Johnny Horton

April, 2011: I look forward to sing-sings with my cousin Brooke the same way I used to look forward to the Christmas holidays. Other members of our family are also essential to the sing-sing, but often, alas, their voices won't rise above a sotto voce murmur. We had a sing-sing a few weeks ago at my aunt and uncle's house. Brooke sang her newly-composed song 'Virgil', which I think of as the last words that go through a woman's head before she gets out her pistol and shoots dead her husband, Virgil, and perhaps also the girl in the red dress whom he's dancing with. The last lines are the sinister: "You're not much, you're not much, you're not much, Virgil, but you're mine.". Then I sang my newie, which is heavily indebted to 'Virgil': a murder ballad, my one and only, about a woman who sets fire to the hut where her ex-boyfriend and his new girl are lying in each other's arms. Brooke and I both disapprove of murder ballads. I tried to start a genre called 'rape ballads' (e.g. my 'Beneath The Bridge', and also Gillian Welch's 'Caleb Meyer'). Evening up the score with a few more murder ballads where the women do the murdering is hypocritical...but sometimes songs just come out, and that's that.

Once we were onto murder ballads, Brooke and my uncle sang Jimmie Rodgers's 'T. For Texas', which I hadn't heard before - first Jimmie sings "gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall", then a couple of verses later, decides he'll also shoot "the rounder who stole away my ga-a-a-a-l". A double murder seemed a bit shocking, until Brooke and Peter sang us Johnny Horton's MISS MARCY. It's not a murder ballad - it's a massacre ballad! When I was back in Sydney once again, I checked out these two songs on the Google (Jimmy Little's graceful construction), and set about learning them. I don't really like singing T. For Texas, a typical swaggering cock (rooster) murder ballad, except that the yodels are so beautiful, and good to practise on. But for some reason, I don't mind the blood-bath MISS MARCY. I sang it while my nieces and their friend Thea was at my house, but first warned them about all the body-counts. My eldest niece is one of those innocent children who seek to protect their own innocence; I was watching a bit of the movie Disgrace when she and my sister came in the room, and I said, "It's a good story - but there's a lot of adult content." At this, my niece promptly skittered out of the room. But not even she minds all the blood spilling in Miss Marcy. I'm not going to give the story away. Check it out for yourself on the Google.


Here it is:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw3JyvO4V64

Billy Bragg

March, 2011: Bob Ellis and Rhys Muldoon organised a fundraising night for the orphans of the refugees drowned off Christmas Island, and they asked Darren and me to sing a few songs. It was a Labor Party gathering, so Darren and I racked our brains trying to think of any of our songs that could possibly be construed as having a political or social theme. "All my songs are about girls," says Darren, and all my songs are about men. In the end, we scraped up my Dalton/Lehmann co-write 'Six Hours West', Darren's new duet 'Where Will We Live?' and then boosted our political content by the power of ten by learning Billy Bragg's BETWEEN THE WARS.

I had three days to learn it. It's four chords (1,4,5, with a minor 2 chucked in), but as Andy says, sometimes it's those three- (or four-) chord songs that really get you into trouble. I wonder what it is with those simple songs: it's as though the melody can go all over the place, and a particular note isn't connected to a particular chord. And yet, you must get it right, or else you'll turn it into a different song. BETWEEN THE WARS has three verses, each made up of sixteen lines - four blocks of four lines ever so slightly different in melody and chords. So it was a puzzle at first; now that I've got it, I can hardly remember finding it tricky.

It is a beautiful song. Cramming a song into my head (foie gras style) could have caused me to hate it, but instead my respect for it only increased. Every word, when you're cramming, exacts a whole lot of brain power, and if the word is sloppily chosen, then it is resented. I once learnt The Strokes 'Is This It' for a party, and the lyrics were eighty percent garbage, and as soon as the party was over I duly threw the eighty percent back out of my brain (N.B. I actually really like that song, but it's a shame about the lyrics). Sometimes I think, "Well, I don't write political songs because we live in prosperous, moderate, peaceful times, and there's nothing extreme enough to penetrate my walls and provoke a song." I know that's a weak excuse. BETWEEN THE WARS is a reminder that times like the one we're living in shouldn't be taken for granted. Peace, prosperity and moderation aren't the default settings - they are fragile constructions that need to be protected. The last lines bring tears to my eyes:

"Sweet moderation, heart of this nation - desert us not, we are between the wars." I should try to get my mind off men for a moment and write a song about the world. And after the recent State election, I've decided to join the ALP.

