Tag: Fairport Convention

Basic Folk – Richard Thompson

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Richard Thompson’s memoir, Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967 – 1975 (now out in paperback) is a page-turner of a read about a legend at the dawn of British folk rock. Thompson details his early days with Fairport Convention, one of the most influential folk bands of all time. He writes how they strived to be different and sought out then-unknown songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen while adapting a modern sound for traditional British folk songs, some that were over 500 years old. He recounts tragedy when the band suffered a huge loss: the 1969 car accident that killed their drummer, Martin Lamble and Richard Thompson’s girlfriend of just two weeks, Jeannie Franklyn. He writes about their first experiences in America: rolling around Los Angeles with the likes of John Bonham and Janis Joplin and their triumphant debut at The Philadelphia Folk Festival.

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RT was game to get into anything I threw at him: talk about experiencing such excruciating grief at a young age, what British fortitude means to him, did he ever really get to know his parents, being outwardly calm and inwardly chaotic. There’s a chapter in the book where he details some session work he did in between the time he left Fairport Convention in 1971 and his solo work and work with his then-wife, Linda Thompson. I had a blast looking up all these albums on YouTube, especially Lal and Mike Waterson’s Bright Phoebus from 1972. Very fun music and fun that RT is playing on it! I highly recommend his memoir and hold out my hopes that there may be a part two in his future. I think there is much left to write: his days after the very public breakup with Linda, establishing himself as a solo act and then coming back to work with his extended family in the group Thompson in 2014 on the album Family. Richard’s got a busy summer ahead of him with a couple of cruises and the tenth anniversary of his writing camp, Frets and Refrains. I’m grateful he was able to make some time for us on Basic Folk!

Photo Credit: David Kaptein

Stephen Malkmus of Pavement Ventures Down an Acoustic Road on New Album

Posted on by Editor

Pop and rock performers of mainstream and indie varieties alike, and their promotional teams, tend to make a production out of explaining sudden embraces of stripped-back production. Often, they spin tales of artistic ennoblement — of Justin Timberlake and John Mayer escaping the glossy trappings of their home genres to do soul searching in more pastoral musical settings; of Kesha and Lady Gaga staking their claims to singer/songwriter approaches that seemed slightly more grounded and organic than the club bangers of their pasts.

They temporarily tether themselves to seemingly sturdy, sincere, rooted approaches, and enlist musical guides and collaborators knowledgeable in those lineages. Even Beck, one of the leading postmodern shape-shifters of the alt-rock era, treated venturing closer to folk as a means of trading a reliance on irony for reflection, and Thurston Moore, long associated with the artfully discordant squall of Sonic Youth, consciously personalized his songwriting approach on an acoustic project that Beck produced.

Stephen Malkmus, whose bristly, brainy 1990s indie rock band Pavement was a distant descendant of Sonic Youth and a contemporary of Beck, isn’t at all oblivious to the fact that there are scripts for lending meaningful context to newly cultivated folk leanings. But Malkmus has carried his slouchy, self-deprecating demeanor into his 50s, and it’s his style to be amiably noncommittal. He’s ventured down the acoustic road himself on an album helmed by Chris Funk of the Decemberists and Black Prairie and wryly titled Traditional Techniques. Coming from Malkmus, that’s not meant to come off as any sort of claim to mastery.

He’s used to being interviewed by general interest outlets, not roots-versed ones, so he tries to temper expectations right off the bat when speaking to BGS, describing his knowledge base of folk forms as “sort of a crude appreciation.” He even tries a bit of deflection: “Chris, who I did the record with, he would be able to speak on more levels than me, you know?”

In reality, Malkmus’ catalog with Pavement and his subsequent band the Jicks betrayed flickers of folk interest. He’s admiring of Bert Jansch’s ’60s-era guitar innovations and appreciative of the Nickel Creek cover that introduced his songwriting to the virtuosic string band pop scene in the early 2000s. And he’s playing his 12-string more than ever.

The 10 tracks he recorded with Funk, bolstered by the contributions of guitarist Matt Sweeney and Qais Essar, renowned player of the rabab (an Afghani cousin of the lute), are accomplished and expansive. Malkmus’ sublimely oblique, thoroughly contemporary meanderings easily merge with spry, spindly rhythms and gently psychedelic interplay. It’s an experiment that paid off, and he stepped away from helping with his kids quarantine homeschooling to offer his measured musings on the making of it.

BGS: In the official narrative around this album, you make its origins sound happenstance — as though you were recording a different kind of project with Chris Funk and happened to get distracted by the acoustic instruments he had lying around.

SM: That’s somewhat true. But I did get into the 12-string guitar. I have all these dad images: “If you try one drug and then you try a pure, stronger version of it, you never want to go back.” That’s what it kind of feels like with the 12-string guitar, going back to the 6-string. Once your fingers get used to it, it’s just chiming and you’re hearing all these overtones. During this bunkering, I’ve been playing a lot.

