Kenny Foster Interview

Kenny Foster is a singer songwriter who relocated from Joplin Missouri to Nashville seeking fame and fortune.  His tale is similar to many who land in The Music City and experience the trials and tribulations of making their mark in a sometimes impossibly competitive market where industry politics often dominate. What separates Foster from many of his peers is his capacity to articulate the experience in a credible, practical and pragmatic manner. Foster released his debut album Deep Cuts earlier this year and spoke with Lonesome Highway about his career before embarking on a short tour of Ireland and The U.K.

You often refer to the difficulties you encountered moving to Nashville from Missouri and establishing a foothold in the competitive music industry in the Music City. Do you now consider Nashville home and intend staying put?

Nashville has become my second home. It’s a love/hate relationship sometimes, and I think you’d hear most folks in this highly competitive field say the same thing at different points. When it’s good, it’s very, very good. When it’s bad, it’s almost unbearable. But my wife and I have developed a great community of friends in and out of the creative industries, and we can find a great deal of balance here. Access to both the lives we led before making the jump to pursue a seemingly impossible dream, and access to the best, most driven, most talented creatives in the world. It really is a remarkable city.

Country Music radio stations dictate exactly what is to be currently labelled as ‘country’ music, the majority of which does not in any way reflect the roots of traditional country music. How does an artist like yourself deal with that and is it possible to stick to your core musical beliefs yet manage to survive?

I appreciate this question, and honestly I really don’t know where this whole thing will end up. But the fact that you asked me in light of what your readers want, there must be a number of country music fans that see the industry in the same way you’ve just described. That says to me that there is a desire for the kind of music that myself and my collaborators/friends are trying to make day-in and day-out. Maybe the desire for a return to the roots of traditional country music will become so great that the industry will follow suit. Maybe it won’t. But regardless, I’ve done a great amount of chasing, and striving, and fitting in before this recent record, and after a good amount of shoul searching (and exhaustion, really) it feels good to know exactly who I am as an artist. I may evolve sonically, but my messaging will all come from the same place: the very heart of me. I’ve grown weary of throwing punches or trying to prove anything to an ever-evolving landscape. Ask anyone playing in it, and they couldn’t tell you what’s gonna break next month. They just keep throwing stuff against a wall and seein’ what sticks. 

It’s more of a long-game mentality for me and my kind, and as such we have to do a great number of things to survive. But once equilibrium sets in, and you’re living a life that makes you content, then the desire for bigger, better, faster, more wanes a significant amount. If it never pans out in a monstrous way with the support of radio and the big machines, that’s okay. If it does become the next big thing, that will come with its own set of challenges and frustrations, even amidst the growth and excitement. Either way, it sounds like great fodder for some remarkable songs to me. And I imagine this is all panning out in the way it was always meant to.

Have your studies in philosophy been an advantage in dealing with expectation, anticipation and the inevitable rejection by times that goes with the territory?

[Laughs] Well it has certainly helped me analyze the depths of my despair. [chuckles] I kid. Pretty sure I already knew how to think, but philosophy taught me how to learn. I had to face ideas and opinions that were sometimes counter to my own, some even came from a completely different place than my own. The mental gymnastics certainly gave me the constitution for accepting and processing all sorts of adversity and the amalgam of different experiences I was likely to face in my pursuit of the ever-elusive ‘life of art.’ I learned how to discern good arguments from bad ones, I learned how to appropriate sound thinking to help bolster my own thoughts/beliefs, and I learned to be comfortable with having my previously held ideas be proven wrong. These are rare qualities in this tumultuous time. I’m grateful for philosophy’s role in helping me shape a more sound world view from which to create.

There is quite a market for Country and Americana in Europe with many artists from The States targeting Europe rather than trying to cover vast areas of their home country. Is this also your intention? 

I love that you assume I have any intention that goes beyond wanting to share my music with thoughtful. respectful crowds. I believe in the power of creating a moment. Whether that’s for 10 people or 10,000. Each show is different given the people, the venue, the context. Ultimately, I will go where I am wanted, and the response to Deep Cuts in the UK and Ireland has been such that I wanted to come be a part of the conversation. As a sound financial plan or a precursor to swift and complete world domination, I can safely say we’ve not thought that far ahead. I love this part of the world, and knowing that a place I already liked to spend time wanted to hear a few tunes come out of my mouth, well that just tickled me pink and so we decided to come over. Simple as that.

You’ve been invited to perform on the Bob Harris Under The Apple Tree sessions which is great exposure for you. How did that materialise?

After my Rolling Stone write up, we were approached by a company called Limetree Music out of the UK and we talked to them about our plans to tour in your neck of the woods. It’s my understanding that they passed along my music to the folks at Under the Apple Tree, and the response was such that we were invited to take part in the great legacy that they have created there. I’m very grateful for their acceptance of me into their fold, and look forward to meeting “Whispering” Bob in person very soon!

Your dates in Ireland and the UK coincide with the release of your album Deep Cuts. Have you been touring the album at home yet? 

Nope. You go to where your people are, and the response from Ireland and the UK has been so overwhelming that it made us take notice. In gearing up for a fall tour, the stars aligned for us to do a leg overseas, and as an independent, the exhaustive nature of stringing together dates became so much easier to muster. Especially to visit a place that has been so welcoming and so intentional with us historically. I look forward to it immensely. 

The album features quite a number of co-writes with some serious big hitters such as Marti Dodson and Casey Wood. Are you more comfortable co-writing and do you consider that working with others makes the process simpler or more challenging?

Co-writing is just a different thing. I think it takes a great amount of trust and mutual respect to get a great tune. I spend so much time co-writing because I’m not always writing for myself. The sheer number of songs that I’ve been pumping out (200 a year over the past 3 years) lends itself to finding comfort in letting the wind take you where it wants to go. That’s easier when you’ve got a supremely talented friend in tow. Sometimes you hit on something that can be recognized as a great song, but it’s so personal that it takes the right voice with the right conviction to pull it off. Turns out a few of those writes for other people were really writes for me to make this record. Simple? Challenging? All in a days work. Depends on the day, the song, the weather, the mood. When a song hits, it just hits. 

The song ‘Made’ on the album is particularly powerful lyrically. Is it autobiographical?

The heart and voice of that tune is absolutely, through and through, me. It’s actually the song that I built the whole rest of the record around. The person I was, in the place that I was when I wrote that song, was just ‘right.’ While I took some artistic liberties with the specifics of the scenario, it became so real to me; so visceral. I wanted to make sure that the rest of the record would fall in line with the sentiment that rocked me to the core. That’s what I wanted to capture, and I’m so glad that you felt it in a similar way.

When writing songs do you always consider that the end product will be performed by yourself or is this a factor in your writing process?

Again, it depends on the day. There are moments of inspiration that are fully and wholly me. But sometimes when you hit upon something that’s deep, and true, and almost ancient in its messaging, then it becomes universal with anyone else who is in that place. If another artist were to want to cut it, then by all means. They will give it a life that I wouldn’t be able to. There are very few songs that I write that I say ‘Nope, that one is mine.’ In my mind, a great song is a great song, and I couldn’t possibly record all of the great songs that I get to be a part of. I try to find a voice that is true. If that ends up being mine, then I’m grateful for it. I’m just here to help the thing come into existence, and grateful for the work.

The album cover is markedly striking and graphic. Did the decision to use the image require much soul searching rather than select the all too often bland headshot on the cover?

I’d had the idea for capturing the photo concept ever since I’d recorded a song called Bravery back in 2011. The lyric was ‘Nothing about me says I think I’m good enough. I know I’ve got a heart with a leak, I try to fill it up.’ Up to that point I don’t think I’d written anything so vulnerable in my life, and it turns out it was just a precursor of things to come. So when this collection of songs was being put together, this image kept coming up in my mind as verily important. The truth is, I had no idea how to marry the two: these heartfelt, authentically simple songs and this terrible, gruesome, bloody image. It wasn’t until I was at dinner with a dear friend and the producer/director of my recent music video for Stand, Kenny Jackson (anthempictures.tv), and we were talking about the project and the history, and what I was trying to do with it and he was the one that said: ‘Why don’t you just call it Deep Cuts?’ Like a fricking bolt of lightning. Of course! It was the tie that bound all of it together in this beautiful package. It catches you unaware in a shocking way that hopefully compels you to look inside and discover something equally as shocking, but maybe not what you were expecting. I LOVED it. It was game-on from that point forward. I phoned my friend Rorshak (Rorshak.com) who is quite possibly the most underrated photographer I’ve ever seen. We have commiserated over many a beer about our particular plights. [laughs] Over one of these beers, the plan was set in motion behind his epically creative vision for capturing the image, and he executed the project like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  With him behind the camera, it was never going to be a bland headshot. I love, love, love collaborating with him.

There’s a great little blog over on my website if you’re interested in seeing behind the scenes of all that. But it all turned out exactly as I’d hoped. Better even. 

Grammy award winner Mitch Dane covers and embraces every conceivable musical genre from bluegrass to hip hop. What inspired you to select him to produce the album?

Mitch is a beautiful soul. His story is remarkable. His aim is true. He got it. We have been friends for over a decade, and when I first moved to town, the idea of doing a record with him “one day” seemed so very far out of reach. We had even made plans to do an EP as long ago as 2010, but some extraneous circumstances caused that to fall through. I’m ever so glad, because 5 or 6 songs wouldn’t have been enough time to spend with him. As it worked out, I kept developing and he kept making great records. The stars aligned. Our calendars matched. We were off like a rocket. We took our time, and moved through methodically. His exact words were: “It’s going to be great. I just have to make sure I don’t mess it up.” If that doesn’t give you the confidence you need as an artist to give it your all, I’m not sure what will. He was very careful. He’s an intentional human being, and anyone would be so lucky to get the chance to allow their work to pass through his gifted hands.

There is a noticeable crossover in recent years between artists that would have previously being considered AMA suited rather than CMA. I’m thinking Chris Stapleton, Jason Isbell, Margo Price and Kacey Musgraves who typically have appealed to both markets. Where would you place yourself in terms of your fanbase and market?

Again, while I’ve been banging around in music for quite a while, this record was really the first of my projects to receive the attention and acclaim that it has. We’re still finding our market. I obviously resonate so deeply with not only the artists you’ve just mentioned and their work, but their decision to walk a different path. I didn’t set out to make a ‘crossover’ record, so to speak. It just turns out that music lovers who don’t typically listen to country music have taken quite a liking to it. There was no master plan [laughs] I just finally made the record I wanted, in the way I wanted to make it, and I didn’t think about markets or demographics, or action items. To me this effort was about making the project. Period. Any life that this record has, I’m just along for the ride. I’m so grateful it exists in the world now, and I’m so grateful people are resonating with it. If they’re AMA, CMA, MTV, BET, or OPP I would just call fans of my music ‘friends’, no matter their walk of life.

Wearing your philosophers hat where do you expect to be career wise in ten years down the road?

My philosopher’s hat would tell me that the only true wisdom is knowing that I know nothing. I don’t make conjecture any more. I will follow my heart each and every day and let the rest work itself out. Worry not for tomorrow, for today has enough trouble of its own.

Interview by Declan Culliton

Jason Wilber Interview

The old adage of the male species not being able to multi-task most certainly does not apply to Jason Wilber. A career spanning over two decades to date has included twenty years as guitarist in the studio and on tour with John Prine, the release of eight studio albums, producer, session player, radio show host and guitar instructor. Possibly best known for his association with John Prine and also widely considered as one of the finest guitar players of his time, I’m intrigued as to how he actually manages to write so much material and actually record it given the mileage he clocks up on the road.

‘’Sometimes I will write a song while traveling, but most of the time I write at home’’ Jason Wilber tells Lonesome Highway while in the process of packing suitcases for another tour as part of John Prine’s legendary backing band alongside David Jacques, Pat Mc Laughlin and latest recruit drummer Kenneth Blevins. The tour takes in shows in Ireland, UK and The States fairly well filling in his diary until the end of 2017.

His latest album Reaction Time is Wilbur’s eight studio recording since the release of his debut album Lost In Your Hometown in 1998. It’s also one of his strongest with songs such as Something Somewhere, Heaven and the title track particularly hitting the spot. It was recorded only twelve months after Echoes, a covers album that featured material written by a variety of artists from The Rolling Stones to David Bowie and Leon Russell. Rather than self-produce Wilber engaged the services of Paul Mahern on both Echoes and Reaction Time. Mahern's musical career kicked off as a teenager with hardcore punk band The Zero Boys and he subsequently worked with household names such as Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Afghan Whigs, Magnolia Electric Co. and Iggy Pop. I wondered what drew Wilbur to him rather than take hold of the reins himself. ‘Paul is a fantastic engineer and producer. We have a good collaborative working relationship and I can count on him to be honest about whether he thinks something is good or not. He thinks of musical things that I don't think of and vice versa. Our musical backgrounds have some commonality but also a lot of differences, and I think that enriches the results we get’ explains Wilber. The album also reunites Wilber with Iris DeMent who adds backing vocals to Heaven, the closing track on the album. ‘I love Iris like a sister. I've had the pleasure of working with her for many years now. She has an amazing and unique voice and I couldn't think of any voice I'd rather hear first in the hereafter’.

With a career balance that involves so many different strands I wondered which of the roles brought the most satisfaction. ‘I enjoy accompanying other artists. It’s fun to be part of the team and to help paint the picture the artist is creating. On the other hand, it's nice to be the one primarily creating the picture too. So, it's kind of a tossup between performing my own songs and accompanying other artists on their songs. If I were forced to choose one though, I'd choose playing my own songs’

A self-confessed guitar fanatic from an early age his career did not follow any premeditated path, simply flowing from one stage to another as if predetermined. ‘Records by Johnny Cash, Tom T. Hall, Marty Robbins, and other artists were what set me off in that direction. Once I started playing guitar and doing gigs with bands, I realized it kind of came easy to me. Or maybe it was because I enjoyed it so much, all the hours of practicing didn't feel like work to me. Right away I was making more money playing in bands on the weekends than any of my friends who had part time jobs. I just progressed from there and at some point I started concentrating more on writing my own songs’

Without doubt the turning point in his career was his association with John Prine who Wilber actually performed with unofficially long before teaming up with him.  ‘I first met John when I was in high school. He sat in with a band some friends of mine had and I sat in on guitar. We played a whole set of John's songs at a little bar in the little college town where I still live. But we didn't stay in touch after that. About 10 years later, some friends of mine were playing in John's band and they recommended me when he needed a guitar player. I auditioned and got the job’

Remarkably that association has now lasted for twenty years without any hiccups. ‘As far as sticking together, first of all John is pretty easy going and fun to work with. He doesn't get too stressed about anything and he doesn't put a lot of rules or constraints on his musicians. Secondly, the songs are fantastic works of art. So, it's a pleasure to perform John's music with him. Thirdly, John's fans are wonderful. The people who like John's music are very loyal and keep coming back to see us play year after year. That can't be overlooked when you think about what allows you to go out and tour continually for so many years. You have to have an audience or there are no shows. Sounds obvious, but sometimes that part gets overlooked. I'd say those are three of the keys to us all being able to do it for so long’

Prine’s shows in Ireland have been and continue to be exceptional, I’d go as far as saying they have even improved in the past decade if that’s possible! There is a notable chemistry on stage between Wilber, Pat Mc Loughlin and Dave Jacques that appears effortless and manages to maintain that enthusiasm and passion show after show which Wilber casually dismisses. ‘We all enjoy playing together and just hanging out. So combine that with great songs and enthusiastic audiences, and it's pretty easy to stay engaged’

Accompanying Prine on duet recordings over the years gave him the opportunity to work with the cream of the industry’s female vocalists. I probed if there was any one artist that particularly impressed you above the rest. ‘Well pretty much all of John's duet partners have been incredible artists in their own rite, so they were all impressive in that respect. I can think of a few things that standout in my mind. One is Iris's voice, which is just so gigantic and unique. It's one thing to hear her on a record, but when you're standing in the same room with her, it's quite striking. Another would be Miranda Lambert, who pretty much sang everything perfectly, every time. Tone, pitch, phrasing, just spot on every time. That's pretty rare. One last one that comes to mind is Lee Ann Womack's voice. She has such a pure and beautiful voice and her southern accent is really ideal for country music.’

 The lack of industry support that many artists are exposed to these days often results in meagre pickings making survival as a professional artist more perilous than ever. Wilber’s laid back and relaxed persona is in contradiction to an artist that appears to have nailed down the survival formula better than most. ‘Ha-ha. I guess it depends on your definition of “survive”. I think you just have to find your own way to solve that puzzle. There are lots of different ways to do it, and plenty of artists out there are making a living. So clearly it can be done. It's not easy, but if it was easy everyone would be doing it’ 

The standard of artists currently residing and recording in Nashville is staggering. Many of these artists have been onstage with Wilber while on tour with John Prine. Margo Price, Sturgill Simpson, John Mooreland, Dan Auerbach, Amanda Shires and Jason Isbell particularly come to mind. Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson and Margo Price have made somewhat unlikely industry breakthroughs in recent years despite the mounting hurdles.  Has the door finally been opened for Americana type artists to reach much wider audiences I enquired. ‘Maybe, that would be nice. I started listening to Joe Ely back in the early '80's and he'd been making records since the '70's. There were lots of other artists I started listening to back in the '80's like Los Lobos, Lone Justice, The Plimsoles, to name a few. This is before Americana was a genre, it was called roots rock back then, or some artists were called cow punk. I couldn't understand why those artists weren't as popular as the Top 40 acts on the radio. Fast forward 30 years and it hasn't changed a whole bunch. It's better now, in the sense that there are alternative outlets for Americana artists to be heard. And you can find almost anything on the internet. But the main stream music is still something else. So to use your analogy; there is a door open, but it's not front door’

Wilber will be playing a full programme of dates on the upcoming tour of Ireland, some with John Prine and also solo gigs at venues from one end of the country to the other. From spraying note perfect guitar licks in sold out theatres as a band member to performing solo with a smaller audience unassisted. I could not resist questioning which of the two roles is more demanding. ‘Ha-ha. That's kind of a loaded question. In this case, neither one is pressurized. Pressure mainly is a result of being unprepared for the situation, and/or working with people who are difficult. Fortunately, I am well prepared and working with fun people, so all the gigs should be a blast. I'm looking forward to it!’

