Workhorse Blues is one of a number of songs on Workhorse that revolves around life choices. I guess when you get to this stage in life you start looking at the paths taken and not taken, sometimes with relief, sometimes with regret.

There were many inspirations behind the lyric. Tom Waits is in there somewhere, but then he usually is... But the person perhaps most on my mind was a bluesman from America who traveled to New Zealand and toured with Midge Marsden in the nineties. His name was“Mississippi” Willie Foster. I'd guess he was in his seventies then.














Actually, that was only his name in New Zealand. We were lucky enough to play support for him a couple of times and I also interviewed him for the local paper. As he pointed out, it's not much use being called “Mississippi” Willie Foster if you're in Mississippi. And Willie hadn't left Mississippi since the '60s. Back there he was called “Little” Willie Foster.

Willie was a sweet and dignified man. New Zealand was a country he didn't really know before Midge met him, and everything seemed like some fever dream, a truly bizarre experience, suddenly being a star in a far-off country and having crowds of mainly young - mainly white - people fete him wherever he went. If you've ever been to Mississippi you'll realise quite how important the word “white” is in that sentence, and how strange it was for Willie.

Willie told me he was born “like a rabbit” between the rows of a cotton field (in 1921). His mother went into labour while picking cotton on the plantation where she sharecropped. He told me about seeing Muddy Waters perform at the Dunleith plantation before the war, and he also remembered a visit by John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. That's the first Sonny Boy, not the more famous Chicago harp player who Willie didn't like at all – reckoned he swore and drank too much...

Willie told me about his own days sharecropping. He'd done that until he signed up for the army and was posted to England during World War 2. Sharecropping was hard. He said to me: “We used to work out in those fields from cin till cain't.”

“Say what?” I asked. That was a new one to me.

“Cin till cain't? That's from when you cin see till when you cain't see” said Willie.

I saved that for 25 years to put in a song.

Mastering? If there's any part of recording that confuses people it's mastering. When I get to boring folk with talk of the new recording, the question I hear most often is “what is mastering?”.

So let me have a quick run at this – and I will keep it brief since it can be the sort of technical thing that makes eyes glaze over pretty quickly. I'll do my best not to make it too boringly nerdy despite my ever-present nerdish tendencies.

Basically mastering is the icing on the cake of a recording, a sort of brush and polish that happens after the recording is mixed. So what does that mean?

In our case, Nigel and I recorded and mixed Workhorse at the Boatshed Studio in Whakamarama and then sent it across town to Tim Julian at The Colourfield in Welcome Bay, who has all sorts of flash specialist equipment for mastering that Nigel doesn't at The Boatshed.


















At its most basic, mastering will do this:

• make all the songs of equal volume
• make that volume as loud as possible (so your songs aren't quieter than other songs on the radio or Spotify etc)
• even up the frequencies (rooting out any harsh tones that have slipped through, adding a little more of anything that's missing)
• make sure that each song has the same frequency balance (the same levels of bottoms/bass, mids, and tops/high frequency

 All these sound like things that could be done while mixing but, as I say, Tim has much more specialised equipment so can do a more detailed job.

The way mastering makes the recording louder is essentially by applying compression. Compression is where you squash down the loudest bits. That means you can then turn the overall volume up without those peaks being too loud and distorting.

There has been much complaint in recent years that to get songs as loud as possible – to stand out better on phones through headphones - too much compression has been used and the music has lost its dynamics (no loud and quiet). We wholeheartedly agree. Consequently we try and compress as little as possible to allow for dynamics. Our albums may be a little quieter than some but we like the sound better.

It is also possible to aim this compression quite specifically so it will affect only certain frequencies or certain places in the mix (e.g. just the left and right of the mix so it doesn't affect the voice in the middle). Tim regularly uses this to “tighten up” the bass sound, getting the low frequencies to be more punchy. He also uses it to add “sparkle” at the top making things like cymbals and tambourines a little more vibrant.

Of course you can really go to town with mastering by adding targeted effects. For instance, if you have a guitar part on the right hand side that is predominantly at a specific frequency, you could target effects – chorus, reverb, whatever – to that particular frequency specifically on the right hand side and essentially change the sound or volume of that instrument alone. So you can do all sorts of clever stuff, depending on how much time and money you have to throw at it....

But we keep it simple. We look to Tim for just the icing on the cake. We've already baked the damn thing at great length and it's just the way we wanted it so Tim just adds that extra 5% of fairy dust. And every bit of magic helps!

Just as an example - here's a minute of I'm Going Fishing - first verse unmastered, second verse mastered. It's quite a difference!

I was inordinately pleased with myself after writing Born To Bad Luck, until Richard O'Brien buggered it up.

The song, as first written, was a crack at one of those classic blues structures, a structure that has one line repeated three times and then a rhyming line at the end. It's one line longer than yer typical 12-bar blues and the first example that pops into my mind is Leadbelly's take on See See Rider. There are hundreds of others.

The blues is like that with structures - there are common ones that crop up over and over. Like many songwriters I have a "bucket list" of styles I'd like to write songs in and this was a good chance to knock that one off!

