Gene Clark/Robert Plant and Alison Krauss

Oct 2009: Gene Clark has been one of my best friends, ever since that first mixed tape Nic made me in 1997. A flatmate, Cassie, reported at the time, “Lucy listens to that tape over and over, even though it seems to make her sad.” ‘THROUGH THE MORNING, THROUGH THE NIGHT’ is an obvious stand-out…but although it stood out in those first hearings, its magic has never faded, not one bit. When I played the song over and over in ’97, I would have been thinking about Justin, who had left me in the middle of the year to go to Alaska. I started going out with Nic. Nic and I broke up for a month or so. Justin returned to Sydney. Nic and I got back together. “To know that another man’s holding you tight/ Hurts me, little darling, through the morning, through the night.”

Last month, on the day of the dust storm, I went up north to visit Justin. He made me a copy of the recent Alison Krauss and Robert Plant album, plus a bonus track at the end – his song of the moment, by an unknown band he saw at an open-mic night. “It’s a very melancholy song,” I said. “Do you think?” said Just, “I could listen to it all night.”

A week later, I was further north, and all the way over on the other side of Australia. Fred Eaglesmith’s album, ‘Tinderbox’, which I’d bought in Brisbane, was rejected by Clint’s CD-player, so I listened to my other CD, Alison and Robert, over and over. Their version of ‘THROUGH THE MORNING, THROUGH THE NIGHT’ is incredibly beautiful – Alison’s glassy voice, Robert’s yearning harmonies, and the gentle waltz underneath it. Of course, my guitar was travelling with me, and I learnt the song, hoping I wasn’t waking any shift-workers as Alison’s high register took me out of my bedroom voice and into my paddock voice. I was still singing ‘TTM, TTN’ when I finally returned to Sydney. The upside of being home is that now I can also play the song on the piano (having wiped the film of red dust off it).

When our heart is aching, why don’t we cheer ourselves up by listening to happy songs? Most of us don’t work like that – it’s one of the mysteries of human nature. Instead we seek out songs that chime with what’s going on inside us, as though – with like attracting like - the songs draw the poison out of the wound. “I dreamed, just last night, you were there by my side,/ With your sweet love and tenderness easing my pride,/ But then I awoke and I found you’re not there,/ It was just my old memories of how much you cared.”

This song returning to me; one man reminding me of another; and vice versa; magic that won’t fade: all this makes me feel, quite eerily, that I’ve come to the point - the seamline - where the pattern of my life starts to repeat itself. No one is ever supposed to see this seamline! We’re supposed to believe that life’s capacity for invention is infinite. The tape has ended, the player has whirred, clunked, and now automatically starts up again.

Randy Newman

Sept 2009: I put on Randy Newman’s ‘Trouble In Paradise’ this morning. I was busy eating porridge, hanging clothes on the line, watering lettuce and rainbow-chard seedlings, and not really paying attention to Randy. I bought this album several weeks ago from the Record Finder, where I sheltered from buckets of winter rain that were being tossed down onto Fremantle. After an hour or two, I walked out, twixt buckets, with Randy, Tanya Tucker, Charlie Rich (doing an interesting, macho version of ‘Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child’) and Rusty and Doug Kershaw: no risks, just solid substance to add to my collection.

Because Randy has a lot to say, at first his songs can be obscure and impenetrable. I have to familiarise myself thoroughly with an album of his before I love it; it might take months of desultory, “Oh, that’s right, I could put on that new [sic] Randy Newman album.” Maybe if he wasn’t packing so much – so many ideas – into his songs, they would be more direct and accessible; of course, this aspect that makes him unpalatable at first is exactly what makes him so rewarding, year after year, to the persevering listener.

So this morning, Randy was singing about something or other. One particular line - the chorus - was being repeated often enough to catch my attention, “My life is good! My life is good!” And then, “My life is GOOD, you old bag!” And I thought, “Well, that’s why I love Randy.”