You’ve downplayed your folk literacy, but I can hear at least a general interest sprinkled throughout your catalog in songs like “We Dance,” “Folk Jam,” “Father to Sister of Thought,” and “Pink India.”

Yeah, that’s true.

What music were you acquainted with in a British folk-rock or psychedelic folk vein that felt relevant to what you wanted to do?

Richard Thompson and the Fairport Convention, the whole British world, and also Bert Jansch that was a huge influence on Led Zeppelin and Fairport Convention. The English tradition, those kinds of spartan arrangements that were kinda catchy too. I guess I like catchy things. I was coming from a Beatles world, like, “Fuck, that’s getting in my head, that melody.” I also felt with the pickers of England, Richard and Sandy Denny, I would hear something catchy in there and grooving. There was, like, a groove.

In some other interviews you’ve mentioned Gordon Lightfoot as a vocal touchstone.

Oh, I love him.

But there were a couple of performances on Traditional Techniques that made me think less of Lightfoot and more of Beck’s Sea Change, like the calm, composed way you sing “Flowin’ Robes.” It made me wonder whether you learned anything from acoustic forays by your alt-rock peers.

Even the first song, “ACC Kirtan,” I thought it back on that one, just because it’s kind of slow and probing. It might be [Beck’s] Mutations instead of Sea Change or something. On all his acoustic albums, he had big world music vibes to it that I could see him jamming out, like throwing a sitar on there or something. Those albums by him, they’re super rich and high fidelity and beautifully recorded by Nigel Godrich. But I guess I don’t really think of those contemporaries when you’re making music at the same time.

How do you relate to the ways that rock or pop musicians’ excursion into folk-leaning forms are presented as personally significant moves, like they’re stripping away the noise and gloss and baring their souls, getting in touch with their roots?

That’s a classic way to see it, right? And also it goes with the sounds; it’s quieter, more direct, versus just naked or whatever.

Everything sort of happens quickly with me. I’ve said a couple times in some interviews, in the back of my mind I always wanted to play an acoustic record of some sort. I just didn’t know how or what to do. I wanted to do it because I thought people would like it too. It wasn’t only just ‘cause I was dying to do it. I also think about what I wanna release and what people might be interested in, and what I think I might be good at, of course. There’s no doubt that I’d think that most people have already heard me that are gonna buy the record. They would like to hear, “What would Steve do in an acoustic environment?”

And of course, we wanna surprise people and do it differently. If you imagined it in your mind, you might not have thought that it would have standup bass and Afghani-American guys playing eastern instruments. We’re sort of aware, or at least I am, of having a little bit of a risk, something gambled, besides not only that you’re just playing quietly. Putting yourself where you’re in a position with people you don’t know; we don’t really know how it’s gonna sound, a little more like a jazz situation in some ways. I didn’t really know what people were gonna play, but I had some rules for Chris and I, which were that we were gonna play it all live in the studio, and the drums were gonna be real quiet, and the bass too.

How much of the album would you say reflects you adapting to or embracing different musical forms and how much is you just framing the thing you do differently?

In the end, for better or worse, I feel like it’s just me putting a version on what I do. Because if you’re just self-aware, what is it really but that? When you’re writing the songs, you can imitate other people in your mind. There’s a lot of that going on. As you run through different ways to approach a riff, you’re usually thinking of not of yourself at first: “This kinda sounds like Led Zeppelin or PJ Harvey,” real basic broad strokes. Then I riff off that. I try to think of the best way. And also in the communal [setting], listen to other people; it’s really important to not have stuck to your own thing.

I’ve gotten the sense that people coming to this music with a working knowledge of your catalog with Pavement and the Jicks find some of these songs, like “What Kind of Person,” to be softer or more sentimental by comparison. Did you think at all about the kinds of tones that people tend to associate with singer-songwriters and folk songs?

Well, I would be thinking that there’s some really deadly serious lyrics about not only “my heart was broken,” but “I’m a poor man that died tragically or whatever and it sucked.” Most of the English ballads are really sad material. You can look at them in a Marxist way or something and say these people were screwed from the outset. I think of folk songs like that, but I also think of Michael Hurley and freaky geniuses like him playing acoustic music in a small bar to stoned people, and it’s not really deadly serious. Sometimes it is for a second, and then it’s funny, or we’re just being together making music, lower stakes. When I say low stakes, the stakes are as simple as just playing with some people in a room, like conjuring up music together, lyrics. Maybe you’re doing them to make the guitarist to your right laugh for a second, rather than make a song for a mother who lost her child young. You know what I mean? [laughs]

You’re talking about the tragic ballad tradition, the stuff that people think of coming over from the British Isles. The modern folk singer-songwriter movement has its own set of expectations in terms of tone and perspective.

