root salad Jack Harris


He’s an extraordinary songwriter, and a great live performer too. Kitty Macfarlane fills you in…


I


think I may have accidentally just vol- unteered myself as Jack Harris’s tour manager. “This is Kitty, she’s on Sanity Maintenance,” Jack quips. “Extreme tour managing. Wouldn’t that be great? You could prepare little adventures between gigs in each location. ‘Jack I found a whimsical thing!’ ‘Great! Well done Sani- ty Keeper!’ ‘Jack I’ve hidden an egg some- where in Sheffield! Go and find it!’”


I first met Jack two summers ago; we were both on the bill at a small rural festi- val. I was sprawled out the front of my tent fanning myself in the heat: an affable Jack Harris proffered me a box of dates. Since then, music has thrown us together more than once, from Bury streets with EFEx to Suffolk songwriting retreats with EFDSS, but most often, in a pub basement in King’s Cross sharing the evening with Folkroom, a London-based community of artists (found- ed by Stephen Thomas and Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker).


Why haven’t you heard of him before (unless you checked out last issue’s fRoots 62 compilation)? It’s not like he hasn’t been busy. He’s just released his third album, pro- duced by Gerry Diver (Lisa Knapp, Sam Lee, O’Hooley & Tidow). He was the youngest ever winner, not to mention first non- American, of the Kerrville Folk Festival song- writing competition back in 2005. Gillian Welch won that competition, as did Anaïs Mitchell. Anaïs describes Jack Harris as a “priest of song”. So why not? And why now?


“I’m peripheral to the folk world. I’m not immersed in the English tradition, nor do I have a trad repertoire. I don’t cleave to it.” I point out that his new album opens with the lyric ‘As I walked out one morn- ing’, and he confesses to sometimes delib- erately playing with the idiom. It’s in his turn of phrase, his subject matter, and his instrumentation.


“Tom Sweeney from RootBeat Records (Leveret, Lady Maisery) is great. He repre- sents great traditional acts – some of the best – and he wanted to get a songwriter on board. And I wanted to get more involved in the folk world.”


Jack Harris is an extraordinary song-


writer. One of his songs flirts with Joyce’s fictional adulteress, the libidinous Molly Bloom, while another envisages the return of all our extinct birds. Another one is about living underwater. Some songs sketch scenes, others narratives. He is also an unparalleled showman, framing songs with monologues and jokes, sculpting an atmosphere of you, his guests, and him,


your host. I ask him to explain the process that led to his remarkable title track, The Wide Afternoon.


“There was a moment on some televi- sion drama I was watching, where some- body got some bad news, maybe a diagno- sis of some kind, and it struck them dizzy, you know, reeling. How might bad news affect the way you perceive things? I start- ed wondering how I could frame this. I needed a character. So I thought about a phlegmatic, dusty old English middle-class archetype (lives in a house a bit like this). Button-down, feelings… in. Who gets told something bad. And then how might that change his perception of the day, where everything is the same, but because of what has just happened to him, he maybe realises the transience of everything, he maybe realises the impermanence of these venerable old Victorian buildings that he’s walking amongst. A roll-top bureau in his parents’ room, a sequence of memory flashing in.”


“I really enjoyed writing that. You do need to keep yourself at arm’s length, though. It’s an act of empathy I think, writing. By inhabiting a character, you have access to thoughts and feelings that aren’t your own. Fill it out with the guitar and the whole thing blossoms, if you stick with it. You hopefully…” (he knocks the table twice) “come up with something that carries the idea well, and is just intriguing and open enough for people to latch onto.”


ack falls among those writers who deal with more than just themselves as subjects. For musical influences he references Laura Nyro, Randy New- man, John Prine, Loudon Wainwright, Rick- ie Lee Jones. For literary figures: Flannery O’Connor, Elizabeth Bishop, George Her- bert. “Penelope Fitzgerald’s my favourite. Didn’t write ’til she was 59, won the Booker when she was 61. A master of withheld detail and ambiguity.”


J


He talks about his affinity for the blues singers. “Bob Dylan when he was 22 said that what made the early blues singers great – they were outside the box. Whatever had happened to them, they had somehow conquered it, and were in some way taking the objective view. They weren’t trying to take you down with them. Even at its most harrowing, the blues doesn’t do that, it casts it in some way into something bigger.”


Evening has crept in and we’re now sit- ting in darkness. This is the room where his album photography was snapped, and it’s full of eerie paraphernalia, twisted wood carvings, shamanic and carnival masks, painted dolls, and a chiming grandfather clock. A large woolly cat stalks in. We’ve been talking for well over an hour. Jack is a fantastic conversationalist, and has asked as much as he’s answered, but he still culti- vates intrigue. It doesn’t matter where he’s come from, where he’s been. It doesn’t mat- ter that you haven’t heard of him. What matters is that you hear him now.


jackharrismusic.com F 15 f


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