4am & Pickin’ Oakum – Two Instrumentals – Live at the Harrietville Caravan Park!
Instrumental songs are like picture books: they tell stories without words.
here’s one that is light
and one that is dark
and a story in pictures
all photographs taken in April 2016 while at the Mt Beauty Music Festival
by J. Land – instagram
We recently traveled to Harrietville for GAP – the Great Alpine Pick. We stayed in the most excellent on-site caravan. It was so terribly awesome that we filmed some videos there.
It had an autumnal burnt orange vibe that absolutely matched the beautiful Autumn weather.
I fell in love with it and took WAY too many photographs of it’s 1970’s splendor.
I particularly loved the bedside lamp.
“Estelle” is a song we wrote a few years ago and with the encouragement of our Goddaughter we dusted her off and added another verse. We recorded it recently and it will appear on our new album ‘Travelogue’ – which you can preview here.
A classic folk song about share house living that tells the true, but sad story of Estelle, who owns only a few photos and a stained t-shirt as a result of her last few houses having burned down.
“Estelle” – Live at the Harrietville Caravan Park!
One of the reasons that we named our album ‘Travelogue’ is that we like to travel & I always take photographs as we go……. Here are some from that journey
Bonnie Doon
Mt Hotham
Mt Hotham
all photographs taken in April 2016 by J. Land – instagram
We’re just finished recording another album; it’s called Travelogue.
A Travelogue describes the experience of a traveler, often in images.
We recorded at Stovepipe Studios with Matt Walker and Rowan Matthews.
We prefer to record a live performance, preserving the human sounds of fingers on fret boards, breath and squeaky chair. It means it isn’t perfect, it feels more important to sound real in these times of heavily processed sound.
If you close your eyes we are sitting in the room with you, just two people playing music and singing.
We recorded 16 songs over a day and a half, with no overdubs.
It’s important to find the right studio for the songs. Matt and Rowan immediately understood what we were looking for. It is challenging to record a live performance in a studio environment but they were up for it. For those of you who have never recorded, it’s important to have nice clean recordings of each instrument/ voice without anything spilling over into it, which is very hard with a live recording when the room is filled with sound. With the help of some really lovely microphones and their technical know how they caught our performances beautifully with very little “cross contamination”.
After recording the songs all the tracks are mixed together – it’s a process……..
are we there yet?
Very soon we’ll have an album to share with you all – till then here’s a track from it we recorded by our friend Chris – “Coming Home”.
With the help of our friend Chris we recorded our original song “Coming Home”.
This song has been, in one form or another, in the repertoire for a while now but recently got a rewrite, buff and polish and it’s come up a treat! It’s a two point perspective story, two sides of a situation, two voices each in turn.
We are all on a journey “Home” – to that place where we feel most ourselves, whether that be a geographical location, an internal sense of peace or the kinship found within a relationship.
It can be hard to hear the lyrics clearly so they appear below. Chris plays banjo in the clawhammer style.
Coming Home – Lyrics & Music by Slim Dime
Oh don’t you roam
Oh don’t you go
Oh don’t you roam
So doggonne far from home
Oh don’t you cry
Oh don’t you sigh
Oh don’t you cry
Until I’m dead and gone
Oh don’t you know
Oh where to go?
Oh don’t you know
This long and lonely road
Darlin don’t you cry
You’re the apple of my eye
Darlin don’t you cry
Until I’m dead and gone
Oh you must know
This hard and heavy load
Oh you must know
this long and dusty road
Oh all alone
Please help me find my home
Nowhere left to go
Lord, please let me go
Oh Lonesome Road
So lost and alone
Oh Lonesome Road
Lord, please bring him home
Oh Lonesome Road
So far from home
Oh Lonesome Road
Lord, I’m coming home
Lord, I’m coming home
With the help of our friend Chris we recorded our version of the traditional song “I wish I was in Bowling Green”, which we learned from the Kossoy Sisters, adding to it with more lyrics: somethin’ old, somethin’ new, somethin’ borrowed & somethin’ blue.
