Dave Graney & Clare Moore

FEARFUL WIGGINGS is sold out as a Compact Disc, digital album available at Bandcamp.

2020 reflection. A watershed album in some ways. The second album credited as a solo set, though once again Clare Moore is very present. Was wonderfully inspiring to work briefly with Lisa Gerrard. Donna McCrae and Michael Vale made a fantastic clip for us. UK guitar master Nick Drake played some acoustic on it. Was a great moment of other artists reaching out to us to be involved.

Fave lyric ...."why such a bittersweet air from the
fresh prince of hilair?
haven’t you lived?
I rode my scooter of the train - the Bluebird
into the city traffic
it was like a situation comedy
I drank wine from your shoe
we kissed in the seaview
hey ain’t we met some dopes
ain’t we been silly too!
if nows not the time for tears
dunno when that is.."FEARFUL WIGGINGS

Radio interview by Dave Graney focussing on FEARFUL WIGGINGS.

Story about FEARFUL WIGGINGS from Australian Musician Magazine

DAVE GRANEY ‘FEARFUL WIGGINGS’ TRACK BY TRACK
I wanted to make a pretty simple and direct album, so I’d rather not comment on the songs too much. I mean, I hope they just WORK for people. I started it on acoustic guitar, not thinking of the end shape. I ran into Lisa Gerrard from Dead Can Dance – quite out of the blue - and she invited me to record some vocals at her studio, saying she had these great mics and pre-amps. She reached out to me from a purely musical direction. I guess she expected m to turn up with one track and I had fourteen on my hard drive.
Likewise, Nick Harper responded, equally as out of the blue, to my stuff and got in touch. Clare Moore, who plays on most of the album on vibes, percussion, keys and vocals, has shared my whole music life with me. I sing about us on the title track.
A Woman Skinnies A Man Up
There was a conversation with my cousin Garry, who’s a stock and station agent in South East Sth Australia. He often says funny things. He was describing how a friend behaved when a woman was around. “She skinnied him up...” The music is a kind of boogie that I’d been goofing off on for years. No bass. I saw a documentary about the Californian country singer Buck Owens and he said he hardly used any bass on his trademark “Bakersfield sound” country re- cords so as to give more room for the vocals. I love the sound of 60s country and where the voice sits, way out front, so that was a big thing in my approach to the whole album.

Everything was legendary with Robert
A mutated Bo Diddley beat with acoustic and electric guitars and bass xylophone. This is the single. The music sounded like a tv theme tune to me, which is to say , I thought it was high quality and really catchy. It’s like a Ray Davies type of a song as far as the lyrics go.

How can you get out of London?
The second line is “how can you get London out?” We lived there for five years and had to leave suddenly. A kind of a “what if?” shadow life runs through my mind occasionally . “What if we’d stayed there?” I love to read books about London. It’s in my mind a lot. The music is a kind of Latin groove, again. Clares voice has no reverb. Dry and straight like those British folk records I’ve been immersed in for years.

Country roads, unwinding
Aside from London, I am obsessed with country roads and down beat country towns. They’re disappearing, really. Just villages with old people and a few antiques shops. I know, I do a lot of driving. Clare plays the vibes on this track. it was finished very early in the piece. Just fell into a sweet spot pretty easily.
Flower Of The Earth
I got very ill in Paris in 2008 and almost coughed my lungs up on a metro train and then on the street. Thought I was popping my cork. A lot of blood can scare you. When it’s coming out of you. I had been trying to learn French and read, slowly, a lot of old books. One was French Vietnamese poetry and there was this proverb saying “ man is the flower of the earth”. I thought that was a wonderful thing to be said at a time when the persons country was being “bombed into the stone age” by the Yanks. A lot of bad French grammar in the lyrics of this song. I wanted to say “Man!Woman! like Eric Burdon did. I pulled the beat together and liked the groove of the chords. Augmented or di- minished chords. Kind of a “cha cha cha” feel in the bass line. Like all those great 30s feels that a lot of classic disco had.
Fearful Wiggings
Nick Harper played guitar on this song. He’s a UK singer and player. Son Of Roy harper. I’d been listening to all this UK folk and he grew up totally IN that world. He got in touch once because he liked some of my songs and even played one at his gigs. He asked me to sing a song on his 2013 album , “Riven”. In return , I asked him to play on a couple of mine. An amazing guitarist. I’ve never met him in the flesh. Hopefully some time this year. The lyrics of this song are very personal. It was originally called “the ballad of Graney and Moore”. That was either a bit too high flown or a bit too rootsy or earthy.

