Sue
Speaks
Sue Foley will be appearing live at the Lagoon City Marina in Orillia, on August 3, Saugeen Rocks in Walkerton on August 4, the Festival of Friends in Hamilton on August 10, the Roots & Blues Festival in Salmon Arm, BC on August 17 & 18, (in Madison, Wisconsin on August 23), and in Kingston on August 24. Check her website, www.suefoley.com, for updates.
The TBS's Blues Doctor, Julie Hill, sat down over Indian food with Sue Foley, to discuss her new recording Where The Action Is, and the two years since the Juno Award-winning and multiple Maple Blues Award-winning Love Comin' Down. The latter led to performances all over North America and Europe, including opening spots for the late John Lee Hooker, the Neville Brothers, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Jennifer Warnes, Jonny Lang, Dick Dale, Booker T & the MGs, and Van Morrison, among many others, and, three times, for B.B. King, as well as in B.B.'s own club in New York City. And, among other international press, Sue Foley was profiled in Britain's MOJO magazine, in which Love Comin' Down was named one of the top ten blues releases in 2000.
Sue Foley on the past two years: "After I made Love Comin' Down, I decided to form a steady touring band. I came back to Canada in `97, and, up until that point, I'd been using 4 or 5 different groups of guys. I had groups in Ottawa, Austin, Western Canada, New York, and one or two other places. I was touring around by myself and digging up these groups of musicians as I went. So, when Love Comin' Down came out, I decided to form a band, which I have kept since we started touring Love Comin' Down: Tom Bona on drums, from Toronto, Mike Turenne on bass, from Ottawa, and Graeme Guest, from Edmonton, on keyboards. For the two years since it came out, we toured that record and those songs - in Europe a couple times last summer, all over Canada, and in the U.S., including California, Florida, and the upper east coast including Boston, and New York City. It took a while to tour it out."
On the Where the Action Is: "The new album is pretty rockin' - excellent drivin' music, keeps your foot heavy. There's more of a rawness, less self-consciousness, more confidence on my part, more abandon, more colouring outside the lines, it's more aggressive."
"There was one more song recorded for the CD, but it was mid-tempo, and would have made the balance of material seem slower, so it would have sounded like a slower record overall, and I wanted a more rockin' record. The sequencing is also critical. I actually sequenced the record 3 times, to give it a rockin' feel, and also thematically, the way the songs are put together; I finally found the final sequence to get the right balance."
"It's my favourite CD (to date, of 7). I like to stay current with my stuff; I'm always more interested in what's current than what's past, and I think that there's just a really high confidence level on this CD that I hadn't attained to this point."
On the production by Colin Linden: "Colin red-lined a lot of the recording process. He was over-driving the amps and the microphones, so that you hear a lot of distortion, but it's a real natural distortion, the kind of distortion that you'd get at a club, you know, at 3 am, when a band is pumping out - it feels like you're there".
On making the CD: "It was a really easy record to make - it was effortless. Most of what you hear is live. A lot of the vocals are over-dubbed, but there are a few songs where it's completely live. `Every Hour' is all live, except for one guitar over-dub: I did two guitar solos - one's acoustic and one's electric, so I couldn't do them at the same time! But the vocals and the band are all live, off-the-floor. That's what you're hearing on a lot of them: `Roll With Me Henry', `Down The Big Road Blues', `Stupid Girl' are all live. It's all pretty live. It's very unusual to have such minimal over-dubs."
"This record is easy to perform live, since it's so stripped down. It's literally guitar, keyboard, bass and drums - there's no horns on it, there's minimal background vocals. We play every song live - most nights we play the whole album."
On the original tunes: "Among my favourites (songs on the new recording) is `Baby, Where Are You', because it's kind of Stones-y. To me this record was a bit of a return in a way to Stones-y kind of stuff. The Stones were the band that got me into blues in the first place, so making a record that sounds kind of Stones-y is almost like coming full circle musically. So it's a bit of rock `n' roll - `Baby, Where Are You' is a pretty straight r&b song that sounds like it could have been written for `Tattoo You'."
"The most personal song on the record is `Two Bluebirds', which has a very low-down feeling. It's written about a friend of mine in a specific circumstance, whereas a lot of the other songs are a little more general."
