The Karl Straub album I just recorded in Australia is a ways from being completed, but that’s because mastering needs to happen, as well as CD pressing, and a few more songs need to be mixed by Jeff before any of that can begin. I’ll also need to do some research amongst Karl Straub fans and friends to see how many people will want CDs, how many will be happy with a download, etc.
In the meantime— here’s some background information on the project, and a checklist that will serve as a teaser while you wait for the album to surface. Once the album is out, people can use this checklist to enhance the Straubinical experience.
In the past, I’ve done a lousy job of promoting my work, and (following the early Graverobbers days, where I recorded fairly regularly) a lousy job of documenting it as well. I hope this album, packed with 19 songs, will make up for some of that.
In 2001 or thereabouts, I met Australian songwriter and guitarist Jeff Lang. I’d heard about him from the fellows in Last Train Home, and when I met him I was subbing on guitar at an LTH gig. We hit it off right away, following the exchange of a few smartass remarks that afternoon, and me mocking him briefly from the stage later that night. (He’d turned up in a sharp looking outfit, and I told him he looked like Clarence Darrow during the Scopes Monkey Trials. He wasn’t familiar with the reference, although I learned later that he and I are both connoisseurs of idiocy, whether historical or contemporary.)
At some point later, he was in town for a while and I got to know him a little better. I was impressed by him recognizing that I’d been playing guitar in the DC Telecaster tradition, or trying to. This intrigued me, as I was well aware that most of the people I went to high school with in Alexandria knew nothing of this local tradition, while Jeff was an Australian and had obsessively studied Roy Buchanan in his youth. Buchanan’s influence on me was more indirect at first, since I never saw him play, but I had spent many hours soaking up the work of Evan Johns and Danny Gatton. From Evan, I’d learned that rock and roll lead guitar could be squalid, trebly, and lyrical. From Danny, I’d learned that you could mix as many American guitar styles as you wanted in every guitar break.
Conveniently, Jeff was in town at the right time to add some guitar to my tracks on the Americana Motel album. He nailed a bunch of guitar overdubs in one take, and it then took me weeks to work up parts that wouldn’t embarrass me when they sat next to his.
We crossed paths a few more times over the years, and I got to meet his sound person (now wife) Alison Ferrier. Alison immediately became one of my favorite people, a status cemented by her accusing me at an IOTA show of “whingeing like an old woman.”
Incidentally, if you haven’t heard Jeff’s music on his own and with various other fascinating collaborators, there’s plenty of it available. He’s done collaborative projects with late luminaries Chris Wnitley and Bob Brozman, as well as Bobby Singh and other terrific Indian musicians, all of which are excellent. And Alison is a fine writer, singer and guitarist/fiddler too. She has two great albums out, which I highly recommend. I hope I get a chance to work with her at some point.
For years, I’ve wanted to do a proper album with Jeff, and when I found out he had a home studio, I got the crazy idea (planted and nurtured by my wife Lisa) to go to Australia and record an album from scratch. My original plan was to write a bunch of new material for this project, but time passed and I was practicing guitar furiously in order to be ready to track with him without doing my usual 27 takes of everything. Eventually I figured out that I wouldn’t have time to write an album’s worth of new songs. I also noticed that I had a lot of numbers I hadn’t recorded yet. A couple days before my flight, I put a list together and it came to 29 songs.
In Australia, we stopped after we’d cut 19 songs. I looked it up, and Exile on Main Street has 18, and Blonde on Blonde 14, so I figured I could stop at 19.
The working title for the album is “Tsunami of Crumbs,” a phrase Jeff’s and Alison’s daughter Alice used to describe her lunchbox after school one day. I had many other titles kicking around at that point, but this one has bubbled up to the top.
“TSUNAMI OF CRUMBS” WILL CONTAIN THE FOLLOWING:
Fuzz Pedals Used: 5
Fuzz Pedals Used On Two Different Songs: 1
Australian Tube Amps Used: 2
Australian Musicians: 6
Vampires: 1
Seppos Appearing On Album: 1
Songs With Guns In Them: 2
Acoustic Duets With Just Me and Jeff: 2
Solo Tracks With Just Me: 1
Songs Written From A Woman Character’s Point Of View: 5 1/3
Songs Written By Irving Berlin: 1
Songs Written By Karl Straub: 17
Songs Co-written with Peter Fox: 1
Guitar Breaks Where I Used “Sequencing,” A Sophisticated Compositional Device Popular With People Like Beethoven, Mozart, Me, Etc.: 2 (Maybe 3)
Times I’ve Bragged About How Much Sequencing I’ve Used On This Album: 5 (Maybe 6)
Guitar Breaks Inspired By Brian Jones: 1
Songs With The Word “Bastard” In Them: 2
Songs With The Word “Fucking” In Them: 1
References To The “Soul Parking” Album: 1
Songs With Pedal Steel Guitar: 2
Songs With Standup Bass: 1
Songs with Violas and Violin Played By Classical Musician: 1
Songs Where Classical Musican Had To Put His Violin In The Case And Get Out His Fiddle: 1
Tracks Where Jeff And I Both Played Lead Guitar: 10
Tracks Where Jeff And I Both Played Lead Guitar, If Dobro Counts As Lead Guitar: 11
Drum Fills Cribbed From Martin Lynds: 1
Drum Performances That Caused Lisa To Say “That Australian Guy Sounds Just Like Matt Tebo”: 1
Songs Sung By A Murderer: 1
Songs with Deaths In Them: 3
Tracks Where Jeff Banged On A Music Stand And Called It Percussion: 1
Tracks Where Jeff Played “Lamp”: 1
Songs That Made Either Me, Alison, or Jeff Cry During Tracking Or Playback: 4
Songs With Vocals Cut Live With The Accompaniment: 18
Songs Where We Shamelessly Ripped Off The Beatles: 1
Songs Where We Shamelessly Ripped Off 10CC: 2
Guitarists Who Directly Influenced My Playing And Sadly Passed Away During The Sessions: 1
British Rock Guitarists I Stole From Liberally All Over The Album: 5
Belgian Guitarists I Stole From Also: 1
Songs Where We Ripped Off The Velvet Underground A Little Bit: 1
Songs Where I Used The Example Of Richard Thompson To Justify A Superlong Guitar Solo: 1
Songs Where I Was Encouraged To “Play Like Roy Buchanan When He Sat In With Merle Haggard And The Strangers”: 1
Songs That Were First Performed By The Graverobbers: 4
Songs That Were First Performed By the Karl Straub Combo: 7
Songs That Were First Performed By The Light Duty Hammers: 2
Songs Inspired By Woody Guthrie, Lynyrd Skynyrd, AND Reese Witherspoon: 1
Telecasters Used On Album: 0
(Note: This is Somewhat In Contention, As The Electric Guitar I Used All Over The Record Was A Strat Type Body With A Tele Style Bridge Pickup)
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