Folk column: New York stories

There’s something about the end of the year that seems to suit the crusty old warrior types. Albums surface that you would never see hit the shelves during the summer months and live dates sneak onto the schedule before the trees start to get their leaves again. Like lizards hiding from the heat of the midday sun, there’s something about the cool and the shade that can tempt an old storyteller out in to the daylight.

So it is that hot on the heels of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Raising Sand album we’re being treated to releases by a handful of the most significant performers on the folk and acoustic scene over the past couple of decades.
Making most waves I guess is Steve Earle’s Washington Square Serenade which marks Earle’s first recorded offering since he decamped from ‘guitar town’ to the ‘big apple’ about a year ago. Living on the street on which the cover for Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ album was shot over forty years ago, Earle finds a type of comfort in the fact that New York hasn’t actually changed as much as the hype would have you believe. Washington Square Serenade, is a loving tribute to that era, that movement, that music and the city that gave them all a nurturing home. “That period changed pop music,” Earle says. “It made lyrics much more important. Rock ‘n’ roll could have become a subgenre of pop if it hadn’t been for that literary aspect, which completely came out of a four-block area in New York City in one brief instant of time.”
Like Freewheelin’ itself, Serenade is an album that combines songs of love and protest, chronicling both the connections between people that make life worth living and the things that must be changed in order to make such connections more possible for everyone. “I knew it was going to be pretty personal,” Earle says about the album, which he recorded at Electric Ladyland Studios, the famed Greenwich Village recording complex that Jimi Hendrix built in the late ’60s. “The best part of my personal life was going so well I knew that chick songs were going to be no problem. As for political songs, I don’t think I’ve ever made an apolitical record. The last two before this [The Revolution Starts... Now (2004), Jerusalem (2002)] were overtly political, and unapologetically so. This one is unapologetically personal.”
In between appearing in the HBO TV series The Wire – for which he has also recorded a version of the Tom Waits classic ‘Way Down In The Hole’, finishing a novel to be published by Houghton Mifflin and presenting Hard Core Troubadour Radio on the Sirius Satellite Radio service (another Dylan parallel) he is also finding time to get out on the road to tour the new record, and while some of the US dates are high profile festival shows, the Irish dates, when they come, will be smaller, more intimate affairs. Starting his short visit on Friday January 18 with a show at Jackson’s Hotel in Ballybofey, he’ll then play two nights at Belfast’s Empire Music Hall on Sunday 20 and Monday 21 before taking himself down to Dublin for a Vicar Street show on Tuesday 22.
At not far off 70 it’s unlikely that we’ll see much heavy duty touring from Levon Helm, himself a former mainstay in ‘The Band’, who backed Dylan through the better part of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Nowadays his live exertions tend to confine themselves to the Midnight Rambles, the late night concerts he hosts at the Levon Helm Studios in the hippy Mecca of Woodstock, New York. These loosely structured evenings have an organic life of their own as he weaves in and out of the mix of musicians and invited guests. Helm came up with the notion of the Midnight Rambles based on the travelling Southern medicine shows he remembered from his youth. His first solo studio record in 25 years, Dirt Farmer follows the same organic path.
It’s a major landmark on a remarkable journey for Levon Helm. After weathering treatments for the throat cancer that took away his singing voice and a fire that consumed over eighty percent of his recording studio, Helm was amazed to find both restored.
On Dirt Farmer, Helm pays tribute to his family, singing traditional songs that he learned growing up in rural Arkansas as well as covering songs by Steve Earle and J.B. Lenoir; full of Dobros, mandolins and acoustic guitars, the album resonates deeply, honouring his roots.
Multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell (Bob Dylan, Lyle Lovett, Solomon Burke) and Levon’s daughter Amy, also a member of Ollabelle, produced and shepherded the project at “The Barn” Helm's studios. Helm himself plays drums, mandolin, and acoustic guitar and, in a two finger salute to the cancer that almost robbed him of his voice, he provides all lead vocals.
Ranked as one of the most revered US folk performers of the same generation, Tom Paxton is also gearing up to release a new album Comedians And Angels in January next year. Paxton’s songs are known and loved around the world: ‘The Last Thing On My Mind’, ‘Ramblin’ Boy’, and ‘Bottle of Wine’, are just a few of his truly timeless works. His generosity to both audiences and fellow musicians is renowned, and his passion for justice and the ties that bind people together is unwavering. He will be touring with the new record but at present there is no sign of an Irish leg of the tour and die-hards will have to trek across to the UK where he is playing a very densely packed nine day tour including a show at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at London’s South bank Centre on Saturday January 19.
Not quite in the same ‘grizzly old dude’ bracket – he has the grey hair but he’s always going to be too smiley and baby-faced to be called grizzly – it’s nonetheless great to see that Colm O’Snodaigh, the multi-instrumental backbone of Kila has finally gotten round to releasing his solo record Giving, coming on the heels of Eoin Dillon’s excellent Third Twin and a brace of great solo offerings by brother Ronan. He’s joined on the record by Liam O Maonlai, Lisa Hannigan and Richie Buckley. Sadly, there has been no announcement yet of live dates (hint, hint) but maybe when things calm down in the new year after Kila’s hectic Christmas period we might be treated to a few shows.
Flook have now announced the full tour schedule for their Irish adventures this coming month and in addition to the previously announced date at Dublin’s Cherry Tree on Friday December 7 there will also be dates on the night of Thursday 6 in Belfast’s Errigle Inn, at Glor in Ennis on Saturday December 8. Cork gets a visit on Sunday December 9 when the band play the Crane Lane Theatre and there is a West Cork show as well when they make the trip down to Baltimore for a concert at the Glebe on Moday December 10. They take a few nights off before heading up to Barry’s of Grange Co. Sligo where they appear on Thursday December 13. Final gig of the trip is at the Seamus Ennis Centre in Naul on Friday 14.