Page 17 - BiTS_11_NOVEMBER_2021

EW: That’s a baritone guitar, yes.

BiTS: Did you have all the tracks memorised and learned and arranged and whatever before you
started recording them, or did things happen as you were going along?

EW: I develop the track list before I go into the studio. I can’t waste any time in there, but things

always evolve in the studio. I did a couple of different versions of a couple of things to see what
sounded best to me.

BiTS: Who did the mixing? Did you mix it yourself?

EW: No. My engineer, Julie Last, did the mixing and I credited her as assisting me and producing
because she is just so brilliant at doing what she does, especially since we were dealing with

multiple tracks being sent digitally without the musicians actually being there and getting feedback
from us, like oh, try this, try that. One guy did 18 versions of the song and we had to pore over that
stuff and choose what we thought
worked, and Julie is just really
wonderful at that.

BiTS: Tell me something about the

tracks and why you selected them.
For instance, we touched on ‘Black
Snake Moan’. What made you
choose that?

EW: Well, Lead Belly made me do
it. I’ve always been a huge Lead

Belly fan. As a matter of fact, I
have a song on “Little Red Wagon”
called ‘I Can't Help It’, which is
about my kindergarten teacher
wondering why I sang the way I
sang and that was because I was
trying to sing like Lead Belly. I loved his songs, whether they were children’s songs or ‘Old Riley’ I

got from Lead Belly too. At first, I wanted to do an entire album of Lead Belly songs, but I was
steered away from that by thinking, let me be a little more diverse here, and I always loved Blind
Willie Johnson and I discovered Texas Alexander and Lonnie Johnson and Geeshie Wiley. I mean,
these were discoveries in the effort to make a real deep blues album.

BiTS: All of these names that you’re reciting are like music to me. I don’t know whether you know
it, but I have an acoustic blues radio show and they’re the kind of things I play.

EW: Of course, yes.

BiTS: I play those kinds of tracks amongst modern acoustic music on my show as well. Absolutely
fabulous stuff. I love it.

EW: It’s interesting that you are attracted to the same sort of music. It’s a special thing. People
who are into this kind of music are really into it.

BiTS: Tell me why you chose ‘Special Rider Blues’. That’s another favourite of mine.