The Shock Of The New

I M NOT sure, but I m almost positive that all music came from New Orleans. Or so Wavelength, New Orleans answer to Hot Press, proclaims proudly on its masthead. And why not? After all, The Big Easy s played midwife to more Creole births than the entire Mississippi basin in its procreationist heyday. Jazz is its most famous offspring, but its genes can be spotted lurking in the unlikeliest corners, infiltrating everything from Cajun to soul, and from twelve-bar blues to the gospel choir sound so beloved of the deep south.

Step out into the street, any street round here, and you re likely to encounter a tenor sax or a brass quartet cosying up to the nearest veranda. Sally forth into the night and you ll be bombarded by crafty panhandlers turning a buck with a harmonica or six string. Darken the door of the tiniest of bars and you ll be treated to a taste of the stuff that puts fires in the bellies of the cagiest of New Orleanians. Sip a mint julep in any one of the numerous French Quarter courtyards and you can t but be seduced by the sassy combo in the corner who entreat you to join them in makin whoopee. This is a town that lives its motto: Laissez les bons temps rouler and who are we to argue?
Mary Black s obviously taking the pills prescribed by Dr. John. Or maybe she s, deep down, a soulmate of Aaron Neville. Then again, she could be simply a closet Branford Marsalis fan. But who needs an excuse to go native in this city that care forgot anyway? Let s face it, when you ve released seven albums in 14 years, every one of them runaway successes at home, and each one garnering respectable sales in Britain (as well as the odd rickshaw-load in Japan), there s nobody doubting your right to let the good times roll. And Mary Black has just embarked on what may well become the party of her life.
Shine, her latest album, is the perfect soundtrack to a walk down Canal St., where these crazy Lousianians once figured they might build a canal, but somehow never got around to it. The album s no-holds-barred gutsiness is the ideal backdrop for a walk through the sites that gave root to so much of today s music.
Strolling through Congo Square, where enslaved Africans performed the ritualised celebrations that inevitably seeped into white folks bones, Trespass Shoes echoes the ghostly presence that still lingers.
Pillaging St. Louis Cemetery for even a trace of a relic left behind by Dennis Hopper or Peter Fonda from their LSD-fired filming of Easy Rider, it seems like I Misunderstood was choreographed just for this corner of the city.
And stumbling upon the streets where Tennessee Williams conceived A Streetcar Named Desire, it s hard not to intone Shine aloud, for all Cajun and Creole to hear together. It s what you might call synchronicity if you were Sting, or plain old love at first hearing, if you re a traveller with a set of headphones.
Shine is big, bold, and one hell of a departure from its predecessors. Where 1995 s Circus was tentative and a tad self-deprecating, Shine is sure-footed. Where The Holy Ground tapped into the indigenous, Shine is a more restless soul with eyes wandering far beyond the confines of home. Eight albums on, and there s no sign of her appetite waning. This is a record with a brand new passport and a mind to travel. And with a painful sundering of her partnership with Declan Sinnott marking the transition more resolutely, it looks like Mary Black is intent on paddling her own canoe way up the Mississippi, and any other waterway she happens to encounter these days.
Our meeting takes place (not without coincidence) in the midst of a massive radio conference that goes by the name of GAVIN for some obscure reason which nobody seems to be able to identify. Black wisely chose to parachute in when the media bosses were in town so that she could peddle the album first hand, attend a couple of meet n greet parties, and generally hang out with the head honchos in the world of radio broadcasting Stateside.
It s a ploy that s bound to pay off, if the sheer volume of sales and programming people quaffing luminous coloured drinks is anything to go by. The handshake brigade will have to wait though, while Mary Black recounts the background to Shine s arrival.
After the shock of Declan Sinnott s separation, she opted for the risky road to self-discovery. No mean effort, after a decade and a half of having him by her side at every gig and in every recording studio, but Black maintains that when faced with the prospect of either sinking or swimming, the bottom of the bayou held no particular attraction for her.
When Declan left, because he felt he d gone as far as he could with the whole Mary Black thing, she recounts, I was a bit shocked. I d say for about a day and a half I was upset. I thought and thought about it, and then, like a woman possessed, I just came out of that state of deep thought, and decided that if I was ever going to fly my own kite, it d have to be now. And I felt I was gong to do it, and by God, I was going to do it well. I really felt empowered by the fact that I suddenly found myself on my own for the first time. It s funny, you know, in many ways, I probably wouldn t have instigated the split with Declan, but it was the best thing that could ve happened for both of us. We had gone as far as we could and we both needed to move on. And now here I am, and I m very proud of this album.
The prospect of flailing and thrashing on her own was daunting, but not at all as intimidating as the prospect of taking it all lying down.