Billy performing on a tv show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjUA3RU4B8E

Andy Baylor

February, 2011: I had too much fun in the first four days of this year's Tamworth Country Music Festival; when I said that to Adam, he wondered what I meant - exactly how does a near-teetotaller have too much fun? What are the consequences of having too much non-alcohol-or-drugs-fuelled fun? The other day, I read a little interview in the Sun Herald with Julian Assange's mother, who denied he had Asberger's; she said that sometimes very intelligent people find intellectual and creative pursuits more stimulating than social interaction. Well, I find social interaction very stimulating - my too-much-fun was meeting too many new people, having too many interesting conversations with my new friends, not getting enough sleep, and finding the world altogether too wonderful. I needed to go off by myself somewhere and mull over it.

The day I started to come down from my high-on-life-high, on Mara's recommendation, I took my shredded nerves and growing misanthropy to Andy Baylor at Southgate. He and his Cajun Combo played impeccable covers of songs written for another time and place. Couples waltzed. I thought of Errol's phrase "museum piece", and wondered whether this band was another example of how people are eschewing the values of the '60s-to-now (self-expression, originality, re-invention) for earlier times, when music was more about craft and tradition. For the first few songs, I found Andy Baylor very pleasant and soothing. A man beside me said, "I wish he'd put himself out there a bit more!" - he is a reserved and reticent performer. Sometimes reserved performers are the best: they don't grab you by your shirt collar and yell, "Listen to me!", but they stand there and wait for you to come to them. It requires confidence (in your intrinsic worth) to be a reserved performer. Andy Baylor doesn't try hard because he knows he has a gift. Suddenly, as I watched the Combo, I was drawn in. I'd almost forgotten how mesmerising it is to see someone who can really play. Thoughts - words - are silenced, as there is no adequate way to describe music when it gets going.

I tried to see Andy Baylor and his Cajun Combo one more time before I left Tamworth, but misguidedly went to the Bill Chambers's session instead; though I walked as fast as I could from the Pub to Southgate, as I walked in, I heard the Combo finishing their last song. When I eventually came home, I found Andy Baylor's website and took my pick of his CDs - I went with The Bush Is Full Of Ghosts because it had a nice title and a rustic photograph on the cover. The title comes from a co-write with Nicholas Langton, the lyricist for five of the twelve songs. I like the album as a whole; I'm resistant to singling out a single song and scrutinising it. Maybe the songs are vehicles for the playing, rather than little discrete works of art. I used to listen to J. J. Cale a lot, and ended up with about six of his records; now, and possibly even at the time, I could hardly tell you a single J. J. Cale song. It is music.


Here's a little sample of Andy and his Cajun Combo:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cdI0_Rkj2A

Mary Gautier

January, 2011: One of the upside of finding myself at home on Saturday night is that, at ten o' clock, Felicity Urquhart's 'Saturday Night Country' show starts up on Radio National. It is a revelation to listen to the radio and to hear songs I actually like! I lie in bed, reading and listening. When Felicity played Mary Gautier's (google-challengingly pronounced "Go-Shay") song I DRINK, it was one of those listening experiences where all my concentration hung on each line as it unfurled, making me gasp with admiration: each perfectly-chosen word paints a picture, tells a story, evokes an emotion, with simplicity and dark depths. Who would have thought you could give profound significance to the lines: "Chicken TV dinner, six minutes on defrost, three on high, beer to wash it down with then another little whiskey on the side"? Or "I know what I am, but I don't give a damn"? I suppose I have a vested interest in what it's like to be an alcoholic, having gone out with so many of them. So it was a song that kind of answered questions...kind of.

