13.
Oxbow – Thin Black Duke
The response to Thin Black Duke surprised me. We’re all inside of our own heads. It’s not our day job. All of Oxbow have real world jobs, so when it comes time to make an Oxbow album it really starts to feel like it’s a case of, ‘Well, Dad’s going back to the shed!’ It took us ten years to make this album and it wasn’t like we were working on it the whole time but it was worth doing it over a decade to get it sounding exactly how we wanted it. My standard for how I like music has to do with certain intangibles. What was great about Thin Black Duke was it perfectly encapsulated the zeitgeist of the times in which it was recorded but it played well over the ten years so it doesn’t feel emotionally insignificant. However, my personal favourite among Oxbow records is King Of The Jews because even though everything went wrong with it – the sales went wrong, the recording went wrong, no one would release it, nobody understood what we were doing – it didn’t make any difference to me. The emotional tone and timbre of it was exactly where I was exactly when I made it. It was one of the truest moments I’ve had ever and it was captured and put out as a record.
