Last Night the Wind ...
Last night the wind blew up out of the south. It silenced the metronomic boom and echo of the waves as they broke in the darkness. It rattled the windows, blew be-bop through the corrugated iron roof and battered the simple round wooden hut where Cam MacKellar lives and recorded the Saudadé EP. Perched high on a ridge, surrounded by bush, he can look down the coast to the city lights of Sydney, Australia.
On nights like these Cam can't record. Fragile attempts to conjure memory through the old microphone are mocked by the savage symphony of the winds. The memories, like so much else, are easily blown away. There's nothing to be done but bunker down and hope the roof stays on while the yurt sways and bucks in the tumult. Below foam crests all around and somewhere out to sea the tankers draped in lights wait patiently for safe harbour.
Saudadé (pronounced ‘saw dade') is a Portuguese word that roughly translates as an enigmatic yearning of the soul, an inexplicable wistful longing for a time, a place, a life or a love that did, or might have, but does not now exist. Returning to Sydney after years spent busking, working and living overseas, Cam found he was carrying suitcases full of the stuff. Soon the longing and joy, the loves, people, places and memories of the last few years tumbled out of him and began their journey into song.
The Saudadé EP captures six of these tracks played and recorded by Cam on nights when the southerly wind was still and sleep was hard to come by. He records and mixes in the circular main room with the doors and windows open to quiet night and the ocean.
The songs contain the wanderlust that seduced Cam and then enticed him to Darwin and the Kakadu, Dublin, Glasgow and then London. The freezing nights spent trying to sleep in the garden shed he called home during the London winter are there. Creeping in between the notes is the small village outside of Montpellier in the south of France where he finally settled and could live simply for a year. The rhythm and rhyme of days spent in the vegetable garden, soaking in the music of Jacques Brel, Van Morrison, Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon and Bob Dylan. The study of Mahalia Jackson and the folk collections of Alan Lomax and Harry Smith. The music of Johns Island, South Carolina. The afternoons retreating to the Bibliothéque Américaine on Rue St Louis to read the Beats, Gore Vidal, Whitman, Rimbaud and Baldwin. The hours spent busking in the Place de la Comedie competing to share the square with conga beating gypsies and a Moroccan kid who sang nothing but Bob Marley songs and spoke no English besides. In these songs is the loneliness and chance that took Cam to the U.S working as a roadie and truck driver. Then opening for bands playing in homeless shelters, theatres, pubs, on the back of trucks at Texas rodeos and for a time on a Native American reservation, all the while working six nights out of seven in exhausting three month runs.
The highways of almost every American state were crossed as he picked up shards and fragments for songs before eventually returning home.
Back in Sydney living on his own for a time in a converted stable just across from Badde Manors Café, Cam kept mostly nocturnal hours. He had steady work at the University and the record store on Glebe Point Road – a perfect environment for song writing. Most of the streets held a memory of an earlier, more innocent time. Here he'd once walked and talked, stopping to pick pomegranates in the winter along this lane. If he got stuck there were probably too many pubs within stumbling distance.
Since he'd been away, the artist's warehouse at Blackwattle Bay had been gentrified, the Valhalla Cinema and most of the pubs and terraces had gone the same way. Still, with the help of friends he began piecing together his memories into songs. He found a musical comrade in multi-instrumentalist and producer DC. Cellist Sally Maer and drummers Rob Hirst (Midnight Oil) and Nerida Wu (The Dark Shadows) wove vivid textures into the developing sound. The wooden floor and high ceilings of the stable brought out the best in the warm wheeze of his old reed organ. Moving to the yurt, the round wooden room lined with books brought out something more intimate in Cam's voice.
Cam's sound on this debut EP, is the sound of symphonic brokenness; an orchestral folk music where soaring strings are brought back down to earth by rickety old pedal-organs; where lightly brushed drums give way to headache pounding cymbals; where dustbowl guitars meet the chime and buzz of electricity in an ever-evolving narrative. Cam's voice somehow stays in the centre, a soulful contradiction, still trying to find shelter from the storm.