John Butler - Port Fairy folkie Official Program

A brief piece on John Butler to run in the 2012 Port Fairy Folk Festival official program, to commemorate his PFFF Artist of the Year Award.

John Butler

Port Fairy Artist of the Year – 2012

Port Fairy Festival Director Jamie McKew told me recently he remembered seeing John Butler supporting The Waifs in the backroom at The Nash in Geelong, more than ten years ago.  “No one knew who he was,” McKew smiled – how things have changed. 

Since that day, and indeed, since the days when Butler first embarked upon his musical journey – busking mainly, a slow and steady beginning – his star has risen.  Risen to heights not often seen in the realms of roots music, a genre (or a collection of genres) before thought, amongst younger circles, to be ‘uncool’ and ‘old’, until the likes of a few came along and turned that notion on its head.  John Butler was one of those few.

It’s because of what Butler has achieved over the past decade or so then, that he’s been awarded the 2012 Port Fairy Folk Festival’s Artist Of The Year.  This is a man who began at the bottom, and through talent, drive and creativity, made it to the top, in the process reinvigorating music and minds alike, ideals and perceptions of roots music, of independent artists, of ways of getting your message out.

“It just has to come from a soulful place at the end of the day, and if it has the opportunity of reaching as many ears as possible, then that’s awesome, that’s a dream come true for me,” Butler himself muses from his studio out West, where mere hours before, he’d happily received news of the aforementioned award.  Butler is also sage on his methods of presenting his ideas, his messages if you will – “I think, of all things, you have to be playful.  If you clutch onto anything too strong, you end up strangling it.”

It’s been this genuine desire to share in such an artistic and subtle way then, that has seen Butler – both solo and in trio format – reach people the world over, come into their lives, enriching them as he’s gone. But in amongst the accolades and the adulation as well, Butler has given back, perhaps most importantly through what was initially known as The JB Seed, now The Seed, “an initiative funded by the music community for the music community”, a true indication that Butler recognises the need for nurturing, particularly given he himself came from such grassroots beginnings. 

“It’s all I know… and I’m really proud of where I’ve come from, how I naturally grew from that place – it’s where I paid my dues,” he tells.  John Butler is still paying his dues (“I feel like I’ve grown… but I feel like my best work is still ahead of me,” he smiles.  “I’m really excited about that.” ), and as such, he’s still exploring, still growing as an artist, still exciting his legions of fans, not to mention himself.

Although Butler is still young, it’s universally recognised that he’s on the path trodden before by the ‘greats’ of Australian music – Paul Kelly, Archie Roach, Jeff Lang, amongst others.  This is a canon of artists revered the world over, and Butler, given his past, seems destined to join them – from little things, big things grow, as Paul Kelly sang, an adage which in this instance, rings clear as a bell.

Samuel J. Fell

John Butler

Port Fairy Folk Festival 

Record Review - Lachlan Bryan

Lachlan Bryan

Shadow Of The Gun

Core Music / Sony

Shadow Of The Gun, debut solo record from The Wildes frontman, Lachlan Bryan, has become a much anticipated one on the local scene.  The Wildes’ debut record from a few years ago, Ballad Of A Young Married Man, received very positive reviews (including from your humble scribe) when initially released, and so to have the core songwriter responsible now releasing a solo record, it’s no wonder people are keen for a listen.

Now, it’s hard not to judge a book by its cover, but when first informed Bryan had hooked up with mainstream-ish country musician/producer Rod McCormack (Gina Jeffreys, Troy Cassar-Daley amongst others), I had immediate doubts – whilst McCormack has worked with many artists, underground and cult as well as mainstream, I feared the rawness and dirt evident in Bryan’s earlier recordings would be lost amidst an overly slick production.  My fears were confirmed first up with opener, ‘Unfortunate Rose’, a song more suited for the Country Music Channel than a smoky, Melbourne pub, where Bryan cut his teeth.

