Eileen Rose interview

18 July 2008

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The overall sound is like the rest of my albums; a mixture of lots of different influences, there’s always rock and roots there and a little bit of country. From song to song it’s a little bit of everything, but for this record I used more loops and drum beats which I’ve done before and I really like.

You have already had three successful records under your belt, how did making this one compare to the other three?

Each album was its own thing; the first album I made with the guys from Alabama Three and the whole band went residential to a place called Model Valley and we all pretty much lived there for a week and made the record.

When I did Long Shot Novena that was spread out over a couple of months and I worked with two producers and went in every day and it was more of a slower process and a little bit more crafted.

With this one I went out to Detroit, which is a city I haven’t spent much time in, and people flew in to help, the guitarist flew in from London, and my brother flew in to play mandolin but it was different and it felt a bit more like what I had always imagined making an album would be like when I was younger, but still, when it comes down to it, I still go into the room with my acoustic guitar or a piano and I still put down the core of the song and everything else get’s built around it. The style we record in changes, but at the end of the day, I’m still sitting there staring at a microphone.

What was it like recording in Detroit? It has quite a violent reputation…weren’t you scared?

It was pretty scary, but it is mainly the press who make it scary. The people who live there are poor, with no jobs, and the automotive industry which kept it alive his now gone and left the place in a pretty scary way.

What was it like working with seasoned producers Al Sutton and Eric Hoegemeyer?

Before I went to meet them I was quite intimidated but one of the reasons Al and Eric are successful is they have the ability to put people at ease and just focus on their music so when I was working with them, particularly Eric, it was like there were no other records or artists and the most important thing in the world was me and the songs and the band, and that’s why they are both good.

I could be intimidated by the names and the record sales, because Al was doing Kid Rock’s record at the same time, that record went to number one in the states and it was really strange because he’d come in and talk about what was going on in the Kid Rock camp and he was like “we’ve mastered it and he doesn’t like it, so now we’re going to mix it again!” and I thought to myself ‘Wow, the budget to master your record is the budget to make my record and you’re just throwing it away. It keeps you humble anyway!

All of your albums have been inspired by events in your life, what was the inspiration behind this one?

I live in England for about 12 years and then 9/11 happened and my parents are 82 and I started to think I’d been gone a long time and, without being too morbid, I started to think about death and how the dynamics and shape of you families change as you get older and I grew up with eight brothers and sisters and my mother was one of nine and my father was one of something like 14 other children, so when we grew up there was a lot of cook-outs and family gatherings and my uncles playing cards and playing volleyball and we all visited each other a lot.

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