¶ Intro / Opening
🎵 Music
¶ Richard Thompson: Career And New Album
Hi there, and thanks for joining us. This is the Soda Jacker on Songwriting Podcast. I'm Simon, here as always with Brian, and our guest for episode 268. is a toweringly talented singer, songwriter and guitar player, still going strong well into his sixth decade of making music.
A pivotal figure in the British folk rock movement, he was a founder member of Fairport Convention, then won half of a celebrated duo with his former wife Linda Thompson, before embarking on a long and illustrious solo career which shows no signs of abating.
His songs have been covered by the diverse likes of REM, David Byrne, Slacer Kinney, Bonnie Raith, Tom Jones, Los Lobos, and Elvis Costello, to name a few, and as this episode drops with a satisfying thud on your virtual doormat, He recently released his twentieth studio album, Ship to Shore, recorded in less than a fortnight in Woodstock, New York. We are thrilled to welcome the great Richard Thompson to the show.
Richard was born in 1949 in Notting Hill, West London. He was obsessed with the guitar from a very young age and picked it up properly around the age of 10 after years of being presented with unplayable toy wands by his parents. He caught the rock and roll bug via his elder sister Perry and her buddy Holly, Elvis, Jean Vincent and Chuck Berry records, while also discovering jazz artists such as Django Reinhardt and traditional Scottish musicians like Jimmy Shand among his father's collection.
He formed his first band, Emile and the Detectives, in secondary school. By the way, that group also featured a young Hugh Stranglers Cornwell on bass. Along with fellow guitarist Simon Nicol and bassist Ashley Hutchins, Richard co-founded Fairport Convention in 1967. Initially a covers band performing material by the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Oakes, and a then relatively unknown Joni Mitchell, their sound was a unique and compelling blend of rock and traditional folk elements.
They were swiftly discovered by American producer Joe Boyd, signed to Polydor and released their eponymous debut LP in 1968. It was around this time that Richard began to focus more on his own songwriting, the first fruits of which can be heard on 1969's seminal Unhalf Pricking. After four highly eventful years, vividly recounted in his excellent recent memoir Bees Wing, our guest departed the Fairport Fold in early nineteen seventy one.
His solo career began promisingly with nineteen seventy two's Henry the Human Fly, but was promptly sidelined as Richard formed a dynamic musical partnership with his new wife Linda that would last for the next decade. It commenced with 1974's I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, which has since attained cast iron classic status and culminated in 1982's similarly revered Shoot Out the Lights, following which the couple separated.
Prolific is not the word to describe Richard's output since then. It comprises dozens of excellent studio albums, live recordings, film soundtracks, including the score for Werner Herzog's acclaimed 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, sundry guest appearances, To even attempt to list all of these credits would be a fool's errand, so let's just say you could never accuse our Richard of slacking.
Certainly not. Music very much runs in the Thompson family, incidentally. Two of Richard's children from his marriage to Linda Thompson, Camilla and Teddy, are also accomplished singer songwriters. In fact, Teddy appeared on this pod back in twenty sixteen, didn't he?
He did, and his mum was on a few years before that. Anyway, if you're listening to this podcast for the first time, make sure you follow us on your favoured provider so you don't miss any future episodes, and take a moment or two to browse our back catalogue of over 260 interviews with fine songwriters like Richard.
Should you wish to contribute towards the running costs of this fully independent ad and sponsor-free show, give whatever you can spare at Sodajaker.com/slash donate.
Before we continue, our thanks to Claire for her help setting this up.
Okay, we hope you enjoyed the video.
🎵 Music
¶ Recording And Creative Decisions
Great to meet you, great to talk to you about your rising, we're thrilled to have you on.
Oh thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Whereabouts are you? Yeah, you're in different places.
We are, yeah. We're both from Liverpool originally, but I'm in Birmingham and Brian's back in Liverpool.
I noticed a a faint accent there. Look all those guitars you've got there, Corrig.
Oh yeah, that's um something you'd appreciate.
I would.
Well, you've done a typically great job on the new record, we thought, shipped ashore.
Well thank you. That's very kind.
It sounds like it was another fast moving production, basically recorded in a kind of a live configuration.
Yeah, pretty much. As I've done really the last, you know, twenty five records basically. Most stuff's live, a lot of live vocals as well. I think we started out with uh drums in a booth and and everything kind of separated away. And I just thought, well let's just go for it, you know, put everything in the room. And if we make a mistake we just do it again like the old days, you know. Remember those days?
Yeah, well that must have been a great groundin' for ya back then, you know.
It was just different. It's a different way of thinking. When I'm at home doing muscle at home demos or acoustic stuff, I mean I like the fact that you can do ninety five tracks if you want to. all that sort of pro toolsy stuff, you know. But there was something about having certainly eight track. You know, four track was quite restrictive, but they managed to do Sgt. Pepper on it. So
Yeah.
Couldn't have been that bad. Um but you know, something like A Treky you had to make some decisions. You know, you had to really think about what you were doing and You couldn't do like, you know, four vocal tracks and edit those down. You know, the stuff was a lot harder. But um it was front-end decisions rather than back-end decisions. These days you leave everything to the mix and that means mixing can take longer than you think.
