Bluesfest Update. Director Peter Noble prepares for an Octoberfest!

Meet the Australian couple storming Nashville.

By Meg Crawford

Remember 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. 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

Ask 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.

PEOPLE ON THE EDGE

Hussy Hicks will stop at nothing to hit the road in order to showcase their latest release, writes Samuel J. Fell

The call comes in from outside a laundromat in Lismore, on the New South Wales north coast. Is this unusual? Not really, Julz Parker and Leesa Gentz of Hussy Hicks are, as Gentz mentions, ‘road pigs’, they’ve been touring almost non-stop since their inception over a decade ago and so a clothes drying stop on the way to the next gig isn’t an odd occurrence at all. Of course, in these testing times, it’s not as usual as it once was. “We’ve had so many things pulled out from under us over the last fifteen months, we’re getting pretty used to it,” laughs Gentz. “We’ve made it to NSW and one show in Melbourne, we’ve had Western Australian attempts three times… we’ve been pretty NSW and Queensland-centric.” Parker and Gentz, as we speak, are on their way to Perisher, then Melbourne, before shows in Queensland and then Adelaide for the Guitar Festival in July, their first decent run since the pandemic began. And it has, of course, been tough, the lack of live playing taking its toll, but the Hicks aren’t ones to let it get to them. “I think everyone, we’ve all had to reimagine our future, and we try to remain hopeful,” Gentz muses. “We know that this government doesn’t care about us at all, the industry has been decimated and they don’t even mention it. But we’re also such a resilient bunch, we live outside of the mainstream most of the time anyway, so I think we’ll all find work-arounds, people are clever, and it is the creative arts, so people are coming up with creative ways to, essentially, not go crazy.” The pair have built onto their studio, and with bandmates Tracy Bassy (bass) and drummer Ali Foster, have forged an even deeper connection over the past year, having had to quarantine together multiple times, using that time to meld together as players even more so than they had done, pre-pandemic. One result of this was the release last year of Gather Up The People, the band’s sixth studio album, from which they’re currently pushing single ‘The Edge’, a song which came together, interestingly, across four countries. “I was engineering and running the desk side of things, so we had time to not push anything,” Parker explains. “That song… we jammed it so many ways, and had settled on the backbone of it, but there were still bits my producer head wanted to hear. So, we got Mick Albeck, an amazing fiddle player… so he came to our place in Burleigh and added that beautiful fiddle part. Then we were in New York… and we had a recording session in a roof-top studio in Harlem playing industrial chain music with two teenage New Yorkers. Then we took the track over to London… and ended up in basically a converted pigeon house [in France], and so played that weird, outro jam… and that’s how the songs ends, it’s a multi-continental track.” I venture, given the wide-ranging and global nature of how Gather Up The People as a whole came together, that it would have been quite odd, and perhaps quite ironic, releasing it last year, mid-pandemic, when no one anywhere was wide-ranging at all. “Yeah, there was no gathering,” Parker laughs. “We did um and ah about the name,” Gentz says, “because it was, straight down the line, against everything that was being hammered into us at the time. But it’s what we wanted to call the record, and what we wanted to offer to our people, this message of connectivity and stronger together.” Parker adds, “And it was very strange to release an album and then not spend six months touring it all around the world. I think a lot of what played into it was, we were all manic and crazy not knowing what was happening at the time, and usually with a new album you try and reach as many new people as possible, but we thought, we’ve got a really loyal and beautiful fanbase around the world who are probably sitting in their homes wondering what to do with their time, so lets just put this album out to the people who already know us, and we can share a moment together, in our houses.” So even during these tough times, Hussy Hicks attempted to gather up their people, releasing an album that does indeed focus on connectivity and being stronger together – and if all goes well, they’ll be able to spread it from onstage, rather than afar.

Gather Up The People is available now via hussyhicks.bandcamp.com

TAKING A STAND!

After an acclaimed debut, Yola’s new album reflects her true musical personality.

By Steve Bell

“I’m the truest I’ve ever been right now.”

