Often found playing in the band of his father, guitar icon Ry, Joachim Cooder has also forged his own impressive musical career. A new album, Dreamer’s Motel, is out at the start of November, and a UK tour right after visits Cardiff’s Acapela venue. From his home in Altadena, California, in the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains, Joachim chatted to Colin Palmer.
“I’ve been over to the UK a bunch of times playing with my dad on his tours,” explains Joachim Cooder, “when he put out the Prodigal Son record and some stuff with David Lindley – but I’ve never done my own headlining tour. So this is the first one!
“I’ve never been to Wales. My wife and I fantasise about having a country home, and Wales keeps popping up – so I’m going to go look at some schools. That’s my un-rock‘n’roll way of touring…
“I always have a better time in other places than the United States. I love going to the UK, I love playing in Ireland. I think it’s nice to be away from your own place; it puts you in a different headspace and you find yourself thinking new things and having new ideas, which you don’t if you’re just in LA.”
While Cooder has been an in-demand drummer and percussionist for over 25 years – featuring on albums from gamechanging 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club to 2015’s In The Heart Of Moon by Toumani Diabaté & Ali Farka Touré to 2018’s aforementioned Prodigal Son – the mbira, a variation on the traditional African thumb piano, is his instrument of choice. He uses it for the kind of traditional Americana songs that showcases the harmony array mbira’s primary strengths, as a singer’s best friend.
“Once you start seeking out odd-ball instruments you keep going down that road,” he says. “My dad had found what he calls a ‘floor slide’, like a huge slide guitar on a table. He would use a big flower vase as the slide. The guy that built that said, ‘hey, you should check out the guy who makes array mbiras’ – so we did. His name is Bill Wesley and he lives in San Diego.
“I bought an acoustic version; I would play it on film scores and on records, but I could never play it live because it was too quiet. A few years later, I find that he’s making solid body electric versions of it, so I plugged it into a guitar amp and got a beautiful distorted sound that just blew my mind. It’s not chromatic like a piano; it goes in fifths, so it’s very modal. I just put my fingers on it and find a key I can sing over, and then I go into these patterns. It changed my life!
“Being a drummer, I was never a guitar player or much of a keyboard player – I had no way to conceive of songwriting until I came upon this thing and really got on my way after that. Once I start playing, it puts me in this very receptive, almost meditative state. It almost sounds like a lullaby, in a way, but it puts you in this zone.
“Then I have lyric ideas that are floating around in my head, and I just see what happens. Sometimes nothing happens, and then you put it away and wait until the next time to see if something comes into your head, and sometimes they come right away.”
Born in 1978, Joachim was introduced to music from an early age. Hearing the music of Steve Earle was a pivotal moment for the youngster, as he recalls. “People used to send my dad tapes and CDs to listen to; there was always things showing up at the house and when [Earle’s album with The Dukes] Guitar Town came out in 1986, we put it on when he drove me to school that morning. Both of us were just floored by it! We listened to it every morning on the way to school and from that record forth he has been my main inspiration in a songwriting way.”
Since those early days, Joachim has worked with an array of musical icons: Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker and Mavis Staples to name but three. Out on the road touring with other musicians has provided the catalyst that often results in his own songs coming to fruition.
“Sometimes when I’m on tour, I carry an iPad, and when people are soundchecking I’ll record them; then later that night, on the bus, I lie in my bunk and listen to things I’ve recorded. If I find a little piece, I’ll take it out, loop it and start singing over that. When I have enough written, I’ll bring in my wife and she will sing all the harmonies, or my dad will play some mandolin. Also, I get ideas from stuff my kids say! I bring them in at the beginning, cos they say crazy stuff, and then I take those and turn them into lyrics.”
Joachim goes on to explain the background to some of the songs that feature on the album, starting with the title track.
“Dreamer’s Motel comes from when I was growing up. My parents always took me to this little motel about an hour and a half up the coast from LA, these little bungalows you could get real cheap. It seemed like nobody was ever there – it was right on the water, and you could just cross the train tracks. I always thought it would be there forever, and I’d eventually take my kids.
“Then one day it got sold – the developer pulled everything apart, then ran out of money. You would drive by and see all these bungalows up on blocks like carcasses just rotting, I wondered, when was the last time I had even been there? That got me thinking about places that you can’t go back to – you can only visit in your memories – and that’s the umbrella of the whole record, in a way.”
Sea Level Man, thinks Joachim, “is a combination of me and a made-up person. The idea came from being too far up in Norway once on tour – I couldn’t sleep, the light wasn’t right. I was thinking about what it means to be a sea level man; what is that, conceptually? All your dreams and the things you want just fit in the palm of your hand, so you keep it low to the ground. It has a double meaning.”
And Cool Little Lion? “That was more of a patchwork that I put together with the mbira I’d made a loop out of. I slowed it down and sat with that for a while, and found myself singing about this dog my wife and I had about 10 years ago, before our kids were born. We found her on the street when our touring van got impounded – we had parked it in the wrong place, woke up next morning and found our van was gone, so we had to go to this area where they tow your cars to.
“We saw this dog, a little chow. She was all matted up and it was a hot nasty day and so she became our dog. We took her into a place and they gave her a lion cut – big head and big paws! And it just came out of nowhere that I found myself singing about her.”
Joachim is clearly a fan of expansive sonic soundscapes, using his electric mbira to transform Appalachian music and blues with a powerful evocative aesthetic. The mbira has become his signature instrument, and he clearly has a deep love and affinity with this traditional African instrument and its capacity to find untold stories in the music he plays.
Joachim Cooder, Acapela, Cardiff, Tue 12 Nov.
Tickets: £18. Info: here
Dreamer’s Motel is released on Fri 1 Nov via Temple Of Leaves. Info: joachimcooder.com
words COLIN PALMER
