on 3C Digital - 20th December 2002. Pat – Hal Ketchum, welcome back to 3c, continuous cool country. Hal – Thanks, good to see you. Pat – Always good to see you Sir, and especially good to see a new Hal Ketchum album, ‘The King of Love’, where did that title come from Sir? Hal – ‘The King of Love’ is just one track on the record, that’s kind of a boastful approach I guess. It’s a real Bo Didley kind of a beat and comes off that way. It’s a proclamation of love, and it’s about a guy who isn’t the most popular guy in the neighbourhood, but he considers himself The King of Love. Pat – Well, we’ll hear that one right now. Plays ‘The King of Love’. Pat - Hal, we really enjoyed playing your last album, ‘Lucky Man’. What, if any, differences would you say there are in your new album from the last one, different approaches or any different thoughts as you made this record? Hal – This record required very little pre-meditation, I went into the studio, cut the sides with a really good band and listening back decided that we probably had captured an entire album’s worth of material. There wasn’t any target audience if you will, there was no pre-meditation about who was going to hear it, it was just a matter of making the best record we could make. Pat – We’ve been playing the first single that we had in the UK, which we really really like, ‘Every Time I Look in Your Eyes’, do you think you could tell us about that song, where that came from? Hal – Yes, a guy named Michael Lloyd out in LA who’s in the film business, he called about 3 months ago now, and suggested that I add it to this record, that it was going to be in a film with Sylvester Stallone and Anthony Quinn, tragically Anthony Quinn’s last film, so my understanding is that it’s going to be an integral part of the film. I just enjoyed singing the song very much, I thought it was a great piece of pop music, so it was a pleasure to record it. Pat – It’s one of those songs that to me the lyrics are very conversational I would say. to me. I’ve said this before to other artists, but a good song to me, when you’re listening to it, it’s almost like the artist is speaking to you rather than singing to you, this is one of those songs. Hal – I think that’s a good statement, in it’s own right, and those are the kind of songs that appeal to me, they’re the kind of songs that lead me in, and it’s a love song and you can’t go wrong with a love song, not in these times. Plays ‘Every Time I Look In Your Eyes’. Pat – Another song that jumped out at me from this album was ‘God Makes Stars’, an unusual song, what can you tell us about that one? Hal – ‘God Makes Stars’ is a song that was written really by Joshua Ragsdale and he was kind enough to let me in on it. He sat down one afternoon and played me this thing that was as purest, closest to a Merle Haggard song as I’d heard since Silver Wings, and I think I added two or three lines to the bridge. Pat – I was saying to my friend Jerry those two or three lines in the bridge really make that song! Hal – Ha ha! Yeah, well you know, I tried to help the kid’s career out anyway I could! He’s a great kid, he and his sister Shi-Anne have a record coming out on Lyric Street in the very near future, you’ll be hearing a lot from them and we’ve been writing, collaborating for about a year. They really are music first people, they’re a young couple of kids, brother and sister from Mississippi whose mom and dad have moved up here with them and took care of them and gave them a year or two to really find their way and they’re great writers, – there’s a duet on this record called ‘As Long As You Love Me’ which I wrote with Shi-Anne and Joshua that again is an indication of their writing and their musical skills. I think they’re gonna be around a long time. Plays ‘God Makes Stars’ and ‘As Long As You Love Me’ Pat – There’s a lot of Irish connections with this CD it appears to me, Hal, not knowing a lot about the circumstances surrounding the recording of it but obviously from the artwork on the album, the photographs and the song called ‘Skies Over Dublin’, so how did the Irish connection get started on this? Hal – It goes as far back as Mick Hanley, I mean, I saw Mick at the Europa in Belfast this trip, he’s a fast friend, he’s a great songwriter. He wrote ‘Past The Point of Rescue’ ten years ago, and there’s almost a national pride the Irish have, of that song, the success of one of their own. That song, to my knowledge has been played over 3 million times on BMI charted radio, and that’s a lot of airplay. It’s in the Irish Music Hall of Fame, and the lyric that he wrote, it is absolutely moving poetry. It’s a song that I open the shows with every night, so it goes that far back, the loyalty to Irish music goes beyond that but certainly that far back. Plays ‘Past The Point of Rescue’. Hal – As far as song titles go, on the new record, ‘The Skies Over Dublin’ is really about a