The wonderful new lockdown album 'Room 822' from Emily Barker and her fellah Lukas Drinkwater when in quarantine on their trip to Emily's home of Australia I mentioned earlier on its release and was going to talk about it track by track but frankly it is somewhat redundant somehow . . . except perhaps the song I play the most lately is their cover of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' song 'Push The Sky Away' her notes here on Youtube are self explanatory but it is a fine, fine delicately fashioned version and hauntingly well supported by Lukas on basses of different kinds and subtle backing vocals. I just love that one can (well they can!) record things of this kind of quality in a contemporary hotel room. Frankly it is breathtaking . . . . . . . . .
We knew we were going to do a Nick Cave cover but the difficult question was which one to choose? An obvious choice might have been to do ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, but we weren’t sure we could do something different or interesting enough. We brainstormed how we might cover ‘Red Right Hand’ and even worked out a key for, and started rehearsing ‘The Mercy Seat’ but the outstanding version by Johnny Cash kept ringing in our ears and everything we tried felt inferior. We trawled Nick’s extensive catalogue and landed upon ‘Push the Sky Away’ – an album, and song, we both adore. We recorded it on a day when the weather outside our window was overcast and we were both feeling particularly claustrophobic and flat. It was around day 5 of our quarantine. It felt like a mantra for the day – to just keep on keeping on, to know it would pass. We buried ourselves in our work and it definitely helped. It’s such a simple and small song in many ways, but it contains multitudes, and can be read in many ways. Lukas starts us off with a beautifully haunting acoustic part, based on a version he’d recorded years ago with his UK duo ‘Jacob & Drinkwater’, and we built the track from there. We retained the sparseness and droney soundscape of the original version, albeit using different instruments.
New album Room 822, recorded in hotel quarantine, Perth, WA. https://emilybarker.com/room822
=========================================Emily Barker's album "A Dark Murmuration of Words" is out now - https://smarturl.it/eb-words "an album of spare, striking beauty" Mojo ★★★★ "irresistibly catchy...an album replete with nooks and crannies, light and shade" The Australian ★★★★★ ========================================= Stay in touch: Sign up to my newsletter: https://smarturl.it/eb-Newsletter https://emilybarker.com https://facebook.com/emilybarkerhalo https://twitter.com/emilybarkerhalo https://instagram.com/emilybarkerhalo
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