Kathleen Haskard – Don’t Tell

Singer, songwriter, political activist and all round task manager has her new album out on July 23rd. Dont Tell is released on indie label Howlin’ Hound. A sussed and aware musician who passionately believes in the healing properties of music, people power and that the personal is most definetly political. We got together to chew over music, life and the family tree;

You have lived a varied and interesting life Kathleen, looking at your bio on your website, what came first for you, music or politics?
Definitely music. My dad was a singin’ in the shower kind of guy. He has a beautiful voice and was into Tommy Wolfe and Fran Landesmans SPRING CAN REALLY HANG YOU UP THE MOST type jazz. I was in school and church choirs from a very young age. An alto age 10!

Tell me something about your political awareness, how did your bullshit detector antenna know where to home in?
If activism can be genetic then it may have always been there laying dormant until it was lit up at 14 by my high school history teacher, Paula Ogren. Her mantra was “apathy is a sin” and if you have the right to vote in what purports to be a democratic society then it is practically criminal to not exercise that right. And if you are a woman even more negligent and a minority woman…… well, you get the gist.

Who would you namecheck as inspirations to your music?
My dad, The Beatles, Leonard Cohen, John Prine, Bob, the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Bros, CSN&Y, JD Souther, Jackson Browne, Marianne Faithful, Joni Mitchell, Dolly, Bobbie Gentry, Steve Earle, Robert Burns and the mighty Chuck Prophet.

And more generally on your life?
My mom, Sister Mary Karlyn, Paula Ogren, Tom Hayden, Tom Paine, Sarah Raphael, my ridiculously beautiful, talented sons, Skylar, Aubrey and Luke are a constant source of inspiration and exasperation. My mad scientist/physician husband Dorian. His work ethic and dedication to his vocation is astounding.

You have quite a lineage, ancestors who led challenging political lives, tell me about them?
My maternal grandfather Robert O’Dowd was an Irish 1st generation American who was a card carrying member of the Communist Party back in the day when it was a romantic movement. When the farm in Michigan went bust he went into town to join the rank and file in the booming auto industry. He became embroiled in the embryonic Labour Movement and fought for the rights of workers to be members of a union. Though inspirational it was to be his undoing. He helped organise and lead various strikes and routinely got his head stoved in by government goon squads. He died of a brain hemorrhage years later in his favourite bar. He wasn’t yet 40. My maternal great grandmother Elizabeth Broom was a colourful Englishwoman from Devon who owned and ran a speakeasy during the Prohibition which included girls upstairs as an optional extra.And my great great uncle on my dads side of the family Jesus Garcia is a folk hero in Mexico who was a train engineer who when a dynamite laden train caught fire in the middle of the town of Nacozari, Sonora, he drove the train out towards the mines away from the heavily populated town center and blew up with the train! A folk song Maquina 501 tells the story in a bit more detail. That was November 1907 so this year is the centenary party which I’m hoping to get to.

I always find it confounding when I hear people say "I leave the politics to the politicians"........that in itself is an act of disengagement, surely?
Yep. That old apathy chestnut again. There’s no point whinging about stuff that you can ostensibly affect change about if you don’t make your feelings known to the people in power who are supposed to be there to represent and implement our ideas and opinions. Bitching and complaining can be great fun but pretty ineffectual unless it spawns great literature or art or is backed up with calls and letters and voting with your feet on polling day. Unless of course you are a member of the Anarchist Party whose motto is Don’t Vote. Because whoever you vote for The Government always gets in.

Naomi Klein has written a book called No Logo, in an attempt to de-mystify and critique globalisation and capitalism. She makes clear the complete lack of unbranded public space, ie gigs, art exhibitions, murals, shopping malls and even towns. multinationals have crept into patronising all these events and use them as a tool to enhance a brand culture for themselves. Whats your view on this?
I instinctively disapprove of obvious branding and am much more likely to be positively predisposed to companies that keep their sponsorship on the down low. But therein lies the rub; no brand - no visibility and no easily attributable credit. Whatever happened to the buzz that came as a result of anonymous altruism?

It got sponsored by Nike.... When will Tony Blair be in the dock for war crimes, I wonder?
My guess is never. Just as it’s only a matter of history that booze is legal and marijuana isn’t, with Blair it’s a question of whose in power, when, and whose empire of dirt is the most omnipotent. I don’t think history will be kind to him but he seems to be getting away with it at the moment!

