote that play, which we took to the Edinburgh Festival. It was about a woman called Elsie Costello, and it was just an excuse back then for Michael and me to indulge in Elvis' material, which we then left alone for almost twenty years. Having done a few My Darling Clementine albums together, we thought it would be nice to explore some Costello songs with a very different attitude to back then. 

Michael, was your solo album CRAWLING IN THE USA from 2008 a spin on Elvis's track Crawling To The USA from his 1979 album TAKING LIBERTIES?

Michael - It was. I released three live solo albums in the early 2000’s and based this one on my live gigs and radio sessions in The States. That title does have a double meaning though, as I was literally crawling through the USA sometimes. I did a six-week solo tour over there with just a guitar and a hire car, which sounds fantastic. But by the end of that run, and after so many years of a solo career, I’d had enough, and I thought it was time to quit being a troubadour and ‘get back into show business’. I thought of who I knew who was a good singer and who could drag me from this hell I had descended into. Turned out to be my wife.

You were married for a number of years and enjoying successful solo careers before forming My Darling Clementine.

Lou - It did take a few years, yes. We were both happily planning our solo careers and then we decided to have a baby, which I took as an excuse to put my feet up and not do anything for a couple of years. I really enjoyed being a mum and left it to Michael to bring home the bacon. We then thought we should collaborate, rather than be constantly competing with each other. In some ways, it became very simple logistically,  as we both knew exactly where we would be and could never escape each other (laughs). 

What was your vision, a one-off album or a permanent career move?

Michael - It was a case of  'let's make a late 60’s Nashville sounding record’ and see what happens.  The whole Americana thing was really bubbling along, and in true fashion, having been part of the Americana scene for a long time, I decided to swim against the tide and embrace real traditional country music So, we made HOW DO YOU PLEAD? Which was steeped in classic country duets; I thought we would maybe play a few gigs and then carry on individually again. Or maybe it would take off? I had looked at Imelda May and Richard Hawley and what they had done with traditional older styles of music, Imelda with rock and roll, and Richard with his Roy Orbison ballad thing, which had resulted in successful commercial careers. Part of the thinking was that My Darling Clementine could take country music and fashion it similarly. Both Imelda and Richard would admit that their careers changed when they landed spots on Later with Jools Holland. When the debut album came out, we were booked to do that show, but the series was reduced from twelve episodes to ten, and we were one of the acts that got bumped. Who knows if that would have been the difference for us? Quite possibly.

Have you seen a change in your audiences' profile over the years, given that 'country' music has contracting definitions for different generations in the U.K. and Ireland?

 Michael - I'm not sure. I've been working in the ‘country world’ since the days of the emergence of new country acts like Dwight Yoakum and Nanci Griffith. In Britain, our generation has always taken to the better country music from America and rejected the Nashville pop country. Nowadays, a general wave of bro-country / pop-country is being embraced here, and we are as far removed from that as we are from Metallica. Our audience comprises people who grew up with ALt. Country and then Americana, older fans who love the whole Gram Parson, Byrds thing,  and others who just like 'our thing'; they like the 'act' although they possibly wouldn't know Tom T Hall from Tom Jones. I was in my forties when we formed My Darling Clementine, and the subject matter we were writing was and is, adult-themed, as it was with George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner, so it music for older folks. 

Lou – I think the younger audiences think of country music as, what I consider, bland pop music because that is what they are being told is country music these days. 

What can we expect from your shows in Ireland?

Michael - we will be playing some brand new songs as we're working on a new record right now. There will be a few songs from the COUNTRY DARKNESS record, we do a ‘Costello set’ within the show, 5-6 songs,  and of course also plenty of songs, from the entire MDC back catalogue. 1-2 from my solo album (if Lou lets me). We also like to throw in a couple of more obtuse covers. At the moment it is the great Joe Henry song You Can’t Fail Me Now

Will the new album change direction from that of the previous ones?

Lou - With each album we make, we are moving slightly further away from our first album, not necessarily intentionally; you just try out different things. Potentially, with this album, we will be writing independently a bit more. We have always tended to do that, but we may be a little bit riskier this time in terms of not necessarily having to fit a particular brief. 

Michael - We are not singing all these new songs ‘to each other’ as we would with classic duets. Some will be conversational, but there will also be 'Lou's songs' and 'my songs', and it will be less 'country' than the previous records, more a mix of torch songs, power pop and singer-songwriter stuff. We are also producing this one solely ourselves. Two of our albums were produced by  Neil Brockbank, who worked with Nick Lowe for many years, and the other three albums, I co-produced them with Colin Elliot, who is part of the Richard Hawley band and also co-prodcues Richards albums.  Currently we are in the studio in Mid Wales with a wonderful young engineer and musician called Clovis Phillips; I made my recent solo album, THE STRUGGLE with Clovis, and the studio is ten miles up the road from where we now live, so super convenient, and it has a great sound. We will eventually take it to Sheffield, where Colin (Elliott) will mix it. It's a different process to other Clementine records where we would set up the band in the studio and record live. It's still a work in progress, and as yet untitled, (though I rather like “A Field Of Our Own”) and it should be out in November. 

Lou - we are doing this album in a more stripped-down way, going in more gently with our approach rather than setting up with a band and working on the songs as we have done in the past.

How much attention will you apply to the track listing given that the 'streaming generation' don't always play albums in full?

Michael - It's always the first two songs that get more plays and streams, no matter who you are. That wonderful process of putting the track listing together has nearly become irrelevant but as usual, we will labour over it. I still listen to cd’s and vinyl

Lou - And we will have endless arguments about the order of the tracks!

I believe you will be working again in the future with Elvis Costello's sidekick Steve Nieve, who contributed to the COUNTRY DARKNESS project. 

Michael - Yes, we are going to Japan later in the year to do some shows with Steve, which we're very much looking forward to. There are also 2-3 new songs which we’d like him to play on, so yes, expect more from the maestro on this album too.

You have a busy touring schedule ahead after your dates in Ireland. You have a strong fan base in Scandinavia in particular.

Michael - We go there a lot, especially to Norway.  The Norsk Americana Forum (www.americanaforum.no), the equivalent of the Americana Music Association here and in The States, are fans of ours and very supportive of us.  Also Germany, Holland and Spain are good for us. There is an audience out there and we are happy to travel. In fact the travelling, is part of the reward for what we do. Obviously, it would be nice to tour in a little more style, rather than splitter vans and people carriers but still. We enjoy the travelling together. When you're touring on your own,  you may be in the most beautiful place in the world but if it cant be shared it rather devalues it. And in fact it can be even lonelier, so the fact we can share and enjoy these experience is an added bonus.

Lou - Our daughter also comes with us some of the time which allows us to also have some family time on the road. She is a musician and regularly joins us on stage and as she gets older, we give her more and more work to do. She is coming to Ireland with us and will be on stage for some of the shows. 

Peter Case, who co-wrote the song Sugar, on Michael's latest solo album, THE STRUGGLE, will also be performing at Kilkenny. How did your connection with Peter come about?

Michael - I actually saw Peter play last night with Sid Griffin in Chester. We go back a long way, well over twenty years. Peter is a generation older than me, and I was a huge fan of him before I got to know him. We did a triple bill, trio tour - myself, Peter,  and John Doe of X, back in 2001, and we have always kept in touch. Just before lockdown I was in The States at a songwriting retreat in Lafayette. Peter was also there at and we ended up writing ‘Sugar' there. That was a thrill and I loved how it turned out. https://youtu.be/nuFmFP4Uin0?si=2yAT-zoSJuv1ILC0

Irrespective of our friendship, he is one of my favourite artists. He is criminally underrated, a hardcore troubadour who started out as a busker and has carried that on to this day, despite  flirting with fame, being signed to Geffen,  produced by T. Bone Burnett etc. He, of course, also played in The Nerves and The Plimsouls before going solo. Peter really has ‘it’, playing solo is not the same as playing without a band, there is a whole craft to it, and he is master-craftsman

Alongside the busy touring schedule and the next My Darling Clementine album, you also have a David Ackles tribute album in mind.

Michael - I've been pondering this for some time. I'm a big fan of David Ackles, he was a genius and hugely overlooked. A friend of mine, Mark Brend, is writing a biography of David at the moment. When I get the time, I want to get this album together to coincide with the book, due 2025. I have done it before, curating both tribute albums to old friends Jackie Leven and Townes Van Zandt but it’s hard work -  it's a bit like herding cats, trying to get everybody together to record their songs for the album. But, once done they are hugely rewarding, and it is always  interesting to see how different artists approach the songs - so hopefully the same will happen with this one.

Before then, and to  complete my busy workload, I am also one of three guest vocalists on an album called TREMULANT by Ghostwriter (aka Mark Brend), which comes out on September 13th.  It is an eclectic and experimental album  recreating and reinventing hymns and spirituals of the past 2 centuries. The other vocalists are Andrew Rumsey whose album Evensongs was a favourite from last year, and the folk singer, Suzy Mangion.

But first, and foremost, the My Darling Clementine Irish tour. Bring it on.

Interview by Declan Culliton with Stephen Rapid Main image by Richard Shakespeare

Jude Johnstone Interview

Jude Johnstone has been an influential songwriter for many years, having come to the attention of the music media in 2002 with the release of her debut album. Since those early years Jude has continued to build upon her reputation as an accomplished and sophisticated creative artist, attracting the interest of Trisha Yearwood, Bette Midler, Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Stevie Nicks, among others, who have recorded her songs. She  sat down to reflect upon her career and her recent return to touring Europe where she received considerable praise and plenty of love for her intimate performances. 

I wanted to ask how the recent tour of Europe went for you. I think that it was the first time in a number of years that you decided to play in front of a live audience?

Actually, other than during the thick of the pandemic, I have played on a regular basis in and around Nashville, often with my daughter. This was the first tour abroad since just before the pandemic.

You shared the stage with Kevin Montgomery and his band. How did you come to meet him and how was the travelling between countries and venues?

I met Kevin on Facebook. He was familiar with some of my songs that Trisha Yearwood had recorded and contacted me when he saw that I was playing in London with my friend Daniel Cainer, in 2018. Although Kevin is from Nashville, he has lived for a number of years in England. So he sent me a message that he was coming to my show at The Green Note and that he would like to sing on Hearts in Armor with me, which he did. That was when we met. The traveling between countries was smooth as silk cause Kevin has done this for over 20 years over there. He books himself, he fills the venues, he drives the van, he books the hotels, the ferries, he literally takes care of everything and sings his lid off every night. He is a marvel to watch. I think the tour with Kevin was a great success.

Since your debut album in 2002 you have been very prolific with eight albums released over  seventeen years to 2019.  How did the Covid pandemic impact on your momentum?

The pandemic didn’t change my writing habits but the change in the music business did. The pandemic caused all the paying gigs I had booked for that year to be cancelled. And they were not gigs that I could re-book later. They were just lost forever.

The last album you released was LIVING ROOM in 2019. Can you bring us up to date with your song writing activity and can we expect a new album during 2024?

As for 2024, It’s a financial challenge to make another studio album, but I have a friend or two that might provide an opportunity for me, if need be. Or I may put out a collection of sorts with several new songs on it. Or a CD of all my Celtic songs or a duet album, I haven’t decided what I want to do yet. I want to find a way to put out a new record this year, one way or another.

You were championed at an early age by Clarence Clemons of the E Street band. What was that experience like and how did it shape your subsequent acceptance as a new artist?

On Clarence Clemons, that is a very long story which I tell in detail on the first two episodes of my podcast,  Book of Jude. But his influence on me and his friendship was immeasurable. I met him on an airplane when I was just 18 and I sent him some of my songs. He contacted me and flew me to New Jersey to watch Springsteen record The River and attend the famous “No Nukes” concerts at Madison Square in NYC, where I met some of my idols. In particular, Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, both of whom would, many years later, sing harmonies on several of my own records and allow me the privilege of opening some shows for them along the way. Clarence remained my dear friend until he died at 69 years old.

The list of famous artists that have recorded your songs over the years is very impressive. Is the phone ringing in your Nashville home these days?

The first artist other than Clarence, to record a song of mine was Laura Brannigan, then Stevie Nicks … Bette Midler, Trisha Yearwood, Jennifer Warnes. I was in my 20’s in Hollywood when it started. As for my Nashville phone ringing, the answer is no, it does not ring much these days.

You initially write the songs for yourself and subsequently imagine other artists that they might suit. Can you remember the first time when headline artists started asking to record your songs?

Yes, both Stevie Nicks and Bette Midler. They were the first to ask back in the 1980’s.

You played piano from a young age. How naturally did song composition come to you?

Songwriting came at a very early age for me, around 8 years old. I think the first song that I thought might be a “hit” for someone was Cry Wolf which both Laura Brannigan and Stevie Nicks did. It wasn’t a hit for either of them but Stevie was my first Gold Record (The Other Side Of the Mirror in 1989). Music is always in my head, and lyrics too. 

Tell me about your creative process. Do the songs come easily to you and do you have a store of ideas that await completion?

The music comes almost by itself, often fully formed. The lyrics are what I spend all the time on, sometimes years. And yes, I have many notebooks with unfinished ideas in them waiting for the right time when I feel capable of finishing them.

Do you believe that the spark of creativity is ever-present and that access to it is the key challenge for all writers?

The spark of creativity is not always there for me. But I don’t sweat it. I just wait.

You like to teach song composition to other musicians and writers. How do you view the role of teacher?

I teach songwriting to students through Airbnb Experiences in order to help pay my bills.

Do you like to experiment with different music genres when composing?

I write in whatever genre presents itself to me at the time.

How difficult is it to get paid a decent royalty cheque these days with the onset of downloads and streaming services to the listening public?

I no longer get paid anything to speak of when my songs are recorded because people don’t buy the physical product anymore. They stream songs instead and make their own playlists, and the streaming companies charge them a monthly subscription fee to listen to anyone’s songs, out of which the songwriter gets nothing. That model destroyed my career overnight, basically. I don’t get paid much anymore, unless I were to write a radio hit for somebody or get a tv or movie placement.

When you reflect upon your career to date I’m sure it resembles a roller coaster of experiences, many joyful moments mixed with all the recognition that your talents have attracted. What advice would you give to a younger Jude Johnstone who is just embarking on her journey?

Don’t be too precious. Be open to collaboration. Don’t rely on others to validate your work. No one else has your story. Don’t be afraid to tell it. Always do work you’re proud of, whether anyone hears it or not.

Interview by Paul McGee

Sid Griffin Interview

Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and author Sid Griffin is a founder member of the Los Angeles band The Long Ryders and bluegrass band The Coal Porters. Alongside his studio output with those bands, he has recorded several solo albums and is the author of four books. Like many of their peers, The Long Ryders' album sales in no way reflect their significance in the alternative country music chain or their influence on numerous acts that followed their path of melodic guitar-driven songs. A statement of their status and esteem in the industry was the Country Music Hall of Fame including them in an exhibition titled WESTERN EDGE: THE ROOTS and REVERBERATIONS of LOS ANGELES COUNTRY ROCK in 2022. After a three-decade recording hiatus, they returned to the studio to record PSYCHEDELIC COUNTRY SOUL in 2019. They followed it four years later with SEPTEMBER NOVEMBER, both albums equalling the high quality of their earlier work. Griffin is about to embark on a tour of the U.K. and Ireland with his longtime friend Peter Case before heading out on the road with The Long Ryders later in the year. Lonesome Highway found him typically enthusiastic when we recently spoke with him at his London home. 

When we last spoke with you eight years ago, you were unsure if The Long Ryders would record again. Since then, you have recorded PSYCHEDELIC COUNTRY SOUL and SEPTEMBER NOVEMBER despite the logistical complications of where you all live and the pandemic. 

I didn't think The Long Ryders would play again after seventeen and a half years, but we got some offers from America, and the next time I knew it, we were back in the game; I didn't dream that would happen. We were going to do a 80s oldies show, but I didn't want to play Run Dusty Run or the same songs anymore. One of my good friends, Barry Shank, wrote a brilliant song called Ivory Tower, which is on the fabulous NATIVE SONS Box Set, but I had played that song hundreds of times, including rehearsals. We thought we really needed some new songs, and that's how we got into that. I was actually the last to succumb, Greg (Sowders) and Steven (McCarthy) were up for it. Now, at our shows, the set list is half and half old and new, and I can do songs like Ivory Tower. I realised that I had to have new songs on those first few reunion tours. 

