Chris Turpin and Stephanie Jean, better known as Ida Mae, are back with their excellent second album, ‘Click Click Domino’. A fusion of Americana, rock ‘n’ roll, blues and folk, Lee Campbell spoke with the pair recently from their home base of Nashville. The conversation covered their road trips across the States which inspired the record, compliments from the Willie Nelson ‘Family’, collaborating with Marcus King, producing their own album and missing the delights of Scotch eggs.
Congrats on the new album ‘Click Click Domino’, which is out now. It sounds great. How is life in Nashville?
Chris: It’s good. It’s very warm. We’ve just gotten back. We’ve been in the UK for the last six months. We couldn’t tour because of the pandemic, so we came back to see family, and we got back about a week ago. It’s pretty surreal. We’ve had 15 months off the road, and then we’re straight back into a festival in Pennsylvania and then Nashville. So it’s a bit weird. It’s like we never left now.
So the best place to start is with ‘The Road To Avalon’. An absolutely stunning opening track. Is that about a particular place, or is that something more abstract than that?
Chris: It’s more abstract, really. It’s a metaphor because ‘Avalon’ is rich in Celtic mythology and that sort of thing. It’s a name that pops up a lot, especially in America. There’s an Avalon in Mississippi; it’s had all sorts. So, not unlike our band name, it just seems to kind of inhabit this Americana-ery world & space and draw some lines between the UK & America. It was more of a destination. It was written as a song that tried to capture some of the feelings of being in some of these small American towns in the middle of nowhere and these strange hotel & motel rooms. Just feeling like a passer-by, really.
You’ve toured with two legends in Alison Krauss and Willie Nelson? Could you tell us about each of those experiences?
Steph: They were really incredible. They were all in huge arenas. We showed up with just us & our manager and a car. We didn’t know what to expect. I think we both sort of expected to be slightly ignored, not in a rude way, just everyone getting on with their things.
Chris: Yes, because it’s just us, Alison Krauss, then Willie Nelson. We’re not exactly high on the food chain there, so we didn’t expect much from anybody.
Steph: But as soon as we arrived, all of Alison’s crew helped us get our stuff. They said, we’ll put your stuff in the bus; you’re part of the family now, and we met all of Willie’s crew. Everyone was friendly, some of the friendliest shows we’ve ever done.
Chris: They were all interested in us. After the first show, it was a huge compliment for us; a lot of Willie’s road crew, nicknamed ‘The Family’, said that we had something to say; that was the quote “you guys have got something to say!” We took that as a huge compliment. Not entirely sure what it means, but we took that as a compliment.
Steph: We got to get up on stage for the last songs and join them on stage. It was very special.
It was Jay Bellerose on drums.
Chris: One of our favourite drummers on planet earth.
Steph: Then Matt Rollins on piano, who also works with Mary Chapin Carpenter. They are all the nicest musicians you could meet really.
On your travels across America, what’s the most bizarre thing (or things) you’ve seen?
Steph: A lot of the time, it’s just us. That previous touring experience when you’re in a band and you sort of have your own unit, and you’re quite blocked off, you stay in a tour bus, you don’t really go outside of that world. Whereas, when it’s just us and a car, strange things happen all the time.
Chris: Because we are a couple, we are more approachable, so I think we attract attention and conversation. I’m trying to think of a specific moment that isn’t too related to politics (laughing). Many of the places we go, people would never meet people with English accents, so there’s a lot of repeating what you say.
Chris: We were passing through somewhere in Ohio in an industrial estate, and we just stopped to get a pizza because that was the only place that was open. Steph just said, “we’ll have a Margherita pizza and a Diet Coke”, and the woman behind the counter just gasped and had to go to get someone else (laughing). Also, just having long hair and Doc Martens is pretty rare.
I did see your track by track chat about the various tracks in the album, which was brilliantly done, I thought, together with some of your photographs. I’m assuming they are some of the ones that you took on the road?
Steph: Yeah, we’ve done a book to accompany the record.
Chris: The idea was to have something a bit more permanent rather than having thousands of digital pictures. We thought if we took out film cameras, we had to think about what we were taking pictures of, so that’s what we did, yeah.
Great idea. ‘Chasing Lights’, your debut album, was released in 2019. Were there any songs written as part of those sessions that ended up making their way onto the new album?
Steph: No. There were many songs written for each record that didn’t make it, but we’re not very good at going back. Even this record, there were songs that didn’t make it on the record that we really wanted on the record, and already Chris had started writing for the next record. There were songs that were not even going to make it on the next record because it’s a moment in time. Especially with what we do and now with the pandemic and everything, so much has changed since. When we wrote ‘Click Click Domino’, we were on the road; everything was constantly moving. It was frenetic, and then everything stopped, and it’s been a year and a half, really. So everything’s changed, so the idea of going back to that moment that you were living then with those songs is constantly moving forwards.