I felt very vulnerable going in to do the first three tracks, she admits, because at that stage we, Larry and I, were just trying to get a feel for how we might work together.
This Larry is none other than Larry Klein, Californian bass player with a track record of trading riffs (and marriage vows) with Joni Mitchell, starting on Wild Things Run Fast and culminating in the wonderful 1994 Mitchell Grammy-winning Turbulent Indigo. With a career kickstarted playing with a handful of jazz greats like Wayne Shorter and Carmen McRae, Klein also lent basslines variously to Randy Newman, Peter Gabriel, Bob Dylan and Don Henley, as well as doing production duties with Chaka Khan, Tina Turner, Annie Lennox and, of course, the great Joni Mitchell herself. As if that wasn t CV enough, he recently worked on the film Grace Of My Heart, produced by his longtime buddy, Martin Scorcese, and on which he worked with Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, Burt Bacharach and Dinosaur Jr. Lately he s been keeping Shawn Colvin company onstage, but it was while he was lounging in Dublin that his and Mary s paths crossed. Klein s nonchalant offer to lend a hand in production (voiced in the back room of Lillie s Bordello) ricocheted right back when Mary asked him to assume full production duties, once the two had had a chance to get further acquainted.
You know, once we d done those three tracks in Windmill Lane, she enthuses, I was ready to go for it in LA, and by the time I got there we had done a huge amount of preparation, in terms of swopping songs, and talking about arrangements and vocals and so on.
Klein, a soft-spoken forty-something who bears a closer resemblance to Daniel Day Lewis than to the quintessential Californian musician (i.e. one who uses Dan Fogelberg s barber and has the sartorial elegance of David Crosby), is in The Big Easy to head the applause as Mary Black launches Shine into the big bad world.
His gentle demeanour belies a sharpened sensibility to all things rhythmic. Shine revels in Klein s place at the helm, its oceanic arrangements a testament to the man s love of broad brush- strokes. He lolls quietly, unobtrusively in the background while the album gets its virgin airing.
Although he comes from a jazz background, and is currently producing the debut jazz album for one Kyle Eastwood (yes, that s Clint junior), he hardly seems capable of prima donna-like behaviour in the recording studios. Still, he must surely have a few stories to relate about the Black/Klein recording experience. For starters, were there many arguments over the final arrangements?
Arguments? he enquires, I think it was a collaboration in the best sense of the word. It s really good to have someone as your alter-ego, and oftentimes, at least for me, I found that having to talk things through with Mary, whether she agreed with what we d done or not, was a really useful process. Generally, unless you re working with someone who s just frivolously asserting themselves just for the sake of doing it, you arrive at better solutions because you ve got two minds at work. I think we were pretty much kindred spirits when it came to making the important decisions.
Mary nods furiously beside him.
I think no was never a word we used, was it? she adds. That was because we were both open to each other s opinion, and if there was anything that either of us didn t like, we managed to reach a compromise.
Pushed to define his contribution to Black s latest album in more concrete terms, Larry Klein is a mite bashful of trumpeting his presence, all-pervasive as it is to anyone familiar with her back catalogue. At home with programming the most gossamer of touches in studio, he seems distinctly ill at ease when it comes to articulating his influence once he s stepped away from the mixing desk.
I didn t really come into it with that much of an agenda, per se, he offers tentatively, aside from doing what I always set out to do, which is make a record that I feel brings out the best in the person I m working with, and a record that I m just going to love to do! I think I announced fairly early on that I was going to be the advocate of imperfection , keeping things from getting too pristine and refined so that was something that was often my role, I guess.
Don t worry about it, Mary, just sing , that s all I heard him say to me, Black intervenes with a smile. Larry told me to just go out and sing it, which was kind of new to me. I was always dissecting what I was doing too much in the past, being too much of a perfectionist, and losing some of the vibe and the emotion as a result. Just allowing my throat open up and sing was a real change for me.
As far as the real centre of the record, the sonic contour of it goes, Klein continues, it took shape as we began refining the song selection. Sometimes I ll have a very specific agenda, but the most exciting way for me to approach a record is when it s somewhat amorphous. You ve got a vague feeling of what you re shooting for, and as you go along every day it focuses more and more. Shine was like that for me. I wanted to hear a bit of a harder edge, but other than that it just revealed itself as it went along.
Shine is an album of contrasts, of light and shade, though neither vies for superiority. The unquenchable optimism of the title track sits comfortably alongside the desolation of What Does It Matter? , both, interestingly, written by Welsh singer/songwriter, David Gray. With no less than five of the eleven songs penned by Gray, and two by Larry Klein, there s room for just one native scribe in the bunch: Paul Brady s I Will Be There , faultlessly dueted by Black and Brady.
