Searching for the source
The former frontman of Old Crow Medicine Show, American folkie Willie Watson, is now flying solo. Landing in New Zealand this week for an Auckland show, he talks with Grant Smithies.
It’s quite a voice Willie Watson has, both on his records and right now, on the phone from his LA home. High and clean, soft as a feather duster one minute, brittle as glass the next, it’s the perfect voice to cut through a tangle of acoustic guitars, banjos and fiddles and carry a lonesome lyric straight to your bleeding heart.
You might have heard Watson yourself, during the 17 years he spent singing with Americana string band Old Crow Medicine Show, or more recently, backing David Rawlings and Gillian Welch in The Dave Rawlings Machine.
And you can hear him this coming Thursday, when he plays alongside Nashville star Joshua Hedley at the Tuning Fork in Auckland’s Vector Arena. No doubt we can expect a bunch of songs from his very fine 2014 solo debut, Folk Singer Vol 1.
‘‘You’ll also hear some stuff from Folk Singer Vol 2, which hasn’t even come out yet,’’ he tells me from his living room. ‘‘I’ve just recorded a bunch more songs I’ve only ever played once or twice before while I was learning them, here at home, singin’ them to my own four walls. I’m gonna play those down your way and see how they go in front of a crowd.’’
You mean, inflict a bunch of unrehearsed material on some defenceless New Zealanders? ‘‘Ha! Yeah, man, exactly. But that’s a good thing. Songs don’t really take on any sort of life until some other people are in the room, forcing me to dig deeper and turn them into something powerful.’’
What makes a great song, in Watson’s view? ‘‘It has to speak to me in some way, and I have to be able to sing it with a certain amount of honesty. I might not have personally lived through whatever’s happening in the lyric, but I have to believe what I’m singing so that a listener will believe it, too.’’
One such song on his debut album is Rock Salt And Nails .It was written by an anarchist folk singer from Ohio named Utah Phillips, whose songs were covered by Emmylou Harris, Joan Baez and Tom Waits, among others, and whose roving life was an influence on the young Bob Dylan.
Phillips jumped railcars and travelled the land, a politicised hobo playing at union rallies, and ran for President in 1976 as a representative of the ‘‘Do Nothing Party’’. Somewhere along the line, a woman broke his heart and Rock Salt And Nails spilled out of him, lubricated by tears.
‘‘That song first got my attention because it has great chords and a melody that really sticks in your head, but what really gets you is the heartbreak in it.
‘‘It’s a very bitter sort of love song. It draws you in gentle enough, but then, by the time you get to the end, these girls have turned into small game animals in the woods and your gun’s loaded with rock salt rather than bullets because you’re not trying to kill them; you just want them to hurt like you’ve been hurt.’’
Watson grew up near Ithaca, in upstate New York, a place where a lot of old-time string band music was still being played, largely because of an influx of folkfancying hippies during the 60s and 70s.
‘‘Banjo players, guitarists, oldtime fiddlers – these people were everywhere when I was a kid, so I was really exposed to that at the same time, and I also listened to a lot of Neil Young and Bob Dylan. But then I started getting obsessed with bands like Nirvana and the Pixies at the age of 12 or so.’’ The game-changer came when Watson heard Nirvana singing Lead Belly’s chilling murder ballad, In The Pines, on their Unplugged album.
‘‘The dark subject matter fit with Kurt Cobain’s self-image, I guess, but it set me off finding old blues and folk and acoustic stuff, you know. Dark roots music, basically. I felt like I’d found the source. It was like being handed the keys to the door of some secret club. That song changed my life.’’
Soon afterwards, Watson was delighted to discover that he was not alone. Quite by chance, some other hot young roots players drifted into his town, and Old Crow Medicine Show was born.
‘‘Ketch and Critter moved to my town from Virginia, and it was like ‘Oh, my God. Where have you guys been all my life?’ Just like me, these guys were the 5 per cent of people at their school who’d been blown apart by Nirvana singing Lead Belly and then followed it back, you know?’’
Watson and his newfound bandmates hit the road.
‘‘Yeah, there we were, in our early 20s, rolling around the country making music in our own little gang. It was fun. We knew we were good, so we probably acted a little entitled, in hindsight. But that’s what you do at that age, right?’’
They were good, though. For a hint of just how raw, ragged and intuitive this band could be in its prime, you can’t go past the YouTube clip of Down Home Girl, a song filmed in one take as it was being bashed out live on a New York street corner, complete with an irate policeman trying to move them along midsong.
‘‘Yeah, we got real lucky that day, man. People ask us if that was staged, but that’s just how it rolled out, right down to that crazy old guy at the end who asked if we were the Sex Pistols. But yeah, that’s one of my favourite things about that band. We could take our instruments out in the street, throw up a microphone and sound just like we would sound in a great studio or on a stage. We made this really pure, honest, heartfelt sound together, without over-thinking it too much.’’
Watson went solo in 2011. At first, he wrote a brace of new songs, but then decided to go deeper into the history of the music he loved by digging out lesser known traditional ballads and reframing them. On one level, it was a professional development exercise, strengthening the bones of his own future songwriting; on another, it was a way of shining some light on the great songwriters of the past.
‘‘A lot of these early singers are like mythical creatures to me. The work they did is so brilliant, it’s hard for me to believe that they really were, like, tangible and real.’’
Most of the early sonic superheroes of the folk and blues era are gone now, of course, but Watson’s obsession gets ever deeper, fuelled by the magical artefacts these people left behind.
‘‘I love those early recordings they made, and the weird frequencies those old microphones captured. Sometimes, on the real early stuff, there was no microphone, and these people were literally singing out their heart into a giant metal cone.’’
The old studios and direct-todisc recording techniques made some sounds leap forward in the mix while others seemed to hover, like ghosts.
‘‘There was just so much punch and high-end in the sound of records made in the 1920s, and that tone just killed me, man. Then one day I kind of did it myself, by accident. I make little demo work recordings on this phone I’m talking to you on right now. One day I had it set on Bluetooth mode by accident, and it was recording through the earpiece instead of the microphone. I played it back and it had this warbly, old-record sound, with my guitar sounding like it was made out of some weird new metal. I thought – Hey! I’m suddenly one of these guys! At last, due to a freak of digital science, I’m suddenly sounding just like my heroes. If I’d been around, making records back then, maybe I could have done OK.’’
‘A lot of these early singers are like mythical creatures to me. The work they did is so brilliant, it’s hard for me to believe that they really were, like, tangible and real.’ Willie Watson
Willie Watson and rising Nashville star Joshua Hedley play one New Zealand double headline date at Vector Arena’s Great South Pacific Tuning Fork on Thursday, July 7 with special guest, Adam McGrath (The Eastern).