Powerhouse British vocalist and songwriter Yolanda “Yola” Quartey spent years trying to breakthrough in the cutthroat London music scene, experiencing both heady highs and debilitating lows as she fought to establish a viable career. At her lowest ebb the singer even spent a brief stint living on the streets as she navigated the trials and tribulations inherent in following one’s artistic dreams. But it wasn’t until much later - and on the other side of the world - that Yola’s hard work and resilience would finally start to bear fruit. It would be in Nashville, not London, that her indubitable talents were first recognised and then nurtured, Music City welcoming her into the fold with open arms. Her acclaimed 2019 solo debut Walk Through Fire was recorded by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach in his Nashville studio and released on his Easy Eye Sound label. The collection of country-soul anthems made Yola a breakout star in the Americana realms, scoring her four Grammy nominations (including Best New Artist) as well as a nomination for Artist of the Year at the 2020 Americana Honors & Awards. She’s played onstage with names like Dolly Parton and Kacey Musgraves, recorded with Brandi Carlile’s The Highwomen outfit, played at the Grand Ole Opry, received praise from celebrity fans such as Elton John and Mavis Staples and was even recently tapped by Bas Luhrmann to star as the ‘Grandmother of Rock’N’Roll’ Sister Rosetta Sharpe in his upcoming musical biopic ‘Elvis’. Now on her gorgeous new follow-up Stand For Myself Yola has remained true to herself and her own journey, crafting a suite of songs as vulnerable and honest as they are uplifting and inspiring. It was again recorded and released by Auerbach, but this time the music is (for the most part) a more sophisticated take on symphonic soul mixed with elements of classic pop and even disco, resulting in a more accurate representation of Yola’s own personal story. “I’m coming from a new musical place, which is alone,” she laughs heartily. “On the first record, it’s almost more of a collaboration than it is a solo record, you know, because every song bar ‘It Ain’t Easier’ was written in the room with me and Dan and another co-writer. One of the co-writers would start playing something, I would respond with a melody, and we’d make it in the room at the time. “This one was made completely differently. If anything, it was the complete antithesis of a way to make the album where I’m taking from my back catalogue of things that I’ve written, things I know I have fire, but I’ve been waiting to have things that go with it that tell the same narrative, that tell the same story. “And also, the isolation of the pandemic meant that I couldn’t be in the room with a bunch of people, so I had to come up with the idea basically, and then be focused enough to know of the ideas I’ve had in my back catalogue, ‘what is it that’s speaking to me most today, and what do I want to say at this point in time?’ “And I found that there are songs that will just pop up and go, ‘I’m the truest I’ve ever been right now’. And ‘Diamond Studded Shoes’ is one of those, I started writing that in 2017 with my friend Aaron Lee Tasjan, who’s a singer-songwriter based here in Nashville. We were just talking about what was happening in the US and UK at the time and it felt really true then, and it’s just got truer. “And so that’s kind of how it was, I’d take the songs I’d partly made, almost fully made - sometimes just a chorus, sometimes just the verse - and I’d go, ‘Okay, I need help to bring this over the line. Um, this is how I’m feeling’. I’d get people in my headspace. And that was the opposite on the first record, it was just all of us coming into a room and then see what happens. So, I feel that this is the most me I’ve ever been, and so if you like this, you like me!” Even the new musical direction itself ties directly back to her youth, and early musical connections gleaned from her mother. “My mother was a disco DJ and she loved disco,” Yola explains. “She loved it - she loved soul music, she loved country music, but she loved disco probably more than anything on planet Earth. And all of the kind of stuff that linked in-between stuff. So, she loved Minnie Riperton and the space she occupies is kind of like jazz and kind of soul-ish, but not really. It’s something else. It’s so hard to put Minnie Riperton in a spot - she also did a disco hit, she did ‘Ring My Bell’ and so we know that - but she was like just everywhere and no one really felt that obsessed with putting her in a place. “And I was always enamoured by Minnie for that record - you know, you’ll know her for that really high note and when she’s singing with Rotary Connection and she’s doing all of those whistle tones, she’s like outrageous. “So, I got really into disco and into Barry White and The Bee Gees through my mother and into Aretha and Dolly through my mother as well. So many of the things that you hear on the album that are a bit soul-y and disco-y, that would be my mother. “And then me, I was brought up in the era of the 90s. And so, I discovered Smokey Robinson through D’Angelo, because he covered a Smokey song, ‘Cruisin’’, and I thought,’This is a really great song!’. And then I looked it up and I was like, ‘Oh, wait a minute, someone else has done this. Oh, this is the original. Okay’. So that was another kind of discovery. “But also, being English, Britpop was massive in my life, and I love Blur. So, in the melody of a couple of the songs, especially ‘Whatever You Want’, you can hear the melodies have got a little bit of a Britpop-y energy to it, even though there’s pedal steel in it. There are things and combinations that would never occur to anyone else, unless it was particularly an isolated black British lady. “Even with songs in the middle of the record like ‘If I Had To Do It All Again’ that’s very of my 90s influence of my love of Aaliyah and Mary J. Blige, but also you can hear maybe a hint of Annie Lennox’s influence on me when I was growing up listening to her as well - and Eurythmics - in the melody.” >>>