How long did those albums take to record?

Those albums were literally made in a number of days. Three days doing the backing tracks and then we sang and did some overdubs, Ed (Stasium) mixed them and sent them to us. The Rolling Stones want to get one track each day done, so if they come up with a Brown Sugar backing track in one whole day, they'll all be happy. I was listening to The Beatles when they toured from 1962 to 1965, and those live shows were amazing. What went down on tape was not repaired or edited. Lennon, McCartney and Harrison sing on key, and Ringo finds the groove every time. It's incredible; they never speed up, and they never slow down. The Long Ryders had a similar understanding in the way that The Beatles incubated so well from playing in Hamburg. 

That adeptness must be beneficial when you tour, given you all living so far from one another.

It does. We don't have to rehearse a lot. Stephen, Greg and I have been playing together for so long, and there is a distinctive and unquestionable groove and tightness that we fall into. Greg literally knows what I want to eat for breakfast. Because of that, I find playing with other people more difficult because the bass player and drummer will have different ideas that I'm not used to. 

What age demographic is attending your show, and has your music filtered to a younger audience?

Primarily but not exclusively, seventy per cent male and thirty per cent female, mostly men our age. But the crazy thing about it is we have more kids between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five coming to the shows. It's a really growing demographic out of nowhere, probably because parents are starting to bring their fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds to the shows. With boys, it may be to see Stephen McCarthy play the guitar because he is a virtuoso; he is the country rock answer to Johnny Marr. My daughter, who is twenty-four, brought her friend to see us play in Brighton, and they loved it. So, the next time The Long Ryders were in Brighton, where she is at university, she brought twelve friends, and they had a marvellous time. I thought the young people listening to The Long Ryders would be at the back of the room looking at their phones; they were dancing and jumping around at the front of the room. That's been a joy, but it is primarily guys my age at the shows. My wife once joked, 'If you don't know where Sid's gig is, just follow the grey ponytails.'

Are you experiencing an acceleration in sales for vinyl for your albums at the merch desks and by the Cherry Red label?

Certainly, young kids want vinyl. The CD is not dead yet, but it's on the ground looking up at the ceiling, on its backside, breathing heavily. I don't know how all these different formats can survive: streaming, downloading, vinyl, CD and cassette. There are two or three cassette plants opening in the world right now. CD’s can be a wonderful package, but they're small. When you get a twelve-by-twelve-inch album, it's a proper piece of artwork. Even forgetting about the music, Sgt. Pepper's cover, by Peter Blake and his then-wife, was a piece of art, but when it was released on CD, you're asking, 'Who are all these people?' 

With the Americana brand expanding in all directions and losing its identity, do you feel that 'guitar bands' like The Long Ryders are being overlooked?

Because of the information highway and the digital world, we have a multiplicity of radio stations and streaming services. There needs to be a format, and Americana as a format has not taken off in the way that I thought it was going to do about eight years ago. It hasn't done what I thought it would, and we need a new name or format. The industry has taken over what Americana could have been to its detriment. It breaks my heart. I want to see new young bands with an immediate place or genre where they can go, but it's not there. With the streaming service paying such terrible royalties, why make music at all? You'd be a fool to go into it to make money, but you should at least get something back. There is a young band here in the U.K. like Eight Rounds Rapid and artists like Jack Valero, and I think, 'Where are these guys going to go?' We as a culture need a format of radio that has everything from guitar bands, riot girl bands, and pop/rock bands like Sleator-Kinney, Tom Waits, Wilco, and Ry Cooder; all these wonderful people, but they're not on the radio.  

Are you as enthusiastic these days about performing live as ever?

I don't know how it happened, but I like playing live more than ever. Jeffrey Lee Pierce from the band The Gun Club was the first person I heard use this funny phrase: 'I do the gigs for free; they're paying me to travel.' I really don't mind travelling, especially with someone like Peter Case, and I like playing live more than ever, and there are not many days off on this tour. I've known Peter for forty-two years, and we did this tour four years ago, just before Covid. I thought we'd be listening to music while driving around in the van during that tour. I think we actually only played any music twice. The rest of the time, we were chin-wagging like two old ladies hanging over the fence or having a morning coffee (what was the club in Sacramento, California, that didn't pay people? What was that girl's name that slapped that guy in the face? Did you hear about the fight one night in Denver? That guy from the band got hit on the head? So, I'm looking forward to the tour as well as the music. Also, many of my friends come to the shows; every other night, someone that I know and love will come to the show. 

What can we expect from your shows in Ireland with Peter Case? Will they be diligently prepared? 

No. Peter never does the same show twice. I've seen Jerry Lee Lewis play, and before playing a few hits at the end, he would play a completely different set each time. He'd play gospel, country, a Broadway show tune. Peter is a bit like that. I told him that my favourite song of his is Still Playing from 1995, and he said, 'I don't play that any more,' and then one night, he just played it, he's a bit like that. I open up for forty-five minutes, Peter comes on and does his set, and at the end, we do some songs together, which is always the highlight for me. I may have to borrow a banjo for the gigs in Ireland, but I'll have my mandolin, harmonica and six-string acoustic with me. Peter will have his twelve-string guitar, which he plays like Leadbelly. It's hard to do Long Ryder's songs because of their pounding backbeat, but I do some. But if someone yells out 'Ivory Tower or Run Dusty Run,' songs I've done a thousand times, half the time I'll play them because tickets aren't cheap anymore, so if someone yells out incessantly for a song, I'll probably play it. 

The Long Ryders will be back on tour in Europe later this year.

Yes, we're on the road in October, playing the U.K. and Europe. We also hope to reprise The Native Sons tour in March 2025 in North America and Central Europe, where we play that album from top to bottom. 

The core sound on the recent albums, PSYCHEDELIC COUNTRY SOUL and SEPTEMBER NOVEMBER, is business as usual, but the songwriting reflects the passing years. I couldn't imagine you writing Until God Takes Me Away in 1984 or Join My Gang in 2023.

Good point. I'm a little embarrassed about Join My Gang. It's a nice punchy rock and roll song, but if you listen to what I'm singing, it's baloney. It's a small, skinny Sid Griffin kid trying to sound badass and tough. I'd feel like an idiot singing those lyrics now. I'd also have been embarrassed back then singing Until God Takes Me Away to a woman. Now, with maturity and age, I can sing that song to a woman and not be embarrassed, but when you're in your teens or early twenties, you are embarrassed by that sentiment. Stephen and I do some acoustic shows and we always do that song.

The instrumental Song For Ukraine from SEPTEMBER NOVEMBER represented a political dimension to your music. Given what is going down globally, Is that something you have been drawn towards as a band in recent years?

I don't think we will be doing a Billy Bragg, but we had a stand-alone single that Stephen wrote called Down To The Well, which came out around COVID-19, and we will probably put it in an anthology. It's a great song about Trump, and as you get older, it is time to point out some of these things. People ask me how I enjoy London and one of my answers is that I can't go home to The States now, there could be a civil war, why would I want to bring a wife and two kids to that. 

Going back to your early days as one of the pioneering bands in what became the Paisley Underground, do you feel shortchanged that your music did not reach a greater listenership then?

It goes back to what we were saying earlier, there was no radio format at the time. We use Old 97s bass player Murry Hammond on tour. He's a great human being and musician, and they came out ten years after The Long Ryders. He's ten years younger than us, and they had a much easier ride because bands like ourselves and Green On Red, The Blasters, and X had laid down a sort of Americana marker and musical pathway to follow. But none of those bands I mentioned sold too many records. I'm not begrudging Old 97's their success, they're a terrific band and have a great new album out called AMERICAN PRIMITIVE. The best way to sum it up is to quote a prominent U.K. rock critic who said, 'The Long Ryders were the perfectly right band at the perfectly wrong time.' 

How do you compare your vocation as a songwriter to that of a biographer?

Songs are bursts of inspiration; sometimes, a three-minute song comes in fifteen minutes, and it's done and finished. I'm working on a book that is kind of an autobiography, and it's taking forever. It's a little different, I skip my early days because no one wants to know about my early days growing up in Kentucky. It is funny or poignant stories about the bands I have been in and some of the famous shoulders I brushed in L.A. I'm extremely proud of it, and I've just finished editing the second pass of the book. I need to edit it because no one wants to read one hundred and thirty thousand words about my life. I've done four books, and they take so much effort than any song or album; a book is like moving a mountain using a small hand shovel. 

You mentioned growing up in Kentucky. What music was around you at that time?

A lot of country and western, and a lot of bluegrass. In the U.K., Ireland, and continental Europe, there's usually a tavern nearby where some act is playing music informally. I go to a bluegrass session on Tuesday nights here in London because it's at a nearby pub. Back when I was growing up, there was a tavern called Bowers; it's gone now, but it was there from 1876; a German/American family owned it. They had a band there in the early1960s, four or five guys with a banjo, a stand-up bass and a fiddle. In the summer, they would have the windows open, and when I was a kid, I could see through the window and hear them playing. As a kid, to me, they looked like old men. One day, coming home from college, I went into the bar, and there were lads not much older than me playing, and I realised that back in Kentucky, these bluegrass bands doing Ernest Tubb and Bill Monroe songs were guys in their mid-to-late twenties. 

Did you reject that music at the time because you thought it wasn't hip?

Yes, I thought it was interesting but kind of stupid, hillbilly and hick. Right in my neighbourhood were these virtuoso musicians, fiddle and guitar players, but I didn't care at the time. Like a lot of young people, I had an infatuation with The Who, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. It's funny because my sister and I were huge Motown fans. We had more records, singles and albums by The Supremes, The Four Tops and The Temptations, but it never occurred to me to be a soulful Motown R'n'B musician. 

Finally, I want your opinion on A.I. in the music industry. Does it worry you?

It does. A lot of people in the Orient make fake Beatles songs and post them on Instagram. They may superficially sound like The Beatles, but when you listen closely, they're more like The Rutles or a parody of The Beatles. But it is worrying. If they can do that to The Beatles, can they do it to James Joyce or Patrick Kavanagh or get some still photographs of Marilyn Monroe and imitate her voice for videos? It's scary. 

Interview by Declan Culliton Photograph by Phil Grey

Jenny Don't Interview

Winners of The Ameripolitan Award as Outlaw group of the year in 2023 was well-earned recognition for a decade of touring and recording for Portland, Oregon band Jenny Don’t and The Spurs. Ignoring industry trends, the band has remained faithful to the vision of creating its brand of high-energy country/punk crossover. Lonesome Highway chatted with Jenny before the band headed off on their customary hectic touring schedule across The States and Europe, where we will get the opportunity to see them perform live at The Static Roots Festival in Oberhausen, Germany, in July.  

Where did your devotion to Western style and music come from?

My mom was a rodeo queen in Wyoming in the '70s, and I was the only one among my siblings who had any interest in riding horses in that rodeo style. I did that during my youth, and my mom would always listen to Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Hank Williams, so I grew up listening to a lot of that stuff. That was ingrained in me and my 'go-to' for my songwriting. 

Like many others, your entry into Western music came via punk bands.

Yes, I had a punk band called Don't in my late teens and early twenties. It was fun to get some aggression out there and have fun, but at the same time, punk was a bit limiting as to certain places where you could play, and I wanted to open up so that we could play anywhere. We have done that with Jenny Don’t and The Spurs, where we can play a louder, faster set in a punk or grunge setting and also play a winery or brewery and play a different set while still sounding cohesive and not like two different bands. 

Did some of your material come from those early days?

I was playing a lot of the songs that became Jenny Don't and The Spurs songs back then. Sam Henry, who died in 2022, was the drummer in the Portland punk band The Wipers at that time and would sometimes play guitar with me. We used to joke, 'Come and see the two worst guitar players in Portland play a show on a patio on Saturday night just for fun.' But we eventually decided to take it a bit more seriously. Kelly (Halliburton) was playing drums with the married couple Fred and Toody Cole, and he and I wanted to do a project together. We decided to do some of the songs I'd been playing on those patio shows. Freddie and Toody asked us to open shows for them, and it took off from there. Now, it's our primary project and has surpassed everything else.

You have been described as rebellious and independent. A fair depiction?

Even within the Western scene, it is rebellious because a lot of people expect you to play traditionally. What we do is our interpretation of that, and we're not trying to recreate something that's already there. We take Bakersfield and Red Dirt influences and do our own thing because if you try to do something exactly as it was done before, it becomes contrived, and you lose some of that authenticity.

How have you evolved over the past decade in terms of performing and recording?

We've hung in more on our own sound with each album and got inspiration from other artists. With CALL OF THE ROAD (2017) and FIRE ON THE RIDGE (2021), we established that we wanted to play these songs hyper-speed with lots of energy. Our latest album, BROKEN HEARTED BLUE, was recorded with Colin Hegna from the Portland band Federale, and he also plays with Brian Jonestown Massacre. He did a cool job because everybody had their own space within the songs. He captured my vocals, allowing me not to have to project as much as before; some of the earlier stuff's vocals have that punk rock attitude, but with this one, we've brought it down a bit and played around with influences like Lee Hazlewood, who has such a way of telling a story. His vocal tenor is so low, yet he really paints a picture with his songs. We also played around a lot more with reverb on this album and having open spaces within the songs. In previous albums, I would present the songs to Kelly and mainly have everything done, whereas this time, we collaborated a lot more in the song-building process. I mainly did the music and the melodies, and Kelly helped with the lyrics. This album is more mature. We've put a big effort into it. It's a good mixture of cowpunk, garage and western, and we're proud of it. It's also the first album we've had Buddy Weeks play drums on, which is good because it's something that he contributed to before the touring season starts.

 Had you worked with Colin Hegna before? 

We had played shows with Colin before but never had him produce for us. We really enjoyed the experience, and I believe we will work with him on our next recording project. He had great input on the guitars we should try and use and spent a lot of time on the rhythm guitar; on previous recordings, I just did my rhythm guitar parts with the drums, and they were done. Colin also spent time getting me to build on acoustic and having multiple guitars on the tracks, which I had yet to do before. We did a mix of recording live and building from that. Kelly also likes doing overdubs for his bass because he's got so many notes. Recording solely live by the end of the session, everybody is spent, and it starts sounding mechanical. For us, everybody gets their takes done in three or four tries. 

Had you road tested the material for the album on your last tour?

We usually play the songs live before we go into the studio to see how the crowd feels about them. The first few times is like a blind date for everyone. It's a good way to let things sink in

Buddy Weeks has replaced Sam Henry, who passed away in 2022 shortly after being on tour with you. That must have been devastating for you all.

It was awful and something that none of us had expected. Sam hadn't been feeling well, went to the doctor to be told he had terminal cancer. Kelly, Christopher and I didn't know whether we wanted to put the band to bed and do spin-offs after Sam died, but we also thought that it would be a disservice to all the work Sam had put into the band and didn't want all of that to be in vain. I had been playing with Sam since 2008 and had no other drummers. We told Buddy that we had a tour lined up in Europe and The States and was he prepared to jump in the van with us and essentially give a year of his life up. It has been great; he is a really good fit. We would never ask anyone to play exactly like Sam, but Buddy plays with a similar style; he also plays with a traditional grip and has his own flair in the way he holds tempos and his own embellishments. He's also fun to hang out with outside the shows; you're on stage for a few hours at a time, but you're together for the rest of the day. 

 The title track from the album, Broken Hearted Blue reflects those sacrifices and missed opportunities that touring presents.

Yes, it deals with being on the road and not having time for romance, and someone catches your eye; that can't be reflective of me, of course. But then you're off to the next town. 

Your touring schedule is hectic, to say the least.

We played a lot of shows last year at home and abroad. We played a bunch of shows in Scandinavia and Germany, and we also played in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. My husband and bass player Kelly had toured there with some of his earlier punk bands and had made connections. He reached out to them as we were going to be in Australia, and it's cheaper to fly to those places from Australia than from the States. It worked out really well. We’re just about to head off touring the States and Europe again in a few weeks.

Can you make it stack up financially touring with a full band?

