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playing going right back when I first started getting into acoustic blues and hearing new names and
it’s a bit of a Snooks Eaglin quality about that, I think.

BiTS: Some time ago, Eddie, you did an album with a big-ish band. Have you got any plans to do
something like that again when things get back to normal because I thought it was a fabulous
album?

EM: Thank you very much. You never say no in music, especially me, because I’m always getting
bored with one particular line of doing my music and then exploring and bouncing off into another
direction and trying different things. But I think I am pretty well enjoying the simplicity of being a
bandleader of just one person [laughing] for the time being.

BiTS: You don’t get band arguments, do you if it’s just you?

EM: It’s true. I’m lucky in that I’ve always had really

lovely people I’ve played with. They’re all really good
musicians and really good people and we’ve never had
any arguments in the bands I’ve been in. They’re all
great guys, but it is complicated to be a bandleader
and I’ve done it for 30 years and I do enjoy not having
to chase everything up for rehearsals and worry about
all the travel arrangements and so on for lots of
people. The number of times we’ve turned up at the
ferry to do a tour around Europe and one of the band
members has left his passport behind [chuckling].
These sort of stresses or band members who go
through security drunk or something and you’re the
bandleader and you have to carry all the responsibility
of these delinquent families sometimes. I don’t miss

not having to do that at the moment. Snooks Eaglin c. 1987

BiTS: You said, Eddie, when we first started talking
that you’d planned to write an entire album with a song a week. I’m not sure how close you got to
that, but there are 14 tracks on this album, and you’ve clearly done a lot of song writing. When you
went to start recording it was everything done, or did you have to add tracks or do anything else to
get things up to your standard?

EM: Yeah, I had to work really hard on this one for a long, long time. Some of the songs took a long
time to sound good. I thought they just don’t sound right yet, so I worked very hard. I’ve probably
worked longer and harder on this album than any of the other albums that I’ve recorded and not
just because I had to learn how to be a sound engineer, but it’s just because I didn’t want to let it go

until I was happy with it. Usually, there’s time constraints or release date constraints where you’ve
got to get it out by a certain time and because I didn’t have that really this time around, it’s taken
me longer to make this album than any other one, and in many ways, although I’m too close to it to
be very objective, I’m happier with it than all of my albums really.

BiTS: I take it the whole thing was produced by you. Did you do the mastering as well, or do you
have somebody else do the mastering?

EM: No, I’ve got a bit of a dream team when it comes to mixing and mastering. The guy that did the
mastering has mastered my last couple of albums and I’m so glad I discovered him. His name is Ben
Macintyre and he’s got a company called Lucid Audio, but he’s a big-time mastering engineer of Van