Mike Nesmith

June 2009 – Mike Nesmith’s ‘DIFFERENT DRUM’ is a song I learnt recently. Learning a song, and especially, figuring out a song (viz. from a recording, rather than someone teaching it to you or - something I almost never do – finding it in a book or on the internet) connotes to me a particular obsessive love that can only be sated by minute dismembering of the song, fumbling with its every note, grasping its tricks, cracking its mysteries. Really, it’s an excuse to listen to it over and over. And then to play it over and over. It’s almost like eating the song; it is absorbed, converted into energy, and becomes part of you. Once in a while, a songwriter has told me, “I haven’t written a song for a while,” [subtext: “Help! Will I ever write another?”]. I’ve recommended learning a few favourite covers; learning a song is like following the thought-process that led the songwriter to the song – glimpsing someone else’s paradigm is often what you need to lift you out of your own spent furrows.

My local cocktail bar is ‘The Different Drummer’; although I have lived in this suburb since I was 8, when my mother, sister, brother and I moved in with my step-father, his ex-wife and her girlfriend, I didn’t step into the dark doorway of ‘The Different Drummer’ until a month or so ago. As I sat with my beer, thus missing out on the 2-for-1 cocktail-offer, and Arabella sat with her two apple-sugary-something-or-others, the song (as sung by Linda Rondstadt) to begin playing in my mind. A few days later, Nic returned a pile of my records, including a Mike Nesmith (former Monkee) best-of I bought in Germany a few years ago. So! It just seemed like the right time to learn the song. While Linda’s version is full of drama, that of finally shaking off an unsatisfied, weepy lover in favour of glorious freedom, Mike’s version is light, loose, almost silly. But equally triumphant. It also has a verse I don’t remember being in Linda’s: “I feel pretty sure that you’ll find a man, who’ll take [I like this ‘take’, when you’d expect ‘give’] a lot more than I ever coulda can, and you’ll settle down with him, and you’ll be happy.” No matter how many times I raised the needle and thumped it (“Oops!”) back to the beginning of the song, I just couldn’t catch Mike’s picking pattern, so made up my own, which is about fifty-percent less charming.

P.S. In the Port Hedland tourist info centre, killing time before my bus to Broome was due to arrive, I struck up a conversation with the two women working there. “And over the road’s the __,” here the tourist-liaison-officer named a pub, but I’ve forgotten it, “which is in the Guinness Book of Records. The most stabbings in one night.” “Fatal,” the other tourist-liaison-officer added. I asked how many. “Three,” she said. The other said, “No, it was way more than that. It was fifteen or something.” They asked me to get out my guitar and play them a song. I played them DIFFERENT DRUM. It’s a good song for women to lay claim to, especially when in the man’s world of Port Hedland.

The Dubliners

February ’09 – ‘FOGGY DEW’ (not the 1916 Irish rebel song, but the 17^th century ballad) is a song I’ve rhapsodised about before, but over the past few weeks, I’ve finally made the effort to learn it, rewinding, then rewinding again, the cassette with the Dubliners on one side and Gordon Lightfoot on the other. A man sings about a love affair he had in his youth; at the time, he didn’t especially value it, and let it slip away - his lover becomes another man’s wife. One defining feature of youth is the feeling of, “Plenty more where that came from – and better-looking ones, too!” Twenty years later, you look back and think, “Actually, it doesn’t get better than that.” The girl of the song is caught between her superstitious fear of the foggy dew, and her fear of sleeping with the man and becoming pregnant. The man thinks it would do her good to have some children, “It would make you leave off your foolish young tricks.” I suppose it reminds me of a relationship or two I had in my late-teens, early-twenties, which were matters of grave seriousness to me, and “sport and play” to him. Like this young servant maid, I would wring my hands and cry, “Oh, what shall I do?” or else, “I am undone!”, and he would say, “Hold your tongue you silly young girl, for the foggy dew is gone, gone, gone!” The foggy dew is the territory of fairies (potentially bad ones) and other perils; an earlier version of the song substitutes “foggy dew” for “Bogulmaroo” or “Buggaboo”, a bogey man. But to me, the “foggy dew” is something else as well – youth? Falling in love? Romantic notions? The formless mystery of night? Hopes? Something that is felt intensely for a moment, and then evaporates. The song ends with him saying that he has never told her husband (no doubt they all live in the same village) “of her faults, and I’m damned if ever I’ll do, for many’s the time, as she winks and smiles, I think on the foggy dew, dew, dew.” It’s a beautiful, emotionally complex song, which is why it has been piquing people’s interest regularly enough, over the past four hundred or so years, for it to have endured till today. I’ll sing it at my show at the Sando on March 26th.