Interview by Declan Culliton

Courtney Marie Andrews Interview

"When I was a teenager I got wrapped up into some very shady business deals, and felt I was taken advantage of as a young woman by a label’’ explains Courtney Marie Andrews while considering how her sixth album Honest Life has finally propelled the native of Phoenix Arizona to the business end of the music industry.  The album, released earlier this year in the UK, (2016 in The States) is already being hailed as an album of the year in many quarters and rightly so given the quality of the material and song writing. It positively overflows with hurt, emotion, rejection and isolation as Andrews simply pours her heart out, reliving her life experiences of the last decade. It’s a body of work that recalls Joni Mitchell’s Blue in many ways, but more of that later.

The encounters packed into her early career and the endless touring as a young artist involved heartbreak, isolation, relationship breakups and a lot of homesickness. It is difficult to highlight any particular tracks on Honest Life given the overall excellence throughout but Not The End and How Quickly Your Heart Mends are simply classic love lost songs and Table For One is the most candid and honest portrayal imaginable of life on the road as a solo artist.

Its impact has given Andrews considerable media exposure, particularly in Europe, including a recent appearance on Later with Jools.  At the end of 2016 American Songwriter voted How Quickly Your Heart Mends as their No.4 song of the year.

''Honest Life definitely came from personal place. They sometimes twist the truth, but the original thoughts are very close to my heart. Personal experience is inevitable, so it’s important to be observant and empathetic enough to be able to connect the dots to your writing’’ she confesses. The album was self-produced by Andrews at Litho Studios in Seattle with the assistance of engineer Floyd Reitsma. "My trust in the industry was scarred for several years, and I was convinced that I had to do it on my own. The first few times I attempted to record Honest Life, I mostly had a bunch of older men telling me how I should sound, so that it will "sell." That really hurt me, and at the end of the day I wanted to do it my way, with my friends. My vision was clear for the album so it was easier to take the producer seat''

How long was the album in the making and was the intention to achieve a late 60’s breezy sound to the album or did that simply develop in the studio I wondered. "It probably has that sound because a lot of the album was recorded very much live, with little to no modern production tricks. I was focused more on the band getting a great take, then I was fixing it in mixing. A lot of these songs dropped into my lap fully formed. It’s so nice when that happens. I wrote them over a course of a few months. I wrote three of the songs in one day, Honest Life, Put the Fire Out and Rookie Dreaming. Regret and yearning feature quite strongly in a number of the songs."

Speaking like an industry veteran it’s difficult to fathom that she is only 26 years of age. Her early career reads like the ideal text book apprenticeship for any musician. While still in her early teenage years she was writing songs, touring as a busker at the age of sixteen and soon progressing to recording, performing and also working as a touring band member.  The tours included back up vocalist with Arizona rock band Jimmy Eat World and playing guitar as part of Damien Jurado’s touring band, an experience that seemed to be immensely influential on her solo career.

"I met Damien while living in Seattle. I opened up a few shows of his around town, then also opened one of his European tours. We hit it off, and he was fun and easy to tour with. When his next record cycle rolled around he asked me to be a part of the band. I was elated! He’s really fun to play for because he allows for so much creativity within the frame of a performance." Listening to her debut album No One’s Slate Is Clean, recorded when she was barely out of her teens, it seems unthinkable that it did not expose her to a wide audience back then. Asked how she considers that album today even though it’s quite similar in style and quality to her latest album you are left in no doubt that she has moved on career wise and is not in the habit of glancing over her shoulder. "Once I’m finished with a record, I usually put it away. I don’t think I’ve listened to No One’s Slate in over 3 or 4 years. It’s sort of like reading old diary entries. You usually are very critical of your past self, and that goes for music as well."

On her success in making a considerable mark in Europe she enthuses "Europe is definitely more immediately receptive to good music. Since there is so much ground to cover in The States, you sort of have to beat listeners over the head with it. Someone needs to shout at them, "HEY THIS IS GOOD, LISTEN."

Scheduled to play four dates in Ireland later in the year in Dublin, Belfast and two appearances at The Harvest Country Music Festival in Sligo and Enniskillen I was more than surprised to see her named among the artists performing at Harvest and her quite often being hailed as the next country music starlet given that her music is unlike the vast majority of artists listed to play that festival. So how does the country music tag sit with her. "I love country music, but I never was shooting for that label. It’s easy for listeners to use that as a way of describing music, so I get it. It’s just, I’ve always been much more influenced by songwriters who explore a wide range of songs, sonic influences, and structures. I’m not sure people will label me country after they hear the albums that are to come. It’s more fun to be a songwriter who writes all types of songs, ‘cause then you can do whatever the hell you want."

Andrews is already at the early stages of her next album which she expects will be somewhat of a departure sonically but hopefully with songs equally as strong as those on Honest Life.  Thanking her for taking the time to talk and noting how much we are looking forward to her Dublin gig it’s difficult not to ask her if a similar young songwriter in the 60’s named Joni Mitchell was a primary influence. "Of course, I love Joni. Every budding songwriter should study up on Joni. She’s up there in the “Tower of Song,” as Cohen wrote of Hank (Williams Sr).’’

Interview by Declan Culliton    Photograph by Susy Sundborg.

Interview with Jade Jackson

Jade Jackson is a Californian country singer/songwriterwho grew up in the small town of Santa Margarita, where her parents owned a restaurant. Both were enthusiastic music fans, and she grew up on a diverse diet of solid country from the likes of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams as well as influential UK indie artists like The Smiths and The Cure. On completing high school she had amassed more than 300 songs. However after a failed record deal she turned to drugs and crime and subsequently served a prison sentence before returning to music. While performing in a small coffee shop she was spotted by the wife of Social Distortion’s Mike Ness who was equally taken with her songs and agreed to produce her debut album Gilded. Lonesome Highway caught up with her in a break from her tour to support the album’s release.

You have written that the first concert you attended, without your parent, was a Social Distortion concert, Was their combination of punk with country elements a roadsign to future direction?

Social Distortion always stood out to me amongst other punk bands because of all the early country music I was raised on. As a fan of both early country and punk music, I was always aware of the common threads between the two. I definitely heard more of the country music influences in Mike’s solo stuff which I’ve always loved as well.

Mike Ness’ two solo albums were standout combinations of the combined genre. Were you aware of them before you worked with Mike?

Yes, I was very aware of them! They were played in my household just as often as the Social Distortion albums.

You were given the task of listening to Car Wheels On A Gravel Road before going into the studio. What did you learn from that and were you worried that it might overtly influence your performance? 

Mike gave me that record before I knew he wanted to produce my album. I fully submerged myself in the songs and fell in love with them before he suggested we use Car Wheels On A Gravel Road as a template for my own. It influenced me organically and became a point of reference that enhanced the communication between Mike and I in the studio.

The link between the honesty of punk and real country music, in terms of portraying real life, has been noted. Who were the bands and writers who most influenced you growing up?

The Gun Club, The Smiths, Buck Owens, The Pogues, Bruce Springsteen, Gram Parsons, The Violent Femmes, Ray Price, Social Distortion, Mike Ness, Hank Williams, George Jones, Cowboy Junkies, Mazzy Star, The Cure, Townes Van Zandt, Neko Case, Bob Dylan, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Rolling Stones, early Guns N Roses, Bright Eyes, Emmylou Harris, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, Robert Johnson, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Johnny Cash, etc.

When you worked in your parent’s restaurant you began writing lyrics in your down time. Were lyrics, literature and poetry something that interested you for a long time before you began to write yourself?

Yes, I would open the CD booklets to memorize or copy down lyrics all over my notebooks, my arms, my clothes, etc. As a young kid I loved both listening to and telling stories; poetry was my favorite subject in school.

This is your first album and your first real touring experience. Where they what you expected?

I prayed about being able to tour and dreamed about releasing an album on a record label for a very long time. These are goals I am so thankful to have reached!

That life on the road isn’t easy is something that you have noted but that you like that it wasn’t easy. Is that still the case?

I'm open to whatever hardships, sacrifices or challenges that may come with life on the road. On our last tour I found that the difficulties made me stronger and I look forward to the lessons to be learned in the years ahead.

A lot of touring musicians find kit hard to maintain relationships while constantly gigging. Is that something that you take as part and parcel of the musician’s life or do you try to find something more?

I don't want to cap myself off from the possibilities of finding love or a connection. As a songwriter, relationships can be very inspiring. However, I will admit, this is something that took me a long time and a lot of lonely nights to realize.

What are the primary sources of your writing and does being able to travel broaden that perspective?

I get most of my inspiration from imagining the world through somebody else's eyes. Traveling and seeing new things definitely adds to that but the trick is finding the quiet time to be able to sit with my guitar and write.

The album is a very strong open statement of intent. Are you looking forward to recording again or is it too early to consider that right now?

I'm really looking forward to getting back in the studio. I write fairly frequently, so I have lots of material.

With the mainstream clogged up, for the most part, with pop and edm influenced production values. What do you see as the future for a more traditionally influenced strand of country music?

I have no idea. Most of the country artists I listen to are my own records. There are some current artists I love like Jason Isbell or Sturgill Simpson who are becoming more popular which is exciting!

How does Europe feature in your plans?

I'm hoping to tour in Europe as soon as possible!

How much has your immediate family influenced your musical choices?

I've always been really tight with my immediate family, they're my best friends. Because I looked up to my dad so much, I paid attention to his taste in music. I went from saying I loved the same music he did just so I could be like him without truly having developed the appreciation yet, to actually having the music affect me directly and letting it change my life. Their support and encouragement gave me the confidence to follow my heart in music.

You are treading your own musical path now. Where do you think it will take you in the future?

I'm not sure. But I'm so hungry for where I think it can take me.

Interview by Stephen Rapid

Amanda Anne Platt of the Honeycutters Interview

Amanda Ann Platt has fronted the North Carolina based band through five albums. The last three released on the Organic label. They are a band who are influenced by classic singer/songwriters and artists who would loosely have been called country in the past but now fall under the Americana umbrella. However as the main writer, singer and producer in the band she has decided for this latest release to use her own name in front of that of the Honeycutters. The music, judging from the last three albums, has been critically acclaimed and they have built a deserved solid following in the US and they hope to tour in the UK later in the year. Lonesome Highway caught up with Amanda recently and had the opportunity to put some questions to her.

After the previous relays it must have been liberating but also a little trepidatious to move from having The Honeycutters name out front now using your name?

Yes, trepidatious is a good word. I'm not particularly extroverted by nature, which is one reason I have always felt safer using a band name rather than my own. But it's something that has come up with every release, and now that I am the only original member (in addition to writing all the songs and singing them) I feel like it makes the most sense. We've had a lot of nice words of support from fans so I'm easing into it. 

As a writer are you continuously collecting ideas, titles and lines or do you have to specifically set aside a period of time and quiet to write for an album?

Constantly collecting. Our process before hitting the studio is one of narrowing down from a list of songs that I'm proposing for the album ... sometimes as many as thirty. Writing is a coping mechanism for me, so it's hard to imagine going months of the year without doing it. 

It's how I make sense of what I see in the world. I don't write a lot about the bigger stuff, politics and world events. It's more about processing the small moments I see-- the little comedies and tragedies of everyday life.

Growing up who and what were your influences that set you down this path?

My parents listened to a lot of classic country, blues, and bluegrass when I was small. Despite being born in the eighties I knew very little of pop radio until I was a teenager. We never had it on at home. My dad has an epic record collection of the aforementioned genres plus sixties and seventies rock and the Texas songwriters of those decades. They met and married in Austin in the seventies so they were strongly influenced by that scene. I think it rubbed off on me.

What sort of ambitions did you and do you now hold for a musical career. How important is ambition?

I think ambition is very important. With social media and internet streaming the scene is more crowded than ever, so you have to want it. That being said, I've never had a real clear vision of where this is going other than that I want to be able to keep doing it. My career has been a lot of small, logical steps, and if we carry on this way I'm fine with that. Just put the mic in front of me and I'll sing my songs.  

To get to this point you must have put a lot of miles on the clock gigging and recording. What have been the highpoint and the low points to date?

Ahahahahaha. OK let's start with the high points ... the first time we sold out a The Grey Eagle in our home town (Asheville, NC). Opening for Billy Joe Shaver was amazing. Sitting at Guy Clark's kitchen table eating oatmeal while he smoked cigarettes and talked songwriting. The low points? Our van breaking down on the last day of a two month tour, out in Montana. Going through a breakup on the road sucks too. 

Does the climate of what’s happening in the world effect your viewpoints?

Of course. I feel a lot of fear these days, as I think many are. It's an interesting time to be an American, which is the only perspective I can really claim, but I imagine it could be said that it's just an interesting time to be a human. I have some strong opinions but I try to focus, at least in my songwriting, on things that unite us rather than divide us. Rather than rage against someone who I think is wrong, I'd rather establish common ground and then see if we can't get to the bottom of what we're disagreeing about. I think that's the most powerful way to change someone's mind. 

What was it about this music that drew you in in the first place?

Honesty. It's not that I don't like pop music ... I do get into some of it. But I think that if someone can make you feel something with nothing but their words and a melody, that's a very special thing to experience. 

Over a period of time you have had some changes in the line-up of the Honeycutters. Is it a problem keeping platers together?

Not necessarily. There have been two major incarnations of the band, pre 2013 and post 2013. That change over had more to do with a romantic breakup and falling out. Since 2013 we've only had one person leave the band. Musical relationships are complicated, sometimes they end without a lot of closure. But that's part of making art together, I think.  

How do the economics of recording and travel effect the range and possibilities of what the band could do?

More than I'd like to admit. As a five (sometimes six) piece band we can't afford to do a lot of the gigs that say a duo or trio might be able to swing. I also have always been a firm believer in guaranteeing my band a certain amount. None of them are kids any more (not throwing them under the bus, neither am I!), they have families and mortgages and I would hate for them to be losing money playing with me. So we end up turning down some stuff because I can't afford to get us there and pay the band too. It does hold us back a bit. But I think it also keeps us happy and fed ... I love having the full band, I'm not very interested in doing the duo thing anymore. 

Of your own songs which ones are you especially proud of?

Hmmm. I love Marie, off our first album. Me Oh My, off the album by the same name. Blue Besides, from the On The Ropes album, as well as Barmaid's Blues. And off our new one I think my favourite might be Eden. I don't know though. That changes. A lot of the ones I really feel proud of we haven't recorded for one reason or another. I just like it when I can sing something every night and feel like I still believe it, like the words don't get less true.  

As co-producer of the album how do you achieve the sound that you want for an album?

Honestly the band has a lot to do with it. We have a lot of similar sensibilities, we love warm seventies tones. This time around we listened to all our previous records and picked out our favourite drum sound, guitar tone, vocals, etc. I'm not sure that we ever nail it - it's a constant pursuit. But it keeps us on our toes.

You have a team around you for management, radio and PR etc. Is that a vital part of survival in this day and age.

It is for me! I'm scatter brained and prone to fits of laziness. It's much easier for me to finish a song than it is to write an email. And for the promotional stuff, who wants to do that for themselves? It's much easier to say glowing things about someone else than it is to promote yourself, I think. 

Are physical sales the main part of how you sell or has the download (and streaming services) also played a major part?

I think in recent years we've seen it tip towards the streaming side of things. But we do sell a lot of physical product at shows and off our website. 

Finally, where are you happiest on stage or in the studio?

On stage, definitely. I love the studio but nothing beats the energy that comes from having all the players on stage, and an audience. That's connection. Nothing beats it. And I love my band!!! Did I already say that? They're incredible. And nice people too. It's a gift to be able to travel and make music with your best friends.

Interview by Stephen Rapid   Photograph by Eliza Schweizbach

The Americans Interview

This Los Angeles trio (usually accompanied by drummer) play rock ’n’ roll that has its roots in the past and is sighted firmly on the future. They come with some heavy duty endorsements. T Bone Burnett is quoted as saying “Genius twenty-first century musicians that are reinventing American heritage music for this century. And it sounds even better this century." While noted critic Greil Marcus stated on his encounter with the band’s music that "From the first rolling guitar notes, carrying sadness and defiance like dust, this sweeps me up: I want to know everything about where that feeling came from, and where it's going." To date they have released two EP’s First Recordings and The Right Stuff and a single I’ll Be Yours. The latter two by London-based label Loose Music. They made their Irish debut at the Kilkenny Roots Festival which is where Lonesome Highway caught up with lead singer Patrick Ferris.

The first question was about the origin of their name as it could be construed in many different ways as, indeed, it would if a local band from these shores decided to use the moniker “The Irish.” The explanation made more sense in context as Ferris explained that the name was taken from the book of photographs by Robert Frank that was first published in 1958 and showed everyday Americans going about their lives and looking both ordinary and extra ordinary at the same time. The band’s music explores a similar path and observation of life, love and its strange logic. Ferris felt that what had set the book apart at the time was that it wasn’t political but rather captured moments in people’s lives and that the band’s material was also biographical with snapshots of people going about their lives.

Ferris also elaborated on the connection with Burnett explaining that that they had crossed paths with the producer on a number of occasions as they were both LA based. “ We worked on a soundtrack first and he also sometimes curates a stage at a festival and he got is involved and then we worked on the American Epic TV show. We didn’t know he was involved when we started but we ran into him onset.” Burnett also joined the band onstage at The Station Inn when they played there during the AMAs. “He showed up about 5 minutes before we went on and played us a new song of his and said he wanted us to back him up, so we learnt it really quick (laughs).” 

The band are hoping to release their debut album in the next month or two. The recoding experience was not necessarily an easy one it would seems as Ferris explained “There was way too much at stake, especially these days when there’s not as much money in the music industry as there once was. Gone are the days, at least for bands like us were you can spend months on end working on arrangements and things in the studio.” They were working in Northern California for a two week period before going in to the studio and so they already had the songs for a long time and they were worked out prior to recording. They had thought about such details as finalising the arrangements and working out how certain guitars should sound at a particular point in a song. They approached it in a very logistical way reasoning that the more time they could save on such factors meant they could us the studio time more productively. They ended up recording the album in 8 days. “We really had to focus and get two songs done a day.” However in the process they also added some new songs that they hadn’t finished yet and so ended up working on them the night before they were recorded. The studio, Prairie Sun in Cotati, was an old chicken ranch that still had resident chickens was one that was conducive to work and full of equipment that suited the band. 

