The album named from a family text message involving a photo of a will during Covid, DUG comprise New York based Scottish ex-pat Lorkin O’Reilly and California clawhammer banjo player Jonny Pickett, the pair meeting in Ireland during 2022 and now based in Dublin. As such, their music embraces Scottish, Irish and American folk influences, both traditional and contemporary, opening with the Joshua Burnside produced drum thumping instrumental lurch of ‘Cold Frost’ with rousing banjo and Ben Strong’s fiddle before heading into the Matt Halls-produced (he and Burnside share duties) title track, an old time spiritual sounding number with banjo, guitar, thumping drums and handclaps as Conor McAuley on fiddle, O’Reilly sings “Won’t you lend me a dollar for the fare/ I know Heaven is a long way from here/ And all my money has been spent on ketamine and beer/ Won’t you lend me a dollar for the fare”, its origin captured in the lines “See my will has been signed, sealed and writ/(What’s it say?)/It’s just three simple words/(Have at it!)/And to my love I’ll leave behind these bread crumbs and dimes”.
Again hewing to traditional American backwoods flavours, the melodically circling, slightly vocally drawled ‘Wheel of Fortune’, again banjo to the fore with Conor O’Riordan on tuba and producer Burnside on fiddle and backing, is all about playing the cards you’re dealt (“this is empathy and patience/this is second rate salvation /this is selling all your things off in the yard/this is plugging in the gaps/this is pills and heart …this is learning not to fight/even if you might be right/this is leaning in to take one on the chin/this is knowing when your wrong/this is settling for a draw/this is everything you’ll ever need to win… this is reaching out and taking what you came for/this is Mondays on the job/this is working what you got”). Lyrically, of course, “this is exponentially backwards from molecules to atoms”, isn’t a line you’d expect to find in anything of a traditional nature.
The first of two sharing a name, with Appalachian banjo, slide, stomps, claps and yowls, ‘Katie’ has a similar sentiment (“Tell me how do you carry/The weight of what you owe/Well you better be ready/To reap just what you sow/Cause Katie keeps the kids now/For six days a week/Says at this point she can’t see it any different/And I try to jump the hurdles/Try to make it all work perfect/But it’s hard to strike a deal between the now and the eternal… it’s sixty years of giving here/And twenty left to try/Lord it feels like I’ve been serving/Someone else’s time…I may be lost but I’m an honest man”).
Opening with a producer Hall’s funky bass riff and given an arrangement evocative of Seth Lakeman, ‘Livelong Day’ is a reworking of the Irish folk tale The Legend of Knockgrafton wherein a humpbacked man named Lusmore is rewarded by the fairies for revising their song by having his hump removed, whereas another hunchback, Jack Madden, angers them and is given a second hump, not that any of that’s mentioned in the lyrics which are more of a caller’s instructions “Spin me around the Mulberry bush/Arm in arm left foot first/Take it in a circle take in stride/Take it to the thicket where the wild things hide” noting “there’s nothing like a fiddle man or an old banjo tune/To make a man go crazy go howling at the moon”.
Sporting an ironic title with a mournful feel and chorus of voices, ‘Fields Of Plenty’ speaks of doing what it takes to survive when resources are lacking (“a man that wins, is a man that’s bold/First come first and the last leave empty”) and the lies about equal opportunities (“…there’s room at the top and they promised us entry…So debts we made and debts we paid/And the price they said was eight hours a day/And you’ll work it off son if you start in your twenties…so cribs we bought and houses sold/And the debt bought credit and the credit bought the homes/But the work soon dried and the loans they ended/Well it’s winner takes all in these Fields Of Plenty”). Burnside again produces and provides fiddle.
