Hello and welcome to WNC Original Music Episode 142, the intangible asset episode. This week we have Blake Hornsby returning to the podcast. Blake is a psychedelic folk musician, born and raised in Chattanooga, but currently based out of Boone, North Carolina. He has got a few albums out and on this episode we're talking about his most recent release, Dogwood Dance.
Like most of his music, it's very Indian influence, but with his own sense of style and musical experimentation. You can find Blake's music on all the streaming sites and also at BlakeHornsby.bancamp.com. Now here is Blake Hornsby. Dogwood Dance was recorded in Asheville at Echomat Recording.
I recorded over the course of two days. It's all soloed by myself. One of the songs I have, Electric and Bored, like I used in Teetering on the Edge of the Void. But that was recorded really just two evenings, I think from like over the course of like ten hours or so.
I recorded most of it in late December and then the rest of it in early January. Actually wrote a new song for it in between, in between those times. And that was very different recording experience, you know, because whenever recorded Teetering in Nashville it was, you know, to tape and with all these other musicians that I had in this nice, nice, big, biggest room, at least in comparison was a great economic, because economic amounts since it was just me and the guitar, it was almost like a large fancy glorified closet, you know. They had it, they have a church there that you can record in because it used to be a church.
I looked at that and that was cool, but there was no reason for me to record it there whenever there was a small little studio. That was just for what I needed. Yeah. It just looks really cool.
Yeah. Have you been in there? No, no, I haven't. I've seen it like videos of a bean recording there.
All right, let's go song by song, Dogwood Dance. Oh, Wood Dance. It's another one of my favorites that I've written. It's in my signature open C tuning, the tuning I use for the entire second half of Teetering on the Edge of the Void is open C with an extra C, so it'd be C, G, C, C, C to give away my secret why it sounds so droning and different.
It's a particular song of C, G, C, C, C, E, so it's the actual open C tuning. I figured that out a while ago just by doing the root and the fifth of C and I wanted to have extra drone and then it turns out a lot of my favorite guitars to use it or to do my favorite guitars, Robbie Basho and John Faehey. They both do it. I'll get that Robbie Basho a little more later because there's a song named after him.
But this song's also directly related to Robbie Basho because he had a song I wanted to learn called Redwood Ramble and I looked at it, looked at the tabs and I was like, I don't feel like I'm too lazy to learn this. So I wrote my own version based off of that called Dogwood Dance, another tree alliteration to word thing. Right. So it's kind of my version of that.
That's nothing like the original. But if you listen to the original, you can see where I got influenced but it's still like it's the same tune, but other than that it's not the same song at all. My darling with flowers in her hair. Oh yeah.
Yeah, I wrote just the first few words to. I got this. Oh, no, you're good man. Yeah.
That's a real short one, short and sweet. I came up with that one because I think it's an open G flat or something came up with that one because I was trying to learn this Led Zeppelin song. That's the way and that's the tuning that was in. I did learn.
I just never really memorized lyrics or perfected it. I welcome back to something. But I had a net tuning for trying to learn a song. The next morning I brought it down to the creek on the property where I live and just started playing around and then within like a couple minutes I came up with most of the song and then flushed it out over the next couple of days and decided I wanted to record it.
I don't know where that name came from, but it seems like a sort of happy flowery song. Yeah. Yeah. This album is definitely more conventional for lack of a better term in comparison to teeter on the edge of the boy.
It's not as ambitious in terms of me writing nine pages of what I want people to do and all the lyrics and everything and having a bunch of musicians and instruments. But it's different. It's totally different, similar but totally different. I mean, the waiting on the forefront from teeter on the edge of the boy to rerecord it for this album because I wanted to have an album that contained a lot of my instrumental stuff because I was starting to write more instrumental things along the lines of jump a heavy bass show, some other folks like that.
And I wanted to sort of consolidate it. So during quarantine, a little after quarantine last year is whenever I wrote the news on. So I kind of wanted an album to not only exemplify what I was doing as an instrumental guitar player, but also to pitch to other venues and places that might not be as interested in the teeter on the edge of the boy type stuff. Yeah.
Yeah. Places where they might not want to get super loud and noisy with the space in the other one. They might just want me to play a little bit of guitar or something. You know what I mean?
So that's part of the reason I created it. But that's not the only reason. It sounds like kind of superficial to just create an album to use it for that. But I was also writing new material.
