In January, Bones sat down with Alexandra Moreau of TG Films to talk about loss, homelessness, his passion for American roots music and the songs on his first album, Another Man Done Gone.
A.M.: Bones, in the booklet to your new album Another Man Done Gone, there's a scary picture of yourself behind bars where you look like a madman. Do I have to be afraid of you in the dark ?
Bones: Well ... depends on the review the album's going to get from you! No seriously, I'm probably one of the least aggressive persons I know, but there definitely is a lot of violence and aggression in American traditional music. It's peopled by killers, outlaws, convicts, tricksters and all sorts of badmen. One of them's actually on the album, John Hardy. The picture wasn't taken with any of those in mind, though. First of all, what your wild imagination sees as bars is really a kind of railing to a staircase leading to the basement of the old factory building where the photos were shot. Might as well be the abandoned Kentucky coal yard described in the "The L&N." I've come to think of the man on the picture as desperate, shocked, cornered. Unable to believe things have fallen apart. Imprisoned in his past, if you insist on the bars imagery. And that's all very much in line with the overall theme of the album.
Tell me more about that theme.
Well, there are actually a couple of them. With maybe one or two exceptions, the songs are variations about loss, displacement, homelessness, and restlessness. About being in the wrong place. About either wanting or having to leave behind what you used to love, destination unclear. I tried to explore exactly that moment of getting ready to go, when pain, grief, and fear are tearing you apart inside. You know, there's John Hardy on the gallows, the Mississippi sharecropper who lost his home to the flood, the singer in "Whistle Down The Wind", who's scared to death by the prospect of leaving the wasteland he lives in. Once on the road, they'll have to come to terms with their former lives, their past. Extremely hard to do, though, while you're moving.
