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Talking To...Eilen Jewell
The Maze,
Nottingham
October 11
Just when my belief was being challenged by the abundance of poorly attended gigs in my part of the country, my faith in human kind was restored temporarily as the narrow corridor that runs between the front bar and the concert bar to the rear of The Maze in Nottingham began to fill with an assortment of characters, all eager to find a decent seat in the house as Eilen Jewell and members of her fine band sound checked up on stage. The air grew thin in the narrow cavernous corridor, the walls and ceiling of which were plastered with posters of the venue's previous triumphs, including the likes of Diana Jones, Martin Simpson, Steve Forbert, Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, Hayes Carll, Laura Veirs, Nick Harper, The Move and the list goes on; all from quite different musical backgrounds but all defined by their quality.
I was particularly pleased to see such a crowd at the Maze tonight, which made the night even more exciting than it was potentially guaranteed to be. Boston-based singer-songwriter Eilen Jewell took to the stage with her regular band consisting of Jason Beek (drums), Jerry Miller (guitars) and Johnny Sciascia (upright bass) and appeared to enjoy the banter that such an audience brings with it. It was guitarist Jerry Miller's birthday and so a party atmosphere was most definitely on the cards.
With sound checks out of the way and with bums on each and every seat in the house, plus the wall of standing figures at the back, silhouetted by the lights from the bar, I saw my way through to the backstage area and was introduced to Eilen by her drummer Jason Beek, who had guided me through to the backstage area. Once in the 'green room' I was face to face with the young singer-songwriter and set about my routine enquiries just as a series of strange rumbling and gurgling sounds emitted from the buildings heating system, providing a curious soundtrack to the interview that followed:
Eilen Jewell(EJ) Allan Wilkinson(AW)
AW: This is not your first time in the UK?
EJ: True, I think this is my third time.
AW: Originally from Idaho?
EJ: That's right, yeah.
AW: I read somewhere recently that you were asked to name your favourite place on Earth and you said Idaho..
EJ: Yeah.
AW: Can you tell someone from the UK what it's like to go to Idaho?
EJ: Well Idaho is kinda unusual I think because most people in the US don't know where it is. There's not that many people who live there and it has the most designated wilderness area per square mile, more than any other state outside of Alaska and Alaska's as big as half the US anyway, so it's a pretty good contender. It's more wild in a way than Wyoming or Montana, those two places are the places that most people think of when they think of ranches and mountains and open space big sky country, but Idaho is that way but even more so, but it's great because no one's heard of it. It's like my own little secret, that's how I feel about it.
AW: Well I think you'd be surprised, a few people in the UK have heard of it but very few of us have actually visited it, so after this you may get a big influx of visitors from the UK.
EJ: I should watch what I say uh? (laughs)
AW: Well you chose the path of a singer-songwriter performer, so that's obviously going to take you out of Idaho and you soon found yourself in Santa Fe, New Mexico. What took you there?
EJ: I moved there when I was 18 to attend college, I went to St John's College and I graduated in 2002. It was in Santa Fe coming towards the end of my time there that I got into performing music at the farmer's markets there.
AW: Did it have a thriving music scene there, or did you make it?
EJ: Well there was a pretty good music scene in Santa Fe that I feel like I never really tapped into because I was too shy to really get on a stage at that point and I was just doing busking and strictly the farmer's markets so, I think maybe the music scene might be a little stronger now than it was back then. There's some good music that happens there and definitely some good busking.
AW: You then went on to record your first album?
EJ: It was a little while after that, about three years it took me to get from Santa Fe to LA back to Idaho, back to New Mexico and then to Boston.
AW: So it was a real round trip wasn't it?
EJ: Yeah, oh and before Boston it was Great Barrington in Massachusetts, out in the western part of the state, in the country.
AW: So you'd had a lot of living by then, you'd done a lot of travelling around and your first self-released album BOUNDARY COUNTY came out, some nice songs on there it's a nice sort of low-key album.
EJ: Thank you, yeah it is pretty low-key.
AW: ..and it did set up what was to come, you definitely found your voice on the album, it wasn't as if the second and third album changed dramatically, you still had that essential Eilen Jewell sound. The one think I must talk about on that first album, you're not known to be an overtly political singer-songwriter but on that album you did record The Flood, which you didn't pull any punches with that. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I think Hurricane Katrina herself got let off lightly on that song, you did put all the blame where it belonged on the slow to respond government. Did you feel compelled to write that song?
EJ: I did, I felt like that song essentially wrote itself and it demanded to be written and be heard. It was a very passive thing for me I felt and I'm not trying to just get out of being blamed for writing something so scathingly political but most of it was written by just reading newspaper articles about what was going on there and a lot of the lines in the song are just simple descriptions that come from first hand observers of what was going on there. So pretty much verbatim; I took some liberty with what I wished could've happened to the leaders that failed so badly and seemed to be so apathetic to the people who were suffering there but other than that it was pretty much just from newspapers.
AW: I spoke earlier this year with Sid Griffin whose sister actually works with an organisation down in New Orleans to re-house some of those affected and I asked him how it was going and he said it's going okay but not as fast as they'd like to, so maybe with Obama settling in and getting his feet under the table something might be done there now?
EJ: I hope so, because we were there recently and although it looked better than when we were there a couple of years ago, it still looks like, in certain parts, just like a war zone really, and that was a long time ago.
AW: It was a long time ago.
EJ: I can understand that things would take time, I know it was a really massive thing but it just felt to me so much like that the leadership at the time just didn't show that they cared, maybe they did care, but it didn't feel or look like they did care but hopefully that is a thing of the past.
AW: Well it's good to have a song like that because it just shows that there are people out there that do care and they're watching what's happening down there, but I suppose a lot of your problems over there have gone now.
EJ: I hope so.