Did Mary make a conscious decision to move away from her regular corps of songwriters when it came to making this album? Jimmy MacCarthy and Noel Brazil may be fine writers, with a finger on the Irish pulse, but did she have reservations about peddling their often opaque lyrics to a non-Irish audience, who must surely be the target of the current album?
No, I never do that, she insists vigorously. I have to follow my own instincts, because otherwise I d be chasing something that I don t really know anything about. I can never understand how people believe that they can read what other people want to listen to. I can only follow my own gut instinct and say: this is what I like at this moment in time, this is the way I feel about this song. Of course, I hope that I can communicate that emotion to the fan, and that she or he is going to like it as much as I like it, but that s my yardstick. I never, ever, choose songs on the basis of what the audience might or mightn t like. Never.
Anyway, I quite like songs where you have to work at finding out their meaning a little bit. I mean, my interpretation of some of Jimmy MacCarthy s and Noel Brazil s songs have been totally different to what they meant anyway! But that doesn t really matter. What does matter is what you think it means, and what the listener thinks it means.
For anyone with umbilical cord-attachments to her versions of Jimmy MacCarthy songs though, Shine signals that it s scalpel time.
With this album, she explains, the producer was different, some of the musicians were different, the recording was in a completely different part of the world, and I thought: well, I ve gone this far, let s change the songwriters as well. I mean, I ve got some other solo albums, and those songs will always be there for people to listen to. But it was time for a change.
Bingo. Hey presto. There s the jackpot. The magnet that s drawn Black to New Orleans with a new album in her suitcase. In a city where to be stagnant is to be positively reviled, Mary Black s penchant for transformation feels right at home. The Crescent City s made its name out of re-inventing its offspring, with everyone from Louis Armstrong to Dennis Quaid and Jelly Roll Morton succumbing to the city s schizophrenia. This is the town that celebrates funerals with jazz processions, keeps its Chevys far from the levees for fear of drowning, and bathes born-again Christians knee-deep in utter debauchery every Fat Tuesday. In short: the ultimate location to test-drive the hair-pin bends of a career path that s on the up, no matter how steep the gradient.
Opting for no less than five David Gray songs, three of them previously unrecorded, is proof, if proof were needed, that the lady wasn t suffering from a case of vertigo as the road inched ever uphill. A Welshman who s garnered a solid audience here with his sublime songwriting, Gray has nevertheless been dropped by his record company just as he was beginning to gain a foothold on his market. Such vagaries of the record industry don t faze Black though. A vote of confidence from a record company is as reliable as the No.3 bus to Ringsend, and Black has never held her breath for either.
I wrote to David Gray and asked him for some songs, she recalls, smiling, and originally we thought we d do a maximum of three, but as the album progressed, David s songs just kept floating to the top all the time.
A timely surprise for the beleaguered Gray, who was blithely unaware of his contribution to the album until their paths crossed at his last gig in Dublin.
Black laughs at the irony of the encounter.
Yeah, I went along to see him at the Ambassador before Christmas and I went backstage to meet him afterwards. I said howya and then I told him that we d ended up recording five of his songs. I tell you, he nearly dropped dead! He was so amazed, you know.
Klein is equally unstinting in his praise of the songwriter.
David opened up for Shawn Colvin for four months when we played in Europe, he recalls, anxious to explain his own reasons for being in thrall of this relatively unknown writer. I think he s never really made a record that gets across the power of what he can do. He s just extraordinary. I d sit and watch him every night for four solid months and I just loved him.
Vocally, Shine affords Mary Black more breathing space than her recent studio outings, that larynx finally breaking free of the shackles of the genteel female singer. More Mary Chapin Carpenter than Nancy Griffith, Shine has the balls of Alanis Morissette, albeit without the tiresome venom.
It s a brave move, given the extent of her loyal following at home and away, much of her audience seemingly hooked on the vulnerability of those trademark vocals.
On this album I had total control over how I sounded, whereas on the last few albums Declan had very strong ideas about how he wanted me to sound, she reflects. Now, I agreed with him at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight you re able to see different things. At the time, we were going for a whispered kind of sound, and I found that I actually missed opening up my throat and singing. So going into this album, it took me a couple of days to get away from that quiet kind of sound. Just being able to literally express a song as I felt it, was great. And I was surprised I still had a good voice, you know!
Shine, the title-track, is a convincing confirmation of this fact. Another David Gray gem, it has to be one of the most optimistic tales of love gone awry ever written (barring a rake of Jane Austen classics). Black could hardly resist its charms when Larry Klein landed it on her desk.