The band recorded the material in a live setting. “It’s important to us as we have never done it in a different way.” Although Ferris noted that he had heard good records done in a single track layered way it was not the way that The Americans record. “There’s two things you get, doing it together, the feel of the band playing together, which is very hard to imitate, as well as the mix between the drums and the amps.That live in the room feel.” That ambience, he felt, were the microphones pick up other sounds in the room was something that adds an excitement to the overall sound.  

In terms of the songwriting the breakdown is that the band work together on the music while Ferris writes all the words, though on occasion he writes both. “I tend to write certain kinds of songs on my own. Sometimes I’ll bring those in finished. If they’re more unfinished I’ll bring them in and we work on them together.” Ferris is not an on-the-road writer he explained other than writing little snippets and that he only really writes when is at home and disciplines himself to sit down and focus. “The only way for me to do it is to kick my own ass for weeks on end and force myself to do something that I don’t really feel like doing.” He finds that often a song comes from finding the right syllable rather than the right word. Finding a sound that works and then working out how that will affect the actual songwriting, that the right syllable has to work even if the line is good. “The open endless of a line can mean something important to someone and that’s a powerful tool.”    

The influences that Ferris mentions were important to him growing up was pre-war country-blues, something that they all got excited about when they were in high school. In terms of songwriting he names Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Joanna Newsome as primary sources. He explained that the members had some common family links even though he was living in San Francisco and the other were in LA. “We had family friends in common and used to go and visit and I got to know Zac and Jake that way.” When he was in San Francisco Ferris was pretty much on his own in terms of the music he liked to listen to. He also meet players who stuck rigidly to their notion of how the much should be played and he wondered if there was a similar trend in Ireland. “In LA a lot of old-time fiddlers and guitarists who had a level of commitment to the old records that I hadn’t heard before while people today have this laser focus on these old records that means they want nothing to do with reinterpreting it they just want to honour it.” Which is that vexed oft-raised question of authenticity again. He found those players illuminating but also made him realise that that was not what he wanted to do himself. Those bands that strived to recreate the look and feel of an earlier era needed to be as good as those they emulated in order to validate what they were doing he felt. “That’s a tall order.”

Along with these initial Irish dated The Americans are playing their first European dates though they had played a one-off date in Berlin previously. “I’m wondering if people happen to like us or if they like everybody - but either way people have been very enthusiastic, I hope that’s because they thought that we were special (laughs).” Ferris thought that their dates in Europe has audiences that were free of a kind of cynicism that often accompanies a band playing rock ’n’ roll in the States. “After a time rock ’n’ roll became less of a cool concept and more like a franchise idea, or like your Dad’s music or something.”  

The Americans are beginning to define their own take on rock ’n’ roll and what it might mean to them and to their audience. Looking for, as their current EP title suggests, “the right stuff.” With a growing number of those who want to fly their flag it shouldn’t be that long before these Americans are having something of the impact that Franks photographs had in defining a point in time.

 Interview By Stephen Rapid and Declan Culliton   Photography by Kaethe Burt-O'Dea

Holly Macve Interview

Holly Macve’s debut album Golden Eagle, released earlier this year, made quite an impression in the music press including Lonesome Highway, being hailed as one of the most impressive debut albums of 2017. Praise indeed for the twenty-one-year-old Galway-born UK resident who appeared at SXSW in March of this year and was credited by the New York Times as one of the twelve most notable acts at the festival. Macve took time out from her hectic touring schedule to chat with us in advance of her appearances at the Kilkenny Roots Festival.

Appearing at SXSW in 2016 and earlier this year, two years in succession, is an incredible achievement for a solo artist of your age out of the UK! 

Yes, I guess I was pretty lucky with that…! SXSW is a great festival to meet and gain connections with other people in the industry. You never know who is going to be at your show watching. It could be someone who becomes really important in your career. I was at the right place at the right time during a couple of my shows for sure.

The positive exposure you have received in the past twelve months seems to have generated an intense touring regime for you. Are you taking it in your stride or does it create its own pressures?

I’m really enjoying it so far, I used to be quite an anxious person and worry a lot but touring seems to actually help me to just take every day as it comes and not have any expectations. Maybe someday I’ll get sick of it but right now it’s pretty cool getting to travel and visit loads of places I never knew existed.

Does touring give you the space to continue writing while on the road or do you require solitude and a more peaceful environment to be inspired?

I need to be solitary. I’m quite a deep thinker when I am alone and touring doesn't always allow me the space to have big, silly existential thoughts (which tends to be important for my songwriting). I also start to panic a bit when I haven't written a song for a while so that’s where I may run into problems with touring in the future … I’ll need to make sure I leave lots of gaps.

Your album Golden Eagle has succeeded in striking a chord with audiences and reviewers of all ages. Is that a surprise to you?

It’s not something I have thought about a lot … but I’m glad that it does seem to! My Grandma’s a big fan, that makes me happy.

Old time blues, country and jazz all sit comfortably together on the album. Were these musical influences that you were exposed to growing up?

Absolutely. My mum’s record collection consisted of all of these. lots of Big Bill Bronzy, Hank Williams and Billie Holiday. She has great taste and taught me a lot of what I know.

How would you personally describe your music?

I sort of hate answering that question because I think it varies a lot from song to song. Whenever I get asked I say Alternative Country/Folk. Something like that! Let me know if you have a more interesting way of describing it! I sometimes think my way sounds a bit boring.

The opening track on the album White Bridge features the lines "I looked at the world with different eyes," which in many ways speaks volumes and captures, for me, much of what the album is about. How aware were you when writing the songs that the material, vocal delivery and playing are in fact quite unique?

I wasn’t really aware at all. I’m still not! They’re just songs that came out of me at that particular time. I was going through quite a lot and had many dark/ sad thoughts going on in my head. Writing is a way for me to release that and turn it in to something positive that hopefully other people can relate to also.

Your vocal style and delivery is quite unique. Did you study voice and music formally?

I never had vocal lessons, it’s just what comes out really. My mums record collection that I mentioned earlier probably helped influence it too. I was obsessed with singing from a very young age though. Often I would find myself rewinding certain parts of songs when I liked the way it was sung and listen to it over and over again. That was some sort of studying I guess …!

Your live solo performances exude the confidence of an artist that has been performing on stage for decades with the ability to silence the room from your first note. Are you totally relaxed when performing live?

Ah, Thank you very much. Yeah - I’m getting there! It’s definitely something that grows with time and experience though I’m sure I have a lot to learn still.

Are you more at home performing solo and in complete control or with a band?

Last year I found an amazing group of musicians to work with and there’s certainly a lot more fun to be had playing/travelling with a band. I think initially I was a little worried and cautious of the idea of playing with a band as it wasn't something I had done a lot of but I was lucky and came across the right people so it worked out pretty good. I do still love doing little intimate gigs on my own too though.

I’m really interested to hear what music you are currently listening to?

There’s a guy called Will Stratton who supported me on my headline tour a few weeks back. I got to listen to him every night during that time which I enjoyed very much! He’s great, I recommend checking him out.

You know that when you are performing in the UK promoters will describe you as a young lady from Brighton whereas in Ireland you will be "Galway born Holly Macve"! Had you visited or spent any time in Ireland during your childhood?

Unfortunately, not. I moved away from Galway when I was just a baby and haven’t managed to go back there yet. I feel quite a strong connection to the country and also to traditional Irish folk music though. Whilst I was being born we had Martin Hayes playing on a tape in the background, his music still always makes me feel very calm and at home.

The Kilkenny Roots Festival over the years has made a habit of featuring acts before their major commercial breakthrough. Jason Isbell, Alabama Shakes and Angel Olson particularly come to mind. Will we be adding Holly Macve to that eminent list?

Who knows! I’m very much looking forward to it either way. 

Interview by Declan Culliton

Peter Bruntnell Interview

It would be difficult to describe singer songwriter Peter Bruntnell’s music any more accurately  than NME did when they wrote "Peter Bruntnell’s music should be taught in schools." His albums and live shows have been highly regarded by Lonesome Highway for many years and he continues to be regarded in the music industry as one of the finest UK artists of his time. Son Volt, Richmond Fontaine and Kathleen Edwards all had him support them on tour, an indication of how he is also regarded by his musical peers. Unassuming and humble, he is more likely to highlight other artists and their work in conversation rather than dwell on his own considerable output. Peter is the type of guy that you’d love to sit down with, have a beer and talk music. Which is precisely what Lonesome Highway did recently when he made one of his regular trips to Ireland.

How many years into your career at this stage?

My daughters twenty two now, so twenty two years at it now.

Easier or more difficult nowadays?

Actually, it’s easier. I was just sitting at the bar here in Cleeres (Kilkenny) with a pint of Guinness (laughs)  and I thought to myself this being the first date of the tour, I’m so glad that I’m playing in Ireland regularly now, thanks to promoter Willie Meighan and Clive Barnes. I’m not just saying this but it’s probably my favourite place in the world to play, here and Northern Spain which I’ve just played and love.

Was an early career ambition of yours for your music be heard in America?

No, I didn’t think that far ahead. America is so vast, in order to do anything there you have to have a big marketing team and trying to make it there for me would be impossible.

Is that why so many American Americana acts target Europe?

Yes, much easier for them to be heard over here and get tours that can pay.

You were well ahead of the posse in your condemnation of Donald Trump with the opening track of your current album Mr. Sunshine!

I really don’t know, most people I know think he’s pretty despicable. When I wrote that song he wasn’t even running for President. I was just writing it from the perspective of the poor Scottish people that got displaced from their homes and next minutes he’s President of The United States! It’s not exactly great is it (laughs).

I was very impressed to read that the album Nos Da Comrades was recorded in your home studio. Tell me about the process?

Well, we created a studio in the local village hall in Devon which I hired for £120 for a week. We set up and did all the drums, bass and electric guitar there. I went in there with two players and we tracked all the songs and got all the drums, bass and my guitar down in a week. I then did all the over dubs in my studio in my own house. I got James Walbourne and Dave Little to come down and play some electric guitar and that was about it. The album took about three years to write from the first song.

Has the Americana UK umbrella been helpful career wise for you as an artist?

Well I’ve been doing what’s now called Americana for quite a while, back to when it was called alternative country in the early days of Uncle Tupelo and then Son Volt and Wilco. It’s not a bad thing to be part of because there are folk that are sympathetic to that genre in different towns and will book you so it’s been healthy for me and very good. There was a time that I got a bit fed up with that tag but I have to say now that it’s been beneficial really.  I got nominated as album of the year by the association so that can only be good for my career. Similarly, the Americana Music Association in Nashville has taken off in recent years, I played it a few years back and was supposed to play it again in 2016 but couldn’t afford it. There’s a funding programme in the UK from the PRS and when I played there a few years ago it was great. I had Mike Heidorn on drums, the original Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt drummer, and Dave Boquist the original Son Volt guitar player was on bass for me and it was tremendous but I had the funding from the BRS. I was invited in 2016 but the PRS won’t support the same act twice so I then tried to organise some gigs to cover the cost. I got a few but it wasn’t going to cover it. My wife wanted me to use some of our savings to go which was really sweet of her but I couldn’t justify it to go and do maybe only one gig.

The Son Volt connection goes back a while, you mentioned James Walbourne when we chatted earlier who has played in your band and Son Volt. How did the connection materialise?

It happened because in the 90’s I played a festival in Hamburg called The Hurricane Festival. Son Volt   were my favourite band at that time and for quite a while before that. It just so happened that they were on after me on the same stage so I got to meet them and more astonishingly their crew liked my set which was the biggest turning point in my career. Before that I was under pressure from my record company to be somebody or play a certain way as record companies do, putting pressure on young artists or artists young to the business. I wasn’t that young but pretty new to the industry, having released my second album. Son Volt liking my stuff and then meeting them gave me such a boost and when they played their UK tour their guitar tech got in touch I was asked to support them on their five dates. Once I did that tour I became friends with them.  I then did a deal with Rycodisc to make a record in Boston and I asked the record company guy if he could get pedal steel player Eric Heywood and Dave Boquist the guitar player to play on the album. They thought that was a really good idea but I was basically too shy to approach them personally so the record company made the approach and it all happened. James Walbourne is one of my best friends, he’s doing fantastic with The Rails and just back from America playing with The Pretenders opening for Stevie Nicks. 

I was interested to hear your influences as a young guy, prog music and rock music being very much your choice of listening in the mid to late 70’s

Yes, I loved Genesis, still do (laughs). Foxtrot is a favourite album for me. I was in 5th Form at the time and listening to Thin Lizzy and Van Halen and the rock thing. I didn’t actually get the new wave thing at the time, thought it was a bit raw for my musical taste at the time.

Comparisons are often made with your song writing and that of Elvis Costello. Was he an influence?

Not really, I only bought The Best of Elvis Costello last year after I’d written the new album! I think perhaps the music has all come from the same place hasn’t it, a bit of soul with some Kinks and Beatles so you could say his influences were similar to mine. Writing this new album my influences were actually mid 60’s Kinks and The Who.

The album Nos Da Comrades released last year received such positive reviews. How did that reflect in actual sales and getting more punters to your shows?

It’s done as well as well as any album I’ve put out and I suppose that’s good because I decided I was going to be the record label for the album which I thought might earn me some more money. So, I did a distribution deal with a company in the UK and looked after the rest myself, trying to get airplay and all that. Considering that I didn’t have any marketing budget at all I’m pleased at how it has done and that people seem to like it. 

How difficult is it to get Radio airplay in the UK?

Well it is for me. I can only speak from my experience. You know what it’s like, if you pay a plugger to try and get your record on the radio you can throw five to seven thousand pounds at it and still come up with nothing. I just can’t do that, don’t have that kind of money knocking around and I know the likes of Bob Harris well enough to e-mail him. I don’t do too badly but it’s so hard without a huge marketing budget to get anywhere.

You’ve worked with Clive Barnes both in Ireland and the UK. How did that relationship develop?

That came about because I played with Clive in Kilkenny at The Rollercoaster Record Store Day about three years ago. I was just about to play a UK tour with Jeff Finlan and was driving to Cork with Clive and we were playing some of Jeff’s music in the car and Clive suggested we do a trio tour and I was up for it. Jeff thought it was a great idea so it ended up with me and those two guys in a car, touring around, having a great time and basically just happy to be given a chance to play somewhere.

Was the tour a singer songwriters circle format?

No it’s wasn’t. I thought it was going to be that way but they didn’t want to do that for some reason (laughs). So the format was, one night play I’d first, Clive did a set in the middle and Jeff played last and the next night we’d reverse it. Clive played guitar with both of us of course. I liked to play first and when I’d finished go to the bar, have a pint and watch their sets! The problem being on last is that I had  to follow Jeff and he’s really good and when he’s rocking he has a bit of Lou Reed attitude about him which is so cool, he’s fantastic I really love and respect what he does.

You’ve relocated to quite a rural setting it the UK. Is that environment inspirational in terms of your song writing having moved from London?

I don’t really know, possibly not. It’s a different scene where I’m living now. When I lived in London I’d meet up with James ( Walbourne) and we’d head up to The Borderline and watch the American bands that were coming over all the time, The Bottle Rockets, Chuck Prophet and people like that. I can’t do that now, the best I might get is a dodgy pub band locally. The scene has changed in London now though with not as much on offer. We used get acts worth seeing every week at The Borderline and in a small acoustic club at the back Andy’s guitar shop, not like that so much anymore. You guys are so lucky over here in Dublin and Kilkenny, great pub music, great Guinness, friendly people who come out to gigs in the middle of the week. In the UK, outside London, you can forget about getting people out to gigs Monday to Thursday. That’s why I love playing over here so much.

Interview by Declan Culliton

Jim Miller Interview

Jim Miller talks about Western Centuries

Western Centuries debut album The Weight of The World featured in Lonesome Highway’s review of their favourite albums of 2016. The band are essentially a collaboration of three singer songwriters and blue grassers, Cahalen Morrison, Jim Miller and Ethan Lawton. They hooked up with pedal steel player Rusty Blake and bassist Dan Lowinger to form the band and seemlessly recreate the classic country / roots crossover sound perfected by The Band and The Flying Burrito Brothers nearly five decades ago. Lonesome Highway spoke with Jim Miller (co-founder of Donna The Buffalo) to get the history behind the formation of this super group in advance of their first visit to Ireland.

Where did the motivation come from to form Western Centuries?

We’re all bluegrass and old time country players so we actually started jamming together informally you know, traditional bluegrass stuff because all of us have been playing that all out lives. At that time Cahalen and Ethan had some original songs so we decided to see what the songs sounded like with bass and drums. We evolved from there but we didn’t take it too seriously at first. It was great fun so last year we thought, why not go ahead and take it a bit further.

Tell me about the Country Hammer project which featured Cahalen, yourself and Ethan and how it evolved into Western Centuries?

I’ve always loved singing traditional country songs and Cahalen grew up in rural New Mexico and his parents are big time country music fans. He had written lots of country songs but hadn’t gotten around to recording them and asked me if I’d like to help him. I said sure, but it wasn’t as if we were going to be a touring band. So, he had about twelve songs to put down on that record and I was just a side kick, they were all his songs. That basically was Country Hammer, it was put out but we didn’t tour with it, was more like a fun thing but we got a really good response. Ethan had his songs too,  I had played all my life as a backup guy which I didn’t want to be anymore, I wanted to be part of the creative side of things though I’d never written a song before. So I started writing too and we decided collaborate for the Western Centuries record. It was actually my first attempt at song writing. 

With three songwriters contributing to the album were the songs previously written and in cold storage or did you all write specifically for the album?

For me I wrote them for the album. For Cahalen and Ethan a kind of a mix, they had some in cold storage that they hadn’t tried in a country format and other ones they just wrote for that record. The fun thing is that now as we are working on songs for our next record when someone comes up with a great song it inspires us all, you think oh my god, I have to come up with an equally good song, which is a challenge but it’s fun. I can’t imagine being faced with having to write thirteen songs myself to put out a solo record!

Does that suggest that having three songwriters in the band is more  of a motivator  than ego crippling?

Absolutely, all three of us are inspired by each other. Ethan listens to Caribbean music and Cahalen listens to straight country and I don’t listen to much country at all, more Wilco and r’n’b and that kind of stuff. That pushes us in different directions which is exciting.

