Track By Track: Hobnail’s Rob Joass On Boots And All

Kiwi Celtic Country Folk band Hobnail is celebrating their 25th anniversary with a nationwide tour and a new compilation album titled Boots And All.

Band member and chief songwriter Rob Joass spoke to The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda and took him through the stories behind every one of the 16 tracks that comprise the new album.

Listen to the track by track rundown here:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: It’s a compilation of the best work of the past 25 years?

RJ: Yeah, depending on how you interpret best, but yeah, it’s a selection from right across of the more enduring tracks, there was some stuff that we haven’t played, a lot of it is stuff that we sort of continued playing. I remember talking to Wayne Mason, Do you know of Wayne Mason?

MD: I do.

RJ: He’s a friend I work with occasionally, and in fact he’ll be playing at our release gig in Wellington. He does a few songs, yeah I’ve known Wayne forever, since I first got here actually, I think I arrived in New Zealand if I’m not mistaken, about the same time as you.

I was reading something you’d written. Anyway, I’m from Sydney Australia, I’ve been here for a little over 25 years now, about 28 years. I met Wayne shortly after and he’s played occasionally in our stuff. We were talking about what’s the best songs, how do you define that? Cause he’s up to best of career stuff as well, and he said probably the songs you still play.

There’s validity to that, but there’s also some songs, particularly for a band like Hobnail, where we have this duality between Saturday night music and Sunday music, if you know what I mean. Stuff that you’re gonna get toes tapping and get people dancing and we love doing that and that’s part of our DNA absolutely. But some of those songs aren’t necessarily the ones that I think of as my best as a songwriter or my best work. At one point we actually would’ve like do have done a double album, but frankly, economics got the better of us with that one.

MD: Maybe for the 50th anniversary?

RJ: Yeah, let’s see. There are some songs that I personally probably would have put on the best of that aren’t, and there’s possibly some stuff that is on there that I wouldn’t have. But it is very representative I think in general of the stuff that people who have seen us over the years will be familiar with, or they’ll at least know where we’ve come from with the whole thing.

MD: Well you’ve got 17 tracks on there that’s not bad.

RJ: Actually, 16, cause when we tried to make a CD out of it what you had was too long, so Blue Sky Song, which is an excellent example of a song that I personally would’ve had on the album but we had to chop that off, it got pulled, so yes we had that conversation.

MD: So, is that on a digital version of the album or is it just gone?

RJ: That didn’t occur to me until after I put everything up that I could’ve listed it on the digital version. No it’s not but the Blue Sky Song is out and it’s on Spotify and all those. And it can be downloaded.

MD: Alright, Well let’s start with the first track on the album, Westbound Train, what can you tell me about that?

RJ: That came about – how much time have we got, cause there’s a short answer and a longer answer…

MD: We have as much time as we want, but we do have to get through 16 tracks so it’s up to you

RJ: Right. So as long as I can be interesting… OK I wrote that in response, for some reason I wanted to add some train songs into a set, and I was sort of doing my YouTube stuff looking for songs and going, ‘oh I’ve started somewhere’ and I kept going ‘nah not like that not like that’, and then I thought, ‘just write it yourself, you idiot.’ It partly came out of something I’d read a short story about, somebody growing up in Kalgoorlie, in the West of Australia, and getting out of there. ‘Cause I imagine that growing up in the middle of the plains of Australia, out there in a mining town would be pretty hellish. In my head, I’m first person when I’m singing that, it’s a young gay guy who’s growing up there and wanted to get out of the mining town. So, it’s writing as a character there. It’s a sort of train and a travel, a leaving home song.

MD: Do you like writing character driven tunes? Putting yourself in that place?

RJ: Yeah, I love songs that are loosely based on a true story, ’cause obviously I come here from another place as well and I think that informs part of the concept of that song growing up somewhere and then moving somewhere else and feeling y’know when you leave things behind, there’s a lot of loss there but then there’s also it’s a great big wide world to wander into.

So, there’s this part of me I write like a lot of singer-songwriters there are a certain amount of songs that are about my feelings and written in the first person but also again sometimes very loosely based on a true story. But I do get sick of hearing me sing about my feelings so actually writing in character can be a really nice release of that. I really enjoy doing it. It’s one of those things that I have to be thinking in that mode to sit down and write that way if I just sit down and write then it just tends to be in the first person or thereabouts but if I’ve got time and I’m being a writer more so, then I’ll think characters and I’ll think situations and try and create something that’s a bit more fictional.