Kelly and I are a good team. He is good at booking and accounting, and I'll do the visually creative side of things. We've got to the stage where no one is out-of-pocket touring; it's a lot to ask guys to commit so much time because you're limiting yourself and sacrificing so much. So, when we go to Europe, we do a lot of shows to cover the costs.

How does touring as a married couple pan out?

It’s good. We are together 24/7, so many couples we know found it difficult when Covid happened, but it wasn't any different for us. It strengthens our relationship; we will have been together for fifteen years this summer. 

You have created a brand by pairing your outlaw musical sensibilities while embracing the genre's fashion side. How important is that to you?

We love to dress up and wear Nudie-style suits, and we’ve noticed at our shows that more people are dressing up that come to them. I make my own outfits from scratch, buy the fabric from the stores and find the patches that I want to use. I have an old-school hand crank machine, which I use. For Kelly's suits, I deconstruct old suits, take them apart and put them together again. I'm always trying to cram this together between tours because we only have so much time, but I like to have a new outfit for each tour. Some of the outfits get thrashed on tour, so I can't justify spending a huge amount to get outfits made for me. 

What designers particularly inspire you?

Manuel, who worked with Nudie, for one. I have a book called How the West Was Worn, which has visuals of old suits, who made them, and their inspirations. Ruth Franklyn has a self-learn embroidery and chain stitching video that I've studied. There's actually a huge embroidery and chain stitching community, and I've met a lot of others who also do it; it's another fun, creative outlet. 

The outlaw genre has been supported and furthered by Dale Watson and Celine Lee’s annual Ameripolitan Music Award festival that have given artists like yourselves deserved exposure. 

Outlaw is something that you can't totally characterise, and I appreciate Dale Watson doing Ameripolitan. He was facing the same thing where the industry wanted the mainstream country to sound a certain way. There is a huge underground country music scene that gets overlooked, so Dale and Celine putting that together every year is cool. They are also bringing together artists from all around the world and not just being hyper-focused on what is happening in the U.S.  

Interview by Declan Culliton. Photograph by Jen Borst

Dan Stuart Interview

Singer-songwriter, musician and author, Dan Stuart's career spans four decades. Over that period, he has recorded over two dozen studio albums; his back catalogue consists of his solo work as band leader with Green on Red and The Slummers and collaborations with Al Perry and Steve Wynn. His literary work includes the Marlow Billings trilogy of novels and his book of poetry, Barcelona Blues. In the early to mid-80s, Green on Red was at the forefront of The Paisley Underground movement in California, providing some of that decade's most essential music. He spoke recently with Lonesome Highway of that period in Los Angeles ('I'm lucky those guys even talk to me') and much more.

We are looking forward to your return to Ireland. What can we expect from your shows?

I'm not sure yet what is expected of me at all the shows, I think some are more literary-oriented than others. I'm also happy to play my songs and tell stories if that's what people want. If people are going to take the time and effort and pay money to show up, I have to honour that, which I didn't always do in the past. I used to be 'I'm going to do what I want to do.' With the way society and our greater culture are these days, and coming out of all the things we've been going through in this last decade, we really need to reestablish that beautiful contract between performance and audience and give mutual respect in both directions

You have two appearances lined up for the Kilkenny Roots Festival. 

Yes, the Kilkenny Roots Festival, like the Dylan Thomas weekend in Wales that I recently performed at, is something that I have wanted to do for quite a while, and I'm very pleased that I have been invited. I met Willie (Meighan) some years ago in Kilkenny and didn't understand how much he meant to that community at the time. When I did find out about his history, I was very impressed.

You will be sharing stages with two artists with a similar background to yourself, Peter Case and Sid Griffin. 

I don't really know Peter, which I'm a little scared of, to be honest (laughs). He's a hell of a musician with a great body of work. I've known Sid forever, and he's a sweet and caring guy who has enjoyed an interesting life in the U.K. He can go on to the BBC and do battle for all of us gringos back home. He's so light on his feet when exchanging witticisms, and he can do all the wordplay and the puns. Not all of us Yankees are that talented. 

I understand that your first exposure to punk was not MC5, The Stooges, or The Velvet Underground but Chris Bailey's short-lived Australian band, The Saints. 

Well, I was aware of the Velvet Underground, MC 5 and The Stooges when I was thirteen. We had a very good radio station in Tucson, and we got a lot of touring acts that played Tucson because of that radio station and that maybe wouldn't go to Phoenix and places like that. I would have heard all that type of stuff that people now consider the beginnings of punk rock. But I would say you've got to go back to the 50s to really get into that sort of basic sort of one-four-five chord change behind that massive backbeat. The punk rock thing is really interesting because I was bored of rock and roll around 1974. I went to Australia with my dad, who was Australian. He was a professor, and he went over there for a sabbatical. So, I spent a year in Australia on Maroubra Beach, of all places. So, I was living in Australia when The Saints' I'm Stranded was the number one hit. This was like 1975/76. But I also saw Radio Birdman at the Royal Easter Show, which was a big County Fair type thing in Sydney, and I was tripping on acid, so that was quite a shock. But when I got back to Tucson, punk had really just taken over, and I had already seen some of it. So, when I came back from Australia, everybody was talking about The Clash and The Ramones. I caught all that when I was about sixteen.

What are your earlier music memories?

You don't get to choose your era, and whatever you listen to, when you first fall in love, or when you first have your bit of independence from your parents, that will be what sticks with you. But I feel very lucky because in 1968 I was seven years old, driving around with my mom and in the car listening to great pop radio and the beginning of what we now call album-oriented rock or classic rock, which was dominant on F.M. radio back then. Then, in the early 70s, when I first started smoking weed, we listened to what we now call prog, but for me, rock and roll was getting a little bit too intellectual, with too many chord changes. I had the best with Burt Bacharach, The Monkees, The Doors, Bob Dylan, prog, album-orientated rock, and then punk. 

All those influences put you on your own musical path.

Yes. All that stuff leaked out when I started doing music with my friends. I wish I had been a better musician to take advantage of what I had heard. That's been a real struggle over the years to get the craft where you can really manifest what you're feeling. That was a long struggle for me; I wasn't, and I am still not, a very good musician. It doesn't have to be perfect, but you've got to be able to deliver. I have a saying that I always try to be the least talented in any collaborative endeavour. I've been really lucky with everybody I've worked with, from Chris Cacavas and Chuck Prophet, and right on until my very last record that I did with Danny Amis producing. I'm like Blanche DuBois, you know, I depend on the kindness of strangers. I've been very lucky that way, and with my writing, too, I've had a few really important readers of all my books that have helped me get better each time, which is a nice feeling. As a writer, it's nice to feel you're getting better at your work. 

Your early band days would have been part of an underground scene in Los Angeles.

Yes, and it's so much harder to be underground this century, the counterculture has gradually disappeared. Everything gets co-opted and sold back to a potential audience within minutes. I like to joke that all my references were last century, I used to think about what it would have been like to be alive around 1920. If you spent most of your life in the previous century, it must have been very strange to have all these references of a time and age that had disappeared. People ask me, well, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? I'm still trying to figure out, you know, 1985. I'm the wrong person to talk to when people want to know about that new Netflix series. I haven't even I haven't even worked my way through the French New Wave yet.

That underground scene most probably does exist. Unfortunately, there are not as many avenues for acts to advance from that as there were in previous decades. 

I'm with you on this idea that, regardless, there will be kids getting together in living rooms and basements who are figuring out how to interact with each other and how to play this thing that we used to call rock and roll. I don't think that's gone away, it's just maybe a little tougher to uncover than it used to be. It's a little more invisible. My son was in a punk band for a while as a teenager. He lives in New York City and they very much had their own little circuit. They had little places where they were playing, but the difference is that there was no New York Rocker magazine to talk about it. 

That absence, or lack of quality music press, in America is lamentable. 

What particularly hurts, and not just in music, is that we're out of the age of criticism and more kind of in the age of celebrity. There's also this egalitarian thing about deciding what's good and what's not. Well, I don't care whether we're talking about a Vietnamese restaurant or some new flick out of Turkey or whatever. I miss honest criticism and negative reviews, which I think are very important. It never bothered me when somebody took the time to give a nice burn to myself or Green on Red, and I appreciated that somebody cared enough to give us a wallop. But I'm a snob, not when it comes to politics or economics or things like that, but when it comes to the arts. I want to hear somebody's opinion, especially if it goes against my initial point of view. As we both know, a well-written piece of criticism is not about declaring something good or bad. It's deeper than that. Because life itself is so nuanced and complicated. I am fortunate to have experienced much of that firsthand and caught the last days of real publishing money and rock and roll criticism. I miss that; I miss the Lester Bangs and Nick Tosches of the world as much as I miss the classic rock bands. 

With Green on Red, did you feel part of a growing movement that became tagged as The Paisley Underground?

Well, we did get lumped into the quote/unquote, The Paisley Underground scene. We weren't friends with all the others; some of the bands we didn't even know, but we knew The Dream Syndicate and Rain Parade for sure. We would have parties and barbeques, go out drinking, and go to each other's gigs. We were all in our early twenties in L.A. having a blast. 

Did you view it as a path to commercial success?

I was too insecure to take advantage of what might have been lined up for us. Lee Hazlewood told me that These Boots Are Made for Walkin' put all his kids through college. But I wasn't thinking along those lines in my twenties and even if it would have been attainable, I would have been, and I'm taking responsibility here, the one to sabotage that simply because if it didn't happen, I wouldn't be disappointed. That's a common thing with a lot of young people, 'if I really admit that it would be nice to hear myself while I was grocery shopping, I might be disappointed if I didn't.' 

Was there industry support there for you to widen your appeal?

Green on Red got away with murder; we were given a chance after chance after chance and blew it. Then I went and fired the band, my best friends. I didn't even tell them all, they had to find that out through the music press. Anyone trying to help us was like trying to help a sociopath, it was not going to work. At the same time, I'm proud of Green on Red, and I'm most proud of the fact that the four of us, the surviving members, are still on a certain level like brothers. I'm not ashamed to say that I love them and that outside of my immediate family, they are some of the most important people in the world to me. It's like the Paul Thomas Anderson movies where your original family is not good enough, and so you start another one in your adult life. We're in regular contact, and they are far better people than I am; I did some really dreadful things. I'm not saying that to beat up on myself, and I'm not a big guy on redemption, but I did some crappy stuff, and I'm lucky those guys even talk to me. But that relationship of us all climbing into the van and going around the world was heavy stuff. It's deep, as Jack (Waterson) said to me recently, it's as close to going to war as you're going to get. 

You have all survived and are enjoying successful careers?

Yes, what about Jack and his hip-hop career with Adrian Younge? He has had the most interesting career of all of us because he is in a totally different world. Chuck and Chris have done extremely well, too; we took our experience and leveraged it into something that was more important to us as adults.

 How did you deal with the transition from band leader to solo performer?

I had to learn to do the 'folkie' thing around 2010. It's not easy though I've got a lot better at it. I did a book tour in September and October last year where I read a few chapters, sang some songs, and told some stories. Because it was neither fish nor fowl, it was easy to do and entertaining. This more recent fifteen-day tour with Tom Heymen was back to doing as Doug Sahm used to say, 'can't sing, can't writer' instead of singer-songwriter. Of course, it's much easier to go out with a decent rhythm section and play rock and roll than do the precious sort of folkie thing. Having said that, it can be lots of fun, and I'm happy that I've forced myself to do it, though it did take a long time to know how to do it. 

You recently expressed that you would prefer to have more novels and fewer albums in your back catalogue. Would you have held the same ambition in your early career?

Well, I also wanted to write back then, but I just couldn't do it. I've always considered myself to be a lazy writer, and that's probably why. Writing a song is like a fifty-metre sprint, it may take a year to finish, but you know you have something within minutes. A novel is like a marathon and takes a whole different frame of reference. I would say that half of my records are ok, and I feel the same sort of thing with my books. They all probably have something worthwhile about them, but I still need to do THE one (laughs). Coming off my recent U.K. tour with Tom Heyman, we were actually talking about 'add a word, get a third' co-writing. Writing a novel is lonely, and you're thinking, 'Is this worth anything?' One thing that is a huge relief to me now, because I'm not writing songs, which can be a curse, is that I can practice guitar without writing a song. I'm not saying I'll never write a song again, but I'm done with writing a collection of songs that become albums, that horse has left the barn. I don't think that collections of twenty minutes of music on each side of a vinyl record is something that is adhered to any more, even if the way I grew up listening to music. There is an expression in Spanish', No Tengo Ganus', and like that, I don't have the desire or passion for doing that anymore. That has been hugely liberating for me.

What project in your extensive back catalogue are you most proud of?

I'm proud of the last book, Marlowe's Revenge because I got out of the way of the story and let myself do something that the average person could read. That made me happy, but I'm not a big fan of myself. When you look at what's out there and the number of brilliant musicians, writers, artists, photographers and critics, I've got my own little corner that I sit in, and I don't want to take up all the oxygen in the room anymore. I feel very lucky just now, after my world fell apart in 2009, that I have to pinch myself. I've had a good run, getting invited to do shows and getting the trilogy of novels and records done. I do want to say to you and the audiences that get enjoyment from what I do, “That's a wonderful thing, and thanks for giving a shit.”

Interview by Declan Culliton

Ian M. Bailey Interview

There is every likelihood that Lancashire-based artist Ian M. Bailey has gone under your musical radar. That was the case with us at Lonesome Highway until we received a review copy of Bailey’s 2021 album SONGS TO DREAM ALONG TO. Aptly titled, that melodic and hook-filled album was a fusion of classic 60s Brit-pop and the sunny West Coast output of that era. That record represented a meeting of minds between Bailey and co-writer Daniel Wylie of Cosmic Rough Riders fame and one that continued on subsequent recordings. Hot on the heels of that record, YOU PAINT THE PICTURES (2022) and WE LIVE IN STRANGE TIMES (2023) followed a similar musical template and, like their predecessor, were recorded in Bailey’s home studio, Small Space Studio, with lead vocals and harmonies, and all instrumentation, except strings, credited to him. If you’re a fan of the instantly catchy tunes of The Beatles, The Byrds, Gene Clark or The Jayhawks, we highly recommend that you check out Bailey’s back catalogue, available on the Kook Kat Music Label. We zoomed into Bailey’s home studio recently to get the background into his passion for songwriting and recording classic and timeless-sounding songs. 

Where did your love of ‘60s and ‘70s music originate from?

My dad was an avid record collector; he collected 33s, 45s, and 78s and tapes and kept them all in a walnut cabinet that he made when he was in school, which I have now inherited. It’s got 45s by Chuck Berry, Del Shannon, Elton John, The Hollies, Shirley Bassey, The Who, Buddy Holly, Stones, Don Maclean, Raymond Froggat Bread, The Eagles, and many more are all in there. We often spend an evening playing the singles, covering the whole living room floor with records. I can always remember from an early age coming home from school and music being on in the house, The Moody Blues, Little Richard, Simon and Garfunkel. My mum and dad had this Binatone radio that they kept in their bedroom, and every Wednesday night, I used to take the radio into my room with a Beano annual and a torch and listen to Radio Luxemburg on medium wave under the covers. They used to play a Beatles hour and a 60s hour. The song America by Simon and Garfunkel really had a big influence on me as a kid. I just soaked all this music up as a youngster.

When did Ian Bailey, the ‘fan’, progress to being a musician?

One of my cousins had a guitar when I was about seven, and I used to try and have a go, but I was fourteen when I got an acoustic guitar for Christmas, which I still have. I eventually learnt an A chord, held the chord down and took the guitar downstairs to show everyone, eventually learning to play Amazing Grace; the first song I could play straight through. I began playing in bands when I was fifteen. We were heavily into The Jam, The Kinks, The Small Faces and The Who, and we played their stuff and some originals. I bought a Rickenbacker 12 string from Hobbs Music in Lancaster when I was eighteen, which I paid back at £10 a week and then I got into The Beatles, The Byrds and the West Coast sound through wanting to hear the different bands using Rickenbackers as part of their sound.

How would you best describe your music?

Melodic, soulful, passionate… I love well written and arranged songs. I'm influenced by lots of the classic bands and songwriters but I do find it's difficult to pigeonhole my own music. I have a lot of influences mostly drawn from the '60s and '70s. I often read a music review describing the music and think, 'Oh, is that it?' If the song moves me and can move the listener then I feel I’ve done the job.

