D.K. Harrell-I’m Grown Now!
by Matteo Bossi
We got the chance to talk again with D.K. Harrell, the rising Louisiana guitarist and singer, whose outstanding new album “Talkin’ Heavy” is out now on Alligator. And lot has happened for this young man since the last time we spoke in Lucerne, two years ago. “Well, I can’t lie to you, I credit the Lucerne Blues Festival for putting me in the eyes of other festivals. We were with Intrepid but they said they could not book anything for us because it was the middle of the season and pretty much every festival had been booked. I think Michael reached out to Lucerne Blues Festival and we waited, we were nervous, I told the band to get their passports just in case it happens. And I think two months before Michael texted me and said, “it’s happening. But you have to do the sponsors party and the festival”. And we got a standing ovation at the sponsors party, which meant a lot, then we did well at the festival. We sold out all CDs. We were back home for about a week and Intrepid called us, and they said, “what the hell did you guys do in Europe?” I said, “nothing we just played”. “I’m getting calls about D.K. what did he do?” It was beautiful. It opened the doors for us, because of that performance it led us to play in eight or nine other countries. It was a big changer.”
He worked again with Kid Andersen, the producer of his debut album, who during our interview last year, had this to say about D.K. Harrell: “DK he’s like my son! You know what they say that your father is the only person in the world that wants you to do better than him…so that’s how I feel about D.K. I must be his father, I don’t care what DNA said. I hope to do more records with him, I love his talent and how he is, he has good heart.” And when we tell this to D.K. soon as we start our Zoom conversation he laughs and says, “yes, we do have this father and son relationship and it wasn’t like we tried to have this type of bond, it just kind of happens. I can’t really describe what it is but it is very father and son like”.
For this new album you went back to Greaseland.
Well, for the first record the goal was to make a unique blues album, if it makes sense, because we had Tony Coleman and Jerry Jemmott and Jim Pugh who are pillars not just of the traditional I-IV-V blues but they’re also known for creating unique funk blues and soul blues, even R&B. With the second record we knew it had to go to an extent in a different way. We had June Core doing most of the traditional blues drumming and D’Mar doing the more funk, disco and R&B sides drumming. And it’s not that June can’t play stuff like that, June was taught by Willie Dixon…and so I feel that songs like “Vibe With Me”or “What A Real Man’s Supposed To Do” you hear Chicago drumming in it. June makes it looks so easy it’s scary. Drumming is not an easy thing. As for bass I chose Andrew from my band, because Andrew likes to learn and I knew that if I put him in that context he would not feel any critique, insult or threats…I think we spent a little more time in the studio that the first record. We went to California in November and we did four days instead of three, which was OK. Jim Pugh wrote a song for me, Kid Andersen wrote a song out of the stories that I shared with him about my father, who I don’t have a very positive relationship with.
The song is titled “No Thanks To You”.
That was a very difficult song to record because when we went into the studio and I was singing it I got emotional every time. I was crying and trying to hold back tears, take after take…and I think I got to the point where I said to myself “OK D.K. stop crying, you can sing this”. But those tears were from the years of verbal abuse and being told some horrible things that no parent should say to their kid. It came from the hurt. At one point in my life I did try to have a relationship with my father but he didn’t really want a relationship, he can be a very bitter person, very sour, rude and cruel. And I just got to a point, within the last year, where I didn’t want him in my life, because so many positive things have happened in my life that I don’t have room for negativity. Even if it’s my own family. It’s a hard thing. I appreciate Kid so much for writing that song. We were sitting down eating pizza which is one of his favorite meal and I think out of the blue he asked me about the relationship between me and my father. And I started telling him stories. And when I got to the end I was like, you know I got my own house, but no thanks to you, I had beautiful women but no thanks to you…Next thing I know he had written this down and I think it’s a beautiful song. After we recorded it, a couple of months I was thinking about it and another friend of mine, you know Art Tipaldi?
Yes, I do know him.
Art called me, we were talking about this song, he did the liner notes, and I was saying that maybe this song is not gonna do well and he goes, “no, this song is gonna touch people who have rough relationships with their parents or with their fathers. I don’t think anybody has done a song like this. Some people have done songs about their hardships, you know they may say I’m an orphan or my parents died when I was this age. But this focus on the victim side of it”. When I was down and out he wasn’t there, when I needed him he wasn’t there, there were many times when I was five or six years old when I wanted him to pick me up for the week-end and he would not answer the phone. Or he would say be there at 5 and he would not show up and I was there waiting. He would not understand to this day how this would make me feel. I think we only perform it one time live, so far and I make it clear that this song is not out of hatred at all. I love my father I just dislike his character.
What about “Praise These Blues”, it has a gospel feel and you also have Alabama Mike singing on it.