Chris: We’re still learning an awful lot all the time.
Related to that question, how would you describe your sound on ‘Click Click Domino’ compared with the sound on your debut LP?
Chris: It’s a much tougher sound. On the debut album, there was a real emphasis for me to make this a real gentle, intimate sounding moment, and I wouldn’t sing particularly wildly or too strong. It would be gentle; it would be live and would capture that kind of intimacy. With this album, especially with how we recorded it, we had plans to fly people in and have this location recording which all went out the window. So we had literally just crashed off the end of this tour and didn’t know what would happen next, so we just decided to spend the money we had on recording equipment and just start. So it’s a much rawer and road-worn sound.
It’s just as personal & intimate because it’s just me & Steph producing and engineering the album, but it’s just a little tougher and more open sounding. We were able to push the envelope a little bit further; that heavier, Brit-rock, blues thing. We could push that way, lean a lot more heavily that way than we did on the last album. Sonically we had a lot more time to play with drums and synthesizers, drum machines, textures & tones. I had planned a lot of this stuff on the road in my head, how I wanted to clash these things together, and we were afforded the time to do that because of how we recorded it.
The title track has so much energy in it, and it’s a powerful song. What is actually behind the phrase ‘Click Click Domino’?
Chris: It has taken on more meaning over time. The first thing to say is that I like playing with language, a bit like The Beatles, ‘Come Together’ or something like that. I like coming up with vernacular phrases that then become something. A lot of that was about algorithms, social media & numbers and also just dealing with the news & the state of affairs in America and what was going on and how that was culturally so different from where we grew up; similarities and differences, cognitive dissonance of all of that swirling around gave us the idea of ‘Click Click Domino’ between clicking on mousepads and the idea of dominos falling one by one in this linearity. It just seems to pull together so many of those ideas that I was trying to weave into that lyric that it felt like a cool name. It wasn’t going to be the title track of the album, but it just felt right and looked good on a T-shirt, so it felt appropriate, you know to go “alright that’s a cooler phrase”, so it kind of means a lot of things, whatever you want to pull out of lyrics it can mean.
There’s a couple of collaborations on the album with Jake Kiszka From Greta Van Fleet and Marcus King on the title track. How did those collaborations come about?
Steph: The first tour we ever did across the States was with Marcus King, for six weeks in 2018, and then we were really lucky to go out with Greta (Van Fleet), as well for a few months before ‘Chasing Lights’ came out. When the pandemic hit, we were good friends with all these people, but you never see each other. It’s that classic thing when you see each other once in London, and then you’ll see them again somewhere random, then you won’t see each other for the year. So with the pandemic, everyone was in Nashville because a lot of musician friends live in Nashville, but they are never all here. With the pandemic for once, everyone was here. Chris loves playing the guitar with those guys, and we thought it would be really nice while we’re here having a few dinners together, and we were like, “why don’t you come to play on the record?” So it happened quite naturally. It was very chilled out; there weren’t many takes. There were many more wines than takes probably (chuckling).
Chris: Even though we recorded it on our own, the whole record was recorded as live takes. So with ‘Click Click Domino’, the bulk of that is me playing the guitar, me and Steph singing together. There’s not like 17 vocal takes or overdubbing of the guitars over and over again. Personally, I think you lose a lot of energy doing that. So we did the same thing with the collaborations. Marcus played on ‘Deep River’, and he played on ‘Click Click Domino’. We just stood side by side & we just rammed the songs, and we just played along, twice, and that was it. The same with Jake. He came in, and we worked a little longer. I said we’ve got this kind of Dr Feelgood-sounding, weird punky, proto-rock blues thing. Let’s just do it backwards and forwards, and we discussed a little bit of a production. We tried quite a lot of takes, maybe ten, and we used the first take because it was better, and it just kind of fell together that way.
In terms of the actual recording process, were you in different locations from the guys or in the studio together?
Steph: These guys came into the house.
Chris: We recorded this record at home, in Nashville. We were gonna location record, so we saved up our pocket money to buy some really nice studio gear, and we ended up buying the gear before the pandemic hit, and all those supply chains went wild. We just got everything, and because no one else was coming back to the house that we were living in Nashville, we just wired the house as the studio, which was a huge risk. But it worked. So they just came over for dinner, and we would do the takes side by side. We put the amplifiers in the basement and just cranked them up. So it was a very personal experience, and we didn’t overthink it, really.
You’ve probably been asked that a thousand times, but I’ll ask anyway. As a married couple, Chris and Steph, how do you manage the intense dynamic of being in a band together?