Newer stuff, I don’t listen super closely to lyrics or what people are singing about, but it’s usually about love gone wrong.

Wait, you don’t listen that closely to lyrics in general?

Yeah, not really. Sometimes. It really depends. Most things I only listen to once or twice, for better or worse. Of course, other things I dig into super deeply. It’s probably to the detriment of my songwriting or people that like super-tight stuff. A line pops out and I’m like, “That was fuckin’ awesome.” It has to be set up by other things in the song. It’s not like you can just say that line with absolutely nothing around it. I’m more like I hear it in a song, or the way a person sings it, and I love it, rather than looking at it on the written page or thinking of it as just lyrics.

You seem to have a healthy amount of self-awareness about being a musician known for one thing, moving into a different lane.

It’s not only what I think, but also when I played it to other people before I put it out, I listen to others who say, “I like that one.” Or, “Why do you want to release that?” So it’s not only self-awareness but being self-aware enough to ask other people what they think. I think for all musicians, there are certain songs we make that we really like that other people like less. [Laughs]

All photos: Samuel Gehrke

Best of: Live at Ear Trumpet Labs

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Since 2011 Portland, Oregon-based Ear Trumpet Labs has been blessing the music world with their finely crafted microphones, with their clean, natural sound and designs reminiscent of the styles of the 1930s and 40s. And for the past three years, they’ve been gifting us listeners with beautiful examples of their high quality equipment through their Workshop Sessions, pairing exquisite videography with master musicianship. We’re looking back at some of our favorites from 2019 as we move into the new year, when BGS + ETL will be partnering to bring you more content live at Ear Trumpet Labs!

Jerry Douglas & Tommy Emmanuel – “Choctaw Hayride”

We’re not alone in our love for this session: it was one of our BGS readers’ favorite stories of the year. But really how could it not be? It doesn’t get much better than two masters of their crafts getting together in a workshop and just letting it rip.

Both are using Edwina microphones, and there’s also a stereo pair of Delphinas as room mics.

The Local Honeys – “The Redhead Yodel no. 1 [Mainliner]”

In their unfortunately rare ode to the female traveller amidst a plethora of hobo songs in American folk music, the Local Honeys bring us what they call “a lovey-dovey, yodelly-wodelly one.” Is there anything better than a yodelly-wodelly love song from the perspective of a female hobo? No. Is there anything better than the Local Honeys? No.

Anthony D’Amato – “Party’s Over”

Anyone else still recovering from all those holiday parties?

Anna Tivel – “Minneapolis”

Once the holiday cheer has passed, this time of year can be heavy. Tivel tells BGS this song is about “that stagnant winter sadness that can take over everything until you have to physically move yourself to shake it loose.” This stirring string arrangement may envelop you in those depths of winter, but it just might give you the hope to get yourself un-stuck.

Rachel Sermanni – “Farewell, Farewell”

Scottish folk musician Sermanni’s gentle delivery and sparse accompaniment of this Richard Thompson tune draws out the influence of the British folk ballad even more than the original Fairport Convention release in the late ‘60s. We dare you to not be completely drawn in by this breathtaking rendition.

Jefferson Hamer – “Alameda”

Hamer’s 2018 release Alameda is a collection of “road stories,” its stunning title track a tale of a traveling worker and a lost love.

The Brother Brothers – “Angel Island”

Adam and David Moss’s arrangement of this devastating Peter Rowan-penned story of a Chinese immigrant couple separated and detained at San Francisco’s Angel Island, a regrettably common occurrence during the years of the immigration station’s operation from 1910-1940, is almost unbearably haunting, and for good reason. This is a story that we as a culture shouldn’t soon forget.

Claire Hitchins – Emma

Aside from the beautiful lyrics painting the picture of our leading lady, and the easy, light vocal delivery, the look of pure peace on Hitchins’ face might just be the cherry on top of this session. “We’ll rise with love, my love, I believe we are worthy.”

Greg Blake – “Say Won’t You Be Mine”

Greg Blake brings some bluegrass from Colorado to the Ear Trumpet Labs with this Stanley Brothers classic.

The Lasses & Kathryn Claire – “Here Now”

Amsterdam folk duo The Lasses team up with Portland singer-songwriter Kathryn Claire to create this captivating session featuring violin, guitar, bodhrán, and trio vocals that could warm any lonely heart this cold winter.