Are all of the band based in Seattle?

No. Cahalen and Ethan are based in Seattle, I live about sixty miles north of New York City on the Hudson river, our bass player Dan Lowinger is from Ashville North Carolina and our pedal steel player Rusty Blake is from Nashville. Four different locations across the country. I actually met Cahalen in Seattle, my wife was working there in grad school and I was just tagging along. We met at this party called Fuck Winter. The winter’s in Seattle can be very similar to what I think you guys have, never ending drizzle, so they have this annual party in January, it’s a jamming bluegrass party. I heard about it and went along and right enough it was jamming and drizzle that never stopped (laughs)

The album manages to maintain a consistency throughout even with the shared responsibilities. Was that your agenda or did it occur due to the compatibility between you?

It was our agenda but we weren’t sure that it would work. We were nervous about it but it seems from the reviews that it did work, though I can’t exactly say why. We really enjoy working together and maybe that comes out and also the addition of the pedal steel and the fiddle adds another dimension to the songs. Because we are all blue grassers we are way big on the vocals and we wanted three part vocals for the big choruses which has something to do with it as well 

Your own compositions, I’m thinking in particular of Rock Salt and The Long Game, very much recall the sound of The Band. Were they an influence on you as a young musician?

They are my favourite band of all time though I wasn’t consciously writing songs that sounded like them but somehow I must have created that sound because people keep bringing that up. if I want to listen to music in my car it’s always the Band and Levon Helm, played until the cows come home (laughs). They appealed to me because of the stories they told with their music and the fact that they had different vocalists, the whole cooperative thing is inspiring to me. The rest of Western Centuries, because they are younger than me, don’t know their music as much as I do.

Another song that you wrote Knockin’ Em Down tells of the less glamourous side of touring however tongue in cheek the lyrics might be. Is touring really that rough?

(Laughs) That was actually written about a different band, I’ve been in a lot of bands let me tell you. Starting at the age of nine! That song was written about a band I was in that every tour seemed to involve driving in snowstorms, all we seemed to be doing was spinning our car  wheels night after night!

The album as a whole achieves a wonderful classic country feel right down to the artwork. You used Bill Reynolds from Band of Horses to produce the album and recorded it in Nashville. Tell me about those decisions?

I’ve known Bill for many years, we both originally played in the band Donna The Buffalo, a rootsy cosmic hippy type band at that time. We really enjoyed playing together and Bill has done really well at production, working on a whole bunch of records. I pushed that idea with the band and I also loved the idea of making a record in Nashville. I mean, Emmylou Harris recorded three albums in that studio so when I even sat in the toilet in the studio I thought, my God Emmylou was here! (laughs). The artwork on the album was deliberate, the photograph on the cover was taken by friend of Cahalen in a small town in New Mexico, probably as far as you can get from humanity. The photo  taken by her shows her dad actually herding goats in the winter on horseback. We wanted an image on the cover that would convey something a bit deeper than ‘here’s the happy band ‘image or a picture of us leaning against a barn!

Have you toured in your previous musical life in the UK?

I was just in the UK a couple of weeks ago with a different band I’m involved with called Red Dog Run, an acoustic banjo, guitar and fiddle group playing folk and roots. We had shows in England and Scotland, part of the Gainsborough Friends of American Music Festivals. It was very much a one off, I don’t know how they even found out about us! Cahalen has toured lots in the UK over the years often with Eli West, I keep hoping that I can tag on to him and follow his burning star (laughs).

I see you’re playing Music City Roots in Nashville on April 5th and receiving high praise from Jim Lauderdale who hosts the show.

I’ve known Jim Lauderdale for twenty-five years. When I was in the Donna The Buffalo we made a record with him where we were his backing band, the album is called Wait For Spring and it’s a crazy assed record. He’s a nut and a half (laughs), such an endearing guy and somehow he got the idea that he was going to have us be his band, he wrote all the songs for the album and we recorded it in Nashville in a studio where he did all his earlier records.  You should check it out, it’s one of the wackiest things. He actually got this weird psychedelic painting of all of our faces on the cover. I check in with him regularly because he goes so hard, never rests, never stops, I don’t know how he pulls it off but there he is. 

We get the opportunity to see Western Countries live in Ireland / UK next month?

Yes, and we’re really looking forward to it, particularly Ireland. I think we’re going to do well in Ireland, that’s a hunch that I have (laughs). When I played in Scotland a few weeks back some people there were excited for Western Centuries to be playing there also and I’m thinking how did they even hear of the band! Our first date in Ireland is in Kilkenny is in a pub called Billy Byrnes and I believe It’s sold out and our Saturday show is selling fast too.

Interview by Declan Culliton

Israel Nash Interview

Israel Nash Gripka appeared on the music scene back in 2009 and caused quite a stir with his first 2 releases; New York Town and Barn Doors & Concrete Floors. His latest releases have seen the music evolve into new directions and explore the sonic possibilities of what some are calling Psychedelia-Americana. He is an innovative artist who deserves all the plaudits that are coming his way.

On tour with the Band of Horses and now using a shortened name of Israel Nash, he is joined by trusty band member Eric Swanson on pedal steel and vocals. Both musicians grant Lonesome Highway an interview at short notice just before they are due to take the stage and share some insights into the life of a developing artist. 

You grew up in the Ozark mountains. What were your earliest musical influences?

My earliest musical influences were with my Dad and we would listen to a lot of classic rock n’ roll. Just great Credence Clearwater Revival stuff, rockin’ down the highway kind of stuff, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles. All that got me wanting to play and do that stuff at a young age. I started playing guitar from age 11 after doing piano lessons before that, but once I found the guitar - that really felt natural. I started writing songs by the time I was 12 or 13 also. It was that process of starting and the idea of knowing I could just write a song.

Can you tell us about your name and the origins of the family background?

The Grypka part is Polish, and my Dad was a southern Baptist minister, so it was their spiritually - led aim to call me Israel.

Moving to NYC was the catalyst for career momentum. What do you remember about your debut release (New York Town) in 2009?

It was the first time I had gone away from Missouri where there is not really an industry or a bunch of studios. I played in bands all over but I knew I wanted to be in New York; in a city for the first time that had some action. It changed my life and started growing things; it was the first time I went to a real classic studio, The Magic Shop, which has since closed down.

Did you have a lot of the songs in place already or did you write more after this move?

About half and half. There were songs already written as there was a lot of excitement about the move to New York and it was about that time that I met Eric and the rest of the band and Ted Young, our engineer on all the records. Just to be around people like that, at that level, New York was a big catalyst.

The second release (Barn Doors & Concrete Floors) followed in 2011 - was this very different in construct from the debut?

Yes, that was the first one with the band and we rented this barn in upstate New York, brought a bunch of gear and everyone stayed. That started the process of how we track; find a place where we can stay and make music and be in the moment. That is where we are at now as I have a studio and it’s kinda the same.

The release of Rain Plains (2013), sees you now located in Dripping Springs, Texas. What brought about this move in location and how did it influence the new songs?

I wanted to get out of New York at some point and my wife and I wanted to buy a house and have a kid. It just felt like a really good time to go. I had been in Austin and loved the vibe and the weather and I loved the idea that we could get some place that is a lot more affordable than New York. We bought some space and it is the old country and just a beautiful place to live and it was a big change in my life to be out in the middle of nowhere and a lot of growth for me, which continues to affect the songs.

In 2015 your last release, Silver Season, is critically well received but was also seen as a move away from the traditional country and folk influences of the earlier records. Do you agree with this and if so, has the shift been a natural progression for you?

Yea, it was definitely natural and I guess that, for me, I like the idea of always progressing and moving forward and seeing where it goes. I think that in the Americana genre there are a lot of artists who do very similar things on each record and that’s fine completely but I wanted to be able to progress and try different things. The thought of making the same record every time would be kinda boring for me. It’s nice to see what happens in the studio and to see where we can go. That’s what is cool about being an artist and making music; who knows what in 10 years might happen? It’s not like saying you know exactly what’s going to happen or how it’s going to sound; it just kind of evolves and there are always new ideas or some other reference, feels and vibes from other albums and other productions that swirl in peoples’ heads.

Your live band also perform as your studio band. Is there a danger of burn-out in having the same musicians playing the same songs repeatedly?

ERIC: There is that risk. We always talk about working in the studio and the difference in playing live on tour, how they are totally different things. Some bands try to capture the studio onstage but we don’t necessarily do that – not that we throw it out the window, but we look at it like it is a living breathing thing that develops and parts change every time, so that is one way to keep it fresh. We have a great time on stage.

Do you enjoy the touring process?

I do. There are these dualities like a have a wife and a child and a home but touring has changed my life too and it has made the World small and opened my eyes. I was always a liberal kind of progressive guy. There is something about Europe that over time has solidified things for me in a different way. Seeing people having lives so far away really helps those ideals that people are the same and there is a spiritual journey on tour that I enjoy. But I enjoy being home too.

Has technology helped bring your music to new audiences?

I think it is still necessary to tour and to give something to your fans. That is great but I think It’s all those things that allow me to be sitting by myself and writing a song. My true love will always be that process of writing a song and I like to have my space at home and be locked away and working. Melodies and ideas will come and you try to jot ‘em down.

Is it still possible to get paid with the streaming royalties from the likes of Spotify being so small these days?

It’s definitely easier today than it was five years ago. But you realise that being a musician is really just continuous work and that’s why people are now 75 years old and still onstage. There is just something about it that you just have to keep making things happen. We have a studio now and we have been producing some artists there which is part of the growth of the whole thing.

What informs your song-writing process? Is it melody first before the lyrical content or vice versa?

Somewhere in-between, generally a melody or a lyric will hit and it will be like a chorus or something. Then I’ll start playing it and work the music and get a verse structure. Now with the studio I can play it back 100 times and start feeling it, so really the studio has brought about new opportunities and resources to make music.

What are the biggest constraints with touring these days?

I think it’s a bit strange to be always moving around. I don’t know in anyone’s life if we are designed to be daily nomads, but at the same time, there is something to look forward to every day and we humans need that too. At the end of the day we have a great time on tour playing shows and tomorrow we have another show to look forward to… 

Do you like to take much time off when it comes to refuelling the creative muse?

Usually I spend time with my family and if I can circuit into my zone and if I’m there for two months, I will probably have 3 or 4 songs a month to show. That is the most enriching time for me to write.

So, is the glass half full or half empty?

I think that it is half full – it’s overflowing…!! 

I was very impressed with the calm and generous nature of Israel when we met. Both he and Eric, his band mate, were very welcoming and at very short notice. The conversation was relaxed and the answers given were spoken with honesty and an easy openness. Lonesome Highway thank both Israel and Eric for their excellent insights and reflections into life as musicians on the road to greater things.

Live review of the gig – 15^th February 2017

Israel Nash takes the stage with his band mate Eric Swanson, who plays pedal steel and sings harmony vocals. The duo play 6 numbers and by the end of their 30-minute set they have won over many of the arriving crowd for the main act. The pedal steel is a very atmospheric sounding instrument and fills the space with a plaintive tone that perfectly suits the guitar progressions of Israel. He can take a song into new areas when playing in this stripped-down format ad it is a credit to both musicians that they carry it off with some room to spare. Parlour Song, a reflective lyric about gun violence, is particularly good and is followed by superb versions of Rexanimarum, LA Lately, Rain Plains and a cover of I Shall Be Released by Bob Dylan. Stirring stuff and a real statement of the talent on show here.  

I wish that I could say the same for the main act as Band of Horses come across as overly loud and the songs get drowned out by booming Bass guitar and a muddy sound. The vocals are hard to hear from my place on the balcony (perhaps it was better downstairs?). I have most of their records but tonight the band just fail to inspire and the long set list of 20+ songs seems to drag along from one to the next with little colour in-between. Most of the back catalogue is featured, with the notable exception of Mirage Rock, and in fairness and the capacity crowd seem well into the show. I was left feeling that ‘less is more’ and by the end of the night I was more taken by the honest performance of Israel Nash and Eric Swanson.

Interview, review and photographs of Israel Nash and Eric Swanson (above) by Paul McGee

Interview with Cody Braun

Few households in the music industry can boast the pedigree of the Braun brothers.  Originally from Idaho, siblings Cody and Willy’s band Reckless Kelly have been at the forefront of the roots scene in Austin Texas for two decades, long before the genre became christened with the Americana tag. Younger brothers Micky and Gary also front their own band Micky & The Motorcars. The brothers learned their trade at a very young age as part of their father’s travelling band Muzzie Braun and The Boys. Their grandfather Musty Braun was also a working musician, playing anything from country to jazz as a professional performer. With music flowing through their veins it’s no wonder the Braun brothers have survived and continue to survive in an industry that offers ongoing challenges and obstacles. They understand the meaning of hard work, reinvention, survival and the importance of offering a quality product to their listeners both in the studio and at their renowned live shows. Reckless Kelly and their entourage arrive in the West of Ireland next month for dates in Galway, Clifden and Lahinch. Lonesome Highway caught up with Cody Braun to discover how the tour came about and what exactly can we expect from the Texas invasion. 

How did the idea of the Seven Days in Ireland tour come about?

In 2005 my brother Willy and I along with a song writing friend from Nashville took a 7-day trip over to Ireland for the first time. We flew into Shannon rented a car and had plans to see the entire country stopping in a different town each night. To make a long story short Clifden was as far as we made it. Our song seven nights in Ireland tells the whole story. We met some great folks who we immediately became friends with and spent half of our trip in Clifden and the other half in Galway. We fell in love with the western country side and this will be our fourth trip back. 

We have since been to other parts of the country but are always drawn to the area we first visited because of the beauty and the friends we made.

Since the first trip we have been telling family and friends about how wonderful Ireland is and our song Seven Nights in Ireland has become one of our most popular tunes over here in the US.

We have talked for years about putting a trip together of family, friends and fans and coming over as a group to see what kind of racket we can make. After a failed attempt a few years ago we were finally able to pull it off and are all very excited to make the trip together in April.  

Did you deliberately target the West of Ireland rather than booking the larger cities?

Yes, this is the part of Ireland we know the best and our friend David Griffin " Griffins Pub" has helped us find other gigs in the area. After visiting the larger cities Dublin and Cork we found that we were more comfortable in the smaller towns where it was easier to connect with people and the pace is a bit slower. 

Is the intention essentially to bring your audience on the tour or to also get the local punters out to the shows?

A bit of both really. We hope that the locals will come out and enjoy the music and the folks we have brought along with us. Most of the people coming on the trip are close family friends so we are looking forward to showing them a good time and hopefully building a local following at the same time.  

You have most certainly lined up a talented bunch of artists to accompany you. Tell me about the selection of other musicians on the tour with you?

We picked friends that we love to jam with. Jason, Courtney and Matt are incredible writers and musicians but also have a deep love and knowledge of where country music came from. When we get together we usually end up playing old country songs all night like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash. My brothers and our father Muzzie and I all love to sing songs of our own and songs by our heroes like Guy Clark and John Prine. 

We picked artists and friends that we love to hang out with and who share the same love for music. Also, friends who can keep up with us at the bar!

How will the three shows be formatted with the number of artists on the tour bus. Precision scheduling or organised chaos? 

It will change every night. Most of the shows will be acoustic with one honky tonk/country rock show in Clifden. We have a bit of a plan but hope to keep it casual and fun. Lots of jamming together with some of our original tunes mixed in with our favourite covers. 

Your posts suggest that this trip may become an annual event. Is this your intention?

We will see how it goes. This trip is mostly family and friends so they are a bit easier to please than paying customers can tend to be. We are going to do our best to keep coming back and if we can bring a group of good people along with us from time to time we are pretty sure we wont have trouble filling the spots available. We want to keep it fun and manageable for the band and our goal is to come back at least once a year with or without a crowd. 

Interview by Declan Culliton

James McMurtry Interview

James McMurtry is a much-respected artist who has largely existed below the commercial radar of commercial media since his debut release back in 1989. With 11 releases to his name this singer-songwriter has continued to endure where many have failed. McMurtry comes across as a deep thinker and someone who chooses his words carefully. He appears as a shy man with natural humility but also possessing a healthy sense of irony. His music is a testament to the sharp mind that surveys all before it and is well attuned to the ways of the world. He spoke to Lonesome Highway prior to his show in Whelan's in Dublin (January 2017).

Is live touring something that you enjoy?

Yea, it’s most of my job really. We don’t get any money from record sales anymore, it’s all road.

When you getting ready to start an album, do you first look for a record deal or do you record and then look for a label?

I’ve done it all different ways. I usually decide to make a record and look for financing to get it done.  To find a label that can licence the record in different territories but I haven’t done enough of that in Europe in the past 20 years. It is always scary coming to Europe because of the overhead. We are at the age where we don’t share hotel rooms anymore or sleep on the floor; each of us has to have his own room nowadays. But on this tour we got some beer sponsorship which helps to not lose money. 

So, is touring really profitable anymore?

We get most of our profit in the States. Used to be where we toured to promote record sales and expected to lose money on the tour; now it’s the other way around where we put out a record so that you guys will write about us and we can get people in the clubs to come out and support the tour.

You have been touring you last album Complicated Games and are now bringing it to Europe.

I’m over here because I’ve run out of territory in the States. You can only go back to a market very 12 or 18 months and we have been around twice on this last record so we can’t really tour as a sole headline there again until 2018. All the work we are doing there right now is package or solo fly-out stuff or co-bills with other acts that are in the same State and the same situation. So, between the two of us we can draw a bigger crowd or play a bigger venue. We just did some dates on the West Coast with Anders Osborne and that turned out really well. Sometimes those tours can be pretty disastrous but this time we were pretty lucky.

I was noticing your comments regarding Napster and Spotify and touring to promote the sales of your records. Can the artist even get paid anymore?

If it is even downloaded of your label’s site the royalty is still a lot less than it was with the hard product. Fortunately, our crowd are about the same age so our people want to buy hard products.

It is always better to get the physical product from the point of view of information about the release. Our website works on the basis of physical product only. Is life becoming more complicated as a result?

I don’t know. We just keep going down the road and this is the only thing we know. My son is just releasing his second record and people ask if I give him advice. We get together and try to figure out where this thing is going. He knows about as much as I do.

When you write in character do you have to imagine that character?

