authorities. Over here, the revolution was slightly
to suit a bit of a cottage industry; there were a lot of
bells and beads and stuff being sold.Leaping forward to your 2005 album Mighty
Rearranger, you talk about one of its songs, Tin
Pan Valley, on the podcast and how important
that time was on a personal level. You suggest
that it was the start of you embracing that
challenge of being both a singer and
songwriter in earnest.
Maybe, but I’ve always been trying to make the
whole thing work as a kind of rounded-off piece.
I think the great power of Mighty Rearranger is its
flexibility, from Tacamba [a Malian rhythm]
through to all sorts of things.Nine years later, Lullaby And... The Ceaseless
Roar seems to be the culmination of all that
searching and experimenting.
We got rid of the kind of grit and aggression of
a recording like Tin Pan Valley, and replaced it with
the panoramic drama of Embrace
Another Fall, which is a combination of
musicality and intention and poetry
that I could never have imagined way
back when.Lullaby is all rhythms and texture,
with your voice as part of that
“panoramic drama”. Was
that a breakthrough of sorts
for you?
It’s partly to do with
circumstance. Sometimes you
don’t run your own life, it runs
itself. I saw my life opening up
in a different way. I suppose if
I go back to Mighty Rearranger
and move from thereon
through, there was a whole
deal of fantastic opportunities and
changes which I could try to get
into and stagger through, which
I did. So from Raising Sand to Band
Of Joy [the 2010 incarnation], thesewere really quintessimal moments for me, because
I was just really a singer from the Black Country
who did a good version of Rock Me Baby, and I’m
suddenly in all these different environments,
musically and emotionally. And I was convinced,
the more I travelled through America and the more
people I met from different parts of the musical
globe out there, that that’s where I should be.
During the Band Of Joy era [2010-11], I spent
a lot of time with Patty [Griffin] while she was
living in Austin, Texas. Of
course I’d been travelling
through America for forty
years or so, and I’d always seen
these little postcard visions of
various places. But I’d never
actually lived in it to see what it
really was. So I moved to
Austin. And I was surrounded
by some incredible musicians.
Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie Ray’s
brother from the Fabulous
Thunderbirds, was a great player.
Charlie Sexton, Junior Brown, Wanda
Jackson... so many people. And I was
part of that fraternity of great players
coming and going, moving in,
moving out. The bottom line is that
I really embraced the whole idea of
being in that scene and I was living
alongside Patty. And she’s so prolific
and such a soulful cat that I thought,
this is it. This is the whole deal of
what it’s all about – musicalintegrity, great company and stimulus. And a really
warm welcome from people from all the arts. So
I dug deep into it and bought a place there.
But then I kept on looking back home and
wondering how it was with my kids and my mates.
I relish the simplicity of life sometimes. I was really
getting used to the fact that I was switched on in
Texas, but there was no escaping my story. So
I couldn’t take it any more and came back. And
that’s what Lullaby And...The Ceaseless Roar is all
about. It’s about coming back, about failing, really.
Or actually just realising that it takes so many
different elements to make a life. The whole of that
record is about realisation, about maturity, about
trying to get in line with yourself and finding out
that you sold yourself down the line a little bit. And
in its own way, that’s the blues.Your most recent studio album, 2017’s Carry
Fire, feels like a companion piece to Lullaby.
Yeah. The Space Shifters, to a man, are remarkable.
They’re also remarkable from the different angles
from which they’ve developed. Justin Adams and
Johnny Baggott and I have been together, on and
off, since 2001. And there’s enough going on in
between that when we come back it’s a great
homecoming. When Billy Fuller arrived, he
brought something different again from his side.
And he’s got his adventures with Beak. John Blease
has joined us on drums. He’s an amazing player.
And ‘Skin’ Tyson was a founder member of Cast.
So it’s like a kind of fraternity. We can get together
any time and it’s all good. There’s great creative
encouragement between us all.Robert Plant And The Sensational
Space Shifters in Austin, Texas,
March 20, 2016.Performing with Alison
Krauss at the Hardly Strictly
Bluegrass festival in SanFrancisco, October 3 , (^2008).
“There’s no greater thing
than being on stage when
the Space Shifters are
in full flight.”
GET
TY
x 2
34 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM