![]() ![]() He can be direct and accessible, honest and humane, but there’s a soft-focus to his sound, a gauzy texture to the production (Watch My Moves) is like an audiophile’s interpretation of lo-fi, designed to encourage the audience to lean into the arrangement and take from it what they want. How Kurt presents his instrumentation has a similar effect on the audience as his lyrics. At times, his guitar playing recalls Ry Cooder, or even Mark Knopfler, but in context with synth and keys, these motifs serve a higher purpose. Kurt plays around with a lot of different styles and textures. Not to say I am not competitive et cetera, it’s just a little different.” What have I got to prove is what I have to prove it’s not such a contest any more. Now I can tap into it but I don’t have so much to prove. “But now, I like my 40s because I feel like, growing up, you’ve got a lot to prove, a lot to figure out. Even in the very earliest sessions on this record I wasn’t even fully ready to record but I forced myself to go into the studio before I hit 40, y’know! “I sort of dreaded them, just the number, when I was in my late-30s. But if children lack the wisdom and emotional maturity to always make sense of their experiences, a 40-something adult at least stands a better chance. Even the title of the album speaks to a sense that Kurt has retained the ability to look at the world as a child might, calling it as they see it without any filter. ![]() ![]() Songs such as Going on a Plane Today are like children’s music for existentialists. The blend of the everyday and the profound establishes a dramatic tension. I think all that’s captured in that song.” I just walked around the block – it was literally all you could do – and the next thing you know the sun went down and I was home alone, feeling pretty good about myself, like in outer space. “I was trying to make it poppy but it came out through me with a Martin acoustic 12-string I got recently, and floaty vocals, just captured at that right time when the song was fully written. I was flattered! Like, ‘Really?’ At the time, I was listening to some of her music, and the way she delivers fast it is kind of hip-hop. “It’s kinda funny because you said it was like Americana hip-hop, and strangely enough, the pop star Kei$ha asked me to help her write some songs. It’s kinda funny because you said it was like Americana hip-hop, and strangely enough, the pop star Kei$ha asked me to help her write some songs. “I stayed, like, ‘I gotta get to know this Marantz four-track!’ I just had this Uni-Vox drum machine, and I sped it up, because I had it down a little too slow, and the next thing you know I’m just sitting and strumming. “When I was trying to get the song recorded, my family went away – it was like the first summer of the pandemic,” he says. How do you finish a track like that, a gentle song, a loose-leaf Americana hip-hop vibe? The risk is that it gets overworked and tightens up. “Like the line on Flyin’ (In A Fast Train), ‘Playing in the music room in my underwear.’, at that moment, I literally was!” “Yeah, I like to just get lost in strumming the guitar,” he says. Faith in the sense of letting the imagination out to forage and trust what it’ll bring back, a form of quasi-automatic writing that holds song ideas in suspension, as though in a dream. ![]() He doesn’t seem the ruthlessly efficient type when he talks to Total Guitar over Zoom, dressed in a flannel shirt and a Willie Nelson & Family trucker hat, with an easygoing demeanour that suggests he is rarely unmoored from a sense of equilibrium.īut (Watch My Moves) is a considerable body of work that can only be the product of a certain brand of efficiency and discipline, and perhaps even faith, too. Kurt has an unconsciously disguised professionalism. I would show up in the studio and then start from scratch. “I learned that on this album, recording constantly and then going back to them. “I have several generations of those Boss loopers, and there’s lots of stuff on this record alone where I just treat it like a tape machine, like a recorder without a loop but then it ends up looping anyway,” he says. Without, as he says, thinking at all, which is how much of his new album, (Watch My Moves), was written. Use tape recorders, Zoom multi-track field recorders, whatever comes to hand, and especially the looper pedal, because that can be the most valuable of them all, allowing you to record without giving a second thought to the red light. One thing Kurt has learned over the years is that you can’t possibly have too many recording devices. ![]()
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