Ferraby Lionheart

I once dated a girl in a band who asked me why I make music. I told her I do it because I feel like it’s what I’m supposed to do. She said that wasn't a good reason. But it’s the truth.

So I continue to justify that, and explore exactly what that looks like. My first effort at high fidelity recording came with my last album, “Catch the Brass Ring". Where I wanted to capture the intimacy of my first EP (which was made in a bedroom), while exploring more adventurous productions. I learned so much from the engineers and recording process, that I decided to try it on my own again.

Now my house is a recording studio. My world is made rich by capturing my own sounds as well as the sounds of my friends, and I feel as though I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. It reminds me of being a kid in Nashville where my uncle owned a studio and devoted himself to making country music records. I met Dolly Parton there once. It made me acutely aware that I had no instruments in my house. My father was a salesman and my mother studied psychology. Fortunately, though, a tutor of mine was a bit of a hippie so I played her guitar sometimes.

It’s been a wonderful journey, getting back home. After touring “Catch the Brass Ring” in the US, the UK and Scandinavia (and scoring a film), I realized that a few years had gone by and I wanted to be singing new songs. So I went to Sweden and stayed in a one room apartment, with the smallest stove I've ever seen. I thought a new environment would yield all kinds of ideas, but I didn't write a single song there. Actually, it feels like I barely spoke a word the entire time.

Eventually, I went back to Tennessee to hang around the train tracks near where I grew up. I ordered some microphones from Germany and wrote songs about antique shops and horse races. A friend of mine has a truck and some land out by the Cumberland River. We swim there and sink our feet into the deep mud of the river bed. I also sit in my front yard looking at the chipmunks and crows that hang around. Once a squirrel fell from a power line and lay on the street getting a little flatter each day, until the rain washed him away. And so that's what the album is about, I suppose. It's an intricate and emotional meditation on being alive.

I’m always waiting for an idea. Songs show up in all kinds of places. Someone sent me a box of old family letters from WWII. The sense of desperation was so poignant in the faded cursive hand. I did my best to paste together a story from the pieces I found and ended up with “Dear Corinne”. It’s about a man clinging to life, and working desperately for pennies to send back to his love, who seems to have moved on without him.

I found the idea for the first single, “Harry and Bess”, after staring at a Harry Houdini poster in a mixing session for a few days. The story encapsulates the heartbreaking romance between Houdini and his wife, Bess. It’s been said that in 1904 an English locksmith spent seven years developing a pair of cuffs that Houdini could not escape. Thousands of people showed up to watch the challenge, which was hosted by the London Daily Mirror. Houdini struggled for over an hour, only to escape after his wife approached him, offering a kiss on the lips. Some claim Bess begged the Mirror for the key, and passed it to Harry in the kiss.

I named the album “The Jack of Hearts” because love doesn't usually turn out quite as romantically for me.