Page 9 - BiTS_08_AUGUST_2021

sustain anyway, so that’s pretty well what it is. That’s what the sound is. It’s just the purely natural
sound of the guitar miked up with room mikes.

BiTS: That’s what they call ambience.

EM: Yeah, a very ambient sound. One of my heroes is Blind Willie Johnson on slide guitar, and in
fact, over this last year, I’ve put up a tuition video on ‘Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground’.
The famous Blind Willie Johnson track. That style of old slide guitar playing is beautiful for hymns
with strong tunes and so I did the ‘Amazing Grace’ version. I actually did it as a request for a
funeral of a good friend of mine. He died and I was asked to play that at the funeral and that’s
partly why I thought it was quite appropriate to stick it on the album really, a lot of people have
been touched by the sadness of loss over the last year and a half and so I thought it appropriate as
an album from this time to give a little musical space for people to reflect on anybody they knew
that they’ve lost over the last year and a half.
That’s how I came up with the arrangement to

start with.

BiTS: The reference to Blind Willie Johnson
actually answers one of my questions that I had
for you and that was why it starts off in the
lower register because that was a lot of what
Blind Willie did. Most people start to play
‘Amazing Grace’ in the higher register, but you
leave it until the end.

EM: [Chuckling] I didn’t realise that. It might
be a Blind Willie Johnson thing, but it’s funny,
it’s just how I hear the tune, but interesting.
You’re right. It could start higher.

BiTS: Tell me about some of the other songs.
Do you have a favourite?

EM: One of the things about doing a recording
on your own, it’s like the era of record
companies just giving their signees an unlimited
time in the studio just to spend the next two
years on a track. Of course, it’s all changed now.
Everything has got so time and money-oriented
that you’re lucky to get a couple of days in the
studio from some recording contracts, but
recording at home meant that I had a long, long
time dawdling over all of these songs and trying different ideas and trying different arrangements,

so I’m very attached to all of these songs because I’ve lived them for about nine months, some of
them. And even longer, others.

BiTS: Somebody said to me recently, they’re all my babies.

EM: Yeah, that’s right. They are. They’re all your babies, exactly right. I think the ones that I did
for the single, ‘Before We Wake Up’, I’m particularly pleased with that one. That was kind of an
experimental arrangement, and all the songs start off pretty usually anyway, with blues guitar
techniques, whether it be old slide or old fingerpicking and usually pre-war influences on the guitar