WHISPERING HIGHWAY EP
in memory of Benjamin Paskins
DATSON HUGHES
PRODUCER Meju
MASTERING John Ruberto
Recorded at THE GREENROOM STUDIO
Masterpiece Records
PRAISE FOR WHISPERING HIGHWAY
"Their latest 5 track EP is a thing of great beauty, shimmering it's way into your brain like a jewel encrusted earwig."
Peter Brookes
'Mountain music, they used to call it. Made by people who lived up in the hills, in the backwoods; people who often made their own instruments, and certainly made their own rules and their own fun. Datson+Hughes live in the hinterlands behind the Sunshine Coast in south-east Queensland, where it’s a lot more lush than it ever was in the Appalachians, and they make their own brand of mountain music. It is appropriately lush, a blend of everything and nothing they’ve carried with them from the inner-inner-city post-punk art-rock demi-monde plus a few new things they’ve found up in the hills and use in that same DIY spirit, most principally an age-and-environment-induced stillness that allows for introspection... On their new EP Whispering Highway, Datson+Hughes write songs out of their own harmonic system, beholden only to themselves, reflections on lives well lived, on hurdles and loss and regrets surmounted, that end up in the moment, on the spiritual quest on-going… the climb to the top of the mountain…'
Clinton Walker (author and cultural comentator)
'...playing Datson Hughes' Whispering Highway EP for the third time today. It's so rare that I repeat a play with so much music to hear... It's a blend of all of my favourite Folk/Psych records. Plus something more. A step beyond into the realm of truth and beauty...I can hear his experiences. I can feel him searching for the right words, the right vocal delivery. The right balance of love and control. It's dark and evocative, with a bright and hopeful tenderness streaming through in the form of those celestial female vocals and some crystalline guitar sounds that crack and splinter ... rays of light and salvation that break through dark clouds of loss and sorrow.
An instant classic to be poured and pondered over for years to come. Enjoyed with a glass of wine in hand, eyes closed and then again with pen and pad, as I sit and marvel in celebration with an artist's gentle envy and an admirers analysis. Congratulations on such a beautiful piece work. A favourite!'
Khristian Mizzi (singer songwiter)
"... Macksville - I hear a classic song about our country. ... it is certainly a beautifully crafted sound. ..."
Tom Kristensen (Singer Songwriter, Love Me)
in memory of Benjamin Paskins
DATSON HUGHES
PRODUCER Meju
MASTERING John Ruberto
Recorded at THE GREENROOM STUDIO
Masterpiece Records
PRAISE FOR WHISPERING HIGHWAY
"Their latest 5 track EP is a thing of great beauty, shimmering it's way into your brain like a jewel encrusted earwig."
Peter Brookes
'Mountain music, they used to call it. Made by people who lived up in the hills, in the backwoods; people who often made their own instruments, and certainly made their own rules and their own fun. Datson+Hughes live in the hinterlands behind the Sunshine Coast in south-east Queensland, where it’s a lot more lush than it ever was in the Appalachians, and they make their own brand of mountain music. It is appropriately lush, a blend of everything and nothing they’ve carried with them from the inner-inner-city post-punk art-rock demi-monde plus a few new things they’ve found up in the hills and use in that same DIY spirit, most principally an age-and-environment-induced stillness that allows for introspection... On their new EP Whispering Highway, Datson+Hughes write songs out of their own harmonic system, beholden only to themselves, reflections on lives well lived, on hurdles and loss and regrets surmounted, that end up in the moment, on the spiritual quest on-going… the climb to the top of the mountain…'
Clinton Walker (author and cultural comentator)
'...playing Datson Hughes' Whispering Highway EP for the third time today. It's so rare that I repeat a play with so much music to hear... It's a blend of all of my favourite Folk/Psych records. Plus something more. A step beyond into the realm of truth and beauty...I can hear his experiences. I can feel him searching for the right words, the right vocal delivery. The right balance of love and control. It's dark and evocative, with a bright and hopeful tenderness streaming through in the form of those celestial female vocals and some crystalline guitar sounds that crack and splinter ... rays of light and salvation that break through dark clouds of loss and sorrow.