I’m The Stranger In Town
Sadly, I have realized that this is how I have lived my life. As if I was just passing through – or if I was set to leave at any moment. Like the songs says “silly – I know” The music is a bit of a groove I’d been mucking around on for ages. Didn’t want it to sound too straight and “bluesy” so I asked Clare to play it half time as if it was a hip hop track,. Just one mic on the drums. There’s cicadas on it. I needed a lonely sound and walked onto my deck with a ZOOM and took them from my own yard. Summer sounds.
Je Est Un Autre
A line Arthur Rimbaud wrote in a letter to a friend when he was seventeen years old. “I is another”. Translated differ- ently sometimes but this has the correct clunky meaning. “I” is the person who is thinking “me” up and fronting it to “you”. Just me on twelve string guitar and some buried keys.
Look Into My Shades
When I was coughing up blood in Paris in 2008 I had to see a doctor with x rays of my lungs. He came out all dressed in denim. The denim jacket slung over his shoulders. He had longish grey hair and mirror shades on, as he stared at the X-rays and waved me off with a happy go lucky smile and shake of his head. I went around the corner to have a coffee and was heaving up more blood into a bin five minutes later. The Doctor with the shades image stayed with me. The song is kind of an Isaac Hayes rap. A wounded, macho man groaning about his ills. The music is a lot of chordal work, stacks upon stacks of chords, set against a Bo Diddley beat. No bass until the last minute.

I know you can't see me
This is the purest moment of the session I did with Lisa Gerrard. She worked on the vocal eq for a long time. The re- verb and it’s stereo pan. Just guitar and vocal and Lisa doing some ambient singing way in the distance. I can’t thank her enough for inspiration and fire.

Everything is perfect in it's beginning
This was all recorded at our studio. Funny, discordant guitar chords. I’d demo’d this a couple of years ago. Hard to get a beat to the irregular timing. I figured something out with a hip hop boombox. Kind of prog chords in the cho- rus. Monstrous distorted guitars and some slide too. Lots of guitars. Clare hates too many guitars, but this was my album.

The Old Docklands Wheel
I wanted to write a really, really DOWN Downbeat song. Lots of music isn’t heavy enough for me. It’s too cute. Or shallow. I want things to be really heavy or sad if they’re gonna try for those depths. So this is a relentlessly down- ward spiralling song. A spiky, discordant folk blues song. Mentions “the artist Schiele”. It goes down and down and then falls a bit further. Then the singer notes, outside the window, “the old Docklands Wheel”... This song is graced by the guitar stylings of Nick Harper too. He’s a demon.
I Was There
Almost a duet with Clare Moore. We’ve been musicians for a long time. Some times we hear and watch people talk- ing about situations and events that we were at and they’re talking about a completely different scenario. It’s become mythic. You can’t challenge myths. I’m trusting this could be a common feeling. That’s what you have to do when you write songs- trust that things and “vibes” you have deep within you could be common to others.
I wanted this album to really sparkle so I got it mastered in Phoenix by SAE (Roger Seibel) as I loved the sounds on the last couple of Bill Callaghan albums.

"DAVE GRANEY FEARFUL WIGGINGS (Cockaigne) *****If I've learnt anything in my years of writing about music it's that if you are going to do anything of worth in this tough game, you better have your own thing. Today's generic is easily replaced by tomorrow's. And yet you need to be flexible, to follow wherever the songs demand. In the case of this, only the second credited as a solo album among 30 or so Graney releases, it's a curious yet welcoming lane he walks you down, with acoustic guitars, not much percussion, vibes, smooth sounds. At the end of it you feel like you've awoken from a strange yet pleasant summer's dream. As shot by Luis Bunuel. It ranges from off-kilter reveries (A Woman Skinnies Up a Man, The Old Docklands Wheel) through to the softly seductive (How Can You Get Out of London) and the downright arch (Look Into My Shades, Everything Is Great In The Beginning.) This is music that is neither folk, nor blues, nor country, but it's all Graney, somewhere out to the left field beyond Lee Hazlewood's raised eyebrow. It's astringent on the tongue but sweetens in the telling. Noel Mengel - Brisbane Courier Mail

“Fearful Wiggings” is the 2014 album from Dave Graney. its a solo album though longtime collaborator Clare Moore was very much involved in the recording , writing and arranging of many tracks. It follows the art pop-rock masterwork of 2012 “you've been in my mind” which was a total mistLY album. (a band recording). Here's Dave talking of the album...

