Tim Eriksen is one of those musicians who seems to be capable of making a mark with every piece of music he makes. He was (and technically still is) part of Cordelia’s Dad, one of the greatest bands to emerge from the US. He’s played Bosnian and East African music, arranged the shape note singing for the movie Cold Mountain, and been nominated for a Grammy for the album he made with Cuban pianist Omar Sosa. For his last album, Soul Of The January Hills, he recorded in a stone tower in a Polish monastery, a disc of unaccompanied singing, which is about a stripped-down as it’s possible to be. His new record, Josh Billings Voyage, is still hardcore folk (“it’s my most accessible solo album”, Eriksen insists), but definitely fleshed out in its tale of the (non-existent) New England town of Pumpkintown. “I’ve been working on it for a while, it took shape over years, figuring out the concept”, he explains. “I’m really excited about it. The vehicle of the semi-fictional New England town is common, plenty of writers have done it. I think because many of these places are small, so it’s almost too close to write about it in specifics. Place is very important here, but there’s a sense of uncertainty about it, too, which is very characteristic in the sense of leaving and not knowing what you’d be coming back to.” Leaving is a thread that runs through Josh Billings Voyage, in more ways than one. New England has a strong maritime tradition, and songs like Bonny Bay Of Biscay and A Thousand Times Adieu speak to that. But musically there’s also a sense of travel, as on Hindoo Air, a song now for children but supposedly originally from India, or the African sound at the root of Gabriel’s Trumpet. But the New England of the 18th and 19th Centuries was far from white bread; it was, in fact, astonishingly multicultural, something Eriksen brings out implicitly – and it’s part of his own experience, having played music from around the globe (his degree is in South Indian music performance, specialising in the veena), and “I wanted some songs that explicitly connecting Yankee and South Asian and African cultures. That contact has been forgotten about. For instance, Northampton, Massachusetts had a unique culture mixing Native Americans and poor English for over a hundred years.” The album also see Eriksen abandoning guitar this time around for the 12- string bajo sexto. “I didn’t want a guitar,” he says. “I wanted the music to be removed from that sonic world, to not have it tied to a genre or place. I first played the bajo sexto in an East African gospel group, so there’s that side of the playing in there. Much world music is lacking in foundation. I wanted a strong base for my music. All my solo albums have been about discipline, and I needed to get to the point where I was confident and felt this was coming from somewhere.” Surprisingly, given Eriksen’s musical history, there are no songs from the Sacred Harp tradition on the record. “That was intentional,” he notes, “although it’s there on Where Shall We All Meet Again, but the tune of Roslin Castle, which was quite common in the 17th and 18th Centuries, also entered the shape note tradition. Playing it instrumentally, I wanted to acknowledge that and also hint at an imagined South Indian connection.” Virtually all the songs here come from the American tradition that Eriksen has mined so deeply (and sometimes iconoclastically) over the years. The exception is The Mice, a piece he wrote concerning mice he discovered in a house where he once lived. It is, he says “a central song to the album, and it’s a true story. It’s a distilled example of moments of experience and the tenuous belief you know what’s going on in your house, let alone the world. It’s beautiful and chilling but again, about those tenuous connections.” And those connections, global, tenuous, real or imagined, are at the heart of Josh Billings Voyage. “It’s implicitly about a hill town kid who winds up at sea and is then unable to fit in at home. Travelling brings you in touch with a larger sense of the world, but it leaves you less able to fit in when you return.” That can be true now, and certainly would have been a couple of centuries ago, when for many the world was a much smaller place, sometimes bounded by the few miles surrounding their villages or towns. Everything new and different, every other culture would have come as a shock, but that’s what Eriksen wants to put across. “I wanted the fun of surprise. I wanted the album to be made up of unexpected moments so I could share them.” One of those moments is his treatment of Song Of The Old Folks (Old Lang Syne), which explodes from the usual into a flurry of electric guitar, completely unexpected and taking the piece in a new, exciting direction. But, he observes, “I like taking hackneyed songs and finding out what makes them tick.” He’ll be touring briefly this autumn – sadly, only in the US – but most of his time these days is spent writing his PhD thesis – on identity in New England. Somehow, that fits just perfectly. www.timeriksenmusic.com F 23 f root salad Tim Eriksen Songs linking the traditions of New England, South Asia and Africa. Chris Nickson asks ‘why not’?