 

Devendra Banhart Finds His ‘Ma’ Muse on Both Sides of the Pacific

Posted on by Editor

On Ma, the new album by folk-globalist Devendra Banhart, there are appearances by singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon and 1970s English folk-rock cult heroine Vashti Bunyan. Lyrics reference his love for Brazilian stars Chico Barque and Caetano Veloso as well as Japanese electro-art-pop pioneer Haruomi Hosono. And no less than Carole King is a presence in a co-write nod via lyrics drawn from “So Far Away.”

But when it comes to guest stars on the album, there’s one that’s hard to top: the Pacific Ocean.

Yup. That noted body of water is credited, fittingly, for “ocean sounds” on the song “October 12.” It’s a song of grief after the death of a friend, and Banhart, who spent much of his youth in Venezuela, his mother’s native country, sings it in Spanish.

“Actually, on every track there is the ocean,” he says, freshly landed at home in Los Angeles after flying across that very ocean from Singapore. “You don’t really hear it, but it is throughout the whole record. What inspired us to do that in the beginning, we recorded in a Buddhist temple in Kyoto with no walls. It is open to a garden. We wanted to create that feel on the album.”

Working with his longtime producer Noah Georgeson and several of his regular musical cohorts, Banhart was invited to record in that temple for just one hour, after a brief Asian tour. The experience was something they wanted to extend through the whole of the album, which they later accomplished by recording in a studio in a house along the Northern California coastline.

“You could hear the Pacific,” he says. “We had the windows open. That’s the big support system for the songs.”

It’s a nurturing presence, even in its most subtle ambience, it being the primal source of life. And as such, it represents the life-giving concept at the heart of the album: motherhood.

“Maternity is the theme,” he says.

There’s more than that here, of course. There is grief in songs such as “Memorial,” about his father, with temple bells mixed in the music, and “The Lost Coast,” about death and loss. The magic of serendipity permeates the album, as does the state of being open to what the world offers. None of the songs are explicitly about motherhood, per se. The notion, in many poetic manifestations, ties it together.

“There’s the relationship one has with a country,” he says, distressed about devastating political and economic strife of the nation in which he was nurtured. “Venezuela has been a constant issue on this record. Moments before now I was talking with my family and reading about what is going on there. It’s a truly apocalyptic situation. My way of writing about it is so related to my mother. At this point I can’t separate my own mother from Venezuela.”

His mother is not currently living there and the last time he visited was two years ago, but he has aunts and uncles and cousins who are there, seeing their country and its people suffer greatly. For him, it’s hard to separate that situation, with which he has such a deep personal relationship, from suffering elsewhere, whether from his own roots or in places where he has spent considerable time (Nepal and Tibet, among them) or that he has merely seen on the news.

“There is the insane suffering of the Venezuelan people, the political madness of the situation in the U.S., Duterte in the Philippines, China and Tibet suffering so much, and the people in Hong Kong.” Banhart seeks solace in the connections he’s made through music, “There’s music and art as the parent-and-child relationship. I turn to music to be consoled, to be less alone, to feel loved and nurtured.”

In that regard, few are more significant to him than Vashti Bunyan. The English singer came from the same folk-rock scene that gave us Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and the Incredible String Band. Her 1970 album, Just Another Diamond Day, languished in obscurity until the late 1990s when it was “discovered” by musicians in a nascent movement that came to be called freak-folk, a young Banhart among its numbers. That brought about the album’s reissue, and various new recording projects, some involving Banhart. Now in her mid-70s, Bunyan sings with him here on the album’s closing “Will I See You Tonight?”

“Within that maternal theme, I don’t think anyone in my life encapsulates the archetype of the wisdom of artists as much as Vashti does, in terms of that nurturing quality of music,” he admits.

Banhart also seeks to make, or embrace, connections in music itself, some coming quite by surprise. This album is threaded with inspirations from and references to music from many lands and cultures, often connecting in ways wondrous, delightful, and serendipitous. Rarely is any of that planned — at least consciously.

“Sometimes the lyrics come first,” he says. “The music is a platform for the lyrics. As you start, as the song starts to take shape, there’s some collaborative element with other musicians, but also with the song itself, in that way. I don’t mean to be oblique, but it’s this strange way that it takes you in these certain directions. It’s out of your hands.

Sometimes it’s easy, he says, as in the song “Carolina,” which cites an earlier song that has influenced him.

“It’s a song for a song, a song written for the song ‘Carolina’ by Chico Barque,” he says. “It’s an homage to Brazilian music and South American music. There’s a samba feel to it, and me really singing about wanting to hear that song and saying I should probably learn Portuguese someday. In those lyrics it was easy to see the shape of that music.”

Others have more convoluted paths, but in them reveal the global pathways he has so openly relished in his music and in his life.

“In some songs I was quite surprised what was coming out.”