However, my fears are soon alleviated, although not entirely.  There are songs on here more than a little reminiscent of Mr. Johnny Cash (Bryan has a marvellously deep drawl when he feels the need), and there are a few that hark to the alt.country scratch we know from Bryan’s previous work.  However, then there are those other tracks – ‘I’d Rather Sing In Churches’ for example – which to me just don’t fit.  They’re too slick, they’re too “country and western”.  Then you get the delightful shimmering guitar of a track like ‘Lily Of The Fields’ and you wonder why it’s not all like that.

So a mixed bag for Bryan’s debut solo effort, strengthened for sure with appearances from both Kasey and Bill Chambers, along with Catherine Britt.  There’s a hell of a lot of potential here, but then we already knew that, which makes me think this record is only half of what it could be.  I await Bryan’s next offering with baited breath.

Samuel J. Fell

http://www.lachlanbryan.com/

Record Review - Joe Robinson

Joe Robinson

Let Me Introduce You

ABC / Universal

Let Me Introduce You is the third album from young (he’s now 20) Australian guitar-slinger Joe Robinson, who of course won reality talent show Australia’s Got Talent in 2008, but who has since gone on to forge a reputation as a consummate and intelligent artist in his own right.

Let Me Introduce You is a very apt title for this record, because despite the fact Robinson has released two previous albums – Birdseed (’07) and Time Jumpin’ (’09) – this is a record of first’s for this prodigious guitar talent.  Initially, it’s a record which features a lot more electric guitar than we’ve heard from Robinson in the past (who I first saw as a solo, instrumental acoustic blues fingerpicking extraordinaire), and secondly (and perhaps more importantly) it’s the first record where Robinson has incorporated vocals.  The verdict?  Perhaps he shouldn’t have.

Being only 20 and a novice vocalist, in a nutshell, Robinson’s voice just isn’t strong enough to showcase at this point.  Not when matched with his guitar prowess, anyway.  Added to this is the extremely slick production that drips off Let Me Introduce You, which when applied to his voice, just makes this come off as a super-produced R&B record – the new school kind of R&B, not the old rhythm & blues kind.  As well, Robinson’s lyrics are hardly likely to set the world afire, but we’ll let that one pass – this is his first crack, after all.

Given all of the above then, Let Me Introduce You isn’t a very strong record.  Save, of course, for Robinson’s guitar.  It doesn’t fit with his voice, but what’s there is incendiary – whether ripping effortlessly along on instrumental opener ‘Lethal Injection’, or riding rainbows on the likes of ‘Adelaide’, it’s all in the right place – shredding when the situation dictates, delicate gossamer when needed.  Joe Robinson is a guitarist first and foremost, and for that, this record is solid.  That voice though, if he wants to continue singing, it has to get tough.  It really does.

Samuel J. Fell

http://joerobinson.com/

To Tweet, Or Not To

In January this year, I created a Twitter account. In the grand scheme of things this is hardly noteworthy, but for someone like myself, despite my relatively young age, it’s a tentative step into the future, into the unknown, away from the analogue and toward the digital.  Weird.

I’m not a fan of social media.  Perhaps because I don’t know much about it.  I know it can raise the profile of a business or individual beyond comprehension, I know it’s a form of ‘staying in touch’, I know it’s Rampant and The Norm and the Way Of The Future, which is fair enough.  I’ve not embraced it before now though because of a connotation I have that it’s frivolous, a waste of time, and because why the hell would I want people, strangers, to know what I’m doing?  Paranoid perhaps.  Lazy too.

As such, I have no Facebook account, I have no MySpace account (I did at one point, but that went nowhere), I do have a blog but that’s more an archive of my published work – hardly a social media tool.  Perhaps I’m behind the times and am now languishing in The Past, too proud to get on board with these trends, too dedicated to the old way of doing things.  In the interest of pushing my writing profile however, I created this Twitter account.  I took my first tentative steps, as I mentioned, and I am now waist deep.  I don’t know where to turn next, what to do or why, but fuck it, it’s all about pushing forward, right?  So they tell me.

