Like a 422 bus on King Street, Newtown, where you wait for one for an hour for a bus and then 2 come along at the same time, I figured that I should hit the fans with a new album straight after the release of the Someone’s Dad CD in August 2007.
From late summer 2008, Jeff Pope and I had been getting together on a weekly basis at his place in Summer Hill to see if we could co-write some tunes. He’d played guitar in Sydney alt country rockers Deadwood ’76 but when he joined my band John Kennedy’s ’68 Comeback Special I was looking for a multi-instrumentalist and he was keen to develop his steel and dobro playing.
Jeff told me he had a song that he wanted to show me. Having written a few songs in my time, I was waiting to hear a chord progression, a melody and maybe some lyrics. He picked up his dobro and played a tasty little lick. Then he repeated it again. I waited for more. Then he repeated it again. That was it. Obviously Jeff and I had completely different ideas about what constituted a song. But it was a start. Lonely Eye, the first song we came up with, was based on that lick.
Over the weeks we kicked around ideas and one night I showed him a couple of obscure songs from indie songwriters that I’d picked up on my travels in the ‘90’s. One was called Robert Mitchum. It was written an instrumental by a German musician called Christoph (aka Justice) Hahn who I’d had an up and down friendship with when I lived in Berlin. I didn’t like most of his other songs but this tune was a simple but haunting piece. Maybe it was the fact that it had been used as the intro theme music for a local radio show called Roots that I used to listen to each week in Berlin, I don’t know. But it had certainly lodged itself. Jeff thought it was pretty cool too. When we got together the following week he played me Hank Williams’ Ramblin’ Man and pointed out how similar the two were in mood if not in tempo. We put down a rough demo of a mash up of the two that night. That was the first medley for the new CD and the piece that set the tone for much of the rest of the album.
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Is This Not Paris? CD: Part 1 – The concept
A story in 5 or more parts.
Part 1 – The Concept
Like a 422 bus on King Street, Newtown, where you wait for one for an hour for a bus and then 2 come along at the same time, I figured that I should hit the fans with a new album straight after the release of the Someone’s Dad CD in August 2007.
From late summer 2008, Jeff Pope and I had been getting together on a weekly basis at his place in Summer Hill to see if we could co-write some tunes. He’d played guitar in Sydney alt country rockers Deadwood ’76 but when he joined my band John Kennedy’s ’68 Comeback Special I was looking for a multi-instrumentalist and he was keen to develop his steel and dobro playing.
Jeff told me he had a song that he wanted to show me. Having written a few songs in my time, I was waiting to hear a chord progression, a melody and maybe some lyrics. He picked up his dobro and played a tasty little lick. Then he repeated it again. I waited for more. Then he repeated it again. That was it. Obviously Jeff and I had completely different ideas about what constituted a song. But it was a start. Lonely Eye, the first song we came up with, was based on that lick.
Over the weeks we kicked around ideas and one night I showed him a couple of obscure songs from indie songwriters that I’d picked up on my travels in the ‘90’s. One was called Robert Mitchum. It was written an instrumental by a German musician called Christoph (aka Justice) Hahn who I’d had an up and down friendship with when I lived in Berlin. I didn’t like most of his other songs but this tune was a simple but haunting piece. Maybe it was the fact that it had been used as the intro theme music for a local radio show called Roots that I used to listen to each week in Berlin, I don’t know. But it had certainly lodged itself. Jeff thought it was pretty cool too. When we got together the following week he played me Hank Williams’ Ramblin’ Man and pointed out how similar the two were in mood if not in tempo. We put down a rough demo of a mash up of the two that night. That was the first medley for the new CD and the piece that set the tone for much of the rest of the album.