I used to enjoy doing live mixes as well, where you'd have the engineer and and possibly the band all grouped around the mixing desk and y you were assigned a fader or two faders, you know. Okay, you ship up the guitar solo and then bring it back again. Here's your mark with the trinograph pencil and um and so no mix was the same as another one. Yeah, they're all a little bit different. And that was quite exciting.
I think these days you can make it perfect and as we know, perfection isn't always exciting.
True. Well we thought Freeze was a hell of an opener. Not the cheeriest start, but
Yeah.
But we're actually big fans of songs that that have a kind of um, you know, upbeat sort of propulsive quality with a dark underbell. You know, that one's very bracing kind of sea shanty, isn't it?
Mm, bracing, like uh Skegness.
Yeah, exactly.
From a musical skegness. Yes, I like that. Yeah, I know what you mean. Um, you could call that a device almost, you know, that's something that you uh deliberately set out to do that you uh you have a kind of upbeat sounding song that has a darker lyric. And I suppose the idea is that people start tapping their feet and thinking, oh this is jolly and then somehow before they've noticed it, you slipped in all this kind of dark stuff.
And then they're committed, you know, they kinda have to listen because th they've already come on board. So that's a way of seducing your audience, I suppose. I grew up with traditional music where there's a lot of Mörders. Mining disasters. So for me it's kind of normal.
Yeah, I suppose our generation's probably a little bit softer in that respect. So we get a line like a friendly breeze there might push you, make up your troubled mind for you. And for us that's oh that's quite dark, isn't it? You know, but I suppose from your perspective that's a bit more of a typical thing.
Well I you know, I don't see it as a sort of suicidal song. I I would hesitate to write a suicidal song because uh it's a complex thing, but um as a song about indecision, really. You know, you're better off to plow ahead and get it wrong. And then you learn for next time, you know. Mm. I'd be good as the manager of, you know, Unilever or something, you know, so some big
multi-corporation because I I really I'm very happy to make decisions, right or wrong. I like to just go for it. I'm also very good at things like um, you know, industrial process, you know, like production line, streamlining production lines. I've missed my vocation and somehow I have to fall back on music as a sort of second career. But um there you go.
Do you think you've incorporated that into your musical process though? Do you think of it as an industrial process that you can kind of optimize?
Uh, no.
Right. Some might say, you know, the output feels almost like someone has optimised that process.
Well, yeah, creativity is just this other thing, you know. You you can try and be efficient about that. You can have your regular hours that you work and stuff like that, which I do sometimes. And that works really well. And I suppose creatively I'm more efficient than I used to be. Back in the sixties, I was uh
a bit more all over the place. You know, drugs, drink, all that sort of stuff can impair your efficiency and reduce your output somewhat. So um in that sense I have a more streamlined process these days, if you want to put it that way. So well I say no, but actually yes.
But uh I don't want you to think of me as this uh sort of you know Swiss songwriter, you know. You time your creative day to the second, you know. Oops, ten o'clock, sorry, have to knock off now, that's it, you know, on onto the next thing.
See you couldn't have been one of those brill building type guys who turned up at nine AM to a windowless room.
I made a lot of money.
Mm-hmm.
I don't know. I don't think I'm a very good collaborator. Necessarily. Or if I am I can't do it right there with another person, I have to go away and think about it. So if someone says, Can you write some lyrics for this song, I I'll sort of sit there for half an hour and and then say I'm sorry, I have to go away and do it. So I'm not a great collaborator. When I force myself to do it, the results are usually good, but um I'd always rather be in my own space.
¶ Melody, Tunings, And Traditional Forms
🎵 Music
On Freeze, that instrumental hook that opens the song and contains the melody, did that sort of lead you to the tune or was it kind of the other way round?
I think I started off with a tune. I think I was walking down the street as one does, um, humming to myself. And then I thought, well, that's interesting. Then I'd go home and and put it on the guitar and figure out if I can play it at the same time as playing the rhythm, you know, dun di dada, dun di dada on the acoustic guitar. And um I can just about do that. And so I think, well, that's good.
And it's one of those songs where you play unison with the vocal. Mm-hmm. I suppose it's a kind of British traditional thing. But you hear it in the blues as well, you know, and other cultures. A lot of cultures that don't use harmony that much. They just use a like a drone and a melody for accompaniment. I like that sort of thing. Got a mandolin playing the line as well in unison with the vocal. And for me that's a good day's work. I enjoy that.
Yeah, it's a very memorable melody that I think after one listen that was um yeah that was lodged in my brain.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's it's uh a bit twisted, bit jazzy almost as a melody. The rhythm's kind of British jig. Maybe a bit of African in there as well. It doesn't sound quite pure British to me. And I don't know why that is. These things just happen sometimes. And we just say thank you. Yeah.
Yeah.
I love those uh crunchy chords towards the end as well, just kinda a hint of dissonance in there, you know, it really drives home the the mood of the song.
There's a couple of places in the vocal melody where you have a flat fifth in the scale and uh in the crunchy chords as you put it. Um yes, there's flat fifth there and then there's a kind of uh like a minor second chord. Um is this too technical? It certainly sounds technical to me. No.
