CREATIVE CONNECTIONS
Grammy-nominated Tim Eriksen’s songs of the past breathe with our times
By Bliss 12/31/2009
When Tim Eriksen sings “I Wish the Wars Were All Over” on his recent CD “Northern Roots: Live in Námest,” it can naturally be taken as commentary on the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the haunting song’s origins lie in the Civil War.
Eriksen learned the tune from a cassette tape of field recordings made by renowned folklorists Anne and Frank Warner, and recorded it for his excellent 2004 album “Every Sound Below” as “The Cumberland and the Merrimac.” It’s a prime example of Eriksen’s gift for retrieving songs from eras past and rendering them not as stylistically outdated museum pieces but as relevant, sensitively interpreted songs that breathe with contemporary times.
“I’ve always thought a lot about the music I was doing,” Eriksen says. “I’m very interested in the history [and] some of the ideas and the ways in which people use it, things that it means to them.”
He is also fascinated by connection and context. His career can be viewed as a journey making connections between dissimilar sounds, styles and art forms.
Although he’s regarded as a preeminent Americana ballad singer, Eriksen says he mostly listens to punk and metal. (He also cites Somali kavan, or oud, music as a big influence on his bajo sexto playing and recent songwriting.) He started out in western Massachussetts’ late 1980s punk scene, and first came to national prominence as frontman of critically acclaimed trio Cordelia’s Dad, which carved a niche for itself with a repertoire consisting almost entirely of traditional folk tunes they transformed into punk rave-ups. Many a punk-rocker has been drawn to gritty old folk and country, but few have attained Eriksen’s depth of knowledge of the music or his respect in the field. Fewer still turn their creative interest into an academic career. Eriksen has taught American music, “global sounds” and songwriting classes at Amherst and Dartmouth Colleges, the University of Minnesota and Wesleyan University, and is currently studying for his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology.
“I’m often in the company of people who have a lot more experience than I do reading French critical theory and a lot less experience playing,” he acknowledges with a laugh. “Hopefully, in the best experiences, it just means we have more to teach each other.” Students presumably benefit from his status as a working musician with a number of high-profile collaborations to his credit. Highlights of his resumé include recording an album with Macedonian Gypsy ensemble Zabe I Babe; teaching shape-note singing to actors and contributing significantly to the music for the 2003 film “Cold Mountain”; playing and singing on Afro-Cubano instrumentalist Omar Sosa’s Grammy-nominated CD, “Across the Divide”; and singing for the recording of Evan Chambers’ “The Old Burying Ground.” Eriksen’s enthusiasm is palpable when discussing the latter project, a “Copland meets Stravinsky” symphonic song cycle inspired by New England gravestone texts that’s due to be released on the Dorian label this year.
“The tunes he wrote are so great,” he declares. “They really catch that flavor of the old unaccompanied songs. There are some very intense ones.
He’s currently promoting his live CD and has already recorded another album of unaccompanied solo singing. Eriksen’s powerful vocals bear a resonant similarity to those of mountain music titan Ralph Stanley. Interestingly, when he’s singing traditional Appalachian ballads and hymns you can also occasionally detect overtones of South Indian classical music — the only music he’s ever studied formally.
The sly, intelligent humor that invigorates his blog posts has long been a hallmark of his live shows. He still plays concert halls and clubs but says he wants to start staging performances in nontraditional venues like parks and parking lots. He’s posted numerous videos online in which he sings, either a cappella or with simple acoustic accompaniment, in natural surroundings. One presents him in a glittering forest after an ice storm; the sound of crackling ice sets an eerie mood as it accents his unadorned vocals.
“Those are the things that make me want to sing,” he explains. “I’d been looking for the ideal recording situation and the ideal recording studio and the ideal microphones and all that kind of stuff, and at some point I realized that what I actually miss is context. The whole idea of a studio is to get rid of context so that you have complete control over the sound, and I’m not interested in having complete control over the sound. I’m interested in responding to the social and natural environment, whether it’s an ice storm or some group of friends getting together. I like all kinds of sounds and contexts. … The stuff that I can’t control is way more interesting.”
Tim Eriksen performs at Coffee Gallery Backstage, 2029 N. Lake Ave., Altadena, 8 p.m. Monday; $18. Info/reservations: (626) 398-7917. timeriksenmusic.com, coffeegallery.com.
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