Harney County

Description

I ventured to Harney County for the first time, 20 or more years ago, after I had read a memoir by the writer William Kittredge. The book is called Owning It All and for me it was a deeply affecting work. Throughout it Kittredge celebrates the hardscrabble, wide-screen landscape of this Southeastern Oregon desert county where he was raised, while at the same time he atones for and criticizes the devastation several generations of his ranching family unleashed upon that land. It is a tragic and cautionary tale that reminds us that the land we think we own can turn back on us, and that we are all more vulnerable and connected to the forces of nature than we care to admit. I thought I should someday write and sing a collection of Harney County songs. With this new album I finally got around to doing just that. Most of the songs on this album came alive when I was fashioning the sounds and words for the last Walkabouts record Travels in the Dustland.

They are in some ways of a piece with the Dustland songs, but even then I knew they needed to be in a different pile. They are less about musical gestures and more about what is being sung. And while the songs for Travels in the Dustland were also desert songs, their landscapes were abstract and mythical. Here the events and characters are imagined but the places are real and the roads are ones I have driven myself. I wanted a sense of both rawness and restraint in the recordings for this album. I felt those qualities were already imbedded in the songs and that the musical performances should also reflect them. The upright bass player Iga Golob and I played the songs live and unadorned for two days in a sprawling, reverberant studio on the outskirts of Prague. The room can hold an 80-piece orchestra and there we were, just the two of us face-to-face in the middle of the floor, dwarfed and a bit awed by our surroundings. Given the subject matter of the songs, this somehow felt correct. Ziga brought the essential pulse and dialogue to these performances and I couldnt have done this record without him.

Milan Cimfe joined us as both the recording engineer and as our occasional drummer. My wife Anda sang backing vocals on two songs, Paul Austin added electric guitar to The Carnival Smoke and my old friend Terry Lee Hale played distorted harmonica on Many Moons. I originally imagined this record sounding like Nebraska if it had been a Dub album. We didnt quite end in that place but I would guess that small remnants of that idea remain. What has been left out of this music is arguably more important than what has been added to it. The space is there so that the stories have ample room to breathe. And finally, now that the album is done, I think I can move on and find a new place about which to obsess. Chris Eckman/Ljubljana/Sept. 2013