Before your three solo albums in 2020, you released The Lost Doves album SET YOUR SIGHTS TOWARDS THE SUN, a collaboration with Charlotte Newman. Was that a one-off?

That was all just before the lockdown, and we just finished it before all the restrictions. We spoke about doing a few shows as a duo, but we both had other things going on musically, so we'll see what happens in the future; at some point, we might put something together.

Your three solo albums, SONGS TO DREAM ALONG TO (2021), YOU PAINT THE PICTURES (2022) and WE LIVE IN STRANGE TIMES (2023), found you working with Daniel Wylie of Cosmic Rough Riders fame. How did that connection come about?

We had been Facebook pals for a while. I love his music and we kept in touch. During the first lockdown, I shared a few tracks with Daniel that I’d recently recorded and he asked if I fancied doing some co-writing, which I thought would be great. He sent four song ideas over to me which would become the EP SHOTS OF SUN. We really enjoyed working together on those four tracks so much we agreed it would be great to record an album and here we are still going strong with album four in the pipeline. Working with Daniel is inspirational, his melodies are magnificent. We work completely as a 50/50 team.

Three solo albums in three years is quite a prolific output, given that you play most, if not all, of the instruments alongside lead and backing vocals.

I do all the recording and instrumentation myself along with help from my good friend Alan Gregson who may add orchestration and strings and other extras like slide guitar, dobro as well as the mastering. Alan’s West Orange studio is based in France and he’s worked with Cornershop, Badly Drawn Boy, Angie Palmer. He has two Gold Discs, one being for a UK number one single - Brimful of Asha for Cornershop. He’s also arranged music for some of the UK's top orchestras and produced music for film, radio and TV.

The three albums share a common theme, but I got a flavour of The Beatles’ REVOLVER in WE LIVE IN STRANGE TIMES.

Funnily enough I did mention to Daniel that there was a little REVOLVER vibe going on when we were working on that album, but not intentionally; that just happened. You don't intend to go out and make the songs sound like a particular band or album, but I suppose having all those musical inspirations that I’ve grown up with, it’s bound to come through in the music.

How do you market your music, given that you are self-managed?

Most of what I do is self-contained and self-managed. The three albums are released by American label, Kool Kat Music. I do the usual stuff to self-promote via reviews, social media Facebook and Twitter/X. I was looking at some streaming stats last night, and The Last Chime, the first track on WE LIVE IN STRANGE TIMES, had something like three and a half thousand streams in seven days all from Finland. Music is full of surprises.

You seem in your element recording at your studio Small Space Studio, given that you record all the instrumentation and vocals there. Live performances do not appear to be a priority for you.

I used to play in bands when I was younger, but my 'happy place' is recording and putting the music and albums together. The room is actually very small hence it’s title and I swear a lot there (laughs). I use basic gear; there are no computers; it's all done organically. The songs can be stripped back and played acoustically, but playing live with a band isn't something I had intended to do in the near future, but you never know. I don't play many solo gigs, though I have a handful of solo shows coming up, it's all about finding the time. I tend to be here in the studio recording, that's my passion and what drives me.

The artwork on all the albums is particularly striking. Who can take credit for that?

The artwork is done by good friend, John Washington. He does collages, abstracts, photography, and all sorts of things. I asked him to do the cover for the first album, which he did, and we've kept a similar theme on the last two album covers. There is something strikingly original about his artwork. He has done work for New Order and Paul Weller's drummer; Steve Pilgrim and his work is admired worldwide.

Many artists don’t enjoy the acclaim that their output warrants due to a lack of exposure. Does that concern you?

I often see a reaction in some reviews of 'why do more people not know about this guy.' I guess I'm just happy doing what I do, creating and recording, If the songs come across to somebody and they communicate in a way to them, then that's a good job done. That's success for me.

Interview by Declan Culliton

Amelia White Interview

Singer-songwriter and poet Amelia White has been at the forefront of the East Nashville folk-rock underground scene since moving there almost two decades ago. A prolific writer, she has recorded a dozen albums, the common theme being no-holds-barred fervid personal searching. Her latest album, LOVE I SWORE, produced by her like-minded peer, Kim Richey, delivers some sweet melancholic songs together with no-nonsense rockers. It's a full-blooded addition to her impressive back catalogue, stacked with songs that explore the everyday challenges artists face pursuing their chosen career path. 

Congratulations on your latest album, LOVE I SWORE, which we recently reviewed at Lonesome Highway. Do I get a sense of bitter sweetness throughout much of the album? Touring and relationships get both the 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down'. 

Thank you! Honestly, it's very rare I don't write with a sense of bitter sweetness. I see life as full of ups and downs and challenges, and I'm a truthful writer, though it's not always as autobiographical as people think. It's challenging definitely to maintain a strong home life with a partner and even friends while touring regularly. I don't see it as bad or good, just the hand that's dealt to me, and I think writing helps me explore the shadows and sunlight of my life, and others lives. 

The album follows ROCKET REARVIEW from 2022 and typically follows a nearly two-year cycle between recordings. Do you attempt to achieve that discipline with your music? 

Good question, and in some ways it's a simple answer: I write a lot of songs, and I want to share them, so I do the work to make that happen. In the past I waited for someone to help me, but as time has gone on, I just do the work. It's full time, but I believe in my songs, and I also have to make a living… you know the dog's got to eat:)

That 2022 album featured songs written during the pandemic and lockdown. Did the enforced shutdown of touring options stimulate you as a writer?

The pandemic provided me space to dig into poetry writing. I self-published a book. My songwriting is nearly always stimulated, but it was interesting the topics it brought up and I loved the strangeness of that time. Being sort of a core introvert, I savoured that time, even though it was financially challenging, and scary. Maybe I like to be scared? Haha.  

Getting back to the new album, LOVE I SWORE. Are the songs 'written at the moment' reflecting present personal or imagined scenarios?

I'd say the songs off of LOVE I SWORE are mostly motivated by going through a dark valley in my marriage. But I never write completely personally, so there is a palette to them that is not just me. Sometimes something someone says to me in a bar, or even a bird flying can give my own story a different depth and angle. Co-writing also broadens my own story. I hope everyone can relate to what I write and feel it in their guts. 

Tell us about the background of the album's title.

The line in the title track song is "I Swore the love I meant and I still mean the love I swore" it's really a pledge and plea of a love going through changes. And I think people who are together a long time either sort of get numb, or they face and deal with the roller coaster of two lives together. I think there's a risk in a long love that in making it better you may lose it. In this song the protagonist was hoping not to lose it. It was written in Scotland. 

Outside the harsh realities and life's obstacles, there is irrefutable optimism in songs like Don't You Ever Forget and Time. 

Oh yeah, I'm an optimist and a dreamer. How can an artist not be? And I really believe in the beauty in humans and the love. And I like exploring people going through devastating things, because that's when they find that halo of hope. 

Can you tell us about your connection with Kim Richy, an artist who has been dear to our hearts for many years?

I have been a fan of Kim's for a while. I was friendly with her from seeing her at shows here in Nashville, and we shared some mutual artistic friends. My manager thought I should work with a strong woman, and Kim was on the top of my list and it was a real thrill for me when she said, "yes." I know she vetted me, and I know she dug my songs. I learned so much from her, and she really put her heart and soul into producing the album.

You also include poetry writing in your skillset. Is it more challenging to write the perfect poem or the perfect song?

Ha - I'm not sure I've ever written ANYTHING "perfect"… but poetry is harder for me, because I don't do it as much. I love it though, and I think when I'm not touring as much some distant day I'll dive in more. I paint too, and honestly these forms that I'm not as comfortable with have made me grow as an artist.

Having resided in East Nashville for many years and having first-hand experience of the often-unheralded talent in that community, would you recommend a fledgling artist to pack their bags and relocate there, given the current opportunities to connect remotely?

Honestly, Nashville has gotten so expensive. So that's an obstacle that didn't used to exist. However, there's such a rich pool of great musicians and songwriters of all kinds here, and I think it's still a supportive and beautiful community. I think diving in to all the opportunities, and lowering expectations is the way to go. You can't get that online. I always recommend new folks here lead with respect and kindness. It's pretty transparent when people are just trying to force their way here in Music City. 

You have a busy touring schedule over the coming months, including your album launch show at our favourite music room, The 5 Spot. Will you tour solo or with a band, and how does the dynamic change when performing the songs in both settings?

Good question. I've learned that to be an above average songwriter I need to embrace both playing with a band and playing solo. I nearly always tour solo just so I can eat and pay bills. It's not how I hear the songs I write, but it's got this freshness of how they were when I wrote them. And that's such a special place that if I can tap into that and give the audience the songs from that place, it really works. I've gotten to be a much better musician from playing solo. And playing with a great band is a total luxury and I've learned to arrange from doing that. It's such a joy here in Nashville to play with a group of incredible friends who are truly excellent at their instruments. 

You stand alongside Mary Gauthier, Gretchen Peters, Amy Speace, and Kim Richey, to name but four women who have worked outside the mainstream in Nashville, stuck to their beliefs, and successfully wrote and recorded their visions. Given the crowded marketplace and industry pressures, is that a possibility for younger artists presently in Nashville?

What a compliment, thank you. I admire those four women greatly. I think the obstacles you mention help to weed out the pretenders from the contenders. That may sound harsh, but you've got to want to live this life and be successful from your core, and I have had to make sacrifices, and more importantly DIG DEEP!

Thanks for spending the time talking to us, and good luck on the tour.

Interview by Declan Culliton

John Miller is a first and foremost traditional country singer and songwriter. That he comes from Scotland makes it that much harder to be accepted in certain circles but there is no denying the love and authenticity in his music. He first came to prominence with the band Radio Sweethearts before releasing a number of albums under his own name. All are recommended including the about to be released Loser’s Hall Of Fame. Lonesome Highway have long been fans of Miller’s music and had the pleasure of working with him on one of the rare gigs we promoted. So it made sense to take the opportunity to catch up with Miller and talk about the past as well, as what should be, a promising future

You started out with Radio Sweethearts back in 1996, with an album produced by the legendary Kim Fowley, not a name that may immediately spring to mind to produce a country styled album. Was the experience a memorable one?

Ha! Given that Mr Fowley was involved it was definitely a memorable one.

Kim was in town to work with BMX Bandits whose drummer, Frank Macdonald, was also a Radio Sweethearts member. Frank had the idea of getting Kim into the studio to produce a single for his (Frank’s) Shoeshine Record label. The night before we were going into the studio I was summoned to Frank’s house and confronted by Kim who made me sit with a guitar and sing him every song I had written. He then ranked them all out of 10 on a piece of paper. The day of the recording we were all gathered in the studio with no idea what was happening until Kim sent a Fax (remember them?) to say I want you to record these five songs; two of which the band had never even heard.

We set up and awaited Kim’s arrival. First song we recorded was one of mine, the title track New Memories. After a few nervous takes someone decided we should play a few covers to get us relaxed. After that we no sooner finished a song when Kim would shout ‘NEXT!’. Unknown to us he was throwing everything on to tape. We ended up with 18 tracks recorded and mixed in a one day session. A few weeks later Kim called from the USA to say he had a deal for our album. What album, we asked? And that’s how NEW MEMORIES the debut album came about. I still have that piece of paper somewhere.

There followed a second Radio Sweethearts album that featured another well know name in Alex Chilton. How were those albums received at the time?

Alex was a lovely guy on the occasions I was in his company. We had a great time recording with him and he added some killer backing vocals and guitar to the ‘Lonesome Blue’ record. I confess that, at the time, I had very little knowledge of who Alex was; but I wasn’t long in learning.

Both of those Sweethearts albums were generally well received by the public. As for reviewers, the strange thing is that US reviewers loved them but a few of the UK ones were a bit shirty about them.

Next up there were your first three solos albums 2002, 2003 and then the gap to 2010s Still Carrying A Flame. Now in 2024 comes the next instalment in Losers Hall Of Fame. This all suggests that, as an independent artist, it hasn’t been an easy road to get those albums out there?

It certainly hasn’t been easy. I paid for all of those records out of my own pocket with no funding (or crowdfunding) whatsoever. I was extremely lucky that I have a generous, loving and supportive wife ha ha.

I was also lucky to have a very good friend in Frank Macdonald who agreed to license the first two records for his new Spit & Polish outlet. That gave me the impetus I needed. The records were very well received both critically and commercially and I soon managed to recoup my costs on POPPING PILLS which funded ONE EXCUSE TOO MANY, for which I also recouped my costs.

There then followed a period where for personal reasons I wasn’t very active on the music scene. Then in about 2007 or 2008 I started touring again which inevitably led to me making STILL CARRYING A FLAME.  At that time, it was very difficult to get any kind of record deal so I decided I would do it as a self-release and I sold it mainly at gigs. It was a bit of a struggle, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well it was received, critically and commercially, and even without record company backing, I was able to recoup my costs once again.

I had a bit of a falling out with music after that and never touched a guitar for about 7 years. I was persuaded to come out of my self-imposed retirement to play at a fundraiser for a sick friend. I got such a great reaction that, after the show I had a chat with the guys and, we decided to give it another go. That inevitably led to me wanting to make another record which brings us to where we are now. 

It has to be said that there was often a negative attitude to UK traditional country music, especially playing original material. Do you think that has changed?

No, I don’t think it has changed. The Country press is generally supportive and, I have to say in my case, probably always has been. The early response to the new record has been very positive and hopefully that will continue after the April 15th release date.

It’s when you get out to the more general press that you need to be armed with your big boy pants (or a hankie) as some of them can display enormous ignorance of the musical road you’ve travelled and be unnecessarily cruel. If you don’t hail from Texas or any other US state beginning with T, then you’re probably wasting your time. Having said that there are a few European friends of mine who are opening doors, although one of them had to move to Austin to do so.

In your own body of work, given the financial restrictions that come with the territory, did you ever feel that it wasn’t worth it?

When you’re an independent artist I think it’s only natural that you occasionally have periods where you wonder if you’ve done the right thing. In the past I’ve sometimes thought I was banging my head off a brick wall. Then one person comes up to you and tells you how much they love ‘that song’; that it means so much to them and made their life richer. That’s when you know it was worth it. I’ve had one or two eye opening experiences hearing people’s stories and a lot of love from folks. That honestly means a lot more to me than the financial return. It is a vicious circle really and, yes, of course, recouping your costs and a bit extra means you can then think about making another album. I’d love to have no financial restraints and I think if I had a big lottery win I’d probably write and record a new record at least once a month, rather than every ten years.

On the other hand, your standard of work hasn’t faltered. The new album being no exception and perhaps the best yet. Would you agree?

I really love the new album, not because it’s the latest one. I like all of them, but this is the first one I’ve made with, what I would refer to as, ‘my own band’. I think it’s the first complete record I’ve made that accurately illustrates where we are musically as a band. If you catch us live nowadays this is the sound you will hear.

Is it difficult to gather and perhaps retain a studio/live band locally these days?

We are no different from a lot of independent bands in that we all need our day jobs to survive. I work shifts and the guys work regular hours and it’s amazing how much that clashes, not to mention the commitment of family life too. It can be very hard to get us all in the same room at the same time but when you do magic occurs. I have such great musicians around me who will put work in at home, so the show comes together very quickly. For a great number of years I didn’t have a regular band, which is why they were called the Country ‘Casuals’ but now I do and it’s a wonderful thing. Occasionally we have to bring in someone to deputise but basically we have our core members and that’s it.

Personally, I feel that there has never been a better time for original music with My Darling Clementine, Dean Owens, Daniel Meade, Ags Connolly and yourself releasing such strong recordings and playing gigs. Do you feel a part of that?

I do know some of those guys and am happy to see them doing good things. I actually contributed to the fundraiser for Ags’ last album. I’ve never really given it any thought but I guess we could all be part of some sort of UK scene even though we are all doing our own thing.

For a long time it seemed like no-one else in the UK was playing my kind of music. I was on the fringe and I often struggled to find good shows. Like my old pal Dale Watson once said I was probably “too Country now for Country” and didn’t quite sit with the Hillbilly/Rockabilly scene. I think people get it a bit more now and the lines have blurred slightly. There are some younger guys than me who have come through and changed things for the better.

