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CHRIS ECKMAN: You learn a lot when you do covers. This record was a great experience in terms of just learning a lot about different types of music and different artists, some of which we were not familiar with and others that we were. I think a lot of it is really selfish, a way to expand your personal musical horizon. I mean this record took a lot of research actually. This record was really an active going out and finding music. Certainly there is a lot of artists I knew right from the beginning that we would cover on this record, but the concept itself was European songwriters, so we had to do a little bit more investigations.
CHRIS ECKMAN: We’ve spent a lot of time in Europe in the last decade. The Walkabouts have always been, at least in this last period of our existence, more popular in Europe than in America, so we have been spending more time travelling through Europe. And I think in some way it’s a small act of paying back our depths to European audiences for having been so generous to us.
CHRIS ECKMAN: We really have such a small world and with technology it seems like everybody ends up listening to the same things. But it also seems strange given this small world that some music doesn’t travel across borders very easily. There could be artists that are very popular in Italy and nobody in Austria knows who they are. So I thought it would be an interesting thing to see if we could move the musical conversation around a little bit and instead of European bands covering American songs let’s do it the other way round, let’s take an American band and see if we can make any sense out of these European song traditions. CHRIS ECKMAN: Translation is almost a recreation. I mean you can have a literal translation and that’s what we worked with these translators for, but in the end you have to make it into poetry and into melody. You have this others goals you have to accomplish with the translation, not just being able to read it on the page. So it was much harder than I expected it was going to be.
CHRIS ECKMAN: We never want to learn a song too well. I think it’s really the approach to be influenced by the parts of the song that you really find powerful and try to not get too reverend. So we never sat down with these songs and learned them note for note. We’d listen to them a lot and in the end put the originals away and never went back to listen to them. You sort of have this good ghost image of what the song is in your head and that way you’re a little more free to make changes. Because I don’t really think there is much point in doing cover versions if you’re going to do them completely like the original artist.
CHRIS ECKMAN: I think the idea in my head was that there was a specific kind of band that I wanted to have on this record, this seven piece band with an accordion and violin. As I travelled through Europe I acquainted myself more and more with European music, and accordion is one of those common instruments that you hear in Portugal or Slovenia or Belgium or wherever. I mean it’s really one of those one’s that travels across borders.
CHRIS ECKMAN: That’s the goal really. I didn’t want it to be like a sampler record, that just jumps all over the place, there had to be some kind of commonality to the sound. And I guess in the end, of all those things that you have to think of when you make a record, that was probably the hardest thing to do, because you have songs from Slovenia and Portugal and Norway and trying to make this into something that really fits together.
CHRIS ECKMAN: In a way you could think of the journey like a train journey. The way we sequenced it, it starts in Greece and ends in northern Europe and you can almost see it as staring out the window going from one song to the other.
CHRIS ECKMAN: I bought a huge amount of Spanish music over this period of time that we were researching and I really wasn’t finding anything that we could do anything with. There is some wonderful music and I listened to a lot of great flamenco artists and even more modern bands and there just wasn’t anything that was coming, that we could do anything with. And one day in the mail I got this tape from this friend of mine, she lives outside of Madrid, and this Lluis Llach, she had like seven or eight songs on this tape, and immediately, even from the first song, I knew this was the guy that we were looking for all along.
He is a very political songwriter. The song was written in the early seventies when the Franco regime was still in power and the song is actually not written in Spanish, his native text is Catalan, he’s from the Barcelona region. At that point you were not legally allowed to release records in Spain in these alternative Spanish languages, anything besides Spanish. So that’s really what this song is about, it’s about the right of free expression. But also I think the song can read in a much more personal level too. It almost seems it could be about two people too. The way Carla an I did it was us both singing and it almost could be about a relationship with two people, sort of the dilemmas and conflicts that come up in that.
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