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Tia: It’s a hard time, we didn’t have so many gigs and usually we are on the road a lot, so life has
changed for a lot of people. I had to write the album when we were locked down, so it was not so
easy because you try to find inspiration, but my inspiration comes a lot from travelling, meeting

new people, new places and being locked down is not very nice for the inspiration. But finally, I did
it. I wrote some songs, and it took a little bit of time, but I had time and so it was hard because we
didn’t play, but we are lucky because we did the recording of the album, so we have good press and
we have some gigs in the future, we cross our fingers [chuckling] and we are very optimistic.

BiTS: Do you have any plans to produce another album before very long?

Tia: The next one? I don’t know. Now we have to play the new songs on stage then I also have my
own project under my name Tia. I had a band who we used to call Tia and the Patient Wolves, and I

released a CD in 2017, so sometimes I think about maybe recording something new, but for Muddy
Gurdy, I think the most important thing now is to go back on the road.

BiTS: Any plans to come to the UK? That’s the most important thing.

Tia: We’d love to. We played at the Red Rooster Festival two years ago and it was a blast – the
people, the place. We really love the UK, and we work with a booker from the UK called Rupert

Orton. Maybe you know him. And so I hope we’re going to play here, but the question is also what
about Brexit, with all the visa and stuff like that? I don’t know.

BiTS: Unfortunately, both COVID and Brexit have affected everything enormously for us in this
country and I guess it has to people in
the EU as well. Tell me something about
how you go about producing a song in

the sense of making it sound Muddy
Gurdy-ish, if you follow what I mean?
Do you take the original song and just
play it, or is there a process, maybe
getting the hurdy-gurdy player to play
first of all?

Tia: We do some arrangements. The
idea is to make it our own song, our
Muddy Gurdy
own version, so when I took ‘Chain
Gang’ by Sam Cooke, it’s a song that I
really love, but it wasn’t possible to record it the same way as Sam Cooke did, the same
instruments, so I decided to play it more rural, more like Fred McDowell or this kind of style. I
wrote a part for the hurdy-gurdy and for the percussion and for the guitar also. Most of the time,

Marc, the percussionist and me, we write some arrangements to make it different and to make it
match with the trio, with the sound and there is some cover that we did which sounds very
different to the original.

BiTS: Any temptation to do music from Louisiana en français?

Tia: [Chuckling] Yes, maybe. We are thinking about maybe the next recording of Muddy Gurdy

could take place in Louisiana because there are lots of links with Louisiana and we really love New
Orleans. We went there in January 2020, just before the COVID and we really had a blast and we
really had fun staying there. There is so much different music. We could do some stuff also with