Of course, that is true in the wider context in Europe with artists like Sweden’s The Country Side of Harmonica Sam and French singer Theo Lawrence and in the USA. The acceptance for the genre seems to be widening do you think that’s true?

I think Country Music has always been accepted. What’s more accepted now is that you don’t have to be from North America to be an authentic country artist. Take Theo Lawrence, for example. He had written a bunch of songs for my friends The Country Side Of Harmonica Sam so I thought I’d check him out. The first two snippets I listened to, as well as the album cover, made me think he was some kind of doo-wop 50s throwback which didn’t appeal to me. How wrong I was. I was introduced to him and caught his show in Spain. I was immediately smitten and very quickly purchased his entire back catalogue (which I can recommend).

The strange thing is that the Americans have always accepted good Country Music wherever it’s from. It’s people outside the USA who have a problem with it.

With the new album, how difficult is it gain exposure in media terms. Has social media had a big effect on how you go about a release?

When you release your own music it’s often very hard to get decent exposure. Of course, if you want to spend money there are people who will offer to do the work for you. I’m currently trying to work out who would be best placed to do that for me. It’s a difficult choice.

Some people have been enormously successful as a result of social media exposure, but I don’t know if that’s by luck or design. I have a Bandcamp account and a Facebook profile but I really need to get more on the ball with social media. Again, I believe there are lots of folk who could help with that. I just need to stop being lazy and do my homework, (laughs)!

What particular era and artists are your listening preference?

Oh, what a loaded question. Where do I begin? My listening today could be different tomorrow. I obviously listen to a lot of Classic Country music; mainly from the 50s and 60s. Hank will always be my number one, but I like all the old favourites plus some lesser-known artists. Wynn Stewart, George Jones and Merle Haggard are particular favourites.

On the contemporary scene I guess my friends Dale Watson and Big Sandy should get a shout out as well as the previously mentioned Theo Lawrence and my pal Harmonica Sam. I’m a big fan of Nick Shoulders too, you should check him out.  I’m an old guy who fought in the Punk Rock Wars and I have a very varied musical taste. I listen to a lot of non-Country stuff, The Beatles, Bowie, Radiohead etc. My current favourites include Tim Smith’s Harp and Michael Kiwanuka.

In terms of your writing, which adheres to those time-honoured themes, are you a constant writer or do you need a specific project?

Since I made the new record I’ve been working on more songs but I’m not a constant, prolific writer except when the occasion demands it. I’ve always assumed, wrongly, there was no point in writing songs if you had no outlet for them. Then I was asked to write for some other people and left it too late. I’ll try to avoid making that mistake again.

Are there any standouts on the new album for you?

The whole album stands out for me. I’d really be hard pressed to name a favourite. I do have a soft spot for My Side Of The Bed which was never scheduled to be recorded and only came together in the studio. A sad song but a happy accident for me.

Vocally I think you have gained depth since the last release are you enjoying playing live?

It’s nice of you to say so. I guess getting older will do that to your voice. I always love playing live, especially to my own audiences. Sometimes it can be hard living up to the challenge of selling yourself to a new audience but I rise to the challenge. It’s great to get your music heard but when folks are actually listening to the songs and there is a lot of love in the room it just becomes a magical thing.

I hope the next album won’t take another fourteen years but I’m well aware of the difficulties involved. What are you hoping for yourself?

What I’m hoping for is that people get to hear and like and, hopefully, buy the new record. I’ve only pressed a limited number but, on paper, the sale of those would allow me to recoup my costs with enough left over to start the whole process again. For the independent artist it all really comes down to finance but, yes, I’m hoping it won’t be too long before we can add another volume to the Country Casuals collection

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate the support

Interview by Stephen Rapid

The John Miller solo back catalogue is available at https://countrycasuals.bandcamp.com

Houston Bernard Interview

Having just released his seventh album, DITCH THIS TOWN, Houston Bernard has upped his game and intends to promote this new album and his own brand of country music, one that mixes storytelling with some forceful rock energy that was inspired by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp, with numerous live shows over the next couple of years. Lonesome Highway took the opportunity to talk to him about his own past and that of his family and notorious outlaw ancestor.

Music played a large part in your background growing up in Oklahoma, with both your father and uncle being musicians in the 70s. What lasting influence has this had on you?

I didn't get to grow up with my dad and my uncle because my parents split up, but once I joined the Army at 18 years old, I was able to travel a bit more and finally meet him. I feel like I am fulfilling my destiny as a human. I am following in my family's footsteps and doing it my way. It is fulfilling, and I have a purpose. It's not just songs either, I am digging deep and making my art from my heart and soul.

There’s also the story of George “Bitter Creek” Newcomb, a member of the infamous Dalton gang. He was a distant family relative and an outlaw. Was that any influence on your musical outlook in any way? 

Yes and he was also a member of the WILD BUNCH of which the Eagles did a concept album about, Desperado and track 10 is a song called Bittercreek. Having a legendary band like the Eagles do a song about your Great-Great Grandfather is pretty awesome. Musically I have always followed my heart and I have written and performed in many styles, I honestly never thought I would have 6 albums of country music that I am so proud of. Colouring outside the lines is definitely In My Blood.

Your family then moved to Alaska, which is quite a different location. Did that also affect your future? 

Hell yeah it did, my dad was a broke musician so he rejoined the Army and they sent us there. Eventually my parents split up and my mom remarried. That step father is the source of a couple songs on the new album, I didn’t want to write about it but my writing partner encouraged me to, I am semi-glad I did, there is a lot of rage and pain in the new album you will not hear in any other albums I have put out since 2012.

When did you move to your current location? 

My Dad met my mom touring, he is from Norman, Oklahoma, where I was born and met my mom in Massachusetts. She is from Worcester. Eventually, she moved us back to Worcester, by the time I went to high school. Leaving everything you have ever known had a profound effect on me and the only ways I knew how to express myself was either through music or fighting. 

You were also a specialist in the army for nine years. Did you put the music on hold during that period? 

Not at all, I kept writing since I was 11 years old. I would write and record on tapes. I have a lot of my songs cataloged. I performed at soldier shows and when I left the Army and graduated college I moved to NYC and got involved in the underground scenes there, I toured all over the States, Canada and some places in Europe.

Some of your named influences run from Dolly Parton to Queen. That would seem to be twin points in the way you make music now, a mix of rock and country. What is your favourite era for listening in the main? 

There is so much music out there that moves me and of course it changes because I try and keep my mind open and it’s a journey. I call my brand of country "Heartland Country" A lot of it is 1984 Springsteen/Mellencamp/Bryan Adams era. Though the new albums is more of like the Into The Fire album by Bryan Adams in the sense that is pretty gray and dark in some spots.

How much time is taken up with your musical career now? 

24/7 - I'm constantly thinking about it, prepping for shows, writing, doing shows, traveling and when you are independent and you don’t have a financial backer you have to figure it out for yourself. And when you come from literally nothing, everything takes longer and you make all the mistakes and things keep changing. If you don’t enjoy the journey and the challenges I would have got burnt out years ago. It's a fire in me that has not seemed to burn out yet, so I keep riding that wave. It's like air for me.

Do you largely gig with a band, or is it a mix of that and solo gigs? 

Both, I love both in a different way. To try and get the attention of a room as a solo acoustic takes some serious skill and I am always trying to improve in connecting with others. That is what is all about for me.

In the current climate, how long did it take to record and release DITCH THIS TOWN? 

It took me about 4 years and more investment than I will probably see back. But, it is extremely fulfilling.

Did you enjoy the recording experience and working with Bill McDermott, or do you prefer the live experience?

For me, they are two different animals. I enjoy the recording process and also the live experience. Bill is great to work with and we had a strong working relationship from the start. He hears things I don’t, and I am able to add a lot of my own spice, and he encourages it. 

You often co-write. Is that the method that works best for you? 

it is, I love a good co-write. When you put a few creative people together it can only improve the song. I love the process. This is the best work I have ever done. I was a writer on 10 of the 11 songs. The 11th song I loved so much, it spoke to me. That song is Come Undone by Ezra Hale.

How difficult is it for a relatively new musician to gain attention nowadays? 

I wouldn’t know, I have been doing it professionally since I was 12 years old and Im not even close to that age now. But if you mean a relatively unknown musician? All markets are saturated, there is a lot of quality but if you don’t have investment or a passion for social media to blow up, it’s a passion project. At this point I do music for me, not because I want to be famous. I love connecting with people who are moved or entertained by my music. Life is short and I get so much back from people being affected by the art I make.

Have you ambitions to play in other territories?

I’d love to perform everywhere people want me. Go where you are loved is what I always say. I watch my analytics and see where people are playing my music, it’s literally all over the world, so I'm hoping to get more opportunities to share my music and meet more people.

What are your plans for the future after this release? 

I think for the next couple years I will be promoting this album, making content to support it and sharing it with whomever wants to listen. But I have already started writing for my seventh country album. I recorded 5 new songs last week.

Interview by Stephen Rapid

Louien Interview

Louien is a singer/songwriter based in the Norwegian capital, Oslo and a leading light in the Nordicana genre, which has given a voice to artists and bands embracing their style of country, folk and roots-based pop music. She is a member of the band Silver Lining (performing under her actual name, Live Miranda Solberg) alongside her solo career, and that’s where she came to our attention after the release of her stunning 2019 debut album, NONE OF MY WORDS. FIGURE ME OUT followed three years later and earned her a Spellemann Award (Norwegian Grammy) nomination. Her recent release, EVERY DREAM I HAD, is a compelling collection of songs showcasing her full vocal range and, in true Nordicana style, refuses to be framed by any one genre. 

The last time we spoke was in March 2020, weeks before the pandemic. You had just released your debut solo album, NONE OF MY WORDS. How did you manage during that time?

Probably better than I would have anticipated. In Norway, we have grants you can apply for, so money-wise, it worked out, not perfectly, but it was okay. I like being at home as far as the isolation goes, but it was difficult, and we did not have the opportunity to tour NONE OF MY WORDS. We did get to play a few scattered gigs, but we did not have that tour feeling. We had a lot of plans for the album, which we did not realise and did not get the opportunity to go abroad and play.

Where did the name Louien come from?

Actually, it's from my mother. Her name is Louise. She grew up on the west coast of Norway, where people often shorten their names into nicknames, and Louien was her nickname growing up. It seemed natural to me to use that name.

There appears to be no end of outstanding vocalists, particularly women, in Norway and Sweden. Did you have vocal training in your early years? 

I had some formal training in my early twenties, but that was more about learning breathing techniques and conveying emotions. I grew up singing a lot; I was in the school choir, my dad was a great singer, and we would sing a lot of harmonies at home together. I went to Christian summer camp when I was young, where we had gatherings and would sing. Singing has been part of my everyday life since I was little.

You are also a member of the quartet Silver Lining. What was the driving force behind your decision to pursue a solo career?

I wanted to express different parts of myself, which was not possible as part of the group in the same way where there are compromises which are good. But, sometimes you have other things to say. I also wanted to challenge myself and see what it is like to be on my own, and it feels good to be the boss sometimes. 

Is your solo career commercially more successful? 

It is difficult to say, but in Norway, probably yes. Louien has been easier to sell to more people than Silver Lining because the band appeals to people who like traditional music, which is a smaller scene in Norway and possibly worldwide. We can see in the streaming numbers that Louien is currently reaching a few more people, though that may be because Silver Lining hasn't released new music in a while. 

How would you describe your new album, EVERY DREAM I HAD?

I would say that it leans towards melancholic pop music from the '60s and '70s but also approaches Americana and singer-songwriters. It makes me happy, but I'm unsure if it makes others happy. I have tried to make this album a happy listen and not as conceptual as my debut album, NONE OF MY WORDS.

That debut album was written at an emotionally challenging time for you. Is writing easier or more difficult when you are in that frame of mind?

I think that the songs come more forcibly when you are depressed or have really strong emotions. When I wrote NONE OF MY WORDS, I hadn't written that much before, and in the beginning, it can come to you more easily because you have storage that needs to be emptied in terms of writing. I don't feel that way anymore, and I feel that the ideas come to me quite easily, but I have to work harder to conclude and make an actual song out of the ideas now. That is also because I have become a lot more aware of the songwriting process, am stricter with myself and have higher standards than I used to have. 

The members of your regular band play on the new album. Given that they are also all songwriters, did that create any conflict? 

There was no conflict. We did have conversations, but in the process, it was quite easy because I was the leader of the project and had the last word. The band members are all very creative and open when it comes to sharing their ideas, but they do not take it personally if I don't like an idea and vice versa with me. All of us have become more mature working together over the years. I tried not to be too protective, as that can really kill the process. 

Did the others have any input into the songwriting?

I brought the songs to them, but I hadn't put them all together, so in some cases, they had input in rearranging songs and putting the chorus first. They might not have written the songs, but they definitely made them come to life, and I would not have recorded some of the songs if it hadn't been for them. 

Does the album's title reflect the inspiration for the songs?

Of course, the album is not about every dream I have had in my life, but it reflects on some of the years I have lived. The title comes from the second track on the album, Please. I usually look through my songs for a line that I like, but mostly because I'm a daydreamer, I spend a lot of time in my head – it's my way of escaping. 

Where did you record the album?

We did some live recording in an incredible studio in Sweden just across the border from Norway. It's called Silent Studio, an old-school building that they converted, and it has been in use since the late 70s. The guy who started it still lives there. He set up all the gear and microphones for us. He also put in mouse traps as there are a lot of mice there. We spent five days there playing music and putting together the basics for the songs. Something about the room made it feel like we were back in the 70s while we were recording there. It was magical.  

The artwork is very different from your debut album, which was quite psychedelic. You have shown your face on this album's cover.

It was really scary for me to release that first album. I felt I needed to hide away, not so much to hide, but some camouflage. I don't feel that way anymore and we had so much fun taking the pictures for this album. Also, the record label thought it would be nice to have my face on the cover. It probably makes sense for me to show my face this time round. 

Are you aiming for a local or more international market with the album?

We have been pitching it towards Germany, Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, and Ireland as well. Touring in all these areas can be difficult, so we've had to limit the reach to these areas because I can't tour everywhere. 

Can you get radio play for your music in Norway?

I've been really fortunate as my songs have frequently been on the radio for the past three years. We only have one radio channel that is not for industrialised pop music. It's a small channel, but it is connected with our national channel, The Norwegian Broadcasting. It is run by five or six music journalists who control what is played and they are open to mainly Norwegian music. 

What is the most popular music in Norway?

Pop music like AURORA and Sigrid. They are Norwegian females who make big, flashy pop music. Country music is huge here, but it is more the easily accessible Nashville type of music. There is also smaller community support for alternative music like Americana. After the pandemic and with the financial difficulties that everyone is facing now, people are not going out as much anymore, even though there is support for different types of music here.

How helpful has the Nordicana brand been for you, and was that term consciously created to give artists like yourself a category?

I'm not sure where the term Nordicana came from. It might have come from a journalist or someone outside the music community. Die With Your Boots Records started as a group of people who loved listening to country music and have released artists like Signe Marie Rustad and Malin Pettersen. They opened a club in Oslo, and it took off from there. A lot of people were listening to roots music and came out of the shadows. It's more of a coincidence, really. Sometimes, I feel astonished by the whole thing. You make your music in your room, and suddenly, a whole community of musicians, some of whom I have grown up with, come together and work together. It is an uplifting and warm community. 

We will get the opportunity to see you perform at Dietmar Leibecke's Static Roots Festival in July. Will you be performing solo or with a band?

I'm super excited to play at that festival and will be bringing my band with me. I have toured as a trio in the past, but I want to represent the music in the best way possible. The bass and drums are a huge part of this album, so I will have my band with me. We met Dietmar at the Americana UK Festival last year, and I played in Oberhausen with Silver Lining last year. 

Intreview by Declan Culliton Photograph by Julia Marie Naglestad

Kimmi Bitter Interview

Traditional and old-time country music is enjoying a revival in recent years despite being ignored by the industry trailblazers who consider acts like Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, Zack Bryan, and, more recently, Beyoncé to represent country music. Ignoring the trends, mavericks such as Charley Crockett, Sierra Ferrell, and Tyler Childers enjoy increased popularity on their own terms, which is an endorsement that quality music away from the mainstream will be supported if it gets the required exposure. San Diego-born Kimmi Bitter is also making strides in that direction and taking things a step further with her particular brand of traditional country music by recreating the classic sounds of the early '60s. Her debut full-length album, OLD SCHOOL, due for release at the end of March, totally evokes the signature vocals of Patsy Cline together with prime harmonies and killer instrumentation. It has not been overnight success for Kimmi, but the album's release and the expanding exposure it's likely to generate should endorse her dedication and commitment to her art and open many more doors for her.