I think the Iraq attrocities will follow him arund like a bad smell for the rest of his pampered, cushioned life. I recently interviewed writer Chris Salewicz who has published a bio on Joe Strummer, were you a fan of Strummer and The Clash?
In spirit I most definitely am. The attitude, the energy and the sheer balls that came across through the music was radical and exciting. Sonically/melodically I was challenged to a duel by them and the music left me feeling agitated and unresolved, which maybe was the point in the first place. I already had a young baby and so couldn’t/didn’t throw myself into that anarchic whirlwind lifestyle.

Kathleen and The Guilty Preachers live @ the Luminaire, London Oct 2nd 2007

How was it singing on Neil Youngs album, Living With War? How did it come about?
It was thrilling. It was combining my favourite things, singing and shouting about what’s gone wrong with our `Jesus take the wheel` form of government and how it’s been hijacked and being pillaged by this right wing cabal even as we speak!
I had flown into LA after having spent 2 very productive days recording the new album with Chuck Prophet in San Francisco, still high from the art we had begun to make. I was awakened around 8:30 am by a phone call from my great friend Dan Navarro (Lowen & Navarro) asking if I would be up for a 12 hour backing vocal session in the Capitol Records building. At first I was kind of blasé about it cause I was half asleep and sort of on vacation. But when he said “Kath it’s for Neil Young” I let out a yelp and dropped the phone. I had to be ok’d by the great Rosemary Butler who along with Neil conducted the choir. She had heard me sing and at a festival in Durango we had both played at the previous summer and so I was in.

What happened then?
Dan came and got me and off we went. We sang for 12 hours with 2 half hour breaks for food. As soon as we arrived we were split into bass, alto and sopranos. The lyrics were rolled up on a giant overhead projector screen and as we read them people would audibly gasp or burst into spontaneous applause. I couldn’t believe that finally someone with his sort of high profile and access to the big media machine was coming out of the closet and singing/saying/shouting even, about the injustices of this war and the hypocrisies that we tend to tolerate in our society on a daily basis. We came out of the session 12+ hours later exhausted, elated and floating in a surrealistic “we can change the world” bubble. My throat chakra was buzzing and glowing. Yeah that’s right the healing power of music….

You have many songwriting credits, via Bug Music, do you write songs with people like Stacey Earle in mind, or do they hear your version and arrangement first?
Yeah I have a couple of songs on other people’s albums but they have all been direct collaborations. Stacey and I met through her publisher at the time Jewel Coburn (Ten Ten Music) who wanted us to get together and write so as to combine our writing sensibilities. Stacey has this folk/hillbilly country/mexican mariachi thang she does and I’m a kinda genre blended west coast, alt blues rock, folk rock noire, jaded by living in London kind of writer. So we wrote Losers Weep for her first album SIMPLE GEARLE and her big brother Steve sang harmonies on it. It’s a song that we both drew out of our shared experiences of being single teenage mothers. Stacey’s dad Jack Earle helped us finish it off. Another is I Got My Own Way Of Doin Things on Lowen & Navarro’s SCRATCH AT THE DOOR. It started life as a slack blues idea I had knockin’ around. We were all in the room and hammered it out together. I have yet to have an artist record a song that I have written without them in the room with me. But the night is young…..

Don’t Tell will be released at the end of July, tell me about the songs on it?
Half the songs are co-writes and the other half are just me. Track 8 Hallelujah was written by Chuck and me on the spot in the studio while recording the album. He had invited his friend JT Leroy down to write with us that day and I was really unsettled by it. Writing songs is a very intimate process for me and so when he announced that this crazy 15 year old boy/40 something woman/number 1 selling author was comin’ in to try her hand at songwriting, I freaked. She never turned up so Chuck and Paul Revelli started laying down this drums and 6 string bass, White Stripes-esque rock riff and the lyrics just started spilling onto the page. I couldn’t write them fast enough. There are some irreverent catholic metaphors and water and death by drowning…. some of my recurring themes.

I guess you`re still in therapy then? And did you have the drowning theme in mind when writing Like A Pearl Necklace by any chance?
No. More like gargling…. On Like A Pearl Necklace, track 6, started by me pilfering a couple of lines from my friend Phil Colley’s poem that set me off on the adventure of writing the rest of it with a friend and collaborator here in London, Toby Slater. The pearl necklace in question is an actual pearl necklace not a metaphor for the shimmering residue that results in various leisure pursuits! It’s a ‘justify your war/behaviour within relationships song’ that Chuck made dark and eerie by playing a weird little 3 octave organ and his shadowy guitar licks.

Okay. Glad we got that cleared up.....
With Leave To Remain, track 10, I wrote on my own after mucking around with various picking and plucking single notes and chord progressions quite a way up on the fret board from where I usually play. I play guitar by ear so happy accidents are a big part of my writing technique. Lyrically it started off as an exploration of my so called “permanent residency” status in the UK. The actual stamp in my passport reads INDEFINATE LEAVE TO REMAIN. A pretty vague ethereal way of saying ‘you can stay for now, anyway’. It sort of morphed into a song about trying to get something across to someone. About communicating your essence….or not. About how you can more fully understand and appreciate someone or something in their absence. Simon plays lap steel on this one and when we were mixing it I said I wanted him to pull up the volume of the lap steel track. But he said the “drifting in from the next room” vibe was perfect for the song. And so it is….

Produced by Simon Alpin and Chuck Prophet, how was Don’t Tell recorded ? Was it done in one hit?
No. Because we are all so busy with our various satellite projects it was a real challenge to find chinks in our respective schedules to get down to doing some recording. Simon and I did some basic guitar and vocal guides in my front room in Camberwell (southeast London) and some drum tracks at studio near Bristol that Portishead has used.

Did you do any recording outside of the UK?
Then I went to Chuck in San Francisco where he pulled in his muso posse at Hyde Street Studios and we recorded 5 of the songs live, as a band with very little post production tinkering. Working with multiple producers can be tricky but we avoided most overlapping and so there are songs that are entirely Simon produced and songs that are Chuck treatments.

And who else played on the album?
Both Chuck and Simon play guitars and bass throughout. The drummers are both called Paul! Revelli and Wigens to be exact. The one and only Danny Eisenberg on Hammond and piano, Tom Heyman on Pedal Steel, JJ Wiesler on guitar, Julian Wilson from the UK’s Grand Drive lent his organ and vocals and my great friend and collaborator Sandy Stewart did BV’s on our song Play Me.

You manage yourself, run your own label and, as you mentioned, are your own masseur when on the road, does having the control of your music, your art, outweigh the hard grind this must be?
I know no other way. I would love to have the support that a great label can offer but it hasn’t come my way yet. Whether I would be able to let go some of the artistic control for the sake of having the help with the machinations of getting the music to a wider audience is unknown. Like any sort of working relationship it’s all about your ability to compromise.

Whats your plan for the coming year?
Gigs gigs and more gigs. I have put together a great band here in the UK and I am in the process of setting up a UK tour in September and regional US tours starting with the South and Southwest in November. Because of the cost of touring with a band the plan is to have a local pickup band in every region. It is another way of keeping it fresh too. Different players bring something new to the table and keep the stale bread at bay.

And finally, the devil, is she/he all bad? Or just an over used and redundant religious metaphor, rich with harmful guilt association used by the church to instill fear, loathing and control in its followers?
Flip Wilson’s immortal line “The devil made me do it” was used as a way to distance his character Geraldine from taking responsibility for his/her actions. I was raised in the Catholic church and from the age of 10 – 17 went to Catholic schools.

I was branded by Ranch Catholico from an early age too, managed to get a skin graft once I hit mid teens.....
I never really believed in the devil. From around the age of 10 I found myself at odds with the nuns when I questioned how pre marital sex and murder could be in the same category of sin. All organised religions have their own particular methods of control. The one thing most of them have in common is this sense of a Heaven and a Hell. They justify their existence by acting as the go-between for us mere mortals, with God/Heaven and the Devil/Hell. I prefer to take responsibility (or not) for my own actions and forge my own relationships with whoever does or doesn’t exist. I find the only reason the devil is of any use is for red costumes on Halloween / a way to change up the way to serve hard boiled eggs!

Many thanks Kathleen. For more information check her dotcom and her myspace. Her new album, Don’t Tell was out on July 23rd, distributed by Proper, downloadable at itunes and available at all good purveyors of sound art.

 

 

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