We love it.
Yeah, so hints of dissonance here and there, which is fine, that's good. That all makes me happy personally.
Any of those songs used in alternate tunings on the new album?
I tend to use alternate tunings less on the electric guitar than I do on the acoustic. I think it's just a drop D, which um I suppose you call that alternate, but that's been in the uh classical guitar repertoire for at least two hundred years, so
Is it a bit of a challenge these days to remember the tunings for certain songs going back'cause the size of the catalogue now, you must have to have that stuff written down somewhere I would think.
Yeah, where it gets confusing is where I've done it in different tunings. Like maybe I used to do it in Dagget and then now I don't do it in Dadget or or now I do it in sort of C modal. Then I start to get mixed up. But usually um You know, you say the title of a song and you think, Okay, I remember that one. It's more a matter of, um, did I use a capo for it? And if I did, which fret did I put it on? Those are more the kind of dilemmas I I come up with on a daily basis.
And I guess it'd be easy to assume you're using the guitar as your main writing tool, but we've heard that you do actually try to stay away from instruments in the writing whenever you can.
I do. Um the guitar's a wonderful thing, but your fingers will by themselves go into patterns you know. And you can break that up with different tuning sometimes, or you can go to another instrument, you know, like I can write on a mandel, I can write on a keyboard.
and then put it back to the guitar and it comes out in a different shape. But sometimes I think it's quite nice to stay away from an instrument and and just keep it in your head. It's not the Stravinsky trick, you know, Stravinsky used to kind of be at the keyboard but not actually touch it.
Yeah.
When stuff's in your head, it's freer somehow, it's looser. But at at some point you have to drag it down into this reality. It's almost like the creative world is this other thing, but at some point it has to become corporeal. It has to have a kind of a body to it.
And so reluctantly you drag it into existence. And as you do that, you impose limits on it. It's always a sad moment, actually, in some ways. Um, because that thing where it's just swimming around, it's kind of beautifully, you know, amoebic and can kind of go anywhere.
But uh you have to drag it into reality, you have to put chords to it and then, you know, give it a backbeat. And these are all things that kind of reduce the potential of the song. But you have to do it. I mean, that has to happen. And then um you can be quite happy with the result, you know. But um
🎵 Music
end up ironing out the wrinkles sometimes when you have to fix it to a chord sequence like in my head it was better than it is now. On the guitar it seems to just be G C and D or something like that.
Well I think absolutely. One of the things I suppose I admire about uh someone like Martin Carthy or David Graham even was um that they didn't want to do the thing where you bring a traditional song into the European three chord tradition, if you what you want to call it, you know, the one four five tradition. Which you could say it happened to Scottish music, you know, Scottish music got kind of um salonized. That's a good word. Salonized. Um
probably in the eighteen hundreds, you know, uh people would kind of fit Western chords to it and make it sound more like Mozart or something. And I think one of the ways that Martin resisted doing that was to use alternative tunings. They don't nail the key down so much. So you can say, Oh, is it in G or is it actually in C or is it actually in F? You know, it's ambiguous. That's a better approach to a traditional song.
Probably approach that we didn't do enough in Fairport. I think in Fairport we tended to uh nail the chords down pretty quickly. But that was our own kind of way of um fusing contemporary with traditional.
¶ Lyrical Craft: Titles, Depth, And Atmosphere
I wanted to ask about um titles. You know, you've had lots of great ones over the years on this album, Turnstyle Casanova, is a particular favourite. I love the juctaposition of Casanova with such a unromantic word like turnstyle, something intrinsically hilarious to me about that. Do you maintain lists of good titles and you know, do you ever use them as prompts to actually write?
I do. I think turnstiles are very romantic work.
Ha ha ha.
Well, you know, it was a line in the song I and I was thinking, um, do I just call it after whatever the choruses, which sounds a lot like some other songs, or do I go for something a bit more um Strange. And I thought, well, I'll call it that'cause it's a bit more eye-catching and a bit more weird. I like titles. Um titles are one of my favorite things. And they can be inspiring. Absolutely. So sometimes I just write a list of titles.
just to see what happens. And if I write a list of thirty titles, sometimes two of those will actually turn into songs, you know. I think I wrote the whole of the Bright Lights album as titles.
哇
Yeah. Um when I was mixing the previous record, Henry the Human Fly, you know, John Woods kind of working and I I'm just sitting there in a more abstracted way and I just thought I'd just write some titles down. And um I think all of those, or most of'em anyway, uh turned out to be songs on the Bright Lights album. Life is strange that way. So the answer is yes. I like titles very much.
Gosh, that's amazing. So you had that list in your pocket and you kind of then manifested the songs based on that list. Wow.
But um it's all just, you know, tapping into the subconscious or whatever. Yeah, I'm writing a list while I'm really doing something else. I'm listening to whatever the mix is and I'm just, you know. abstractedly writing stuff down without giving it too much attention. And I've written songs like that where, you know, I'm trying to write one song, like some epic, you know, sort of um
It's gonna be like the single songwriter version of Beowulf or something. And um it's not going very well, but I've determined to finish it. Uh meanwhile I'm jotting things down in in the margin, you know. Oh that's a good idea, blah blah blah blah blah.
