A coffee with the ever-engaging Jim Moray resulted in a chat about his new album The Outlander, a project germinated from a vintage guitar that has resulted in a distilling of ideas.
With his new Outlander album, Jim Moray has made something different; a set of old songs that are performed, certainly by his standards, quite straight up. “It’s an album of traditional songs, which is really what I’ve been doing all along,” he smiles. “I’ve just been spicing it up in different ways, but I think this time I needed to reset my baselines a bit and do something that was more of a statement of traditional music played in a slightly more straight way.” He pauses a moment for a sip of coffee. “Although, my idea of playing in a straight way is probably not the same as everybodys. I feel like our understanding and the audience’s understanding of traditional music is slightly moveable at this point; what do we mean by traditional songs and what do they represent? Since the folk revival of the 1950s, there are so many layers of other people’s agendas that you have to sift through. With this music, the more you dig away at it, the more you realise that everything isn’t what you thought it was. What is an authentic traditional way of performing? When you start to look into the origins and at the evidence, going back to facts, none of it is what you think it is, because we’re all looking at it through people’s eyes. That’s the fascinating part of oral history, or any history, who gets to do the telling? And with folk music, everybody is doing the telling all at once.”
When it came to the structure of The Outlander, although there is dynamic instrumentation throughout, it seems that Jim wanted to hark back to a more traditional method of communicating music, and also somewhat adhere to his own solo shows. “The majority of my gigs these days are solo and for most of them I’ve been playing acoustic guitar and singing,” he tells me. “I don’t do looper pedal things any more and it’s a long time since I’ve done that kind of performance. I think I’m still regarded as quite electronic, but I have two pedals and the rest of it is playing acoustic guitar with my fingers and singing. So I wanted to make a record that had a more limited palette and was a bit less hyperactive. I think my records have sometimes suffered from a surplus of ideas; I hope I’ve made each track coherent, but sometimes when an album is on, it’s covering a lot of different ground.” This resetting of baselines Jim mentions throughout our chat also takes him back through his own career to when he was starting to play folk music. “It is reflecting the stuff I grew up listening as well,” he nods. “I talk about Nic Jones, Martin Carthy and June Tabor, which is the music that made me want to do this, but I’m not reflecting it in my music that clearly, you’d have to know what you’re listening for in order to hear that influence. I wanted to do something that was more the sum of my influences; this is the music that I like.”
The Outlander is gorgeous throughout and works to Jim’s strengths as a singer and player, and the songs are given plenty of room to breathe, something seemingly important to Jim this time around. “In the back of my mind, all the records I’ve made have been an alternative to a thing that is the mainstream folk sound, which are the records I was listening to,” he explains. When I started performing, there were acts like Waterson:Carthy and Spiers and Boden had just started out, so there were lots of strong – not retro – live recorded performances of traditional songs played in a forward-looking way, but on acoustic instruments. So what I thought I was doing was a counterpoint to that, but eventually, you realise that the main strand in the middle isn’t as prominent as it used to be. Some of [my previous] records make sense to me because I can see them as part of a wider folk thing. Not everybody can see that, so I wanted to reset that connection and make a statement of here is the core trad repertoire that I’m interested in.”
When it came to the inception of the new album, there was also a catalyst of a guitar involved… “It was a lucky find,” he says. “I bought this 1949 Epiphone Triumph from a retired taxi driver from Liverpool who bought it in the sixties and then put it under the bed in the seventies when they all bought Stratocasters. He hadn’t changed the strings since 1974! It’s not in a good way, so it was cheap and it’s a bit delicate, but that was the germ of this idea; thinking about those early Blues records when they were transitioning into electric Blues but still playing like Robert Johnson. It’s not really my area, but maybe people like T-Bone Walker or Lightnin’ Hopkins; guitarists still playing acoustic but through an amp. What I like is that there’s no baggage of rock guitar vocabulary at that point, they were inventing it from scratch for their own needs. There’s that really nice description of Richard Thompson from Joe Boyd, who said he was the only guitarist to not compromise his whiteness. It could come across wrong, but he meant he was building a new way of playing electric guitar from Celtic pipe music and fiddle tunes. I had this unfamiliar acoustic guitar that could be plugged in and I wanted to see if I could make an English folk guitar style [album]; that feels fresh to me.”
Fresh is the right word, and Jim has never sounded better, but he also had other musicians in mind when he was hunting for the sound of The Outlander. “Having these songs my head and this sound in my head, but not really knowing how to do it, I thought the first step was to play a bit more live with somebody,” he says. “I’d always wanted to do more stuff with Sam Sweeney; I think among our generation of folk musicians he will go down as one of the important figures in English music for many reasons. So thankfully he wanted to do it and we pretty much did three days of playing all the songs we could think of and then I took that away to make something out of it. I also did a session with Josienne [Clarke]; I love singing with her and we’ve never done anything on record, so I wanted to do something with the two of us singing in harmony in one room. I think that’s probably the key track on this record, ‘Lord Gregory’; it’s a long ballad in that sort of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings style. Josienne is really into that sort of thing as well, and I wanted to see if we could do that Bluegrass kind of idea but with English music. But the overall idea is that all of the songs on there started with me and somebody else playing together, and the bulk of them are from the three days playing with Sam. It’s a more natural record done for real, playing face to face.” It was indeed recorded quickly and the music is striking and direct, but this is Jim Moray, so, with sessions with Sam and Josienne, as well as Nick Hart, Jack Rutter, Matt Downer and others, there was still plenty of tweaking to be done. “Yes,” he laughs. “It was recorded in three days and mixed for nine months!”
A Jim Moray album is always highly anticipated, this one will be no exception.
Outlander is available to Pre-Order now via Jim Moray’s website here
All pre-orders receive an MP3 download now. Pre-order CDs will be mailed out this month and vinyl pre-orders in August. General release is in September.
https://youtu.be/NBN2levNoD8
Photo Credit: Elly Lucas