young man waiting for a girl to make up her mind, whether she loves him enough or not and I wrote it, I was staying in Dublin, I was staying at the Westbury and looking out the back and the sky was just constant change. It reminded me of a young relationship in that sense, in that it was blue and sunny one minute and then it was black and cloudy, and then it was a little drizzly, it was in constant change, so that was the theme behind that song. Pat – We can really relate to that in Scotland, where 3c originates, because there, as an American it particularly strikes me the clouds are always moving, you know I’m used to California weather where the clouds are just kind of there, when you have the clouds, any clouds, but here everything’s in motion, and like you say, within a day you can have rain, sunshine, sleet. Hal – I firmly believe that sparks the mood of the poet, that there’s something in that restlessness that’s good, it’s a good thing. I’ll take a rainy day personally, I’ll take a rainy day any day. Pat – We’ve got loads of those for you! We got a few extras. Plays ‘Skies Over Dublin’. Pat - Our audience includes a lot of very knowledgeable Hal Ketchum fans who are aware among other things of the fact that at one time you were a carpenter I believe by trade and there is of course a song on the new album ‘The King of Love’ called ‘The Carpenters Way’. How did that come up now, after I presume you haven’t been a carpenter for a number of years? Hal – Sentimentality prevails. I was riding in my truck to Franklin, Tennessee, and thinking, you know, the business was driving me crazy, and poor me, wouldn’t it be great if I just had a ladder and a toolbox and was going somewhere to put a roof on, I mean it was a no-brainer, I know how to do that, you know, and so I wrote the lyric. I build houses and barns and a bird house or two, study my blueprints and plans, I like wood that don’t argue, nails that drive straight, tools that don’t skin up my hands, I mean basic truth, and then as time progressed I put it away and thought of the fact that Guy Clark is a great woodworker, and would get it, and thought that he’d make a great guest on it, so I got Guy to come in and sing the second verse, add a little dignity to it. Plays ‘The Carpenters Way’. Hal – I should mention ‘The Way She Loves Me’, which is the speculation of a man who leaves Ireland and comes to the States, to make his fortune, and has to leave his family behind, as many did, not too many years ago, from all over the world, come to America, come to the land of honey, so that song is sort of about his standing on the shore and pining for his love which is across the way. I just thought I’d slide that in there. Pat – I’m glad you did, we’ll listen to that one right now. Plays ‘The Way She Loves Me’. Pat - Stylistically, the song ‘Evangaline’ also sort of jumped out at me off the album. Hal – Good, that’s a good record. I don’t know what makes a good record, other than just magic, alchemy. I wrote that song with Charlie Daniels, so it’s got that a-minor funky swamp kind of southern boy thing, that Georgia thing going, and it just pops, yeah, I like that record a lot. Plays ‘Evangeline’. Hal – That’s my son’s favourite. My son actually wrote the lyric to ‘On Her Own Time’. He sent me some lyrics and said ‘Dad, I don’t know if these are any good but….’ and it just knocked me out, it was a kind of a Dave Matthews kind of thing. Totally from a different place, a different generation, and I sent him the record hoping that he would brag on my treatment of that song, and all he can talk about is Evangeline. Pat – I thought you were gonna say you changed a word or something and he wasn’t speaking to you! Hal – That’s okay, he’s already out of the will! Plays ‘On Her Own Time’. Pat – The album ends with a song called ‘The Angel Song’, it’s a real beauty, what can you tell us about that one? Hal – That was the last thing I wrote, the record was really done, prior to that I was mixing the record and I was on my way over to the studio and I thought, one more, there’s one more thought here, and it’s sort of an open apology, and I think that every parent deserves an open apology, deserves a moment where they say, you know, I’ve done the best that I possibly can. I was not perfect, Lord knows, I was not perfect, but you’ve always got a safe home to come to and you’ve always got this place, when all else fails, you know, and the last line of that song is ‘never run faster than your angels can fly’. Plays ‘The Angel Song’. Pat – I think some of the really great lyrics, great lines in songs, are the kind that when you hear them, you think, you know what, why didn’t I think of that. Because it’s so perfect, you know, it expresses an emotion or a thought so perfectly, it almost feels like you did think of it when you hear it, you know, it just sounds like a natural fit. Hal – As a writer, I’m sure you know