And um the big song never gets finished. It's just a complete overblown waste of time. But um I've written these other songs while I was thinking about it. Other stuff creeps in because I was in the right mental state to bypass my consciousness and just uh appear. And some other strange um form.
Yeah. It's almost like you're sort of playing the same trick on yourself that Hitchcock would play on audiences with the with the MacGuffin in his films, you know. Oh, this film is about this, but then, you know, a third of the way through it becomes about something else entirely and that original premise actually has no importance. Yeah. I guess Psycho's the classic example.
Yeah, it's brilliant. Brilliant film. Yeah, in a three minute song we're a bit more limited to what we can achieve. We can't quite do a a whole psycho.
🎵 Music
really appreciated the depth that you put into your lyrics, you know, whether it's more like a personal reflection or characters in sort of imagined places and things like that. How do you typically proceed with developing the words for the songs? Do you find that they emerge as you're kind of putting chords together or is it a separate standalone thing?
I think there's all different ways to approach a song. Uh there are songs where you start maybe music first and there's songs where you maybe start lyric first. And um it's a nice song that maybe starts with both at once. Maybe you get some lyrical hook. that suggests a melody almost immediately. Half the work of a song is just contained in that little bit. But I don't have to limit the beginnings of a song. I think it can come from anywhere and um
I think you should just be open, as open as possible. I think something I learned at school was, you know, uh look at this poem. It has a kind of a surface to it and it has a depth to it as well. You know, the surface is easy to comprehend and it's easy to absorb.
But then once you've absorbed the surface, um, these other things start to hit you and it's deeper than you think, you know. Um we were studying Shelley, Oh to the West Wind and it's all about the colours of the leaves, you know, and you think, Oh that's nice, you know, I sort of tunnel images. But it's about, you know, the races of humanity, the different colours of human beings. And it's about revolution and it's about all this other stuff. You know, you think, Well, that's amazing.
So some critics at the time, we're talking back in the sixties, um, didn't actually get that about Shelley. They didn't understand that he was being political when they thought he was just being, you know, bucolic and romantic. He was actually uh sticking the knife in as well.
So you know, as a songwriter, I think you can absolutely have a surface and then suggest some other things underneath. You know, someone like Leonard Cohen who was uh actually a very good poet at the same time. Um, in his songwriting he would be Certainly superficially simple. But there was always something else going on underneath. And um I think something like The Songs of Leonard Cohen is a good place to learn, you know, about songwriting. Yeah.
We love little details in songs as well, like on Maybe on the new album where you refer to Jimmy Choo's shoes and her lily grey sweater or how she keeps you guessing like Monroe and Grable. You know, it doesn't take much to sort of paint a portrait or conjure an image in the listener's mind, does it?
I think the details are important. They're important in any kind of writing, certainly in prose, in poetry. You have to get to the detail. But yeah, Betty Grable, I mean Crikey, you know, Rides with Table. Obviously getting desperate at that point. Um And I'm wondering, you know, even among, you know, my generation of listeners, who even remembers Betty Grable, you know?
Yeah. There's a great uh Neil Sadaka song called Betty Grable, actually. I recommend that one.
I like Nosodaka. Yeah, he's great. Speaking of the brew building, he was one of those.
Yeah.
So, uh, I forget what I was going to say. It's probably brilliant.
Ha ha ha.
But detail, yes, absolutely.
There's a definite marriage though, isn't there, between those details and the musical setting for the song as well. Like something like uh Life's a Bloody Show or We Roll. There seems to be kind of almost stylistic influences in those I think. Yeah, well conjured a particular time and place.
Well I think conjure up is the right way to look at it. You know, it's to create an atmosphere for a song. Every song requires an atmosphere of some sort, requires the right setting. You know, a song I don't particularly care for, but it has a brilliant atmosphere, you know, like Riders on the Storm by the Doors where you've got this Sound of rain on your stereo, you know, think, oh my goodness. I must clean the stylus, but I think no, no, actually it's rain. This is really evocative.
Obviously there's endless pieces of music that conjure things up, be it Ravel or Duke Ellington or whatever, you know, or the doors. On this album, you know, the Life's a Bloody Show, uh there's a There's a kind of a sadness and a world weariness about it, but it's really the persona is this you know kind of nasty human being, you know, not a nice human being.
who's incredibly selfish and doesn't really care about other people. And there's a bit of um Berlin in the thirties w about the setting as well, besides being, I hope, contemporary. What was the other song you mentioned?
We rose.
Oh we roll. Yeah, yeah. I mean I again it's um I mean it sounds a a bit valedictory almost, but it's really more about You know, the musician's cycle where you tour and then you get tired and you you get off the road for a month or two and but y then you just want to get back on it again. It's as old as the Troubadon, probably older than that, in fact.
You know, it's a process. Uh y used to be y you go from castle to castle, you know, and uh you go in the tradesman's entrance and uh and entertain for a while and then you move on to the next one and and then the next year y you go around the same circuit, you know. And I think we're a bit like that, you know, as travelling musicians. But we like to bring joy to people, you know, we like to entertain people.
