Notes on The Mirabel

Falkirk troubadour <b>Adam Stafford</b> lays out the liner notes for his curious new album of covers

Feature by Adam Stafford | 30 Jun 2010

Blue Clouds (Daniel Johnson)
The conception of this covers record began here, really. I'd been asked to play a Johnson Tribute night in Glasgow and was going to cover Blue Clouds – one of my favourite songs of his – but didn't want to just go up there and play it on guitar. I'd been experimenting with looping and layering vocals before – inspired, primarily, by Steve Reich's vocal arrangements on Music For 18 Musicians and Edinburgh's Wounded Knee. It took a while to get right.

Big Mess (Devo)
Big Mess is one of the best pop songs you've never heard. I'd hate to speculate on the interpretation of the lyrics, but I think it's about a redneck Radio Talk Show Host. We stripped the fun/satirical aspect out of it and tried to make it a bit more sinister – the boy's got a gun at the end of the day! Emily Scott asked if her double bass playing was "too country", I said "no, it's perfect". That countrified element was definitely something we wanted to imbue.

Tin Foil (The Handsome Family)
Rennie Sparks is not only one of the best living lyricists but also one of the greatest poetesses of her generation. I would place her words right up there with my two favourite American female writers, Flannery O'Conner and Carson McCullers. The words to Tin Foil, like most of the Handsome Family songs, strike directly at the macabre and mysterious aspects of life while still embodying a deeply dejected wit. Robbie Lesuik (engineer, ex-YiFI) threw down some pedal steel on top of the track that was so good I almost vomited. The Handsome Family is hands down one of my favourite bands ever.

Music in The Mirabel (Georg Trakl)
A friend gave me a collection of Trakl's poetry entitled Trakl: A Profile and it was some of the most deeply haunting stuff I've ever read. Music in the Mirabel is the first poem in the collection and I wanted to split the LP into two sides essentially, like the good old days of records, with a recital of the poem. I had to get a writer/performer – Alan Bissett – to recite in a careful, expressive manner as my speaking voice is mainly dull and monotonous. There's a section in the introduction to the collection explaining when Trakl, returning on leave from the front of WW1, had to pass through a forest to reach his town. Hung from the trees were the shifting bodies of deserters from the front. A deathly reminder to the soldiers that always sends me into a shiver when I think about it.

Nancy Sings (Jandek)
The second half gets slightly apocalyptic, naturally! A lot of people haven't heard of Jandek and probably wouldn't enjoy his output: he's a shadowy character who's released over fifty records of near unlistenable music since 1978. This cover, again, is mostly comprised of vocal loops and Emily Scott's bowed strings. I was in the middle of reading Roberto Balano's waking-nightmare of a novel 2666 when we recorded this, which informed the mood quite a lot.

Invisible Sun (The Police)
I've been out of The Police closet since I was eleven! I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't disagree that Stuart Copeland is one of the best rock drummers of all time. While I'm predominately a fan of their earlier, punkier stuff, Invisible Sun from Ghost In The Machine is probably their darkest track and, I think, relays a deep paranoia about industrialisation, the Cold War and Terrorism – pointing towards a potentially futureless future, essentially the times we are living in now. For me, serious songwriting is a process of elimination, so when I rearranged the track I ripped-out all of the choruses that divide the verses up and left them to the end. Louise Hendry is known more for her rawkess rock moves in The Elements, but I knew her back when she sang folk and her double-tracked vocal is beautiful on the song.

Walking For Two Hours (The Twilight Sad)
I can't say anything else other than I wish I'd written this song. I don't know what the lyrics mean but I understand the sentiment and emotion, I think that's why so many people connect with The Twilight Sad. The girl at the end of the track is my girlfriend, aged five, singing a goodnight message to her parents. Out of all the things in my oeuvre, this is one of my favourites.

Music in the Mirabel by Adam Stafford and the Death Bridge Convention is available for free download on 24 Jul.

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