AUSSIE DUO WINNIE BLUES RELEASE A SMOKING DEBUT ALBUM
NEW RELEASES
Meet the Australian couple storming Nashville. By Meg Crawford
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emember when smokes cost next to nothing and tucking a packet up your sleeve was a legit option? Well, Aussie-born but Nashvillebased couple Alice and Cam Potts harken back to that time with the golden haze, seventies alt-country glamour vibe of their first album Half Wide Awake, But Dreaming. Serving up some serious Gram Parsons and Emmylou feels, the romance, longing and melancholy of the album belies the fact that the couple are individually and collectively a joy. Let’s start with how they met. Alice had been in New York City for all of a week when she decided to take herself out for a night on the tiles. After strolling around town, she found herself at a Ruby Boots gig. By chance, she stood next to Cam, and clocking an Aussie accent, Alice bought a round. Incidentally, Cam still hasn’t repaid that first beer, but it evidently didn’t matter because it’s now a number of years down the track, they’re married and loved up. What happened next? Well, initially nothing. Alice went home, while Cam went out for dinner with the band. Then, serendipity intervened. The pair discovered they’d both moved to Nashville. “We hadn’t been in contact at all, except when Alice came to town she posted in this Australians in Nashville Facebook group,” says Cam. “We all know each other here and it’s very small and weird. She was looking for a room, and I was like, ‘Hey, I don’t have a room but I remember meeting you in New York. You want to get a beer?’, and so we went and got a beer at the diviest of dive bars in Nashville and we just talked about music and stuff all night. At some point Alice said, ‘Oh yeah, play a little bit of guitar’. And I was like, ‘Oh cool, we should write’, because everyone else fucking writes in this city.” So, a plan was set to write some, except that Alice kept canning the meeting. Having never co-written before, she had some initial trepidation. Happily, she bit the bullet. “We eventually got together and I just realised, ‘Oh, he’s such a lovely human’ and made me feel very comfortable,” she recollects. “So, we wrote our first single ‘Settle Down’ in that first sitting, which was great because it just kind of just tumbled out of us. And then we just kept on going.” Next came the band. With about five songs under the belt, the pair met for lunch outside at Las Maracas for tacos on a busy main street in Nashville whereupon Cam asked Alice what she’d like to do musically and outlined some options. “I wasn’t trying to be a producer or anything, it was just ‘what do you want to do?’,” Cam explains. Up to that point, Cam had been in the Dead Letter Chorus, whereas Alice – not that anyone would ever know – had never been in a band.
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With that background in mind, Alice was certain about only one thing. “I knew I loved writing with him,” she notes. “I remember we both cheered and we were like, ‘Oh, I think we’ve got band’.” And so, the Winnie Blues was born. Which begs a question: do Americans get the providence of the name? “No, Americans don’t know what Winnie Blues are,” Alice says, gleefully. “ It’s our cheeky way of carrying some subtle Australian with us over here.” Then came their first album, Half Wide Awake, But Dreaming, which was recorded live over three or four days at Neal Cappellino’s fabled studio, The Doghouse. Backed by local players, including fellow ex-pat Ryan Brewer on drums, the recording captures the energy of the band on stage, with a gloriously seventies Americana sway. In getting to that point, they were prompted by producer Nick Bullock to compile what he pegged as a “mountain-top playlist”. “Immediately, the first song that came to mind was ‘Hopelessly Devoted To You’ from the Grease soundtrack,” Cam recalls. “We wanted it to sound like that. It’s a little bit polished, a little bit country. It’s got strings in parts, and it’s very emotive. If we could have just bottled up Sandy from the middle part of Grease, that’s what we were going for.” That said, don’t expect their songs to be all sweetness and light. For a start, they mostly do trade in story-based sad songs. “You know how singing along to a sad song makes you feel happy and connected and empathetic?” Cam reflects. “We definitely use music as a cathartic exercise. We write about our friends in disguised ways or our own experiences. I like challenging stories.” It’s an interesting balance. Take their heartrending first single, ‘Coming Home to You’ for example. On one hand, it’s a nu-country anthem with sweeping harmonies, but, in essence, it’s a feminist protest song responding to inequities, like the pay gap. The Winnie Blues aren’t pulling any punches, but they’re doing it such a skilful way that may be you won’t even notice. It’s an iron fist in a velvet glove approach. Let’s fast forward to now, whereupon the Winnie Blues have just released the album – on their own label, Two Hands, no less. While Half Wide Awake, But Dreaming is the first cab out of the Two Hands rank, more (including from other artists) are set to follow. For Alice, it’s an opportune moment to reflect. “We’re proud to have been able to put out this album, especially given everything that’s happened in the world. Everybody has had a hard year, but it’ll be nice to look back and have timestamped this period with a record.”