And you put up with cancel flights and uh roads closed through snowstorms and all that kinds of stuff just because you love to get in front of people and do that thing where you sing something from your heart.
¶ Writing Environments And Performance Cycles
And you hope it reaches other people's hearts. Yeah. And everything about travelling, uh about, you know, time spent, time wasted sometimes, just to get to that situation where you're there and I in a club or a concert hall or whatever and you
🎵 Music
able to write much when you're on the road'cause I mean, some people don't find that very conducive to their um creative process, but others find that that sort of constant motion helps create ideas.
Yeah, I think i it can unlock ideas. So I I kind of jot on the road, you know, I jot stuff down. And I'm not sure I get much finished on the road. I think it can be a lot to remember the repertoire, you know, change the repertoire from night to night sometimes. You know, that's all fairly brain consuming. I just get more finished when I'm at home.
Is the ideal writing set up for you a particular place at home? Do you have like a a space that you're sort of superstitious about almost?
I find that if I have a place like that, I can't bring myself to actually go there.
Yeah.
Agatha Christie in the kitchen, you know, with a typewriter on the kitchen table. I mean that's more what I do really. Um so I'd like to have several places to go to. I I like to move it around because I think it's different energy in different places and you pick up different things in different places.
You wanna be um in somewhat like a cafe where you're alone in company, if you like. Mm-hmm. You know, you're surrounded by humanity but you don't know anybody, so you're just sitting there quietly. with your cappuccino going cold and um your notebook. You know, I I can write some really miserable songs set in a kind of a bleak landscape, um lying on a beach in Mexico. Um it's strange how that happens.
So the songs are not necessarily informed by the experience you're having in that moment?
No, I think you tend to set the songs in a kind of a landscape that maybe you drag around with you. And I think with me it tends to be um what do I visualize? Yeah, but kind of British weather, it's kind of grey and and it might be the nineteen sixties even. I often go back to that, really.
Oh that's interesting. Whenever I dream I tend to be in the house I grew up in. Mm-hmm. Which is really weird. Like I'm almost never where I am now.
Oh interesting. Yeah.
I'm always trying to solve some problem, but in the old place.
Yeah. Interesting. Interesting.
So is live performance a good way for you to develop songs? You know, will you sort of road test songs in the same way like a comedian might road test material? Mm.
Mm. Yeah, sometimes I think that works really well. I think everything got written like at least a a year and a half ago in a fairly short space of time. And uh one, two, three, maybe four of'em have been on the road for at least a year, basically since COVID. And that does tighten things up and in some cases you think, well, you know, that's got first too many or something, or uh could be a little bit faster, could be a little bit slower. That's an interesting thing actually. I think live
you can kind of establish the tempo of something. Whereas in the studio, often you can get the tempo wrong. You can be too slow, too fast. So it's good for that. In contrast, it's nice to throw things at the musicians in the studio so that they're reacting for the first time. So you just say, Okay, play this, one, two, three, go.
And sometimes that's got a freshness to it that you can't get any other way. Um so what's my ideal? My ideal might be to rotest half of it and then just um Throw stuff at them in the studio for the other half.
And do you find that you sort of reevaluate the old songs through that process of performance as well?'Cause I guess you have to kind of re embody them every night and if they were written a long, long time ago.
Yeah, it's strange. I mean recently in the repertoire I've I've had um uh Genesis Hall, a solo repertoire where I'm just playing, you know, solo. My wife sings with me now sometimes. And it's a song I wrote in nineteen sixty nine. Yeah, that's like fifty five years old, my god. But I think it's a good song. So I'm happy to sing it. And I know that longtime fans
who might have been on board since the sixties. So I appreciate that. It is a kind of a reinvention every night, almost like a reminder of who I am every night, or my arc of existence, if you like. You know, there's things from all periods. of my so-called career. And that's weird. I mean, it's strange actually. It's a strange process. No, if you're a filmmaker, like you make a film and and that's now and you you've done it, then you move on to the next one.
If you're a painter, you know, you paint a picture and you might never see it again if you sell it. Might be got into a private collection. That's it, you know. If you take a photograph of it, maybe you can remind yourself what it was like. If you're a singer songwriter, you know, you're referring back a lot of the time to the whole arc of your career. And
🎵 Music
¶ Performing Old Hits And British Mythology
Are there certain songs where you just can't find a way back into them to perform them?
Absolutely, yeah. And those are ones that don't get performed. And sometimes there'll be uh a song in the repertoire that I'll just think, well, I played this too much, I'm gonna give it a rest for a while. And some songs are very popular and even if they're not in the repertoire, people might shout out for them for an encore. So I have to do them. So some like Vincent Black Lightning or uh Bees Wing, oh these are popular songs.
And um I have to respect the audience anyway and play those. But um at some point Vincent is interesting because I can see it differently every night. It's a little movie that runs around in my head and I can kind of see the characters differently from each performance. So for me it comes out differently and I don't get that tired of it, really. So um I still play.
Yeah. And is that a song that was sort of you had just the idea of that motorbike first and then you just sort of developed the story around that object essentially?
