KORAL By Robert Dunstan Adelaide singer and guitarist Koral has a busy time ahead of her as she is set to play in solo mode with Melbourne’s The Broads and Ben Mason at The Wheatsheaf Hotel on Friday 22 May and then perform at The British Hotel’s Sunset Sessions on Saturday 30 May. She will then undertake a Friday evening June residency at the Grace Emily with her band, The Goodbye Horses, which will culminate with the official launch of their EP. “Hey, you know more about my gigs than I do at the moment,” Koral laughs when we chat over the phone. “But, hey, that’s why I have a diary.” The singer then goes on to say that the gig with Broads, the dark, acoustic folk duo of Jane Hendry and Kelly Day of The Nymphs, came about due to her performing in Sydney. “I’d taken off to Sydney straight after Adelaide Fringe to do three shows,” she explains. “So I did a little solo show at a sweet little bar called Midnight Special and on the second night I did a show in a private house in Surry Hills with Broads for a membership-only event called High Tea. “So Broads said, ‘Come along and play three songs between our set and then the three of us will do a song together’,” Koral continues. “So, on the day, we learnt an arrangement of Love Hurts and then did it together – amazingly well, actually – that night. “So from that we formed quite a friendship and I now can’t wait to play with them again at The Wheaty,” she enthuses. Koral will also be appearing at Sunset Sessions, a monthly event which features local singer songwriters who took part in The Semaphore Songs Project as part of last year’s Semaphore Music Festival, at Port Adelaide’s British Hotel from 5pm on Saturday 30 May. “Semaphore Songs was a great project to be involved with,” Koral enthuses, “and some great songs came out of it. I loved it because I got to work with Charles Jenkins as my mentor. “And getting to write with someone like Charles on a specific subject was quite a huge learning curve for me, as it was for many of the others involved,” she then says of working alongside the now Melbournebased solo artist who is formerly of Adelaide band The Mad Turks and also Icecream Hands. “But I’d injured my voice and couldn’t speak for a month, so Charles and I did it all via email and it wasn’t until the day of the actual festival that I could use my voice again,” Koral reveals. “But for my show at Sunset Sessions, I’m looking to do it with another Adelaide artist and do the songs from a classic record,” she then says. “The idea is definitely there but I don’t know who I’m going to do it with yet or what the album will be.” Following those escapades, Koral and her band, The Goodbye Horses, will then kick off a month-long Friday evening residency at the Grace Emily Hotel which will involve the official launch of their debut EP.
“That’ll be right at the end of the residency on 26 June,” Koral clarifies. “So on that night the EP will go out into the world and we’ll also be filming a little video clip. “So that’ll be a good one because we’ll also have The Sloe Ruin and Max Savage & The False Idols as our special guests,” she enthuses. “And the three Fridays before that we’ll try and do some interesting kinda stuff because we’ll have some guests [as well as guest bands such as Cosmo Thundercat and St Morris Sinners] and we’ll also throw in some interesting cover songs,” Koral indicates. “So it’ll be a totally different show every night for our residency.” The debut EP was recorded up at Mick Wordley’s Mixmasters studio in the Adelaide Hills. “We first went into the studio in July of last year and recorded the instrumental tracks and then I was meant to do my vocals,” Koral sighs. “But because of the damage to my vocal cords and having to have an operation that didn’t happen until recently. “And the EP runs together in a cohesive way because the idea of just slotting four separate songs on a CD just didn’t appeal to me,” she continues. “That kind of thing makes me shiver a bit because there needs to be some kind of sonic narrative that fits all the songs together.”
IRIS DEMENT By Robert Dunstan American singer Iris DeMent toured Australia for the first time in a long while back in 2013 to promote the release of her latest album, Sing The Delta. She is now returning to our shores and on this occasion will also be performing in Adelaide with special guest Pieta Brow, who is Iris’ daughter-in-law due to her marriage some 10 years ago to like-minded musician Greg Brown. Raised in Arkansas in a Pentecostal household, Iris DeMent wrote her first song, the introspective Our Town, when she was 25 in 1992. The song, which has since been covered by numerous artists and was used during the closing scene and credits for the final episode of TV series Northern Exposure, and its parent album, Infamous Angel, quickly established her as a new artist of note. Iris’ second album, My Life, picked up a Grammy nomination in 1994 for Best Contemporary Folk Album and she was soon counting fellow artists such as Steve Earle, Merle Haggard and Emmylou Harris as fans and has since gone on to work with them. The singer, who played Rose Gentry in the 2000 film Songcatcher and also contributed to its soundtrack, says that Sing The Delta is her first album for some years.
