Hal Willner - RIP

Hal Willner - famed record producer and album curator died from COVID-19 yesterday. He was a remarkable, relatively underground music figure.

Here's an interview I did with him 2011

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It would be good to have Hal Willner’s job. Hell, it would be good to have Hal Willner’s phone book! As a music producer Willner creates genre-based tribute albums, starting with 1984’s Thelonious Monk celebration. He followed that with tributes to Kurt Weill, Disney music, Charles Mingus, Harold Arlen and Leonard Cohen.

Most recently he’s turned his attention to an under-rated genre – Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys. In 2006 he produced a 2 CD collection of this genre called Rogues Gallery and recently he followed this up with a sequel, Sons Of Rogues.

The album features performances by an incredible collection of iconic artists performing songs that seem to have been made for their idiosyncratic styles. Among them are Shane MacGowan, Robyn Hitchcock, Beth Orton, Sean Lennon, Tom Waits & Keith Richards (together!), Ivan Neville, Iggy Pop, Macy Gray, Ed Harcourt, Shilpa Ray (with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis), Patti Smith (with Johnny Depp), Chuck E. Weiss, Michael Stipe & Courtney Love (together), Dr. John, Todd Rundgren, Marianne Faithful and Richard Thompson. As remarkable as that list is, that only covers about half the tracks! To gather together such a collection of luminaries requires a trusted producer.

“That’s what part of it is”, admits Willner. It’s also in the casting and deciding who to call. It’s also how strong the concept is. Largely whoever I have a relationship with over the past bunch of decades, will trust the situation, but they still have to have some sort of feel for the material. I try to make what I think is a cohesive work, even though I know that's asking a lot in this age.”

The concept for the Rogues albums is irresistible. While pirate songs are generally a misunderstood genre, being perceived as having an almost cartoon-like character, there’s incredible depth of history in these songs that many of the artists responded to.

“It’s not undiscovered, but it’s under-researched”, considers Willner. “There are aficionados that know everything about it, but accept for “YoHoHo and a bottle of rum” it’s not something that one really hears much of. It’s an amazing kind of folk music because a lot of these songs were just made up just to pass the time as they were working. They were on a ship and they were trying to sing and “out-filthy” each other on each verse. There are songs that had literally hundreds of verses. I loved doing the research for this. When you combine all the different songs from all the different places they were written…it’s a beautiful body of work and an amazing history.”

While the tracks from some of the iconic artists do stand out, there are also some gems able to be discovered. An example of a lesser known artist stealing the show is New York vocalist Shilpa Ray who sings with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis on a song called Pirate Jenny. Her performance is staggering and it had me heading for Google to find out more about her.

“Always the gems are when we put in new artists with the veterans”, considers Willner. “It’s important to have the unknowns and new talent and Shilpa Ray was that. A guy named Larry Sloman told me about her and also told Nick about her. She’s wonderful – this little girl with a big harmonium and this attitude and this big voice. Bob Dylan always said Pirate Jenny was perhaps the greatest song ever written and she was the first person who instantly went for that song. I think she’s an extraordinary artist and I’m really happy that this record may help expose her to the world.”

Even so the Waits/Richards recording must have been a bit of fun? “

Those guys inhabit their own islands up at Mt Baldy or wherever they are”, laughs Willner. “I’ve known them both a long time and Tom’s been a staple of a lot of my records. Between picking the song and getting it together, it was hard co-ordinating, but once the idea came it was as good as music gets. Tom doesn’t take anything lightly. He’s not someone I could put in with eight other people on a day, he doesn’t think that way. There’s something about Keith Richards as a guitarist – he plays two notes and you know who it is. When you ask me about my job, I guess that’s the payoff for all these years of doing it – one gets to be in a room with that and I can even make comments which is really crazy!”