Steph: We do get this a lot. It’s all we’ve ever known. We get on really well, and it just works. We do flip into work mode sometimes.
Chris: We squabble like teenagers now and then. Because we were in a band before we were together, we like debating song structures, and we squabble a bit, but pretty much we’re on the same page 99% of the time.
Steph: We did an interview last week, and they just wouldn’t believe that we didn’t argue. He said, “You must argue about something! (laughing) – what’s the last argument you had?”
Ethan Johns – he did all the drumming on the album?
Chris: He did. Other than the odd 1960s, 1970s drum machines, he’s the only drummer.
He’s obviously also a renowned producer in his own right. Did he get involved in any of the production or engineering behind ‘Click Click Domino’, or is it just yourselves?
Chris: He worked on ‘Chasing Lights’ with us, and he was a huge, huge influence on how we think about recording music and the process of how we approached this record in terms of cutting it live & textures and working very, very quickly. We were relatively cheeky and said, “Look, Ethan, this is the situation that we’re in. We’re working towards having our own studio. We’d love for you to drum.” He was in a position where he can play almost anything. He’s a fantastic drummer. He was looking to do some more session work and bits & pieces. Steph is also one of his favourite session keys players. Steph’s been on Mary Chapin Carpenter records; she’s played with Tom Jones through Ethan, so I think he owed us a favour. We didn’t give any instruction to him or Nick (Pini), the bass player. They work together all the time; we trusted them. I know he’s worked with Laura Marling in that way where she’s delivered whole live takes, and he has pieced together parts around it, so we were quite confident that he would do that.
Steph: Yeah, him and Nick, even though no-one was in the room together, all of us played enough together that we know each other’s feel. We knew we wanted Nick and Ethan together. When we first started planning it, we didn’t know they would be in separate places and that we’d all be in separate places, but somehow, there are moments on there, we feel like it sounds live.
Chris: The song ‘Deep River’, which was literally sung there with my acoustic guitar in a third take, just sang it through with Steph singing, and then everything after that was kind of drums, bass and Marcus was done after. Even though it was a live take, it was done after, and it feels to me like we’re all in a room together.
Steph: Which is insane, especially with the drums and Marcus. That’s the bit that always throws me off because there are moments where they sound like they are playing together, and they never heard each other.
When I listen to the album, it feels like that to me as well.
Steph: (laughing) It might be a fluke!
Chris: It was terrifying sending recordings to Ethan. But thankfully, he said we did an amazing job on the record, and he has been incredibly kind.
Was it not really tempting to say, “Ethan, we are struggling with the production and engineering process, can you jump in here and help?” Did it ever come close to that?
Steph: I don’t think it did, because we knew what we wanted and what we were doing and he was very much, before we did this record, you should self-produce your next record. He was a real advocate of Chris producing because he was always taking notes and asking questions, and I think he was like, “you’ve got this, go and do it”. We’re just really happy and excited to be a part of it as well.
Yeah, it really works; you’ve done a great job on it. Another one of my favourite tracks on the record is’ Learn To Love You Better’. Beautiful song. What is the story or theme behind this one?
Chris: I guess it was a kind of a lyric that just fell out. We had a few friends with tougher relationships, and there was a lot being spoken more often, especially in the music community, about mental health and that sort of thing, so it just felt right. It kind of just came together; there wasn’t much thought about it. It was just a friend of ours who was going through a tough time, dealing with a tumultuous relationship and the phrase “learn to love you better” just came out. It was recorded on this little tiny mandolin thing from the 1800s, and it just kind of happened. It was one of those songs that happened really, really quickly, so there wasn’t too much thought into it at all.
Yeah, it’s really naturally a great song. An important question coming up here. What do you miss most about Norfolk and the UK?
Steph: (laughing): A nice, Scotch egg.
Chris: The seaside – it’s very flat and beautiful coast. I miss being able to get into the car and drive to like an empty piece of beach. I do miss that a lot. And the little pubs in Norfolk. We miss that, yeah.
Steph: Yeah, the cosy pubs.
Is Colman’s mustard available in Nashville?
Chris: It is. You can get Yorkshire Tea here, so we’re good (laughing)!
Steph: I mean, it all costs about ten pounds!
You can afford it once a year.
Chris: That’s about right, yeah.
You seem to span quite a few genres with your music, which is partly what I like about it. I can hear shades of Ray LaMontagne; I can hear The Civil Wars. I can hear a bit of Robert Plant in there. There’s also a multitude of instruments on this album, from out and out acoustic & electric guitar to some of the more synthesised instruments. Is there a genre that you feel most naturally in, or do you like to span a few different genres and let people make up their own minds on the music? Where do you see yourselves in terms of the overall fit?
Chris: We don’t really know.