It's a feat to write a simple song about a big subject close to your heart. I end up writing novels about the big subjects close to my heart. But Mary Gautier has the restraint, and the turn of mind, that can distill the big subject into two verses, a chorus and a one-line middle-8. It's awe-striking. In almost equal parts, it both inspires me to greater songwriting heights, and also makes me want to throw in the towel. The 'inspire' part is slightly greater, so I keep going, consoling myself with, "Oh, well, being second-rate isn't so bad."

P.S. I saw Bill Chambers supporting Kasey last night at Rooty Hill RSL. I think Bill has his good points, but I'm not sure that he's a frontman, and I haven't yet heard a song of his that impresses me. And last night he said, "Here's a drinking song," and sang I DRINK, ripping the heart right out of it. He didn't even credit Mary Gautier. He made the lines, "I know what I am, and I don't give a damn" sound swaggering and boastful. The last line of the chorus - "I drink" - had none of Mary's fatalism, or wretched matter-of-factness. He made it sound like a Slim Dusty song. He should be prohibited from singing it. I said to Sophie, who was taking the opportunity to check the weather on her Iphone, "He ripped the heart out of that song." She replied, "Are you surprised?" But I don't mean to hoe into Bill, I like him. He just missed the point of I DRINK.


A beautiful live performance by Mary, with arty violin.  It's so restrained!  I teared up all over again, watching it:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ1aPaP1_Ew

And here's Bill.  Is my criticism fair?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrPUSQiwA-0

Justin Townes Earle

November, 2010: One of the gigs that always appears on my very short muso-C.V. is the one where I supported Justin Townes Earle at the Annandale in 2008. That night, I managed to resist the general bewitching that he performed on all the girls in the audience. I thought, "Yes, he's an amazing performer, but his songs aren't that great." No matter how bewitching a performer, most solo artists, especially when you don't know their material, will start to sound very repetitive after forty minutes, let alone at the end of a ninety-minute set. But I recently heard a new song of his on Felicity Urquhart's 'Saturday Night Country' radio show, so I legally-downloaded* the album with the voucher I was given for being in Heat Nine of The Telstra Road To Tamworth. At first I said, "It's okay, but the songs are a bit samey, and I think he needs to get out and have a life, because the songs are either about being constantly on tour, or else lonely nights on tour, or problems that occur at home because you're constantly on tour." Then, after listen number two or three, something happened. I suppose it was the bewitching. Certainly, the songs on Harlem River Blues are very simple, almost entirely structured with 1, 4, 5 chords, and featuring oft-used (potentially hackneyed) phrases and words and themes - "wandering", "troubled mind", "Tell my father I tried". But something creeps in. His gnawing loneliness? And so he becomes a companion of the moment. "I've always been a fool for a conversation and a couple of smokes. And when I'm feeling this low I just need someone to laugh at my jokes." Apparently he is one of the world's twenty-five most stylish men. So it does occur to me that this album is predominantly style, and in a year, we will all have discarded it for the next stylish album. I hope not!


JTE looks rather tired and discouraged in a lot of his videos, presumably due to overwork, but here's one where he seems happy:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLIN17QcXN8&feature=related

For the sake of contrast, here's one where he looks sick of the whole business:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AaohmyVtAY


*This legally-downloading business has been fun: I like Kasey & Shane's Rattlin' Bones and The McClymonts's first album, and at first I liked Teddy Thompson's A Piece Of What You Need but then it lost me.

Angie Hart

May, 2010: Adam Gibson took me to see Holidays On Ice about four years ago. Adam is a long-term fan of Angie Hart, and has even written a song about her, ‘Angie Hart Made Me Want To Move To Melbourne’ (he didn’t). The Aerial Maps perform that song, and as erstwhile Aerial Maps member, I’ve sometimes spoken Angie Hart’s part, which is meant to be along the lines of: “Hey, nice suit! Where did you get it? Let’s go to one of Melbourne’s many uncomfortable-but-trendy cafes and have the best coffee in Australia!” See, even writing my lines down now, I can’t resist meddling with them. Sometimes when my mic seemed to be low in the mix, the lines would degenerate into, “Hey, nice suit, wanna fuck?” Adam is a good sport, and I discovered it’s hard to ruffle him - in fact, he likes being ruffled. So we went along to the Sando to gaze at Angie Hart, and I quickly became almost as big an Angie Hart fan as Adam. She has a beautiful voice, and she gives a whole lot in her performance, but - even better - keeps something back for herself. She makes herself vulnerable, but is supremely self-composed. It’s a really interesting combination.

