David’s Psalms

Having a conversation with David Kitt is strangely not that dissimilar to listening to one of his records. In person too he is quiet, thoughtful and not particularly given to hyperbole. Indeed, despite being warmed up for press duties, our first question as to whether songwriters make the best cover versions produces an answer littered with pauses.

“Ehmm… I’m trying to think… in terms of understanding… the condition of the songwriter, maybe trying to find where the song came from………and the nature of the song, I definitely think that being a songwriter helped me find a perspective with the songs and helped me sing them from almost the same place as if I’d written them myself”.
It’s a discussion that’s taking place because Kitt has joined the fray by releasing his own covers album, The Black And Red Notebook, featuring songs from the likes of JJ Cale, The Beatles, REM, Money Mark, Jape and Toots & The Maytals. He’s right about the place thing. No matter what the style of the original, each has been reduced down to its bare bones before being restructured in Kitt’s own distinct style. The album works so well because he gets to the heart of each track, covering the song as opposed to just recreating the original.
“I like to think so,” he says. “I was very respectful of the songs because they’re all great, and because some of the stuff on the album is quite obscure I wanted to keep the spirit of the originals so that in some way it might help as an introduction to the people who wrote it.”
The record’s two best moments come together in the middle, with gorgeous reworkings of Sonic Youth’s ‘Teenage Riot’ and Thin Lizzy’s ‘Dancing In The Moonlight’. Of the first he says, “in terms of that whole ‘looking for a ride to a secret location’, the way I did it echoes my experiences of going to secret parties on the beach out in Whiterock and Dalkey. There’s a documentary side to that particular song.”
‘Dancing In The Moonlight’ is probably the album’s highpoint – a master class in how to cover a song and make it something different.
“That one took a bit of time,” he admits. “That’s the third version of it. It started to develop its own atmosphere and then I realised that the best thing was to pull the vocal right back. To me it’s like you’re singing it to yourself on that walk home, there’s much more solitude in the song. The lyrics are just incredible, it’s one evocative image after the next. People forget that side of Phil Lynott, they see the guy in the leather pants playing the bass but they forget how great he was at writing lyrics. I think that’s why I’ve always identified with him. There was this real loner at the heart of it all.”
Kitt also sees the record as another step in redefining his own identity.
“It’s almost an insight into where I’m coming from musically, because so many people lump me in with all the other singer songwriters who are out there today, as well as Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen. Nick Drake is someone I haven’t listened to since I was a teenager and I find a lot of what he did a bit studenty. There’s a lot more to where I’m coming from than the way people have pigeonholed me. It kind of helps address that thing.
“Someone the other day said that they saw me at The Electric Picnic and that it was really funny seeing all the E heads bopping away to a folky guy,” he proffers. “I was going, ‘Well I’m not a folky guy. Listen to the beats, they’re rooted in the same territory as a lot of the music that dance people listen to.’ People just see guitar and vocal and go ‘folk troubadour’. There’s lot more to it than that. You can’t lose too much sleep over it, but it is nice when people see where you’re coming from.”
Maybe if he’d created a band persona for himself there would be a different perception?
“Exactly. Jape is Richie Egan the songwriter, but people go and make the Yo La Tengo comparisons, talk about it like it’s a band. With me they start with Leonard Cohen, Damien Rice, David Gray and I don’t think that I have very much to do with those people.”
The other key fact with the record is that it’s the first on Kitt’s own label, his time with Warners having come to an end earlier this year.
“I tried to put a spin on it at the time by saying that we parted company but basically I got dropped,” he admits. “It was all going really well in the UK, it was just on the verge of happening. Then they downsized and dropped two hundred acts in one go. To be honest, now I see it as the best thing that ever happened to me. It forced me to go back to my home studio and start again.”
“Now I have Rough Trade releasing it for the rest of the world. They’ve done more in the past three weeks than Warners did in three years because they give a shit. They really want it to work. They released my first record and it feels like coming home to a place where people have complete faith in you. They agreed to release this without even having heard it. I’m really proud of my last two records but I wouldn’t change a thing about this one.” b

The Black And Red Notebook is out now on Dublin Discs