An instant classic to be poured and pondered over for years to come. Enjoyed with a glass of wine in hand, eyes closed and then again with pen and pad, as I sit and marvel in celebration with an artist's gentle envy and an admirers analysis. Congratulations on such a beautiful piece work. A favourite!'
Khristian Mizzi (singer songwiter)
"... Macksville - I hear a classic song about our country. ... it is certainly a beautifully crafted sound. ..."
Tom Kristensen (Singer Songwriter, Love Me)
LYRICS AND LINER NOTES:
1. Eve Fooled Yourself 3:00
An ode to a vanished Australia that no longer sees the unattended roadside produce stand with its honesty box, into which you put your payment. Written during freezing 1987 North American winter, such trust seemed a distant dream. During the time we have been in S E Queensland, the honesty box has disappeared. This was the first song off the production line for the album. When we heard it, the project crystalised and we realised we wanted to work with Kalju Tonuma. The middle class moralists remain as thick on the ground as ever (we count ourselves among them) but we are holding up a mirror to this denuded, deluded land.
Without a doubt I’m no king of no highway
My apple stalls all who pass by
Rich firm and juicy it comes with a message
You'd better take a big bite, and be sure to enjoy
It's no use you're in love with your own excuse
It’s no use you’ve Eve-fooled yourself
From sunrise to sunset sell lots of apples
To the blonde with the bust, the rambling man
Each one convinced by the tale that they're dragging
Marking their life through the lie of this land
It's no use you're in love with your own excuse
It’s no use you’ve Eve-fooled yourself
We're going to market the fruit from our home tree of knowledge
To middle-class moralists out on sweet Sunday drive
Can I help you out with that log in your eye?
It's no use you're in love with your own excuse
It’s no use you’ve Eve-fooled yourself
2. Back Up the Car 4:42
The process of recording sound can be a journey in reverse. More than a decade ago we returned to SE Queensland to help ageing parents.
It was the start of a profound unfolding of both their bodies and our psyche. The initial inspiration for the song was a short at Sydney film festival. My Bed, Your Bed (dir Erica Glynn 1998) is set In an isolated desert community, Della and Alvin are promised under the traditional laws of marriage. Their time has come. They move in together. One house, two swags, a guitar… no idea. During the making of this recording, all the players involved had family business looming large in mind. It is a song about breaking & repairing family bonds, the barbed wire of desperados, some fences that indicate ownership and containment are beyond repair. AH
Let the sun go down on your last regret
Forty years wrong on a barbed wire fence
Feeling it over pack up your books and clothes
Back up the car, you took the wrong road
Easy forgiven, empty the whispering wire
I watched you two burn
Beat into ploughshares the hammer and sickle of song
Get out of town you don’t belong
Swearing that day from deep in your heart
As they made you, so you’re a part of them
Try not believing when you’re leaving, it’s the wrong time
You might change their hearts, but never their minds
I know, mistaken as I often am
With plenty of time and too many plans
Let the sun go down on your last regret
Forty years wrong on a barbed wire fence
Feeling it over, pack up your books and clothes
Back up the car you took the wrong road
3. Macksville 6:23
A tale of runners who ran out of time. They put down roots where they stopped, fashioned a sacred space for their black madonna and retired into themselves.The forest regenerated them and the cycle continues. The generative image was a momentary glance as I drove south to a band reunion in 2009. A perfectly outfitted woman, attired to step effortlessly into 1963, stood beside St Mary's Catholic Church Warwick. The story line of the song was instant & fleshed out by the time I reached the edge of town. A few miles down the road I stopped, unpacked my dulcimer & played the arrangement. Meju (our producers) took our forest artifact and burnished it with gold.