Justin Townes Earle

November ’08 – I supported Justin Townes Earle (and Perry Keyes) when he played at the Annandale at the end of November. I’d been looking forward to the show for months – when I’d been offered the gig back in August, I’d been feeling a bit forlorn, having just broken up for the last time with a man I’d been breaking up with, it seemed, from the very first night we spent together about nine months before. Or another way to put it is that I jumped aboard a ship that had a great big hole in its hull, only it took nine months to sink.

The prospect of the gig made the future just a bit brighter. I was not immune to the fact that Justin Townes Earle was Steve’s son. In another broken-hearted phase of my life, I had even written a song (‘Take Me As I Am’, soon to be released by Nic Dalton And His Gloomchasers) in which I channelled Steve, and wrote a love song to me. “How did you get here so quickly? What took you thirty years took me fifty,” I had Steve singing to me. “Even then I nearly didn’t make it – offer me a bad deal and I’d take it. But everything happens in its own time - I’ll be your reason, and you can be my rhyme.” My love for Steve’s songs has comforted me over the years, and it was very bemusing to me that he was comforting me again, in a more convoluted way, by siring a son some twenty-five years before who needed another act to open his show in Sydney.

By the time the gig came around, the forlornness had passed, as it does (oh, shame!), and I had trained myself to drop the epithet, “Steve Earle’s son.” My set was fun – thankfully, as it was being filmed by Moshcam (you can see the whole night at moshcam.com/…) – and when the time came, I shoved my way to the front of the crowd to study Justin. The spectacle of JTE was very arresting. Off-stage, he was lanky and polite, a bit odd-looking, with a touch of gawkiness; on-stage, his eyes burned, his face was lighted ridges and gouged-out shadows, his combed-back, macassar-oiled hair gleamed. He is very tall and rangy, and had his mic arranged at chest height, so that he loped around the stage, his guitar hanging round his neck, and had to duck his head to sing into the mic. I don’t think he glanced at his guitar once, no more than you need to look at your own mouth to make sure you’re chewing properly. He was an amazing player – very percussive, very distinctive. I was looking very hard, but I couldn’t see how he was making all that noise with just one guitar. A fair bit of hammering, and just general wizardry. At first, he reminded me of a caged animal prowling up and down the stage, taking leisurely bites out of the microphone as he passed it. An hour later, as his set continued, I was up the back with a friend who commented, “Guitar addict!” By this time, JTE seemed more like a moth, drawn again and again to the candleflame-microphone. “You get the feeling that he could go on like this all night,” said my friend, a boy, and therefore less susceptible to Justin’s charms. Every girl in the room was at that moment wishing he WOULD go on like this all night, preferably in a private concert performed solely for her pleasure.

Of course, my favourite song, one that will be on his soon-to-be-released album, was about him and Steve, “I am my father’s son.” The next day I could remember most of the lyric – it was simple, with a repeated line at the end of each verse, and was in that plain language you use when you have something very, very definite to say, and your meaning comes through with a stark truthfulness almost embarrassing for the listener. I can only remember the gist of it now, two months later. The first two verses were about characteristics he shares with his father, including, “We don’t know when to shut up.” Then in the next verse, he says, “I have my mother’s frame,” and the song begins to turn. One lonely night, he lights a cigarette in the kitchen, and in the reflection, he sees himself clearly, because, “I have my mother’s eyes.” There was something quite devastating about him, such an assured showman, sharing this troubled relationship with us, a roomful of strangers with no helpful advice to offer. Driving home, my flatmate Stella was in the back-seat, scarcely able to speak, for love of Justin (who had told her, after the show, that her eyes were “prettier than Pearl’s”; Pearl being the beautiful woman who joins him on his album cover). For Stella, I had plenty of not-so-helpful advice, considering myself an expert, after my recent experience, at identifying sinking ships.

