Since his birth in Sussex in 1965, Wesley Stace has become a man of all colours, releasing 21 albums (17 under the nom de auteur-interprète John Wesley Harding), writing four books, organising the Cabinet of Wonders variety shows at the City Winery in NYC, and taking on several other activities that fill his days and nights. His latest record is called One Last Heist (Pravda, 2026) and is as adventurous and intense as it is tender and existential, crafting a level of intimacy that is immersive and compelling. The sound is expansive, generous, lush, even groovy, by turns dramatic and mellow. He has taken a wee detour into jazz even while retaining his basic acoustic guitar-driven songs. He attributes this to having lived in Philadelphia for the past 16 years.
“The city’s soul has finally found its way into my music,” he said with hermetic theatricality. “It is specifically the Hammond organists that I love. All the greats were from right here: Charles Earland, Shirley Scott, Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff. It’s not even just the organ itself, but the feel of those records, the bass and drums. That’s the backbone of the aesthetic of this album; that’s where my ears are, and my heart is, wherever the other inspirations on One Last Heist stray globally or locally. Like all my records, it’s a cocktail. We were feeling ambitious. I like my music sweet, but my lyrics tart.”
Stace continues to unapologetically weave his own lore both in and out of the music. But if there’s anything that this commitment or dedication to the uncanny truth proves, it’s that he wants us to be in on the cosmic joke that guides his life, and informs his enlightening folk-rock and pragmatic, intuitive songwriting.
At age 60, Stace is still brimming with Dylanesque curiosity and the desire to explore, recently filling in for the late Pat DiNizio on some gigs with the remaining members of The Smithereens. “I’m very old friends with the drummer Dennis (Diken), and he asked me to sing with them. I was very honored. My voice is very similar in range to Pat’s, so it was clever of them, a good pick. But I have much more to worry about these. Nobody’d be able to tell this on stage, but I really want to sing these songs right.”
Stace can wring poetry out of the most elusive aspects of life. To listen to one of his (or JWH’s) records is like turning the ignition key in a car and unlocking the mysteries behind the music. His albums blur the lines between handcrafted irony and pure authenticity. But it feels as though that was one of his goals with the work – to create a paradigm of truth and fiction, reality and the abstract, humour and utter seriousness. One Last Heist is a heady blend of mysterious narratives; a cracked visionary offers his work to an oppressive scientific board (This Knowledge Dies with Me), practical advice to would-be entertainers still learning their lines (Get It in Your Fingers), excursions into mythology gone awry (Penelope).
One has to admire a writer like William Blake, who for 225 years has got away with rhyming “eye” and “symmetry” in his famous poem The Tyger. Stace does Blake one better in Hanging Up the Sickle, in which Death retires and forces his crown upon an unsuspecting, unconvinced stranger. In this song, Stace’s witty streak emerges in some zany rhymes for sickle. There are many sides to the man, some of which are on display in the following interview.
Americana UK: You are headed out to Los Angeles soon. Are you going to be playing with the Smithereens?
Wesley Stace: They asked me to be their lead singer for some shows, and so I’m doing that, and there are going to be more afterwards, but the very first two are next Friday and Saturday in California.
AUK: There is some jazz chording on the record, which seems new. You’ve also played with the Jayhawks and Minus Five, but putting together the band for this new record, what were the qualities you were looking for in the musicians?
WS: Well, actually, I have a band called The English UK, and they’re the band that have done the Cabinet of Wonders with me all these years in New York City. Steve Goulding of The Rumour and the Mekons was the original drummer for the first couple of gigs. Then we had a drummer called Adam Gold for a bit before he moved to Australia, and then my Philly neighbor, Patrick Berkery, who’s played in all kinds of bands and records that you’ve heard, he became a member of the band. But ever since the very first Cabinet of Wonders – and there’s now been 130 – the band has been David Nagler on keyboards and guitar, Eddie Carlson on the bass, and Patrick Berkery on the drums. That’s the band we made the record with.
We decided to do this one by recording it live in a studio with a band, and then just have me overdub the vocals and put some other things on there. David, because of the songs that he’d written and the arrangements he was thinking of and the lyrics, he wanted a particular drummer called Stéphane San Juan, who is currently on tour with David Byrne and is a master of many of the styles that we wanted to get into on the record. He came down and stayed at my house, and we did ten backing tracks. It was a very rewarding experience.
But the more basic question is why it sounds like it sounds. And the reason for that is because my natural default since 1988, when I started making music, is a kind of strummy folk rock. Now, of course, that can become either of my album New Deal and Self-Titled, which are a bit more folk-baroque kind of thing or rock like Here Comes the Groom or the album I made with the Jayhawks. And sometimes, if I’ve got enough money, which is rare, but it’s happened over the years, it can go towards pop, like on The Man with No Shadow and Confessions of Saint Ace.
So that’s my world of music. The lyrics don’t change, but the arrangements and the settings and the bands and the budget and the ambition can change. Well, about five or six, seven years ago, I realized that my best time for listening to music is not in the car but in the kitchen when I’m cooking. The records I listen to when I’m doing that are not singer-songwriter folk rock at all. They had become mainly jazz as I was listening to Nina Simone singing Bob Dylan and George Harrison, or Esther Phillips singing Gilbert O’Sullivan or Johnny Hammond, because I love all the Hammond organ players, doing an instrumental cover of Peace Train by Cat Stevens. When I thought how many of the great singer-songwriters- Joni Mitchell, Lyle Lovett, Randy Newman- how their music kind of swings, I was like, well, why not?
AUK: Jimmy Smith was the first Hammond organ player I was introduced to. Her recorded on Verve, and those vinyl records are still in my racks.
WS: I love the musical history of Philadelphia. I’ve been here 15 years now, but obviously I knew about Philly long before I came here. We recorded in Larry Gold’s studio, not this album, but the album Self-Titled. He, as you know, played a lot of the strings on the Gamble & Huff records. Anyway, I was asked to DJ a night, and I started amassing my Hammond organ jazz collection. It’s crazy how Philadelphia is the cradle of the greats like Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, who was a Philadelphia policeman, Shirley Scott and my favorite Charles Erland. And then there’s Richard Groove Holmes and Ronnie Foster and Johnny Hammond’s my absolute top because those albums that he made on Kudu are incredibly great, with all those crazy versions of singer-songwriter material redone as instrumentals, generally produced by Bob James. So that’s just a little Philadelphia link to this record. When you put those in a box, you realize how influential Philly is on that music.
AUK: Philly Soul – Teddy Pendergrass, Daryl Hall – hasn’t rubbed off on you yet.
WS: Well, I put you the direction of a song called Do Nothing If You Can on my last album, which is hugely indebted to Teddy Pendergrass. Every day I drove my kids to school at Germantown Friend School in Philadelphia, I passed the spot where he had his awful accident on Lincoln Drive. I’m a huge fan, and certainly Love TKO was huge.
AUK: You’ve written four novels, a memoir, many albums, Cabinet of Wonders. You’re teaching, revising all the oldies in that huge collection and songwriting, of course. And then there are the gigs. Do you ever have time for anything but music?
WS: That’s a good question. I have time for cooking. I hope I have time for living a supportive and high-quality family life, but it’s the Cabinet that doesn’t leave time for anything else. That’s quite all-encompassing: the booking of it and the rehearsing and the preparing of my introductory poems for it, handling all the invoices afterwards. But I’ve always said, to me, it’s all the same. I mean, sometimes I’m leaning over here and picking up a guitar. It’s right there. But I’m at this desk, whatever’s happening in the daytime. I mean, unless I’m on errands, I’m sitting at this desk. And sometimes that’s writing songs. Other times it’s the endless, awful self-promotion that goes with what I do that didn’t used to be that way at all, which is just the way music is nowadays.
AUK: You are now on a new label.
