An Essay on Pilgrimage.

I woke up one morning and thought, “What is happening to us?, We’ve lost the way”. Everything around me seemed to be an illusion, filled with fake news, fake images, corporate bootlicking and seemingly very little moral standard. Communities no longer gather like we used to, especially here in North America. Maybe I was on the cusp of a midlife crisis (Awakening as my therapist likes to say), but I pined for the old ways, the truth tellers and the truth. It could partially be my age (Im 42 as I write this) But algorithms, AI, Playlists, Tech oligarchs and year end “Wrapped” lists were doing my head in and causing me a moral sense of dread and doom that I had never experienced before. In order to understand where I was going, I needed to know where I had been. Enter my old pal Joel Plaskett and the great Scottish Author and thinker Alistair Mcintosh.

Some of us understand that the universe does indeed work in mysterious ways, In 2018 I found myself in Glasgow Scotland for the famed Celtic Connections Festival. I was on the bill at the Royal Glasgow hall for a Tom Petty tribute night with some amazing artists, including Willy Vlautin, Alela Diane, Lera Lynne, the late and very great Rab Noakes, and my old friend Joel Plaskett, among others, all lovingly curated by my dear Scottish friend Roddy Hart. Over that long weekend in Glasgow, Joel, and I bonded over our favourite folk music (Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention etc), Joel with a glass of whiskey, me with an enchanted heart, and no whiskey. Joel offhandedly mentioned a book called Soil and Soul by Alistair McIntosh. The book took a while for me to get, six years or so, actually. I was taken with the story and with Alistair’s literary voice, so much so that the book inspired me to find out where I come from. Not only geographically but spiritually speaking.

These songs are an invitation to go inwards, to find our own paths, to find the truth in the artifice. But most importantly, this album asks of us, what are we to do about it all? Do we create community again or do we fall into the empirical trap of fear and isolation? Business as usual.

The record purposely has more questions than answers, intended for the listener to make their own mind up, but to actually get out in the world, ask questions, take a look around.

Songs like “Last one to know” A song about my first trip to Ireland with my old band Easton Stagger Phillips, are exactly that. lines like “we should be burning down billboards, not putting on a millionaire’s clothes”

cut deep to the mess we’ve found ourselves in. (Thank you Edward Abbey)

“Bangor” is the return to Ireland, years later. I was enchanted with the place, especially up in the north. Bangor is actually not far from where my people come from up there, 30 miles to be exact. Maybe that’s why I felt so at home there. That night I met famed Waterboys Roadie Jimmy Hickey and saw one of the most moving musical performances I’ve ever seen. Just in the corner pub, no airs, no ego, just pure human emotion.

The Crown Jewel of the album “Highlands Leaving” “Coal in the lungs that once held up the Sky” a song of the Highland Clearances (1750-1860) thats saw so many Scottish Highland Clans forced out of there ancestral lands by british imperliasts only to be forced into the factory work in the unfamilair cities or on a boat to the new world in the america’s far away from the old ways of living. “This land is your land, what happened to ours?” Plaskett asks on his verse, while Kendel Carson weaves a magical sense of place with her fiddle and bow.

At this point, the record feels cut like a ruby, a long-lost gem in the rough seas of untruths and conformity.

Leeroy And Joel (Erica Chan Photo)

The album ends on “Carry me” inspired by a conversation between myself, and Soil and Soul author Alistair McIntosh. “I was out of my intellectual depth interviewing Alistair, but he’s such a kind and humble man, he made me feel welcome. I could resonate with his telling of the story of being carried through a particularly hard bit of path by an unseen thing”. The Divine Feminine plays a big part of this album but no more so than in “Carry Me”. After all, this world is now more than ever crying out for feminine wisdom and guidance. I’m swinging a lantern towards that path.

I’m convinced we need some of that old wisdom in this modern world gone wrong, more honouring of the natural world, the ultimate truth. When Joel suggested we make this record on his old Tascam 388, an antiquated 1/4” 8-track machine, I was skeptical at first. It actually took me a while to get on board, but when he gave me an impassioned speech on the magic of analog tape, how it was always moving and changing, never the same twice as it passed over the play head until it was frozen by the ones and zeros of the digital world. I started to see the human-ness of tape in all of its warm and unpredictable glory.

Joel and Kendel Carson.

Marshall McLuhan says “The medium is the message”. Well, the medium is loud and a little more grainy than clear on Pilgrimage. Instead of infinite choices, there’s infinite feel and hand-built music by actual humans embracing the unusualness of the process and letting go of old ideas of how things should be in favour of just how they came out on tape.

While there were no hard and fast rules during the making of Pilgrimage, we tried to make it as acoustic as possible, but as it progressed, a couple of Joel’s beautiful electric takes made their way onto the tracks. We listened to a couple of records to guide the way. The efficiency and small but beautiful sonics of Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells A Story” as well as anything from the Fairport Convention and Richard and Linda Thompson’s “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight” were on the turntable. Joel’s drumming is obviously inspired by Levon Helm, so the band is in there too.

W/Cindy Fairbank (She plays all the keys on the record)

At this point we have to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in. A simulation swarm of artifice, of digital isolation or a community-forward offering of storytelling, of truth in the natural world, of something tangible and real, a bit of the old ways.

Pilgrimage might help.

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