Korals says that, apart from the CD launch, there are some other plans in the works.
“I simply didn’t have enough good songs,” Iris responds when asked why it’s been so long between drinks.
“Sam [Knight], the drummer and coproducer, have been spending a lot of time writing together,” she reveals. “So we are starting to work on the next project but not sure yet if it will be a Goodbye Horses thing or not.
“Some people can manage to write enough good songs for an album every couple of years or so but I don’t. I sure wouldn’t complain about being a prolific writer but I’m not.
“It may be something else again,” Koral suggests, “because Koral & The Goodbye Horses is a band with a specific sound and an alleyway for that style of writing and recording.
“So I just waited until I had what I believed to be some really good songs, which I think they all are, and that they all had something to say. They are also songs I think I could sing forever if need be.
“But, with Sam and I, I think there will be other musical avenues we’ll travel down that may well end up being completely different.
Iris roped in such hot players as Al Perkins, who had played dobro 20 years earlier on her debut, and Double Trouble’s keyboard player Reese Wynans to work on the album.
“So things are up in the air at the moment but I’ve also been researching into heading over to the US on some kind of songwriting journey,” Koral concludes. “I’d like to meet up with as many musicians as I can and write as many songs with them as I can.” Koral will play with Melbourne’s Broads and Ben Mason at the Wheatsheaf Hotel, 39 George St, Thebarton, on Friday 22 May and then play Sunset Sessions at The British Hotel, 11 North Parade, Port Adelaide, from 5pm on Saturday 30 May. Koral & The Goodbye Horses will then enjoy a month-long, free entry Friday evening residency from Friday 5 June until Friday 26 June (EP launch night) at the Grace Emily Hotel, 232 Waymouth St, with special guests each night.
“I sure did and it was great to have a roomful of such really great players and I had a couple of great producers in Bo Ramsey and Richard Bennett who are both wonderful players themselves. People may know of Richard through his work with Mark Knopfler’s band, although he has also played with everyone from Liberace through to Emmylou and everyone in between.” The singer famously worked with John Prine on his 1999 album In Spite Of Ourselves which featured female guests such as Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams and Pattie Lovless. Iris sang on the title track as well as Let’s Invite Them Over, We Could and We’re Not The Jet Set.
to be honest, I’m not trying to sell a million records or anything. “I figured out a while ago I was never going to become a household name so I didn’t really see the need to be on a big record label. And maybe I’m wrong but it seems to be working out at the moment as I’ve had a distribution company, Red Eye, working with me who have helped fill in some of the gaps. “I also like the complete freedom that having your own record label brings,” she decides. “There’s not a bunch of people standing over in the corner wishing or hoping I would take my music in a particular direction. Whether they were doing that or not I don’t know, but I always felt that when I was with a record label. Prior to Sing The Delta, DeMent released Lifeline, an album of mostly traditional gospel songs that harked back to her early childhood. “Oh, it was always a given I’d do that,” she says. “I’d been singing most of those songs as far back as I could remember and at that particular time of my life, when I decided to record that album, I was going through some tough times and they were the only songs that made me feel better.” Even those not particularly religious often find gospel music to be very uplifting. “And I sing those songs from a similar place because I am no longer particularly religious either,” Iris responds. “It actually mystified me why I would be sittin’ around the house singing those old gospel songs. But I now think it was some kind of emotional, psychic connection to my family and my very, very early upbringing. “So I was taking a lot of comfort in that but the particular songs I chose for the album had a real, honest quality about them. “I don’t know, but you can hear a certain desperation in a lot of those songs – it seems like the sending out of an SOS – and that was pretty much how I was feeling at the time,” she adds. In 2001, DeMent married fellow singer songwriter Greg Brown, whose daughter, Pieta, took the front cover photograph for Sing The Delta. Pieta, who is currently touring with Iris, also works with Australia’s Lucie Thorne as a duo called Love Over Gold. Iris DeMent and Pieta Brown play the Governor Hindmarsh, 59 Port Rd, Hindmarsh, on Friday 22 May with tickets via the venue or OzTix. Sing The Delta is available through Flariella.
“And I still work with John a lot,” Iris says. “We still go out on the road together a couple of times a year and I’ll open for him or we’ll do a show of duets.” The singer has also set up her own record label, Flariella, after working with Rounder and Warner Bros. “Well, as you’d know, there just aren’t a lot of record labels left,” Iris laughs. “When I first started out I was in a different place and,
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