DERRY, NH – He might be getting close to approaching his sixth decade of being a full-time musician, but that hasn’t stopped Richard Thompson from writing new material and creating brilliant music.
The English folk troubadour has a vast amount of songs under his belt, and he’s going to be adding a few more officially on May 31. That’s when he’s going to be releasing the album “Ship To Shore” and it promises to be one of his best. As part of a long run of shows in support of the upcoming full-length, Thompson is going to be performing solo at the Tupelo Music Hall in Derry on March 22. The show starts at 8 p.m. and fans are guaranteed to hear an array of the music he’s made over this extensive career, along with a few of the songs off “Ship To Shore.”
We had a talk ahead of the show about the making of the album, hanging out with chickens and goats, what fuels his creative drive these days and his thoughts on intertwining new songs with older ones.
IF YOU GO
Tupelo Music Hall
10 A St., Derry, NH
Rob Duguay: For the making of “Ship To Shore”, you did the producing and recording with your band in Woodstock, New York. What initially made you want to go to this historic town to make this record?
Richard Thompson: Well, I figured that probably the old vibe might still be there, but I wasn’t expecting Van Morrison to drop by to do some vocals or [Bob] Dylan to come by and write a few songs. I think I was 60 years too late for that, but I lived in Woodstock for a year at the time of recording and I thought it would be great to use this really good local studio that I’d done a little bit of recording at before with my son Teddy. It’s a really nice room with a really good engineer Chris Bittner and the place also had accommodations so I could fly my band in and put them up. It was a nice quiet location with chickens and goats which always helps a record, I think. It was a really nice environment to record in and we got through the process really quickly.
RD: With chickens and goats being where the studio is, were you near a farm? What was the location like?
RT: It’s probably a mile outside Woodstock and it’s got some farm animals. The studio owner’s wife or something had them more as pets than for a real farm. They had a pig, but I think the pig had gone by the time we got there. There were chickens, goats and easy stuff to look after.
RD: Ok, cool. The album is your first full-length release in six years, which is the longest you’ve ever gone in between releases, so what was the main reasoning for this? Was it simply COVID-19 shutting things down back in 2020 and the first half of 2021 and you were waiting for it to be safe without any restrictions or was it something else?
RT: I think COVID killed everything really for two and a half years, so it wasn’t practical to make a record during that time. I did do some home recording while putting out two EPs, but those were just done at home during COVID. I think it really set back my album schedule. I’m used to recording every two or three years with or without a band, but that just couldn’t happen. That’s why there was such a big gap, really.
RD: Ship To Shore is your nineteenth solo album and you’ve released an assortment of live albums, compilations, EPs and soundtracks to go along with this prolific output. Being nearly 60 years into your career as a musician at this point, what’s your creative drive these days? What are you searching for as an artist when you write new songs and new material?
RT: The excitement about the possibilities of music, really. I’m always keen to see what’s around the next bend, musically speaking. It’s exciting to think about the song you didn’t write, the song you didn’t play and how you can improve. To get more perfect as a writer and get more perfect as a musician, you have to be driven somehow, but I’m not sure what drives me. It could be some demons from the past or something, but I do feel this urge to be creative and if I’m not creative for a while then I’m not a happy human being and my family find me hard to live with, so I try to keep creating.
We used to run an old model of rock & roll that you basically stop performing at 23 or something and then the next generation took over. That ideal isn’t long gone, but I think in people’s minds that if you’re 50 and you’re still out there playing then it should be teenage music or something. The [Rolling] Stones are about 80 and they’re still going, so perhaps the model has changed now. In visual art, which is incredibly creative, David Hockney is pushing 90, so why stop?
RD: Exactly, that’s a great perspective to have. This current run of shows you’re on, which includes a stop at Tupelo Music Hall this Friday night, is sort of a preview of the new album ahead of its official release, so how have you gone about incorporating this new batch of songs into your live performance?
RT: The audience usually can absorb a certain amount of new music, but it depends on who you are. If you’re more like a dinosaur act or something where you’re expected to play the hits, it’s very, very hard to sneak new material into a show. I really don’t have that problem, I’ve kind of taught my audience to accept new music and to expect me to be creating new music. If I don’t create new music, then they’ll start asking me questions about what I’m up to and why I’m not being creative anymore. The audience is well trained, but they shouldn’t expect me to play more than five or six new songs in a set and I’ll tend to interweave them into stuff that goes back to the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, zeros and teens.
There’s a lot of decades to cover, so I’m going to try to mix it up and interweave it as much as I can.