Lost Brothers - Interview

  by Cila Warncke

published: 9 / 2 / 2018

intro

Country-tinged Irish duo The Lost Brothers talk to Cila Warncke about desert rambles, cheap guitars and the places they call home.

Oisin Leech and Mark McCausland, aka The Lost Brothers, have just released their new album, 'Halfway Towards a Healing'. The duo's peripatetic career has seen them record five albums in five cities in ten years. On the eve of their new tour, Leech took time to chat with Pennyblackmusic about the places the Lost Brothers can be found. PB: Where do you feel most at home? OL: Buncranna in County Donegal. It's a beautiful little fishing town where we spent most of our summers as kids. It's where I started playing music, where I first saw live music - a five-piece band playing Dire Straits in this tiny pub. Each Christmas my friends and I gather in Buncranna. We have a bar band that plays everything from Muddy Waters, to Neil Young, to old Irish songs. PB: What is your home away from home? OL: We recorded 'Trails of the Lonely' in Portland, Oregon in Mike Coykendall's studio the Blue Rooms. It's basically his attic and we kind of lived there for a few weeks. Making an album is a big occasion. You're running down a road of ideas, trying to keep up. Portland was a great place for this. We went to Powell's City of Books and lived in the White Eagle Hotel, this old haunted place. It was our first album, and everything was fresh and new. For that, Portland is our home from home. But I could say the same for Sheffield, Nashville, Liverpool, and Tucson. You associate each city with the record, it becomes part of the songs. PB: What was your introduction to Dust & Stone, your latest studio "home"? OL: The first thing Mark and I always do is find the studio. We landed in Tucson at 10 p.m. and set out walking to find Dust & Stone. We walked for over an hour - it got pretty rough - we found out later the studio is in the worst part of town. When we found it, the studio was dark. But a toy store was open, at midnight, with windows full of Star Wars figurines and antique toys. We went in and had a chat with the two loveliest people. They ran us back to the hotel in their truck. PB: What place is significant to this album? OL: Sligo on the west coast of Ireland, where WB Yeats lived. Whatever molecules are flying around the air have a magic. We spent a year there before we went to Tucson, working with Steve Wickham from the Waterboys. He had a studio in an art museum. We must have demo'd 30 or 40 songs there. He challenged us to write better. PB: What tour destination has special significance for you? OL: We're playing Liverpool on 2 Feb, which is where Mark and I met, where we wrote our first songs together. I can't believe we're taking our fifth album back to Liverpool. When we made our first [album] we thought it would be our last. It will be poignant bring our new songs back there. PB: What things feel like home to you? OL: There's a guitar my uncle gave me before he passed away, a 1968 Yamaha FG180. They were these cheap guitars made in Japan. Nick Drake, Elliot Smith, and John Martyn all played one. When I strum that guitar, which is held together by tape, I think of my uncle, that feels like home. The Lost Brothers new album 'Halfway to a Healing', produced by Gabriel Sullivan and Howe Gelb, is out now on Bird Dog Recordings.

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