Kane and Able

“A GREAT microphone and a great instrument. That’s all you need!” So says Nashville-based singer-songwriter Kieran Kane who’s Dead Rekoning album of last year impressed many with its rootsy integrity and refreshing lack of studio gimmickry. The album, which features guest slots from Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams, was recorded live in the studio and mixed in just three days, with few if any overdubs.

“I don’t even use headphones when I’m recording,” Kane reveals. “And the only time I’ll fix something, is if I make a drastic error. When the album came out, people would come up to me and say ‘how do you get that sound?’. I’d say, ‘well, you get a Fender Telecaster, plug it into a Deluxe amp and stick a microphone in front of it’. It’s that simple. They were amazed. They were so used to processing sounds through all kinds of electronic stuff that they’d lost the ability to make an honest record.”

Kane blames the inexorable advances in recording technology for the over-produced sound on most of today’s records. “Just listen to a Patsy Cline record or a Gene Vincent record,” he suggests. “I don’t think they could be recorded any better. But the producers and engineers these days want to use all the new stuff simply because it’s there not because it’s any better.”

Kieran Kane is part of the Dead Reckoning crew, a co-operative of musicians who formed their own independent label three years ago. Prior to that he was a member of the O’Kanes – a “new” country outfit that had huge success during the mid to late 1980’s. But his experiences with a major label, has made him highly critical on how the big record companies operate.

“They’re a bit like an army,” he says. “They operate on fear and control. And they like young people who they can intimidate. When I first went to Nashville I wrote a number called ‘Play Another Slow Song’, which was a hit for a guy called Johnny Duncan. Mercury Records wanted to sign me on the basis of that song. I told them I couldn’t cut that particular one because someone else had already done it. They said, ‘well, write another one like it’. I told them, I can’t write two songs the same, it doesn’t work that way. But they just couldn’t get it.”

Despite the success of The O’Kanes, Kane now says that their eventual estrangement from the record company was both predictable and inevitable.

“It was almost prophetic,” he recalls. “The day that we signed a deal with CBS, I sat across the desk from Rick Blackburn who was the head of the label. There was, as you can imagine, a lot of ‘love’ in the room that day. I said to Rick ‘I’m really happy that you like our album and it’s great that we’re embarking on this journey together. But I know there will come a day when you’re going to come to me and say, ‘Kieran we need to make some changes’. When you do that I’m going to say ‘no we don’t need to make any changes – goodbye’.

“We left the office that day and said to ourselves, ‘well we’ve got one album done. We know we’re going to get the second and if we’re lucky, we’ll get a third’. That’s exactly what happened. We knew it was a limited time-span but we had a great time while it lasted.”

Kane then went solo, but ironically ended up on another major label – albeit this time for an even shorter period.

“I recorded ten songs on my own and Atlantic records liked them,” he explains. “They put the album out in October and by the following March they’d dropped me, having spent $400,000 on promotion including making a video! That’s when I decided to forget about record companies and do what I wanted to do.”

In keeping with this pledge, Dead Reckoning takes a much more organic approach to promoting its small roster of artists. As well as playing on each other’s albums they get together regularly for joint appearances. Last year, the Night Of Reckoning tour, featuring Kane and others like Kevin Welch and Tammy Rogers, hit Ireland and they’ve since returned for solo gigs.

“Ireland was first on our hit list,” Kane says. “We decided to come over and play Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Belfast and come back in six months time and do it again and keep on doing it until we build an audience. With the O’Kanes we were doing these big festivals in the UK, Germany and Switzerland without any audience contact. That’s no way to build an audience. That’s just ‘take the money and run’.”

Meanwhile, a Dead Reckoning band album with contributions from all the musicians on the label has already been recorded and will be out next February, while Kane soon expects to begin recording the follow-up to his debut.

“I need about three or four more songs,” he says. “I’d like to take some kind of turn, maybe make it even more stripped down, with more air in the record. I think it’s important to take chances and occasionally fail. If you don’t fail there’s no growth.”

• The Dead Reckoning label is marketed in Ireland by Round Tower Music