You are hereLive Review: Eilen Jewell at the Maze, Nottingham
Live Review: Eilen Jewell at the Maze, Nottingham
Just when my belief was being challenged by the abundance of poorly attended gigs in my part of the country, my faith in human kind was restored temporarily as the narrow corridor that runs between the front bar and the concert bar to the rear of The Maze in Nottingham began to fill with an assortment of characters, all eager to find a decent seat in the house as Eilen Jewell and members of her fine band sound checked up on stage. The air grew thin in the narrow cavernous corridor, the walls and ceiling of which were plastered with posters of the venue's previous triumphs, including the likes of Diana Jones, Martin Simpson, Steve Forbert, Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, Hayes Carll, Laura Veirs, Nick Harper, The Move and the list goes on; all from quite different musical backgrounds but all defined by their quality.
I was particularly pleased to see such a crowd at the Maze tonight, which made the night even more exciting than it was potentially guaranteed to be. Boston-based singer-songwriter Eilen Jewell took to the stage with her regular band consisting of Jason Beek (drums), Jerry Miller (guitars) and Johnny Sciascia (upright bass) and appeared to enjoy the banter that such an audience brings with it. It was guitarist Jerry Miller's birthday and so a party atmosphere was most definitely on the cards.
With sound checks out of the way and with bums on each and every seat in the house, plus the wall of standing figures at the back, silhouetted by the lights from the bar, I saw my way through to the backstage area and was introduced to Eilen by her drummer Jason Beek, who had guided me through to the backstage area. Once in the 'green room' I was face to face with the young singer-songwriter and set about my routine enquiries just as a series of strange rumbling and gurgling sounds emitted from the buildings heating system, providing a curious soundtrack to the interview that followed:
AW: This is not you're first time in the UK?
EJ: True, I think this is my third time.
AW: Originally from Idaho?
EJ: That's right, yeah.
AW: I read somewhere recently that you were asked to name your favourite place on Earth and you said Idaho..
EJ: Yeah.
AW: Can you tell someone from the UK what it's like to go to Idaho?
EJ: Well Idaho is kinda unusual I think because most people in the US don't know where it is. There's not that many people who live there and it has the most designated wilderness area per square mile, more than any other state outside of Alaska and Alaska's as big as half the US anyway, so it's a pretty good contender. It's more wild in a way than Wyoming or Montana, those two places are the places that most people think of when they think of ranches and mountains and open space big sky country, but Idaho is that way but even more so, but it's great because no one's heard of it. It's like my own little secret, that's how I feel about it.
AW: Well I think you'd be surprised, a few people in the UK have heard of it but very few of us have actually visited it, so after this you may get a big influx of visitors from the UK.
EJ: I should watch what I say uh? (laughs)
AW: Well you chose the path of a singer-songwriter performer, so that's obviously going to take you out of Idaho and you soon found yourself in Santa Fe, New Mexico. What took you there?
EJ: I moved there when I was 18 to attend college, I went to St John's College and I graduated in 2002. It was in Santa Fe coming towards the end of my time there that I got into performing music at the farmer's markets there.
AW: Did it have a thriving music scene there, or did you make it?
EJ: Well there was a pretty good music scene in Santa Fe that I feel like I never really tapped into because I was too shy to really get on a stage at that point and I was just doing busking and strictly the farmer's markets so, I think maybe the music scene might be a little stronger now than it was back then. There's some good music that happens there and definitely some good busking.
AW: You then went on to record your first album?
EJ: It was a little while after that, about three years it took me to get from Santa Fe to LA back to Idaho, back to New Mexico and then to Boston.
AW: So it was a real round trip wasn't it?
EJ: Yeah, oh and before Boston it was Great Barrington in Massachusetts, out in the western part of the state, in the country.
AW: So you'd had a lot of living by then, you'd done a lot of travelling around and your first self-released album BOUNDARY COUNTY came out, some nice songs on there it's a nice sort of low-key album..
EJ: Thank you, yeah it is pretty low-key.
AW: ..and it did set up what was to come, you definitely found your voice on the album, it wasn't as if the second and third album changed dramatically, you still had that essential Eilen Jewell sound. The one think I must talk about on that first album, you're not known to be an overtly political singer-songwriter but on that album you did record The Flood, which you didn't pull any punches with that. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I think Hurricane Katrina herself got let off lightly on that song, you did put all the blame where it belonged on the slow to respond government. Did you feel compelled to write that song?