“Kantori Ongaku” offered several such surprises. In the chorus, sung in Japanese, he uses words from a song by Hosono, one of the founders of Japan’s landmark trio Yellow Magic Orchestra. At one point in the cited lyrics, Hosono sings, in English, the words “country music.” That planted some ideas for Banhart as he wrote his song although he wished to sidestep literalism.

“I wanted to do a Buck Owens thing here but that wouldn’t work out,” he says. “J.J. Cale was a great hero of mine so I took J.J. Cale as inspiration, not literally, but that kind of platform emerged for the song. Those things aren’t really done consciously. There are people who are inspirations I’ve been listening to for so long that it enters into the music, naturally.”

In some ways, Ma is a culmination of Banhart’s past work in a career from the two shambling albums he released in 2002 through 2016’s ambling Ape in Pink Marble that’s seen him go from neo-hippie troubadour to bossa nova evangelist, from playful folkiness to, well, playful electro-pop. He’s been a part of collaborations with kindred spirits from Beck to Brazilian tropicalia great Gilberto Gil, with whom he shared the Hollywood Bowl stage one highly memorable evening, to the Strokes’ Fabrizio Moretti to Antony and the Johnsons.

Yet the range and depth of Ma extends beyond even that, particularly in its emotions, the sense of loss in some songs not just complementing the joy in others, but expanding upon it in ways that truly honor the maternal wonder of the world.

How to make that work? How to bring all that together so naturally?

Well, now we get to the other concept of Ma. Yes, the title is a word generally associated with mothers. Banhart’s use of it comes from something else.

“The word ma is actually born from a different meaning,” he says. “It’s a philosophical term for space in Japanese. Starting the record in Kyoto, that’s where I learned the word. I’ve always failed but have strived to get a type of space in the music. How do you create spaciousness in music? Ma is a term of how essential it is to an object, and in music the space between the notes is essential. I really got into that word, and it also happened to be the perfect word for the theme of the album.”

Photo Credit: Lauren Dukoff

The Show On The Road – Richard Thompson

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, Z. Lupetin speaks with British-born folk-rock rebel and underground guitar icon, Richard Thompson.

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With his signature grimace, that seems to dare you to look at his album covers, his salty slam poet vocal delivery, his slashing fingerpicked guitar style, and imposing black beret — which makes him look more like a hardened revolutionary than a kindly grandpa who just turned 70 — Richard Thompson is a true icon of rock and folk music.

Richard Thompson Lets the Songs Guide ‘13 Rivers’

Posted on by Editor

Richard Thompson’s new album contains 13 tracks and is called 13 Rivers, which suggests an intriguing metaphor regarding music and bodies of water. These are songs as rushing currents, as tributaries cutting through the landscape with unstoppable force; they can be dammed but not contained, their power harnessed but not diminished. Or perhaps they are obstacles to be crossed, either by swimming against dangerous rapids or by devising elaborate feats of engineering. It is any wonder that songs have bridges?

Thompson admits he didn’t think too hard about it. “It’s just a convenient title, and I liked the way it sounds,” he says with a chuckle that sounds both self-deprecating and possibly curious about the idea. “I’m not sure how deep it is or if it stands up to intellectual scrutiny. I guess songs and rivers can be fast or slow, straight or meandering. They have a beginning or end. You should make of it as much as you can. The more you make of it, the better I sound.”

He doesn’t need me or anyone else to make him look smart, but let’s go ahead and make too much out of that metaphor. Thompson’s catalog is full of raging rivers, most with rock rapids and treacherous oxbows, some stretching for miles and miles or years and years. He’s been navigating them for more than half a century, ever since he strummed his first notes as the guitarist and occasional songwriter for the famed London outfit Fairport Convention. That band helped to electrify folk music in the late 1960s, adding drums and Stratocaster to centuries-old rural ballads about maidens and knights, before Thompson went solo to emphasize his own songwriting.

For years he was merely a cult artist in the States, his early records available only as imports, at least until 1980’s Shoot Out the Lights—written, performed, and recorded with his then-wife Linda Thompson—established him as an insightful chronicler of the challenges of commitment and contentment, a songwriter who is neither blandly optimistic nor cynically dismissive, but somewhere right between bitter and sweet.

And, of course, he is a guitar player whose resourcefulness somehow dwarfs his technical virtuosity. A teenager in the late 1960s, he was too young to be as enamored with American blues as other players were, which means he was never a contemporary of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, or Jimi Hendrix. Instead his playing is grounded in folk music, aligned with the experiments and excursions of Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, and Davy Graham. Like them, he has significant range, incorporating a range of styles and sounds: African desert rock, urban punk, country & western, Indian ragas. His solos change shape constantly; listening to him play, you never know where he’s going but you know he’s going to get there.

