INSIDE THE DREAMER’S MOTEL with JOACHIM COODER

With his young children sound asleep upstairs, Joachim Cooder is talking to me about his new album, Dreamer’s Motel, from his entirely painted in blood red basement room. It’s in keeping with Dreamer’s Motel’s final track, Down In The Blood, as he reveals the origin of this macabre song title.

WORDS: Paul Davies PICS: Supplied

“My daughter came home one day and she said, ‘Daddy, Eleanor bit Weston, and it was almost down to the blood’. And I was like, oh my god, that is the weirdest blues lyric I never would have thought of. And I just took it out of her context and created my own.” Out of the mouths of babes the essence of a mesmeric song and its title is created: “You hear this voice going on the whole time, this slow voice singing this melody, and it comes around in an odd number of bars, and I kept listening to it,” he says. “I don’t know why I did it, but I had taken something else I’d done and then just slowed it down. And I was listening to my slow voice, and I heard the melody in that, and I thought this would be a good chorus. It was like a New Orleans kind of blues march and I started singing over it.” recalls Joachim on the making of this significant final check out track on Dreamer’s Motel.

To begin the checking in at the start of this deceptively arranged ambient, folk-blues album, the inspiration for the naming of it and the title track derived from a personal Cooder family experience as Joachim reveals to me: “It started with this little motel that my parents would take me to when I was a kid. It was always there, north of Los Angeles, right on the beach, and a train would go by it. I had a feeling it would always be there. Then one day it got sold and these developers bought it and tore it apart. Then they lost all their money and then it just sat there like these carcasses. And every time I would drive by it going north, I would look away because there was something so depressing about it. And I thought, ‘What are these places that we can no longer go back to, and we can only imagine them?’” Cooder turned this greedy

act of destruction into a cathartic creative adventure via muscle memory moments of inspiration as he continues: “And you sort of walk through the rooms and you picture all these memories and all the songs kind of fit into that kind of contemplative place we can’t go back to, or people we can’t see anymore, and we just have to visit them in our in our minds.”

It’s right at the beginning of the opening track that his famous father, Ry, walks into this imaginary space as Joachim gets round to telling me: “I had gone out with my dad on some touring, and one tour was with Ricky Skaggs and the musical family band The Whites. It was such a rich musical experience, being with those people and hearing those harmonies. I took a lot from that and listened to everything they had to say and wrote down little notes about songs to go listen to and I think that was a big musical influence on this record.” He adds: “Then making the Taj Mahal record, with my dad on board, was a shortlived experience because we made the record and then only played two live shows and that was it. But there’s something about being around Taj... he must constantly do new things he’s like, ‘what about this song’? And we would play it, and then, maybe, we would never play it again, but it would stick with me.

So, it shaped the musical part of how these songs grew.” As compositional proof, he further tells how the title track took shape: “I would be at sound checks, and I would record people playing, then I take that home and kind of re-sample it and make things out of it and that’s how the Dreamers Motel song starts. It’s just my dad playing a guitar by himself in a big concert hall, and because it has this great ambient quality to it that you could never get in a recording studio.” He furthers: “He was like, ‘What? What is that’? Because it starts off with his guitar that I had sampled and looped from one of the shows. He’s like ‘That’s beautiful. What is that’? And I was like, ‘that’s you from the Chicago soundcheck’. He got a big kick out of that. Then he would come in and play mandolin on a few things and it was a very easy process. We would drive over to (Producer) Martin’s (Pradler) house and he listens and he’s like, ‘I’ll try this’, and then he leaves.”

Joachim details the importance of his creative relationship with his co-producer Martin Pradler: “He’s very important. Martin has such an incredible ear. Sometimes when I come into his studio with a song that’s maybe 40% or 50% there, I say here’s what I think... I have a verse and

a chorus, and then he will do some great chord change for a bridge that I never would have heard. Or I say, ‘I don’t know how to deal with this’. Then he’ll just do something, and he has an incredible musicality, and I have so much trust in him that it’s hard to imagine working with anybody else at this point, because we’ve been working together for decades. He’s from Austria and is always threatening to move home, and I’m always hoping that’s not going to happen.”

I inform Joachim that I think there’s a playfulness and an innocence about the sounds that translate these song ideas into musical form. What’s enchanting is there’s not a huge amount of instrumentation, but there’s the right amount and in the right places. It consciously possesses a minimal feel. I enquire if this was something he was exploring or did it occur by happenstance: “I wanted it to be very easy to listen to in a good way, and let the stories be the main focus. But that’s good that you said it’s the right amount, because sometimes when I listen back, I think, did I not do enough to these songs. Was I unfinished? But then I think, no, I think it is finished, and there’s also nothing you can do about it now.” He continues: “ I also think with the Mbira being my main instrument on my records and my live show, it has an inherent quality; there’s something like a lullaby to it. I put my fingers down on the Mbira, and instantly you get a meditative, playful quality. I also think some of the songs come from things that my kids say. They’re now a little older: six and nine, but they have this way kids have of saying things that are just not quite right. It’s somehow psychedelic. I’m always inspired by them with my lyrics.”

Joachim also sings throughout this sublime set of songs which is something of a new experience: “My singing just occurred one day. I had never sung before, because I’d always been a drummer and never attempted singing or writing songs. Then, one day after singing to this plant in our yard that wouldn’t grow, I found myself chanting at first, and then turned it into a song. I found myself singing as if I had always sung in this voice that I had never used before. It was this pure expression that came out and I hadn’t worked on. It was just there, and I found it. It’s just me singing and my wife, Juliette (who is a highly respected musician and recording artist in her own right), singing all the harmonies.”

I’m interested in the title of track three, Godspeed Little Children Of Fort Smith, Arkansas and ask him about its origins: “That comes from when my wife was pregnant with our daughter, our first child, which is probably about ten years ago. We drove across the country to Nashville to produce a friend’s record and stay there for a while and see what it was like to live there.” He continues with this inspirational road tale: “We were driving along Highway 40 and go through all these towns that are sort of boarded up. The industry, whether it was farming or whatever this town was built around, had disintegrated. And we would go through these little towns, and nobody was there. I think because we had a baby on the way, we were thinking about what the young kids of these rural American towns were going to do. Will they leave? Will these towns eventually die out?” He says: “The night before we got to Nashville, we stopped in a town called Fort Smith, Arkansas, and we were eating in this place called the Texas Roadhouse. It’s like a chain restaurant and we saw this family come in, and we were so transfixed by this girl. She was probably seven years old, and the family looked like they had fallen on hard times, but she had this incredible look in her eyes: so bright. And we thought, God, what if we could follow her into the future, she would be a really good answer to this question about what happens to these young people. We never knew what happened to her, of course, because we left the next day, and it just ended up being a tale that I would tell my daughter as a bedtime story. It would change every night, and it was a meditation on young people, but through the prism of this one town, Fort Smith, Arkansas.”

With the telling of this dreamscape narrative of post-modern America, it felt right to allow Joachim to escape his basement red room and to climb the wooden hills to bed-ford-shire and hit the hay and, perhaps, dream of another sublime song to sample in the bright light of a fresh new day.