Five years later I realised that the short segment of road where this song of loss & redemption flowered, is a brief 1400 metre, 90degree bend in the New England Highway. At the end of that short, bent runway it becomes the Cunningham highway. Cunningham is the surname of the girl, my first love, through whom I met the Mark Foster, the singer in the band reunion. The energy running along the eastern ridge of mountains is acute, like a spine of powerful memory and its stories are potent for me. A lot of electrical energy exchanges from air to rock along its length. A RADF grant enabled me to get down to the gig and in a weird way, kick started this whole project. GD
Pray that they don't get stuck in Macksville
unless that's where they plan to make their stand
It's halfway to paradise and a crap piece of land
20 years later she came back for the winter
that's how the story starts but it's not the beginning
Don't set your sale on no travelling heart man
You can see him in the park playing with the frozen children
The radio soft with a Jesse love song
If it's cold in the car outside it's freezing
So you make a list, a list of all reasons
you got 'em all lined up in a clipboard fashion
That's before he started praying
drinking the three at one tree
numbed by the numbers
before he figured me
What went wrong was a misunderstanding
suddenly the whole town knew
Losing heart or losing faith
neither is easy to do
When confronted by their demons
got to rue this blasted hill
concede instead it's better for my head
to just admit that I am human
Took their shame off to the forest
and wrought it there a golden cage
and from the darkened woods and caves
unwound some damage days
The valley now rings with songs and laughter
as if that stream could run uphill
migrating birds fly to their seasons
turning through magnetic will
20 years later she walked into the future
and held that moment still in mind
grandchildren now are still waiting
for her to hold them one more time
See him in the park playing with the frozen children
See him in the dark playing with the frozen children
4. Whispering Highway 3:40
Two journeys in two precise pieces of British engineering - a Humber Super Snipe and a Triumph Sprinter - purring their way up the east coast of Australia, across rivers of uncertainty. 1977. A celt and a saxon drive all night in an unregistered Super Snipe up the New England.
I'd met my travelling companion Des Wade - my first accomplice in harmonic mayhem - in a London squat. We worked together on building sites. Black Peter descending through Cunningham's Gap - the smell of leather seats, singing an augmented third above the tappets. 1983. In the Sprinter taking the coast road with two women in the front seat making slow but relentless headway through viscous emotional work. They had already inspired a half dozen songs about them and written some of their own. The gold rush was over and I'm reading in the back seat - Jane Bowles documenting her own roadmap/soul journey, the extension of her interior tree of life branches breaking under the weight of social mores .
I felt our journey deep into taboo, though I had no conscious knowledge of the song-lines laid down millennia before. Then, I was ignorant of the downstream effects of colonialism. The landscape of memory from that period yielded only 'hope' and 'progress' - from Sydney into South East Queensland, from cool to warm.
Somewhere south of Gympie she vanished into mist
under shadow of the head frame memory might lie
broken cup exclaiming fragments of St Georges parish hall
we split the cost of fuel and coffee out to Mooree
The highway whispered two or more to three
They slipped across the border humber silent running
clouds lift on the scenic rim singing hymns to sin
beauty, distance magnifies silo's silent rust
across the face of land uplift hopelessness
The highway whispered two or more to three
Swallowed up the baited lie nomadic heads retold
landscape full of flatness wasteland in our spoil
the sky was no protection stood up beside the rain
cowgirl dripped with bleeding heart
Her monotheist girlfriend with a polyamorous brain
5. I Only Come Here 3:21
About a kilometre south of Coffee Camp, the Nimbin Rocks - rhyolite volcanic extrusions, part of the Mt Warning eruption 20 million years ago - were thrust up west of the road to Lismore. There, in 1973, I saw a flock of swallows seemingly emerge from the surface of the road. The associated emotion of this moment jammed in my throat, between head and heart chakra. The event faded in my memory for 35 years till a similar moment recurred on the road to where I now live. The song popped out almost instantly, fully formed. The site of the original event was where young Bundjalung boys were initiated and home to Nmbngee or Clever Men. So while orchestrating my tactical retreat into time, the dissonance between heart and head begins to heal. Ideas are stones from the throat, cast down like dice.
This is a song, a song from a long, long time ago
you know it well well enough to sing along.
Swallows erupt, a handful of rocks tossed from the throat of the road
up ahead a map you can't refold.
I walked a summer mile with you in my heart it was hard and fast
but you knew it was too good to last.