While many of the players listed above have either died or all but retired, Thompson continues to make relevant music in the 2010s, both as a songwriter and as an instrumentalist. “The most important thing is the song—the particular batch of songs you find yourself with. That dictates so much about the way the record sounds,” he says. “The songs are going to tell you how they want to be shaped, how they want to sound in the end. They tell you if they want to be acoustic or electric; they tell you if they want to be simple or complex. If you’re listening to what the songs are saying to you, then making the record should be a fairly easy task.”

The batch of songs that comprises 13 Rivers stemmed from what he calls a “difficult time in my life,” although he declines to discuss the specifics of those difficulties. Still, it’s possible to gauge the general nature of them based on songs like “Rattle Within” and “Shaking the Gates,” which suggest a feisty relationship with the idea of mortality. Writing them, however, is not necessarily a conscious effort to address certain events or predicaments. “It’s a semi-conscious process. You’re not always thinking about the big picture. You’re just kind of floating sometimes. You’re almost allowing yourself to switch off some of your critical faculties in order to write. And once you’ve written it, you think, okay, here’s this song, now what does it mean? But you’re not thinking about that meaning while you’re writing it.”

Take the opening track, “The Storm Won’t Come.” A low, brooding number with a worried vocal and a searing solo, it reverses the typical storm metaphor, casting the thunder and rain as something other than destructive. Especially opening the album, it almost sounds like an invocation by an artist waiting for inspiration to strike like lightning. “That’s not what I had in mind, but that sounds great! I was thinking more than sometimes in life, you can feel stymied and you long for change. Sometimes if you try to change it yourself, it doesn’t work. You have to wait for the world to do it to you,” he says.

One storm arrived just after he had assembled this batch of songs: The producer backed out of the project, leaving Thompson to ponder its fate. Thankfully, pragmatism won out. “I thought, well, the studio is booked, the musicians are booked, we’ve got the material, so I’ll just produce it myself. I’ve done it before. It’s always nice to have the contrast of working with other people, but it can be good to do it yourself. You can get more into the nuts and bolts of what you really intended to find in the songs.”

Perhaps that’s why so many songs have a raw-nerve friction to them, lyrically and musically. After a handful of solo acoustic albums, including 2014’s Still, produced by Jeff Tweedy, Thompson put together a very tight, very agile rock and roll combo to give these songs a jittery energy. He’s worked with bassist Taras Prodaniuk and drummer Michael Jerome for years, “so I know them a bit—what they’re likely to come up with.” They worked quickly in the studio, learning the songs just enough to pound them out but not enough to pound them life out of them. “I try to not get too embedded in learning the song. We just give it a couple of listens at rehearsals,” he says. It’s a way to avoid what Thompson calls “overlearning” the song, to allow room for happy accidents and to keep the possibilities wide open.

When the song goes out into the world, those possibilities shrink dramatically. The song becomes settled, more or less. “What the song is now is public domain. It becomes a kind of public property, and the audience won’t let you change it, even if you want to. I’ve got songs where I’ve snuck in the odd word change, but to change a verse or even a line is just asking for trouble.”

Being the song’s creator doesn’t mean he determines that meaning for anyone else. In fact, his interpretation is only one of so many. “It’s always amazing to hear other people’s ideas of what a song is about. I may have written it as a satirical song or a very pointed song, and people will say, ‘Oh that’s about Bob Dylan’ or something. How did they reach these bizarre conclusions? But I’m glad they can find their own meaning in it.”

Illustration by: Zachary Johnson
Photo by: Tom Bejgrowicz

MIXTAPE: Cordovas’ Unknown Legends

Posted on by Editor

The playlist is called Unknown Legends because each song carries a factor of the unknown; be it a somewhat unknown version (“Connection”), artist (Altyrone Deno Brown) or even origin (“Statesboro Blues”). These compositions and singers are the backbone of American weirdness, the reason we love our country’s music. – Cordovas

“Shake Sugaree” — Elizabeth Cotton

Cotton’s “Shake Sugaree” is crucial. Hard to find anyone that good at being a singer songwriter in the early 1900s but she was. Perfectly written, this song is a masterpiece of American music. This Carolina girl was an unknown legend

“Sweet Pea” — Altyrone Deno Brown

Just look at the picture of the dude. He could slay drums and he was 9 or 10 when he got signed. They want him to be the next Michael Jackson. Listen to his vibrato and the tenderness in his voice. The way he heard other singers seems to come out.

“The End of the World” — Skeeter Davis

This perfect melody. So sweet. Skeeter. Heartbroken and gettin’ over it by singing the blues. Some dynamite two part she throws down.

“Sign Language” — Eric Clapton

Clapton is obviously very well-known but this is a lesser known song. Featuring lead guitar by Robbie Robertson, harmonies by Richard Manuel, and a verse by Dylan himself, this is a beautiful scene in some movie. Two lovers. “You Speak to me in sign language as I’m eating a sandwich in a small café at a quarter to three.” So simple.