WS: Yes, I quite like that. The idea of making something with such love and care, regardless of whether anyone likes it or not, and then having to promote everything oneself, it’s too much for me. I mean, it just blows my mind. I admire anybody who thinks that’s the way to go, as it were, independent or in charge, but I mean, I just can’t deal with it.
I want it to be like it used to be. I want there to be hookers and cocaine and problems. No, I don’t want any of those things, but I liked that paradigm. The moment it went promote yourself, I was less into the whole thing, I suppose. This is a phenomenally ambitious album for me to make. David’s arrangements are pristine. They’re like David Axelrod’s. It’s incredible that I could even get this album made; that I would spend money doing so is such a quixotic quest.
AUK: So, transitioning between the solitary structured part of writing songs and books and all the other duties, and the collaborative spontaneous nature of recording albums, do you have to compartmentalise that?
WS: I think not. I think writing is a lonely business whether you’re writing an article or a novel or whatever; you can’t do it with other people around. I suppose you could be working on a train, but you are going to write up this article. It’s not something you’re going to do at a party. It’s lonely and requires solitude. I mean, I stand alone on a stage often enough, but music is so the opposite of that. And I think, in fact, rather than compartmentalize, I like the way they complement each other and make me feel social. Music is social. You play it. I’m alone on the stage, but I’m in front of people. And when you make it with a band, it’s like being at a party.
That’s why some of the best record producers might not have known anything about music technique, but they knew how to make people comfortable in a studio situation. Making an album and playing with a band is like that too. The Cabinet of Wonders is very like that. That’s my little party I’m throwing, and I want everybody to be happy. I want everybody to have food backstage and the drink that they want, and I want to introduce everybody to everybody, where you have a little meeting beforehand, which is like breaking the ice at the party. Of course, when I put out my first novel, early 2000s, there were less people generally writing novels. Now, everyone has written their rock memoir, but there were less people writing novels and making music. Kinky Friedman and Jimmy Buffett did it. Since then there’s been quite a lot of people doing it, and I bet they all see the charm of those two things actually going together.
I review those books, not a lot, but I reviewed plenty of those books for the Wall Street Journal. The Peter Wolf I didn’t review, but I think it’s an excellent book. The one by the guy in Steely Dan, Donald Fagan, is a fantastic book. And another one I read recently I thought was beautiful was Chris Hillman from The Byrds. There’s been a lot of great rock memoirs over the years, but I don’t see those in the same genre as somebody attempting to write a novel, if you see what I mean.
AUK: You have written one memoir.
WS: I have, but not my memoirs. It was somebody else’s memoir, and the only way they’d write it was if I wrote it for them. So, I did countless interviews with Mark Morris, who’s a very beloved friend of mine and suggested he write it. He finally called my bluff. He said, “I will do it, but I’ll only do it if you do it for me.” I mean, the chances of me doing that for anyone else ever are very tiny, but this was just the way it happened. I’m proud of the book and very glad I did it.
AUK: On the new record, I know you’re 60 now, if my math is correct. That used to be three-quarters of the way through life; now it’s perhaps two-thirds, but either way that leaves some time left. Some of the songs seem to have to do with later in life and retirement. What has got that on your mind?
WS: I’d say that’s a constant theme of my work and always has been. I could go through every album. Confessions of St. Ace has a picture of me dying on the cover. And on the back of Why We Fight, I’m face down in a swimming pool like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. There are intimations of mortality throughout all my work. I don’t find myself particularly scared of death, yet ghosts and death and murder haunt part of my work.
AUK: Where did the direction of, say, jazz-pop enter your process?
WS: I’m very influenced by the music of Creed Taylor, who produced music on the CTI jazz label, most of it recorded by Rudy Van Gelder. I love those records. I love the playing on them. I love the choice of material. I love Don Sebesky and Bob James’s arrangements. To me, it’s that pop version of jazz, which was disdained by the jazz purists for years, that ended up being the blueprint for ’70s cop show themes. You can hear that music on the Rockford Files. Bob James wrote the theme tune to Taxi. Because of that, I felt there was a cop show theme idea we could do with the music, which Nagler was working on separately, it turned out. I just write lyrics when I think of a little story, and I just love that idea of the One Last Heist.
