Lee Sklar gives us the skinny on his latest project with singer-songwriter Judith Owen

“I met Judith through her husband, Harry Shearer [aka Derek Smalls of Spinal Tap],” says Lee of the Welsh singer-songwriter with whom he recently recorded her beguiling album Somebody’s Child, which ranges in its references from Steely Dan to Randy Newman.“I have worked with Harry over the years and, in fact, we had done an album called Songs Of The Bushmen, which was his satirical album about the end of the Bush administration. So we were playing a gig up at this place called Blues Alley in Seattle. Judith came up and he said, ‘My wife’s going to sit in and do a couple of songs’. She sat down at the piano and I was like, ‘What?’ I had no clue about what she did. But we connected instantly.

“When she was doing her last album, Ebb & Flow, it was this homage to the 70s classic West Coast music of James Taylor, [Linda] Ronstadt and all. She called me and said, ‘Would you play on my album?’ I said, ‘Well, absolutely. I’d love to’. She said, ‘Could you call Russ Kunkel and Waddy Wachtel?’ I said, ‘Sure’. Everybody immediately said, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’ We went in real old-school and cut the album live. In a week we were pretty much done with it.

“Everybody that’s ever come to a gig walks away going, ‘Wow, she’s unbelievable, man – this is blowing my mind.’ It’s just getting people to hear it. That’s really the essence of what this is all about.”

Somebody’s Child by Judith Owen is available now on Twanky Records