“Jesus I’ll Never Forget” — Forbes Family

Gospel Vocal groups. They believe. They lift their voices. This one has some epic 5 part harmony. It gets us singing in exaltation “Jesus I’ll Never forget” in the van as we ramble on. We are atheists.

“Piney Mountains” — Bruce Molsky

Jump up on the flat wheel car and let this fiddle tune take you up into the u-pined hills. “My hands can’t fiddle and my heart’s been broke, lord, and my time ain’t long.” Brother Bruce.

“Runs in the Family” — The Roches

The Roches have a masterpiece here. They address here the things we pass down in our families and in our ways and ambitions. Our desires. Through and through, concept, arrangement, feeling, this one is so well thought out and executed. On the idea of the sisters themselves coming of age the Roches sing, “Something about the danger zone, wouldn’t leave the bunch of us alone”

“Matty Groves” — Fairport Convention

This is a reworking of the old English ballad that tells a tale of lust, deceit and revenge in a renaissance setting. Sandy Denny’s powerful, convincing vocals are flanked by 20 year old Richard Thompson’s innovative, unpredictable guitar lines and Dave Swarbricks masterful electric fiddle, tying the tradition to a new era.

“Shady Grove” — Doc Watson

An Appalachian folk ballad by Doc Watson. There are some 300 stanzas collected reaching back to the 1800’s. There have been a vast amount of versions recorded and documented of this song, but Doc Watson’s version would come to be known through the folk revival period of the 1960s and making its mark into popular music by way of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.

“Statesboro Blues” — Blind Willie McTell

This song came about from his many trips to a tobacco warehouse during harvest season in Statesboro, Georgia. He collected change from the laborers in a tin cup tied to the neck of his 12 string guitar that could be heard right outside the loading docks. “Reach over in the corner mama, grab my traveling shoes”.

“Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad” — Woody Guthrie

Accompanied by Sonny Terry (harmonica) and Cisco Houston (mandolin, vocals) Guthrie’s rendition would provide the template for many subsequent versions of the song in both the bluegrass and the folk rock genres. Alan Lomax recorded this for the library of Congress.

“Connection” — Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

“Connection” is a Jagger/Richards song about being stuck while traveling, wanting to be home. Covered by NRPS among others, the song is on Elliott’s Reprise debut where it takes new life, now sung by a gunslinger-type.

“Tamp’ Em Up Solid” — Ry Cooder

Cooder’s “Paradise and Lunch” is a collection of older tunes, some somewhat unknown, including songs by McTell, Philips, and more. “Tamp’ Em Up Solid” is a traditional, attacked by Cooder in his unique style.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Canon Fodder: Fairport Convention, ‘Liege & Lief’

Posted on by Editor

It was inevitable: If Fairport Convention hadn’t added rock guitars and a rhythm section to centuries-old folk tunes about bedeviled knights and fairy queens, someone else would have invented English folk rock. Released in December 1969, Liege & Lief sounded like a culmination of a scene that had been in resurgence for most of the decade, spilling out of pubs and social halls to offer an alternative to the frivolity of rock and roll as well as a sense of national identity at a time when the idea of British-ness seemed to be changing, even diluting. As such, it was a scene that was extremely guarded about its many centuries of source material and extremely suspicious of any innovation, whether it’s Davy Graham adding raga filigrees to his folk instrumentals or the Pentangle pushing the form into jazzier territory.

Earlier in that fateful year, Fairport Convention had taken a small step toward English folk rock while recording their third album, Unhalfbricking. It’s a varied album, one made by a band only just realizing its power but not yet shedding its American aspirations. It includes three Dylan covers, including a French-language version of “If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” as well as a Cajun number and a stunner called “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” penned by singer Sandy Denny. Side One ends with an eleven-minute track called “A Sailor’s Life,” adapted from a 19th-century broadside and recorded in one take by the band. As Rob Young writes in 2011’s definitive Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, the song contains “a historic few minutes: the first recorded use of drumsticks and drum kit on a rendition of an English folk song.”

Fairport Convention almost died before the album was even in stores. In May 1969, during a trip back to London from a gig in Birmingham, the band’s tour bus flipped down a ravine, killing drummer Martin Lamble and Jeannie Franklyn, girlfriend of guitarist Richard Thompson. Bass player Ashley Hutchings was thrown from the vehicle and spent a month in the hospital. Guitarist Simon Nicol was nearly crushed by their gear. Thompson suffered broken ribs. How does a band continue after such a tragedy? How do you make musicians when you’ve seen your instruments and your bandmates scattered across the highway?