It’s a very skilful way to write a lyric. I’m not sure anybody else is paying attention, but that’s totally cool. There’s a particularly sweet spot for me with a song where you don’t know whether it’s me singing about me and my career in the record or him singing about his One Last Heist coming up because they just sit there in tandem. I’ve written quite a few songs that way. There’s another one that always springs to mind called You’re a Song on The Sound of His Own Voice. What I try and do is make it so it doesn’t matter whether it’s a metaphor or it’s the real story. The end of that song, the climax, the bridge, is killer.
AUK: At the end you say, “I don’t want to give up at all.”
WS: That’s the thing. It’s that drive in the creative artist (or perhaps the career criminal) to just say, “Oh, I’ve said I’m retired, but maybe all this proves is I can’t let it go. I’ve got to keep going. I can never let this go. This is what I do. This is what I’m good at doing.” And that’s what the song’s about. Maybe I don’t want to give up at all.
AUK: But can a person with a thirst for creating ever manage to actually accomplish, get done what you want to do in life as you go along? I have so much music, books, other art forms
WS: A library shouldn’t be only a record of what you’ve written or read or listened to. It can be that, but a proper library is something where you go, “Oh, that’s what I want now. I’ve never previously gone to that book or listened to that record.” The greatest feeling in the world is when you pick something up, and you go, “Oh, it’s here for me now.” Like a reference library. It’s dictionaries of quotations and jazz records and the children’s literature encyclopedia. I’m not looking at those books every day or ever anymore because of Wi-Fi, but they’re there when I need them. When you want a definitive fact rather than something you then have to research to find out whether it actually is true or not, they’re very good.
I’m never satisfied with my artistic output. I can always work harder, but I am very happy with this record. Whatever it achieves or doesn’t achieve in the world, it has very much come out like I wanted it to come out. In the end, art is its own reward. I mean, why are we doing it? We’re doing it to give other people pleasure, but mostly to give ourselves pleasure. And you hope that those things will intersect in some kind of magic Venn diagram, and then you got the business side to deal with.
AUK: On Hanging Up the Sickle, was sickle a lyric device for rhyming or does that have some other meaning to it? One of those rhymes brought up Travis Bickle from the Scorsese film Taxi Driver.
WS: Well, isn’t that the kind of guy who Death would hand over to? The setup of that song, I heard that phrase hanging up the sickle years ago. I might have misheard it. I can’t remember where I heard it. Maybe someone saying it. I have no idea, but it’s been in my notebook for years, and I’ve gone past it many times. For some reason, one time recently I passed it, and I thought, oh, Death’s hanging up the sickle and he’s going to hand it over to someone because he wants to retire. He’s had enough. And I thought of that story, something like Meeting in Samarkand by Amin Maalouf.
AUK: It reminded me of Peter Ustinov’s novel, The Old Man and Mr Smith. In it, both God and Death or Satan descend to Earth in human form. The Devil is fed up with being, well …. The Devil.
WS: I haven’t yet read that book or know what it’s about, but that is perfect. It’s exactly the right reference. It’s as though I’ve read that book. Death wants to give up. He’s tired of being death. So, he’s picked someone and, well, … they’ve got no choice. But he’s trying to seduce them into taking over because he wants to be free of being death. He’s had enough, and he feels like he’s doing his job by the numbers, and he wants to move on and do something a little more creative. Meanwhile, he’s saying, “Forget your dead-end job. I’ve got a real opportunity for you, and this next guy’s going to be Death for all eternity.” Once I’ve got that idea, then I just sit down and bang the lines around till they make sense for me. David led that to some fun places, that song. We really got together on that one. There’s a lovely little conversation between the flute and the piano. It’s really cool.
AUK: We have a little herd, so I had a tough time with the first few lines of Hello Dead Horse.