EJ: I did, I felt like that song essentially wrote itself and it demanded to be written and be heard. It was a very passive thing for me I felt and I'm not trying to just get out of being blamed for writing something so scathingly political but most of it was written by just reading newspaper articles about what was going on there and a lot of the lines in the song are just simple descriptions that come from first hand observers of what was going on there. So pretty much verbatim; I took some liberty with what I wished could've happened to the leaders that failed so badly and seemed to be so apathetic to the people who were suffering there but other than that it was pretty much just from newspapers.
AW: I spoke earlier this year with Sid Griffin whose sister actually works with an organisation down in New Orleans to re-house some of those affected and I asked him how it was going and he said it's going okay but not as fast as they'd like to, so maybe with Obama settling in and getting his feet under the table something might be done there now?
EJ: I hope so, because we were there recently and although it looked better than when we were there a couple of years ago, it still looks like, in certain parts, just like a war zone really, and that was a long time ago.
AW: It was a long time ago.
EJ: I can understand that things would take time, I know it was a really massive thing but it just felt to me so much like that the leadership at the time just didn't show that they cared, maybe they did care, but it didn't feel or look like they did care but hopefully that is a thing of the past.
AW: Well it's good to have a song like that because it just shows that there are people out there that do care and they're watching what's happening down there, but I suppose a lot of your problems over there have gone now.
EJ: I hope so.
AW: You've had two albums since then, the album in the middle your 'difficult' second album, LETTERS FROM SINNERS AND STRANGERS, I thought you finally found that jazz sound which I actually love, especially on High Shelf Booze, a great song with the clarinet sparring with the guitar; you like jazz don't you?
EJ: Oh yes some of it, I haven't listened to as much of it as I have blues of country. I like Billie Holiday, she's one of my favourite performers ever, I always think of her as a blues artist but everyone else seems to think of her as a jazz artist but really it has both of those things going on.
AW: I think she rarely sang straight forward blues it always leaned towards jazz. I know you do a smashing version of Fine and Mellow and I first was introduced to that song by seeing that piece of footage, they say that Bohemian Rhapsody was the first ever pop video but people ought to look at that piece of footage with Billie Holiday, it's a black and white film and she's seated, she looks quite relaxed although a little bit nervous as well, and she's surrounded by the cream of jazz players of the time, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, did you see that and is that where you got the idea to sing the song?
EJ: No, I actually just saw that on this tour.
AW: Oh really?
EJ: Yeah, a friend of ours over in the Netherlands showed us it at his place and I'd never seen it before. It was like in the 1950s maybe? Later on in her career?
AW: Yeah.
EJ: I think so. I fell in love with that from.. I think she recorded it earlier than that and I mostly listen to her earlier stuff and that's kind of where my heart is. I always loved that song and it always stood out to me and I didn't know that she wrote it until recently and then I pieced it together that all my favourite songs of hers are the ones that she wrote.
AW: She was such an under-rated songwriter.
EJ: She really was. God Bless the Child and Strange Fruit, didn't she write Strange Fruit?
AW: Yes, that's astonishing that song, would you consider doing that? That's a little bit heavy that song.
EJ: Strange Fruit is heavy yeah, maybe I could pair it with The Flood and really depress people (laughs).
AW: Do them as a couplet (laughs)
EJ: Yeah (laughs)
AW: Well your new album is out and that's got a much more contemporary feel although it's quite rocking in places. You do one of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' songs Shakin' All Over and you do quite a faithful version of it, you've maintained the iconic guitar riff throughout; did you have that in mind as a jamming song with the band and it just fit or is it something you do love, doing that song?
EJ: Oh I really do love it and it just kind of happened and in a way the new record SEA OF TEARS was actually formed around Shakin' All Over because the folks at our label Signature Sounds heard us perform it at a festival and we were just doing it for fun. We just kind of fell in love with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and we’d been listening to them in the van and we thought Jerry would sound great doing the electric guitar part on that and we thought maybe it would be fun hearing a female interpretation of the song, there's no one that we knew of had really done that. So we started doing it live just for fun and when our label heard it, the folks there were saying okay, you really have to record that on the next album. We were kind of shocked and we said 'really, are you sure?' I mean so many people have done it and it was already a big hit but they insisted, not in a pushy way but in a flattering way, no it’s a really great version and you should do it. Then we thought that we can't really very well just have all these slow paced country songs on there and then randomly Shakin' All Over, and it worked out well anyway because we wanted to gravitate a little more towards the vintage rock and roll stuff. We were already naturally doing that in our live shows, so we put down I'm Going to Dress in Black by Them and that fits in really well with Shakin' All Over and Sea of Tears is inspired by The Kinks; we’d been listening to some of that kind or early 1960s, mid 1960s rock, I love that.