I grew up in the church! When my nerve issue happened in 2022, I stopped playing guitar for a while but I was still going to church and I used to play in church. A church member I was sitting in the church, the service was about to begin or ended I can’t remember, but she said “you know D.K. you have talent but you have to make a choice, you can play for God or you can play for the devil, you can’t do both”. I said “OK.” And she said, “the reason you got that nerve issue is because you’re playing secular music and you’re playing gospel music. And six month or maybe a year later after she told me this she passed away. That kind of scared me because it was the last interaction I had with that person and I had known her for over ten years so it was weird, strange. What also inspired the song is that we played in a town called West Memphis, Arkansas, which is maybe 15 minutes from Memphis and it was a predominant black audience. Th first band was this black lady who is a singer, she does a lot of seventies/eighties R&B like “Working At The Car Wash”…which I love and I don’t have any problem with and the black audience was really into it. Soon as we got on stage they looked at us like we were the Klan….I don’t know, it was because we are a different type of blues band but at the same time, and it’s a reality in the black community, there’s this type of music called southern soul and it is now what many people in the black community consider blues, which in my opinion is not really blues, I don’t mean to disrespect it but to me it’s like a cheaper version of R&B. With real blues you got to have real instruments, guitars, real horns…not synthesizers. I always try to show my own people, african-americans, that this is what real blues is and that influenced the southern soul. Then we were at McDonald’s the only place open after the show and I was sitting there with the band telling them the same things I’m telling you, and I said, “you know what’s so funny about playing for black people? We’re the only people that would complain and say there is no new music, when there are new artists and new music in any genre. But we’re so used to hearing the same old things. Think about when we go to church on Sunday the choir can sing the same four songs and they’re still going to be happy and jump up and down and praise the Lord. And that’s what inspired “Praise These Blues”, I sing “you can go to church on Sunday and clap you hands to the same old songs”. I told Kid and I told everybody…I’m just trying to get people to be more open minded about what they listen to. For me people think that because B.B. King is my ideol this is all I listen to, but it’s not true, I listen to Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Mozart and Bach…I got a lot of different types of music in my phone from classical to jazz, to sixties pop, I even have brazilian music… If you talk with any musician that plays black gospel and that plays blues they would tell you that the only difference is one or two chords, and that’s about it. I was in church two days ago playing a traditional gospel song and it had a traditional blues turnaround.
What about the title track “Talking Heavy”, it is almost a topical song.
Oh this is gonna be funny. There is a film that came out in the eighties called Back To The Future and I think I was watching it or I had watched it and I went what’s the term that nobody really uses anymore but it does resonate if it’s heard? Heavy. Because it’s what Marty McFly says, “that’s heavy, Doc!”, every time he’s got some extreme news or bad news. I thought to myself, I can write a song about this. I kind of took the problems of the world and of everyday life and talk about that. When we were trying to find a title for the album that was the hard part, we didn’t know if we wanted it to be nominated after one of the songs. So we came up with like thirty different titles…it was a lot. And each time Bruce Iglauer would say “oh I don’t know about this or I don’t really like this…” Kid actually suggested Heavy or Talkin’ Heavy. But when we first mentioned it to the label they say “oh no that’s not a good one”. Then they came back to it and say “oh you want to call it Talkin’ Heavy” And Kid was like, “that’s what I said”. Sometimes we do this, come back around things and see if we like it or not.
D.K. Harrell ph Laura Carbone
You changed guitars a lot on the sessions?
Yes, used several different guitars on this recordings, believe it or not I used a Fender Strat, a Telecaster, a Gibson Barney Kessel which has a very big jazz sound to it…and also a Gibson 175 or a 125 very similar to the one Charlie Christian used to play. That’s the guitar I used on Get These Blues, because it was supposed to be a mixture of the type of guitars that were used in churches in the twenties and thirties, with that hollow body sound. And I even used a pedal on Talkin’ Heavy a Mxr 90 phaser…and I used to despise those. When people would say “Oh you don’t use pedals or effects”, “It’s more crap to carry”, I would answer, depending on the gig but I don’t wanna to carry all this stuff. But for the record the reason I tried all these different things it was me and Kid were hearing the songs and go this tone would sound great on this one or this type of guitar…we thought a lot more about it. We were listening back to some tracks in the studio, me and Michael, my manager, were sitting there and Kid was playing one of the songs on the speakers. And on a guitar solo he goes, “man, is that Kid playing right now?””No, that’s me”. And he goes, “No! I’ve never heard you play like this”. For some reason, depending on the type of guitar that you give me, I’m going to play differently. It’s very strange, but I’ve noticed it a lot. I think it’s because of the tone, how the guitar sounds that makes me play differently. Even the band, they’ve seen me play other people’s guitars and I sound different. And people are used to the B.B. King or Albert King approach that when they hear me play something else they go “what was that?”
There are a couple of other songs, like “Grown Now” or “ Life’s Lessons”, where you talk about what happened in your life the last few years, not just music wise.
