When I listen to your music it is like you are still a teenager at heart?
Thanks man, I am a teenager in my own mind.
After doing it for so many years making albums you are still able to come up with something different and fresh —what is the secret?
The songs, thank god just keep coming. That is what keeps me excited.
Am I correct in thinking that being on the road travelling the country and going on stage give you the required buzz to keep going?
I like travelling around. I like playing, I like going out playing for the folks. I really enjoy that, but oddly enough, this record came from staying at home. Last year I took a year off to stay at home, the first time in twenty-five years and it afforded me the opportunity to have some time, take a breather, and finally catch up with myself. It was kind of time to slow down for a minute and these rock‘n’roll songs came out of that.
Had you started to slow down before that, because when I saw you at the Sage in Gateshead a couple of years ago it was solo, just you and your trusty guitar(s)?
No, I have been doing that for years. I like to go between solo gigs and the band, and like to mix it up.
Do you find playing solo gives you more space and time to think?
Well, you know I like to play solo because I get all the cheese. I get all the credit —he laughs. I get all the stage to myself, no I am just kidding. The thing about playing solo I can draw from my whole catalogue and not be confined to what I have learnt the band to play. I can play what I like because when you have the band and we do change it every night you have to follow a sort of set list but solo there is a greater freedom.
When you play solo there is more room and enjoyment when sharing a story with an audience, and to sometimes take an unplanned direction?
That is true, as long as I can remember the song.
How much of your own self is there in the songs?
You know, it is fictionalised accounting of someone’s life and it filters through. I am in there somewhere I know I am. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Where it comes to songs with an edge ‘What Kind Of Man’ is up there with the best you have written; the lyrics really jump out at you. It has an edge to it?
I like that song, too. It is a reaction to Same Old Man, a little love song and a kind of twist on that. It is the general complacency you kind find yourself in a relationship.
People can write songs about how governments have failed them and all the ills of the world and then one day reflect on how it really is and wake up to the fact we are often our own worst enemy?
That is true, but we don’t like to write about that. We would rather complain about institutions, our boss or taxes!.
I noticed on the album there is a song, ‘Homeland’ that gives the English a small mention, why is that?
That is a little less fictional than some of the other ones. We are on a farm and had a problem with the spirits that are not at rest, back behind the barn and we had two friends who were medicine man and woman from an American Indian tribe who, we had known for years and live up in Canada and have been friends of ours a long time. One day they contacted us and said, you have a problem behind you barn and we said, yes we know. For years our wives and kids had been scared to go back there because they saw eyes and I have had oratories like one hundred televisions back there blah, blah, blah. So they came down and started walking ‘round and started weeping and we felt profoundly sad as well and we felt this heaviness. Then the medicine man said back about 300 years a lot of people died there, a lot of native people, English people and some French trappers and they were stuck and couldn’t get home. So, we did a ceremony according to tradition, and sent them home. Basically, it was about people who lived on this land long before we did, and what it really means when you call a place your homeland.
Today, through ever-bigger machinery places that once meant something are being flattened and parts of history in some case are being destroyed and lost forever?
Yes, like in the words of the song. ‘You can’t bury anything, men or nations / old memories, old vibrations / the pain doesn’t stop just because the killing ceased’.
What an interested guy Fireball Roberts must have been to whom you dedicate a song?
Yes, he was a stock car racing driver who died in the early 1960s in a real fiery accident.
Do you have any special cars or motorcycles back at home?
I raced for about ten years, Stock Cars, oval track style, at a very amateur level. I have always been a fan of racecar driving. I grew up in Indianapolis (Indiana) where we have the Indie 500. Every May I would at the racetrack for the whole month, out at the racetrack and I had hero race drivers; Jimmy Clark of course who brought the rear engine Lotus to the Indie 500, guys like Mario Andretti and AJ Foy people like that. So besides having musical heroes I also had my racing drivers.
When you recorded the album were you all in the same room?