And also a few of the songs, so called eternity blues waiting in the forefront that I mentioned and mountain spring had all been previously released on other albums. Mountain spring and eternity blues had been released on legend of them. Which I wrote multiple years ago. I think like 2016 I wrote that 2017 something like that.
And yeah, 2017. I wanted to rerecord those just like I said, compile a bunch of my instrumental stuff because the album was fairly experimental too. So I took two of the instrumental solo guitar songs and the one is to know so guitar song from the previous record and then just wrote. I wrote five other songs and put it all together.
The ones were slightly reworkings and then the rest was new material. I would dance during lockdown. But firemunks the evening waters. Hold on my 12 string.
I hadn't. I hadn't released anything with me playing on my 12 string. No, I released one something one something one thing a few years ago. I was just a self released one.
But anyways, I digress. I hadn't recorded much with my 12 string before and I don't really play it much. I don't really play it much. But I wanted to write some write some songs with it because 12 strings interesting.
It's almost like a it's almost like a different instrument. Whenever I play it up and start like taking on and for enter. I play it like in pretty much different style than I play six streams. Kind of weird.
Does it feel you feel some connection with that in the guitar because of the synthetic strings and that sort of thing. Not as much oddly enough whenever I pick up a six string, I'd do more Eastern related stuff and blues related stuff. But whenever I pick up the 12 string, I start to want to go into like a fantasy medieval vibe land. Yeah.
Yeah, because it has that sound kind of like almost like a harpsichord, you know, at certain times because harpsichords are, if I'm not mistaken, they, oh, yeah, I know what the way harpsichords work are instead of whenever you hit the key instead of the hammer hitting the string and the piano, it plucks the string. So it has a brighter, brighter sound. And with all the strings being doubled on the 12 string and then some of them not the same octave will be like the same note, two different octaves on one course of strings. That makes it sound kind of somewhat similar to a harpsichord.
Not exactly, but I guess that's what it kind of reminds me of. So I start going into the sort of medieval type stuff. And with fire amongst the evening waters, I named it that because I was writing it and I was working on it, that brought it to a little spot just off the parkway during sunset and played next to a tree. And I just closed my eyes and I asked myself, where do you feel like you are?
What is this song? And then I thought of fire and water. Fire amongst the evening waters amongst sounds, you know, fun and British. Right.
So I put that in there because it's a 12 string. More from Blake Hornsby in just a few moments will remind you to check out his music at BlakeHornsby.bancamp.com. Also check out the show notes for other places to find his music and the social media and all that stuff. And don't forget, this is Blake's second episode of the podcast.
So go back in the archives and check out his first episode in which we discuss more of his music. When you go to Bancamp, make sure to listen to his other albums there. Equally is good. And finally Blake is playing live different places as we speak, not as we speak because first of all, we're not speaking as I speak, but even then, I don't know if he's playing right now.
Anyway, the point is he's actively playing live on the weekends and throughout the week. So go to his social media and find out if he's playing near you. Hey, it's Andrew Scotchy from Andrew Scotchy in the River Rants. Thank you for supporting WNC Original Music.
Visit Andrewscotchamusic.com for tour dates, merch and much more. Be sure to go to wnseoriginalmusic.com or search WNC Original Music on any podcast player that you prefer and subscribe if possible. That way you get it every fortnight or more that the podcast comes out. I promise it will be at least once a month.
Promises, promises. Corrections and clarifications from last week's episode with True Vare. Kingfisher is a bird, a kingfish is a fish. So that's simple.
We were both right. Next up, the group of Cravamico is Tazcucando WNC Musica Arena. Oh, to Robbie Basho. This is the other 12 strings song on the record.
This is the one song that I wrote in between sessions. So I went back and I think whenever I went back, I just recorded this one, the other 12 string one. I recorded the rest of the album on an evening in December and then two 12 strings on evening in January. Oh, to Robbie Basho.
I've been wanting to write a song called that for a long time. You guys see this? One of my favorite guitars, but I kind of forced it a little bit. So I like it and it's fun to play it.
I hardly ever play it. Whenever I pull it out and play it, I do enjoy it. But I worked hard on it. I feel like maybe I forced it too much because I wanted to have it included on the album.
It's called a to Robbie Basho because he's known for playing 12 string. I think most of the songs were recorded on 6 string, but he played a lot of 12 string and he played an open C tuning a lot and variations on that. So I tuned it to an open C tuning. I looked at the notation of a particular Raga called Kamaj.