Yeah, that was it. Yeah. I think Americans have it easy in the sense that they've got access to a lot of romantic mythology to draw on in their songwriting. And it's been that way since I think Stephen Foster. I mean, it goes back a long way, hundred and fifty years. Um, it's been that way. And all that stuff also got exported to Britain.
So we've been importing uh romantic uh song settings for a long time. You know, all the minstrel stuff. It's become, you know, lingua franca for UK singers, you know. And so I I thought, well, what can I do? You know, I live in Britain, I want to express British ideas and sometimes I've taken place names or something from a traditional song because it's already established, you know, there's a kind of a romantic history to it.
If you're not using Cadillacs and Rocky eighty eights and all you know, it's a whole car mythology in America that makes songwriting easy. You know, you just mention the name of a car and you've got half a song title right there, speaking of type.
Tennessee, that's half a song right there. You know, Texas, my god, that's two thirds of a song. Um you know, Scunthorpe, hello. I don't think so. So You know, some of those place names that you have to be careful and have to select ones that I feel that there's a resonance and a and a kind of romantic um tradition associated with them. And I thought the Vincent was enough of a mythological object. Certainly when I was a kid, you know, that was the bike. One of my neighbours had a black shadow.
When I was growing up. And we just thought that was the most beautiful thing we'd ever seen, you know. So um I was really choosing the visit as something that you do revolve a story around. That's the central object and the characters just kind of built around the
🎵 Music
¶ Musical Influences And Finding Your Voice
As someone who's been so associated with folk music since the sixties, do you ever feel kind of obliged to make use of aspects of that tradition in your writing? You know, whether it's a particular type of story or a particular type of Finger picking or those kind of things?
I don't feel obliged, no. Uh I think it's absorbed. I think it's just in there. And I suppose that as musicians we are the sum of our influences. or what we choose as our influences. I wouldn't even say these days that you absorb everything. There's so much music, there's access to so much music that we tend to pick and choose what we want to be influenced by.
what you actually tune into becomes part of your own vocabulary. And I think it's good to have that as a base, you know, as a kind of a a fundamental place that feels solid to you. you know, this is what I come from. But for me it's a mixture of, you know, Scottish, Irish, English traditional music plus
you know, Les Paul, you know, plus Django Reinhardt, you know, plus uh Jim Vincent, you know. And what comes out of me is a mixture of of these things, you know, gosh, you know, B Debussi in there as well. That's nice, yeah, we'll shove that in. And hopefully it's what makes someone unique as a songwriter. And makes them different from other people. We have a music camp every summer. It's like a a guitar and songwriting camp. And I I I did a little exercise one year where I said, Okay, um
You have a child and you're going to send this child to an island um for their upbringing and they're only allowed three influences, musically speaking. That's all they're going to hear in their formative years. What are those three influences going to be? You choose. to create someone who who's unique. So you're gonna have uh, you know, mothers of invention.
And Beethoven and Big Spider Beck or something. So you choose what three and and we'll give a prize to the most interesting three. And I forget what one. But uh that's the idea. It it's quite fun to do it yourself as well. I think, well, you know, to make someone unique. Shostakovich and uh Coldplay.
Yeah.
You know, you think, well, what would that actually sound like if you just had these very narrow influences? And would you be able to tell what those influences were? Would it be distinct enough? But um You know, everybody comes out a little bit different. Everybody listens to different stuff and they're influenced by different stuff. And um once you've got past your influences, well once you've left them behind and you have your own voice
It is gonna be fairly unique, I would hope, unless you become a a slave to something very generic. I suppose actually a lot of people do become slaves to that which is generic.
And did you always want to write your own songs? I mean, I know at Fairport there was a point where you thought, right, we have to start doing our own material but Were you already kind of writing on and off before that from the moment you kind of picked up the guitar, or was it just right, I'm going to start writing songs now?
I think I tried to write songs when I was at school, probably about fifteen, sixteen, but I didn't quite get it. I didn't quite figure out how you do it. And I didn't persevere that much. And it wasn't until Fairport that everybody else seemed to be writing songs. So we thought, well, we should write songs too. So I didn't have confidence to do it myself. So I I collaborated for certainly the first half dozen songs. And then I thought, well, wouldn't it be nice to do one myself?
I think that was me on the ledge, actually. Uh So how old was I then?
Yeah.
Ha ha ha.
Yes, so whatever that song is, you know, that's just a summation of whatever I'd been listening to up to that point. But um Yeah, I I think we had to come out from the shadow of being a cover span in any sense of the word. I I think well we were an interesting cover span because we were doing Singer songwriter covers. So we were doing Leonard Cohen and Richard Farinha and Johnny Mitchell and Bob Dylan songs. But obviously to um have an audience respect.
Thank you.
The Beatles changed the landscape. 'Cause the Beatles did everything, you know, they could sing great, they could play great and they wrote great songs. And so suddenly it wasn't enough to be the Rolling Stones anymore, to just be doing R and B covers. And the kings had to catch up, you know, all these people had to start writing their own material.