WS: “Where it goes can I flog you again?” It’s not really about a horse, and in fact, it includes the phrase one last heist.” It is a phrase that I use, and people make fun of me for using this phrase. I’m sure I’m not the only one to use it, but I use it in a quite specific way, which is when I have to go to New York to do a gig when it’s Christmas. I’m just settling down for Christmas. I’ve got to have a week off, and we’ve got to watch some movies or what have you. I always say, “Okay, just one last heist before Christmas.” And that’s what it feels like to me. It’s like you have to get over this final hump. But what if you don’t get over that final hump? There’s going to be no Christmas, that kind of thing.
Or like going to the supermarket for that awful trip right before Thanksgiving when you’ve forgotten something. It’s just one last heist. So that phrase was on my mind and coincidentally ended up in two of the songs that happened to be the first and last songs on the album. But Hello Dead Horse, with its beautiful Bert Bacharach kind of Gilbert O’Sullivan vibe, I hope that makes clear, not that it wouldn’t be clear anyway, what the pivot, the axis that the first song, One Last Heist, operates on between the criminal and the artist. Hello Dead Horse is a singer of a long-broken-up band, ringing up his old bandmates who haven’t spoken in years and probably hate each other and saying to them, “Look, there’s money on the table. Please do it. Please do it.”
That is a very old lyric of mine that I first sang as a rock song. I mean a balls-out rock song with the Minus Five. I think we did it a couple of times when I lived in Seattle in the ’90s with Scott and Peter and those guys. He had a whole version of it, but I never recorded it. And at some point, I went, I want to revisit that lyric. So, I gave it to David without him even knowing it already had a song that was full-out rock-and-roll. This one’s just a beautiful little song.
AUK: Take the song This Knowledge Dies with Me. But does it? I mean, you have left evidence of your time on Earth.
WS: The narrator is mad. There’s a place called the Jurassic Museum of Technology in California. I can’t go into what that incredible pastiche of a museum that is. There’s a great book called Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders about it by Lawrence Wexler. I bought a book in the gift shop of that museum in about 1992, and it’s called No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again. And it’s letters written to the Griffith Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles, 1915 to 1935, by the kind of people who think if they write to an observatory: “Mr Wilson, please show Mr Einstein your big telescope so he can tell us all about it. He has no big telescope, but we know he is a big scientist. Some weeks ago I wrote you a letter. Not yet having heard from you, I was wondering if you received my letter.” I read these many years ago and thought, oh, those beautiful people who feel that they have some knowledge to tell these scientists about. I picture this guy in his house with all these equations on the wall, kind of like a serial killer, trying to communicate with these people who just aren’t in touch with him at all because he’s writing these anonymous letters to them. That song goes on a trip of a trip of a trip towards the end. But in answer to your question, no, because I hope that if the physical media somehow magically survives the impending doom and holocaust that we’re about to go through, perhaps CDs will be found.
AUK: Perhaps they’ll send one on one of Elon Musk’s rockets like they did with the Voyager with Chuck Berry and Bach songs.
WS: Quite. I’ve actually got that. I mean, look over here. That’s one of my favorite box sets, which was actually a gift from that memoir I wrote, which is a beautiful reissue of the record they sent up into outer space with instructions of how to play the record for aliens.
AUK: You wrote a very interesting phrase, reminding me of a line from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – “And the mobile spirit / Transcends the abyss / At the edge of eternity.”
WS: “Please be assured that I know the bliss when the blindness of sight disappears with a kiss, and the blind owl takes wing to the snake silent hiss and the mobile spirit transcends the abyss on the edge of eternity.” That’s just me letting my mind wander… What’s the mobile spirit? I mean, it just sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? If you want the honest answer, it’s me letting my mind go and write the most poetical lines that I could imagine about being a doomsday prophecy of a mad person who’s writing with their supposed scientific findings. “The blindness of sight disappears with a kiss.” That is from Dr Trelawney in Anthony Powell’s epic 12-volume series Dance to the Music of Time, which are some of my favorite novels, and which I’ve taught a class in actually at the Rosenbach (museum in Philadelphia), a year-long class. The blindness of sight is something that Dr Trelawney’s Mrs Erdleigh talks about. It’s the human condition, something a mystic says in that book.