It's an evening Raga. And I just pulled the specific notes used in that Raga to as the skeleton for the song. And I listened to Robbie Basho and just picked up certain little things and nuances that he does and sort of recreated it to a certain extent. He likes to do the, which I do in Dogwood Dance as well, the three finger, fast thing that they do in a lot of classical music.
He likes doing that, but he'll do it in a much more. But whenever it's done on a 12 string and an open tuning that's still string instead of a 6 string nylon guitar, it definitely sounds like a lot more almost chaotic. Definitely like an avant garde. So still beautiful at the same time.
So I incorporated that in just other little kind of ornaments that I've noticed him doing. He's unfortunately a lot of people don't know about him. I think by the 80s, whenever he died, all of his records were out of print. He died young.
His chiropractor accidentally killed him in an experimental adjustment. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. But this guy was wild. There's a really cool document around him called the Enigma of Robbie Basho that you'll should check out if you're interested.
He was a very mysterious fellow. Very, I don't know, there's something about him. You can even hear it in his music and his voice and his playing something just very ethereal and different like not of this earth. I don't know how to describe it.
He was kind of private. He was very odd. He never really had a romantic partner. He blended like Spanish music with Persian music and Hindu music on the steel string and play solo and then his first couple of albums were instrumental but he started singing.
I used to hate his voice. It's kind of like almost opera-like. It turned me off for a while but eventually I started really, really loving it. He's got a whole lot of passion in it.
You can really feel his energy. He was also born with synesthesia. You can find it online. He has a chart that he wrote of different tunings and different chords or whatever and the color and the mood that was associated with it.
The color that he would see whenever he was playing D minor or whatever and D minor he described as agony for sure. Then C calls the sun tuning because it was the tuning cues on Sunflower River Blues by John Fehe. He says associated with the color yellow, maybe. Maybe it's blue.
He says it's associated with Krishna. He's a very interesting fellow. What do you play? Do you have a couple of places that you play live fairly often?
No. Well, I mean, I go to the open mic and I have a legend out in Burium, Boone sometimes but other than that, not really. Because of the pandemic, I only played one show last year. It was just me and Sam played at Satagade Records in Asheville.
Just a few weeks after we recorded Deeter on the edge of the void. He was on violin. I was on guitar vocals. The Turkish instrument called a sasfira and random other jingle, jengly, shaky things.
But now I'm playing with Jonathan on toblas and Dume Beck and we've played a couple shows this year and we got some other ones booked coming up in North Carolina. So I mean, before, I feel like I've gotten more serious about music just in the past two years. So it's kind of hard to answer the question because I was going to go on tour for Deeter on the edge of the void last year, but then the pandemic happened. And then before that, I might have played between seven and 15 shows a year, probably right around 12.
But now I'm starting to branch out of Boone and messaging people, especially now that I have two professional albums under my sleeve instead of just home recorded stuff. You know, it sounds better and it's more convincing if you're trying to pitch to a venue. Yeah. So hopefully...
Right. Hopefully a lot more. I think I got seven dates this year plus three other shows I've played this year. So I hope to go on a much longer tour next year.
Yeah. So I'm probably on as the longest track on the album. It is around 15 minutes or so. I took it, got it on the first take, even though there are mess ups and up.
So Yaman Kalyan is the name of a popular evening Raga in India. I found the notes for the Raga and I was sort of doing some amateur studying of Indian music. I did more so between... I did it a lot in lockdown.
So in between recording, Deeter on the edge of the void, and recording dog with dance, I started to delve deeper into Indian music, particularly northern Indian classical music, there's still Hindu sonny music. And started learning about the different movements, listening to it more, and finding the notes in different Raga's for different time periods of day because every Raga's associated with like, you know, dusk, dawn, early afternoon, late afternoon, even the seasons, some of them are just a rainy season, some of them you can only play as the last Raga in your concert. And you're supposed to listen to Raga's at the specific time of day. You're supposed to practice them, you're supposed to play them, perform them, listen to them all the time of day that they're meant to be.