Much as I enjoyed the show, and especially the Angie/Ben Lee co-write, ‘Sand’, which haunted me for days afterwards, I didn’t follow up my new fandom. There was another Angie show at the Sando that I missed because my phone was on the blink and I got Erik’s message a week late. Then my sister rang up a couple of months ago, saying she’d just seen Angie play. One thing I love about my family is their/our memory for detail. There’s never the unsatisfying response, “Oh, I don’t know, just because.” Julia described the show evocatively, quoted slabs from the songs she’d liked best, and provided me with speculations (and evidence) about the current state of Angie’s personal life. So I went out and bought Eat My Shadow. I’m not crazy about the production - it’s too diverse, too embellished. Angie Hart doesn’t need embellishment, and the diversity is in the content and mood of her songs. The songs are top quality. All are co-writes; as the lyrics are so idiosyncratic, inimitable, I would guess the co-writer contributes mainly (or exclusively) to the music and arrangement. The song I had to listen to many times per day became ‘LITTLE BRIDGES’, a co-write with Mark Seymour, and a duet with Bonnie Prince Billy. It brought on a much-needed cry, and going through the lyrics in my mind soothed a very unpleasant anger that was waking me up in the middle of the night. The whole song is naked and beautiful. It makes me shiver. There is nothing obscure in any of Angie’s songs - she wants you to be able to figure out what it was that prompted her to write the song. But they’re completely poetic: “Some people talk, and some people do - there are two kinds of ways to pass the time. I heard, through a door, a conversation; I heard your voice, I heard a name, and it was mine. The picture that you painted was black and white - there were no shining lights or shades of grey. You made me sound like I was a stranger; I should have turned and closed the door and walked away.” I’d like to transcribe the whole song. I feel excited (relieved!) that such an excellent songwriter is living and working in our time and geographical location. “Do you take great comfort in believing all the things you think I am that you are not? Does it put safe distance between us? Was it something that I said that I forgot?”

Mary Kay Place

March, 2010: In March, I spent three weeks rewriting the ending of Earthly Things, now known (I think) as Dust, on the veranda of the Railway Hotel in Koorawatha. Several days after arriving (arrival: stepping down from the Countrylink coach with 21kgs of books and food, Sunday 4pm, looking across the Olympic Highway at the pub, rallying myself as though the pub were a treacherous pass I now had to cross) I thought, erroneously, “This is a place where, when someone new appears, not only does everyone know about it, but they also know who he or she is related to.” It was the most beautiful season: hot days, cool nights, and a day of torrential rain, when the hill at the end of the main street was completely obscured by the rain. Drifts of native bluebells, silky grasses. Soon enough, I began to think of ‘STREETS OF THIS TOWN (ODE TO FERNWOOD)’, sung by Mary Kay Place for a ‘70s TV show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and written by Paul Grady. This song describes a country town that is a ghost of what it once was, where the past is bigger and noisier than the present. This atmosphere - the one you pick up when wandering around a rundown, half-deserted country town - is something I think of as my bread-and-butter. It sets me off into daydreams: it’s imagination provoking. I hadn’t heard or played this song for several years, and it came back to me in full over a few days of memory-racking. I’d never been able to decipher the whole of the last verse; when I first learnt the song about seven years ago, I even checked it out – in vain – on the Google. This time, I just made it up, pleased to be able to cut a notch in the song that would always remind me of my three weeks in Koora. Here’s the last verse: “The streets tonight are quiet and serene/ Dream a dream of things that might have been/ Just a trace of the lives/ Of the hearts broken, the fortunes lost/ As I walk down streets of this town, I can see what was.” I also made a change in the second verse: “Smoke from the tip blown in by a high lonesome breeze.” In the original, the smoke comes from the factory, which is inapplicable to Koora. I sang “wheat-fields” (Americanising “paddocks”) until the afternoon they burnt off at the tip.