I did some reading first, most notably a study conducted by American company Pear Analytics in 2009.  To be quite honest, I didn’t read too much, I skimmed and looked at pie charts and the like – to that end, I am indeed a member of this social media, short attention spanned generation.  Anyway, this study postulated firstly that Twitter was used mainly as a form of self-promotion.  After exhaustive research (I imagine), it was determined that this was not the case, that the vast majority of Twitter’s over 300 million users (as of June 2011) use the service for “pointless babble”.  40% of them in fact.  Self promotion uses up just six percent.  The rest is made up of “news”, “spam”, “conversational” and “pass along value”.  Basically, Twitter is mainly people talking shit. 

Regardless, I decided to get on board, promising myself I’d be one of the six percent – I’d use the service to tweet (ugh) about what I was doing in a professional sense.  For example, my first ever tweet was, “Interviewed Justin Townes Earle this morning, great chat about new record, see new song here: justintowneseale.com”.  Since then, I’ve stuck to my promise.  It’s true, all five of my tweets thus far have been professionally based.  I’m pretty happy with that – suck on it, 94%.

So who knows where this will end up.  Perhaps I’ll get hooked, a Twitter junkie, hankering after his next fix, tweets evolving from poignant professional prose into pointless psychobabble, the likes of which should not be read by anyone, ever.  “Put on my shoes this morning”.  Good lord, I don’t even wear shoes.  Imagine – I shudder to think, and so I’ll stay strong and use this for the Good of my career or my profile or whatever I’m doing this for and despite the fact I’m an old man in a young man’s body, I’ll forge ahead like Robert F. Scott, into the cold, forbidding unknown.  Or something to that end, anyway.  To tweet, or not to, that is the question.  The answer, no doubt, is somewhere on Twitter.  Ugh.

Samuel J. Fell

SJF is indeed on Twitter, and can be found at @SamuelJFell

Cosmic, Man

Published in February issue of Rhythms magazine (Excerpt below)

Rodrigo y Gabriela

Growing up in Melbourne in the ‘90s, I became consumed with heavy metal. Thrash metal mainly, courtesy of a friend of mine in year eight, who lent me – on my third day at a new school – a tape of Metallica’s 1989 album …And Justice For All. I’d never heard anything like it. I had never even vaguely dreamed that music like that was possible.

What drew me in then – and it consumed me, I spent the next four or five or six years listening to metal and metal only – was the pure power, the blatant aggression, that writhing groove and the sheer terror of hurtling towards a riffed-out breakdown at triple speed, riding the back of Kirk Hammett’s blistering guitar work, holding on for all I was worth. I was instantly hooked, and it’s fair to say that day changed my life forever.

Though I’ve broadened my musical horizons dramatically since then in my never-ending quest to find sounds to slake my musical thirst, there’s always that little ‘something’ in the back of my mind that equates ‘What I’m Going To Like’ with ‘Those Metal Sounds Of Old’. And not necessarily the sound per se, but the aforementioned power, the aggression (to an extent), the galloping grooves, the things that got me so hooked back in year eight.  Being a big blues fan too, there’s not been much (aside from a slew of stoner rock) that’s brought that and the love of metal together, yielding something different and as (if not more) exciting – until I found Rodrigo y Gabriela. The power, the precision, the aggression, the groove – in spades.  And they’re about as far from metal as you can get, to the naked eye, anyway.

Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero did actually begin their musical careers playing metal. They met in the ‘90s in Mexico, playing in a thrash band called Tierra Acida before teaming up and heading to Europe where they began to forge the style and sound they’re now globally recognised for. For those who don’t know this dynamic duo, to see their guitars mesh so forcefully (for they are virtuosic players), Latin-tinged, acoustic guitar juggernaught, their strings soaked for weeks in lighter fluid, scorched and flaming high by the end of only the first song. They draw heavily from their Mexican heritage, they lean on Latin fire and rhythm, they drink from the well of metal, or at least the spring from which that well feeds – it’s something that sets them apart, that makes them so good.

