[continued...]
I used to write these bittersweet love songs, sort of anti-love songs, and sometimes I still do. Those older songs, I’ve taken down a lot of them now, but some I stand by and they’re well worth re-making. Now I write about people and places and relationships and situations. And still, bittersweetness is the common thread because that’s all society is to me.
LN: That sounds like your lyrics could get political.
AC: Not in the sense you mean. It gets social, is a better way of describing it. Sometimes people tell me I’m writing folk songs, but I don’t know. But if people hear a folk element in my songs, it’s coming from the blues, and sometimes it’s in the words more than the music.
LN: Isn’t the blues just about feeling down?
AC: There’s always a double-edged feeling to blues lyrics and somewhere deep down that resonates for me. They always have that self-awareness, that ability to look at themselves and the situation they’re in, usually with a smile at the irony. They explore thoughts, feelings, issues which were relevant a hundred years ago, and will be in a hundred year’s time. And can be sung in a hundred years time. Because human nature continues to not surprise us.
LN: Where do your songs stand in relation to that?
AC: I can aspire to write something like that. All my lyrics are rooted in my firm belief that despite what anyone says, in our heads we’re all just kids and we’re all terrified. Of something. It’s my way of saying ‘it’s not just you’, it’s the vast majority of us. We’re all questioning ourselves, questioning if everything we believe is a fantasy.
LN: You have a line that goes "I feel fire, when I see through you." Does that sum it up?
AC: It sums up one song, but it's true there's more where that came from.
LN: Do you have a band?
AC: We’re working up material all the time. Once I’ve got a song that’s been road-tested with just me and an acoustic guitar and I know it’s going across the way I want it to, that’s when we start to develop it.
LN: I never asked - where are you from?
AC: My heritage is Liverpool Irish, the family’s been there off and on for a hundred and fifty years. You wouldn’t be able to tell from my accent though.
