New Song Spotlight: "Dusty Ground"

Back to the Beginning

It was 2006. We had a band name. We liked Flogging Molly and the Pogues. We drank regularly at Vancouver’s Ivanhoe Hotel. We had The SSB, Willy and I, a whistle player named “Bouzouki Joe” (bonus points if you know who he was) and some fiddler named Elise. That was all we had.

Oh, and we had “Dusty Ground”. We had been trying out a bunch of crap material, some covers, a tune that eventually became “Antarctica”, and these very early practices were sort of lacking in collective energy. But when we first made it through “Dusty Ground”, I remember Elise and B.Joe—highly talented players steeped in folk traditions—turning to me and saying: “OK, we like that one.”

Why didn’t we keep playing it? The neurons storing the justification for that decision were obliterated by something called “Träsch” in Switzerland around 2011. No idea. But somehow it always stuck around in my head. And when we were putting Roll and Go together, I realized that because of the album concept we had to return to those early days and capture the spirit of those first chaotic sessions. We had to do “Dusty Ground”.

I have no idea why the lyrics are so edgy and dark, but there they are. During the album writing process I was very close to changing them entirely, I had the idea to make it a drinking song about my favorite Rhum, Barbancourt 8 yr (“Bar-Ban-Court” instead of “Duss-tee Ground”). But this felt wrong somehow. And so the dark, pessimistic lyrics stayed:

There’s Children blown to pieces
by madmen in the sky
and warlords gathering
with deserts in their eyes

These last two lines are stolen from a song called “Digging For Some Words” by a British/South African singer who had a huge influence on my childhood, Johnny Clegg. My parents were always listening to Clegg, who became inspired by South African Mbaqanga music and gave it an 80s pop feel long before Paul Simon was to make millions doing the same. I loved his songs so much.

Eventually we lived in what was then called Swaziland for two years in 1989-90, and I got to see the culture that Clegg was singing about up close, right when artists like him were helping to finally break apartheid’s backbone once and for all. And one of my most vivid memories is of trying to grow a crop garden out front of our little house, and of watching this endlessly thirsty ground just soak up every drop I could throw at it during a dry spell. The metaphor always stuck with me.

I know, pretty weird for this all to end up in a celtic punk song. As the world’s greatest comedian says: “But… thaaaat’s my life!”

And yes, the jig in the middle is the same one we used for “Joli Rouge”, though this time we complete it with its B-part. No idea what it’s called. Probably Finnegan’s Merry Hornswaggle or something like that.

And finally, you paid subscribers get to hear the shitty, home-studio, fake-drums fake-bass version of “Dusty Ground” that I recorded in 2020, when I was getting some sounds together for the band to listen to. I think you’ll agree that the studio improved it a lot, but it did have a certain raw energy...