I try to imagine the character and follow the words in rhyme and metre ‘cause that is how it starts – with a couple of lines and then you try to imagine the character who said those lines. And you get a story – it might take awhile but you get a verse and chorus structure going and the song builds itself. The template is carved. Several songs just started out as jams as putting lyrics to existing music can be really hard. St Mary of the Woods started out like that.

Does the song-writing get easier as you get older?

No. But it doesn’t get any harder either. You can leave a lot to the listener because it is verse, it doesn’t have to be that detailed.

Is what is happening worldwide an influence on the characters that you are writing?

A lot of my characters are dated and the songs are dated. I put a song out on the website (Remembrance), just before the election and it’ s not about Trump per se; but about demagoguery in general, mostly focused on Franco as I was in Spain just after Franco passed and I lived with a family where they wanted Franco back out of the grave and didn’t want this Democracy stuff that required thought...

And yet when you recall the songs ‘We can’t make it here’ and Cheney’s Toy’ which dealt with the Bush administration, you could almost cut & paste them onto the situation that we are now facing

It never seems to change. I sang that song (Cheney’s Toy), during the first Obama administration too and I finally just got tired of it and quit playing it.

The critical reaction to Complicated Game was very positive. Were you happy with the media response as it had been some time since the previous release?

We did not have to make another record for economic purposes as the previous one held up for so long. It was really unusual. Already this latest one has fallen off so we need to get back in the studio and make another one.

Do you play with the same guys all the time?

Pretty much so. Tim (Holt) and Daren (Hess) have been in the band for 18 years while Cornbread has been with me for about the last 5 years.

Do you still have the residency in the Continental Club?

We have been doing that since 2002 and we do it whenever we are home. It starts at midnight and goes until 2.00am.

The Outlaw Country stance against the traditional sound of Nashville. Is that something that impacts on you living in Texas?

When I hear outlaw country I think of Waylon Jennings. That started so long ago and they are still calling it that but I no idea what they are talkin’ about. They have this thing called Americana which is a catchall for all of us who were having a hard time getting on rock radio and we couldn’t get on mainstream country radio.

Do genres annoy you?

Not really. If I can squeeze into something then people can find my records and buy them. It’s becoming what AAA became, which was what AOR was. Now we are getting the Bonnie Raitt’s and Robert Plant as Americana artists.

Does You Tube open up avenues to your music?

I don’t know because I don’t really go to You Tube very often. I dread to think what some of my clips may be like...!

Perhaps it opens up some traffic to your website?

I don’t know as I don’t monitor the demographics. If we have money in the accounts, then we can do stuff and that is ok with me.

Do you plan to go back in the studio soon?

If I have enough songs. I was going to go to California for the next record and have Ross Hogarth produce as he seems interested. He recorded my first two records and mixed the first one that I produced; St Mary of the Woods.

Do you enjoy the studio experience?

It can be tedious. I have done records where the producer wanted an insane number of takes- like on ‘Lost in the Back-yard’ where we did maybe 20 takes and the drummer nearly lost his mind – funnily, it was the “drummer loses his mind” take that made the song...!! You don’t know how you’re gonna get it but usually I like to get it done quickly...

Can we expect a broadside against Trump?

I don’t think he deserves that much attention. He is just another of many dime-store demagogues who happened to come along at the right time and sell it to Americans. 30 years ago, there was a guy called Lyndon LaRouche who ran as an independent in the Mondale/Reagan race and was saying the same thing - but back then, the world was different and there was no NAFTA and there were no manufacturing job losses. Ideas that Trump is spouting now could find no purchase. 9/11 happened and all this paranoia – suspicion of anything other... It is real easy to get people to focus their fear and hatred against an ethnic or racial/ religious group.

The message into Europe from other American artists seems to be one of community and looking to bring people together

My cousins all live out in the country and they live in a different reality. I was turkey hunting with them one time; during the Florida recount when Bush was losing the election to Gore and they were perturbed that Gore was trying to steal the election from Bush. The same with Reagan was running, the academics and the people I hung out with, did not think he had a chance whereas you talked to a country person they were all solid Reagan lovers.

Do you find the creative process one of isolation?

I don’t mess with it much. If I get a line out of somewhere, I put it on my cell phone. The creative process is very brief. I don’t spend a lot of time creating.

Do you do a lot of reading or research?

I read one or two books a year usually. I’m not a big reader.

You have been quoted  as saying that you ‘write with a poet’s pen and a painter’s precision’. While another quote is that you don’t really make a conscious decision what you write about. Is the reality somewhere between?

Well you can write a song that completely expresses another opinion than your own. A lot of my songs do because my characters do not necessarily agree with me. If you listen to Carlisle’s Hall that guy is complaining about Government regulation of fisheries. Of course he is, because he is a commercial fisherman and that is how he makes his living. I don’t think that way; I think that we have to regulate fisheries or we are not going to have them. But I’m not trying to haul my living out of a bay.

Is the glass half full of half empty?

Townes Van Zandt said that some folks look at a glass and think it’s half empty; some folks look at a glass and think it’s half full; I look at a glass and wonder if its water or vodka.

Interview by Paul McGee and Stephen Rapid    Photographs by Stephen Rapid and Kaethe Burt O'Dea

Aaron Watson Interview

As an independent country music artist, Aaron Watson has released 13 albums and in February 2015, he made history when he released The Underdog, making him the first independent male artist to debut at number one on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. The record sold more than 26,000 units in the first week.

As part of his European Tour Aaron Watson plays a gig in Ireland for the first time and gives Lonesome Highway an interview to share his philosophy and thoughts about the music business and his career.

Your first time in Ireland and you have brought the full band with you. Does this work financially when you are trying to break into new territories and does it not make sense to come over initially on a solo basis?

My band are on salary so apart from a couple of extra plane tickets it makes sense. Our show in London sold 500 seats, so we have grown that market relatively quick and Manchester was 300, Glasgow about the same… So, we have had a successful run and although the show in Dublin is in a small room, it is sold out. I love doing acoustic shows as well and you have to make the most of every night. I have been doing this for 17 years now, 13 albums, 2500 shows and we are still up and coming. We have played all sorts of venues. There is nothing better than a small venue packed full of people who love music. It’s going to be so much fun and I want the crowd to hear the full band.

Being an independent artist you have a lot of responsibility in taking care of the business. Do you have a large staff back home that helps with the running of it all?

I’ve got a couple of dozen people in what has developed into a pretty solid business. I love music, I love writing songs and playing live but If you don’t have a solid sense of business about things, then you cannot continue doing what you love. I wait until the time is right to hire the right people. People ask me why I have not signed to a major label and I say that I have now become the major label.

You have achieved everything without compromising at all; rather than have the major labels dictate to you what direction you should take

Yea, that feels so good and I love music, so I can’t imagine having to sing songs that I don’t like. How can you sell people a bunch of crap? My new album is coming out in a month and I wrote all sixteen songs and I’m passionate about all of them. I can get up on stage and share the story behind each song, where it came from and what it means to me. It’s soulful and personal and not really about the genre. It’s about whether it is original and unique.

Technically I do have a record deal because I’m married and my wife is the CEO and I’m more like the custodian! On a serious note, music is not an Industry, it’s the family business … We’ve always put the fans first. How has a West Texas boy from some small town outsold so many major artists.

Over the years, we have stayed true to our brand of country music. We haven’t shifted and chased after the different phases and stages and flavours of the month. We stay true to ourselves and we work hard. I always say we ride a horse named hustle and we always put our fans first and like to hang out with them after each show. The people who turn up tonight, tell their friends and it starts to grow. It only takes a spark.

I play a little of everything and there will be a couple of new songs. I am a fan first and know when you go to a show, you want to hear the artist play your favourite songs. So you slowly and gradually incorporate the new songs in due time.

You have spoken in the past about getting up early to write songs. Do you still do that?

I love that. We live on a farm with a lake behind the house and as the sun comes up I make coffee and I write with my guitar before breakfast and before my kids start to wake up. I may take ‘em to school and then come back and write some more; or maybe go on the ranch and do some work there. There is nothing more satisfying, in my opinion, than writing a well-crafted song. That feeling you get inside after you’re finished, when you say ‘this is a good song’...

When you are writing a song do you go back and redraft until you get a perfect version of it?

Absolutely. More so than ever lately with the new record (Vaquero). After the success of the last album, The Underdog, which debuted at number 1 in the Billboard Country Charts, a lot of people said that if we wanted to continue our success then we would have to break out of the Texas outlaw thing. Because, they said, that made us a regional act. Well, I just laughed and said we played 38 states and 8 countries last year so that’s not a regional act. It’s a wrong opinion and perspective.

I’m from Texas and this is where I was born and raised so it is an integral part of who I am. It’s like food; you don’t have to be from Mexico to like Mexican food or from Italy to like Italian food – to think that me being me, is going to keep me from crossing over borders? That is just narrow minded. I remember Chris LeDoux when I was growing up and he was singing about Wyoming and it made me want to go to Wyoming. It’s like U2, when I study some of the lyrics and realise he is writing about home; his home. We all like history and geography and music has that in it too. When people said we had to get away from that Texas thing, I didn’t pay much heed to it; what we did for the new record was to paint a Texas flag on an old building outside a town where I live and I held up a guitar in a very revolutionary pose; just to let ‘em know we are from Texas.

Is the new release, Vaquero, a concept record?

The vaquero is the original cowboy. There is a lot of tradition with the vaquero and I wanted the album to be rooted, rebellious and traditional. I wanted to make music that you have never heard before. When the band are playing, we can open for any rock band and hold our own. It’s about energy and passion and we thrive on our live show. We have the energy of a punk band but we just use a telecaster and a fiddle. The new record has 16 songs and I wrote all of them so If the record is terrible then it’s my fault. There is a common theme of believing in who you are, sticking to your values; don’t let people push you around. I focus on Faith, family and my brand of country music for my fans.

Are the studio musicians the same as the touring band?

I change them around so that they don’t get tired, having played on the album for so long. I ask them who they want to play with on the records, who are their musical heroes and this pushes them to be better musicians.  They have a lot of say in how the songs turn out as they spend time in pre-production with me also. It is a big group record. I produced all my records, some are co-productions and I write the songs and know what they should sound like in my head.

I notice that you sang with Willie Nelson on your 4th release. How did that come about?

What that does is give me bragging rights for the rest of my life. I think it helped me a lot and helped validate me as an artist. Ray Benson from Asleep At The Wheel produced that record and he was playing pool with Willie over at this house and he was playing a rough copy of my new record in the background. Willie said "I really like this stuff" so Ray said if he really liked it all that much he should go and sing on the record. The rest is history. My Dad is a huge Willie Nelson fan so when I got to tell him at home in Amarillo, he was so excited. Willie is not a genre; he is the genre – he is the icon.

Willie, Waylon, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, they are my heroes. My heart belongs with the songwriter; Guy Clark, Townes van Zandt, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earl and the rest of ‘em.

There still seems to be a Nashville vs Texas territorial divide. Do you see that still happening?

Maybe Willie or Waylon started that? Some say it was Bob Wills who played at the Oprey years back and when they wouldn’t let him have an amp onstage, he just packed up and went home. George Strait was not included as a member for many years. Even when our record went to no.1, it caused quite a stir there. The Country Music Hall of Fame and The Opry have been good to us in recent years but I don’t do this to win awards and my career doesn’t revolve around radio or charts. My career revolves around my fans because these are the things that matter. The mainstream artists, my heart goes out to a lot of ‘em, because their days are numbered. You gotta work hard and get on the road. The rest of the World is working hard so every artist should do that as a basic.

All your kids names start with the letter ‘J’, Any particular reason for that?

My wife said that their names would all start with the letter J. Therefore, they did …

Jack, Jack and Jolie Kate - my kids love music and are growing up playing the right stuff, Waylon, Willie, the Beatles. Then recently, my baby girl asked for a Taylor Swift guitar and songbook for Christmas and she wanted me to teach her how to play some of her songs. I said she needed to lock the door as her mamma will video us and put it up on Instagram and Facebook…!!

Music is so subjective, I always stay very open-minded and I don’t dismiss anything. If you are at the top of the mountain, then people say you sold out. You have to be political. If you are small and independent and making the same records, then everybody loves you. It’s a fine line, a fickle game. It’s about the music and the fans and continuing to spread our brand of country music wherever we go.

Ireland is important to us and we will come back because we are committed to Ireland and want to earn the love and respect. You have to be able to start at the bottom and work your way up. New markets are exciting; unchartered territory. It’s an honour to be here.

My Mother has Irish roots and wants me to get some dirt from Ireland for her garden. I wish every woman was as easy to please!!

Postscript:

Aaron Watson gets his wish when Lonesome Highway presents him with a small jar of Irish soil during the show for his Mamma back in Texas. He is thankful and comes across as a genuinely enthusiastic and very likeable person who is fully committed to his craft. He speaks with a refreshing candour and is generous with his time and energy. We look forward to welcoming Aaron Watson back to Ireland and to watching his career continue to blossom in these territories. Aaron Watson's new album Vaquero is out now.

Interview by Paul McGee and Stephen Rapid  Photograph by Stephen Rapid

Erin Rae Interview

We are not normally in the habit of reviewing an album on two separate occasions at Lonesome Highway. There are exceptions however, as was the case with Soon Enough by Erin Rae. A promotional copy of her album was reviewed by myself in June followed by a further review of the album in October by my colleague Paul Mc Gee. Whether this was an editorial master stroke or an oversight is neither here nor there! More to the point is the impact the album had on both of us with references to ‘one of the finest songs of the year (Clean Slate)’ and ‘one of the highlights of the year and a must buy’ being included in the reviews. Lonesome Highway caught up with Erin Rae after she returned to Nashville following a whistle stop tour of the UK supporting Cale Tyson.  

Your recent tour of the UK with the Meanwhiles received hugely positive feedback. How important is it for you to create a market in the UK/Europe?

We had a really great time. I felt and feel very fortunate to have such a warm welcome our first time to the UK ... I'd say it's just as important to me to develop the market and relationships over there as it is to do so in the States. It has been at the forefront of my dream of being a musician. Ever since loving the Spice Girls as a little girl. (I was Posh). 

You’ve moved to centre stage with your album Soon Enough having performed as a backing vocalist for many artists in Nashville. What prompted the move? 

I've been working on my own music from the beginning. It's a fun part of being in the community and being a singer and getting to sing harmonies to share and support in friends music! We all help each other. Molly Parden has been singing with me for a few years, and she's got some exciting things coming her way! It's neat to see us all grow at different times. We each have our own paths, and it’s such an amazing thing to witness and help each other with. 

Soon Enough was recorded in two days, basically a live recording, over what period were the songs on the album written?

2012-2015. So a lot of the songs had been played for a couple years as a band, making the live recording fun and easy. And special!

On repeated listens the album reveals itself as possibly a commentary on a life’s experiences to date. Should we consider it autobiographical?

Yes, every song (excluding Pretty Thing) is autobiographical. However the sentiment of that song still is true to me. 

The album, for me, benefits from not being over produced and its quality is not in any way compromised by being recorded in such a short time frame. Had you and your band been performing the material live over a period of time?

Most of it we had! At least half of the songs, maybe more. There were some that were saved to release on the record, but we did already have the band template in place, so we used a similar format for those songs, taking away or adding elements where that was needed.  

The quality of female singer songwriters in Nashville operating under the Americana banner seems endless at present. I’m thinking of yourself, Lilly Hiatt, Molly Parden, Kelsey Waldon and Margo Price to name a few. Has Margo Price’s breakthrough acted as a confidence booster in terms of possible career progression for an artist like yourself?

Love all of those women, and the list goes on! Tristen, Caitlin Rose, Kristina Murray, Liz Cooper, Emily Nenni, Becca Mancari, and more and more! I think it acted as an affirmation of the path we are all on. That big things can still happen, that the reach can still be far for real music! That turn around has been happening. But, it has been such a cool time for music. So many incredible records were released in 2016, with more to come in 2017, and I think it's just a really good time for music. Also, the community here is such a supportive one, so it's changed a lot of the motivation in my mind from mainstream success being the focus, to creating a true path for myself. It's cool that those things might realign again for more of us, as we see with Chris Stapleton, Sturgill, and Margo, Aaron Lee Tasjan, to name a few. Margo has been so generous with me, inviting me to be part of really neat things as they come up, like her panel at AMA fest in Nashville last fall. I think a lot of people heard about me through that, and came out to my show, and its things like that which serve as the real confidence boosters. Feeling like the friends that you look up to and admire are also fans of your work is so invaluable. Thank you, Margo!

Your writing and delivery, for me, is as much West Coast influenced as Nashville. I detect certain parallels with artists such as Judee Sill and early Joni Mitchell for instance. Was this a sound that was influential to you when you were developing a musical direction? 

 I love Judee Sill. I think I discovered her on the Elizabethtown soundtrack, and the song Jesus Was A Crossmaker has become one of my recent favourites to try and cover. Those two voices weren't primary influences, but I do love them! I'd say my parents music and voices were the most directly inspiring/ taste-making for me, followed by Kate Campbell's voice, Gillian Welch & Dave Rawlings, Slaid Cleaves, Greg Brown, John Prine, Feist, etc. I love great voices with strong songwriting. I definitely love the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Neil Young, etc., so I'm sure that has helped to create the laurel-y sound!

What’s next in terms of a career move for Erin Rae. Do you intend returning to Europe to further promote the album and is there a follow up album under consideration?

We are actually going into the studio on Sunday at Cory Chisel + Adriel Denae's place in Appleton, Wisconsin, which is called Refuge Foundation for the Arts. It’s a monastery, turned creative space, right on the Fox River. Dom Billett, Jerry Bernhardt and I will be the main players, with Dan Knobler engineering/producing. That will come out later this year. We will be returning to the UK in June!

Can we expect some dates in Ireland on your return to Europe? 

Yes! I believe those are in the works now, official announcement should be out soon via Clubhouse Records UK. Thank you so much for having me!