When did your love of old-time and traditional country music come about?

I was a late bloomer discovering older country music. I learned to sing by imitating country singers of the 90s at that time. Country music was always natural in my voice, and in my late twenties I started diving deeper into more traditional country, Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Jessi Colter. I knew of those artists but did a deep dive into their music through Spotify because my voice was best suited to traditional country. The more I dug in, the more I knew that this music suited my voice. I'm also obsessed with the '60s; I think music really peaked then, and I'm always chasing those '60s sounds, whether that be Patsy Cline with The Jordanaires and their really cool harmonies, also the twangy and psychedelic guitars of that time; I love everything from that decade.

Your vocal is ideally suited to the style of that decade. Did you receive formal training?

No, it's been a long road; I just taught myself. I worked hard and watched a lot of YouTube videos. I've been performing with my band for almost ten years, and I've honed my skills simply by going out and doing it. I sometimes wish I had some formal training to have a better technique, but who knows, it might have changed the tone of my voice. 

There appears to be, however slowly, a greater audience and broader age demographic growth for traditional country music. Are you experiencing that in your live shows?

This year, in particular, has definitely seen a lot of momentum; I'm starting to notice the growth in the fan base. It has been a slow burn for many years, but this year has seen a lot of change. I'm from California and have a strong fan base there, but we do a lot of touring across different States, and I'm starting to notice an expansion of the fan base nationwide. That's undoubtedly new, so I'm excited to get my new album out because we've been touring without an album; it has really been grassroots so far. I do look at my stats on Spotify and YouTube, and I have a strong male fan base, which surprises me because my music isn't rowdy, and my pre-order sales are eighty per cent male. As far as age demographic, it is definitely my peers and older, which makes sense as my music is old-timey, though there is an increasing number of younger people coming out, which is good.

Acts like Tyler Childers, Sierra Ferrell and Charley Crockett have forced the industry to take notice of that growing trend?

Yes, it started as an underground movement, and now it's blown up with some of the people you mentioned. It's really like an 'F-you' to the mainstream country industry, whose music is so watered down. I love that these underdog artists are coming along and playing different music, not what the labels tell them to do. It's also working on a more international level and gaining a lot of mainstream attention, which is cool. 

Apart from the music of the 60s, you also pay particular attention to the fashion of that time. Do you feel that that ticks another box profile-wise for you?

Absolutely, I love branding, and it's so much fun. As I mentioned earlier, I'm really obsessed with the 60s, not just the music but art in general. Also, cool cars and appliances that lasted forever. I love the fashion and the style from the 60s and spend a lot of time researching the dress styles back then, and with my stage image, I bouffant my hair, wear 'go go' boots and a mod dress. Nanci Sinatra would be a real style icon for me. It's something that I'm really conscious about, and I enjoy playing a character that I want to play on stage. I want to transport people to a little snapshot back in time.

You have patiently worked on and developed your individual style over the best part of a decade. I get the impression of you as a very structured person.

Yes, I have everything planned and organised; that's how my mind works. I do pretty much everything one hundred per cent myself, I've started to work with a radio promoter but aside from that I book all our shows, do my graphic design, manage my website as well as writing a lot of music.

That's a full workload. Where in particular would you like to get assistance in the future?

I would love help for sure. I work on music 'twenty-four-seven' both on the artistic and business side. I would love help on the booking side, which is very time-consuming; I don't know if and when we will come but, in the meantime, I'm going to continue what I'm doing. I don't have free time but I'm very grateful that it has grown to a place where I'm at now.

Your debut album, OLD SCHOOL, follows the release of several singles. Was this your attention to test the waters with the singles and progress to a full album?

No, I wasn't even thinking of doing an album. I was actually at a point where I wasn't even sure if I would continue doing music because I was working so hard, spending so much time on the road without getting very far and being really tested in the industry. I recorded the song, My Grass is Blue, and it had about fifty streams for the first month or two. Trigger from the publication Saving Country Music found it and showcased it to his demographic, and everything changed after that. My music is such a niche, and for a specific kind of listener, and Saving Country Music nominated it for Single of the Year. That single doing so well inspired me to do a whole album. The guy who co-wrote My Grass Is Blue with me, Michael Gurley, absolutely nailed what I wanted to do and what I wanted to accomplish. So, we worked on this whole album together. We have been working on writing a whole bunch of songs for nearly two years, trying to pick the best ones. We then spent a whole year in and out of the studio mixing the songs to get them right. 

Where did you record the album and what players featured?

At a guy named Enoch Jensen's home studio in Los Angeles; he is an amazing engineer. Nothing glamorous about the studio but we had a really glamorous team dedicated to making something of quality and not putting a deadline on it, we were done when the album felt right. It wasn't like I booked ten days in the studio; the album was done when we all gave it the stamp of approval, which took about a year. My co-writing partner, Mike Gurley, played some guitar on it, and then Willis Farnsworth, who has been playing guitar with me for nine years, played guitar on most of it, and my upright bass player, Ben Neal, also played. I had a drummer, Phil, from back home who is an incredible drummer across all genres. Through Mike Gurley's connection, we had an awesome pedal steel player, Christopher Lawerence. Mike also did all of the backing harmonies.

You have a hectic touring schedule. What are the main negatives of life on the road for you?

Lack of sleep is the main thing (laughs). Touring is tiring, and sometimes, I miss being part of my community back home. We love what we're doing and choose to do it. I get to see a lot of the country and make a living in music, and I'm really grateful for that.  

How difficult is that financially?

Well, we make it happen financially. I pay my band, and we get by, though I don't personally save any money; I use anything I make to reinvest, particularly in recording, which is a huge expense. We spend six months on the road, so I have to figure out how to make it work, how to negotiate my guarantees and how many shows we have to play to make ends meet. We cook many of our meals on the road and eat at In-N- Out, which is really cheap and of good quality.

Interview by Declan Culliton. Photograph by Willis Farnsworth

Jesse Sykes Interview

‘Unique’ is a well-worn and often overused expression in the music industry. However, defining the output of Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter with that term is not out of place. Their four studio albums RECKLESS BURNING (2003), OH, My GIRL (2004), LIKE, LOVE, LUST and the OPEN HALLS of the SOUL (2007), and MARBLE SON (2011), although planted into the Alt-Country genre, were psychedelic cinematic vistas, raw in emotion and quite unlike anything else before or since. The good news is that a fifth album from them is on the horizon and likely due for release this year. They are also touring again as support act to drone-metal band Sunn O))) and play Dublin’s Concert Hall on 25th March. We spoke recently with Jesse about her music, the band, the intervening years since their last recording, and her latest venture as lead vocalist with Dave Alvin’s project, The Third Mind.

Hi Jesse. You appear to be busier than ever at present, touring as a member of The Third Mind and about to play dates in Europe, opening for Sunn O))). How are you coping with that workload? 

I’m very excited for the adventure, thank you for asking! Lord knows I’ve been long overdue for some heavy workload;) 

In terms of the coping aspect, I think now it’s become less about the trials and tribulations of touring itself, but trying to cope more with the reality of how fast life is moving, and how much I don’t want this (or anything for that matter) to be a missed opportunity. 

I just hope that I can deliver, and be inside each moment, so that I can give all of myself. That’s all I ever really am concerned with—the transcendence aspect. 

So yeah, just knowing that I can hopefully find "that" sweet spot each night on stage makes all the logistical nightmares of travel fuckery worth it. 

Our review of the excellent THIRD MIND 2 album describes your artistic marriage with the band as 'made in heaven.' How did your involvement come about?  

That’s very sweet and a lovely compliment, thank you. Well, I’ve known Dave Alvin a long time and I was always a fan. He and I got to know each other years ago when my band opened some shows for the Knitters—and we remained friends. So back in 2019 when Victor Krummenacher called me and asked me to sing a song on the first Third Mind album, I, of course, said yes.

I think Dave just thought my voice would be a good match for the song, Morning Dew. (Which is on the first album.)

Then when this next record rolled around, Dave wanted to focus more on just playing his guitar vs. singing—so I was invited back, and I ended up becoming the main vocalist. It was a sorta, “let’s just see what happens” vibe—and honestly, it was nice to step out and away from my own constraints, and in essence not have to call the shots—and just simply sing. 

I just have to add, too, that it’s been a real privilege and honour to play with such top-notch musicians.

Being described by Dave Alvin as a vocalist 'that sings like Sandy Denny meets Grace Slick' is about the highest compliment for me. Did you develop your vocal styling after being influenced by any particular artist? 

That's a huge compliment, and it truly means the world to me —but I’m going to explain why I feel like I’m not worthy, in what’s hopefully an interesting way;)

These influence questions always stymie me, because I’ve lived a long time, and to answer this I have to go back to being thirteen!

I mean, many of my earliest influences (and the list is honestly too long) were extremely powerful soul, R&B and blues singers (both men and women.) I mean influences, in that they made me want to dedicate myself to music.

I definitely don’t have a powerful voice or range… I’m not a belter….and early on I’d get psyched out of course, because technically I couldn’t come close to singing like them.

But what I did come to understand or intuit (luckily), out of the impossibility of ever having pipes like, say, Aretha Franklin or Janis Joplin or Lead Belly, was the understanding that it more often than not, was about the emotion left behind in the actual wake their voices created, that I was being emotionally struck by—and sometimes less about the raw psychical power of their singing.

I just really honed in on how they might sing one word, or one note, and for me it became about chasing that feeling I’d get from even just a whisper perhaps —which eased the burden early on of thinking I had to be a “technically great” singer, to be a singer at all. 

I just quickly came to understand that you had to embody the song, and there are different paths to doing so.

Of course I was also obsessed with a lot of singers who weren’t technically great and were very idiosyncratic … I mean this is kinda par for the course in the rock n’ roll canon….and when I finally started to listen to more singer songwriters in my 20’s vs classic rock bands etc., I definitely finally let go of the trappings of thinking I needed to belt it out. Leonard Cohen was a game changer for me this way.

I just found the voices that can convey an inherent sorrow with just one note, or even the subtle space between notes. I mean not all music allows for this either —that space that’s needed to cradle a voice—and sometimes those micro nuances, or the mournful ache of a voice can get overcome by its own sheer power, or the music itself.

So it’s the “in betweens” — the cracks and fissures that I respond to—the actual “sound” of vulnerable desperation—which is exceptional when it’s juxtaposed to great fortitude of spirit and soul.

I’m into mournful music in general. I mean I could listen to nothing but Gregorian chants from here on out and be quite satisfied;) I need a bit of death and a sense of nature and the elements, with hints of broken-hearted desperation. Love.

Sounds cliche, but funeral worthy music;) That’s what my influences all share! You could be buried to them;)

Townes Van Zandt is another that comes to mind of course, in that his voice was all cracks and fissures with light coming in from all over. In his last years, his voice literally sounded broken… it was unbelievable to behold. And it embodied pure love.

Anyway....it’s important to add I’m speaking from the perspective of myself as a fan. This is what I’m touched by from others. This is what inspires me. Moves me.

I am not saying I have achieved this myself.

But of course it’s what I strive for. I’m still trying to reach this “place” with my voice as the “go-between”. But I’ve yet to. And I may never.

Sandy Denny, she had it all. Honestly, I’m not worthy of comparisons, nor do I come close to the timbre and richness her voice had - the warmth. No one comes close (in my opinion) to the rarity of the purity of her voice.

Grace Slick too was so distinctive and out of the box, ahead of her time in so many ways. Always was a huge fan… but I see her as an artistic singer (whatever that means;) Maybe just in the sense that her voice was like looking at a piece of Modernist sculpture in a grand museum hall… It was important, it stunned—but it wasn’t soulful …It was beautifully sculpted and defined but a bit cold. I don’t think I’d play Grace Slick at a funeral;)

Anyway, to try and summarize my thoughts… 

My voice, or my goal as a “singer”, was to simply occupy an emotional space — and the singing itself was almost secondary to this space —which is why I started writing my own songs. The songs were forged out from my many vocal limitations—so the songs made it all make sense as a cohesive expression —in that it wasn’t about being “a singer” at all, but more an interpreter of an internal world that was, for better or for worse, needing to come forth—with music being the vehicle to do so.

How’s that for explaining my style;)

As far as the last couple of decades, I can tell you my favourite singer songwriters that inspire me (in that I’m just a huge fan of them.) 

Marissa Nadler, Will Oldham, Nicolai Dunger and Jason Molina.

But I’ll close by saying this (and I think I said it before in an interview once) that my biggest influence was probably my mother’s voice…. humming a lullaby to me as a child at night. The sound of her voice through her chest, next to her beating heart was everything. Love.

How were the recordings for the albums THIRD MIND and THIRD MIND 2 structured, and at what stage were your vocals added? 

All the songs were cut live, so I was there at the get-go for each one. We’d basically just run a few versions of each song, and you'd just hope you'd nailed it. 

Were you familiar with the song selections before recording them? 

Yes. On the second record a few song choices were actually mine. ‘In My Own Dreams’ by Paul Butterfield, which is an all-time favourite from my teenage years, and “A Little Bit Of Rain” by Fred Neil ….and then of course “Tall Grass” (which was an original Dave and I co -wrote together.) 

I actually was not familiar with the Gene Clark song. That one’s a good example of a cover being completely reimagined.

Is performing live with them a different experience than fronting Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter?

Yes. I mean The Sweet Hereafter is my DNA, my forever unreachable Sistine Chapel ceiling, (that I will be reaching for from beyond the grave, eternally ;) and It’s my sole reason for being. So, therefore the live shows have a specific emotional context and sonic timbre.

The Sweet Hereafter is my and Phil's songs and vision (which is a dire and desperate vision.) And it’s also Phil and I on our emotional journey as two people who share the same heart, on full display. 

The Third Mind for me is an extension of what I’ve come to learn from the Sweet Hereafter, but it’s more light-hearted onstage. I mean the Third Mind’s music isn’t sombre the way ours can be at times—and I suppose it’s a bit more of an exercise in "letting go" vs holding on. Especially because there is a lot of improvisation— it’s literally about letting go. 

I enjoy finding new ways on stage to embody the songs with The Third Mind, because they didn’t come from me, so I get to be free from them, and I get to be an observer too—and I enjoy never knowing where it’s going to go because I’m learning as I go.

On a side note—I’m learning too, that it’s ok to fall in love a little with new musical relationships. I guess I’m poly “band” erous now;) But seriously, I am very loyal to a fault—so there is a true freedom to belong to something else that doesn’t belong to me (if that makes sense?) 

Also, onstage I’ve gotten over feeling like I’m cheating on Phil;) 

Your relationship with Sunn O))) goes back almost two decades, and you contributed to their collaboration with the Japanese band Boris. Were you familiar with both bands and was that association a stimulant for you to be even more experimental musically?

I was familiar with Sunn O))) because our bass player Bill Herzog introduced us to Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley way back in the day—that’s how they found me and asked me to come write and sing the words and melody for what became ‘The Sinking Belle’ (from the album Altar), which was the Sunn O))) Boris collaboration.  

Boris I met during the actual recording, and I was just blown away by them. Their presence, their whole gestalt. I mean they have all the elements. True artists. 

So yes, working with those bands in the studio and then performing with them made us feel like we needed to step it up as artists. We felt like what we had done til then was child’s play.

One night after we performed at ATP with them all, Phil came up with the intro to Hushed By Devotion, the song that opens our last record, Marble Son…and I remember thinking we have to start a record with this musical movement (cuz it really is a movement, or a “piece” vs. a song.) So that intro set the template for what became Marble Son. 

Had it not been for Sunn O))) and Boris, I don’t think we’d have gone that far into (what for us at the time) was left field…a real departure—or an arrival—depending on how you care to view it.

Does the support slot touring with Sunn O))) herald a rebirth of Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter? 

Yes, we are definitely in a rebirth. Or we are getting ready to be born;) But….it remains to be seen how that will translate.

