Well . . . how did I get here?!
If there is an image that defines the early 1980’s post-punk / post-disco “what do we do now?” dilemma, it’s David Byrne in his bowtie and horn-rimmed glasses posing – with art-school hipster attitude – the definitive existential question: “Well . . . how did I get here?!”
“Once In A Lifetime” will go down as one of the culture’s pivotal records, not just for the catchiness of the tune and the brilliance of Brian Eno’s production – but also for its self-conscious irony.
So David Byrne’s question remains. How did we get here? For me, the answer to that question ultimately has to do with creativity. Steve Reich talks about how “Stravinsky said something to the effect that composers grub around for roots. . . . It’s an instinctual searching for what it is that gets you musically excited.”
Whether I knew it at the time or not, that’s what drove me in making this album. It was about finding where the music I loved came from, and about trying to identify the core characteristics that tie the countless regional styles of American music together.
It was about connecting dots – personal, musical & cultural.
I can’t say I connected all the dots, but I do see our ‘musical cultural’ interaction in a new way. When I hear Almeda Riddle sing “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” I hear an ancient European folk melody that’s lived in an Appalachian holler, been dragged across the Mississippi Delta, and is now sung in the Ozarks by a white woman with as blue a 3rd & 7th as any slide player I’ve ever heard, and I can hear the whole country in that one voice.
When Tower Records went out of business a few years ago, I went in to pick up as many deals as I could afford. While I was rummaging around I found a gold mine – collections of old vintage & archival recordings that I had never heard, most of which I’d never even heard of. Some were field recordings from the Library of Congress. Some were old commercial releases that had been re-issued (legally and illegally,) and some I have yet to determine the source.
For a guy who realized he loved music when he first heard Bill Evans’ “Trio ’65″ & Traffic’s “John Barleycorn Must Die,” these recordings filled in a lot of the blanks. They started to tie the various American ‘folk’ genres together. I immersed myself in these recordings – singers, guitarists, storytellers, fiddle players and so on, for whom music had been the defining instrument of their daily lives, whether at home, at work, at church, at the picnic, at the juke joint, and who – for the most part – were never known beyond the county they lived the balance of their lives in. I was captivated by these voices, each with incredible distinction and deep history, who spoke for and defined a very particular region. And I was drawn irresistibly to the idea that these voices would have sounded great together, that these highly individual voices were all a part of our common cultural noise, and that with the technology available to us now, I could try to put some of them in the studio together, however separated they had been by decade, geography, ethnic origin or otherwise.
So that’s what I’ve done with this record, hopefully with a great deal of respect for these incredible artists I never could have met, but have had the honor of working with. And as for the opening question – how did I get here? – well, the answer keeps unfolding . . . and unfolding . . . and unfolding.
Steve Mullen
