Songs Of The Book

Portland, Oregon-based roots blues musician Kelly Joe Phelps has made his name as one of the most innovative players of lap guitar today, writing and singing songs that draw deeply from the well of not only the original makers of the more spiritual end of the blues – Fred McDowell, Reverend Gary Davis – but contemporary stylists like John Fahey and Leo Kottke. But there comes a time when you need to stretch out, and for his latest album, Brother Sinner & The Whale, he put the lap guitar aside and picked up a National bottleneck slide guitar and a Martin D-35 acoustic.

“Playing bottleneck was something I'd wanted to do for a long time,” Phelps explains. “I've been messing around with it at home here for a few years and wondered if I would ever attack it and approach it and embrace it, and inevitably what it took for that to happen was music. Once I started putting these new songs together, it seemed to me a really good fit.”

Of course, while the songs might have suggested that they'd be best served played with bottleneck, the technique is quite different to that by which Phelps had been playing slide on the lap guitar. “It was a lot of work,” he admits. “When I realised that the time had come for me to do that sort of thing, again I was fortunate in that I was off the road for a couple of months and so I decided to go back to work, essentially, and started practising ten, twelve hours a day for about three months. In my mind's eye I could see what was possible, what I might be capable of doing, but I realised early of course that what my mind's eye was seeing was yet something I had in my hand.

“So I devoted myself to pulling it together and doing the work needed. Because it's the newest thing for me musically, technically, guitar-wise, I'm still working very hard at it and enjoying it. It's thrilling to have that feeling – it reminds me of times past. Discovering something new on the guitar is very hard to come by when you've been playing it for forty years,” he laughs.

Phelps wasn't quite sure which direction Brother Sinner & The Whale would take, even as the initial songs suggested they were heading down a gospel-blues road. “Thematically, regarding the Bible and the search for God and those sorts of things, it's become something I've applied my life to the last couple of years, so when I had the opportunity at the top of this year and I had some time off and felt like I was in a good creative space, every time I allowed that creativity to come through, I found myself writing these new songs, and anytime I ended up being concerned about the fact that I was putting together a record of all kind of biblical themed-songs and, 'Oh, I need to write some other stuff', I couldn't come up with anything. So when I turned my focus and direction back to the gospel-themed things, I kept coming up with ideas. So there was a point in the process where I gave up the fight.

“With the Book of Jonah, the overriding theme is Jonah getting the call to do the work of God and finding he doesn't want to do that and trying to get as far away from that as possible, but ultimately realising there's no way around it.”

In a sense then, Phelps similarly found that there was no way he was going to make a different record.