AUK: In that breezy song, Penelope, is that a reference to Greek mythology?
WS: Yes. It’s not a reference to Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, but it’s coming out at the right time. Couldn’t they have just used this theme for Penelope? I think the title was originally Tales of Brave Penelope, which I thought sounded a bit patronizing. So I changed it to Penelope.
AUK: Perhaps a nod to Cream’s Tales of Brave Ulysses?
WS: Exactly. So, I was thinking, I can think of three great songs about The Odyssey: Home at Last by Steely Dan, Calypso by Suzanne Vega and Tales of Brave Ulysses. There are countless others, but those are three that popped into my mind. What it’s kind of about is a moment of enlightenment at the end of the trip, rather like Ulysses in Tennyson’s poem, where he’s kind of going, oh, could have avoided all that and stayed at home and had a good time. And why did you wait for me? What the fuck was I doing?” And it’s not that he wasn’t forced to do it all, but that he could have not set out in the first place. Although it’s him talking, it’s kind of looking at The Odyssey from the perspective of those who only stand and wait.
AUK: She put her husband through hell with all those trials.
WS: She did. That backing track is like Gerry Rafferty and Ned Doheny, which is why there’s a big sax solo in the middle of it. It’s a song about any bloke asking any woman, or it’s a song about asking any woman why they put up with them. That’s what the song’s about. I mean, I’ve never even said it that succinctly.
AUK: If, like Odysseus, you came back after 20 years gone, what would your wife do? Would she go all Penelope on you?
WS: Blimey. That’s an interesting thought. Set off on tour when I’m 60. Return when I’m 80. Heaven knows. I saw a great map of New York the other day with Ithaca and Troy three miles apart and a red line between them where somebody just wrote, “I just can’t work out how this took so fucking long.”
AUK: From Not My Speed – “She who travels fastest, travels alone.” You basically gender swap the Kipling poem The Winners.
WS: I must admit, and it’s weird you bring up Kipling because I just met a bloke at the Steven Page Summer Camp who asked me to read some Kipling for the Kipling website. He thought I had a nice voice for reading some Kipling, and I’d love to do that, in fact, because my father is a huge Kipling fan. Of course, we all know the various colonial negativity towards Kipling, but use of words is fantastic there.
AUK: The poem is all about men accomplishing things faster than women, but you’ve turned the gender around. Is it to do with feminine independence?
WS: I did not know that was a Kipling specifically about men versus women. That is, as it were, a cliché now. Or not, but a well-known quotation that I’ve just put to my own use in this particular song. This song is really about two people who aren’t very well suited for each other. What I love about the tune is when it spreads out into that big chorus, “you’re not my flower, you’re not my weed, you’re not my…” It was such an incredible chorus or bridge or whatever it’s called that when the song is in the outro, I wanted it to go back into that and have that Herb Alpert-like horn singing on it. It’s very sad that verse. “I wanted to write you the song of all songs, but now I know something I’ve known all along.” I like that one. “Words and a tune are the last thing you need. You’re not my speed.” To me, that’s a tragic line about how we all try to communicate, and we can’t communicate with each other in the ways that seem like they would work. My favorite line on the album is, “You get nothing back if your magic’s black.” I love words that just fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
AUK: As we talked about at the beginning, you are going out to sing with the Smithereens. What is it like reinterpreting someone else’s classic catalogue compared to performing your own extensive catalogue?