Pete Molinari

October ’08 – The singer for October at my house was certainly Pete Molinari (though Sam Baker is still our bread and butter). One evening, I was walking past the almost-corpse of a dying CD shop; its twenty-percent-off-everything offer induced me to do what I had only done once or twice while it was still alive, namely, go in. I hoped there would be a few shreds worth picking off the bones. There were several copies (someone’s fatal over-ordering) of Pete Molinari’s ‘A Virtual Landslide’. His name rang a bell, and his digi-pack was quite nice and featured photos of a very attractive guitar. I had twenty-two dollars in my wallet, so I bought it. Good move! I played it a lot, and, in my enthusiasm, I even unearthed a burn of an earlier album that had been given to me (then promptly forgotten) last year. His lyrics do the job; like power pop, you hear “glove” and know that “love” is coming up next, but you accept the limited parameters as part of the genre, and are perfectly satisfied with the two or three lines per song, generally in the chorus, that actually say something. I love the sound of his guitars, his drums – old-fashioned, raw, full of twang, toughness and sweetness. His voice is probably what I like best. It’s the quality of his voice, the widely-ranging melodies, but mainly his absolutely heartfelt performance. A few of us were sitting in the back garden listening to him, and I said, “Listen to that! He sounds like a woman!” He certainly did. Debbie added, “I suppose Odetta sometimes sounds like a woman.” I said, “Odetta nearly married Gary Shead” [the Sydney painter]. “Odetta IS a woman.” But Debbie is perfectly right, Odetta does sometimes sound like a woman.

Sam Baker

Sept ’08 – One of my brothers recently gave me a burn of Sam Baker’s ‘Pretty World’ and ‘Mercy’. As I subsequently fell in love with the albums, I went out and bought them, an act that places me squarely in an older age-bracket: the ‘went out’ - i.e., went to one of those anachronisms, record shops (so anachronistic that this one actually closed down before my order had arrived) – the ‘bought’, and the fact that I wanted to actually hear the albums, with the tracklisting in the right order, and liner notes, and the quality better than a many-times-compressed-and-uncompressed-download-burn (at first I thought Sam Baker had a lisp, but if he does, then so does the woman who sings harmonies with him, and even his guitar has one). His songs are very much in the Texan singer-songwriter camp, with lots of anti-heroes, lots of characterisation, specific town-names, horses, oil, whiskey. He goes so far as to sing a song about Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Waiting Round To Die’. But he doesn’t limit himself to the genre; and by reaching out to other subjects, other sources of imagery, other influences, he ensures the genre’s survival.

One of his songs, about an Odessa oil heir, incorporates a couple of verses of ‘HARD TIMES’, a song I knew from Emmylou’s ‘Live At The Ryman’ (which includes an enigmatic anecdote where Bill Monroe says to Emmylou, “I’ve got some scissors if you need ‘em.” This phrase, its context shed, has been lodged meaninglessly in my mind for about twelve years). It’s impossible to sing ‘HARD TIMES’ without putting your heart into it, and I downloaded (see, I accept that this internet thing has its uses) the lyrics, and even went onto All Music Guide to read about Stephen Foster, who wrote the song in the late sixties (that’s the lateeighteen-sixties). I sang it at our recent house-warming, which might have been a bit of a downer, as its first verse begins with ‘Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count her many tears’, and goes on, ‘Though we seek mirth and beauty, and music light and gay, there are frail forms fainting at the door.’ Don’t we have parties precisely to forget all that? But I think everyone was too drunk by then to be capable of taking in anything except another chug-a-lug.