You've decided to do an entire album of covers of death ballads this time. Why?

I guess my answer to that is "why not?"

There are shipwreck ballads, murder ballads, even an infanticide ballad, all written a long time ago. Which one was the oldest song on the record?

I suppose one answer would be to say that the songs are all at this point only half a year old, because they were only recorded last August.  But I don’t know how old the songs really are, and most certainly some of them have their roots in the very ancient past even if the songs themselves were created at a later date. Some of them seem to be continuations of even primeval culture at heart, containing the remnants of mythic or pre-Christian religious significance, although I would say that the oldest of the songs as they stand probably date, in their earliest forms, from about 15^th or 16^th centuries. I think that’s really the period of the earliest flowerings of the ballad form. Some of the songs in their proto-forms were probably accompaniments to dance or drama performances with pagan ritualistic significance, which survive on in things like Mummer’s plays and Morris dancing.

Did it take long to put together this new album? Is there leftover material that may yet see the light of release?

Some of the songs I had been singing for about four or five years before recording, like ‘The Cruel Mother’, and others were relatively newer to me, like ‘Sweet William’ and ‘On The Banks of Red Roses.’ Songs like ‘The Two Brothers’ and ‘Admiral Cole’ have been in the live repertoire for a year or so now, when I’ve been playing gigs as a trio with Gareth and Alex, who play guitar and drums on the record. The album was recorded in about six days in an old hunting lodge in the Scottish countryside, and mixed in two days in Will’s brother’s studio in Kentucky. There are several leftover songs which remain unmixed and it’s not clear what will happen with them. There are perhaps only one or two out of about four or five leftovers that I’d be happy to have released. I have about another 8 to 10 traditional songs which I’m singing at the moment and hope to record one day, but I’m also writing songs again at the moment and I think the next record will be of those songs I’m writing rather than the traditional ones.

Will would be Will Oldham.

Yes.

With the homogenization of popular music styles these days and the huge reliance on modern music technology, how easy is it for you to keep ploughing your furrow?

I don’t really understand your question. It seems to imply that the music I make doesn’t have anything to do with modern music technology, which isn’t really true. For instance, the last album was recorded entirely digitally, while all previous records have been analogue. I don’t see the music I make as anti-modern in any way, I don’t consider it regressive. And digital recording technology to me, at its best, is more about democratization rather than homogenization of music. I tend to think that I just make and record music using whatever tools are to hand, and at the moment it’s mostly an acoustic guitar and voice – so in that sense I don’t see any difficulty in continuing to do what I’m doing, although I don’t intend, as you say, to plough the same furrow forever.

How vibrant is the folk/roots music scene in the UK? One imagines for any genre to survive, there has to be a fairly stable group of practitioners and aficionados.

I don’t really know much about the folk/roots music scene in the UK, but I imagine it’s fairly vibrant. I don’t particularly feel part of it. I’m sure there are a lot of great players and singers of what you might call traditional British folk music around nowadays, but I have to admit I’m not as aware of them as I perhaps should be. For instance, John McCusker who played fiddle on my record is very much an established part of what I would call the Scottish/British folk music scene in the traditional sense of the term, although none of the other players on the record have that kind of background of coming up through folk clubs and touring in traditional folk bands and so on.

The early press about you around the time of "The Rye Bears A Poison" is filled with references comparing your singing voice, your whole persona to Palace, who's Will Oldham. We love Will's music and have also interviewed him before. He's now producing you. How did the two of you meet and start working together, not just on this record but on other stuff as well?

I suppose I first met Will (right picture) when he was playing with one of his Palace bands in Glasgow in 1995. I still lived in this little village in the countryside at the time, but I traveled to Glasgow to see the show and gave him a tape of some music, which next year was released as a single on Palace Records.

How different is performing your own material compared to covering other people's compositions?

Not a lot different really. I don’t really think of singing traditional songs like the ones on No Earthly Man as covering other people’s compositions, because the songs don’t ‘belong’ to any one individual. Of course I am conscious of other people’s interpretations of the songs I sing, but when I’m singing them I suspend that consciousness and sing them as if they were my own. I don’t really see if there could be any other way of approaching the songs. No, wait- actually, maybe it’s the other way round- maybe the songs I write myself I sing as if I hadn’t, as if they were passed-down songs. I suppose it amounts to the same thing- I think there has to be an element of displacement between singer and song at some point in the process.

Seeing that very few people must have heard the original versions of the songs on "No Earthly Man", how faithful were you to the songs?

I don’t know about ‘original’ versions, but there are certainly the versions which informed my own, which are by no means the definitive versions. In that sense, there being no definitive version, there is really no such thing as faithfulness to the song. However, I think there is a faith to the spirit of something which it helps to be aware of, which comes from a consciousness of past voices moving through the song and guiding you in its singing, but allowing you to adapt what you need to adapt to the needs of your own mind and heart and voice. Essentially I think it helps to be familiar with the context of the songs and their inherent, numinous ‘feel’, in order to sing them, and that having that familiarity truly allows one the license to f**k around with them and tailor them to one’s own needs. I don’t know that I’ve fully earned that license yet, but nevertheless some of the songs have been changed by me a lot more than others. For example, ‘The Cruel Mother’ is a kind of amalgamation of different versions- a melody from here, a verse from here, another verse from somewhere else. ‘On The Banks Of Red Roses’ is more or less exactly as I heard it from the singing of Ella Ward- any obvious changes I’ve made with that song are subconscious.

I'm fascinated by the history of the ballads. How did a song like "Sweet William" transfer across the Atlantic to become 12 versions in the Appalachians?

Probably by the process I’ve described above- just a natural process of the way things change as they pass from person to person and place to place. I think of these songs, any songs actually, as fulfilling a need- a communicative need, and a psychological and a spiritual need specifically, in the same way as spoken human language fulfils a need of communication. In that sense, they have to exist, and if they are to continue existing, they have to adapt to different singers, different audiences, different environments.

Could you introduce us to the people who played on the record?

There’s my friend Gareth who used to be in Appendix Out with me and with whom I’ve known as long as I’ve lived in Glasgow. He’s also in a disco pop band called The Mitford Girls. Tom is another old friend who was in Appendix Out, and is also in the Pastels and International Airport. There’s Alex the drummer who I’ve played with for a couple of years now, who has a band called Scatter and also plays with Richard Youngs, among others. I met Isobel, who used to be in Belle and Sebastian, through Alex last year. Kirsten is a Dutch harpist friend of Alex. Phil Johnson who plays flute on one song I’d never met before- he is a friend of the engineer, Jim. John McCusker is a fiddle player from Glasgow who’s been playing and touring from a very early age. Paul Oldham wasn’t at the recording session in Scotland – he overdubbed his part at the mixing session in Kentucky. A bunch of uncredited people sing on the last song on the record too, including people who were working on the farm connected to the studio.