July 28, 2016 - AmericanSongwriter.com
British folk icon Billy Bragg and Americana stalwart Joe Henry teamed up this past year to “make a record of the railroad”. The pair boarded the Texas Eagle in Chicago and rode Amtrak’s longest stretch of rail down to San Antonio and across to Los Angeles. At cities along the way, the two used the stop-break to record a classic American train song. The album, Shine A Light, comes out September 23 and reads as a tribute to the living history of the railroad in America.
Watching the music trailer on the Shine A Light website, it really seemed like making the record was a great deal of fun.
Joe Henry: It was in fact. I’ll confess the way the music was going to be created was what was most intriguing to me. These are all old songs, and most of us who come out of any folk tradition have know them forever. It’s a familiar vocabulary and that’s part of the point. But how we decided to engage them is what made it relevant and alive, and not just a revisiting of old campfire songs that most of us know in our sleep in some way or another.
Billy Bragg: It was fun, it was a lot of fun. There was the experience of being on the train for 65 hours and the 2,700 and whatever it is miles. But there was also the adrenaline of having to record a track before the train leaves. First you need to find a place to set up. Which was usually the waiting room. Most of the waiting rooms were built before the Second World War and are beautifully tiled and have great acoustics. But some of them were so far away from the train you couldn’t take a chance, so we had to perform next to the train on the platform. So you have the adrenaline of the stop coming, and then the finding the spot, and then playing all the time keeping your eye on the train listening for the “all aboard”.
Read more: http://americansongwriter.com/2016/07/joe-henry-billy-bragg-forthcoming-railroad-record-shine-light/
British folk icon Billy Bragg and Americana stalwart Joe Henry teamed up this past year to “make a record of the railroad”. The pair boarded the Texas Eagle in Chicago and rode Amtrak’s longest stretch of rail down to San Antonio and across to Los Angeles. At cities along the way, the two used the stop-break to record a classic American train song. The album, Shine A Light, comes out September 23 and reads as a tribute to the living history of the railroad in America.
Watching the music trailer on the Shine A Light website, it really seemed like making the record was a great deal of fun.
Joe Henry: It was in fact. I’ll confess the way the music was going to be created was what was most intriguing to me. These are all old songs, and most of us who come out of any folk tradition have know them forever. It’s a familiar vocabulary and that’s part of the point. But how we decided to engage them is what made it relevant and alive, and not just a revisiting of old campfire songs that most of us know in our sleep in some way or another.
Billy Bragg: It was fun, it was a lot of fun. There was the experience of being on the train for 65 hours and the 2,700 and whatever it is miles. But there was also the adrenaline of having to record a track before the train leaves. First you need to find a place to set up. Which was usually the waiting room. Most of the waiting rooms were built before the Second World War and are beautifully tiled and have great acoustics. But some of them were so far away from the train you couldn’t take a chance, so we had to perform next to the train on the platform. So you have the adrenaline of the stop coming, and then the finding the spot, and then playing all the time keeping your eye on the train listening for the “all aboard”.
Read more: http://americansongwriter.com/2016/07/joe-henry-billy-bragg-forthcoming-railroad-record-shine-light/