Sunn O))) have given us a huge gift by taking us on this tour, because it’s allowing us to re-emerge in a very elegant and gentle way. 

I mean to be invited to set the tone each night that guides the audience into Sunn O)))’s intense sonics, isn’t just a huge honour— it just makes sense somehow in context to our journey—as we are still kinda caught between worlds until the new record is released. And these performances are all about being between worlds.

As strange as it sounds, their music feels very quiet to me, very calm…. Like being beneath the ocean or sort of like being in the eye of the storm… gentle in the middle…and I relate to that stillness, and I need that stillness, now more than ever…. it’s like a sonic shroud….and I’m lucky to play for people who get this, and understand that this is a kingdom you enter. I know it sounds overwrought perhaps to describe it so majestically—but it warrants this description.  

So again, it makes re-emergence feel gentle….and reverent. And perhaps dare I say, relevant.

You've hinted that we may be presented with a further album by Jesse Sykes & The Hereafter. With a gap of over twelve years since the release of MARBLE SON, what can we look forward to? 

Well, there is a record and it’s done and in waiting. This record is a little bit like if you were to put all our records in a cosmic petri dish. 

It’s funny cuz we started recording it eight years ago, but I’m proud of these songs, because they sound like what life felt like this past decade, for better or for worse—in that the songs seem to exist outside of time, much in the way we all have (perhaps) existed outside of time.  They might not have made as much sense had they been released eight years ago. Who knows. I’m probably too close to make this call.

For me the songs really seem to have grown into the zeitgeist of this modern era—which is one of great fragility. I think this moment in history is best defined by the collision of the collective unconscious, pressing against the sinister digital construct we’ve all seemingly allowed ourselves to become bound by. 

How does one quantify this? For me it’s shaped every aspect of life, and I have to be very careful because dipping into the internet pipeline can ruin me for days at a time.

Anyway…. Phil sings a song on this record too, and honestly, It’s my favourite song. It’s like we’ve come full circle and it’s almost irrelevant who’s singing what at this point. But for the story of this record to make sense—this song had to be sung by him. I think it might be a eulogy.

That hiatus we were on, from which this new record is born out of (and which was still in an acceptable range at the point when we started recording eight years back) was all about living outside of the indie music world’s goings-on because aside from other things I was dealing with in life that were monumental, I had felt it all got tainted and made worse by social media and the internet in general. It all finally culminated into this moment in time where I just needed to shed all aspects of persona and expectation and associations—which were all an unwanted part deeply entangled with any kinda musical pursuit. 

It’s hard enough to pursue music in the purest way imaginable (i.e. not caring about money—because I really don’t) but then to have to be continually demoralized each day with the dog and pony show of social media —well that was just killing my soul. I just needed to leave it behind. So I did.

I didn’t even have a computer for many of those years. I just revelled in the mundane and the beauty of the day, and kinda let myself get lost in life without overarching goals, and often without music in any form. 

At first it nearly killed me “letting go” of everything ….and I had to grieve big time …. but eventually it became a life. 

A beautiful one. A life where music stopped being— everything.

Instead, silence became everything.

I’m leaving out a lot of background;) I mean we as a band lost a lot of our machinery right after the last record came out, in that labels folded, people quit, Spotify took over, Seattle rents went way up…but it’s too vast to go into in a cohesive way;) Let’s just say Phil moved five times to four different cities during the hiatus.

But if there was a bright side to all the changes taking place, I think it just forced us to take a long view with making this record….and in doing so it seemed to be an almost protective entity. Like going to the studio over that long time frame kept us on track emotionally, while parts of us evolved into whatever it is we needed to, in order to carry on.

For me, just going into my own world, allowed me to kinda re-enter that “Theta” stage of childhood —which was an unexpected cherished outcome of everything seemingly falling apart around me at the time.

During this period I also obsessively made a bunch of little surrealist documentaries (on YouTube), because I tried to capture this beauty and its ache and the melancholy, through story telling. Luckily, the process of creating these mini documentaries eventually helped me fall back in love with music and life…. And some of the music for our record came out of these storytelling vignettes. 

Bottom line, these little YouTube movies are important companion pieces to the new record.

So I feel like in hindsight it was all necessary, the hiatus, and the eight year on again off again recording sessions. It was the only way to continue in this adventure in a pure and authentic way. 

I’m just hoping the new record has a bit of that childlike melancholic beauty I’ve alluded to, and evokes the feeling of how hope feels, before you ever knew that it was a thing you could lose. 

Does that make sense?

It’s aptly titled, “Forever, I’ve Been Being Born.”

 In 2011, MARBLE SON arrived after a traumatic time for you and the band, and that disorder adds to the album's brilliance. How difficult was it for you and the band to create that album collectively? 

In truth I just think it’s always been hard for us to make records, even at the beginning when our records were quite simple. I mean Phil and I have an intensity—and well, you mention a “disorder” and I’m laughing, cuz I think I have one in this regard —when it comes to making records. 

I just think aside from the music actually not aligning to my vision at times, and the frustration of clashing viewpoints, I have a kind of sonic dysmorphia, and it’s hard for me to hear the music played back outside of the studio sometimes. It’s like I won’t hear it played back the same way twice… I lose trust in my own perception…. and that just makes mixing a nightmare. 

The first time I encounter a mix at home to review it, is pure hell. I used to get in the bathtub and cover my ears with the water running, while Phil would take a listen in the living room, and tell me “Yay or nay” while I was still in the tub. Then I’d eventually work my way into stomaching a listen —if he liked it.

If he didn’t, or worse if I didn’t like it —it could really send me spiralling. I’ve had bedridden depressions over mixes.

I end up (especially in the case of this new record) having to step away for long periods to forget what I thought I heard;) Honestly, hearing what might be your very soul played back, for me can be traumatic and disorienting. If you really think about it, it’s not that far-fetched— to go a little crazy;)

Because again, in my mind it had to be right, or close enough to the internal world from which it came. 

I don’t have any other excuse really. I just seem to be a bit of a victim of my own undoing in this particular circumstance (i.e. the circumstance of my own recorded music;)

But I also think depending what’s happening in your life at the time, record making dynamics are gonna be a crap shoot - I mean it’s hard to make a record during a major life transformation I think….

With Marble Son it started out brilliantly… the recording process with Mel Dettmer was magical…But yes, Phil lost his dad during mixing and he and I had just broken up ….and then we didn’t like the mixes —so we took it to like three different people before we finally cracked the code. 

Plus, it was clear at the time we were going to lose crucial members, because they weren’t able to tour as much as we were required to. 

Fatherhood, motherhood…. Marriage. It was kind of the beginning of the end of that incarnation.

And soon after I lost my mind;) 

I mean it’s so much more complicated than we have time for. I’m not able to do this question justice;) I’m making myself look insane. 

Someday maybe we’ll make an easy record!

Songs such as Hushed By Devotion and Be It Me, Or Be In None are like open wounds. Can you perform them live, or are those memories best parked? 

We still perform “Be It Me, Or Be It Non’’ but “Hushed by Devotion” needs a full ensemble. We are definitely wanting to get a full band back together, and yes, I’d play that beast in a heartbeat! 

No one ever had to twist my arm to play most of our older songs! I mean even the new ones are old now;)!

 Your intrigue with mortality comes across in your writing and, indeed, in your band's title. Is that drawn from anxiety or fascination, and has that tempered over the years? 

Oh Yes, death was always my muse and as a child it was my constant play date you might say;) I came into the world knowing it belonged to us all and it was just a crap shoot who would be called upon. As a very young child I had a great amount of anxiety because death was very present early on, so it shaped me into who I was then and who I am now.

I guess as one would expect, my relationship to it has deepened. Meaning it’s less novel in terms of its elusive ways, and less conceptual and closer to home--more hands on.

As far as hands on, I now care take my ninety-year-old mother much of the time, and at night she has what I can only describe as visitations. When they started it was easy to write it off as dementia or a side effect of medication…. But now I’m convinced she’s just living between worlds where she can see things we can’t. People, old pets. She has many phantom cats in her apartment that she’s always in search off—hiding in closets etc. One night I heard a ruckus and she was throwing newspaper pages into the air and I said, “mom what’s going on?" "Why are you throwing this newspaper everywhere??!” 

And she responded, “I’m throwing them at the people.” 

I think she and I are at a point now where she no longer fights them, and I no longer tell her they aren’t real. (But honestly, I always knew they were real;)

So I’m in it… deep. And it’s every bit as beautiful as I might have expected, but even more sad.

You have spoken previously about the intensity associated with the band and how that can lead to ruination, yet despite numerous collaborations, you have not recorded a solo album. Was that ever on your radar, or are you committed lifelong to Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter? 

Sometimes I joke that I make music not so much for music’s sake, but more for the notion of having an excuse to sleep in a motel room with 5 people;) 

I just always loved the familial aspect of it…. I mean maybe not so much motel-wise anymore;) But I think I truly needed a family, and Phil (and the others) became my family through music. Plus he and I just have such a shared internal braille. We read each other’s minds and hearts —and I know it’s too precious of a relationship and that life’s too short to think I could find that again. The musical trust as well. 

It’s a love story, and I don’t need to always be falling in love. 

Solo records often sound too engineered. (i.e. The soul gets sucked out) Sometimes the metaphysical nature of the relationships between people is not taken into consideration enough. Those relationships lend some kind of extra juju we can’t quantify. Even if there is great friction. The friction might be necessary. Might be the magic bullet. 

I mean, I know there are many exceptions where magic occurs in solo records— but the thought right now makes me think of lawns with fake grass;)

Yeah. I’m just not interested. And at the end of the day, a solo record at this point in time, with so many band members having come and gone (with the exception of Phil) would ultimately mean “no” Phil…. and it’s just not going to happen. He’ll probably roll his eyes if he reads this, but I know he gets it …at least from my vantage point

Your show in Dublin is advertised as Jesse Sykes with Phil Wandscher and Bill Herzog rather than JS and The Sweet Hereafter. Is that anything to be read into, or is it a faux pas by the PR people? 

 It was honestly just that we didn’t want people to think it was a full band and then be disappointed. It can get confusing. I think of Jesse Sykes and The Sweet Hereafter as the full band experience, with drums etc….

This tour is us stripped down. No drums. In the early days it didn’t matter if we showed up as a duo, trio or five-piece, cuz the first two records were so minimalist. But after Marble Son, which is such an epic journey of an album, the distinction started to really matter, in terms of what form of the band you were getting (because so many songs on that record require full band.)

Man, now I’m thinking I probably should have billed as JS & The Sweet Hereafter after all— and just surprise people! 

Lol;)

Either way, with Sunn O))) also performing, it promises to be an exciting double bill and a welcome return to Dublin for you. We are very much looking forward to the experience. 

We are beyond excited Declan! And I cannot thank you enough for giving us a voice (out in the vast sea of it all!) See you soon my friend.

Interview by Declan Culliton Photography by Harrison Kadwit (Main Image and Jesse with Phil) and Steve Dewall (Jesse with Dave).

Jeffrey Martin Interview

Portland, Oregon is home to singer songwriter Jeffrey Martin. He first appeared on our radar back in 2009 with the release of his debut album GOLD IN THE WATER and he has gone forward into a career that has steadily built upon his insightful and sensitive songs. Having made a hard decision to give up a regular job as an English teacher in High School, Jeffrey has used his talents to reflect upon the human condition in all its guises and to hold a mirror up to our humanity, our deeds and insecurities. He speaks for those on the margins of society and frequently captures the quiet dignity and the hidden depths within everyman. We asked Jeffrey to share some thoughts with us recently while visiting Ireland and his wisdom shines through in the words. 

Congratulations on the new album. Thank God We Left the Garden has received very positive media feedback. Are you happy with the results of your labours?

Of course.  People have been really kind to the record. I’m glad folks are connecting with it. 

The feel of the album is one of quiet intimacy. Is that what you were aiming for originally – almost a fragility to mirror our troubled times?

Yes that’s very much what I was aiming for.   This batch of songs was a direct response to my anxiety about the pace of the world.  

How long did the recording process take?

Not sure exactly. Three months?  Or 7 years.  

Was the backyard shed you used always meant to be a studio during construction?

I built it so I could have a dedicated place for writing. I definitely didn’t build it with any acoustic recording function in mind.  Just built the cheapest thing I could that would keep the rain and rats out. 

You recorded late into the night to avoid neighbourhood noise. Did you get any strange reactions from the immediate neighbours who must have wondered what was going on?

I think my neighbours are perpetually curious what I’m up to. Strange sounds. All hours of the night. A few know what I do. Others I leave to wonder. 

Your producer on the album is John Neufeld. Can you tell us more about your working relationship with him?

Jon is a music friend. And a crucial part of the Portland music scene. Working with him feels like working with a kind and humble sound guru. He’s talented on another level.   

The songs seem more personal and internal in comparison to your earlier writing. Was this a conscious change of direction?

It was the opposite of conscious.Writing these songs was one long exercise in getting out of my own way. It’s just what came out. 

When you were growing up, who were your favourite artists and bands?

It was a constant and ever-changing buffet. Every kind. But I always come back to the songwriters whose lyrics feel like finding a light switch to a dark room in my mind that I didn’t know existed. I don’t really care about genres. I care what people are trying to say. That can be Nina Simone. And it can be Dave Matthews. And it can be Blaze Foley. And it can be The Black Diamond Heavies. 

Did you play guitar from a young age?

I started playing casually when I was maybe 16 or 17. I taught myself just enough to write to.  And there it’s remained. 

Do you intend to release your earlier albums in physical format?

I haven’t decided.  I think I’d like to revisit those songs and release those albums as “then and now” double records. 

Going back to 2014 and the DOGS IN THE DAYLIGHT album. When you look back  do you see much change in your writing process?

I’ve moved away from some folky Americana tropes.  Fewer trains and less heartache for the sake of heartache.  In previous albums there were a lot of dark and sad songs, but I didn’t offer much of myself.  I discovered that a certain amount of vulnerability, some honest telling of my own story, in a song can help balance the melancholy with some solace. 

ONE GO ROUND  (2017) is an album that carried on your leaning toward story songs. Did you record this in a friend’s home in preference to a studio setting

I recorded it with Tyler Fortier in his home studio.  He’s got a very legit studio space with great gear.  I liked working with him because he was willing to build the songs out in a really organic way. Slowly  and mindful of what might be too much.  

Do you prefer to perform in a live setting or would you choose to stay home and simply be seen as a songwriter today

I absolutely love the live show.  There is a magic there that can never be contained on a recording. For me, recordings are deeply secondary to the live show.  Both are important, but if I had to choose one it would be live shows every time, forever.  

When you tour, is it hard to make any real profit when you add up the cost of flights, hotels, meals etc?

It’s hard for anyone these days, doing any job, to make any profit.  My goal is sustainability, and so far that’s working.   Money kills everything and the more you have the more you sacrifice to it.  My goal is to make enough money to keep playing music for a living. Whatever exists beyond those margins I don’t really care about.  I try to be intentional with that mantra. It’s too easy to start feeling like you need more.  Or worse, that you deserve more.  

So many artists cannot make ends meet with poor royalty payments and increasing costs of living. However you gave up a regular teaching job to devote your time to music. How difficult was that decision to make?

It was only difficult in that I was trading a conventional job that was somewhat reliable for the infinite expanse of working for myself.  But art thrives on a healthy amount of uncertainty.  Every creative moment comes alive with real stakes.  

 Do you write slowly or do song ideas and words come to you quickly?

It’s both. All at once for some. Over the course of years for others.  If a song doesn’t come quickly, that usually means I need to do some more living. I try not to fight that equation.  

Your partner Anna Tivel is a very successful singer and songwriter also. Do you regularly communicate song ideas to each other or how does your creative dynamic work?

We write very separately from each other, but live together in constant shared space of ideas and reflection.  We’re two deeply internal minds who were lucky enough to find each other and fall in love.  There is a common unspoken understanding that we both need mounds of time alone. 

The new album wrestles with some big concepts such as ‘who are we, and what are we doing here.’ Have you resolved that heaven already lies within us, if we would just wake up?