Yes, I have a little outbuilding out behind the farm. Basically, half of it used to be my race car shop, garage, and the other half was my writing room and we sort of set up a bunch of equipment I had collected over the years and wired it up about four years ago and it is a recording studio now. It is nothing fancy, but we’re all playing at the same time. It is essentially a live recording and because I only have an eight-track machine there is not a lot of overdubbing.
It must great to work on something were there is only the four of you involved but still obtain a big sound?
That is what I love making it sound big and lively but only four guys, the basic sound, two guitars, bass and drums —thank you Nick Lowe!
It must have been a wonderful experience working with Nick when you were in the band, Little Village. What a great observer and what fantastic grooves come so naturally to him?
He is amazing. He is one of the all-time greats. Great singer, great bass player and like you say he is also a wonderful guy and he is totally, rock‘n’roll.
Have you done any songwriting with Nick Lowe since the days of Little Village?
Unfortunately, no, but I would love to get together and still hold out hope that we will get together and do another Little Village thing someday.
You are now all that bit older and strive less today so maybe able to ease back and let things happen?
Yeah, I would of thought and hope that would be the case too.
Back to recording, have you any thoughts of making a live album?
We have given it a great deal of thought and it is very much a possibility. We have been recording all the shows supporting The Open Road, and have a bunch of solo stuff in the can so there could well be something out as early as next year.
Do you think the term Americana helped you music become more accepted by a wider audience that before?
You can call it whatever you want it does not bother me. I don’t know what helps and what hurts, I know I am grateful for the audience we have and the audience who come out to hear the music that is for sure.
Americana I feel helps break barriers to where we are getting back to where people just going to live music show and there isn’t so many strict divides as became the case?
I think it is music. Music is the power we are taking about and it doesn’t matter what form it comes in it is that experience. Especially in a live situation and the music is right and, the musicians are able to make this magic happen and able to give it to the audience. Able to share it there is something in the transference. Something happens that make it a magic event and you don’t get that on a recording. Only in the excitement of being at a live show, it is something you are unable to get on TV or download.
Today, I think is good time for the likes of your self where the artist has a greater say who they have play on the record. You can now have your friends play on the record like on New West and other independent labels?
There are plusses and minuses to every advance in anything. There are huge pluses in recording techniques but there are minuses too. The pluses are obvious, you can make a record in your bedroom for a few thousand dollars for the reasons you described. But on the minuses we are losing sound quality and things like mic techniques and the art of recording, the dynamics but that will come along.
When you were growing up who were the people you looked up and learnt from?
Oh, god it would take hours. But the first record I bought was Little Stevie Wonder Part 1 and 2 as a single, I remember playing it over and over gain and it was a live record. It was a hit single, an unbelievable record. My older brothers had Elvis records around the house so I was a fan and, then when I was eleven I got a guitar and after that I put little bands together and we would play whatever was on the radio. Here in America it was the golden age, we would hear Otis Redding then the Beatles, Aretha Franklin and then some silly bubblegum record. You would hear all types of music on the one station. Then I leaned more towards r&b and trashy rock‘n’roll. More Rolling Stones and the regional kind of stuff, Midge Rider and the Detroit Wheels and the Tex-Mex borderland radio kind of music. Doug Sahm and people like that really appealed to me. I then looked to see where all that come from, and discovered Muddy Waters and Lightning Hopkins and folk music, Bob Dylan, Odetta and the country blues and all the way through.
Have you been involved in any other projects recently or tribute records? I loved the work you did with the Chieftains a while ago, that must have been a thrill?
Oh, man I loved that day we did that. I was also played on the live show they did at the Ryman; and I am about to do something on a Waylon Jennings Tribute that Jessi Colter (Jennings’ wife) asked me to be part of. Waylon was one of my big heroes. He was so fearless as a musician and what a great catalogue of work and he wasn’t afraid to record a song no matter what genre it might belong to. If he thought it was good he would do it!
John Hiatt’s The Open Road is out now on New West. Go to Johnhiatt.com for more.