Interview by Declan Culliton – Friday 10th February 2017

Jeff Finlin Interview

Jeff Finlin Interview 22^nd November 2016 – The Sound House Dublin

It’s a bitterly cold winters night in Dublin with the outside temperature marginally higher than in the venue where Jeff Finlin is about to take the stage for his slot on his latest Irish tour, this time accompanied by UK’s  Peter Bruntnell and our own Clive Barnes. Not the most obvious trio that comes to mind but having witnessed them in action the previous week in Kilkenny, both on and off stage, their compatibility as performers and personalities is obvious. The format for the tour are sets by Finlin and Bruntnell accompanied on guitar by Barnes, who also does a short solo set himself between the two acts. Clive Barnes comes across as the organiser, the tour manager, the sat nav of the team, always busy, setting up, sound checking, and stacking guitars. Peter Bruntnell is the most laid back, the joker, the happy go lucky one. He’s likely to slip out to the bar, have a pint ("I’m very disciplined, only having a few beers every other night on this tour" he tells us) and discuss the merits of Tottenham playing with Harry Kane as a lone striker or how Wales are likely to hammer both England and Ireland in the Six Nations. Off stage Finlin is the most reserved of the three, a listener, an observer, an artist that has been at the cold face of the music industry in Nashville and has witnessed first-hand the highs, lows, expectations, hopes and regrets of a ruthless industry. Yet he also exudes contentment, self-control and is an engaging and charming conversationalist. Hitting rock bottom almost 20 years ago was, by his own admission, a godsend. Getting sober was a life changer, leading him down a more spiritual and magical path which inspired much of his splendid catalogue of work as a songwriter, musician, prose writer and poet. Lonesome Highway took the opportunity to get an insight into the industry from a true survivor, career musician and writer.

You’re one of the few artists that have moved out of rather than into East Nashville in recent years. How did that come about?

My wife and I moved back there but she didn’t really like it, missed Colorado so we decided to get back to Colorado where she was happier, that was about two years ago. I had been in Nashville for twenty years, I cut my teeth there and then we moved to Colorado to raise my son, we wanted to get out of the city which turned out to be really good at the time. There may be an opportunity for me to go back so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Property prices have rocketed but we bought at the last minute so you could say it didn’t work out yet did work out as we still own a house there that we are renting. Even by getting in at the last minute was a coup and I still have a lot of ties there and I’m pretty bored in Colorado right now so I’m thinking of going back to Nashville more often as there are opportunities for me there at the moment. The music scene there is just crazy at the moment, the level of talent there, artists coming through and established acts, it’s amazing but it’s also a Nashville that comes with its own can of worms and the scene of all my crimes!  When I cross the county line I think "what’s that funny feeling in my stomach (laughs)." It’s a double edged sword that town. 

On reflection and twenty years into your career is it more difficult to make ends meet these days?

Completely, the music industry is gone, it’s over. It’s all about having enough of a name to go out and play and attract people, then it can work out. Who knows how it happens now, there used to be these paths to success which are all gone now, the publishing industry’s gone, the record labelling industry is gone. At least when I was young there was this $100 billion Industry that was out there spending money and making money so if you were in the right place at the right time with the right song something could happen for you. I knew guys that were in bands that signed record deals for a million dollars, records that never even came out! That certainly doesn’t exist anymore! There’s an entertainment industry and a touring band industry. It’s crazy but as artists we’re not in charge of the results, we just take action and turn it over and see what happens.

The contradiction is that the artists are still there, 2016 has possibly been the best year for recorded music in the past ten years

That’s it and you wonder how they make ends meet. You go to Nashville and you see a lot of the artists tending bar. There’s a great story about a well-known artist. It’s a story and I’m not sure if you can publish the artists name but it’s about these college kids having a wild party listening to him and his band and they decided to order a few pizzas and the delivery man comes to the door and guys who’s delivering the pizzas arrives and of course its him. The guys are like "what the fuck he’s my hero!" That’s the reality you know.

So tell me how you ended up touring over here with Clive (Barnes) and Peter (Bruntnell)?

Well, I wanted to come back to Europe as I hadn’t been over in six or seven years and I wanted to come back and dip my feet in the water again. So, I spoke with Clive last year and he said he’d call Peter up and see if we could all do a couple of weeks together in the UK. It worked and we were able to fill the two weeks and we had so much fun that we said we’d try and do the same in Ireland

Tell me about your writing. I’m aware that you’ve written a few books of prose. Did that direction come in advance of the song writing out the other way around?

The music always came before the prose. I’m kind of a word guy, I’ve always written songs because I’ve something to say. People will often say that the music comes first but for me it’s about the story. I’ve had so much stuff going through my head for over twenty years so I thought I need to put this all together in a book. My last book prose book just came along as a stream of consciousness thing. 

And is that a form of relaxation for you?

It can be (laughs), it just comes over me and I do it. The last prose book, I was going through certain stuff at the time and I just needed to sit down every morning and write stuff down. I’ve just finished a yoga book too, I’m pretty disciplined when it comes to writing and can get up at six every morning and write, I’m a morning guy so this touring and late nights turns my world upside down, going to bed at 2am and getting up at 8am (laughs). I’m not used to feeling shit all day and coming alive at six o clock in the evening, I’m used to feeling great at 5am and shit at 4pm (laughs). I’m good with the sun up.

So in terms of a young guy growing up in Ohio what sort of music were you introduced to?

I grew up in the 70’s which was probably the greatest time in history for music, the majority of people were listening to the best stuff. Those times in music history are rare, I grew up with all that great music radio in the 70’s, AOR radio and   I was a Stones, Beatles, Dylan guy ... Led Zeppelin too.  Black and white music was an integral part of what I listened to, they were separate and yet they were not. Getting to see Ike and Tina Turner live in 1974, Pink Floyd in '77, The Stones in '78 so many great bands in that era. I grew up with the blues, that’s why I loved the Stones, they went back into the blues and the Chuck Berry thing but I also always loved pop music. My song forms tend to lean as formalised as pop songs, there is blues influences but there’s pop form in there. Maybe that’s from hanging out in Nashville, it’s a very structured form based craft thing there and it rubbed off on me a little bit.

Your early career found you behind the drums I believe in the rock band The Thieves?

Yes, I was a drummer until I was 28 years old and started writing songs, a bit of a late developer as a songwriter and a guitar player. Some guy at the gig last night commented that I was a perfectly paced guitar player. I had to tell him that I’m actually a drummer and he said ‘Ah well that explains!’  Every good guitarist needs a good drummer behind him so I pretend to be both!

Are you optimistic career wise going forward?

I’m kind of in the middle, I’ve got my ass kicked enough not to get my hopes up. I just trust that inner voice to tell me when I need to write and what I need to do. I’ve just finished another album in Holland that will be coming out next year, have some more touring lined up but realistically it has to be sustainable so we’ll just have to see. I don’t do what I used to do, killing myself. I can’t do twenty-two dates in twenty-three days in three countries anymore, nor do I want to, life’s too short.

Your current compilation album Life after Death. How difficult was it to select the songs from your extensive back catalogue and did the record label give you a free hand to select the material?

Not too hard, there are songs that are missing, as I’ve been reminded. They allowed me to select all the songs myself which was nice of them, though I reckon if I don’t know myself by now I have a problem!  I tried to pick songs that were unique to my own little twisted lyrical thing but also wanted it to flow as a piece of work you know and not be disjointed and have a beginning and an end and feel that it flowed the whole way through. It can be difficult when you’re putting twenty songs together but I’m happy with it.

Interview by Declan Culliton

Country Lips Interview

Country Lips are an eight piece country band who have just released their latest album Till The Daylight Comes. It is a testament to their talent, attitude and collective take on traditional country music - somethhing that is a whole lot of fun. Lonesome Highway recently took the opportunity to throw some quick questions to the band.

What brought you guys together as a country band in Seattle?

We were all part of the music scene out of the U-District in north Seattle, some of us playing in other bands together. There had been talk of our shared interest in country music. Austin (bass) invited us to his house to jam on some old country tunes one night. We all brought a song or two, and that became our first set list. He booked us a show maybe a month later. We were super raw but excited to share the side of country music we loved - the party, honky-tonk, hard-edged side of country music. We started writing songs not long after that. A few lineup changes later and here we are.

Playing country music of the old school type is not usually something associated with the area. Is there a good local scene there?

There really is. Seems like there have always been at least a couple of very solid true country bands in Seattle since it was put on the map as a music town. And that seems to be more true today than ever. In Seattle proper the scene exists mainly around three venues (Tractor, Conor Byrne, and the Little Red Hen, which serves as the hub) and more than a couple handfuls of solid country bands (check out Ole Tinder, Swearengens, Deception Past, Lucky Lawrence, Country Dave, Gus Clark). Regionally Washington can be about as back-country as anywhere! Remember, Loretta Lynn got her start in northern Washington State.

With a line up of 8 members is there a difficulty with people moving on or are there a pool of platters there you can draw from?

We have had a number of lineup changes since our inception. And we have relied on fill-ins here and there, but our lineup has been solid for three plus years now.

How do you collectively feel about the state of country music these days in the mainstream and independent sectors?

Despite the obvious, that mainstream modern country has kind of become its own genre, I feel there may be some kind of reunification coming, as “alt-country” artists like Sturgill Simpson, Whitey Morgan, or Nikki Lane grow in popularity. My favorite mainstream country artists have had more traditional country leanings anyway - Miranda Lambert, Dierks Bentley, Brad Paisley - and less of the arena-pop stuff that’s on the radio. But in spite of that weaker radio stuff, really good young musicians, singers, and songwriters are continuing to find expression through the more traditional country sounds and that is definitely a good thing for country music.

Your shows are a mix of original songs and some classic covers. Is that the best way to mix the old and new?

We think so. It’s a good feeling when we hear our song on the radio in a block of music with some of the greats and you think “hey that holds its own!”. Same idea in a set list.

How difficult is it for Country Lips to tour in the current climate?

Our touring difficulties are as much our own as they are the climate’s. We like touring as a full band and it’s tough bringing 8 on the road. And the market for live music 7-nights a week has dwindled all over the country.

Do you guys have day jobs to keep body and should together or how does that work?

We all do have day jobs and that also makes touring tough.

There is an element of humour in the songs and I’d imagine with such a large band that that needs to be part of the make up?

It is inevitable. Get that many fun-loving guys in a room together and try being serious.

With the album Till The Daylight Comes being available in Europe, do you intend to tour there?

We do, just a matter of when. Touring Europe is a major goal of ours. It will be a logistical challenge and we don’t have a plan yet in place but we’re hoping there will be enough of a demand to make it work sooner than later.

What is the best and worst thing about being a member of Country Lips?

Best: It’s a collective of the most supportive friends I could hope to have. We drive each other to be better musicians and band mates and we help each other out. Worst: it can be bad for ones health at times, what with all the partying. When it comes to drinking, we practice what we preach.

What do you see as the future of country music today. Will it survive on the fringes?

I think modern country music will continue to dominate in middle America, while alt-country and traditional country gain in popularity along the east and west coast. And like I said, I see more modern country artists breaking from the modern pop-country mold.

What do you draw inspiration from for your original material?

Musically it’s a blend of honky-tonk and Bakersfield - like Merle and Jones - with some Mexican norteño, and other outlaw country. Personally on guitar it’s all about “Chicken Pickin’” ala Brent Mason or Johnny Hiland.

Lyrically we seem to come back to our own personal struggles with love, money, work, and minor social deviance.

With a number of albums under your belt to date what is the band’s intention as a recording act and how important is that?

Hopefully we can up our rate of output, and keep recording albums at a more rapid clip. Recording is certainly something we’ll always be doing as it helps make sure we keep writing new material.

Outlaws or outsiders?

Outliers

Cowboy hats or backwards baseball Hats?

Almost always cowboy hats. Sometimes baseball hats, but usually forwards.

What are the bands ambitions for the future?

To keep getting better. To continue making music we love and to keep getting more and more opportunities to share it. Beyond that: Tour the world by boat. Move to Mexico and make a true norteño album. Waterski with Alan Jackson. The usual.

Interview by Stephen Rapid

Michael McDermott Interview

If you were to judge from the photography and the songwriting on his latest album (and previous recordings) it would be easy to perceive Michael McDermott as an overtly serious and moody person. In person nothing could be further from the truth. 

McDermott is an open, honest, gracious and likable man. His background of artistic failure and the following decline into drink and drugs before a subsequent recovery and renaissance is documented on his website ( http://www.michael-mcdermott.com/bio ). 

It says a lot about the character of the man that he has seen the light through the darkness and his journey has made him a very notable singer and songwriter whom author Stephen King wrote “ Not since I first heard Bruce Springsteen singing Rosalita had I heard someone who excited me so much as a listener …” King is not the only one to recognise McDermott’s talent. He recently made  his Dublin debut playing upstairs in Whelan’s. Lonesome Highway caught up with him prior to that performance.

You were raised in Chicago in an Irish-American home, what an affect did that have on your future musical direction if at all?

Well it was pretty big. It was so much growing up even though there was Irish music playing in the house but when I first moved into the city I played with a guy, Paul Fitzpatrick, who’d seen me at open mics and I was, you know, with sunglasses on doing the whole beat poet thing, reading Ginsberg, pretty silly. I was broke too. So, he said “if you want you could play with me.” I ended up getting a schooling of sorts in Irish music with songs like The Fields Of Athenry, which isn’t that old really, or songs from Christy Moore and others like Waltzing Matilda, all that kind of stuff. It was great to learn them and highly influential and also learning about, not particularly Irish, but just good songwriting. Songs that went on too long (laughs) but were written because they had to be written not just a current song of the day.

After the failure of your major label band deal you went through a very negative period. How did that experience resonate with you?

I’d become a very entitled spoilt brat. I was a young kid and had been given money, that kind of thing. Then it didn’t happen and for a young man that was hard. I wonder about kids today and how they remain well adjusted to all of that. It’s a disappointment really when people you thought were your friends and family don’t return your calls anymore. That was the hardest thing. You know it’s not going to happen and that is painful. Friends used to say “don’t forget about me when you make it big.” And you think “well don’t forget about me if I don’t.” 

You have just released a solo album. Where does that fit in the overall scheme of things?

It was a new start. I was sober and clean so I felt different and I wanted to re-establish who I was. When you bury yourself with all that stuff for twenty years you don’t know who you are. You become infantile in a lot of ways; emotionally and in a lot of other ways such as relationships and all that stuff. It’s a learning process all over again. I felt that I was making up for lost time. I was writing all the way through that terrible mayhem. I would never write under the influence of anything as it wasn’t that ‘drunk poet’  thing. I wanted it clean, but I may take something when I was finished. There’s a purity that I take seriously. So The Westies was kind of a new birth. But there was a lot of baggage and my manager at that time said “Mike, I don’t know to tell you this but there’s a lot of baggage associated with your name. But your songs are so great so if we could just get them heard.” So we set about trying to do that. 

Do you think and have you now put The Westies on hold?

No, it was really just the nature of the material. Right now it’s just very solo record kind of writing, but as I move forward I’ll know where the songs are going. Like “that’ll be a good Westies song.” There be the solo records that would be a spiritual journey or some weird crime song. So I thought why not put those songs into one kind of thematic place. 

Some of your songs have a historical context, for instance your song about William Bonney.

Right, when I was watching a show on Billy the Kid and it mentioned he was Irish I just like “you’re kidding me!” So, I ordered all these books on him. That was amazing. No one really wants to hear another song about Billy the Kid but when I heard about the Irish connection I thought maybe he was the first Westie (the Irish Mafia gang in New York). That gave me a different angle.  

I’ve since become friends with the writer of the book on the Westies and he still talks to those guys as they’re still around. I’ve always been fascinated by those characters so in my days being insane you run into a lot of those people. Gunrunners and so forth, so I’ve always been compelled by that, by the psychology of that lifestyle. But I don’t romanticise them as many of them are sociopaths. 

Do you tend to write for a specific project or are you always stockpiling songs?

I wrote as I go. I try to do it every day. I get up before the family as I have a 6 -year-old. I get up when it’s still dark and try to get an hour of writing in before the footsteps start. There’s chaos the rest of the day so it’s the only time.

After the initial writing do you redraft a lot?

I do, I overwrite. For a normal song I could have up to 30 verses. Them my wife comes in and what she writes becomes the song. I’Il write what I think I need and I then edit it, then it will be half of what I wrote. 

After two Westies and a solo album what’s the next Step?

I don’t know. I’ll see what comes up I think I have more solo songs right now. My wife and I were talking about this as the first (Westies) record was this guy looking at the early part of his life - urban, New York, getting into trouble. The second album was where he was re-habilitated and were he goes away and discovers how hard it is to get back into life. I know how hard it is as I was facing time. If you try to get a job after that it’s really hard but I’m a musician so it doesn’t affect me in the same way. So I don’t know where that guy goes now. I’m not giving up on the Westies at all. I’m just not sure what to do with it next.

As a solo artist are you consciously making a move away from the Westies group sound?

I don’t know, maybe. But if there is anything to be learned from the last few records and the way they seem to have gotten more connection is that my work was buried under the fact of maybe being obtuse for obtuse sake. I’m now getting rid of the fat so-to-speak. I hope, if anything, that they’re getting leaner. The songs, while I don’t want to get away from the detail necessarily, which is kind of what I do, are more honest. Some people have said that I’m a painfully honest songwriter but I don’t know that I’ve been as honest as I could be.

Sometimes it may be better not to reveal too much.

Right, that’s the thing. A lot of times I’m asked what’s the song about but I don’t really have anything to add. I think it’s there for the listener.

A song should allow for personal interpretation.

Exactly.

Do you write outside of the song lyric structure at all?

I don’t think that I’d have the stamina for it, or maybe the attention span. Songs are like little books. I’ve entertained the idea, but not seriously.

How different is the process of getting your music out now compared to when you started?

Actually, I never had a bad relationship with any of the labels I was on. You hear nightmare stories, but it didn’t really happen to me. They say the best thing now is that anybody can make a record and the worst thing is that anybody can make a record. There’s just a lot more clutter now. Before you would know who was coming out with a record, someone like Warner Brothers would release 16 albums a year. 

Labels were somewhat different then to some degree as they were often headed by people with a genuine love for music rather than simply profit. As an independent artist you can have some say in how the record sounds and how the artwork looks .

I don’t really think about that because records are so ephemeral now. You put a record out now and a month later it’s pretty much over. It’s hard to get traction. There’s so much music and I don’t blame anyone as it’s hard to find. We are so inundated. Even making videos is something I don’t think about that much. We are making one for my song Getaway Car as it’s going to be in the Showtime series Billions. We got permission from the John Dillinger Museum where he broke out from jail so we’re going to film there. 

