What happened then?
Dan came and got me and off we went. We sang for 12 hours with 2 half hour breaks for food. As soon as we arrived we were split into bass, alto, and sopranos. The lyrics were rolled up on a giant overhead projector screen and as we read them people would audibly gasp or burst into spontaneous applause. I couldn’t believe that finally someone with his sort of high profile and access to the big media machine was coming out of the closet and singing/saying/shouting even, about the injustices of this war and the hypocrisies that we tend to tolerate in our society on a daily basis. We came out of the session 12 plus hours later exhausted, elated, and floating in a surrealistic “we can change the world” bubble. My throat chakra was buzzing and glowing. Yeah that’s right the healing power of music….
You have many songwriting credits, via Bug Music. Do you write songs with people like Stacey Earle in mind, or do they hear your version and arrangement first?
Yeah I have a couple of songs on other people’s albums but they have all been direct collaborations. Stacey Earle and I met through her publisher at the time Jewel Coburn (Ten Ten Music) who wanted us to get together and write so as to combine our writing sensibilities. Stacey has this folk/hillbilly country/Mexican mariachi thang she does and I’m a kinda genre blended west coast, alt blues rock, folk rock noire, jaded by living in London kind of writer. So we wrote “Losers Weep” for her first album Simple Gearle and her big brother Steve sang harmonies on it. It’s a song that we both drew out of our shared experiences of being single teenage mothers. Stacey’s dad Jack Earle helped us finish it off.
Another is “I Got My Own Way Of Doin’ Things” on Lowen & Navarro’s Scratch At The Door. It started life as a slack blues idea I had knockin’ around. We were all in the room and hammered it out together. I have yet to have an artist record a song that I have written without them in the room with me. But the night is young.
Don’t Tell will be released at the end of July. Tell me about the songs on it?
Half the songs are co-writes and the other half are just me. Track 8, "Hallelujah" was written by Chuck and me on the spot in the studio while recording the album. He had invited his friend JT Leroy down to write with us that day and I was really unsettled by it.
Article comments
1 - Rob
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