(A special extended blog post to accompany the ‘reissue’ of the 2009 album The Duke of Oklahoma & Other Stories on Bandcamp - you can play through the album on the Bandcamp player below, and download high-quality music files)
Looking back on The Duke of Oklahoma & Other Stories – the writing of the songs, the recordings, the arrangements, the design – I see HOURS and WEEKS and MONTHS of effort, most of it worthwhile, some of it in vain, some of it… uncalled for.
The success of ‘Sailortown’, from the Sky for Every Day album early the year before had put me in a strong position – I was now starting to perform more and more as a solo artist, I had been invited to go to Nashville in 2009 with the Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival.
As an only child, I have a complicated relationship with the gaining of attention. It felt like a huge amount of faith had been placed in me, and I got started on that album with a sense that I should deliver. Not pressure, as such, but a sense of… obligation. And looking back on this period, I think I might have tried a little too hard as a result. Not that much, just… a little. Like I always do in those circumstances. I wanted to show the world that the ‘Sailortown’ guy had more up his sleeve, that he was here to stay, that this was no flash in the pan.
So there are 13 songs here (and one live version of ‘Sailortown’ – why is that on there? I was still so in thrall to the success of that song that I didn’t want to let it go yet, I guess). It was still that time when people put out albums with fifteen or sixteen songs on them. As Dylan said, ‘too much information about nothing’.
Looking back, there are a few songs here that feel undercooked, that could have waited for the next bus. But we’re never the best judges of these things in the moment. Even with fourteen tracks, there are a couple of whole OTHER songs still knocking around that didn’t make it. I’ll work on a collection of outtakes and rarities one of these days.
Following on from the Sky for Every Day project, Clive Culbertson and I were joined again by Rod McVey on piano and Hammond. But there was a different drummer on the project – the great Martin Hughes, a wonderful, soulful and sympathetic player and a veteran of sessions with Robert Wyatt, Elvis Costello, Clive Gregson, Any Trouble and many more. He was already booked to come over for a few days and play on the ‘No Borders’ album that Errol Walsh was recording at Clive’s studio at the same time, and we managed to get him for the day.
Joe McNamee is also on here, too. This is the only album of mine to feature pedal steel guitar – I must put that right one of these days. I grew up surrounded by albums soaked in that supremely melancholic sound, and I don’t know why I don’t use it more often as part of the arrangement. Clive recommended Joe, and he was great. I remember we ran the first song for him a couple of times, and after the first take I asked if he could play something slower, with a bit more of a slow burn to it. We ran it again. No, I said, even less licks, more… open. And Joe said – ‘oh, you want, like 70s country pedal steel?’ Yes, exactly, I said. So he gave me some wonderful Charley Pride-style pedal steel. Perfect for the material, I thought.
There are some inspirations worth mentioning – I had been on my third or fourth visit to Quebec, remembering a particularly wonderful warm summer, and ‘The Water Letter’ came from that. The title came from Andrea, who had e-mailed home from Canada a couple of summers before, describing the beauty of swimming in the Gatineau River. She called the e-mail ‘The Water Letter’ and I always loved that title. John Fitzpatrick played the most sublime, gorgeous viola lines on that song. I had written something for him, thinking ‘yeah, this should work’, but he gave it something completely new in performance. It still haunts me.
‘Boy Struck by Lightning’ was a news item overheard driving back into Coleraine from a gig somewhere. A kid had been felled by a bolt of lightning on the outskirts of Tallaght, north Dublin (he went on to make a full recovery). By the time I got home, I had imagined him as a figure forever empowered and made legendary by the incident.
‘Well Well Well’: A word on the songwriting benefit of paying attention - on that trip to Nashville, I lay awake in bed one night and heard the most American of sounds – a freight train in the distance. I was still wired by the experience of being in Tennessee, and lay there in the middle of the night with the thought in my head that… at the point of death, there must be an imbalance between the number of days you’ve lived, and the number of nights. It CAN’T come out even, can it…? So I had the phrase ‘hope the days outnumber the nights’. A few weeks later, I had fashioned the song into a meditation on an old unrequited love, and was almost finished, but couldn’t get a line to rhyme with ‘the memory won’t let me be…’ and on a bus one day, I looked out the window and saw a plastic bag caught in a tree. Out came the notebook and the song was finished.
The decision to record it completely alone – voice and guitar – was a brave one for me at the time, I didn’t yet have the confidence to let the songs breathe. If asked, I still reckon it might be my favourite of all the things I’ve written.
The title track came from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slapstick. The plot centres around a virus called The Green Death that wipes out huge chunks of the world’s population, and leaves isolated tribes living wild, under the command of self-appointed leaders with strange names – The Prince of Candlesticks, the King of Michigan... In the middle of all this, here was The Duke of Oklahoma. I just loved the name and created a character for him that was a composite of various people that I knew.
My mother always loved ‘Merci Beaucoup’, but to her every French phrase sounded the same, and she occasionally would called it ‘Bon Appetit’.
When the recording and mixing was done, I put a LOT of effort and money into the detail and feel of this album – the physical look of the CD was a big deal for me, and I spent a small fortune on design. I told the designer (at Frank in Belfast) that I wanted a ‘second hand book’ look for the thing, and he went round the corner to a used bookstore, bought four or five devastated old books and scanned them to give the effect you see on the cover and the booklet.
Around this time, Andrea had doodled a little cartoon of a group of figures, like a large extended family, all standing in a line holding hands. I loved the image, and asked if I could borrow it. It became the ‘logo’ for our imaginary record label and production company, Dozens of Cousins, and I’ve been using it ever since.
I asked Ken Haddock to do a location photo shoot for the album, at Barry’s Amusements in Portrush, during the off season. They very generously opened the door and left us to it. I’d been a regular at Barry’s as a child – it was always a ‘big day out’ treat, and the place is rich with memories. It was a haunting experience to wander around there with the lights all turned off, the rides all stationary and the whole place completely silent. I must have taken it seriously – I’m wearing two different shirts in the pictures, including a lovely Wrangler Western-style shirt (on the cover) that I bought the during the Nashville trip. I went through some of the pictures recently and put together this short film with the instrumental version of ‘The Water Letter’.
Postcards, launch invitation and flier for the Trio tour in 2009, to support the album.
I toured in late 2009 to promote the album – it was the first time I got myself organised for what was to become my methodology: book some dates in advance, put the album out, and then go out and play the dates and promote it. I toured throughout Northern Ireland with Clive on bass and John McCullough on piano, and the ‘circuit’ of theatres and arts centres that we visited has, with some exceptions, remained my circuit since then. I was learning, learning, learning all the time in those days, building relationships, trying and failing, trying again.
Looking back on it, there are songs on this collection that I still play regularly. There’s a lot about it I would change of course, from arrangements to design touches, even to basic song choices. But overall, I think it achieved what I wanted – to show that I wasn’t just the ‘Sailortown’ guy. There was going to be more to come.
NEXT MONTH: “All the happy couples that you meet, walking up and down Bedford Street” – the making of A Light Below the Door.