Interview with Cousin Harley Front Man and Solo Artist, Paul Pigat

We’re gearing up for the Nov 14th CD Release Party for ‘Boxcar Campfire’, the new acoustic solo album from Paul Pigat, who is otherwise known as the front man of local Rockabilly/Western Swing act Cousin Harley. I spoke with Paul on the phone less than a week before the big show!


NS: Paul, you’re about to release your 1st solo album, and I’ve been listening to it for the last 3 or 4 days now. I really like the songwriting, and I love the stripped-down bare production style. How did the idea for this album first come about?

PP: Well, I’ve been doing this music for quite a long time, but I started playing it live about 6 years ago, and I guess I found myself on the road with Neko Case, playing upright bass for her, and the opening act couldn’t do the tour; we were touring the U.K. She asked myself, Kelly Hogan and Jon Rauhouse to do a Songwriters-In-The-Round for the opening set. I started performing it there, and the response was really good, so I thought maybe it’s time to actually record this stuff.

NS: That was the impetus for it.

PP: Yeah, that was the get-up-and-go to actually record the record. As I said, I’d been playing that music for quite a long time, and we had a little house gig at Perkowski’s on Commercial Drive, and I saw it through 3 different names as it changed ownership, but it was basically our Sunday night get-together. I never really thought that I was going to do a record with it until that tour.

NS: So, you’ve been writing these songs over a 6-year period?

PP: Let me just pull that up and see what’s on that. I finished the record like 6 months ago, and I’m one of those guys that once it’s done, I just walk away from it for a while. Yeah, these are sort of over the last 6 years I would say. A lot of them are a little more recent than that though.

NS: As I’m listening to the record, I notice a lot of ups and downs. “Papa Come Quick” is a mover and a shaker, and then you’ve got the slower “Nowhere Town”. Was that intentional to have it like a roller coaster, or is that just the way it came out?

PP: That’s kind of the way it came out. I play live a lot, and I’m a live musician mostly, so I try to run my records to feel like the way I would normally run a set. You can’t do a set of all depressing stuff, or your audience is completely wiped out by the end of the set. You’ve got to throw the occasional “Up” tune and a fun little number.

NS: So, you were looking for a live-feel.

PP: Yeah, it’s got an ebb-and-flow to it, and I think the goofy songs like “Sweet Tooth” kind of balance out the darker side of “Dig Me A Hole” and stuff. There’s a balance to it all.

NS: “Corn Liquor” is another great track. Is that autobiographical?

PP: Yes. I played The Wild Oats and Notes Festival in Tofield, Alberta, and it’s a really strange little festival, because you can’t apply to play this festival. He only hand picks bands. It’s this crazy farmer who goes out one year and checks out all the bands at all the festivals that everybody goes to, and then he throws a festival every second year and he invites all his favourite bands out. I think this was the first time I’ve done it. I’m doing it for the 3rd time next year, and you know, we had a great set, lots of good times, and the stage is this converted Quonset hut. He always gets us to close his festival, we’re the closing act, and there’s of course a large amount of free beer for the band. I made my way through that, and I met a fellow that, it wasn’t corn liquor he gave me, it was a bottle of home-made tequila, and I learned my lesson that you shouldn’t open a bottle of home-made tequila at 4:00 in the morning. It’s not the time to start.

NS: Oh, man.

PP: The reason I called it Corn Liquor is, are you familiar with Carolyn Mark?

NS: Yeah.

PP: Carolyn Mark and I are very old friends, and Carolyn was doing the festival as well. Carolyn is of course infatuated with corn, and that was one of the few times I’ve ever drank her under the table, so I was very proud of myself.

NS: Well, you got a song out of it, anyway.

PP: I got a good song out of it. I was pretty happy about that, but I had a massive hangover. There’s nothing worse. Of course you sleep in tents at this festival, so there’s nothing worse than being beaten on by sun at 8 o’clock in the morning, and you’re just completely de-hydrated, and you have to get to the airport and get on a plane. It was horrid.