As a duo, Rodrigo y Gabriela, as they are known, released their debut, Foc, in 2001, but it wasn’t until their self-titled 2006 record, that they began to garner the recognition they now have. Indeed, as Sanchez says, the records before Rodrigo y Gabriela hardly even count. “Yeah, I don’t really count them as official albums,” he muses on Foc and ReFoc (’02). “But certainly before then, we were a touring band, so those albums were for us to only sell at gigs.”

Regardless, the success of the self-titled effort propelled the duo into the musical stratosphere and subsequent records – Live In Japan (’08), 11:11 (’09) and Live In France (’11), not to mention their extensive work on the fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean film soundtrack last year – did nothing to deflate that rising balloon.  Today though, sees the duo in a reasonably different spot. They’re about to release a new record, Area 52, and it’s not really as you’ve seen these two before. Well, to an extent it is, but largely, it isn’t.

...

Samuel J. Fell

Area 52 is available now through Rubyworks / Warner Music.

http://www.rodgab.com/

Bibb's Back

Published in February issue of Rhythms magazine.

Eric Bibb

On Eric Bibb’s website, in preparing for this interview, I watched the film clip for new track, ‘Bayou Belle’.  It’s the first track to be released from Bibb’s upcoming new album, Deeper In The Well, what will be the 15^th record under his own name.  It’s a track steeped in swampy grooves, it nods its head to the blues and courtesy of a quick little banjo shuffle, gives off more than a whiff of bluegrass – it’s a finger-snappin’ tail shaker, and it more than whets the appetite for what’s soon to come.

“Yeah, it does have that swampy feel to it, and other tracks on the album have that too, and other ones sound even more old timey, kinda like country music, and there’s some blues tunes on there that are played in that Louisiana style,” Bibb smiles, regaling me with what to expect once Deeper In The Well is released in March, just in time for what will be his seventh tour of Australia.

And it’s an album which is somewhat of a departure for Bibb too.  Not so much in sound – he’s always been known as a world-class purveyor of blues-soaked folk tunes – but in the way it came together, Bibb teaming up with friends old and new to bring an “acoustic band” feel to the whole thing.  “Well, it was amazing to be down in Louisiana first of all,” he tells, having made the album down in the Bayou State late last year.  “And it was doubly amazing to be able to make some music with some great players.

“So originally I thought it was time to make an acoustic band album,” he goes on, getting into the nitty gritty.  “I’ve been doing a lot of projects [recently]… I’d done a solo acoustic record (Blues, Ballads & Work Songs, ’11) and I’d done quite a lot of studio work involving larger productions with my friend Glen Scott, and so I thought a group, acoustic band record with mostly newer songs – along with traditional songs, because I always like to combine the two – [would be good].  And I wanted to reconnect with harmonica player Grant Dermody, who played on Booker’s Guitar (’10).”

From this idea, Deeper In The Well began to take shape – and you only have to watch the clip for ‘Bayou Belle’ to see why Bibb wanted to work with Dermody again – the man can wail.  From there then, it was a matter of finding the right musicians – can’t be too hard in Louisiana, right?  “My American agent suggested Dirk Powell, who I’d heard about but never played with,” Bibb relates.  “He plays fiddle, accordion, mandolin, guitar, bass, piano, he’s whiz kid.  In fact, he’s been on tour with Joan Baez for the past few years, he’s her accompanist.