Well put.  I’ll never understand why religious communities seem to be so fearful of this concept. Especially considering that it’s written in their bibles in black and white. There is the sandbox of the material world, where all of our politics and capitalist dreams and inane social constructs reside. And then there is the infinite expanse outside that sandbox, where compassion and wonder permeate and go on forever.   

You sing of intolerance and homophobia on the song Red Station Wagon. Do you think that prejudice can ever change or is the mountain of hate too big to climb?

I believe things like prejudice have to be overcome on the individual level, life by life. Society can offer helpful tools (education being a key one) but will never be able to compensate for a fearful and ignorant mind that has no desire to find a better way.  

The division that we see today in our world makes me think that humans are the greatest blight upon the planet. In writing about a higher purpose do you see a light at the end of the tunnel?

I don’t agree. While certainly other creatures are conscious, I believe that human conscious specifically brings a profound value to the universe that nothing else does (that we know of so far.) One that allows Existence to ponder itself and be awestruck by the infinite depth of minds and hearts.  The destructiveness of humans isn’t the fault of our awareness, but rather the result of those who choose to remain unaware.  I could stab someone to death with a paint brush, but it wouldn’t make sense to blame the brush. I hope we can become increasingly aware that our humanity is a powerful tool, not a passive fact of our existence that we are slave to, and it needs to be protected and wielded with immense care. Not to say that our human nature doesn’t contain some truly horrifying potentials, but that with awareness and compassion we can choose our better natures. 

Interview by Paul McGee 

Nora Jane Struthers Interview

Singer-songwriter Nora Jane Struthers is a Nashville-based artist who lives with her husband and fellow musician, Joe Overton, and their two young children. Her recently released record, BACK TO CAST IRON, is another album brought to pass under the ‘pandemic umbrella,’ albeit with the caveat that it was also written while Nora Jane was heavily pregnant and expecting their second child. Given those elements, you would be forgiven for expecting a profoundly unsettling and worrisome theme to prevail across the album. The outcome is quite the opposite, with positivity and hopefulness at the core of the song’s subject matter. We spoke recently with Nora Jane about her move to Music City to follow her career dream and the new record.  

You were born in Virginia but moved to New Jersey. At what age did that shift take place?

At the beginning of my memory, it was about four years old.

I understand that your father was a musician.  

Yes, my father still is a musician. He is a saint. He plays the banjo and the guitar and, during the pandemic, he learned to play pedal steel guitar and is quite good at it, quite an accomplishment for a seventy-year-old to take up a new instrument.

Did you play on stage with your father or just at home?

Up until college, it was just in the living room. I was writing songs, and they were pretty bad. In my teenage years, I would play them at open mics. But in college, my dad and I started playing together at these folky venues in New Jersey and then dive bars in Brooklyn. We named ourselves a father and daughter duo, Dirt Road Sweetheart. You can find some of our music on Spotify. It's very sweet, honest music that sounds like a brother duet style.

I expect that you got your love of music from him.

Yes, my whole musical foundation was bluegrass and folk, and country. And then, as a child of the '90s, I loved grunge and many bands like Pearl Jam. I also loved many women artists coming out in the 90s, like Annie De Franco and Tori Amos. I went to this festival that happened in the early 2000s called Lilith Fair. It was a collection of female artists:  Jewel, Sarah McLaughlin and The Cranberries, who toured and played the biggest arenas. Being around all those women making music and writing their own songs was inspiring.   

You completed a teaching degree in college. Did you put that into practice?

Yes, I taught in high school for three years and loved it. It was so much hard work. I thought I was working so hard and still broke; I could move to someplace that is less expensive, work hard, and try to be a musician, which is what I always wanted to do.

That led to a move to Nashville.

Yes, I moved there 15 years ago, in 2008. I made my first record in the fall of that year and released it a year later.

Did you integrate easily into the musical community in Nashville?

When choosing a city to go to, Nashville, I only knew one person there. At the time, there was a weekly old-time music jam every Wednesday at The 5 Spot, and it was so much fun. There was a strong community of people my age and older who were excited about music and making music on all levels. I stayed for a week for my first visit. I wrote a song, met a producer, and the song was pitched to an artist. And I was like: ‘This is where I want to be if I'm trying to make a career out of music, this is it.’ So, the move was great, and it was exciting. I made many friends, many of whom are still my friends today. 

The 5 Spot is an iconic venue in East Nashville, as is Dee’s Cocktail Lounge in Madison.

I'm thinking about doing my album release show at The 5 Spot. I haven't played an album release show yet in Nashville, so I’m still trying to decide when and where I want to do that, but The 5 Spot would be great for old-time’s sake. But I've also played at Dee’s every two months for the last year. I love it there, too.

For obvious reasons, you didn't get to tour your 2020 album BRIGHT LIGHTS, LONG DRIVES, and FIRST WORDS.

Oh Lord, I think I got to play seven shows. We put it out in February 2020; I think I played two weekends and then we came home, and stayed at home. It was pretty rough.

And that led to you writing the songs for your new album BACK TO CAST IRON, which we described in our review as a ‘series of diary entries.’

That's accurate because, as an artist, I process my life through songs, and it certainly makes sense to me that those would feel like diary entries. I was, at least for some of it, heavily pregnant when writing the songs. I was pregnant a lot of it, although some of it was written after my son was born. 

Did that condition work itself into the songs?

Topically, certainly, but the physical condition is in there too. In one of the songs, I talk about my shoes not fitting, and certainly with sleep and how erratic that is when you're both pregnant and have a baby, that’s in the songs. Because that affects the way a person's brain works.

You open the album with Is It Hope and bookend it with Back On The Road. Despite the times they were written, they suggest an extremely optimistic author. 

I'm a hopelessly optimistic person. What my husband called me the other day is relentlessly optimistic. That’s not to say that I haven't had my downtimes, of course, but my natural state, my baseline, is an optimistic state. I think that comes through in my writing, and it certainly comes through in my shows when I can connect with the audience. I want them to feel that it’s part of the Nora Jane experience, that you leave believing in yourself and that things will be okay.

Did that track sequencing come naturally to you?

That's a tough question to answer. Initially, I had a different opening song. My first sequence was Back On the Road first and I presented that to my producer, Nielsen Hubbard. He said that he’d hate to put Is It Hope so far down in the sequence because the intro in that song is so strong and in case some people didn’t get that far with the record. When I was in the studio singing that first verse of Is It Hope, it felt so magical to me. I knew when I had done that take that it had to be the opening track. In a way, once Neilson gave me that perspective shift, ending with Back On The Road made sense because the whole record is about me not being on the road, and I couldn’t wait to get back out there. It just seemed to make a lot of sense. 

I particularly love the lyrics in the song Something Wild when you say: ‘Because you can’t make something wild grow in your garden.’ What is behind them?

The song's first verse is based on my mother, and the second is about my experience. My mother loves Queen Anne's Lace. It's a weed that grows on the side of the highway all over this country, in all parts. It's related to the carrot and the person in the same family. My mother was an avid gardener, and she would always pull over and dig it up, put it in her beautiful soil at home, and it would always die. It wanted the rocky, craggy highway soil. The second verse is about motherhood and a tolerance for mess and uncontrolled actions of people. To a certain extent, it's about control. And being aware that there are many beautiful things that are not only within our control, but they should not be within our control and just allowing them to be wild and beautiful.

Children They Need You (All of the Time) is a beautiful country song whose title speaks for itself. 

Thank you. I love that song. It just tickles me wherever I get to play it live. 

I have always wanted to write a song with parentheses in the lyrics, so mission accomplished.

You mentioned your producer, Neilson Hubbard, earlier. You’ve worked with him on your past three albums, haven’t you?  

I have. A lot of people that I know operate on the basis that you make three records with a producer and then it's time to move on. This was my third record, but I don't know if I was ready to move on as I love working with him. He's so laid back and smart and has such great taste. He is flexible but firm when he really believes in something  and he's just so much fun to be around. I love the records I've made with him; every record I make with him is a notch above the last. Part of that is my own personal development and growth and hopefully, I’m getting better and deeper, but it is also his personal ability to magnify that.

The songs were written during an unprecedented period with COVID-19, pregnancy and your child being born. When you went to record over a year later, was there any temptation to revisit the songs or include others?

There was no temptation. I did have many more songs from that period that didn't make the album. That was part of the fun of making this record, going into the studio and with all the work tapes I had sent Neilson. I didn't always know what we would be tracking on any day. I just left it up to what I felt like playing that day. There were a couple of other songs that are really good songs that I'll probably never record. I won't go back unless I relate it to this album in some way. 

The album has been getting great reviews. Do you read your reviews and if so, do you approach them with trepidation or curiosity? 

I do read them. I'm always curious to read reviews. I know what I've made and how I feel about it. It's interesting to see how other people relate to it and what others take away from it because what I'm going to take away from it will always be different. That's the whole part of making art; it's going to be different for everybody. 

Your husband, Joe Overton, features prominently on the album, playing pedal steel guitar, banjo, and adding backing vocals. Is having two professional artists in a marriage supportive or testing?

It's just so supportive. If you knew Joe, you wouldn't even need to ask that question because he is the loveliest, laid-back, calm, easy-going, even-keeled kind of person that it's lovely to be around. I bring to the partnership decisiveness, grand vision, and other things, and he is great at just making things happen. There are so many fantastic musicians here in Nashville. What I love about Joe is that he sounds like Joe on every instrument, and he has a unique voice. I'm just crazy about it. 

How do you balance motherhood with your professional career as a recording and touring artist?

Because my children are young – I’ve got a two-year-old and a four-year-old – I am looking at this as a season of life to be at home mostly. I love playing live shows, and I don't know how many I played last year, but it certainly wasn't a high number. I play one solid weekend a month and usually bring the kids or at least one kid with me. Sometimes, I do the shows without Joe. I did a weekend in Texas this summer where I flew with my two-year-old and played some shows solo, which I wasn't comfortable doing years ago. Being a mother has increased my flexibility, which is good. At the moment, it’s mostly a season to be home. I take the gigs that I know will be fun and that pay. Later in life, if I want to tour a little harder again, maybe I will, but this isn't the moment for that. 

Interview by Declan Culliton

Jaime Wyatt Interview

Three years after the release of her last album, NEON CROSS, Nashville-based artist Jaime Wyatt has shifted somewhat from the country nuances of that album with her recently released album, FEEL GOOD. Jaime’s songwriting has consistently been autobiographical, and that continues to be the case with the new record. Sonically, it travels in a more soulful direction than her previous recordings and finds her writing about issues such as sexism, personal relationships, gun violence and environmental collapse. Not afraid to challenge the tried and trusted, producer and band member of Black Pumas, Adrian Quesada was brought on board by Jaime to oversee the arrangements. The result is a fuller, warmer and more harmonious sound that reaches the sweet spot between modern country and soul. It’s also a triumphant move forward by an artist whose career appears to take giant steps forward with each of her albums. 

Are you at home in Nashville this morning?

No, I’m in California, it’s 10 am. We’ve just played an album release show here and also Orville Peck’s Rodeo at Pappy and Harriets; it’s a cowboy hang where they filmed part of Easy Rider; it's lovely. I’m hanging out with family for a while and taking some meetings in Los Angeles. 

How is your relationship with Nashville progressing?

I love Nashville; it has made me good at music. When you come to Nashville, one good assimilating thing is ‘getting good.’ I love Nashville but miss my family on the West Coast. It’s home for me now, my band are there, and they are like family to me, and we tour out of there. I’ll have my base in Nashville for years to come.

Congratulations on your recent Grand Ole Opry debut. How did that go?

It went really well; I was surprised it went so well. I got to sing with my friend Butch Walker and Trey Binkley from my band came and played with me. It was really fun to share the experience with people, too; Trey had never done the Opry, Butch had done it before but was so supportive and sweet. I played Ain’t Enough Whiskey with Butch and also played Moonlighter. 

Our review described your new album, FEEL GOOD, as more Dusty and Bobby than Loretta and Dolly. Did you lock yourself in a dark room and binge on soul music to get into that groove?

I did lock myself in a dark room and listen to music. I have this deal with ADHD called hyperfocus, and I use it. I’m obsessed with music. I would write a few songs for this album and then study Motown, Soul, Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, and Grateful Dead. I listened to their records because I knew that the grooves I was writing were different from my last record, NEON CROSS, and could be really powerful if I learned more about their music. 

You recorded in both Los Angeles and Nashville.

While writing and compiling the songs, we would go into different studios and jam and improvise with melody ideas that I had. The players would be jamming, and I would be looking through my notebook for words. We were recording everything, and after a session in L.A. I went back to the drawing board, listening and writing more. I then took my touring manager and a group of guys to a studio in Nashville, and we did the same thing, demoing again. After that, it was up to me to really cue in, finish the lyrics, and select the songs. We then ended up working with producer Adrian Quesada to finish the album.

How did the connection with Adrian Quesada come about?

I was talking to my friend Nikki Lane and asked her if she knew who Adrian’s manager was; he happened to be a former manager of mine. I really wanted Adrian to take the project on and was surprised when he did because my last two records were very country. I told him I wanted horns and strings, and I knew he could do those arrangements. He was brilliant, his Electric Deluxe Recording studio was impeccable, he has great tape machines, and his engineer is a genius.  

 You wrote on the piano for this album. Was that the first time?

I did write many of the songs on piano this time and play piano in the live sets quite a bit. I had written two songs on piano before for my last, NEON CROSS.

Is the Album’s title, FEEL GOOD, a statement of your frame of mind or advice to others? 

That’s a good question; it’s both. I write about things that I feel but question whether they are relevant and whether people need to hear them. I believe that we are living in a toxic society for the most part, and I’m trying to highlight healing, both for myself and others, because I know that it is needed. So, the title means ‘permission to feel good.’

You open the album with World Worth Keeping, a reminder of the current environmental ruination.

I wasn’t sure how that would go down, and I think most people do love the planet. But we can’t ignore what’s happening at the moment with the weather, and we’re not going to have any clean air for the next generation at this rate. But I have immense faith in the young generation; they are very well educated about the environment. I grew up in Washington State, where environmental issues were encouraged and taught in schools. I appreciated that but did not realise that not everyone learned that way. Moving to the South, I found that in Nashville, they don’t even recycle glass and recycle very little. I’m not mad at any single working-class person for the state of the planet; what I talk about in that song is billionaires who are destroying the earth without having to pay for the damage they have done. 

We recently selected the track Hold Me One More Time to feature on our radio show as one of this year's favourites.

Thank you. I wouldn’t say I like listening to my own music, but when the album came out on Spotify, I actually listened to that song. I’m really proud of it and think it sounds beautiful sonically. 

I understand that the song Fugitive was written while you were feverish.

Yes, I was down with Covid; that song is a fever dream. I was reading about life in America at the time, and that song is about gun control. That’s my ‘fever song.’ My dad always told me to write songs when I had a fever because Neil Young wrote Cowgirl In The Sand with a fever. 

You recall your dad on the album with the inclusion of the Grateful Dead song, Althea.

Yes. My dad was friends with Bob Weir when we were kids, and he would be stoked that I recorded that song. I grew up at Grateful Dead shows with my family as a baby. I started seeing young people wearing Grateful Dead shirts a few years ago and just dived back into their back catalogue and discovered how amazing that song, Althea, is. Robert Hunter’s lyrics were so cool because he left them open-ended. I follow Bob Weir on Instagram and watch him working out, which he does so that he can still play heavy guitars. That’s why I work out, too, to be able to stand up and hold a guitar, play better and sing better.

Were all the songs written specifically for the album?

Two of the songs were around for a while. I had been playing Ain’t Enough Whiskey on the road, but it didn’t make the last record. I’m glad it didn’t now because it works with the flow on the new record. Also, Jukebox Holiday, which I originally pitched to Charley Crockett when I wrote it.  

You are due to tour the album in early 2024.

I start a headline tour on January 17th at The Troubadour, California, and it ends on February 24th in New Orleans, with twenty-five dates in total. Riddy Arman does the support on the West Coast, and on the East Coast, we have an upcoming young man, Joshua Quimby. I’m excited to hear them both each night.  

Will you get back to Europe soon?

Hopefully, as soon as possible. Playing the 3 Arena, Dublin, with Dropkick Murphys in January was incredible. It was so powerful to see a whole room of Irish people singing Dirty Old Town; I was crying; it was so beautiful. 

Interview by Declan Culliton