Isn t it incredible! , she exclaims. It s saying: okay, we ve come to the end of the road, but here s the beginning of something else for both of us now, so go and grow. When Larry first told me about that song, there were tears in his eyes. He was so moved by it. And the song marked a rejuvenating time for me too. I really felt an affinity for it. It was the first song we recorded, and it was as though I had a new lease of life. I hadn t sung like that for so long and it was so invigorating. I had a real feeling of going forward, which is the sentiment of that song too. It marked the move for me, and Declan, on to a different plateau; I was becoming a different person. So that song means a lot to me.
Klein, too, can barely conceal his affection for the song.
I don t think I ve ever really heard a love song written from that perspective before, he avers. One of a relationship being over, but written from such a place of generosity and goodwill, as opposed to the acrimonious or heartsick situation you usually encounter. I just think it s stunningly fresh. David s got strength of language, a sense of rhythm in language, a sense of melody. Everything, really.
Not being privy to a peek at the contractual arrangements agreed pre-production, I wonder whether the two Larry Klein songs were part of the deal, so to speak, or whether they got thrown into the melting pot with all the rest for her consideration?
God, Larry was really bashful about letting me hear his songs, you know, Mary says. He was so reluctant to give me the songs. But Nobody Lives Without Love and By The Hour are both stunning, and to be honest, when I heard the demo of By The Hour , it was done so well, that I didn t think I could make a fist of it myself at all. I love the mood in it. And both those songs show how he s been hurt. It s somebody who s come out of a big hurt situation and they re entering something that s fresh and new, and it s great.
The Klein songs are about as emotionally naked as you re likely to encounter outside of a Freudian group therapy session: songs that would usher a hint of recognition from the faintest of hearts.
That s right, Black concurs. I don t think anyone survives this far in life without getting heartbroken and hurt, and it s a feeling that most people can either remember, understand, or are feeling when they listen to the songs.
Broken hearts and blinding optimism apart, Shine soars across a musical wide-angle lens that whispers of wide open spaces and prairies that are far removed from the cosier geography of home. Greg Leisz pedal steel guitar is the driving force behind this Paris, Texas ambience, particularly on What Does It Matter and Beautiful (a sure-fire daytime hit), his hypnotic, infinite chords conjuring images of Joshua Trees and tumbleweed with the agility and familiarity of a native son.
A lot of that feel came from Larry, Mary admits, and even though we all contributed our sixpence worth, that sound was his. In fact he loves What Does It matter? with that pedal steel guitar, because he loves the darker side of music. If you listen to it: What does it matter if the sun don t shine/It s midnight forever in my Jimmy s eyes the passion and the mood are incredible. David Gray is a real poet, he really is!
There was one production trick that Black stumbled on herself, one that didn t demand any Klein inspiration.
When we were recording Shine I took a few pulls of a cigarette, she reveals confessionally, and it gave a kind of a cracked quality to my voice, which Larry thought was great! It was the tobacco that was doing it. I used to smoke but I don t anymore. It s a disgusting habit but I do it for my art!
Another novel experience was the recording of her duet with Paul Brady on I Will Be There . Most artists might be fazed by the fact that they were on different continents, but it would ve taken more than mere geographical considerations to stimie Klein once he was in full flight. He just decided it was time to put all those fancy satellites and telecommunications systems in Silicon Valley to the test. Recalling the logistics of the operation does little more than bring a smile to his face.
Yeah, he was singing in a studio in Melbourne, Australia and we were in Capitol Studios in LA, Klein recalls nonchalantly, and we just used phone lines. It was a somewhat involved process, in that we needed five lines to do it, but once we had gauged the time- lag, it took a little over an hour to record the song.
Now that the album s finished and she s got a chance to breathe in the light again, Mary Black s chomping at the bit and itching to get on the road. The goodwill factor is a tangible strength of the Irish music scene, and one that s not easily replicated elsewhere, she reckons. The prospect of an Irish equivalent to the Britpop squabbles is difficult to imagine, if her experience is any yardstick of the prevailing attitudes.
There s a good feeling of camaraderie among musicians in Ireland when someone does well, she avers. At least, I ve always found that to be the case. You very rarely get this feeling of resentment or jealousy that you see in other parts of the world. I think there s enough room for Irish people to do well in the world without them stepping on each other s toes. There s a great feeling of fair play and, I suppose, pride.
Now that she s put album number eight to bed, is she happy to keep a million miles away from studios for the next year or two?
Funny thing that, she notes, always after an album, because it is hard work, and it drains you in many ways, I always say: that s it now, leave me alone for another two years. I ve done the album, now let me get it out of my hair . But this album is different. I m thinking already about the next one. Larry and I are over that initial teething stage, and while there always has to be a beginning and a middle, I think it ll be a long time before it ll be at an end. Now that we know one another as well as we do, I really think the only way is up from here! n
Mary Black embarks on a five-week nation-wide tour at the end of April. Shine is released on the Dara label on March 21st.