NS: Well, I’ve been listening to the new record as I said, and then I went back and listened to some of your Cousin Harley material, and it’s quite different. For fans who have heard both, where do you think they will make the connection? You’ve still got the Paul Pigat stamp on it, but do you think that people will necessarily know, if they just heard one song from each, that it was the same guy?

PP: I think that the guitar playing, I mean I’m pretty distinct as a guitar player, so I think most people will hear that. I think they both carry a thread of that traditional country sound, because that’s always been something that, even though I’ve tried to deny it for many years, it seems to be what I do, that sort of rootsy, country, rockabilly thing. I actually think that boxcar is almost an extension of Cousin Harley in a way, it’s just the mellower, sit down and listen version.

NS: Who do you see this album appealing to?

PP: This is for the people that Cousin Harley would be too loud for.

NS: I see. Again, going back to the live show, you’ve got a big one coming up on Nov 14th, and I saw that you had some really great musicians lined up for it: Jesse Zubot, Tommy Babin and Chris Nordquist. Is that going to change the sound of the songs?

PP: No, it’s going to retain its quality. Kind of the point of this stuff is that it’s loose and in the moment, and basically everything except for the mandolin and of course the drums and bass, I play on the record. I play all the banjos, I play all the dobros, all the steel guitars, and I play all the guitars on it, so that’s impossible to do live.

NS: You need a little help from your friends on that one.

PP: Exactly. When I’m performing this, and as I say I’ve been doing this for a while here in Van, I’ll just basically surround myself with a bunch of different musicians, musicians of course that I know, that are friends of mine, and also who I trust to have big ears, and will add stuff to the song. This stuff, some people called it ‘Porch Music’, and if it’s too slick, it won’t work. With Jesse Zubot and Tommy Babin and Chris Nordquist, although Tommy has been doing this stuff with me for quite a long time, it’s going to have a really cool, loose feel. They’re all different players, except for Tommy, that were on the record, but they’re all fantastic guys, and they’re going to hear exactly what they want to do. I also want to hear what they can bring to it, and it’s always interesting for me when I’m on stage and I hear something completely new from somebody, and it helps me find new things, because I basically try to improvise as much as possible, even with this stuff.

NS: So then, every live experience is going to be different each time, depending on who you have onboard.

PP: Absolutely.

NS: Do you see a live album in your future for this project?

PP: For this project, I wish we had been able to record that band that I did the U.K. with, with Neko’s band; Paul Rigby on bass, Jon Rauhouse on steel guitar and banjo, and Barry was on the record as well, but that moment, that one tour had a certain vibe to it that was really spooky music, especially with Jon Rauhouse playing banjo. I think if I found the right group of people and the right opportunity, I would be more than happy to do a live recording of this, and have sort of a revolving band, where you could have 15 different players over the course of the live recording. That would be fun.

NS: Sort of like a “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” kind of thing.

PP: Exactly, but I’m also into small ensembles. A quartet is generally the biggest band I tend to front. I like the open spaces of not having too many people onstage, so we have to figure out a way to get everybody to revolve.

NS: I heard you’re a bit of a collector. How many instruments do you own?

PP: I have no idea… It’s somewhere around 30. Between mandolins, banjos, guitars, steel guitars, erhus, upright basses.

NS: And of course amps too, right?

PP: Lots of amps. I’ve actually just started thinning out the amp herd. I sold a couple of amps in the last few weeks. Amps are just big and heavy. I’d love to have all the great amps, I’d love to have a Vox AC30, but they just take up too much space, and there’s really not much space left in my apartment.

NS: Too much to carry around too, right?

PP: Yeah, as I get older, my amps get smaller.

NS: Isn’t that why you quit playing drums originally, because it was too much to carry around?

PP: Wow, you did some research! My original interest in music was to become a drummer, and my brother convinced me that, “You don’t want to play the drums, look at all the stuff you gotta carry around!” Not realizing that when I was gigging, when I was 12 or 13, I was gigging with about a 1971 Super Reverb, which is a pretty large amp for a 12 year old to be carrying around. I might have been better off with the drums!