MD: We’ve got ‘Every Single Day‘ next

RJ: Yeah, that was one, well it’s sort of about my feelings, a middle-aged statement on life, but you can dance to it. It’s really about, well like a lot of middle aged people, you find yourself, I became the oldest person in my family once my parents passed away a lot of stuff messes with your head at that point and it’s a really interesting phase to go through and that’s where I was which all sounds sad depending on how you look at it. But what I was definitely trying to do in that song was to embrace the whole idea that you’ve got all this ahead of you though and life is still a wonderful place to be, beats the shit out of the alternative put it that way.

MD: Can I ask you how old you are?

RJ: Fifty-seven.

MD: You’re a youngster.

RJ: Well, it’s all relative.

MD: All right, ‘Deeper Well.’

RJ: It’s an Emmylou Harris song recorded on the Wrecking ball album that Daniel Lanois did, so we definitely changed quite a bit of stuff around. I really like our version, put it that way. Obviously, I liked her version enough in the first place. When it comes to the covers we do, Jo sings quite a lot of our stuff but she’s not a songwriter so occasionally I’ll write something but she’ll say ‘I’ll do that one’, but for the most part we’re kinda looking for songs for her to sing, and I do a lot of the hunting and gathering of those things as well so I remember with that one thinking ‘that would be a really nice, we could do a number on that one’, and I really love the way it came out. Caroline Easter, our drummer, does some great drum work on it and it’s just the whole vibe to the song. It sort of takes elements of what was there in the original but we twist it around and amplify it, get a little bit more full-on I guess because the Emmylou Harris one is just quite, with the Daniel Lanois production is just quite sort of ethereal almost.

MD: Atmospheric.

RJ: It’s very beautiful, we’re a little but more rock & roll.

MD: Alright we’ve got ‘Elbow’ (The Driving Song).

RJ: Elbow is one that I wrote, it’s sort of a relationship song but I pay homage to quite a few albums I really love in there as well about being in a car, but it’s about escaping a relationship and escaping your home-town and just driving, just being in a moment and driving away.

MD: Any of those Bruce Springsteen albums?

RJ: I’m quite familiar with his work put it that way. So it has little elements also of in the writing, yeah that’s a fairly recent one that was on Blue Sky Songs, the album we put out a couple years ago, and certainly as a guitar player there’s little hints of R.E.M in there as well, I was playing it the other day and I mentioned that there was a little bit of R.E.M in there and someone went ‘yeah I thought the driver, eh? and I went ‘yeah you got me on that’. Nothing was plagiaristic or anything but you can hear the Peter Buck guitar.

MD: Nothing wrong with that.

RJ: Hell no, no he was a huge influence on me, his guitar style.

MD: We move onto ‘All Through The Town.’

RJ: Another cover from a very obscure Australian band that I had an album of when I first moved over, they were a band called Club Hoy. That was one that Jo heard and went ‘I’d love to do that song.’ It resonated with some of her feelings at the time that being in a relationship and feeling insecure about it. It’s just one of those ones that we played for a long time, left it alone for a while but when I went back going through the album, it just stands. It’s a really lovely recording. I love the way Jo sings it.

MD: Very cool, alright, ‘Raising My Hands.’

RJ: Right, a song about the end of a long-term relationship. To tangent there, Jo and I were married. We started the band when we weren’t married, but got married and had children. About ten years ago that all came to grief in various ways that we won’t go into any great detail here – it’s not that kind of a programme. But suffice to say, things got a little bit Fleetwood Mac in there for a little while, yeah just a little bit messy. But on the other side of that we continued to play music together as painful as that sometimes was emotionally, but it added a resonance to a lot of stuff. And if anything, that song ‘Raising My Hands’, was about actually getting to the point where you realise that it’s time to move on and get up but not in a defeated way. Life goes on, so as a piece of song-writing I’m very proud of that song, and I love the way it came together in the studio as well, again wonderful work from Caroline and all of them actually.

MD: ‘A Girl Called Johnny.’

RJ: A Waterboys song from our very early days, when we recorded our album ‘String Things’ which was on our twenty-first anniversary, four years ago no. We decided to do a couple of covers that we’d played over the years a lot and were really popular. But we never have done a lot of covers on the album and that was one that was particularly driven by Jo’s violin playing which adds a whole other colour to it. Even when we were playing way back in the early days, like bars all the time and playing lots of covers, never ever did straight up covers. We were never really terribly interested in that kind of thing, So the original has a very distinctive saxophone part which Jo kind of takes off on the violin but then takes it a whole other direction. That’s another one of those ones with Wayne Mason playing piano on. And Jo takes the vocal whereas Mike Scott from the Waterboys sang it originally. It’s a song that we first heard, again we spent a lot of time in Irish bars back in the olden, olden days and a lot of that music got very old for us very quickly, but The Waterboys were always an exception, they had some fabulous songs.

MD: They played here about maybe five years ago now I think at the Civic Theatre. Amazing show.

