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You can hear the CD tracks by clicking the links below.
Track 1 - Lonely Hearts Come Creeping
Allan Toussaint was a master musician, in every respect, and his arrangements for brass are always clever and...funny. New Orleans soul of the late 60s and early 70s could be very experimental (good drugs, we suspect), but vaudeville was never far away. The original had a daft brass part, intended to make you smile, and it's there in the guitar part, more or less. The rhythm is cakewalk, not cajun, funeral music with black umbrellas hitting the upbeat. Betty Harris never really made it, even locally, but she's RW's favourite, he's not sure why. The banjo (in fact a Variax) was just a device to help the guitar keep time, but we liked the odd Steptoe-in-the-Hammersmith-Palais feel, so we kept it.
George Anders was a retired working man who began playing banjo again near the end of his life. Was he a musical genius, or the complete opposite? RW wants to say yes, but check out 'High Atmosphere' on Rounder records--what do you think? In any event, this very rare song took a lot of working out, but the effort was worth it. Sometimes traditional songs do things it's not possible to create.
The first song we made up. Aaaaahhh......Eeeeeugh....
Nick Cave's text, from 'Murder Ballads', although minus one couplet RW now wishes we'd used. Answers on a postcard...The crashing glass at the end was sampled from a gig recorded at the Portland in Cambridge a few years ago. You just never know when something'll come in.
A woman ends a relationship - how does she feel? Sad, in this case, for inflicting hurt, but determined too, and optimistic - hence the conceit at the end. Apart from that, this is a live take.
A one-man band in Manchester called Pete Farrow used to play this, with great power. We've recast the harmonies and written new verses to flesh out the addiction angle (in this case, of course, addiction to gambling), and then thrown the kitchen sink at it.
Soul without bass and drums - can you make it work? Think so.
Well, life teaches all of us something, eventually. The vocal was the guide in a project RW began years ago, but AH wouldn't let him change it. And what about the lovely steel drum...let's not go there.
The CD ends with a medley. This first element is an American shape-note devotional, but obviously English before that. The best old songs are like pebbles, battered and abraded until only the really important bits are left.
Track 11 - My Journey to the Sky
On the album, an instrumental version of this great old gospel track, most famously sung by Sister Rosetta Tharp in a recording in the late 1940s, segues seamlesslyish into our full vocal version. Sister R. really believed: respect for that means we had to secularise the words a little.
