CLOTHESLINE
REVIVAL INTERVIEWS
A Conversation with Conrad Praetzel (continued)
PM: What about the unbelievable Doug Wallin?
CP: Doug Wallin, I heard his music on a Smithsonian Folkways recording. He's from North Carolina, from Madison County, the same area where Cecil Sharp, the English folklorist, discovered all these old songs just past the turn of the century. The last century.
PM: And he was so amazed by this place in the Carolinas that he said, "Music there was as natural as speaking was."
CP: Yes. And the movie Songcatcher kind of documents that time period. But Doug Wallin is like the next generation from there. He just died a couple of years ago, and I think he was in his 70s somewhere.
PM: He does that eerie story about William Riley Shelton on the CD.
CP: Yeah. He talks about one of his fellow a cappella "brag ballad" singers. He's just kind of reminiscing about someone who must've had a major influence on his singing style. And it's a pretty funny story in some ways, about this guy who tries to hide from his wife in a barrel of feathers--which you don't see happening too much any more.
PM: [laughs] It's wonderful.
Now, before we get off of the cast of characters--not so much on this album, but on your album previous to this, a remarkable recording called Receive, there's an amazing Pakistani vocalist featured and we should mention him.
CP: Yes. Sukhawat Ali Khan. I was just talking to him on the phone, right before you called. He's a good friend. Sukhawat is originally from Pakistan and he comes from a tradition of singing that goes back nearly 500 years. His family were court singers. He and I worked on this album Receive, it was Sukhawat, myself, and Robert again. That all came together in a real natural way. And there are some similarities between that album and Clothesline Revival, because again there's a combination of traditional styles and the electronics.
PM: We'll include a few tracks from Receive on our Listen page, so our readers will get turned on to the incredible vocalizing of Sukhawat Ali Khan.
CP: That'd be great.
PM: I notice Mark Fuller is on the drum kit. Where does he fit in?
CP: Mark is a friend of Robert's. I don't know him really well, but he's an amazing player, and a really playful guy. He's also an engineer, so he knows how to get the right sounds. It was a real pleasure working with him. The drum tracks went down last, which I guess is sort of unusual. We already had the rhythm structures pretty much established with the beat loops and the rest of the orchestration. But it needed that live element, you know? So Mark came in and filled that in--what he calls "putting some grease on the tracks."
PM: Our readers will be able to hear some clips, to know what we're talking about when we say it's traditional music with all this other stuff. Let's take a minute and describe how it is in general that these tracks went together. After you choose a song, how would you and Robert begin to put it together?
CP: They all came together in different ways, so maybe it'd be good to pick one to use as an example.
PM: Let's take "Cow Cow Yicky Yicky Yea."
CP: Okay. With "Cow Cow Yicky Yicky Yea," the Leadbelly song, the first thing I did there was to sample his vocal. The vocal also comes from a Smithsonian Folkways recording, a collection of cowboy songs. He sings it a cappella, so there was the opportunity to work with his vocal and construct the musical bed to support his story line and his feel. I'm always conscious of it being a very delicate ground that we're dealing with, combining electronics and a traditional vocal part. I want to be true to both worlds.
PM: Yeah, and right off the bat you're dealing with it being Leadbelly. It doesn't get much more legendary than that.
CP: [laughs] There's a pretty good pressure involved right there. But anyway, after I sampled the vocal I started exploring what beats might work with that, what rhythm ideas. You know, [laughing] maybe we should try looking at a different song, now that I think about it. This is actually a hard one to talk about, there were so many elements involved. I tried a lot of different things with that song
PM: Sure. It's very difficult to talk about exactly how any song comes together. And here you've got a Leadbelly vocal, and then you've got a sampler and beats and loop ideas, and pretty soon you're entering a domain that's mysterious and maybe inexpressible.
CP: Basically there's an exploration, and a hiddenness, and a keeping of the faith that... [sighs] Well.
PM: Let's take another song. How about "Gypsy Laddie," with the amazing vocals by Wendy Allen, what can you tell us about how that came together?
CP: Wendy started by singing the song with a very simple beat, because we knew that eventually we were going to be working with loops and beats that have a defined time structure. And she can sing perfectly in key and won't drift at all through the whole song, so she didn't need a reference point even. Then she put down the harmonies, so we had three-part harmony over a very simple beat.
PM: [grinning] She sings in perfect pitch and needed no musical backing whatsoever. She could be relied on to end in the exact tonality where she began.
CP: Exactly. She told me she could do that, and I thought, "Well... Are you sure?" [laughs] But she was right. She didn't shift a bit.
PM: That's uncanny.
CP: So here we have a vocal part and a simple beat loop. And it was very interesting to hear at that point, just that alone, because of the beauty of her voice. It opened up all these possibilities of where you could take it from there.
PM: Does Robert come in then with his pedal steel?
CP: Yeah, that was one of the next things.
PM: And no bass on this tune.
CP: That's true. But there's plenty covering the lower frequency part of the spectrum.
PM: The bottom end gets addressed with the beats.
CP: Yes.
PM: And then how about Sukhawat Ali Khan's part? continue
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Sukhawat Ali Khan Wendy
Allen Tom Armstrong Robert
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