‘I wanted something more interesting than a key change. So when someone walked by the studio with a husky, I said, “Do you want to howl with your dog?”’
I wrote I Feel Just Like a Child when I was 18, but it wasn’t until I was 23 or 24 and making the Cripple Crow album that it made sense to record it properly. As a teenager I’d thought of myself as an old blues guy and demoed it on an unplugged electric guitar as a slow blues. When we recorded it for Cripple Crow I’d found my musical family, people like [producer-musicians] Andy Cabic from Vetiver, Noah Georgeson and Thom Monahan. Along with the likes of Joanna Newsom and Adam Green from Moldy Peaches, we were doing a sort of anti-folk that was labelled “freak-folk”.
We were living in Woodstock in upstate New York in our own mini 60s world, a utopian bubble where it felt like music from any period was up for grabs. We spent a lot of time in record stores and the music library, grabbing soundscapes, electronic music, the Fugs, the Band or Basement Jaxx, trying to gain influence from everything we could.
We recorded in nearby Bearsville, a legendary studio that had been set up by Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman when Dylan lived there. We had a hippy ethos about pacifism, sisterhood and egalitarianism, but also I was very aware that this wasn’t the 1960s – it was the leather jacket, Strokes period of music – so there was a parody element to it all. However, I Feel Just Like a Child was genuine. It was about how I could get away with being myself – naive and idealistic – without shame.