RJ: I would love to see them yeah. Mike Scott’s a wonderful song writer, he can make some seemingly very simple concepts, ideas just grow, and you never get tired of them. A song like Fisherman’s Blues, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, which we’ve played on and off forever as well. On the one hand it seems like there’s not much to it, but that would be very deceptive, sort of like Tom Petty. Some of the songs are seemingly simple but really not. They would never endure in the way they would if they were as simple as they kind of seem on the surface.

MD: We move onto The Fortune Horses.

RJ: A song I wrote for my children many years ago about what I was hoping for them as they grew up and got brave enough to leave home and travel the world which they’ve actually started doing much to my dismay now. Again it’s another one of those wonderful, weird, strange, middle aged things where maybe from a different perspective you’d look at it and go it would be great when the kids leave home you get all your freedom back, but all I do is walk around missing the noise and their presence.

MD: Fortunately, mine live not too far away, so I’ve got the best of both worlds.

RJ: Well done, yeah well that’s what you hope for really. Me speaking as a person and you as well who wound up living a long way from where my parents were, so yeah that’s a paradox. You never want your children to go far but you certainly went far away from where your parents are. Fortune Horses is about wishing wonderful journeys and bravery and courage and an interesting life.

MD: Then we have ‘Ride On’ next.

RJ: That’s a Christy Moore song, which I remember really hearing for the first time, when Jo and I were in Ireland which must have been at least 20 some years ago now. Never played much in Ireland, went to a whole bunch of sessions in bars and sat around and played with the locals that kind of thing but didn’t do any gigging as such in that part of the world. It was a song I remember driving around and hearing it on local radio. Definitely not for the first time but actually listening to it and going ‘Another one of those, I thought I bet we could do a really cool version of that’, so Jo sings it, and we did a lot of work on the vocal arrangement on that song. I really like the way it came out. Very popular live song, people love that song.

MD: ‘Maria’s Last Words’

RJ: My ode to drinking way too much and killing relationships as a result. Again, let’s just say, loosely based on a true story. A lot of people, particularly people who play music in bars and travel doing that, I do enjoy a drink and I’ve learnt to be better at that but certainly back in the old days… I never killed a relationship with alcohol, but I swept perilously close more than once. That’s a song about that, but a bit of an anthem and certainly that was one of those songs.

In the early period I did write a bunch of songs that would work in that Irish bar environment and that was definitely probably about the last of those, but to this day still kills live. It’s one of those songs we play and what I tried to do in it was to make it sound very much like a drinking song – let’s drink, drink, drink kind of deal. But then turn it around then the story falls apart on the way through; so it’s an anti-drinking song. But it’s still got the chanting, big chorus so I think that’s what works; and people get that on the way through in the first person – it seems you don’t wind up with what you think. The whole idea of the big, drinking song. It seems to come off quite well, I’m pretty proud of that one too.

MD: Then we have ‘Haul Away’

RJ: Haul Away was very early on. That was in that early Irish bar period but it’s probably a very Celtic sounding song that Jo sings and actually Jo wrote the lyrics for that one, so collaborated, I think for probably one of the few times. I normally, as a song writer, take myself off to a quiet place and work by myself. I’m not a great collaborator usually, but Jo wrote lyrics for that one and sings it and it has this touch of The French Lieutenant’s Woman about the lyric. It’s from the early period something we did play a lot; it fell off the radar but we dusted it off for the tour that we’re doing at the moment so it’s come up well.

MD: ‘Where The Wild Things Are’

RJ: Caroline’s favourite, which is a large part of the reason it’s on the album and it’s of course the children’s book, if anybody’s ever had children or a lot of people who haven’t will be aware of it. But when you’re a parent you read that book about a hundred thousand times to young children, but that was one of the one’s I was always happy to read over and over again. It filtered into a lyric that’s not directly related but kind of eludes thematically let’s say, and to me a nice piece of whimsical song writing.

MD: Then we have ‘Baggage.’

RJ: Baggage was, as the title would suggest, a lot to do with the end of the relationship kind of era. So, one of the things I try and do is think about, cause there are enough end of the relationship songs and heartbroken songs. They’ll still be more and there’s always room for more, I should qualify that ’cause I’m down to write another one tomorrow. Fortunately I’m not in my current situation, I’d be drawing from distant memories, however… Baggage is to try and look at it as something from a different perspective; I just try and find a different way of looking at those emotions or whatever you’re going through so it’s not the same sort of narrative all the way through. Baggage is definitely one of those.

That was a finalist for best country song a few years ago. I love the way it came out; we had a couple of guests on that, Al Norman, who’s played with The Warratahs for a bunch of times and has played with so many different bands from Wellington, he’s a fabulous, an old friend too, keyboard player, accordion player. He’s dotted all over this album actually, but he played piano on it and we had another guy Paddy Bergen who played some lap steel on it, so again it has a very country flavour about it, we really love the way the arrangement came together.