Fearful Wiggings. The title comes from a 1920s book of French stories.. I came across a new word and looked up in the glossary and the meaning was puts as “fearful wiggings’. I took it to mean “great anxiety”.
Fearful wiggings is a lyrically freewheeling kind of album. Elemental figures and scenes. Sex, myth, dream cities, shadows, invisibility (a recurring theme in my songs) and the very personal title track. Musically, it’s pretty simple and stark but every song could come from it’s own album. Frenchie (“je est un autre” and “flower of the earth” ) and Australian (“country roads, unwinding”). A "best of" from the future.
The recording itself was like an arthouse movie. Beginning in early 2013 on a whim when I had a lot of music to unload but wasn’t going to be thinking of releasing anything very soon. I wanted to record things with no shape in mind, to just capture the licks and not try to shove them into any form, not think of the end result. A chance meeting with Lisa Gerrard at a screen composers award night and her invitation to record my vocals at her studio. We had seen Lisa play solo in Melbourne in 1980 and 81 and saw the very first Dead can dance gigs then. We went to see Dead Can Dance again in 2013. She expected me to come to the studio with one song and I turned up with thirteen. A commanding presence. She lifted my artistic aspirations and senses out of the hollows I’d been running through for years. Using Sinatra era mics and beautiful Avalon preamps and reverbs. She’d sit with her eyes closed and say “I don’t wanna do a radio mix- I wanna do a classical mix!” and “That’s fucking great! That’s Russian! I know what we need to do! We need to go North!”. The best was “It’s nice when you can put your hand back behind the voice…” How could you not be inspired?

Then a similar contact- also from a pure musical direction – happened when UK guitarist and songwriter Nick Harper contacted me to sing on one of his songs. I asked him to play on two of mine. He comes from folk rock royalty. His father is Roy Harper, noted player and subject of a tribute from Led Zeppelin. (“Hats off to Harper”)
The rest of the album was played by myself and Clare Moore. Guitars , bass, keys , bass xylophone, percussion and vibes.
The minimal bass left a lot of room for the voice.
The album was mastered in Phoenix Arizona by Roger Siebel and the cover is by Tony Mahony who has done all but five of the roughly twenty eight albums created by Dave Graney and Clare Moore over the years.
Fearful Wiggings is an album I could have only gotten to via this convoluted route. All this involvement of chance meetings and luck. Serendipity. It’s full of feeling, colour and drama. Jazz chords, folk forms and country feels. But kind of pop all the same.

<a href="http://davegraney1.bandcamp.com/album/fearful-wiggings-2014-dave-graney-solo-album">FEARFUL WIGGINGS (2014 dave graney solo album) by dave graney</a>

<a href="http://www.melbournereview.com.au/commentary/article/irregular-writings6">a story about the recording session from the Melbourne Review </a>

All songs written by Dave Graney
Published by Mushroom Music
Initial recordings with Idge at Soundpark
Vocals recorded with Lisa Gerrard at her studio
engineered by James Orr - then overdubs done at the Ponderosa.
Mixed by Dave Graney and Clare Moore
Produced by Dave GraneyMastered by Roger Seibel at SAE in Phoenix Arizona.
Cover image, inside portrait and back cover photo by Tony Mahony.

Video for everything was legendary with Robert by Donna McRae and Michael Vale.

Dave Graney online blogs.

FEARFUL WIGGINGS lyrics?

See The Moodists and Coral Snakes sections for discography and archival information pre 1998.

the dave graney show- an outstanding album recorded for Festival in 1998

Kiss tomorrow goodbye (2000)

heroic blues(2001)

the third woman (2002)

the brother who lived ? (2003)

Liquor?
Hashish ? (2005)

Keepin' it Unreal (2006)

We wuz curious (2008)