This Is Folk Music
“This hasn’t happened in 16 years” was the refrain as Ali Karim tried to understand why just one small vocal section (albeit stacked to the rafters and then merged) caused my new song ‘Peace’ to cause his Protools to freeze – if freeze is the right geek word…if merge is the right geek word! Anyway it pissed him off big time because he spends half his life making sure all his own hardware and software is secure, and that all the music he has helped to create for various artists over those years is never affected by ghosts in his machine.
This was external to his own system, a problem that he could have done nothing about, and while it was probably a one in a million failure (his words not mine), it was nevertheless a failure of a system he largely trusts and knows like the back of his hand, and probably the front of it for that matter. Part of the frustration was that we were at the end of the third and final version of a song that he thinks may be my best yet, the album version. So it added 90 minutes to an already long, if fulfilling day. I should add that during the current recording we have both come out of the studio after each session declaring we have just produced the best song yet, which may or may not be true, but it shows that we are continually trying to break new ground.
Many people still view ‘folk music’ as the music created by bearded old men with hats and sandals playing the spoons with one finger stuck in an ear, and ladies in dresses adorning proceedings with beautiful voices. But it is the music of folk, of the people, and the closest thing to an accurate representation of social history that you will find throughout the ages. So it carries both historic and contemporary context. The night previous, Ali had been to a reggae gig in town with Hak Baker in support. His music may not be everyone’s idea of folk music but it is. It tells a story from a different perspective but it is very much in the folk song writing tradition.
At the end of our frustrating but ultimately successful day, Ali’s Mum Adela asked if I had seen Karine Polwart on the One Show. I had not. Because I can’t bear the One Show in all its BBC cheesiness, but I did know she was going to appear. Having never heard Karine Polwart before, Adela was both surprised and hugely complimentary about her innovative style, and there is no doubt that she is one of the leading lights of contemporary folk music right now. I’ve been into her music for some time and she just keeps getting better. Yet the folk purists would probably not always see Karine’s work as folk music, beautifully sung and produced as it is. Nor would many see the work that Ali and I put out as pure folk music, with or without The Folded Arms.
At the end of it all there is ‘traditional’ folk music and ‘contemporary’ and both labels enable the music industry to neatly pigeonhole musicians into genres to help focus sales for the big distributors. However, they don’t always get it right because when iTunes first came on the scene Cliff Richard’s ‘Carrie’ was listed under the ‘folk music’ genre. I should declare at this juncture that I was not searching for Cliff’s songs because I can’t abide most of them, I was searching for ‘folk music’, but quickly gave up when I realised the dysfunctionality of Apple’s pigeonholing at that time.
Yesterday, amid all the collective anxt, we produced an acoustic version of ‘Peace’, and album version, and Ali’s own interpretation of the song which is utterly beautiful. The lyrics are exactly the same and the voice is the same in each of the three versions, therefore each remains a folk song in its own way. So don’t judge music, don’t put it in comfortable boxes because these are boundaries that shouldn’t exist. Just enjoy the music.
#Inheritance will be released in October. Look out for gig announcements. You won’t have to look far!