 “So then I happened to meet [Dirk] in Scotland [not long before we started] and we got a chance to play, and the idea had been proposed to him before I met him,” Bibb tells.  “And he was up for it because he has a great studio in Lafayette… so we knew it would work.  So we went ahead with it, Dirk brought in another player, Cedric Watson, who’s a great Creole fiddler and accordion player… and together with a local drummer named Danny Devillier, basically the four of us put together this record in Dirk’s studio.”

Deeper In The Well will be the culmination of some fine chemistry between all players concerned, and seems to be, for Bibb, a bit of a chance to relax a bit after the solo acoustic Blues, Ballads & Work Songs from last year.  This also shows how busy Bibb has been – two records within the space of a little over a year – but there’s more – when I speak to Bibb, he’s only just back from Mali where he’s been working with Malian musician, Habib Koite, on a project he’s more than a bit excited about.

“That was an amazing, wonderful experience,” Bibb beams on his recent musical trip.  “The story goes back a while, it took a while to come to fruition.  10 years ago, a song of mine was featured on a compilation called Mali To Memphis, and on that compilation was also Habib Koite.  We happened to be in the States on tour at he same time, and so [they] put together a little promo tour, which was the first time I met him to play music together.

“Anyway, so we had the chance on this little tour, in the dressing rooms, to play together and there was a real compatibility there,” he goes on.  “So we continued to bump into each other until finally my French agent said to me, ‘Listen, I think it’d be really good if you did something with Habib’… and I said sure.

“What we discovered… was that we’re both basically acoustic finger-style players,” Bibb tells on what the collaboration turned up sonically.  “His Malian traditions are unique, but they are definitely connected to and related to the country blues finger-styling Piedmont style of my playing.  So I’d be able to play a traditional tune or something, and Habib would be able to jump in and play around that in a beautiful way that was not strictly the American perspective.”

Well, that makes two Eric Bibb records I need to get my hands on now (once the latter is released), but as has always been the case, that’s not something I’m complaining about.

Samuel J. Fell

Deeper In The Well will be available in March through Stony Plain Records.  See Gig Guide for tour dates.

http://www.ericbibb.com/

The Boogie

Published, as a news item, in March issue of Rolling Stone.

Endless Boogie

In 1997, somewhere within the labyrinthine expanse of New York City, four guys with a love of rock ‘n’ roll started a band.  There was no agenda, just a need and want to piece together toweringly heavy grooves, recreating those sounds of old, just for their own ears, in a jam space on a Tuesday evening – a bit of fun for four guys with a collective age of 169.

Four years later, Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus invited them to open for him and his then band, The Jicks, at the Bowery Ballroom – quite the first gig – and the world was, finally, introduced to Endless Boogie.  “Well that’s how it started… we never pictured, at first, Endless Boogie being a band, except for jamming and making up riffs,” explains guitarist Paul ‘Top Dollar’ Major.  “But people started twisting our arms saying, ‘You’ve gotta play, you’ve gotta play’, and so eventually we said yeah.”

Part of the Boogie’s appeal then, is that they only play gigs when invited – an Endless Boogie show isn’t something you’ll see every day.  “We figured that rather than calculate or pursue what we’re doing… we’d just go with whatever connection we’d make with people.”  This seems like the antithesis of the modern day band, to actively not pursue fame and fortune.  “Yeah, absolutely, and you can tell when watching a band whether they’re there in the moment, living it, or just putting on a presentation,” notes Major.

The Boogie will make their first foray to Australia in March, riding high on the back of 2010’s epic Full House Head (their second full-length release).  “Yeah, I’m looking forward to it, and being on the same festival bill as Roky Erickson, one of my childhood heroes, that’s exciting for me,” Major smiles, referencing the band’s upcoming appearance at Golden Plains, before revealing that the plan, the Endless Boogie plan, remains unchanged.

“We’ll be doing some familiar songs, but they’ll jam out into places spontaneously,” he promises.  “We use the songs as a diving board to leap off… we’ll keep it pure and just rock.”

Samuel J. Fell

http://noquarter.net/bands/eb.php