‘Calling me an outsider artist … yes, I think it’s apt. It’s taken me a long time to join the gang.” On Thanksgiving Friday, Michael Hurley – freak-folk singer-songwriter and artist of nearly 60 years’ standing – is considering where he fits in. He’s calling from his little house in rural Oregon, among the doug firs and tall pines, where he’s just brewed 11 gallons of cider from his homegrown apples. “It’s really quiet here. Few cars go by. It suits me. It’s remote. It gets a little lonely sometimes.”
To celebrate his 80th birthday, Hurley is releasing his first album of new material in 12 years, The Time of the Foxgloves, named after his favourite flower and his favourite time of year. His band on it includes the left-field bluesy singer-songwriter Josephine Foster, one of many contemporary fans. Other admirers include Cat Power (who has covered his songs Werewolf and Sweedeedee), Devendra Banhart (who released two Hurley albums on his Gnomonsong label), Lucinda Williams, Yo La Tengo, Violent Femmes and Will Oldham. “He’s a real hero,” Oldham said in 2017. “Seeing him singing and smiling makes me think I can get through this life doing what I do.”
You hear some of their influences in Hurley’s eccentric, pared-back, bluegrass and blues-inspired back catalogue. At times his songs are sparse and tender (Be Kind To Me; Valley of Tears) at others spikily surreal (and with titles to match, like What Made My Hamburger Disappear?). The music’s playfulness is underscored by his records’ cartoonish cover art, featuring werewolves inspired by his childhood pet collies Boone and Count, psychedelic sunrises and women in bars drinking beer – “my favourite thing to draw”, Hurley says.
Born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1941, Hurley spent childhood summers on the road with his siblings and operetta-directing father, travelling between their home and theatres in Florida. In the car, they would soak up artists including Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton, and make up “simple songs”; he also got on stage for the first time back then. “At the beginning of the shows, we’d be there, us kids, pretending we were fishing into the orchestra pit. Then the actors would come on and chase us off, make it part of the show!” His voice flutters with sleepy delight. “I always wanted to be a creative writer. I never dreamed that I would record.”
He became a teenage school drop-out who passed his time making fanzines with names such as The Outcry and The Morning Tea – then he started playing music and hitchhiking with his sister’s blond Stella guitar (“I loved the way it looked and the way its strings would resonate”). One day, he was picked up by the folklorist Fred Ramsey, who lived up the local river road; he’d recorded traditional music across the south in the 50s and invited Hurley to his house to play his songs. He liked what he heard.
Hurley’s debut album, First Songs, produced by Ramsay, came out in 1965 on the renowned Folkways label, home to Woody Guthrie and Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. On its cover, Hurley already looked different, slightly edgy, peering from under a roguish swoosh of dark hair, a devil-may-care 22. He was also playing the Greenwich Village coffee house scene at the time, where Bob Dylan and Paul Simon had made early career moves.
He had meeting with major producers but nothing transpired: one assumes Hurley never wanted to be a bigger musician. “I did,” he replies, “but I didn’t have a progressive drive about it. I didn’t enjoy the process of applying for gigs, that determination to penetrate things, all this trouble you had to go through. I preferred playing parties. Little gatherings. Drinking with friends, hopping across the river.”
He says he didn’t seem to fit people’s ideas “of what the blues or bluegrass or folk should be”. He thinks it’s funny that he first played the Newport folk festival in 2013. “By which time there was practically no folk at all, just indie-rock, so I played a real old folk song, Barbara Allen. Now I’m acceptable!”
Seven years passed between his debut album and its follow-up, Armchair Boogie, in 1971. In the meantime, he’d got married, had kids, separated from his wife, had another kid with his girlfriend, and worked as a hospital janitor, artist’s model, shoe pattern-maker and pretzel vendor on the streets of Boston. But he kept making music. His 1975 album, Have Moicy! with the Holy Modal Rounders and Jeffrey Frederick & the Clamtones became a cult favourite: its raggedy, joyful folk-rock holds premonitions of early-80s REM.
Over the next three decades, Hurley managed to make a modest living selling his art, touring and making drowsy new albums every few years (the critic Robert Christgau said 1984’s Blue Navigator “sounds as if Hurley padded over to the studio before he was done with his nap”). This has meant his social life has for decades been on an international cycle. “I’ve been spoilt over the years in a way, catching up every year with old friends.” The pandemic has been hard. “I’ve been adjusting to staying in my locality. Doing two to three gigs a month. Going to drive-in automobile places … and I’m scared to fly yet. Hopefully I’ll be lucky in spring when the conditions will be better.”
In recent years, he has enjoyed the new interest in his work from younger artists. He adores lots of their covers, highlighting the Hackles’ softer, subtler version of 2002’s O My Stars and Cat Power’s 2000 version of Werewolf, an eerie classic he wrote in the 60s, inspired by the horror films of Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff. “Cat’s version puts it in a whole different place. I don’t want people to sound like me. I want them to sound like them.”
His new compositions on The Time of the Foxgloves warmed his heart in the summer: he says he loved playing with a full band in a studio – violin, pump organ, upright bass, banjo and percussion. Tracks include Knocko the Monk, an instrumental where a pump organ wheezes beautifully behind his spiky, nimble finger-picking, and Jacob’s Ladder, on which Josephine Foster’s ghostly alto acts as an antique, woozy foil for Hurley’s reedier tones.
“The way music comes to you … it’s like dreaming,” he says. “Something’s going on. Melodies just drop into my thinking.” He has a theory about the type of person who is drawn to his songs. “They respond to the irregularity of it, how it’s not ordinary. A mother of a young son wrote to me recently and said, ‘My son gets so stressed but when I play your music, it calms him way down.’ Oftentimes, musicians have trouble with irregularities, but not everyone’s the same.” He takes a moment in silence. “That’s how it is. Some people feel its beauty.”
The Time of the Foxgloves is out now on No Quarter Records.
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