Michael told me, after we recorded the first album, he said, “you should record a song that talks about what you went through, when you were homeless.” And I said, “Mike, I don’t want to do a sad song, people do sad songs all the time”. “It doesn’t have to be sad, I just want you to talk about that”. “OK”, I said. So we were in Germany no we were at home in Louisiana and I wrote the lyrics to Grown Now…and some people in the band wanted the song to have almost an eighties poppish thing and I was not liking it. Don’t get me wrong, I like some eighties stuff but my blues cannot sound like Prince or I can’t have a Michael Jackson sounding blues song it would be weird to me. So Kid and I sat for a while on it and in September or October last year we changed it up a bit and Kid goes, “how about we give it a Little Milton feel like That’s What Love Will Make You Do?” And I said, “I like that, let’s do it”. “Grown Now” is a type a song where you can be proud of the crap that you went through…usually songs that talk about the life changing from negative to positive are slow songs, but I knew it really had to stick with people. For “Life’s Lesson” I did have in mind that I wanted to do a song that was an eight bar blues. Months ago I wrote some lyrics for “Life’s Lesson” and sent them to Kid, he’s a great songwriter, he can get out the things that I hear in my head. He took it and he treated the lyrics and the arrangement and it felt so good when we recorded it. There are two or three people who said, “No one uses the word transgression” and I said, “but that’s the point”. You want to use words that make sense, and if it’s not that common they may go, “let me see what transgression is”.
D.K. Harrell ph Laura Carbone
You got strings on “No Thanks To You”.
Yes, but I’ll say that some people were not happy about the strings, they felt like the song was too similar to The Thrill Is Gone. But for me personally I love a great string section. And nobody’s doing it in the blues anymore. I’m not trying to crossover, it’s not the sixties. When Kid asked me what did I feel about strings I said of course, let’s give it a try. It was his idea. When he sent the first mixes of the raw recordings of the strings I cried. Because you have the bass cello in a part of the song that sounded so nice. And it really sets the tone of the song, you can almost hear the journey of sadness, acceptance and triumph, like a movie. You look at songs like Into The Room, which has a flute on it, the whole band was happy to hear it because it’s different. We had fun with this record, it had to be special. It was an idea of myself, Jim Pugh and Kid. When we were in Switzerland in march of last year I wrote a horrible song called One Day Flu, which was about this man who gets a call from his girlfriend, she tells him she’s “sick” meaning she’s gonna take off work and come home to make love to him. The music was very similar to Bobby Blue Bland’s song Soul Of A Man. Then I sent to Kid the version of “Soul Of A Man” I had in mind and when I got to the studio Jim goes, “you know, there’s a song by Jackie DeShannon called Every time you Walk Into A Room and that will be good with the Bobby Bland song idea”. “I’ve never heard the song.” So they played me the song on Youtube, and it was the most sixties song I’ve ever heard in my life. So it became like Jackie DeShannon meets Bobby Blue Bland! It was kind of disco sounding. I saw a video of Bobby Bland playing live at Chicago Blues Festival in 1981 and Mel Brown, one of his guitarists, he played a Barney Kessel on that. So I tried my best to make it feel like Mel was playing on this, again I can’t chord like him, but at least I tried to have the same tone.
“PTLD” is about, in certain way, the aftermath of a love story.
That one was written in Belgium, we were about to play the Hook Rock Festival, I was in the hotel room, thinking about a past relationship of mine with Sallie, ma partner she was an alcoholic, and every other day it was an argument about something stupid, totally dumb. One time I was cooking dinner and she had a cat and the cat got tired of eating her crunchy stuff and I was cooking chicken so I might tear a piece of chicken and give it to the cat. And she was, “D.K. you’re killing my cat!” and I said, “Cats can eat chicken!”. So I said what if somebody struggles to love or find love or recover from a relationship because they did all they could but they got PTSD from it. But the lyrics in this version are not the same lyrics of my version. Because they advised us to make a song that was not about myself. So Kid told me this story of a friend he had that went through the same thing and he became an alcoholic because he lost his woman. And I was like, “we can make a song about it”. It’s about a person that does the right thing but trauma makes him go down a different path.
How did you get on Alligator?
Bruce and I met two years ago and he kind of showed interest in me then. We met in Wisconsin, I remember. Sadly at the time his wife took ill which I was very concerned about. In 2024 myself and Michael met again with him, because he expressed interest, we discussed it and I’m open minded I like to make things work, we didn’t have any disagreement. Of course once we recorded the record and got it to Bruce there were some things he asked us about. He called one song too slick, but me and Kid debated him on it, we made slight adjustments and he’s satisfied of the record, I saw him a couple of weeks ago and he said, “everybody on the label loves the record!” And his co-workers have reached out to me and have expressed that they do like it. We had creative control but we were also open to other people inputs about creativity but it was pretty much the same process on Little Village. I think there’s something for everybody on the record.
You’re gonna play at the Chicago Blues Festival for the centennial celebration of B.B. King (the interview was conducted at the end of may ndt)
I’m very happy they asked me to be part of this. It’s been twelve years since I saw him in person. I’ve loved his music all my life, I’ve worked with the B.B. King museum since 2019, they gave me my first gig. The Chicago festival is actually hard for artists to get on, because they have such a strict policy or procedure for doing that. So the board agreed to it and to be there with some friends of mine like Jonathan Ellison or Christone…and the majority of the band I already know them, I’ve played with these guys. I’m very excited about it and I hope I don’t mess up because of that, but I know we’re gonna have fun. And there’s other projects about B.B. that I will be part of, they’re gonna be out this year, but I can’t talk about them yet.
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