Emily Barker’s extreme folk: ‘You’ve got to keep on moving forward’

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/apr/07/emily-barker-extreme-folk-tv-theme-music

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“This song is not about crime fighting in southern Sweden,” Emily Barker tells the audience at her local music venue, perched high above Stroud, in the Cotswolds. She is about to perform Nostalgia, the haunting theme tune for the BBC production of Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh. A few lyrical tweaks were made for the TV version because the song was originally about being in Melbourne, separated from her lover, but its urgent, searching feel suits the dark, Scandinavian murder mysteries.

The room falls quiet as she embroiders that familiar delicate minor riff on her 1937 Gibson acoustic guitar, before singing in her silvery voice: “Tram wires cross Melbourne skies / cut my red heart in two.” Barker won a Bafta for it, along with an Ivor Novello award for her song Pause, which was used for another BBC drama series, The Shadow Line. These brooding numbers came from two of Barker’s four albums recorded with her multi-instrumentalist band the Red Clay Halo, who do a good line in rootsy and latterly more rock-tinged folk.

This week sees the release of the Toerag Sessions – her ninth album since she moved to the UK from Western Australia in 2002 (John Peel championed her first UK band, the Low Country). The album includes Anywhere Away, the theme song for her first film score, for the forthcoming Hec McAdam, which stars Peter Mullan as a man who has left his family and lives in motorway service stations. “I could relate to Hec McAdam,” she tells me over a cup of tea in her cottage. “His life on the road: different landscapes, strangers who become new friends, that feeling of freedom through movement, and also the aspect of escapism.”

It’s a solo album, and was recorded direct to tape at the all-analogue Toe Rag Studios in east London, which is perhaps best known for being where the White Stripes made Elephant. It was a visit to Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which inspired this foray into old-style production. “I got shown around by [Fame Studios proprietor and record producer] Rick Hall’s son, Rodney, and it was just amazing. Aretha Franklyn is one of my inspirations and she recorded there, and Etta James, so many legends, and seeing this old equipment, I started thinking.” She was also keen to make a solo record to mark a hiatus in working with the Red Clay Halo. She has a new look, too. Cropped hair and monochrome shirts and trousers have replaced the wavy locks and pretty frocks. “I definitely subscribe to the Neil Young philosophy,” she says, “which is to keep on moving forward and trying different things out, rather than making the same thing  over and over.”

Barker credits her mother for her work ethic, and teaching her how to sing harmonies, and her father’s record collection for shaping her musical tastes: “the Band, Neil Young, lots of roots and Fairport Convention, mostly 70s singer-songwriters or folk rock bands, and blues and soul”. Growing up in rural Western Australia, with no TV, Barker spent her time riding her horse or swimming in the Blackwood river. She’s a driven and independent soul (she releases most of her output on her own label, Everyone Sang), with a gung-ho attitude.

Many of her favourite projects have been what she jokingly refers to as “extreme sports for music”. A recent Nashville collaboration saw three women who barely knew each other – Barker, Amy Speace and Amber Rubarth – coming together with 20 songs between them, and in eight days, whittling them down into a 14-song album. The result, says Barker, has got “a real live quality and rawness about it. On some of the more upbeat songs there’s almost a nervous energy.”

Barker upped the ante still further when she and the Halo recorded direct to vinyl. “You can’t make any mistakes on that, you have to keep going.” They were covering four songs that inspired their 2013 record, Dear River. On one of the songs, Patti Smith’s Easter, she was doing the spoken word part, “and I say the same word twice, accidentally. Damn.” And there it stays, on the record, as a reminder that nothing real is perfect.

Her travelling Folk in a Box project, which she started with Dom Coyote in 2008, can also be an emotional rollercoaster. The concept is simple: one performer, one listener and one song, in a dark box. The box itself was inspired by a confession booth, Alice in Wonderland and Horace Walpole’s gothic castle at Strawberry Hill. “It’s sort of like therapy,” she says, recalling a time at Sydney arts festival, when a performer’s song had related exactly to an audience member’s life. “They both came out of the box after, and had this long hug, and were both in tears.”

However, Barker doesn’t adhere to the tortured-musician myth. She is easy-going and songs seem to pour out of her. I ask how many she’s written so far and she starts counting on her fingers. “Two, then one with … Argh, I don’t know. Two hundred? Something like that.”

•The Toerag Sessions by Emily Barker is out now on Everyone Sang, from £12 on CD and £24 on vinyl.