this, that there are times when you can sit down and write something and go ‘Wait a minute, I’m stealing, I know I’m stealing, someone has said this, someone certainly has turned this phrase. And maybe not, I mean it may be a unique visitation, you just don’t know. Tim O’Brien and I constantly do that, we almost write like, when we sit down to write there’s barely time to pick up the pen, and so we wonder where it comes from, we use words that are not common, but they’re not strained either, they’re not clever for the sake of. I’ll take a unique lyric any day, I’ll take a memorable lyric any day. I just finished one, this Longfellow thing, it’s 25 verses, I couldn’t stop and its words about this kid going into a town he doesn’t belong in and getting in trouble. Its sort of an odyssey that he’s followed by bounty hunters, sort of turn of the century mountain piece and there are lines, and I’d read em back and it’ll be like ‘ no place for a simpleton, a tree-lit boy like me’, now what is a ‘tree-lit’ boy? I have no idea what a tree-lit boy is, probably this kid knows, its something from his culture, I don’t know what that means, but I leave it. Pat – Those are the good ones though, because everybody will fill that in themselves. Hal, - Sure, Its like a composite of a novel, and you and I can read the same book and we probably had this conversation where a main character will be a compositive of one of your uncles who came back from Korea, and somebody else with brown hair and a moustache, and it will be someone entirely different, a compositive to a two different people to me, but they’re the same person. Pat – I mean as you were saying, I was thinking, tree-lit, its like if you’re beneath a tree and looking up and the sun is shining through the branches, it’s almost like the tree is like a lamp and the sun is like the light bulb shining through it. Hal – At certain times of Autumn it is, yeah. Pat – Makes perfect sense. Hal – But if I took that down on the Old Row, you know, they’d look at me like a pig looking at a wristwatch! Plays ‘Prisoner of Love’. Pat – ‘Too Much of Nothing’, we’ve had fun playing that song. Hal – Right, that’s become a great live song. I’ve got a new band as well. Just prior to going to do these Irish dates I had a minor mutiny, and I lost my band and they’ve been replaced by these saviours, these guys who just came out of nowhere, literally, who are so hungry to play. I’m calling them the ‘Gypsy Playboys’, they’re a great band, and ‘Too Much of Nothing’ has become one of those mainstays of the shows. It’s easy to play and again there’s a little message there, you know? Plays ‘Too Much of Nothing’. Pat – We were talking about the lyrics and the writing of lyrics, and sometimes you’ll be writing something and then you’re not really sure if this is something you’ve just thought of, or perhaps something that you’ve heard or forgotten, you know, something that came from some other source. What always amazes me, with songwriters, is where they get the melodies from, because I mean, there’s only so many keys on a piano, or some many strings on a guitar, and I would think that would be very hard coming up with original melodies that are harmonious and pleasing to the ear without doing something inadvertently that’s already been done. Hal – Melody either suits lyric or it does not suit lyric. It either pulls you out of the lyric in the story or it does not. So for me it’s like the track, it’s really the train track. Train tracks are very mathematical and so many ties to the foot, and the rails are smooth, and that’s sort of the way I write melody. The hardest time I had was when I used to write a lot of lyric first, and then sit down and noodle, get a verse. And now I get the visitation all at once, typically when I wake up and have a lyric, if I have a first verse, I have a melody simultaneously. Initially it was kind of overwhelming, and now it’s just like ‘okay, if I don’t ask, I don’t need to know’. Ignorance has indeed been bliss as far as song writing goes. Pat – Hey, you almost hate to talk about it because it is such a gift, you don’t want to analyse these things. Hal – I could do seminars, and yeah, I could talk myself round the whole thing, I’m sure, and confuse everyone who paid their buck and a half, and they’d all sit there looking at me like a pig looking at a wristwatch. Pat - Or they would think it was so profound they obviously didn’t understand it! Hal – Yes, of course, myself included! After about a week I’d be impossible to live with, I’d be living in the back yard, that’d be that! Pat – Hal Ketchum, it’s been great talking to you. Any chance of your playing some dates in the UK then sometimes soon? Hal – Absolutely, absolutely, I’m coming over in the Spring, you know, hell or high water, we’re coming over, we’ll be there! Pat – We’ll hold you to that! Thanks very much, Hal Ketchum. Plays ‘Run Loretta Run. |