Which of your contemporaries are you inspired by?

Well, I think Jason Isbell is amazing. David Grey always seems to speak to me too. Those two guys would be the main ones. In the Irish context I like Mundy and Liam from the Hothouse Flower. U2 too, I used to cover some of their songs. They’re one of my favourite bands of all time. 

Where does Europe fit into the long-term equation?

I’m not sure of the numbers but there seem to be interest here. It’s a more discerning audience over here. I really believe that. 

Interview and colour photograph by Stephen Rapid   Black and white cover portrait by Sandro

Jude Johnstone Interview

Jude Johnstone is a very special songwriter and someone who has been producing wonderful music under the media radar for many years now. Her experience in the music industry is second to none and it was a real treat to speak with her when she agreed to spend some time giving her insights and thoughts on the creative process and her career. If you have not heard her music, then the following interview should certainly have you looking to add her to your collection of important artists.

When did you begin to play music and was the piano always your instrument of choice?

I started writing songs when I was 8 years old and started playing piano. And yes, piano was always my instrument of choice.

Who were your early influences when you were growing up?

My influences varied widely because of my dad, my brothers, my mom ... they were anywhere from Glen Miller, Sarah Vaughn, The Beatles, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, James Taylor, Lowell George, Jeez Louize, so many more.

In 2002 your debut, Coming of Age, was released with notable guest appearances from Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Trisha Yearwood & Jennifer Warnes. How did you come to have them involved with the project?

I was back stage at a concert in Santa Barbara that featured Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Shawn Colvin, Bruce Hornsby and I forget who else … after the show I was talking to Jackson and said, “I am gonna finally make an album at 40 years old!” and he said, “Well, that’s a great idea! It takes about 40 years before you actually have anything to say.” So, I said, “Would you sing on it with me?” And he said, “Sure.” And the same with the others that sang on it. Was as simple as that.

Were you happy with the reception that it received on release?

Well, I was on a label that my manager and I made up so there was no machinery behind it. There was no money to promote a product like what is necessary. We were with a distributer that was calling Barnes and Noble and Borders and asking them to put it in their stores but I had no prior records, audience, or reason for that, so they said no. Then I got an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition with Renee Montagne. Well, it went well and the impulse buyers on their way to work that morning stopped at the Borders and Barnes and Nobles stores to get the cd but it wasn’t there, you see, so they had to search it out on our website etc. That takes too much time. We still sold 7000 cds that morning and would’ve sold 20,000 if it had been easily available in the stores. But that’s the catch 22. So, after that, the bookstores called our distributer and said, “Where is this cd everyone is asking us about?” And they said, “That is the one we tried to get you to put in your store.” Well, of course, then they did put it in the stores but it was too late. It’s an impulse buy. So, in answer to your question, was I pleased with the reception from that the first CD, I’d say yes. But I was handcuffed.

Clarence Clemons was an early mentor and invited you to E-Street band sessions for the River. How did that experience shape you?

Clarence Clemons was my guardian angel in every sense of the term. He was my second dad, uncle, whatever you wanna call it. He brought me to Los Angeles where I lived for 14 years and worked in those early days with Springsteen’s producer, Charles Plotkin, who helped me hone my craft. I wouldn’t be talking to you now had it not been for Clarence. It’s too long a story but he was one of the greatest friends and supporters I have ever had.

You also sung on records by T Bone Burnett and Leonard Cohen and were invited to compose some music with one Mr Bob Dylan. What were these experiences like for you as a young artist and what are your memories of that time?

Oh, I was fresh in Los Angeles in those days. And not a pretty picture in some ways. Yeah, I remember singing some with T-Bone and more with one of his cohorts, Stephen Soles, who I worked with quite a bit. As for Leonard, I was invited by Jennifer Warnes to sing on his I’m Your Man album, a great privilege. Entirely because of Jennifer at the time. It was a blast and Leonard was a blast. I will never forget the experience. The Dylan thing was a fluke. His publishers at the time just sent me a “song start” of his that they wanted me to take a look at...so I finished it and recorded it and sent it back to them. They were trying to make him some money, I think, maybe get some cuts, to pay for some of his overhead, I suppose. It has only been recorded by one artist whose record wasn’t widely released. Hardly anyone’s ever heard it. I almost did a weird version of it for my current cd but didn’t have the time.

Your songs have been covered by the likes of Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Bette Midler, Johnny Cash, Stevie Nicks, Jennifer Warnes, Trisha Yearwood and many others. Do you write with such artists in mind or do the songs come from a personal perspective initially?  

No, I do not think of other singers when writing, generally. I just write my songs cause I have to. Then afterward, I might think, “Oh, I’ll bet Trisha would really like this one.” So, I’ll send it to her. I did write this one Xmas song that’s very sad that I actually heard Willie Nelson singing in my head as I was writing it. But that’s rare. Never got it to him.

Has song-writing for others become your main focus or do you see the release of your own work as the key driver?

The release of my own work is for me, mostly, and my fans, cause I don’t have a situation that can get my records out there too far. It is like a calling card for my friends who are more famous than me to listen to and take songs from it, hopefully, and record them on their own albums so that the songs find their way out into the world.

Your second release in 2005, On a Good Day, received much praise. Did you feel a media momentum building at this stage of your career?

I just put my music out there as best I can. I have the acknowledgment of my peers and try not to have a lot of expectations beyond that.

In 2007 the Blue Light release took a new direction into a more jazz-based space. Was this a conscious decision and did you feel the need to redefine your sound?

Blue Light was made because, first of all, jazz inspired writing and chord changes are my favourite kind of writing to do, particularly torch. At that time, Henry Lewy, Joni Mitchell’s long time engineer/producer, who had also worked with me on many unreleased tracks, and been a lifelong friend, died. And because that style of music was his favourite that I did, I needed to do that record to grieve his loss. For starters

Mr Sun quickly followed in 2008 and remained in the area of reflective jazz-based arrangements. The lyrics referenced songs that dealt with the challenges of relationships, hope, loss and gained perspectives on life. Did you allow character writing to infuse your songs or did they continue to evolve from personal experience?

Mr. Sun was derived entirely from personal experience. The whole record was about a relationship with the same person, from start to finish.

Quiet Girl arrived in 2011. The songs included were a return to something of a roots/country base in terms of song structures. Was this a conscious decision?

Yes, it was a conscious decision to go back to the Americana cause I felt I had, over two albums, done the work I had wanted to do in jazz/blues. For the time, anyway.

Was the title in any way a reflection of your absence from the media glare over the previous years?

No, it was about a guitar player.

Shatter was released in 2013 and saw you speak of new beginnings and seeking a sense of rebirth. Was there a new perspective shaping you at this time?

Yes. But it’s too long a story. I was in a separation/divorce at the time after 28 years of marriage. So many of the songs were about what I was thinking at that time.

Your new record is now ready for release and can you tell us a little more about the central themes and the creative process behind it?

The new CD contains songs that pertain to love, some of my traveling abroad in the last few years and what it’s meant to me.

You have been touring in Europe, on and off, for a few years now. Touring can be hard work but do you find the journey and the miles worthwhile?

Touring Europe and seeing more of the world and its inhabitants has saved my life.

You have now moved to Nashville. Was this to be closer to the hit machine factory or was it for other reasons?

I moved here because I could no longer afford to care for my 1800s Victorian house on the California coast and rather than go all the way back to Maine, where I’m from, I thought I would try Nashville, since I have so many contacts here. Still working on that. We’ll see.  

Do you like playing live or would you prefer to remain as a home-based writer essentially?

I love playing Live and telling stories. And I like staying home. But staying home doesn’t get you very far. Around here, you gotta get out and be seen. So I try to do that every now and then.

When you look back over the arc of your career what reflections do you draw?

That’s a tough question. I have some regrets about missing some opportunities that I shouldn’t have missed cause I was asleep at the wheel at certain times. but at other times, I suited up and showed up and it was good. I’m grateful that other artists recorded my songs. It was a great living for a long time. It put my kids through various schools, it fed our faces. You know, I am grateful for the most part.

Has the changing distribution of music been a good or bad thing for your career? 

The internet and the way music is pretty much stolen these days has been very bad for me. The artists that have recorded my songs don’t sell records anymore so unless you are writing hit singles that are getting radio airplay, you don’t make any money anymore. I mean, I made a living on album cuts from album sales and those days are kind of over unless you’re on a very big record like a Beyoncé or Adele or someone like that. There’s still money in tv and film placements but those are hard to come by. I’m working on that. 

Is the present state of the music business something that you now embrace? 

No, I don’t embrace where the music biz has gone for the reasons I just stated. Also, I’m old fashioned. I loved getting a whole album by an artist. The album is its own full statement. The songs are meant to be listened to together. My albums certainly are. Not to be taken a song at a time out of context. I take the sequence of each record and the meaning behind the whole record very seriously. I do think it’s sad that people just download a song and put it on some playlist on their iPod. I mean, that’s just not what I ever envisioned. It’s art. You don’t order pieces of a painting. You buy the painting. 

What does the immediate future hold for you and is the glass half full or half empty?

I have no idea what the future holds for me or writers like me. I just bang away at it cause it’s what I do. I didn’t choose music. It chose me. I stopped trying to figure out if the glass is half empty or half full a long time ago and just do my work and hope I can do it again tomorrow

Interview by Paul McGee

Ariel Bui Interview

One of the most interesting new artists to come to the attention of Lonesome Highway at The Americana Music Festival in Nashville this year was a young female artist currently residing in Nashville by the name of Ariel Bui. The daughter of Vietnamese parents who emigrated to the States at the end of the Vietnam war, Bui is a classically trained musician who studied voice and piano at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida focusing on Piano Pedagogy, the art and business of teaching piano. She founded Melodia Studio in Nashville which currently provides education in piano to over twenty students and intends widening the project to include education for children as young as infants

Bui showcased her recently recorded self-titled album at Fond Object on September 25^th, introduced on stage by JP. Harris whose annual Sunday Morning Coming Down outdoor event has become a not to be missed feature of the festival.

Lonesome Highway was interested to learn more about Bui and her experimental and quite unique take on Americana which she and her excellent band performed during her forty-five-minute slot.

How would you describe your music?

It is challenging to describe my music, because I draw inspiration from so many different places and strive to defy genre. Since moving to Nashville in 2011, I was inspired to explore my Southern roots. Born and raised in the American South, I wanted to write songs that explored the depth and richness of distinctly American music like rock’n’roll, country, jazz & blues. However, with a background in classical music and a variety of other styles, I wanted to meld everything together in a way that was classic yet subtly experimental. I suppose I would describe my music as a unique melting pot of styles, with honest lyricism and delivery.

Your album launch in Nashville featured the album in its totality played in the same order as it on the record.  It seems to start with a somewhat traditional country feel and move further away from country and into more classical and jazzy territory towards the end. Was this intentional in choosing the order of the songs?

One of my main concerns going into recording this album was how to cohesively put together songs that sounded so different from each other. Producer Andrija Tokic not only assured me he would help choose what songs to include on the album from over twenty demos that I sent him, but he would also help me decide on song order.

When making an analog album with the intention that it is going to be on a vinyl record, there are a lot of considerations. You must consider how long each side needs to be in order to maintain best audio quality, with a maximum of 18 minutes per side being the sweet spot. Then you must consider the physics of the grooves, with sparser slower songs sounding better towards the end or inside of each side. Then, there’s also the consideration that each side becomes its own stand-alone unit, where typically Side A hosts the more conventional hits (in this case, the more country-sounding songs) while Side B hosts the less conventional.

Honestly, by the time we were done recording I was so mentally and emotionally exhausted, I gladly let Andrija take the producer lead on song order. After poring over his song order, I made only one change which was to make To All the Cowboys the first track instead of Jump the Gun. Andrija wanted the first track to immediately grab the listener with the catchy bass line, but on listening I wanted the first track to slowly sneak up on the listener and honour my long-time friends and fans who know that my last three releases were solo acoustic albums. I wanted to slowly introduce the band production. And to honour my classical sensibilities and background, I wanted the tonal centre to move gracefully from track to track. To All the Cowboys ends closer to where Jump the Gun begins, but then Jump the Gun ends on E where the next few songs hang out. Then we move from E to A with Moon Over Kentucky and slow the country tempo down to end Side A with Since You Went Away. Side B starts out with a fully orchestrated, spaghetti-western style interpretation of a song that’s on my first record Disguised As Fate from 2009 and slowly gets “weirder” from a single drop D tuning to a double drop D tuning until it ends on the stand-along jazzy track Honey, Moon. The way Honey, Moon ends, so jazzily and dreamily, feels like a cliff-hanger to me. A musical mystery of what’s to come next.

Take us through the recording of the album at The Bomb Shelter in Nashville and the influence of producer Andrija Tokic

I knew I wanted to record this album for analog vinyl. For years, many of my friends around town highly recommended Andrija Tokic at The Bomb Shelter, the little pink analog recording studio in East Nashville. One night, I went to Mickey’s Tavern and ran into Jem Cohen (Fond Object Records, The Ettes) who was playing foosball with Andrija. After being introduced, I sent Andrija some demos, visited the studio, and we decided to work together.

Between meeting in January and booking our June recording session, Andrija and I were in pre-production. I recorded rough demos of over twenty songs, trying to capture the essence of my songs in my kitchen onto my ipad. Andrija and I worked on dwindling down which ten or eleven songs we would want to record and what kind of instrumentation and vibe I wanted.

He recommended two session musicians, percussionist Dave Racine and multi-instrumentalist Jon Estes, assuring me of their precision and expertise. He had many spaghetti western ideas, and ideas of how to not make the songs sound like stereotypical Music Row country songs. He liked my weirder songs. He assured me that, though he had many ideas, he would always respect and defer to my artistic vision.

Once in the studio, we started with Appraisal, listening to the demo a couple times while Jon and Dave charted out the chord progressions and song structure. Andrija discussed with us what he was thinking for instrumentation, vibe, and sound. Then we would record the bed tracks live, meaning the main bare bones of the tracks were recorded live with me singing and playing guitar in an isolated booth, while Dave and Jon played drums and bass in the bigger room at the same time. We went through all the songs this way, charting the songs, discussing production ideas, and recording the bed tracks live to 2-inch tape with me in an isolated booth. Then, Jon overdubbed all the other instruments, from keys of all kinds, to supplementary guitars, cello, pedal steel, and some percussion.

We ran out of time after those first four days in the studio, so we booked some more dates in the fall. At that point, my friends Emma Berkey and Lizzie Wright came in to do a bulk of the harmonizing vocals while Jem Cohen offered additional support as an extra ear and voice for harmonies. Andrija acted as motivator, coach, and conductor, boosting morale while offering direction, suggesting ideas and changes and engineering everything. Working with tape, you only get a limited number of tracks to record with, so Andrija also called a lot of shots on which takes to keep and which takes to re-do and tape over.

Once harmonizing vocals were complete, Andrija and I chose a few songs for me to re-record main vocal tracks over. At first I felt a little insecure that I hadn’t “nailed” the vocal tracks while recording with the band the first time, but singing vocal overdubs probably became one of my favourite parts of recording. I got to set my guitar down and just sing. And not only sing, but sing my heart out to match the now fully-orchestrated tracks, not just sing over my own guitar or even with a small band. However, there were a few songs where we left the original vocal tracks, such as in Since You Went Away. There’s even a part where I accidentally hit the microphone with my face, which will never be able to be cut and pasted out.

Andrija then mixed the songs from the 24-track 2-inch tape to ¼-in tape, adjusting analog effects, manually fading parts in and out and adjusting levels live as the 24-tracks were condensed into a few tracks. We collaborated on things like which takes and mixes to keep, and I got to be my perfectionistic, detail-oriented self-asking that certain breath sounds were kept or cut, certain things end abruptly rather than fade. After mixing was done, we finalized a song order and Andrija literally cut the ¼” tape and taped the songs into the right order for the reels.

Eventually, I flew up to Brooklyn with the mixed tapes and sat in on the analog mastering session with Paul Gold at Salt Mastering. It was like watching a mad scientist at work in his lab, with all these gadgets, circular knobs and mathematical notes. He fine-tuned everything and I’m grateful I was able to fly up again when I was ready to press the record to vinyl. I got to watch Paul take all his mathematical notes, and in real-time witness the ¼” tape play through the board where he would adjust all the knobs at the start of each song as the grooves were cut into the lacquer, the template for what would become the metal stamps to stamp out the analog vinyl records. Not only was it a huge learning experience for me to witness this process, but I got to be there to catch any weird irregularities that may have arisen.

Was there a particular reason for choosing to live and record in Nashville?

It happened a little by accident, or fate, depending on how you look at it. After graduating with a degree in music from Rollins College in 2009, I took a totally different turn and moved to Taos, New Mexico, living off the grid for a couple years, working first with radically-sustainable architecture firm Earthship Biotecture and then with Americorps’ Energy Conservation Crew at Rocky Mountain Youth Corps.  When my term at Americorps ended, I had plans to move to Port-au-Prince, Haiti to work in Disaster Relief as a freelance activist with a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). But my life came to a head when I went to Burning Man in 2011 to convene with Burners Without Border and the NGO I was planning on working with.

At Burning Man, no money is exchanged for an entire week, and it really changes the way people interact with themselves and with others. While I was questioning what role I could play to make the world a better place, especially if the world were to end in, say, 2012 or something, it really became clear to me that I had to come to terms with my calling as a musical artist. Attending Burning Man and living in New Mexico, appropriately dubbed the Land of Enchantment, I was forced to do some serious soul-searching. I had put music off as an egotistical hobby at that point, but others appreciated my unique musical artistry and urged me to pursue music for my own sake and for theirs.

So when I returned to Taos and decided not to move to Haiti, I had to figure out what to do next. I had no shelter and no job. Someone I met at Burning Man travelled to Taos to intern with Earthship Biotecture and needed a place to park his RV. We struck up a deal. He could park his RV on my little quarter-acre of land if I could live in it, too. But winters in Taos are brutal, dropping to temperatures of -30 degrees Fahrenheit, and winter was coming. So, we struck up another deal. We could drive my car to his hometown near Toronto, Canada where he could find work and we could elope. Then I could become a Canadian citizen and hopefully receive benefits and make a living as a Canadian artist. But the relationship was untenable and shortly after arriving in Canada, it became extremely clear it was not going to work.