NS: Gigging at 12! I couldn’t believe that. What sort of shows were you playing then? You were in garage bands before that, right?

PP: I ended up meeting one of my best friends when I went to Junior High School, and he and I were both very large for our age, him even bigger than I was, and I remember our first gig was at a mall, but our second gig was at a roadhouse bar that was just up the street from me in Toronto. Toronto had Roadhouse bars, but not anymore. We had a house gig there, we played once every two weeks for a couple of years and that got me going. I’d say I probably did that until I was about 15, and then I took a year off, I kind of got bored with it all, and then I went to a school of the arts for a while, and one of the guys that I was teaching guitar to there convinced me to go down to Grossman’s, which was the cornerstone of Toronto’s Blues scene, and I went down once and never stopped gigging after that.

NS: At what point did you transition from playing other people’s music to wanting to compose your own music?

PP: That was pretty much when Cousin Harley started. I’ve always written my own stuff, because I do a lot of fingerstyle guitar as well, but never lyrical music, never wordy kind of stuff. Cousin Harley kind of got me started on that, and I was sort of hanging around with Carolyn Mark and Tolan McNeil and all these great songwriters I really respected, and I figured, “Well, I’ll give it a shot.”

NS: Did you come from a musical background? Were your parents involved in music at all?

PP: No. In fact, I can’t remember any music in my house, other than my brother’s record collection. My parents never listened to music, there were no musical instruments in the house whatsoever. My brother did have a great classic rock, early heavy metal and new-wave record collection.

NS: Early heavy metal, as in Judas Priest?

PP: More like Black Sabbath. Sabbath and Mountain, and stuff like that. I started listening to all of that stuff, and then every once in a while, I would pull out a BB King record or something, and then pull out a Madness record. It was a pretty interesting collection, which is strange, because he doesn’t really listen to music anymore. It’s a drag, because he had such great taste as a kid.

NS: From Black Sabbath to Madness. You had a lot of influences. Danny Gatton was a big influence for you, right?

PP: Oh, huge influence for me, yeah. Not so much on the boxcar stuff, but for everything else, he’s always been the guy. There are other guys as well, like there’s Tal Farlow and Les Paul and Charlie Christian, but the first time I heard Danny Gatton play, I knew that I was going to follow that route of guitar playing.

NS: I like your baritone on this record. When did you start singing?

PP: I became a singer because I had to when I moved out West. There were no gigs for me. I never had that experience before, where I was looking for work. I always had enough gigs to make a living, but I moved to Victoria, so I had to make my own gigs. I started sort of a swing band, and I started getting into the crooning stuff, and a little more of the Cabaret stuff. I think there’s a bit of a Cabaret element to Boxcar as well. I don’t know if it’s audible, but I hear it as certain Cabaret tunes, and of course the Blues has always been there.

NS: You never really got into jazz though, did you?

PP: I’ve always loved jazz, and I had a jazz trio for quite a long time, but it’s swing jazz. Because I’m classically trained, I perceive music in a different way than jazz musicians. I have a theory degree, and the way classical musicians approach harmony and theory is very different from the way jazz musicians do. It’s always been a goal of mine to completely understand jazz guitar, but there may be a jazz record one day. I would hope so.

NS: You did play at the Vancouver Jazz Festival though, didn’t you?

PP: I did play the Jazz Fest. That was really fun! I didn’t realize that when they asked me to do the show, because it was Jesse Cahill, who is my drummer in Cousin Harley, he invited me down to sing this song for this tribute to Jimmy Smith, and I know that he’s got a band called The Nightcrawlers that’s an organ band quartet, so I figured that it was just going to be, you know I’d show up to the Cellar, and there would just be an organ quartet. I had no idea that there was going to be a 16-piece Big Band. It was awesome! I got to do the big outdoor show with them the next day, and it was really fun. I love playing with Bill Coon, you know I don’t get a chance to do that very often, and Bill is a fantastic guitar player. We got to trade a few things back and forth, and it was nice to play with that many horns behind you.

