Brian Houston talks about his new blues-infused album, Shelter

Brian Houston is a singer and songwriter from Belfast in Northern Ireland whose music has been referred to by veteran BBC DJ, Bob Harris, as “really, really special”. Brian’s musical influences range from old time gospel tunes to Elvis, Bob Dylan and Steve Earle. He has played support for Elvis Costello, Dr John and Van Morrison and has recently begun touring in the US as well as the UK. His gigs are always wonderful, feel-good events where you get fully drawn in by Brian’s passionate performing style, you lose yourself in the music and you laugh until your sides ache. Brian has released around a dozen albums which feature his well-crafted songs with their engaging and challenging lyrics.

He has just released a new album, Shelter, which Cross Rythms called “a raw mix of rock, blues, gospel, soul and funk”. Recorded in both Nashville and Belfast, the album features gospel-style backing vocals from the renowned McCrary Sisters who have performed with Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Buddy Miller. As ever, Brian’s Christian faith infuses the album, which at times screams with anger and rails at the world, with hope.

Downatthecrossroads caught up with Brian recently:

DATC: Brian, congratulations on the new album. Have you been pleased at the reception it’s had?

Brian: Delighted. Can’t believe it’s been so well received. 10 out of ten and 4.5 out of five as well as Steve Stockman’s album of the half year. Really delighted!!!

DATC: It’s a bit different from what you’ve done before – it’s very bluesy, rocky, and of course there are those fantastic backing vocals. Was this the album you set out to make?

Brian: Hmmm good question. I knew as I was writing the songs that it was very different from what I’d done before. I even recorded the demos kinda differently by starting some songs on the bass and drum machine rather than guitar. I even considered putting it out under a different name as it seems different enough to justify a whole new identity and marketing approach. In the end though I was talked into doing it as me. As regards it being the album I set out to make….no, probably not…I thought for a long time it would be like Gospel Road  ‘cause many of the songs came from that old-timey place stylistically. But there was much more of an edge that kinda set the direction by itself.

DATC: There are certainly some traditional blues themes on the album – the title track, Shelter is a kind of cry of distress, Praying Time sounds like an old Spiritual, Night and Day’s got sadness, loneliness and hopelessness. And yet there’s this constant theme of hope breaking through. Does that reflect your view on life?

Brian: Me and my family have been through two of the hardest years of our life recently and I think much of the record and even the anger of the vocals reflects that anxiety. But at the same time I’ve wanted to keep myself from despair and so I’ve lifted up my head and declared that God is still good and has plans for hope and a future. The idea that seems to come across is that I’m gonna walk through this time with as much faith and dignity as I can and so I will praise him no matter how bleak things may look.

DATC: In Prices Go Up you kind of send up the “Preacher man” who “takes the people up, never let them come down”. Has that been a kind of religion you’ve had some experience of?

Brian: Ha ha, a pointed question…..You’re the first person to comment on that line actually…I thought I’d sneaked it past everyone…..I think it’s fair enough to say that many of the disillusioned, hurt, wounded and fed up people of this part of the world have had bad experiences with churches and religion….NOBODY I know has been treated badly by God or has a resentment issue with Jesus. I heard the line once…the difference between God and the preacher is that God never thinks he’s the preacher! lol

DATC: In some of the songs you talk about a very practical expression of faith – in Five Dollars, you talk about giving to the beggar, In Lord Pity the Fool, you mention people who are “too blinded by greed, too busy…to hear the cry of the poor”. As you tour around, do you find people get it, that this is a pretty fundamental element in Christian faith?

Brian: No, not at all….I think I, like many of us, are constantly being caught up in the “just a little bit more for me” culture that we live in. It’s one of these paradoxical situations. In order to give, you have to have something to give…How do you decide when you’ve enough and can afford to give some away?  I don’t think you can…sacrifice hurts….we live in a world that says “here take another pain killer…let’s all try to live a pain free existence.”  But there is pain in living and there is pain in giving….I think it’s time for me to accept that pain is inevitable at some point and it may as well be suffered for the sake of others

DATC: You’ve been touring a bit more in the US recently. How do you go down over there? Your live shows are very entertaining, but have a lot of a kind of Northern Irish humour, with a lot of banter and interaction with the audience. How does that go down in the US?

Brian: Slower lol…..we do talk extremely fast over here, lol…..I think what I do is a Bard-like event. It’s “here’s who you are …here’s your identity…your history, your politics, your anger …your humour…and…these make up your culture…”

It is very helpful to learn something about the place you are going to…what are the issues folks face?  If you can tell a story that is informed by that or make a joke about a topical issue or person…you begin to build a bridge that says, ”I know who you are…I know how you feel and I’m telling you you’re not alone”. If I can do any part of that in an evening then I make a connection and once I do that….I’ve become their friend from Ireland. To me that’s what its all about…making the connection….touching their hearts and making them laugh…it’s the idea everywhere I go….

DATC: Brian, thanks for talking to us.