And it's kind of been that way ever since. You know, Oasis write their own material. Even people who don't really write people like Madonna, I don't think of it as real songwriters, but they co write a lot of stuff. Yeah, Beyonce co writes a lot of stuff. Uh Taylor Swift, I think, does some co writes as well. You have to be seen to have your voice as a songwriter.
to have authenticity with with the audience. The audience won't settle for it any less. They want to hear your voice. They want to hear what you're saying. So you can't just sing, you know, Strangers in the Night anymore, you know. Yet you have to uh present your view. You know, you too wouldn't have gotten anywhere as a covers band, you know. Also I think that the quality of songwriting's gone down.
When the songwriters did the songwriting and the performance of the performing, uh it was a much higher standard of of songs that everybody would do. Everybody would do the standards. And it was down to your interpretation. But people would accept the fact that you could have a whole album of standards that were well known that other people had covered. And that was just fine. But then um, you know, as I said, you know, the the Beatles really changed the landscape.
And I guess that led to a a sort of a drive for authenticity from other artists who didn't necessarily have those songwriting chops.
Exactly. So you had people who weren't good songwriters writing songs and uh there's a lot of stuff that wasn't very good.
¶ Broad Artistic Inspiration And Teaching Songwriting
So what is the particular makeup of your influences beyond those traditional ballads and things then? Because when you talk you do tend to reference
Well I think that they should do, yeah, absolutely. It depends what you like, but I tend to like most of the arts anyway. I don't think I've ever been to a ballet. But um apart from that, I mean I go to art galleries, uh I love visual art, go to plays. I go to films and I read prose and I read poetry. And I love to go to museums and I love to be in nature and I love, you know, intelligent conversation, like a good dinner party where you got people
talking about the world and life and everything. I find that very stimulating. And I think people have done for thousands of years.
You mentioned um the sort of songwriting camps that you've done. I think you've done some with your son Teddy, is that right? Yeah.
It's the same camp. Um it's up in Woodstock in New York and and it's our uh twelfth year.
Right, yeah.
got Teddy got my other son Jack, my grandson Zach. That's the kind of the the core team and then we bring in other writers. I think we've got Tiff Merritt this year, we got John Doyle teaching guitar, Happy Tram's a regular. Yeah, it's just wonderful.
So you do believe that there are elements of songwriting that can be taught? Because you you do say in your book, and I quote, uh Those who claim to understand the creative process are usually uttering bullshit of the first magnitude.
Yeah.
So you do think there are things that can be relayed to people about how to write songs?
I think to some extent you can talk about structure. And I suppose content as well. Um for instance, someone's written a song and you kind of listen to it and you're gonna gently critique it, very gently critique it. And um maybe you need a stronger hook line to the song to bring people into it. And you might say, um, you know, if you're gonna write about yourself, make sure it's interesting to other people. Mm-hmm. That might be the main fault of uh
certainly a lot of amateur songwriters and some professional songwriters is is your life that interesting? Are you gazing at your shoes slash navel? A bit too much, you know. And um a song about being a victim. That's not particularly interesting. You see yourself as a society is always, you know, getting down on you. Like uh most blues songs are kind of uplifting. You know, you talk about your hard times, but it's not very positive
why and you can usually dance to it. But um this thing, you know, probably started in the sixties where you you just kind of be miserable and and um and you switch other people to enjoy that and it's just not enjoyable. So I think we kinda teach a philosophy rather than actually, you know, don't put C there, that should be an E flat. It's more this is what I like about music, this is what I like about life, and I want you to feel the same exhilaration that I feel.
It's more like that really. Mm-hmm. And and I think also um it's osmotic. Is that a word? Sounds good.
It is now.
Okay, I'll smile check. Um, The attendees as a group, well we have a hundred plus people every year and uh it's like if you go there you're gonna get something. And I think we teach so intensely actually sometimes that you're gonna have enough to nourish you for a year and you have to come back again.
Hopefully.
¶ Creative Habits And COVID's Impact
I did wonder if you maybe shared practical exercises for songwriting like word games or these sorts of things, because I know in the past you've done things like that, like I think on half bricking came from a word experiment, you know. So I was just wondering if those sort of practical things were part of the camp as well.
To a small extent, I I think it's more about uh how do you get your head in the right place to be creative. You can say, well, you know, Beethoven, you know we'd make himself that most incredibly strong cup of coffee at six in the morning. Then he'd go till noon and then he'd knock off for the day. You know, and then he'd go and visit his friends, go for a walk, go to the theatre.
You know, you think, My God, he must have been working all the time. No, he wasn't w he just had his intense periods every day. Hemingway, you know, would always type standing up, you know. That was his thing. That kind of thing's interesting. And you think, well, what what if I did that? Probably wouldn't make any difference. But um we get set in our ways of what we think we should be, what we think we should do.
And sometimes you think, Oh, okay, I I'm a tortured um songwriter, you know, I have to sit in my room with my acoustic guitar and strummer for days until something happens. Well, yeah, that's one way of doing it. But um there might be other possibilities as well.
So we really just try to open people up and uh get people out of their routines sometimes and show people possibilities and just try to inspire people. As songwriters, we all get stuck, we all get blocked, so there's ways to to deal with that.