NS: Congratulations on your Gretsch Guitars endorsement!

PP: Thank you.

NS: That’s huge! Has that been in the works for a while, or did that some from Viva Las Vegas?

PP: It’s all from Las Vegas. I went to Vegas, and the guys from the Gretsch Appreciation Society, which does the Gretsch Discussion Pages, who aren’t really affiliated with Gretsch Guitars, they’re just fans, asked me if I would do an interview for them, because a lot of them have bought my instructional DVDs. They said, “Meet us at the Gretsch booth”, and Tim, the person from the Gretsch Pages introduced me to Joe Carducci, and Joe is one of the bigwigs for Gretsch. He asked me if I would like to play their guitar for the festival, and I already have a lot of nice guitars, but I really wanted to play their amp. I knew their amp was going to be good, so I said, “Yeah, I’d be more than happy to play your guitar if I can use your amps as well.” I didn’t think I was going to use the guitar for the whole set, and then I ended up using it for the whole set, because I just fell in love with it when I was onstage. I got offstage, and they asked me where they could send this rig, because they wanted to give it to me, and then we had a meeting the next day, and we talked a little bit about the endorsement deal, and if they wanted a clinicnian, and Gretsch really hadn’t decided if they were going to have a clinician. They just told me they would contact me, and then a month later, they flew me down to Scottsdale, Arizona to meet all the guys at Fender, and then I was their clinician. It’s a great gig.

NS: So, your DVDs led them to discover you in a way?

PP: In a way. I don’t think the guys at Gretsch really knew about my DVDs at all. It was basically that show. I just got on the stage and Cousin Harley played the set that we would normally do, and they just loved it. It was recorded, and filmed, and we did an interview for them and all that stuff, but it was basically out of that 70-minute show that sealed that deal.

NS: So now you’re travelling around North America doing clinics and workshops, keeping busy with that.

PP: Yeah, I hope to do a lot more! They’re fun.

NS: What do you enjoy most about doing clinics?

PP: Well, I get to meet a lot of people that I sort of met through the Internet. My email address is actually quite easy to find. I get people from all over the world emailing me about my DVD and stuff like that, so this is an opportunity for these people to finally come out and I get to meet them face-to-face, so that’s really great. Also, I’m a guitar gear head, and I’m in music stores all the time.

NS: Sort of like a kid in a candy store.

PP: Oh yeah, I could have spent everything I made ten times over on this last tour. (laughs) I have a problem.

NS: To get ready for teaching, you must have had a good teacher that showed you the ropes, not just with guitar playing, but also someone who showed you how to teach.

PP: Absolutely. I had a great teacher. I’ve had many great teachers all through High School and all that stuff, but my University professor Eli Kassner really got me started on figuring out how to teach properly, because I studied with him for 4 years in university, and he offered me a job in my second year of university to teach at his studio. I had already been teaching a little bit at that point, because I taught the younger students at the School of the Arts as well, but I really didn’t understand how to teach then, and just being able to study with Eli, and hang around with the people that hung around with Eli. I’ve sat down and had tea and crumpets with John Williams, because Eli was pretty well known in the classical music scene. He taught Liona Boyd, and he studied with Segovia, so he was hooked in.

I got to meet a lot of great people through Eli, and Eli was always the cat in the University who was completely open-minded. You wouldn’t expect it. He’s an older man, he’s in his late-80’s now, so I met him when he was about 55 and he loved that I played the Blues. I think I’d been a student for 3 months and he asked me to play for his 65th birthday party, and it was Ed Bickert, Liona Boyd, Lighthouse, and my blues band. We were terrible! You’ve got guys like Ed Bickert onstage, probably the best Canadian jazz guitar player of all time, and then I’m trying to hack my way through a Chicago electric blues kind of thing. It was pretty funny, but Eli always loved it. He’d throw these parties, and whenever there was a classical guitar player touring from another country, he would always throw a party for them, and all of his students would be invited, and 9 times out of 10, he would have the guitar player do a recital, and there was always this old beat-up Telecaster sitting in the corner and he would insist that I jam a Blues tune with him. It’s really strange when you’re trying to jam a Blues tune with a Cuban Classical guitar player.