At this point, I was running out of money and options, so my father and stepmother convinced me to move in with them in the suburbs of Dallas, TX. In between Toronto and Dallas was an Earthship friend outside of Bowling Green, Kentucky and a close old friend in Nashville, TN. I spent a couple weeks helping Jacob Mudd with his Earthship build in Kentucky, pounding dirt into tires, playing music and reminiscing about Taos.

Then I headed off to Nashville, where I was reunited with my old friend Dylan Ethier. Dylan and I have been friends since high school and our friendship has revolved around music. We collaborated on my first record, Disguised As Fate, where he recorded some of the tracks, mixed the album, finalized the album art, and released it on his boutique label Love Note Collectables in 2008. During the week or two I visited Nashville, I met amazing people who were artists, musicians, industry people, and activists, and Dylan and I recorded my third album, Niche EP, in his living room. Dylan moved to Nashville to study sound engineering at SAE, yet he and I have always been a fan of lo-fi albums and artists. I love collaborating with Dylan because he understands and respects my artistic vision and it was a no-brainer when we recorded Niche EP live to tape, from a single mic straight to his reel-to-reel tape recorder with no editing and minimal mixing or EQing. We wanted the organic room of the sound and of my performance. It broke my heart a little when we converted the tape to digital files to then become limited edition cassette tapes, released on boutique cassette label, Tent Revivalist. At any rate, I felt like this third record was much more natural and indicative of the way I wanted to record moving forward.

I left Nashville for Dallas where I quickly had another falling out with my father, fled to stay with my mentally ill mother in my birth town of Shreveport, Louisiana for a couple weeks where I fell in love with a late-night college radio DJ, and headed back to Nashville where I crashed on Dylan’s couch until I could find work and get myself established in Nashville. It was clear I could definitely build a life and career as a musician here, amongst like-minded people and friends. It’s taken a few years to work up to the point where I am now, and it is proving to be the best move I’ve ever made.

Comparisons have been made with another wonderfully talented artist Angel Olsen. Are you comfortable being placed in a category of female experimentalists such as Olsen and Fiona Apple?

Not only would I be honoured to be placed in a category with female experimentalists such as Angel Olsen and Fiona Apple, but it is a dream of mine. I will admit, I get really star-struck by people I admire deeply, so I dream deep-down of just getting to become friends and equals with my heroes. That way I’m not only a blubbering fangirl, but hopefully, fingers-crossed, a respectable peer in the world of music and art.

The word experimental is funny, because I feel like what makes artists like Fiona Apple or Angel Olsen experimental is not that they necessarily do anything avant-garde, but more so that they are genuine and unique, which is what I strive to be.

Where did your musical inspirations come from growing up to lead to a career as a singer-songwriter and performer?

Gosh, I have so many influences, it’s hard to narrow it down. But when I started writing music at around fifteen years-old, it was contemporary artists like Fiona Apple and Regina Spector that inspired me to pursue song writing and performing. Fiona’s performing, lyricism, artistry and production really drew me and has stuck with me over the years. When I was fifteen, Regina Spector had two stripped down, self-released albums out (11:11 and Songs) and was gigging around New York City. I followed her on her website where she would communicate with her fans on a chat forum, but I was too young to get into the bar shows during my summer vacations in New York. Instead, I did by chance get to witness Beyoncé perform with Destiny’s Child when they performed their first album for free in Time Squares’ Virgin Megastore. If you bought the album you could watch them perform in the book store and get their autographs, which I did. Following these humble women’s careers from the early stages has been very inspiring.

Ultimately though, it was the underground music scene in Brevard County, Florida that inspired me to write and perform. When I was a teenager, there were countless bands making music that will never be heard by most ears because it all happened in garages and weird DIY spaces, on burnt CDs and Myspace profiles never to be re-released. The spirit of making art for art’s sake and sharing it within a community of friends, that will always be an integral part of who I am musically. My teenage years in Brevard County, Florida was where I learned to write songs, perform live, record an album, book and promote shows, and do everything DIY. These skills and sense of community have laid the foundations for me to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter and performer, and now to hopefully evolve to reach a wider audience.

What artists in particular have inspired you in a manner that you would be proud to achieve in inspiring others?

On this album, I was inspired by older artists like Odetta, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Mississippi John Hurt, and Bob Dylan, while also being influenced by more modern artists like Angel Olsen, Fiona Apple, and The Ettes for being classy, unique, and genuine. Elliott Smith is also a huge inspiration to me for his song writing, guitar playing, and tasteful yet simple production. I also draw inspiration from bands like The Beatles, Radiohead, and Bjork because of the way that they have been able to evolve and change over time while remaining true to themselves as artists.

These artists, and too many others to name, have inspired me by making me feel less alone. Every artist is inspiring in different ways, but I find that authenticity and honesty carry through and that’s what speaks to me. I’ve felt inspired by the way people express their emotions, or execute a tone or performance, how they navigate their ever-evolving careers. But at the end of the day, I would be proud to inspire others in the way so many artists have inspired me to connect with ourselves, each other, and the entire planet and universe in a more honest and meaningful way.

Your lyrics appear both deep and very dark, in some ways a contradiction to your upbeat and buoyant personality. Do you consider song writing a necessary medium for you to comfortably express your inner feelings?

People seem to make the observation of this contradiction quite often, while the people who know me most don’t find the contrast surprising at all. In my daily life, I prefer to be upbeat and friendly, perhaps because I want everyone around me to be as comfortable as possible. However, I do absolutely consider song writing a necessary medium for me to comfortably express my inner feelings, and in a way, make people comfortable with their deep, dark feelings, too. I experienced a great deal of trauma as a child including child sexual abuse, and though I am a high-functioning individual who is not defined by my trauma, I live with many symptoms of PTSD. Coming from a family of immigrants who fled the Vietnam War, I have many theories about intergenerational trauma and epigenetics. Music is a healing force in my life, a meditative process where I commune with my subconscious and the collective unconscious. Without music and song writing, I honestly don’t think I would be alive today.

You combine your performing career with the Melodia Studio teaching vision which seems the ideal combination. Is it your intention to remain in Nashville and expand both projects?

Yes. As both musical careers grow simultaneously, I do often wonder what the future holds, but thus far my plans are to continue living in Nashville and to expand upon both my careers as a musical artist and as a musical educator ... and hopefully as a DJ at our new community radio station WXNA as well. I aspire to find a permanent live/work space, hopefully with the help of Nashville non-profit The Housing Fund’s Make A Mark Project which aims to help provide affordable live/work options for artists in Nashville. With gentrification and development on the rise, many artists and low-income residents of Nashville are getting forced out of the city.

I would eventually like to be able to provide a more permanent space not only for my students, but for other artists, teachers and their students as well. I currently have students as young as three and as old as retirees, however, I want to begin offering group classes for infants and toddlers and eventually be able to somehow offer lessons to underprivileged children and adults as well. My thoughts are that if my own musical career gets to a place where I need to step away from teaching sometimes, I can bring in other teachers and eventually other administrative assistants as well. But I feel very attached to Melodia Studio, because I helped form it and have stuck with it through thick and thin because of my belief that everyone could benefit from a musical education. Music is a healing force and it is beneficial to individuals and communities for an infinite number of reasons. Whenever I get overwhelmed by the task of promoting my own music, teaching offers me the opportunity to watch someone else discover their own musical journey, which is extremely humbling and gratifying. Combining a career as a musical artist and a career as a musical educator, really allows me to pursue my dreams while having a balanced, humble and stable grounding. It really is an ideal combination.

Interview and photography by Declan Culliton

Emily Barker Interview

Emily Barker is an Australian singer-songwriter and composer currently residing in the UK. She is an artist that continually challenges herself and seems to thrive and excel on a more than full workload. Her early career featured recordings as a duo in The Low Country followed by solo albums leading to a number of critically acclaimed recordings with The Red Halo Band. Her 2015 album The Toerag Sessions, recorded live to tape at London’s Toerag Studios, featured solo recordings of material from her earlier albums.  She subsequently formed Applewood Road with American artists Amy Speace and Amber Rubarth and recorded the album of the same name with them early this year to extremely positive reviews.

Her varied work schedule has also gained her awards for composing and writing the theme music to the BBC TV’s Wallander, starring Kenneth Brannagh, followed by the theme music to the BBC TV drama The Shadow Line. She has also recently composed music for Daniel Barber’s The Keeping Room and a soundtrack for the feature film Hector directed by Jake Gavin.

This year also found Barker in Memphis Tennessee recording an album not yet released and including some of the finest Memphis session players. Lonesome Highway had the pleasure of an invitation to a preview of the album, at Alley Taps, Nashville in September. The preview suggested possibly Barkers strongest work to date and featured the collection of musicians that play on the album.

Lonesome Highway arranged to meet with the convivial and bubbly Barker when she arrived in Dublin Airport and given the rush hour traffic travelling from the Airport to the city centre and a potential sixty-minute journey, suggested they conduct the interview during the journey. Barkers response was ‘great idea, good time management’. Not surprising for an artist that never seems to waste a minute! 

Starting at the present time and your recent recording at Sam Phillips Studio in Memphis Tennessee. How did that come about?

I was looking for a producer to work with having worked with The Red Halo Band for about nine years. We had developed a quite distinct British sound over that time and when we decided to stop working together the gates were really wide open for me as to what direction I should go in. I started writing a lot, I think I had written about fifty songs for my next record and within those songs there were a lot of different styles going on. The songs also included quite a few co-writes that I had started doing when I went to Nashville a few years ago and continued back in the UK.

So stylistically there were a few different things going on with the songs. I started looking around for a producer and ended up asking the engineer that I had worked with on the Applewood Road album in Nashville, a guy called Chris Mara who works at 1979 Studios, to recommend an up and coming producer for me to work with. He had worked with this guy Matt Ross Spang, whom I googled to discover that he had done the Margo Price album and Jason Isbell’s record Something More Than Free and also found out that he had worked at Sun Studio for eleven years. His story is really interesting, when he was fourteen he went to Sun Studio to record a song with his friends and fell in love with the studio. As soon as he got his driver’s licence at sixteen he got a job as a tour guide there and would drive there after school and do the tour guide thing and then sit in on the sessions which always started in the evenings as the studio was closed during the day. So eventually when the head engineer left Sun he got the job as lead engineer at the age of nineteen. He actually restored the studio with the original equipment that Sam Phillips had, gave it a new lease of life and got it up and running again.

Anyway, I sent an e-mail to Matt after we were introduced by Chris and I sent him my Toerag album as I thought he would be into that sound as it’s all analogue and recorded to tape. He loved what he heard and asked me to send him some of the songs, I sent him five songs at first and he asked for another batch and with them he picked out the soul and blues thread that I had running through some of the songs and him been from Memphis would have been tuned to that type of sound. He suggested some artists that I should listen to like Dan Penn and Ann Peebles, who I really loved and already knew because when I was a teenager I grew up listening to a lot of soul music, what inspired me to sing was hearing Aretha Franklin.

When I’d come home from school I’d lock myself in my bedroom and try and sing like Aretha. I’d never really written in that style but it is music that I really love. So we got talking about a plan and I went over in February of this year to meet up.  He arranged to meet in this place called Sam Phillips Recording Studio.

I didn’t know where that was so I put the address in my sat nav and arrived at this building where there was a lot of construction works going on. When I finally managed to work out how to get in and opened the door I found this beautiful old studio and Matt was in there with Rick Steff who plays keys on the record. He went on to tell me that this was the building that Sam Phillips designed himself in 1958 and over the course of a couple of years built it. It was like stepping inside Sam Phillips mind. It’s a lot bigger than Sun and has two studio rooms and it had all the Sun Record Label and Administration upstairs including Sam Phillips office and it looks like he just stepped out of the room, all sixties style and red shaggy carpets and white vinyl seating It’s incredible.

The Memphis session musicians you had at your album preview show at Ally Taps in Nashville were amazing players. How did you recruit them?

Indeed. David Cousar on guitar, played with Al Green, Rick Steff on keys plays with Lucero and has worked with Dexy Midnight Runners, bass player Dave Smith has played with Norah Jones, John Mayall and drummer Steve Potts played with Neil Young. Matt pulled them all together, they’re local Memphis, incredibly down to earth. Unlike Nashville, which has a large commercial infrastructure for music, Memphis has had its heyday and doesn’t have the same commercial infrastructure. These musicians, if they’re not on tour, are hanging about and happy to get the work and (laughs) at a reasonable price. The sound happened for the record partly through the songs that I wrote, many of which are quite ballad sounding and could have been produced in a whole different way, but because of Matt’s Memphis sound background and these guys playing as they do, it came out as being more of a country soul album I guess. 

How long did the album take to record?

Four and a half days, we did it completely live so I would play one of the songs to the guys on guitar or piano and we would talk about the groove, it’s all about the groove in Memphis (laughs) and then we’d go to our stations in the studio and Matt would hit record and we’d start playing. So with the core band, which was those guys, we did ten songs in four and a half days and then got some horn players down for some of the songs and also had a quartet came and did string parts as well. Backing vocals were by an incredible woman called Susan Marshall, who I did the vocals together with. We did the whole thing in seven days and mixed it as well while I was there. 

When can we expect to hear the final product?

It should come out early next year.

Working back from that and the The Applewood Road venture and album which is superb.  How did you manage to write and record the album given the geographical distances between yourself Amy Speace and Amber Rubarth? 

Well it all happened quite spontaneously. We had met in a café in Nashville and hadn’t intended forming a band, but having a few mutual friends who made the introductions, we decided to go to Amy’s house and write a song together. So we wrote the song Applewood Road and recorded it at 1979 Studios in Nashville standing around one microphone and loved what we had done. It was initially going to be a one off song but anyone we showed the song to encouraged us to do an album and so we did. We didn’t have any plan after the album to tour but along came a label who encouraged us to tour. We have done a lot in the UK with it and we may look at doing something in America, we’ve had some good interest in Nashville so we will see. We are all singer songwriters in our own way so we could only do it when we all have the time together. It’s never going to be a full time thing for all of us it’s more of an add on, unless of course someone finances us to do it as flights are involved for us all to get together.

I’m intrigued by your TV work. Did that work come by way of a commission or were you approached on the basis of music you had previously written?

I was doing a house party at Tufnell Park in North London, playing in these people’s garden and after the show this man called Martin Phipps came up and bought one of my CDs. He rang me a few days later, it turns out he is a famous film and television composer, and he asked me if I’d be interested going down to his studio and re-record my song called Nostalgia to fit with a BBC series called Wallander starring Kenneth Brannagh based on the books by the Swedish Author Henning Mankell. So I went down and did that and the director loved it and it became the theme tune of the very popular TV series. From that and through Martin I got more work on another crime thriller called The Shadow Line which I did the theme song with a song called Pause. I then got my own film commission from a writer called Jake Gavin, it was his first script and he ended up getting funding for the film which is called Hector which stars Peter Mullan and I did all the music for that.

Was this all after the release of your album Dear River?

 Wallander happened in 2008 and Dear River came out in 2013 and I started doing the Hector work in 2014. So yes, the film actually came after Dear River.

Dear River for me contains what I would consider signature tunes. That struck me before I was aware you were involved in film

Well thank you

Continuing to work backwards, had you a game plan when you came to the UK from Australia in 2002?

I had no plans for a career in music, I came over because I had dropped out of university. I had been doing an arts degree there but didn’t feel that was what I wanted to do. I was already a musician and had done some touring but was a little bit disillusioned with the Australian scene at that point, not that I’d done national touring. Australia at that time was all about music you could dance to and there wasn’t much of a listening crowd around. My intention was to go travelling around the world basically, I was working in bars and waitressing saving up money to go travelling through Europe, back packing.

I spent six months in Brazil, I loved their martial arts called Capoeira, the dancing and whole subculture there. I ended up in Canada having travelled for three years and during that time I kept on writing songs and at one stage was based in Cambridge where there was a really great music scene going on there particularly with The Broken Family Band who becoming really successful. I was opening for them from time to time and ended up meeting Rob Jackson, who’s a great guitarist and we formed a band accidently (laughs) called The Low Country just before my visa expired. He had a set at The Cambridge Folk Festival and he invited me to sing a few songs with him, I also sang a couple of my songs which he accompanied me on.

It went down very well so we decided to record those songs just before I left for home. He sent the recordings into John Peel who started playing the songs on his radio show. Having returned to Australia after three years the last thing I expected was to get a call from Rob telling me that John Peel had been playing our record and that he kept getting gig requests. So we said ‘let’s do it’ and made a couple of albums which was the beginning of me moving to the UK to try and pursue a music career.

From there to The Red Halo Band. You recorded three albums with them?

Yes. I did do my first album Photos, Fires, Fables with them and another bunch of musicians also but hadn’t actually formed the band at that stage. I followed with Despite The Snow, the album that Nostalgia is on and then Almanac and Dear River all of which were recorded as Emily Barker and The Red Halo Band.

On the basis of the various projects you are involved in do you consider the UK as the right location for you career wise particularly with the TV work you have been involved in?

I would love to do more work in America, I’ve done quite a few shows in Nashville which is inundated with talented artists, however If I could get a working visa I’d consider basing myself out there for a while. Having said that I think the UK music scene is very strong at the moment and is where a lot of my fan base is. I also tour a lot in Germany and throughout Europe and the UK is an ideal base for those markets. I’m just about to do a tour of Germany with Scottish band Runrig , they’ve been around for forty years and we are playing stadiums in Germany, which is a very loyal market for musicians. I’m also very excited about working back in Australia where the market has changed and Americana is now a growing genre there as it also is in South East Asia where they particularly love when artists come over and tour. It’s also on the way to Australia which makes it very convenient. I’m actually interested in world domination I guess!

I can’t believe this is your first trip to Ireland! How did the tour come about?

I know, I know! I’m going to love it and I’m delighted to be here. It really doesn’t make sense that I haven’t been here before Ireland being such a music loving country.

The tour came about through Ciaran Lavery, who is a friend of mine and came over and opened shows for me in the UK, he did five shows with me last year and out of the blue he emailed me to see if I’d be interested touring with him over here which I was very much up for and I was free which helped.

Interview by Declan Culliton - Oct 2016