MD: Next one is ‘String Things.’

RJ: String Things was my homage to country music in a way, my love song to country music and very sort of almost writing, almost a caricature of a country song.

MD: And when you say a country song, country music is something that means different things to different people, what do you define as a great country song for yourself?

RJ: Well it’s evolved over the years, I grew up, like a lot of people of my era, I was a big fan of glam rock and David Bowie, and the early 70’s was the folk-rock stuff and discovered Bob Dylan, that kind of thing. But then I had my three fat truck driving uncles as I often refer to them in the stories that attached to it, who were big country music fans of the outlaw country, so Waylon Jennings, Willy and all those guys. So, I was blooded on that stuff as well. And love that kind of outlaw country music as a teenager, so that kind of stuck with me and by virtue of that even way back then, big fan of course Neil Young and stuff like Allman Brothers and some of that. Which, at a point when popular music was, and this was in my mid-teens, when popular music was very much getting more and more cocained and smoother in that mid 70’s era and I love that kind of rough around the edges stuff and that always stayed with me. So subsequently when people like Son Volt and Uncle Tupelo and the alt-country stuff popped up about 15 years ago, it was just like it was made for me. Equal parts y’know, dirty rock & roll, those people all obviously loved their Neil Young, grungy stuff and Nirvana but also had the elements of the country music that had wonderful, great stories, great attitude…

MD: And melodies!

RJ: Yeah, the whole routine, absolutely, and great song writing, the whole routine. So yeah, that’s my favourite country music. String Things is a bit more straight up, a fairly straight up country song, but you could imagine, well I would love to imagine someone like Johnny Cash I was about to say but that would be paying myself far to great a compliment. It’s more of a traditional country song in that way and almost an homage to the style in amongst that. And with that one we had a ton of different people coming to play, contribute on the recording of it. So, there was again Wayne Mason, but Al Norman that I mentioned before, wonderful pedal steel player, Buck who now lives in the Coromandel and Cameron Donnell who plays with a bunch of people and Kim Bonnington who’s a great vocalist. So, a lot of guests came in and played on that song. It just has that really great vibe, good fun song we play all the time, and if we don’t, we’re in trouble.

MD: And we don’t want that! ‘Sierra Leone’ next.

RJ: That was our most recently recorded song because we wanted to do something new for the album and I released the solo album about four months ago so I’ve kind of dried the well on my songs. It was suggested to us, we used to do that song, it’s a kiwi classic Coconut Rough song from the 80’s, and we played it occasionally. Again prominently in the original it’s got a keyboard part which we then used violin to take that out and gave it its own sort of flavour, so bought a but more of the folk rock realm than the synth pop realm that it was originally recorded in, and it came out great. It was just one of those experiments and you do it and go ‘that’s awesome.’ Hamish – it’s his vocal contribution, our bass player, sings it, does a great job.

MD: You’ve always got to let the bass player sing one.

RJ: Yeah, exactly – it’s a rule! In fact on some of our albums he’s even contributed two songs. That’s a double Ringo.

MD: And it wraps up of course with ‘Goodnight.’

RJ: Again, one of those songs that they tell us to play. If we try not to play it! We close the show with that one usually all the time. I wrote that on a ferry from Holly Head in Wales to Dublin many, many, many, many years ago. I started writing it then and actually finished it whilst the sun was coming up in O’Connell street in Dublin in the wee smalls. It’s one of those ones where I got onto the ferry hungover as anything thinking ‘I’ll get some sleep in a quiet corner’, and what I wasn’t aware of, was that once you’re between those places, it’s duty free everything, which seemed like everybody on board was having a party of their life. It was like being stuck in the middle of a New Year’s Eve party. It turned out to be a really nice song, wishing everybody love and happiness and mostly I was wishing they’d all go to sleep.

MD: Great, well we made it through the record, and tour is actually underway already, as you alluded to, so how’s it been going?

RJ: So, it’s only the one show so far, we were supposed to be playing Palmerston North last week but there was a venue issue there so we had to postpone that one, so off to the South Island this week playing Nelson and the wonderful Mussel Inn. The last Friday show was actually excellent. We’ve had a fairly stable line up for about twelve or fifteen years. So, when you’ve been playing with people for that long, you never put in a bad show. I think it’s just a joy and we do it infrequently enough that it’s always fresh. We’ve got that foundation that means we are very confident walking on a stage that we’re gonna be able to do the job of entertaining people, which is at the heart of it, what we’re there for. So yeah, great fun and I’m really looking forward to the next few weeks.