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.

You seem to be obsessed with the past. Actually one of the most striking aspects of the album is that Berlin, the city where it was recorded and where you've been living for more than six years now, is completely absent from both the music and the stories. All songs, even the more contemporary ones by Waits, Dylan and Michelle Shocked, are decidedly non-urban. Are you hopelessly nostalgic?

The countryside described in the songs is actually anything but pastoral. It's one of disaster, despair, death and damnation. Hardly a place you'd feel nostalgia for if you lived in a city. The reason I like American folk and country blues songs is that many of them have a sort of metaphorical and timeless quality to them. The stories told are very simple on the surface, but they're able to convey powerful emotions. Unlike some songwriter's complex lyrical explorations of his or her own individual tortured soul, these old songs - and new ones written in that vein - tell countless stories at the same time. Yours. Mine. That's because the landscape is open, free, ready to be written on. There are places to go, distances to cover. It's full of mystery and legends. The city doesn't lend itself that well to mythology. But don't worry, my next album will definitely sound more urban.

Mmmh ... interesting. But let's come back to this one. How did you choose the songs ?

Some of them I've been performing for quite a while, others I learned especially for the album, like the Tom Waits song, for example. The song list kept changing in the process of recording. I kept listening to my favourite records for help and inspiration, frequently discovering little gems that would fit the mood of the album. So I tried many more than the ones that are actually on there; some felt right with just me and my guitar, others didn't.

Like the title track?

Yes. That was originally meant for inclusion. "Another Man Done Gone" is the name of an old African-American field holler. It's actually quite well-known. It tells the story of a hanging, probably a lynching, witnessed by the singer. An extremely mournful tune, and unexpectedly hard to do. I struggled with it and eventually recorded a version with some guitar in the background, but wasn't satisfied with it. Since I ran out of recording time, I decided to drop it but still leave the album title the way it was. Like that, the song remains there as a kind of unspoken presence, a subtext to the other songs.

Before we get a little more into the individual songs on the album, I'd like to ask you about your name. Is there some secret meaning behind it? Did you name yourself after Bones McCoy, the Star Trek character?

Oh no, not at all. That connection actually never occured to me. I didn't watch a lot of Star Trek when I was a kid. No, the original Bones was a 19th century minstrel show character. You know, blackface minstrelsy was America's chief popular mass entertainment at the time and extremely significant in shaping American ideas about race, class, and gender. Continuing to this day, actually.

What were those shows about?

Well, white performers wearing blackface and ill-fitting, kind of ragtag clothes, imitated and in fact appropriated black folk culture. They spoke in some sort of fake black accent, sang songs - mostly plantation songs like "Swanee River" - delivered funny stump speeches and so on. Those "darkie shows," as they were sometimes called, created kind of a national clown: the dancing, careless, happy-go-lucky plantation Sambo. In the 1830s, they were formalized into several different parts, one of which was usually a comic routine with a white genteel interlocutor and two blackface endmen. One of those endmen was called "Bones," or "Mr. Bones," after the instrument he played, a kind of castanets. In the early days of the minstrel show he was sometimes the master of ceremonies as well.

Sounds like a terribly racist thing to me. Why do you want to be perceived in that tradition?

The shows were racist to some extent, no doubt. But the cultural work they performed was far more complex than that. After all, blackface minstrelsy was also the first prolonged, featured appearance of black culture on the American stage, if only in this painfully distorted manner. What's important to be aware of, though, is the enormous impact the minstrel show had on vaudeville, burlesque, musical and most of all on our ideas of American folklife. I guess it wouldn't go too far to claim that it created that folklife in the first place. You know, the cabins, cottonbales, wagons, steamboats, railfences, the harvest moons, the barefooted children, the magnolia, honeysuckle and wisteria vine, all the longing songs addressed to them - the very "South" itself! And these images continue through today in albums, catalogues, advertisements, product packaging, toys, as well as films, radio, television and now even music videos. All sorts of modern masks hiding an old tradition, you know? In the early 90s, Michelle Shocked recorded an album called Arkansas Traveler. That's where "Blackberry Blossom" is from, by the way. In the notes to that album, she explains that her original intention was to put a picture of herself wearing blackface on the cover, with the intention of pointing to the real roots of many of the tunes included, which the white mainstream believes were somehow immaculately conceived in Las Vegas or Tin Pan Alley. She says that "blacking up" should be done correctly, in a context of genuine respect for the cultures we ape. I like that. So Bones is kind of a subversive gesture of respect, not at all of mockery or derision.

Quite an elaborate concept behind a name.

Well, I mean there are more obvious connections that you could make and that I like as well. All sorts of things. Bones is another word for dice, for example, so that's were the old roving gambler image kicks in. I also like to think that I play skeleton music, kind of stripped down to the bone, you know. And people always used bones as talismans, like rabbit's feet and stuff. A black cat bone is a common voodoo charm, for instance. It's a good blues name.