Since we were planning an album of blues songs - as much as we plan anything - this seemed like a real winner, since it required very few words, which suited me fine. I have always been a sucker for songs with a lot of words but after all these years I know just how much work that takes (or at least takes me). I am a very lazy writer. That made the idea of an "quick" song without a lot of words very appealing... each verse would effectively be only two lines (one repeated three times then the rhyme) – easy!

And, actually, it was. Of course when you're working in such minimalist territory you want to make sure all the lines are good ones but, hey, that's just basic quality control, par for the course.

So not long afterwards I happened to be out at Richard O'Brien's place of an afternoon. Richard is a friend; we often try out new songs on each other.
And of course Richard likes his rhymes. Fair enough too. Without exaggeration I regard him as one of this planet's most agile and imaginative rhymers when it comes to poetry or song. So when he offers opinions I tend to listen.

Long story short, Richard was unimpressed. He pooh-poohed all those repeated lines as being, well, what they were really - laziness. In the nicest possible way of course. And deep down I knew it too but I hoped I could get away with it.

So I asked him to help. After writing it one way the last thing I wanted to do was start again.

“C'mon Richard” I said, “You could whip out a few fun rhymes and clever lines.”

He declined.

I had another crack at it, but I really couldn't think of anything interesting so I asked him again. No dice. So I did what I knew (and he knew) I needed to: knuckled down and spent a couple of weeks actually doing the work. 

And, as he usually is, Richard was right. It's much better now. Nothing lazy or throwaway left - I reckon it's a fine lyric and I'd be happy to take it anywhere.

I sang it originally, in that first version, way back during lockdown in 2020 – here's a verse from that, with the simple lyric, and the same verse, rewritten, from the new recording due to be released on May 14th.

Grant Winterburn? We've known Grant since before the band even got together. He played on the Kokomo Blues album To Be Or What nearly 30 years ago, and I've felt bad about it ever since. Let me tell you why...

Grant was the most amazing keyboard player we knew. Probably still is. When I first started playing solo in the mid-eighties at Tauranga's Saint Amand Hotel Grant, who I think was still at school at the time, played with the band in the upstairs bar, Hit And Run. Along with a guitarist who set fire to his axe, Grant, who regularly threw his keyboard around the stage like his heroes, was the talk of the town.

(Just as an aside, it was John Terry, frontman of that band, who wrote and donated us the song Freight Train – it has been a fan favourite now for 30 years, thanks John!)

Grant was also winning awards at the National Youth Jazz Band Competitions at Tauranga's annual jazz festival and a couple of years later headed down to the music school in Wellington.

It was down there that we recorded To Be Or What (1996) in the famous Studio 2 at Radio New Zealand's headquarters. And since we could bring in musicians of our choice we asked Grant to play on the very first recording of Rainy Night In Taupo.

The only problem was that we hadn't properly thought it through and although what we wanted was for Grant to show off his amazing keyboard chops, we hadn't really arranged the song that way and hadn't really left any space for him to play anything particularly exciting. So Grant played a completely unobtrusive backing part. To this day I don't think anyone has even noticed it!

Thus when it turned out that Grant was living in Tauranga during the Covid crisis we dragged him down the road to The Boatshed studio and set him up to play on two songs slated for the new album, Workhorse...

And this time we were ready. One of the central songs on the album is Something Funny Going On, a funky Covid-flecked groove, and for the recording we played the whole song and added a “false ending” - after the end the entire band started up again and played instrumentally for another couple of minutes.

And that was what we gave Grant. First he played piano on another song then we set him up with his organ and let him loose. I actually had a video camera there to capture the moment for a video. What hadn't occurred to me was that Grant would nail the song in a single take. I hadn't even turned the camera on. He just blazed through it, it was staggering.

Here's the solo. Have a listen...

        










 





Exciting news - a new album is almost ready!
And it seems like a long time ago we started on it. If I didn't hate the word with a vengeance I'd probably call it a journey. If I do that just shoot me now.

But back at the tail end of 2020 when we released the first song - I'm Going Fishing - from an intended acoustic blues album, we really hadn't grasped quite what the scale and length of the pandemic would mean to music-making.

As gigs and proposed tours were successively cancelled we continually postponed: there seemed little point in releasing an album when you couldn't get out and play people the songs. That was partly why we diverted in 2021 and instead released the retrospective collection A Little Something From The Attic.

But now we're back and rolling. The album that started life in October 2020 is finally coming to fruition. We are in the final stages of mixing the final songs. The first release for this year will be the song Born To Bad Luck, due on May 14, followed by the full album timed for a physical release at the Port of Tauranga National Jazz Festival over Matariki weekend at the end of June.

I'm going to write regular blogs about the recording process and more over the next few weeks. In the meantime let me fill you in on some of the basics...

• The album is called Workhorse
• It contains 10 songs, including I'm Going Fishing, Highway 29 Blues and SunDog
• 9 of the songs are mine, one is Nigel's
• It was recorded entirely at The Boatshed Studio, Whakamarama, New Zealand
• Sonia is currently taking a break and doesn't feature on Workhorse
• The only musicians from outside the band are two keyboard players, Alan Norman,  who played accordion throughout, and Grant Winterburn, who contributed  piano and Hammond organ, one song of each
• The cover art is from a painting by Edvard Munch

OK. I'll be back with further updates in a few day's time.