NS: That’s interesting.

PP: Yeah, but he was an awesome cat still is an awesome cat, and he really taught me, first of all how to understand music, and how to teach it.

NS: How to share it.

PP: Yeah, he was really good. He was always supportive. The teachers that crack the whip are not usually very good teachers in my opinion. I’m more of a constant encouragement kind of guy.

NS: I was just listening to “Boxcar Campfire” before we spoke, and there are some really strong songs on there, but what I think it needs is exposure. Exposure is the key, so what are you going to do to expose this music, and what do you think is the biggest hurdle that you face, as far as exposure?

PP: Well, the biggest hurdle is that not many people know who I am. Cousin Harley has a certain reputation in certain scenes, and we’ve got sales in Holland and what not, but Cousin Harley is its own entity. The DVDs have done really well, so my name is out there for that, but people only see me as this rockabilly guitar player. That’s going to be a big hurdle, is to get the singer/songwriter thing going on, and getting people to listen to this side of the playing, although there’s still some fine guitar playing on it, but to sort of open up that group of people, the Folk Society people and have them listen to it, since I have no pedigree in that kind of genre, I think that’s the biggest hurdle. The nice thing about Boxcar is that I could tour it relentlessly if I want to, because the hardest thing about touring when you’re in my circumstance is that everybody I play with, we’re all professional musicians, so we all have to play in at least 4 or 5 bands. Coordinating tours can be extremely difficult, however with Boxcar, I could tour that record by myself.

NS: It’s really flexible.

PP: There are some tricky bits to the record, it’s not as straightforward as some may see upon first listen, there are strange bars and 2/4’s thrown into it, but it’s all charted out, should I go to a city and I want a bass player. If I know a bass player who’s living there, I can just say, “Come out to the show. Here are the charts. Let’s go.” That keeps it fresh!

NS: So, Nov 14th is the big Day. Your CD Release Party at St James Hall, but what are your plans after the CD Release? I see you have a couple of gigs with Cousin Harley, in Prince George Dec 4th and here in Vancouver Dec 5th, but what’s next after that? More solo shows?

PP: I’ve got a few more solo shows that’ll probably be just little places on Commercial Drive. Right now, the thing on the plate that we’re working on is actually a lot of Cousin Harley stuff, because we’re going down to the NAAM Show in Anaheim for Gretsch, and they’re flying the whole band down for that one, so that will be really good. I think February I’m going to take off, and I might even get out of town, because I don’t think I want to be here for the antics of the Olympics, but then in March, I’m going to be in the Netherlands with the Sojourners. Kathy, my manager, just got back from Denmark at the WOMEX conference, and there is some interest in the Netherlands with Boxcar, so maybe we’ll try to do a little ground work while we’re there. There’s also the potential for an Australian tour with Cousin Harley as well, so I think I’m just going to try to do as many Boxcar shows as I can, just in-between other stuff. I’ve got to make a living.

NS: I think we’ve covered a lot of ground here, but is there anything else you’d like to add to readers of The Skinny?

PP: I just hope that they come out to the show, and it’s going to be really fun, and the lineup of players, with Chris Nordquist and Jesse Zubot and Tommy Babin, they’re just such fantastic players, and they’ve all got their own specific voice. I’m really excited about what’s going to happen there that night! If you want to hear some good acoustic music, it will be a great night for it.

NS: Finally, if they were to make a movie about your life, what would be the one scene that everybody would still be talking about the next day?

PP: Oh, that’s a good question. I’m not sure that scene has been written yet.


If you’d like to check out the latest scene in Paul Pigat’s life story, you can come down to St James Hall on Nov 14th for a night of great acoustic music. If you can’t make it, you can pick up Paul’s new record ‘Boxcar Campfire’ at such fine local establishments as Red Cat Records, or through web link Posted: Nov 13, 2009