Rich Davies has just dropped his second second album, the emotive and narrative-driven Ghosts.

The new record is certainly a departure from Davies’ first, The Devil’s Union, leaving behind much of its bombast in favour of a more minimal approach befitting the darkly poetic lyrics. Ghosts draws strongly on Davies’ Americana influences, but also on the Celtic sounds he first met with playing pubs in Scotland under the guidance of his folksinger father.

“I wanted to draw from that well for a long time,” Davies says of the new direction, “and as it turned out, I needed to at this point in my life, more than I knew.”

The album was recorded with producer Myles Mumford (Kim Salmon, Mikelangelo, Lindsay Phillips) and Davies’ backing band The Low Road, which includes banjoist and regular collaborator Ayleen O’Hanlon (Mick Thomas & The Roving Commission), Pepita Emmerichs (Oh Pep!), Bek Chapman (The Nymphs, Damien Cowell’s Disco Machine) and Ladie Dee (Howl At The Moon), among others.

Rich has taken us through each of the tracks below, and we’re sure it’ll make for a brilliant set when Rich Davies & The Low Road play an in-store performance at Basement Discs on Friday November 11, before setting out on the road with Mick Thomas & The Roving Commission.

Ghosts Track By Track

Digging Graves

We set out to make an album using a minimalist pallet of sound. We wanted to let the ‘song’ take centre stage. With ‘Digging Graves’, the album’s opener, we stretched the limits of our own rule right off the bat.

The arrangement in the outro just grows and grows and features every single instrument that appears throughout the rest of the record all at once.
I love Ayleen O’Hanlon’s ghoulish, howling vocal that comes in towards the end. Sonically, it is pretty chaotic, but I believe it does a good job of setting the thematic tone of what is still to come.

Walking Ghost

I wrote this one whilst feeling the sting of not doing capitalism very well. Indeed this record was written and recorded in a time of adversity in my personal and domestic life.
I’d been listening to Shipbuilding by Elvis Costello all day and thinking about how our societies’ history of relentless oppression of the lower classes, just seems to keep repeating itself.

The cycle of poverty in our western world, controlled with a lack of empathy, by those with money. It doesn’t matter where or what time in history, we are talking about… humans and greed just seem to go hand in hand.

Don’t Weep My Bonnie Lassie

Written in a period of homesickness and pondering my formative years around Scottish Folk music, ‘Don’t Weep My Bonnie Lassie’ tells the tale of how a famous Scottish Folk song was written, all those years ago.

The story goes that two Scottish Jacobite soldiers were captured by the opposing Redcoats, (British Government troops) and held in Carlisle Castle, just south of the border with Scotland. In the evening, the Redcoats, as an further act of torture, decided the fate of both Jacobites. One soldier would be set free in the morning, so as to tell of their torture as a warning to other Scots, whilst the other soldier would face his death at the end of the hang-mans rope.

The freed soldier would be walking home on the ‘High Road’, on foot, over land, and the journey would take days. The doomed soldier believed his spirit would be transported back to their homeland instantly, at the moment of death, travelling on ‘The Low Road’.

That night, the doomed soldier was said to have written a letter to his lover, saying, ‘Give this to my true love, you’ll find her by the Bonnie, Banks of Loch Lomond’ as he handed it to his compatriot and friend. The letter contained the words to ‘Loch Lomond,’ one of the most famous Scottish Folk songs ever.

Dirt Under My Nails

The Australian dream beckoned for many Italians after their villages and towns were ruined after WW2. They came in pursuit of basic dignity with the belief that in this country, no-matter what class you were born into, if you worked hard, you would be able to make something of your life.

These immigrants enriched the melting pot that is, Australia. Lest we forget, or we risk repeating history’s mistakes again.

Covered In Dust

I’m very proud of how we captured this song. I’d barely woken up when I put the vocal down on this one. It was intended to be a guide vocal but months later when we listened back, therefore we decided to keep it.

This song also features a duet vocal from Ladie Dee of Howl At The Moon. We have been close friends for a long time and I’m so pleased that we have this recording as a testament to the chemistry we have known whilst performing music together over the years.

Ashes

This song had been in my notebook for some time. I’d played it with a drastically, different rock style arrangement with my old backing band, The Devil’s Union. I’d always had a soft spot for this song and was very keen to rearrange it for inclusion on this album.

Rather than with its previous drums and Hammond organ heavy sound, it became a banjo and mandolin driven beast, featuring a dual vocal from Ayleen and myself and a thick bowed double bass from Stuart West.

Ghosts

There is no glory in war and we humans need to hurry to realise this. This song tells the tale of a soldier’s torment. Indeed, his body did return home from the Battle of the Somme but his mind was taken from him on the battlefield. The shell of this protagonist, now walks through each day, carrying the ghost of his first blood and the ghost of his own soul.

Ballad Of The Wolf

The Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries, was the forced displacement of a significant number of people from traditional land tenancies in the Scottish Highlands, where they practised small-scale agriculture on their crofts. Many were outlawed, arrested and thrown on densely packed boats and forced to live out their days in America. They had to fend for themselves, use their wits and desperately use all that they knew, just to survive.

In this song, the violence of the protagonists’ past, is what he draws on to keep him alive, as he inevitably becomes an American outlaw.

Already Dead

I’m especially proud of the musicianship and how we recorded this one. Ayleen O’Hanlon (Banjo, vocals), Stuart West (Double Bass) and I put this one down with vocals and instrumentation all live in a room.

The first take was just a bit of a run-through and then we nailed it on the second take. Ayleen had the flu, but powered through that session like the trooper she is.
I think this is a really good example of our producer, Myles Mumford really owning it. “Get in there, say what you gotta say, in as direct a way as you can, less is more.”

The song was recorded on the first session and really informed our approach to the rest of the album.

Dirge

Maybe this could be the darkest song on the record. This song is a simple narrative, following the death of the protagonist, after he is assaulted whilst out walking on a cold winters’ night. On a less obvious level, the emotional content of the song for me, is about loss and knowing who your real friends are, when the tough times come.

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