Which takes us right to the opening number on Another Man Done Gone. "Backwater Blues" is probably one of the most famous blues. I thought it was written by Bessie Smith ?

Yes, it's usually credited to her, but it probably had a country prototype as well. Bessie Smith started her career in minstrel shows as well, by the way. The song tells the story of the southern floods of the late twenties and was recorded and performed by countless blues artists, many of whom were personally affected by the heavy rains and rising tides. The first version I ever heard was on a live album by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Besides "Backwater Blues", the flood disaster inspired some other great tunes like Mississippi John Hurt's "Mississippi Heavy Water Blues" or John Lee Hooker's talking blues "Tupelo". Much much later Nick Cave also wrote a song called "Tupelo" that drew on the same historical incident, but cast it in kind of a mythological frame of reference.

You said these old songs tell more stories than just one. What does the song have to say to us, who are not flood victims?

I think it gives us one of the most powerful images for loss and defeat, for losing the ground beneath our feet. It doesn't necessarily take a flood to make you feel things are coming apart. I guess all of us, at one point or another in our lives, experience some kind of personal tragedy that all of a sudden leaves us in a dark dungeon with no idea how to possibly go on. But at the same time, we know that we'll have to somehow. And it's that kind of emotional state that is captured by the song. Trying to escape from the rising water, the singer climbs a hill, condemned to watch helplessly as everything he loves and lives for goes below the line. His house, his belongings, livestock, ancestors' graves. Like all the other victims, he knows he won't be back to start all over 'cause what he felt before has been washed away. They will all move on, probably find a place somewhere else, settle down ... but from now on they'll be homeless drifters, displaced and uprooted, trying to regain what's been lost. The philosopher George Lukács once coined the expression "transcendental homelessness" to describe the human condition, and I do hear and feel that in a simple song like "Backwater Blues."

There is another song on the album very similar in mood and theme, "The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore". In this case, it's not a natural desaster that deprives people of their homes and meaningful lives but the closing of a coal mine in Kentucky, the Hazard Hollow.

Exactly. Nobody forces anybody to leave, but there is no sense in staying either since the place is absolutely dead, a ghost town shrouded in despair and haunted by coal miners' ghosts with snow-white faces. When the singer was little, his father warned him not to continue in the family tradition and become a miner like his own father and himself, but I guess he refused to believe that anything might change in their traditional way of life, which is always a mistake, especially if big business interests are involved. Again, I see this song as a metaphor for being in the wrong place, or no place at all, even though - unlike in "Backwater Blues" - it's the place you used to call home not too long ago, which must be even more painful. There's a more recent song by Bruce Springsteen about the decline of the steel industry in Youngstown, Ohio. He must have written that with Jean Ritchie's song in mind. I think there is actually a reference to the coal mines of Appalachia in it.

Jean Ritchie is the woman who wrote "The L&N"?

Yes. Ritchie is a really interesting and impressive woman. She must be about 80 years old now and still does a few public performances from time to time. She grew up in Viper, Kentucky, in the heart of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, so I guess she knows what she's talking about. After getting her degree in social work she went to New York and worked in the famous Henry Street Settlement where she played traditional songs to entertain the children in her charge. Her reputation as a folk singer grew pretty quickly and she was asked to perform more formally. For folk music fans of the 1940s, Ritchie represented the ideal traditional perfomer: She grew up in the mountains of Kentucky, sang songs that she learned from her family, and played a little known instrument called a dulcimer. Her growing influence is actually best shown by the fact that dulcimers, previously relatively exotic instruments in New York, began selling at a brisk rate.

Trains and train imagery are quite pervasive in American folk and blues music and on Another Man Done Gone as well: John Hardy tries to escape his persecutors by hopping a train, the dumped lover in "Sittin' On Top Of The World" ends up riding a freight train to forget and then there's the L&N and the "Orange Blossom Special." That was a big hit for Johnny Cash in the sixties, wasn't it?

Yep, and Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison is where I actually got the song from. But it's originally a bluegrass tune. In 1938 the Seaboard Air Line's "Orange Blossom Special" became Florida's first streamlined train. Bluegrass fiddlers Ervin T. Rouse and Chubby Wise went to Union Station to see it and made up this tune afterwards. To his subsequent regret Wise relinquished all claim to it. It was first recorded by the Rouse Brothers in 1939, and has since been performed and recorded by numerous other groups. I always liked the jumpy, train-like rhythm. And again, here's somebody itchin' to go someplace else, lose those New York blues, with the shiny new train as promise and possibility.

Do you share this fascination for trains?

Absolutely. I grew up in a tiny apartment on the fifth floor of an ugly postwar building, but right behind our house there were open fields and train tracks. You can see them on the back cover photo of the CD. When we were little my friends and I used to walk on those tracks for hours and I always dreamed of hopping one of the freight trains that came by once or twice a day and ride it to some unknown exciting place. They probably wouldn't have taken me very far, but the idea was intriguing enough. Ever since I moved to Berlin I've done a lot of traveling by train and I still like it much better than going by car. You can enjoy the landscape floating by outside, and inside you have this more or less random assemblage of people who happen to have similar destinations. It's a good way of getting somewhere.