I only come here to go home
In the fabled city got a message from a distant star, it said:
don't confuse your goal with golden get back to who you are
This is a song a song from a long, long time ago
you know it well well enough to sing along.
Rivers of milk and honey run with blood and rust
but you will cross them all and welcome home at last.
I only come here to go home
1. Eve Fooled Yourself 3:00
An ode to a vanished Australia that no longer sees the unattended roadside produce stand with its honesty box, into which you put your payment. Written during freezing 1987 North American winter, such trust seemed a distant dream. During the time we have been in S E Queensland, the honesty box has disappeared. This was the first song off the production line for the album. When we heard it, the project crystalised and we realised we wanted to work with Kalju Tonuma. The middle class moralists remain as thick on the ground as ever (we count ourselves among them) but we are holding up a mirror to this denuded, deluded land.
Without a doubt I’m no king of no highway
My apple stalls all who pass by
Rich firm and juicy it comes with a message
You'd better take a big bite, and be sure to enjoy
It's no use you're in love with your own excuse
It’s no use you’ve Eve-fooled yourself
From sunrise to sunset sell lots of apples
To the blonde with the bust, the rambling man
Each one convinced by the tale that they're dragging
Marking their life through the lie of this land
It's no use you're in love with your own excuse
It’s no use you’ve Eve-fooled yourself
We're going to market the fruit from our home tree of knowledge
To middle-class moralists out on sweet Sunday drive
Can I help you out with that log in your eye?
It's no use you're in love with your own excuse
It’s no use you’ve Eve-fooled yourself
2. Back Up the Car 4:42
The process of recording sound can be a journey in reverse. More than a decade ago we returned to SE Queensland to help ageing parents.
It was the start of a profound unfolding of both their bodies and our psyche. The initial inspiration for the song was a short at Sydney film festival. My Bed, Your Bed (dir Erica Glynn 1998) is set In an isolated desert community, Della and Alvin are promised under the traditional laws of marriage. Their time has come. They move in together. One house, two swags, a guitar… no idea. During the making of this recording, all the players involved had family business looming large in mind. It is a song about breaking & repairing family bonds, the barbed wire of desperados, some fences that indicate ownership and containment are beyond repair. AH
Let the sun go down on your last regret
Forty years wrong on a barbed wire fence
Feeling it over pack up your books and clothes
Back up the car, you took the wrong road
Easy forgiven, empty the whispering wire
I watched you two burn
Beat into ploughshares the hammer and sickle of song
Get out of town you don’t belong
Swearing that day from deep in your heart
As they made you, so you’re a part of them
Try not believing when you’re leaving, it’s the wrong time
You might change their hearts, but never their minds
I know, mistaken as I often am
With plenty of time and too many plans
Let the sun go down on your last regret
Forty years wrong on a barbed wire fence
Feeling it over, pack up your books and clothes
Back up the car you took the wrong road
3. Macksville 6:23
A tale of runners who ran out of time. They put down roots where they stopped, fashioned a sacred space for their black madonna and retired into themselves.The forest regenerated them and the cycle continues. The generative image was a momentary glance as I drove south to a band reunion in 2009. A perfectly outfitted woman, attired to step effortlessly into 1963, stood beside St Mary's Catholic Church Warwick. The story line of the song was instant & fleshed out by the time I reached the edge of town. A few miles down the road I stopped, unpacked my dulcimer & played the arrangement. Meju (our producers) took our forest artifact and burnished it with gold.
