Good Ol' Folk Music

It’s just inevitable, you get old, you play folk music.

Heroes

We were slated to play the proper venue at Dogfish Head brewing down in Delaware, and when they asked us if we’d do an acoustic set beforehand in their full brewery we of course said yes. As it turns out, that set was way more fun.

For the first time since I used to play in a celt-rock pub band in 2000-2005, I was up strumming an acoustic guitar and providing the entire damn rhythm section. Let me tell you how hard this used to be: I would play 45-50 songs a night, with no drums or even foot stomping behind me, with just the acoustic guitar providing the beat. We were doing songs like The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn. Whiskey in the Jar. These are around 150 beats per minute before you get sloshed on the free pints you’ve been skulling all evening to get the previous night’s hangover out of your system. Then it’s god only knows:

Yes, that is an “Ixnay on the Hombre” sticker

I would stand up there on that stage at D’Arcy McGee’s Pub in Ottawa, Canada, and bash out these chords on a shitty guitar endlessly and as a result I developed this wild strumming arm. I can’t play solos or fast noodley bits on the guitar to save my life, but if you need me to do triple-time accent stumming on a jig or a reel I’m yer man. I remember recording with Consuelo’s Revenge and they’d booked four hours for me to do my acoustic bits, and I knocked all the songs out in one take save for one re-do. Our engineer showed me the peaks on a resulting WAV file and said “Jeez, that looks like a metronome”. All because of roughly 250 hours spent being the only rhythm instrument in a pub band.

So when it came time to get the tempo up for the quick songs we were doing at Dogfish Head, it all felt vaguely familiar. Oh yeah. Jigs, reels, etc. Families were there, toddlers and kids were bouncing around, people were clapping along and stomping their feet, it was so twenty years ago.

But of course we also did a ton of shanties… er, sorry David, Nautical songs… and perhaps the most special moment of the afternoon came during the song Shenandoah. This is fast becoming our favourite new song to sing. Mr. Cream (bass) loves it more than life itself. I introduced the song as our only American song, but then realized that we were barely 150 miles east of that actual river, over in West Virginia. And not really that far from where John Skenandoa lived, the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannock chief who inspired the song. And again, barely 50 miles from the Susquehanna river, which bears the name of those “people of the muddy river”.

And when we sang it, I looked around the room and saw 3 faces tearing up, people actually wiping their eyes. You realize in that moment: many of these people grew up singing this song at school, or hearing someone in the family sing it, or something like that. Right, you remember: this is folk music. Music that invokes the history of a place for the people who are there. A lot of bands and singers who call themselves “folk” because they have an acoustic guitar or a banjo or whatever could stand to think about this.

Which is why, now that I’m writing new songs and shanties for the next album, a lot of them are turning out to have lyrics based around New York City. It’s where I live now. A folk musician has to try to tap into the history and mythology of where they live, and not just sing shanties about being “true British sailors” when they aren’t British and would get seasick crossing a wet lawn.

Anyway, we’re practising tomorrow and I’m gonna make a recording of Shenandoah so y’all paid subs can hear it. It’s awesome. Onwards!