Don’t miss Brian Houston’s brilliant new album, Shelter

US customers can buy Shelter at Amazon.com or iTunes

UK customers can buy Shelter at www.brianhouston.com or at Amazon.co.uk

Brian Houston with Pity the Fool

Brian Houston performs We Don’t Need Religion at the Guitar Rooms, Holywood.

Nobody’s Fault But Mine

Blind Willie Johnson first recorded this famous song in 1927. Nobody’s Fault But Mine – the need for personal responsibility and making the right choices.

Blind WIllie Johnson

Nobody’s Fault But Mine was first recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in 1927. The song is a traditional gospel song that is listed in the 1924 Cleveland Library’s Index to Negro Spirituals. Over the years, it has been recorded by a great many musicians, including Nina Simone, Tom Jones, Willie Nelson, Ben Harper, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Robben Forde and Eric Bibb. So – choose your favourite version!

It was also famously covered by Led Zeppelin for their 1976 album Presence. They used some of Johnson’s lyrics, but excluded the overtly religious passages and added several verses of their own.  Jimmy Page and Robert Plant recorded it again in their 1994 album, No Quarter. Record producer Rick Rubin called the Led Zeppelin version, “A traditional blues, twisted through a trippy, psychedelic filter. They played with such precision, doing these odd arrangements that sound like loose jams but are really choreographed.”

In its more original setting in the hands of Blind Willie Johnson, the song is particularly interesting. The song is basically about personal responsibility – the singer has a bible at home and his mother and father taught him how to read it. So if he doesn’t and he ends up “with my soul be lost”, then he recognizes there’s nobody to blame but himself.

Nobody’s fault but mine,  Nobody’s fault but mine

If  I don’t read it my soul be lost

I have a bible in my home, I have a bible in my home

If I don’t read it my soul be lost

My mother she taught me how to read,  Mother she taught me how to read

If I don’t read it my soul be lost, nobody’s fault but mine

Blind Willie Johnson wasn’t born blind; rather his blindness was likely the result of a tragic, avoidable accident.  When Willie was seven, his father beat his stepmother after catching her going out with another man. The stepmother then picked up a handful of lye and threw it, and it caught the face, not of Willie’s father, but of young Willie. The rest of Johnson’s life was no less tragic. Poor all his life, he spent his time preaching and singing in the streets of several Texas cities. In 1945, his home burned to the ground and Willie ended up living in the burned ruins of his home, sleeping on a wet bed in the late summer Texas heat. He lived like this until he contracted malaria and died on September 18, 1945.

Given his circumstances, you might excuse Willie Johnson for putting the blame for whatever short-comings he had on the circumstances that life threw at him. Instead he sings that it’s “nobody’s fault but mine”. You don’t often get that sort of honesty these days. For sure we all realize that some people get less than a fair deal in life; in fact, our world is full of injustice. Inequalities of all sorts, not least in education, put people at risk and are at the root of many of our social problems. But Willie Johnson realized that despite the racism, discrimination, poverty and disability he suffered, nothing took away his own personal responsibility. In the end, there is personal responsibility for ourselves and our actions. If we end up ignoring good advice and making wrong choices, ultimately, “it’s nobody’s fault but mine”.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Dublin to see Bruce Springsteen (the usual high-energy, hughly joyous entertainment that you get from the Boss) and I got to the open air venue nice and early to get a prime spot. As I waited I chatted to one of the promoting company’s security officials. Lovely guy. Who told me that this would be an easy night for him and his colleagues – just look around, he said, at the sort of people come to a gig like this. Very different, he said, from the event two weeks ago in Phoenix Park. A big rap/hip-hop event that attracted about 45,000 people, starring – and here he mentioned a load of names I’m afraid I didn’t recognize, apart from one Snoop Dogg. Anyway, my friend told me that they had forcibly to eject over 570 people from the gig, that there were numerous stabbings, including nine serious stabbings and three fatalities, one from a knife wound. He pointed to the drug culture surrounding this scene and the violence inherent to some of the music. Rather shocked, I asked him who was taking responsibility for what had happened – who had fouled up, the promoter, the police, the city council – who was to blame? My new friend was in no doubt, notwithstanding my typical liberal response – in the end of the day, he said, it’s each of those young people’s own personal responsibility. They have a choice he said.

Psychiatrist and best-selling author Scott Peck’s well known book from 1978, The Road Less Travelled, is about what it takes to be a fulfilled human being. For Peck high on the agenda is the unpopular idea of self-discipline, particularly the ideas of delay of gratification and dedication to truth. And key to all of this, according to Peck, is accepting responsibility for oneself and one’s actions.

In the Hebrew bible, a man called Joshua once asked a group of people, who had within living memory been fleeing slaves, to “choose” whether they were going to serve the God that had rescued them from the oppression of being Pharoah’s brick-makers, or just fit in with the world around them. For all of us there come points in life where we need to take responsibility for the way things are going and make the right choice. To simply drift on blaming everybody and everything else for our problems is the road to nowhere. Better to face up to the fact that “it’s nobody’s fault but mine”.

Mavis Staples & the Blind Boys of Alabama with Nobody’s Fault but Mine