"'Vertigo Blues' is written specifically about travel, and not taking care of yourself, when you get that vertigo feeling, specifically when I was in England and the room was spinning after travelling for 36 hours."
"'Where the Action Is', the cover track, is the whole theme for the record. That song is to lead off the record, it's exactly where my head's been at lately - sort of feeling like I'm a little on the outside of the business or the scene or something, and wanting to sort of bust in on it, and I think that's the whole theme of the record, this person's sitting on the edge, ready to go, where the action is."
On the cover tunes: "There's been a lot of hoopla about covering `Stupid Girl'. A lot of people think that it's too misogynistic for a woman to sing - but when a woman sings it, it brings it back to: maybe the Stones weren't so sexist, maybe they were just making fun of a certain person, and it shouldn't be taken so seriously. Everything's too PC now, so, when I sing it, it brings it back to `there's a stupid girl', `cause everybody thinks that. I think that political correctness has come so far that we can't even speak the truth anymore."
"I chose Roll With Me Henry `cause it's a straight-ahead Texas guitar thing. When Etta (James) did it, she had a male singer and background vocals and all that, making it a big band r&b tune, and I just thought that it would sound really good stripped down, with just the electric guitar doing the lines."
"'Down The Big Road Blues' is just me & Colin, a Matty Delaney tune, which I chose after combing through old blues records, and Colin has such a strong rapport with that music, and so do I, that we blended into it pretty gracefully."
On the state of blues: "I think that what the blues is missing right now is that there's not enough risk being taken. There's too much respect, too much emulation, too much colouring between the lines, thinking they gotta play it just like Muddy and Wolf did, and a lot of times the average blues band you go see is not taking any risks musically - they're not putting anything on the line, and that's not what the blues is about - the blues is about telling the truth. And if the truth is that you grew up in suburbia as a white middle class person, then you can sing that - there's nothing wrong with that - you can't sing like you're from the south and worked on the railroads, it's not going to come across. I think that a lot of the preservationists in the blues are the people that are ruining the spirit of it, because they're so intently keeping things a certain way, and, if anyone steps out of that and makes a risky record or a left turn in their career, then everybody gets all up in arms, but the blues should be able to take you anywhere musically. That's what the Stones let it do - they started out as blues musicians wanting to be like Muddy Waters and Slim Harpo or Jimmy Reed, and they became themselves, and made the greatest rock and roll music. And there were probably a lot of people who thought that they shouldn't do that, that they should be keeping that blues stuff, but, if they had, they wouldn't have made all that great music."
"There's a lot of resistance to that - a lot of people who think that it (the blues) will lose its integrity, or lose touch with where it came from, but people like Muddy and Howlin' Wolf weren't thinking that when they were making it, they were thinking about keeping it modern. They were on the edge, taking it further, and that's what I'd like to see more of. I love R.L. Burnside, too."
On her music listening habits: "Since I was 16, I listened to nothing but blues. I saturated myself in everything. Now, I could put on Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf, I listen to all that stuff a lot, `cause I still haven't learned everything from it - I still have a lot more to learn - but I try to listen to stuff that has a sense that it's happening now. To me that`s really important. I like Jimmy Vaughan's new album - he's taking his own turn. You can't say that Jimmy's not a blues player, but you can't say that's just a blues album. And I love the Sidemen record - Colin produced it, and they pushed the envelope. I haven't bought a new blues record in a long time. I'm listening to Paul Westerberg's new album (ex-Replacements). Lately I listen to a lot more rock and roll, I like stuff that drives you a little better."
"When I'm off the road, I'm a full-time mom to my son, running a household, not a lot of time to practice. But I work on my technique, particularly my flamenco, right hand technique, which I use in my blues playing, and which improves me as a guitar player on the whole."
In conclusion: "If I'm taking risks, if I feel like I'm growing and that each album is my best, then I feel happy - I feel good if I'm taking chances and getting new places."
`Where The Action Is' is licensed by Koch Records Canada, using the original Colin Linden mixes, and the original Alan Messer artwork.(In the U.S. it's licensed by Shanachie, who remixed 7 of the tracks, and also changed some of the artwork.)
- Julie Hill