I didn't know that about Hemingway actually that he wrote standin' up. That's interesting. 'Cause you'd think, you know, the the act of writing would require some degree of of comfort, but um as opposed, you know, being upright while you do it maybe just makes the ideas come out in a different way.
And um some descriptions of uh Bob Dylan. Uh he's he's kind of standing up but with a guitar rather than sitting down. Although I've seen him do both, I think. But um yeah, you know, Hemingway was a hard drinker as well. But regardless of uh what time he got to bed
He'd be up at dawn and he'd be writing. But he didn't write many words a day, he'd write four hundred words a day and that's it. And a lot of prose writers, um, you know, they're not writing that much a day, but they're writing every day. And I think that's important as well. You get this thing flowing. And once it starts flowing, you can't turn it off. Four hundred words doesn't sound like a lot, but uh you know, like after a month, you're getting somewhere.
Yeah.
and i think in recent years you've built up quite a backlog of material haven't you i think you've said that you've already got the next record lined up
Well, COVID um did strange things to everybody's lifestyle. You couldn't go on the road for two and a half years. So that was uh a serious halt to uh a a way of living that I I've been doing since I was eighteen. I've been on the road since I was eighteen, basically, and and hadn't had that much of a gap, I don't think, for a long time. So uh being at home I thought, well, you know, we can do some podcasts here and there. That's fun.
But I just had all this time on my hands and suddenly found well I've got all this time to write. So I I just I wrote a lot of stuff. Uh and I've certainly written the next album. What do I do now? I have to write the album after that. So we'll see. I don't know. But COVID was a big uh interrupter of uh schedules.
¶ Hosts' Reflections And Episode Conclusion
Well I guess we better let you go, Richard, but we have to say this has been just an absolute thrill for us to get to talk to you so
I think you should get out more.
Well thank you so much for all your answers.
Oh, you're very welcome. Very welcome. Thank you for your interesting questions.
Great cheers, Richards.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, great to meet you.
Yeah.
🎵 Music
That was guitar slinging beret wearing folk rock maestro Richard Thompson talking to us about his new album Shipped Ashore.
Fantastically engaging guy with such a rich knowledge of well, everything creative really, traditional music, folk music and much more.
Yeah, he's so interested in creativity and and songwriting particularly. I think because he recognises the power of efficiency, doesn't he? You know, as he said, he's he's good at streamlining production processes and and making decisions, but he doesn't think of himself as a as a workaday type of songwriter, even if he does value the songwriter as a standalone figure.
Yeah, yeah. He's also argued that he's not a good collaborator, which is another interesting thing to throw into the mix. I suppose that would be unusual for someone who was in the business of churning out pop. He's kind of a one-man production house, but with very artistic ideals, I guess.
Yeah, his new Twitter bio. Sorry, X.
He's got some really cool ways of approaching the work as well, hasn't he?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. I think he's inspired you to get a standing desk from IKEA, hasn't he?
Yeah, if only Hemingway could have had a Pomodoro time app and a MacBook. That was all that was holding them back.
Nice to hear that he's always trying to break away from familiar patterns too and you know, try different instruments and tunings or or even just keep it in his head, you know, the old Stravinsky trick, as he put it.
Yeah, he also had a very unique way of describing the process of dragging a song into existence, didn't he? You know, he he he saw that as a sad moment. 'Cause there's that period where it's forming in your mind and you hear all of these possibilities and all of the magic and the newness and the excitement is there. And then when you actually bring it into being and give it a real shape. Sometimes the real world kind of reduces the potential of of the idea.
Yeah, it's a strange phenomenon that, isn't it? I suppose there's been many times when I've been buzzing about an idea and then I've put it on the guitar and I'm like, Oh right, okay.
I think every songwriter must have had that happen to them. You know, you think you've just come up with a masterpiece and then it turns out to just be a very prosaic yeah kind of three chord dirge.
It happens all the time, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Some great revelations there about the use of titles too. I mean when he said he wrote the whole of the Bright Lights album from titles, that was amazing.
Yeah, that's um pretty incredible, especially considering how well that album turned out. I know. I guess in a way songwriting's all about jotting stuff down though, isn't it? You know, training your brain to capture those fleeting thoughts and then you might end up with a title like Turnstile Casanova.
Yeah, or just mention a car. You've got half a song title right there, as you pointed out. And structurally he's doing interesting things too, as you mentioned, the scope to take a listener on a journey but then subvert the destination even, you know, change the focus of the song halfway through, almost like a kind of hitchcocky and plot device.
Yeah, like the song or the project you're working on, you know, you might think, Oh well I'm doing this thing, but then it just ends up I was actually just writing a song. Yeah. I just kinda tricked my brain into thinking I was doing this grand project.
Yeah.
But yeah, I love that kind of depth and and that's what makes Richard uh a national treasure. I don't think that's too uh grand a term for what he is, you know. You know, the scope of his work, uh his application of all his knowledge and and that commitment to just keep on doing it.
Yeah, it's fantastic. So thanks to Richard for the wonderful conversation. Cheers to Claire for connecting us. Ship to shore is out now.
And if you've not had the pleasure of investigating Richard's previous work, then we recommend that you do so, but uh pace yourself, there's
We'll be back again soon. Until then look at it.
🎵 Music