AW: The Kinks are fabulous aren't they?
EJ: They really are; they're just to me like the pinnacle of rock and roll.
AW: Dave Davies had that nasty sounding guitar, he was one of the first to do it and you couldn't go out and buy a guitar like that, he used to stick knitting needles into his amp to get that sound, this is what they used to do.
EJ: It's amazing and now everyone kinda imitates that, the Punk scene was going for that sound.
AW: We'll just talk briefly about your side project, you got involved with the Sacred Shakers, which is a kind of melting pot of Western Swing, Bluegrass and Gospel music of course, there's the Gospel thread going right through that.. fabulous album. How did you get involved with that?
EJ: That was the brainchild of Jason Beek, the drummer in my band. The Sacred Shakers, this is a little known trivia fact, actually pre-dates my band and in a way is what made my band come together. Jason had this idea to start a country gospel brunch every Sunday at a local pub in Boston and he wanted to get together all his favourite musicians from the area, which he did and we would just play gospel songs every Sunday and that went on for a couple of years and that's how I got used to playing with Johnny Sciascia on the upright bass. At that time I knew that I liked playing with the band but I didn’t really have a set band, I was just experimenting with different people, I didn’t really know the sound that I wanted. I knew I had to record all these songs that I had written and so Johnny, because of the Sacred Shakers was a logical choice because we were familiar with him and we knew we loved his playing and then Johnny recommended Jerry Miller the guitar player, and there was Dan Kellar the violin player who is in the Scared Shakers and we asked essentially a mini version of the Sacred Shakers to do BOUNDARY COUNTY to record that and from there, that's become my band. It's a lot of fun but we couldn't keep doing them because this band started touring so much so I guess that's the thanks you get from us, for helping us form.
AW: It's nice to fall back on though isn't it?
EJ: Yeah, it's a fun hobby; it works out pretty well because the other Sacred Shakers can't tour as much as we can so when we go home we tend to do a show or two with them. We've only done a couple of out of town gigs. It's very much like gospel the way Hank Williams or the Reverend Gary Davis might have made it.
AW: Well Gospel has the best harmonies.
EJ: Yeah, we have a lot of harmonies on our record too and you know, we try, none of us are really trained singers so we don't know exactly how to perform the perfect harmonies to the rules of harmony or whatever, but we have fun with it, live especially and the spirit of gospel comes through for us.
AW: Finally, I noticed that you had two signatures on your guitar at one point, I don't know if they're still there, Loretta Lynn and Lucinda Williams..
EJ: Yeah and there's a third now..
AW: Really? Oh I'm eager to find out..
EJ: The new arrival is Mavis Staples, she signed it over the summer.
AW: I've seen Mavis play.
EJ: She's amazing. So I got my three gals on my guitar.
AW: So briefly sum up what it is about those three gals that you feel particularly inspired by.
EJ: I guess to really over simplify it I would say that Loretta Lynn is a huge inspiration for me because her voice is so powerful and perfect in my mind and she's also an icon, a country music icon, I could really go on about her, I'm a big fan but I love how gutsy she always was and is. There’s a rumour that she's had more songs banned from the country music radio stations than any other country music artist and I think that's pretty great because she was singing songs that women were not allowed to sing, no one was really allowed to sing stuff about the birth control pill or divorce or women going bad, like I'm the Other Woman was sort of outrageous to sing about and how it's the woman's fault that she wasn't loving the man properly and so you can't blame her for being the 'other' woman. You know people weren’t singing that stuff so she's gutsy and really brave and wonderful and on stage she's really fun, she's very spirited and I like that in an artist, I like that spirit and generosity on stage and fun loving-ness, not taking yourself too seriously. Lucinda Williams I adore her song writing so much and as a person I think she's just stella, I aspire to be a lot like her as well. Her father is a great poet and I think that she inherited a lot from him. If there is a gene for being a wonderful poet and a wonderful writer then I think she has it and it seems so natural to her. I always hold her as the standard for song writing and Mavis Staples, is just.. I feel like you have to see her to believe her. Her voice is supernatural I think and as a performer every time I see her, I guess I've only seen her twice but both times I felt really really happy whilst I was seeing her yet I was crying, she just brings something out in my that's so powerful and you feel like she is just wanting to give her heart to everyone in the audience and she has this wonderful heart.