What is the "Marley Bone Coach" in the Tom Waits song? Is it a train as well? I was wondering about that.

I'm not sure either. It's one of Waits' many beautiful, evocative expressions that make you wonder where in God's name did he dig those up. The name may refer to a street in London, the Marylebone Road, which is itself a corruption of "Marie la bonne," the site of a famous courthouse. But there's also an old expression, "to ride in the marrow bone coach," which means to go on foot. One of the things I love about Tom Waits' songs is that they're full of weird names of places, people and items. Dylan's sixties stuff is like that as well.

Okay, Bob Dylan. He's your great idol, isn't he?

Hmm, I try not to idolize anybody. That makes people distant and untouchable. Dylan himself once said about Woody Guthrie that he was his first and last idol because he taught him that men are men and have reasons for what they are doing ... But you're right, Dylan's music definitely changed my life when I was introduced to it at the age of, well, seventeen. I think he's written some of the most amazing songs I've ever heard. For some time, I hardly listened to anything else. So obviously, at least one Dylan tune had to be on Another Man Done Gone.

And you picked "Blind Willie McTell." It's a fantastic song, but I don't think anybody outside the Dylan fan community has ever heard of it. Which period of his career is this from?

Dylan wrote and recorded the song sometime in the early eighties. It was originally meant to appear on Infidels, his first release after his religious phase. Unfortunately, he was not satisfied with either of the versions he did and decided not to have it on the album. So for years it was only available as a bootleg until it was officially released by Columbia on The Bootleg Series. He's even performed it live a couple of times during the past years so I guess he made his peace with the song. I thought a lot about which Dylan song to record for Another Man Done Gone. I tried "One Too Many Mornings," "I Am A Lonesome Hobo" and "One More Cup Of Coffee." All of those would have worked, but "Blind Willie McTell" seemed to fit best the general mood of the album. It sort of provides the framework for all the stories told in the other songs. It evokes the landscape the song characters are traveling back and forth in, haunted and cursed, it's peopled by martyrs, chain gangs, bootleggers, charcoal gypsy maidens. "I heard that hoot owl singing/ as they were takin' down the tents./ The stars above, the barren trees/ were his only audience." I tried to capture that atmosphere with the cover photograph. That and the hanging imagery.

The album ends on a more optimistic note, though. I think "When I'm Gone" might actually be my favorite.

Yes, it's a really catchy tune, isn't it? It was written by Phil Ochs, a leftist songwriter and political activist of the sixties. Actually kind of a rival of Dylan's. His motto was "All the news that's fit to sing." In many ways a tragic figure of the folk revival. He was often seen as this political radical, especially by the FBI, although his character was much more complex. He was able to admire both John Wayne and Che Guevera, to go to Santiago to support Salvador Allende and play "I'm an Okie from Muskogee" in front of a bunch of leftist intellectuals there. Unfortunately he never had the success he hoped for and was very upset by Dylan's sudden electrified mass appeal. He became depressed and started drinking until, after somebody had attacked him with a knife and seriously damaged his voice box, he hung himself in 1976. Another man done gone ... So there's a very sad note to the last song as well. Tom Paxton wrote a very moving song about Ochs' death, called "Phil." And Billy Bragg made up new words to "Joe Hill," the old Earl Robinson union song, calling it "I Dreamed I saw Phil Ochs Last Night." I do have a lot of respect for him. "When I'm Gone" was brought to me by a person I was very much in love with, but who decided a little later that there was no space for me in her life. So there's some personal sadness involved everytime I listen to it or perform it.

Is that what "Sittin' On Top Of The World" is about?

Well, I guess. It's the prototype of all songs about self-delusion. That's an old old tune. My rendition is heavily indebted to a version by the Mississippi Sheiks, an obscure blues duo that recorded between 1930 and 1933. Emotions didn't change all that much over the years, did they?

Are there any songs of your own? When will we be able to hear them?

Oh yes, definitely. I'm working on them, and the next album probably won't contain any cover versions at all. I'll hopefully be able to get some musicians together as well to help me record. But before doing that, I wanted people to know where I come from. And I'll certainly keep playing traditional songs all my life, they're so rich.

One last question: What are you listening to at the moment? Anything you might hear on the radio these days?

I'm afraid not. I just bought a 3 CD-set of music by Big Bill Broonzy, a country blues artist and one of the most swinging guitar players you've ever heard. This material was recorded in a studio a few months before his death, and the songs he played are interspersed with bits of dialogue between Big Bill and the guy who recorded him. Really really exciting. But I'm also going to see Ani DiFranco when she comes to play Berlin in February. Not that you would hear her stuff much on the radio either, but at least she's under fifty.