What should have been the happiest moment of their career—the release of Unhalfbricking, their first charting album—was instead a time of misery and uncertainty, as Fairport Convention nearly went their separate ways. Instead, they retreated to the Hampshire on England’s remote southern shore, where their producer and friend Joe Boyd rented a crumbling manor called Farley House. There they grieved and recovered, played football in the yard, busked at the local cathedral to pay the milk bill, and rehearsed for hours and hours every day.

Given the trauma they had endured, it’s remarkable that Fairport Convention knew exactly what they wanted to do musically. Where once they wanted to be in Britain what the Byrds and the Band were in America, they wanted to build off the experiment of “A Sailor’s Life” and explore the intersections between rock and folk. More generally, they wanted to see what England’s past might have to say to its present and what its present might have to say to its past. Finally released from the hospital, Hutchings threw himself into the project, spending hours at the Cecil Sharp House in London, the famous repository of all things British folk. There he pored over handwritten journals, songbooks, cylinders, records, and documents to uncover songs like the magical-realist Scots ballad “Tam Lin” and the grisly murder ballad “Matty Groves.”

Pounding out the arrangements at Farley House, the band added a few originals, including Denny’s opener “Come All Ye,” which plays as a statement of renewed vigor and purpose. It’s a rousing number, loose and gangly and inviting, with Denny calling out each of the instruments and explaining their roles in this new music. Everyone joins in on the chorus, gregariously inviting the listener to join them on this journey: “Come all ye rolling minstrels and together we will try to rouse the spirit of the earth and move the rolling sky.” The song heralds something different and radical in the music: a new way to play old songs. It’s the drumsticks and drum kit, of course, but something else.

Replacing the sadly departed Martin Lamble in Fairport Convention was Dave Mattacks, whose biggest gig till then had been an Irish dance band. He plays for movement, emphasizing the bounce in his rhythms, making it less about how the stick hits the drum but what happens immediately after: the upswing of the stick, that sense of jubilant motion. He peppers his bright, buoyant beats with unexpected fills and rolls, pushing “Matty Groves” and “Tam Lin” along at a crisp clip. The innovation isn’t simply the introduction of rock drums into a folk context; instead, he’s thinking about how the instrument fits in this new setting, how it interacts with the other instruments, how he can mimics the jigs and reels of Thompson’s guitar and Dave Swarbrick’s fiddle. Somehow on Liege & Lief he makes his drum kit sound like a folk instrument.

And that’s an important aspect of this album’s enduring appeal. These songs are excitedly and boldly conceived, but they’re also beautifully executed: loose, casual, seemingly unrehearsed, messy in places but all the livelier and more spontaneous for it. All are deft and distinctive musicians: Denny a commanding and expressive singer, Hutching a bass player who emphasizes rhythm and melody equally, Thompson already a guitar hero on par with the overblown blues soloists of the era. There is between them a sense of elated and grateful collaboration, a sense of relief that the others are still there to play these songs together.

Ironic for a band that had survived such a tragedy, their greatest success marked a kind of breakup for Fairport Convention. Denny, featuring she would enjoy fewer opportunities to write new songs for the band, left the group for a too-brief solo career, dying in 1978 at the age of 31. Hutchings exited for the opposite reason: He felt Fairport would not continue to explore folk music as deeply and as persistently as he wanted, so he left to form Steeleye Span (whose 1970 debut Hark! The Village Wait picks up where Liege & Lief left off). Fairport soldiered on throughout the 1970s, shedding and absorbing new members, but the Farley House crew is considered the classic lineup.

Liege & Lief casts a long shadow over the band, however. They never quite topped it in terms of popularity or influence, perhaps because the questions they raise on these songs sounded so new and bold in 1969: How should we treat the past? How does it define us as citizens and as a collective? One of the joys of folk music is how it allows every generation to imprint itself on the music, which means that Fairport Convention might have been looking to the past but they were commenting on the present. The album may seem removed from the pop music of the era, from the end of the Beatles to the beginning of Zeppelin, from the ascension of the Stones to the first notes of heavy metal and prog, from hippies and rebels.

But they are very much a band of their moment. They transform “The Deserter” into a powerful anti-war anthem, and it doesn’t matter that the “Queen” in the lyrics is Victoria instead of Elizabeth. “Matty Groves” is a tale of sexual treachery, about a woman who rejects her husband’s riches to bed a younger, poorer man, but as Denny sings it, the song’s sexual politics are surprisingly progressive. The woman becomes a hero and a sexual martyr, her jealous husband a brutish villain: the establishment, a square, the Man.

Fairport Convention approached folk music from a distinctive generational vantage point, one with new technology, new pop culture, new attitudes toward England. Liege & Lief marks a very specific point in the history of folk music; it sounds deeply rooted in the late 1960s, yet it serves as an evergreen reminder that we are never beholden to history. Rather, the past is the raw material from which we fashion our future.