The Perlich Post: Greg Dulli

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Mark Lanegan's Gargoyle out April 28 – listen to "Beehive"

Early in 2016, Mark was at home in LA, working on some ideas for what might turn into his next album when he got an email from a friend, an English musician named Rob Marshall, thanking Mark for contributing to a new project he was putting together, Humanist. The pair first met in 2008, when Marshall’s former band Exit Calm supported Soulsavers, who Mark was singing with at the time. Now Rob was offering to write Mark some music to return the favour: “I was like, Hey man, I’m getting ready to make a record, if you’ve got anything?’” Mark recalls. “Three days later he sent me *10 things… !”

In the meantime, Mark had written ‘Blue Blue Sea’, a rippling mood piece that he thought might be a more fruitful direction for his new record. “It’s almost always how my records start,” he explains. “I let the first couple of songs tell me what the next couple should sound like, and it’s really the same process when I’m writing words. Whatever my first couple of lines are tell me what the next couple should be. I’ve always built things like that, sort of like making a sculpture I guess.”

Within an hour, Mark had written words and vocal lines for two of the pieces Rob had cooked up at Mount Sion Studios in Kent and pinged through the virtual clouds to California. Rob's music fitted perfectly with the direction Mark had been pondering: in essence, a more expansive progression from the moody Krautrock-influenced electronica textures of his two previous albums, ‘Blues Funeral’ and ‘Phantom Radio’. Eventually, Rob Marshall would co-write six of the songs on the new Mark Lanegan Band album. “I was very thankful to become reacquainted with him,” Mark deadpans.

The remainder of the album was written, recorded and produced by Lanegan's longtime musical amanuensis Alain Johannes at his 11 AD base in West Hollywood. Everything was done and dusted within a month, unusually fast by Lanegan’s recent standards. “I definitely feel like I’m a better songwriting than I was 15 years ago,” he says. “I don’t know if I’m just kidding myself or what, but it’s definitely easier now to make something that is satisfying to me. Maybe I’m just easier on myself these days, but it’s definitely not as painful a process, and therefore I feel I’m better at it now. But part of the way that I stay interested in making music is by collaborating with other people. When I see things through somebody else’s perspective it’s more exciting than if I’m left to my own devices.”

While sharing roots with its two predecessors, on Gargoyle there’s a significant up-shift in the swaggering powerlode of such keynote songs as Nocturne and Beehive, while the lyrics’ tonal palette is more varied. The album title comes from a lyric in Blue Blue Sea – “Gargoyle perched on gothic spire” – and was chosen for its hint of self-deprecation. “I’m most proud of the songs that are atypical to stuff that I’ve done in the past” says Mark. “So I really like Old Swan, because it’s an expression of positivity, which is completely anti-anything I’ve done before!” He laughs. “Y’know, I haven’t played this record for too many people yet. I played it for Greg Dulli, who played on some of it, and he was like, ‘Wow, I had to listen to it twice – it sounds like he’s having a good time…’ Listen to "Beehive" below.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Celebrating Eddie Hinton

While CD selecta Gord Cumming cued up Eddie Hinton's raucous Ting-A-Ling-Ling at Reposado last Tuesday night, it occurred to me that the this cozy Ossington tequila bar was probably the only joint in Toronto where the DJ would not only know that tune but be able to play the request on the spot. The other thing that hit me was that Gord, like everyone I've ever met who's equally enamoured with Hinton's rough-cut soul sound, has a different story about how they initially discovered the under-appreciated Muscle Shoals singer/songwriter who penned Cover Me for Percy Sledge and Breakfast In Bed for Dusty Springfield. Their personal testimonial almost always concludes with how they subsequently became Eddie evangelists for their own small circle of friends.
In the case of Darren Blase, the co-owner of Cincinnati's Shake It Records store and label happened across a 99-cent copy of Hinton's 1978 debut Very Extremely Dangerous (Capricorn) in a second-hand shop and grabbed it simply because the cover looked kinda cool. Once he got it home, he was delighted he did. Now, some 20 years later, Hinton's Very Extremely Dangerous is back in print, Zane Records' three volumes of his songwriting demos Dear Y'all, Playing Around and Beautiful Dream are all available on iTunes and Blase is in a position to spread the gospel according to Eddie with a series of limited seven-inch singles with some of his favourite artists covering Hinton's shoulda-been hits.
Dangerous Highway - A Tribute To The Songs Of Eddie Hinton is planned to be a 10 single project with the first two volumes pressed in an edition of 2,000 copies apiece feature hardcore Hinton fan Greg Dulli on Volume 1 and the Drive-By Truckers do the honours for Volume 2.

You can count on Dulli to revel in the darker aspects of Cover Me and Hard Luck Guy while the Truckers' Patterson Hood (son of Hinton's Muscle Shoals rhythm section buddy David Hood) sounds born to sing Everybody Needs Love and bassist Shonna Tucker brings an aching sweetness to Where's Eddie? which Hinton penned with Lulu in mind. Those two records are available from the Shake It Records site with follow-up installments from the Heartless Bastards and Hinton's songwriting partner Donnie Fritts due early in 2010.
It would be great to see fellow converts like Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Bobby Womack, Mavis Staples, the Black Keys and Kings Of Leon getting involved although, realistically, Blase's budget of $1,000 per artist probably wouldn't cover the parking costs for any of their tour buses. Of course, Blase would be the first to admit that this endeavour is not intended to be a big money-maker, just a labour of love by another Eddie convert trying to introduce a few more people to the greatest soul singer they've never heard.

Ting-A-Ling-Ling by Eddie Hinton, 1991