The midpoint is marked by two traditional numbers, Strong’s fiddle, banjo and handclaps driven steady mid-tempo stomp through ‘Cumberland Gap’, followed by the second Katie in a wearily-sung slide and fingerpicked banjo ‘Katie Cruel’. It’s back to originals then for the measured pace, banjo and fiddle flecked ‘Big Sundown’ featuring Ye Vagabonds’ Diarmuid Mac Gloinn on back-up vocals, referencing Captain Cook and taking inspiration from the journey of O’Reilly’s parents as they immigrated from Ireland to Australia in the 1980s in search of a better life as the narrator recounts “I worked all summer saving/Up to fly the nest/I was cutting grass in the cul-de-sac/With a two stroke Cub Cadet/I was dreaming of the bush man/And the Northern Desert sky/And Martin Cash and Old Bold Jack/And The Great Australian Bite”. Finally reaching Darwin Harbour in 83, what greets him isn’t quite what he’d hoped (“The foreman had us pouring asphalt/By a sewage treatment facility/Said you couldn’t find the end of a shovel/Cause you can’t teach stupid how”), saying thanks but no thanks in the hope “the road will open up”.
Again fingerpicked with Luke Murphy on lap steel and Strong on bouzouki, ‘I Reside’ deals in anxiety and paranoia (“I’m here to raise suspicion/I’ve come to collect your debt/I’m here to play with silence/And the whispers in your head… I’m the pillars of Palmyra/I’m a point-n-shoot caregiver/I’m 14 miles of ocean/I’m a desert storm blowing/I am the few who care the help/I am the rest who help themselves/I am the winter setting sun/The frost that grips all it’s become”). The longest track at just over four minutes and with a strong echo of Dylan’s ‘Buckets Of Rain’, written by Ian Felice of The Felice Brothers, ‘ In Memoriam’ has the narrator telling his vision of their widowed late mother (“She was watching the Price Is Right/Or the Wheel with Vanna White/Wrapped in ephemeral light/With her head in her hands/It’s a mystery so surreal/No newsman will ever reveal/How destiny spun the wheel/And killed my old man”) and namechecks Tom Paine, the English architect of the American Revolution, and American poet Hart Crane in its conjuring of desperate lives (“I’m wasted and nearly in tears/With the same old working class fears/Pulling coins from the children’s ears in grief and despair”). It also sports the rather wonderful imagery of “where the communist bees relax/In their hives of golden wax”.
Conor McAuley on fiddle and Jamie Bishop on percussion, ‘Good Time People’ is a sprightlier banjo number of a decided traditional persuasion about fairweather friends (“when I’ve got plenty of money, good people/You know my friends they are standing around/But as soon as my pocketbook is empty/Not a friend on this earth can be found”) and regrets about being a ne’er do well (“You know my mama taught me more/Said, “Son, if you don’t quit your rowdy ways/You’ll have trouble at your door…Well if I had listened to my mama, good people/You know I would not been here today/But a-drinkin’, and a-druggin’, and a-ramblin’/At home I cannot stay”).
With the ghosts of Drake and Jansch hovering over the guitar picking, alongside lap steel, Burnside’s fiddle and Ryan Hargadon on clarinet, O’Reilly describes ‘When The Days Cool Down’ as a “musical representation of an immigrant’s journey”, and the hardships in starting a new life (“the foreman’s cut my side/If I turn I’ll come untied/Says he feels the debt I’m in/Says he’ll work me till the end…So I strap the handles down/Throw my weight behind the plow/Heaven knows the path is set/See the fields bend and stretch/As the days cool down”).
Drawing on the biblical connotations of restoration, liberation, forgiveness and celebration, again with clarinet, it ends with the drone and resonator banjo of ‘Jubilee’, closing on a carpe diem note and doing your best to carry on, “Well here’s to love and here’s to hope …Here’s to taking flight and falling/ Here’s to getting up and walking… Here’s the love I made for you/Here’s the home we’ll build together/Here’s the door we’ll paint bright yellow/It’ll come around”, so “Grab your shovel let’s get going”. Dig in.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website: www.dugworld.com
‘Have At It!’ – official video:
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