AW: She owns the stage doesn't she?
EJ: Yeah, in this wonderfully positive beautiful way that doesn't seem Prima Donna-ish, you know egotistical in any way. It's a very spiritual thing for me to see her.
AW: So, you're here at the Maze, you're going to be going on shortly, who have you got with you tonight?
EJ: My band, the guys who are always with me, Jason Beek on drums and he does harmony vocals and Jerry Miller on electric guitar and Johnny Sciascia on upright bass, they're on all my records, including the Sacred Shakers and they're always with me wherever I go for better or worse (laughs).
AW: How long are you in the country for?
EJ: We leave on the 19th (October) so I guess another week.
AW: So you have some more shows to do ?
EJ: Yeah we've been here for a week now and we have one more week to go and we're having a great time it's a really beautiful country.
AW: Oh thank you. We'll have a great gig tonight..
EJ: Thank you, you too.
AW: ..enjoy the rest of your tour and thank you for talking to me.
EJ: My pleasure.
Tonight's support was provided by Canadian blues singer and guitarist Rob Lutes, whose set was like a naked flame all set and ready to torch the place. His assured finger-picking blues style set a mood for the evening and judging by the amount of CDs he managed to shift during the interval, the crowd certainly seemed to approve wholeheartedly. Starting with The Only Soul from his current album TRUTH & FICTION, Lutes played a hyperactive set featuring Billy Mayhew's 1930s classic It's a Sin to Tell a Lie and part of Robert Johnson's They're Red Hot, played as an introduction to Lutes own I Knew a Girl, which was inspired by Johnson's peculiar ragtime tune.
The tiny figure of Eilen Jewell appeared on stage shortly afterwards, equipped with her regular guitar, the one emblazoned with the slightly faded signatures of her 'three gals' on the front, Loretta Lynn, Lucinda Williams and Mavis Staples. "We've come all the way from Boston just to join you guys tonight, and we're so glad we did" announced Eilen before the first number. "We’re so glad you did" came the first of many audience comments and heckles during the show.
Starting with Sweet Rose, the band warmed themselves up with a handful of songs from Eilen's latest album including the title song Sea of Tears, Rain Roll In, Fading Memory and The Darkest Day, which Eilen introduced as one of her favourite Loretta Lynn songs.
Eilen has a great stage presence and finds it easy to build a rapport with her audience. At times the singer tests the water by making fun of the way we speak over here, that the British have a certain way of making a song and dance out of such a simple word as 'no.' "You all say neeoouu" she said, seemingly out of curiosity. The audience also tested the singer by shouting out for songs that Eilen Jewell obviously doesn't have in her repertoire, such as Swinging Doors. I was flabbergasted when someone retorted "it's a George Jones song, you should know it." Unfazed, the wide eyed singer quipped "I see, I profess my love for you and then you start being demanding." Eilen and the band did perform an alternative George Jones song though, just to appease one or two of her more verbally animated fans, Taggin' Along from Eilen's side project, the Sacred Shakers album.
Responding to several requests from the audience, the band went on to play Eric Andersen's Dusty Boxcar Wall from Eilen's second album LETTERS FROM SINNERS AND STRANGERS before launching into one of the highlights of the set. There was no attempt made to even try to imitate Billie Holiday's vocal delivery on Fine and Mellow, yet Eilen managed to claim the song for herself and delivered a heart stopping-version of the old blues song whilst Jerry Miller's guitar fills perfectly accompanied the arrangement and the band pitched a moody groove to a momentarily silent audience.
Continuing to fulfil all the requests being called out from the room, the band performed Back to Dallas from Eilen’s first album BOUNDARY COUNTY preceded by an apology for running out of copies of the debut album. After the song, during which guitarist Jerry Miller started to grin like a Cheshire cat, Eilen pondered "sometimes I think he’s telling himself little jokes, he'll be playing and then he'll start chuckling to himself, it's the funniest thing." Rich Man's World was perfectly timed as Eilen grabbed her harmonica rack for vibrant reading of the song, which also opens her second album.
Concluding with the band's take on the Johnny Kidd and the Pirates classic Shakin' All Over, the band returned for a final encore of Hank Williams' I Can't Help It If I'm Still In Love With You, once again fulfilling the audience's demand for a Williams song. I personally could have done with another Jewell original, making the most of the singer-songwriter whilst we have the pleasure of her company here.
Allan Wilkinson
Northern Sky
An audio version of this interview is available in the Interviews section:
http://www.allanwilkinson.co.uk/node/387