Steph: It’s tricky. We often find this making records because there are both those sides to us. Especially because we came from a rock band. The rock ‘n’ roll side of thing we really enjoy and live, that’s so fun, but then, we also have the more intimate harmonies.
Chris: We’re definitely Americana based, whatever that means. We’re definitely students of blues, folk and rock ‘n’ roll. I mean, if you grow up on any kind of UK based rock ‘n’ roll, Brit-rock, from The Beatles to the Stones to Led Zeppelin, you follow that one generation back you are at Chess Records, follow it one more back, and you’re at early country blues, Fred McDowell, Robert Johnson and Son House. For me, when I was a teenager growing up, I was listening to Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones. At the same time, I was listening to the White Stripes and The Black Keys. In my house, John Martyn was on constantly and a lot of English folk singers. I grew up in English church choirs, and Steph’s Mum is from Northern Ireland.
Steph: Yes, she’s from County Antrim.
No way!
Steph: Yes, from Kilrea
Chris: So there’s a lot of folk songs that come directly from your Mum. My Mum’s a piano teacher, and your Mum endlessly sings folk songs and plays the recorder.
Steph: Tin whistle, actually (laughing).
Do you ever play any of the folk stuff that you grew up with during live performances?
Steph: We actually don’t. I grew up listening to Christy Moore, and she would sing ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ and everything over me, and I would say “, I don’t like this, stop it”, when it’s being forced upon you. But now, it’s like, “you know all those chunky Irish songbooks you would throw at me when I was a kid? – can I now have those?”
Chris: The same thing happened in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The American music was cooler, slicker, more exciting.
Steph: Especially with this recent time at home. We left to join a rock band when we were 18. So having this year back at home with family, you’ve (Chris) been talking more to my Mum about folk music, and Chris has been getting really into Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson and having the time to go back and trace some of this music.
Chris: We’re considering playing it, but the thing is with folk music, with a lot of the language that is used. It just wasn’t used in popular music; it doesn’t feel modern. It just doesn’t transfer as well, which is a shame.
What was your first piece of vinyl, either owned or stolen and can you remember where you bought it or stole it from?
Chris: Mine is pretty good. It was my Step-dad’s record collection, which I still have – don’t tell him! (chuckling). The double-album of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Electric Ladyland’ was the original pressing, with the poster and everything. That’s pretty cool.
Steph: My Mum has an amazing copy of Dylan’s ‘Times They Are a-Changin’, that she bought in Dublin in a market in 1970 something and she has written the date and where she bought it.
Was that the first piece of vinyl that you got into, Steph?
Steph: No, my parents were very much on the classical music train in terms of vinyl, but I would have probably stolen more CDs from my parents than vinyl – Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and I was recording music off the radio.
With all the touring and writing in the past few years, it sounds pretty relentless. What passions are outside of the musical arena for both of you?
Chris: Not a huge amount, really (laughing).
Steph: I do a lot of art. I love drawing and sketching. I did all the artwork for the record. When I have the time and space, I love to paint and draw. Chris does a lot of photography.
Chris: Yeah, but I am obsessed with guitar playing, obsessed with song-writing, obsessed with production, so that can take up so much time.
Steph: Especially now, every moment of your life could be taken up by creating content. You have to take time out. For example, if I haven’t read a book in a while, I should set aside some time to read. Try not to make just music, 24 hours a day.
Chris: Yeah, we need more hobbies (laughing).
Steph: Yes, we should both take up squash or something.
Any plans to tour the UK or Ireland soon?
Steph: Hopefully, we have one show in London in August and a festival in Norfolk, and at the minute, that’s it.
Chris: As soon as we humanly can.
Steph: The plan is to be halfway between the UK and the States. The last gigs we played in Ireland actually was with Josh Ritter. Our first ever show in Belfast was opening for Brandi Carlile, a long time ago in our old band (Kill It, Kid).
Maybe you’ll do a special show in Kilrea.
Steph: We’ll do one in Ballymoney (laughing)! We should say our limited imprint on Thirty Tigers is called Vow Road Records. We have our own imprint, which is named after the road to Kilrea – The Vow Road!
Thanks, guys. It has been a pleasure catching up with you both for XS Noize. Best of luck with the album.
Chris & Steph: Thanks for having us – great questions
‘Click Click Domino’ Tracklist:
1. Road to Avalon
2. Click Click Domino (feat. Marcus King)
3. Line on the Page
4. Raining for You
5. Little Liars
6. Deep River (feat. Marcus King)
7. Heartworn Traders
8. Calico Coming Down
9. Learn To Love You Better
10. Long Gone & Heartworn (feat. Jake Kiszka)
11. Mountain Lion Blues
12. Sing A Hallelujah
13. Has My Midnight Begun
Be the first to comment