The lyrics talk specifically about the town “Bowling Green” in Kentucky in the US of A, but the song for us is about the longing for that place that feels like home and a nostalgic recollection of the place you grew up in, or belong to.
A perfect home…….
Traditional songs last in popular culture because the message or meaning is timeless, continuously relevant, like any cliche there’s a deep truth enfolded inside,
Slim Dime play “I wish I was in Bowling Green”
| Wish I was in Bowling Green
sittin’ in a chair One arm round my pretty little girl ‘Tother ’round my dear ‘Tother ’round my dear, Bowling Green Oh you good old Bowling Green. |
Wish I was a bumblebee
sailing through the air Sail right down to my true love’s side, Touch him if you dare. Touch him if you dare, Bowling Green Oh you good old Bowling Green. |
| If you see that man of mine,
tell him once for me If he loves another girl, Yes I’II set him free Yes I’II set him free, Bowling Green Oh you good old Bowling Green. |
Goin’ through this whole wide world,
I’m goin’ through alone; Goin’ through this whole wide world, I ain’t got no home, I ain’t got no home. Bowling Green Oh you good old Bowling Green. |
| Wish I was down in the South
where folks treat you kind Listening to a pretty little song, with that love of mine. With that love of mine, Bowling Green Oh you good old Bowling Green. |
Been around this whole wide world,
walkin’ all alone; Goin’ through this whole wide world, I ain’t got no home, I ain’t got no home. Bowling Green Oh you good old Bowling Green. |
| I ain’t got a dollar Dear,
I ain’t got a dime But I got a sweetie pie who loves me all the time. Loves me all the time, Bowling Green Oh you good old Bowling Green. |
Goin’ back to Bowling Green,
any ole way I can; when I get to Bowling Green, I’ll never leave again, Never leave again. Bowling Green Oh you good old Bowling Green. |
“Shady Grove” is a lovely Bluegrass standard, which many really great musicians have done versions of. One of our favourites would have to be Doc Watson’s.
Link to wikipedia entry on “Shady Grove“
We recently enlisted the help of our friend Chris to film us playing a few of our favourite cover songs/standards. All these clips were recorded with a Nikon D90 – the sound quality is pretty good considering we’re outside!
We don’t make a huge fuss about our guitars but we get asked a lot what we play. Jen plays a Martin LXM tenor guitar and Chris plays a Martin D00-18V acoustic guitar. Neither have pick ups – all acoustic!
So here’s a link to our version of “Shady Grove” – hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoy playing it!
We write our own music but we also enjoy doing covers of well known songs in a Slim Dime kinda way. Enormously successful in the 80’s, Euro synth pop hit, “Take On Me” – lyrics & music by Pal Waaktaar, Mags Furuholmen & Morten Harket is a great example. Although recognisable, without that synth tag it sounds totally different.
With the help of our friend Chris this was recorded September 2015 in a house more picturesque than ours on our trusty iPad so the image and sound quality isn’t excellent but it’s certainly good enough. God bless technology!
We decided to share this particular song because it isn’t something we’d ever put on an album but it is a song we put in the set along with country & bluegrass numbers. It has that lovely bittersweet quality that we love so. And it’s fun to surprise folk with something a little unexpected.
One of the memorable things about this song is singer Morten Harket’s incredible vocal range, we don’t do that either! It’s more fun to make a song your own than to mimic someone else.
Here’s a link to the original video, which has a happy albeit sweaty ending……
Despite having a really busy month, with the help of our friend Chris we recorded some wee home videos. She lives in a gorgeous house with a brilliant garden. The Spring blossoms were bloomin’ up a storm.
Silver Tongue & Gold Plated Lies was written by K. T. Oslin – country stalwart songstress, although we learned it from Suzanne Thomas on the excellent album “O’ Sister – The Women’s Bluegrass Collection”.
We play it slow.
More like a blues song than a bluegrass number………
Lots of fantastic musicians play this excellent song – this is our version!
Everything we do, we do with a little help from our friends…….
thank you!
Slim Dime 