WS: You are asking the right person because I have been thinking about that a lot for the last two months since I put that setlist I’m going to sing on a Spotify playlist and listen to it over and over and over. I think I’ve managed to explain it to myself. When I do my own stuff, I only have me in the songs to live up to. It’s very natural to me. It doesn’t matter if I fuck it up. I’m good at fucking things up. I’m not embarrassed to do so. If you do a song that somebody’s requested, you can’t remember, it’s going to go wrong sometimes. You might fall over. It doesn’t matter. Singing with the Smithereens, it is a band I like a lot, and I’m very old friends with the drummer Dennis (Diken), and he asked me to sing with them. I was very honored. My voice is very similar in range to Pat’s (DiNizio) voice. So, it was clever of them, a good pick. But I have much more worry about these. Nobody’d be able to tell this on stage, but I really want to sing these songs right.
I want to honor that band, and they’ve put trust in me. I don’t want to overstate it; they’ve just asked me to sing some songs, and that’s fine. But they put their band in my hands. I’m going to be the lead singer, and I want their audience to look up there and go, “Yes, this is a good version of The Smithereens.” What I’ve found is it actually made me approach it in a completely different way. I’ve worked probably harder on these Smithereens songs than I have on rehearsing songs of my own because I’m doing something for someone else and I want it to be really fucking good. I don’t want to go up there with bits of paper around my feet where I’ve got to refer to everything and don’t know the lyrics. That is literally like a nightmare, isn’t it? When you turn up for an exam, and you’re not ready for it, or you’ve got no pants on or whatever it is. It’s been a really exciting process. And what it means is that going into these first two gigs on Friday and Saturday, I am ready because it’s serious business.
AUK: I can imagine. It’s certainly not as if you are singing karaoke, is it?
WS: Well, it isn’t, and also, it’s deep. I mean, let’s not foreground my anxiety about it. Let’s foreground my excitement about it because I’m going to play with what is essentially a phenomenal power trio. I’ve seen them live since they asked me. It’s a great rock band. We’re talking about Marshall amps. You know what I mean? This is not my normal vibe standing on stage. This is a loud band with full harmonies. Basically, they don’t really mind whether I play the electric guitar, the acoustic guitar or no guitar. In fact, I’ve decided I’m going to play the acoustic guitar because there’s a lot on the recordings, and I’m very comfortable with the acoustic guitar in my hands. But they’re allowing me fully to express myself, and I want it to be good.
AUK: I happily own all four volumes of rarities and such in the Dynablob series, which you’ve come up with an anagram of Bob Dylan.
WS: That is because the first Dynablob, I just thought I’d put some outtakes on a CD. It was so cheap and easy to do back then. It still is. And I thought, oh, I’ll do the cover of John Wesley Harding, but in reverse, like Nick Lowe did Bowie and Bowie did Lowe and Nick Lowe did Bowie without the E and all that.
AUK: In a similar vein, what possessed you to record the Secret Series?
WS: Well, good question. Maybe the answer’s kind of COVID, like a project, something to do. I’ve never really printed my words on my record sleeves, because I like people to have a total experience when they’re listening to music. I don’t like them to be looking at the words. I want them to hear the whole thing. And that’s even more so now the music’s better. But I just thought it was a very interesting project to go back to, because when you write a song solo acoustic, it might go like this. And then when you record it in a band, suddenly you’ve got this riff on it because that’s what’s happened. And there’s harmonies on it, and there’s a solo in a particular place. So, when you come to play it solo acoustic again, you put all the nice stuff and the nice chords you’ve invented.
And I thought it would be a really nice thing to take my largest band albums, of which there are 12, strip them right back and go way beyond unplugged, rehearse them a lot and then record them quite quickly. These came out as a series of 12 books with introductions about what I was trying to do on the album. That was in a subscription series of 250. At the end of it, everybody got one of these beautiful little slick cases to put it all in and a caddy for the CDs, et cetera. I just thought on one level it was something to sell and, on another level, it was a long journey I took with 250 fans of mine. We delivered a book or two every three or four months, and it took three and a half years, and it was a very beautiful experience for everybody.
That’s the high-priced item on the merch table, but because of COVID, the books went from costing 700 to 1800, and then tariffs and increased postage. It was insane, and we ended up making nothing at all. But it was a great project, and I’m very, very glad I did it.