When God Was Great
Even the staunchest atheist will be hard pressed to find fault with the Bosstones’ latest album By Meg Crawford
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sk any Mighty Mighty Bosstones fan and they’ll tell you that the band have always made a revolution sound like a party. Their eleventh studio album, When God Was Great, is no exception. However, while tackling everything from George Floyd’s murder to the state of American politics, the album still manages to be uplifting. “I believe in the human race,” says Dicky Barrett, the graveltoned, charismatic frontman of the Boston ska-punk legends. “The message that I’ve always sent is, ‘there is hope and people are good, more good than bad’.” The album’s weightiest moment is undoubtedly ‘The Killing of Georgie (Part III)’, which references Rod Stewart’s ‘The Killing of Georgie, Part 1 & 2 from 1976. Barrett started putting pen to paper days after the event. “It just started pouring out of me,” Barrett says. The sad fact is that the band has been tackling the topic of racism for decades. Take their ’97 ska-punk anthem, ‘Let’s Face It’, for example, which starts with the line, “Well it’s so hard to face/ That in this day and age/ Somebody’s race can trigger somebody’s rage”. “The Mighty Mighty Bosstones is a band of many cultures and many ethnic backgrounds,” Barrett notes. “If you told us that in 2021 things might even be going in reverse, I would have laughed and said, ‘that’s ridiculous, that could not be the case’.”
“As for ‘The Killing of Georgie’, it’s more of commentary on how we as people in the United States handled that versus how, in other situations and times of trouble and tribulation, we used to be a country that would rise to the occasion. I think we failed and I don’t think we had anybody to look to in order to unite us. I kind of took from great speeches – I guess maybe even plagiarised. It’s crazy to me, as not a young man, to think that when Martin Luther King gave us the great ‘I had a dream’ speech he took the country and put it on the shoulders and said, ‘we can do this. We are better than this’. If he was alive today, he would be shocked to see that we haven’t gotten it all sewn up.” On the lighter end of the scale, there’s the band’s ska treatment of the Creedence classic, ‘Long As I Can See the Light’. “Oh, did you like our version of that?”, Barrett asks, sounding genuinely excited. It turns out that Creedence as a topic lights him up. “My biggest problem is that John Fogerty’s vocals were pure perfection,” he continues. “Everything that needs to be brought to that song, vocally and lyrically, he was doing. And it was a huge hit. In 1968, I think it hit number two here in the United States. The interesting thing about Creedence Clearwater is they had six or seven number two hits. And no number ones in the United States in their history. “So, instead of leaning into it harder, I kind of sat back a little bit more than he does or more than I normally would, in order to
not step on what he’s already carved out. I didn’t want to give anyone the idea that I think I was improving on it. Also, I loved the message and felt like it was timely. It really blended nicely with everything else we were trying to say. I often think of all the people listening to the record, and I think, ‘I really hope John Fogerty likes our version of the song’, because it’s a great, great song. There’s a possibility that he goes, ‘What is this rubbish?’. That would break my heart, because it was meant as nothing but a complete and utter tribute to a guy that made some great music.” Of course, being written and produced last year, When God Was Great is a pandemic baby. Written in a tumultuous year, Barrett credits the album with seeing the band through. “We always write together and share ideas, so we’re mostly writing songs at all times. Then, eventually, we realise we have enough songs to make a record and we make another Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ record. That’s what we were going through with this one. Then, all of a sudden, we realised that we had more time on our hands because of the lockdown and the pandemic, so we were suddenly writing at a more rapid pace, with a level of fury and intensity. We stepped up the pace, to say the least.” When God Was Great is available now through Epitaph. 23