You know, there's a window of leeway, but, you know, if you listen to, say, coffee, that's an evening Raga, but if you want to listen to it at four o'clock, that's all right. You know, that's not something you want to listen to right when you wake up in the morning. They believe that it's that the actual notes and not just the notes, but the way the notes are played and how they interact with other notes does something cosmic and relates to where the stars and the sun, the moon are to where it actually improves your health by listening and performing a particular Raga whenever it's supposed to be played. So I recorded this one in the evening and I thought I was playing Gemon Kalyan, which is why I named it that.
And then later I found out I don't think it was Gemon Kalyan because even though I played the notes right, I didn't know enough about Raga to know that I don't know if I played the notes how they were supposed to be played. So I started taking some lessons with the Ali Akbar, wait, I started taking lessons at Ali Akbar College of Music from Alam Khan, he's a surried player. Alam Khan is the son of Ali Akbar Khan. Ali Akbar Khan was really huge.
He was like next to Rabi Shankar in terms of his popularity. I think he played on some beetle stuff. He was actually Rabi Shankar's brother-in-law for a period of time. So I've been taking lessons from Ali Akbar Khan's son.
That's when I started to realize, oh, I wasn't playing Raga's this whole time. Whenever I said I was when I thought I was, I was suffering as a stupid colony at Yemon Kalyan, but it is the notes of Yemon Kalyan. But as I heard like in a documentary, if you're just playing the notes without what they call ornaments, then it's just a mode. It's just a scale and a mode and it's not a Raga.
You got to do certain ornaments. So certain Raga's, like I said a lot of this, I didn't know until recently after this album was even released, is there's specific ornaments that go with specific Raga's, to my understanding. Or ones that are more used more often than the other in terms of the way that you go up and down with certain notes. And also with Raga's, there is, there's two main notes that you accentuate.
So even if there's X number of notes in Raga, there's one, you might not want to pay attention to very much. You can use it for just a second. Or you aren't supposed to go from this note to that note. You can only do these other ones from that note and then hit that one in between.
So it's very complex, even though a lot of it's improvisation, there's still a lot of rules that's completely different from Western music. And these rules are, they're just in place for to define that kind of music and promote, it says that kind of promote a connection to the universe. Not that there's any kind of like, if you do it wrong, you go into hell or anything like that. Right.
Yeah, it's not like that. It's more like if you do it wrong, you aren't performing a Raga. You're just performing a collection of notes. You got to do it right and that's what Raga is.
You know, it's a collection of notes with certain movements and certain feelings and certain ornaments, whenever you end, you also focus more on some notes than others. I'm still learning. So yeah. But Dao is fine.
I still play it. That's one of people's favorites to hear me play, I think, even though it's real long. Yeah. And for a banquet dance, I'm really excited for that album actually.
I already came out, but record label in Australia called Rambel Records has decided to press the final. So they've already paid for the pressing. It's in the middle of being pressed. I'm actually going to receive test pressings to my place here, probably within the next couple of weeks.
That's cool. To hear it. And then I'll give them the okay and they'll assemble all the artwork. I gave them the artwork and then another some complications.
So the guy in Australia, Mike, he got someone that he knows to do graphic design. I got a similar to how I did it, but made it look better. And he also designed the center labels inside of the actual vinyl itself. And he paid for the vinyl mastering because you have to do different masterings for record because it's site A, site B instead of each individual track.
Yeah. So he paid for that as well. And we're getting 200 pressed and I'm going to get them sent to my place in North Carolina. I'm going to send most of them to him and he's going to put them out in record stores in Australia and help promote it.
Oh cool. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to go in Australia and tour.
Oh yeah. Eventually. All right. I want to thank Blake for being on the podcast.
Really enjoy talking to him and really enjoy these albums. I encourage you to go and get a couple of them. You can find them once again at BlakeHornsby.bancap.com. Go and check them out and also you can find them on the streaming services.
Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast also on most of the streaming services and all the podcast players, WNC, original music. Listen to it and tell people about it and be kind of like, you know, I found out about this before you did some a little cooler than you are. And then when it gets like super popular, you can tell people that you were listening to it before, you know, all the soccer moms start listening to it. I'm closing song this week comes from Sullivan Smith and Stray Lyons.
Sullivan Smith and Stray Lyons are a pop group and a musical dance craze from Roan of Virginia. You can find them by searching Ban Camp or Spotify for Sullivan Smith and Stray Lyons. And of course we'll have the links to their music and their social media and the show notes. Here are Sullivan Smith and Stray Lyons.
Have a good week. The ocean breeze and you have your face into another shade over here.