Five years later I realised that the short segment of road where this song of loss & redemption flowered, is a brief 1400 metre, 90degree bend in the New England Highway. At the end of that short, bent runway it becomes the Cunningham highway. Cunningham is the surname of the girl, my first love, through whom I met the Mark Foster, the singer in the band reunion. The energy running along the eastern ridge of mountains is acute, like a spine of powerful memory and its stories are potent for me. A lot of electrical energy exchanges from air to rock along its length. A RADF grant enabled me to get down to the gig and in a weird way, kick started this whole project. GD
Pray that they don't get stuck in Macksville
unless that's where they plan to make their stand
It's halfway to paradise and a crap piece of land
20 years later she came back for the winter
that's how the story starts but it's not the beginning
Don't set your sale on no travelling heart man
You can see him in the park playing with the frozen children
The radio soft with a Jesse love song
If it's cold in the car outside it's freezing
So you make a list, a list of all reasons
you got 'em all lined up in a clipboard fashion
That's before he started praying
drinking the three at one tree
numbed by the numbers
before he figured me
What went wrong was a misunderstanding
suddenly the whole town knew
Losing heart or losing faith
neither is easy to do
When confronted by their demons
got to rue this blasted hill
concede instead it's better for my head
to just admit that I am human
Took their shame off to the forest
and wrought it there a golden cage
and from the darkened woods and caves
unwound some damage days
The valley now rings with songs and laughter
as if that stream could run uphill
migrating birds fly to their seasons
turning through magnetic will
20 years later she walked into the future
and held that moment still in mind
grandchildren now are still waiting
for her to hold them one more time
See him in the park playing with the frozen children
See him in the dark playing with the frozen children
4. Whispering Highway 3:40
Two journeys in two precise pieces of British engineering - a Humber Super Snipe and a Triumph Sprinter - purring their way up the east coast of Australia, across rivers of uncertainty. 1977. A celt and a saxon drive all night in an unregistered Super Snipe up the New England.
I'd met my travelling companion Des Wade - my first accomplice in harmonic mayhem - in a London squat. We worked together on building sites. Black Peter descending through Cunningham's Gap - the smell of leather seats, singing an augmented third above the tappets. 1983. In the Sprinter taking the coast road with two women in the front seat making slow but relentless headway through viscous emotional work. They had already inspired a half dozen songs about them and written some of their own. The gold rush was over and I'm reading in the back seat - Jane Bowles documenting her own roadmap/soul journey, the extension of her interior tree of life branches breaking under the weight of social mores .
I felt our journey deep into taboo, though I had no conscious knowledge of the song-lines laid down millennia before. Then, I was ignorant of the downstream effects of colonialism. The landscape of memory from that period yielded only 'hope' and 'progress' - from Sydney into South East Queensland, from cool to warm.
Somewhere south of Gympie she vanished into mist
under shadow of the head frame memory might lie
broken cup exclaiming fragments of St Georges parish hall
we split the cost of fuel and coffee out to Mooree
The highway whispered two or more to three
They slipped across the border humber silent running
clouds lift on the scenic rim singing hymns to sin
beauty, distance magnifies silo's silent rust
across the face of land uplift hopelessness
The highway whispered two or more to three
Swallowed up the baited lie nomadic heads retold
landscape full of flatness wasteland in our spoil
the sky was no protection stood up beside the rain
cowgirl dripped with bleeding heart
Her monotheist girlfriend with a polyamorous brain
5. I Only Come Here 3:21
About a kilometre south of Coffee Camp, the Nimbin Rocks - rhyolite volcanic extrusions, part of the Mt Warning eruption 20 million years ago - were thrust up west of the road to Lismore. There, in 1973, I saw a flock of swallows seemingly emerge from the surface of the road. The associated emotion of this moment jammed in my throat, between head and heart chakra. The event faded in my memory for 35 years till a similar moment recurred on the road to where I now live. The song popped out almost instantly, fully formed. The site of the original event was where young Bundjalung boys were initiated and home to Nmbngee or Clever Men. So while orchestrating my tactical retreat into time, the dissonance between heart and head begins to heal. Ideas are stones from the throat, cast down like dice.
This is a song, a song from a long, long time ago
you know it well well enough to sing along.
Swallows erupt, a handful of rocks tossed from the throat of the road
up ahead a map you can't refold.
I walked a summer mile with you in my heart it was hard and fast
but you knew it was too good to last.
I only come here to go home
In the fabled city got a message from a distant star, it said:
don't confuse your goal with golden get back to who you are
This is a song a song from a long, long time ago
you know it well well enough to sing along.
Rivers of milk and honey run with blood and rust
but you will cross them all and welcome home at last.
I only come here to go home