Northern exposure

Sipping coffee in a glum south Dublin cafeteria, Tim Easton is trying to describe how it feels when the lonesome outdoors howls your name.
“Recently I bought a house in Alaska and now live part of the year there,” says Easton, a strummer whose soulful, storytelling style has seen him compared to Johnny Cash and his hero Woody Guthrie. “Something about that landscape – the vastness, the emptiness draws me in. There’s a peacefulness there, a peacefulness that can drive you mad.”
He mentions Timothy Treadwell, the self-proclaimed – and clearly unhinged – ‘Grizzly Man’ who moved to Alaska to cuddle mountain bears. As relayed by the 2005 Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man, Treadwell met a bloody, bittersweet end, mauled by one of the beasts he had sought to befriend.
“Clearly that guy had issues,” Tim says. “I mean, you go and hang with the bears and act like they’re your friend – what do you expect? It’s dangerous. Suicidal really. The point is, Treadwell wasn’t the only one attracted to Alaska. A lot of people go there, to go mad or die.”
In his song ‘I Don’t Want To Come Home’, Easton bears witness to another damaged soul searching for answers in Alaska: Christopher McCandless died in 1992 after walking for weeks through the wilderness. Sean Penn is directing a biopic of McCandless’ life: Easton hopes to see ‘I Don’t Want To Come Home’ included on the soundtrack.
“I wrote that track in Alaska, sitting on my porch,” he says. “I was thinking about Christopher. I tried to get inside his head, to understand why he would want to vanish into the wild and leave the world behind. It’s a scary place to go, as an artist.”
Starting out, Easton knocked around the Akron, Ohio music scene, the ranks of which include the Black Keys and Joseph Arthur. To post-punk historians Akron, of course, is holy turf, having spawned Pere Ubu and Devo.
“It’s a funny place. It used to be this massive industrial centre. It was the biggest producer of tyres in the entire world. And then all the jobs went to Mexico. So now, it’s kind of this fading place, a big old suburb. There’s a weird feeling in the air.”
When not losing himself in the frozen north, Easton divides his time between Joshua Tree, an artistic community on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and an itinerant lifestyle.
“Roaming’s in my blood,” says Tim, who’s been knocking around Ireland for the past fortnight. “I’m not the only one. I met Steve Earle and John Prine in Galway. Just bumped into them. I had no idea they liked to hang out there. It was completely a coincidence. The road had carried us all there, to the edge of the Atlantic. We hung out. Steve’s a great guy, and a role model too. He was one of the first songwriters to protest at the way the current American government is conducting its business in the world. That should be an inspiration to every songwriter.”
Easton’s roaming is inspired by Woody Guthrie.
“I buy into the mythology of the wandering musician,” he admits. “It stirs me. You see things that open your eyes on the road. Like, last night I was in Drogheda (he pronounces it with a hard ‘g’) and I got talking to these guys and they had a sense of humour completely unlike anything I was used to in America. I recorded my first album within sight of the Charles Bridge in Prague. I’ve spent time in London. I’ve lived all over.”

Ammunition is out on New West.