His American-Influenced Album That Began In Broken Hill

“It was quite a rambling adventure,” Hanlon admits of the album’s evolution. “No matter where I am, I’m looking for quiet places to go to write that are cheap. There’s always a bunch of stuff that get started that I file away but I try and finish at least something. If I get one song a week, I’m actually pretty happy. In Broken Hill I got one completed and bunch started – lots of ideas, lots of lyrics, lots of stories written.

“Then I put a message out when I was in Portland saying did anyone know of any places I could go and the Sou’wester Lodge [in Seaview, Washington] came up a few times, so I checked it out. The new owners were interested in the idea of an ‘artist residency’ – before my call they hadn’t existed,” he chuckles, “so I was the first one. I was the guinea pig. It’s funny, wherever you go kind of feeds into the process.”

In the end, the bulk of Where Did You Come From? was written as Hanlon travelled across America’s South.

"I was the guinea pig."

“Apart from those three, none of it was prepared. I had other songs that were completed that never made it onto the record. I kind of realised that a pattern was forming, a style was forming, and I just wanted to stick with that, the more roots-based kind of songs, and I was trying to write songs and melodies and rhythms to suit the players that I was meeting along the way. So often I’d book the studio a week or two in advance and then write the song up until the day we went in there.”

Among the musicians Hanlon met who ended up joining him in the studio were Riley Downing from US country band The Deslondes; singer James Wallace from The Naked Light; a singer named Elle King who was living upstairs at this house in Nashville where he lived for a month and ended up providing not only the vocals for a song he’d started during a session with Guy Clark he’d abandoned but saw him rewrite it with her in mind, The Will Of The River; and, courtesy bass-playing Memphis’ Electrophonic Studios owner Scott Bomar, the extraordinary Howard Grimes, 72-year-old veteran of countless sessions including a stack of Al Greene records, who ended up playing on four songs.