Sanctuary

Luka Bloom talks to Denise Sofranko

[From Dirty Linen #54 Oct/Nov '94]

To many followers of acoustic music and Irish performers in particular, the story of Barry Moore's transition to Luka Bloom has been hashed through quite enough, thank you very much. But, for those who don't know, a quick recap is important to give an indication of the determination and drive that makes up this dynamic musician.

Bloom was born Barry Moore in Kildare, just outside Dublin, Ireland some 30-odd years ago. As a young musician growing up in Ireland in the shadow of his famous older brother, Christy Moore, the young Barry found himself floundering. He had become a victim of alcohol and was suffering professionally. Realizing that drinking did not make him more creative or a better performer, he swore it off and went about trying to further define what he did as a performer; what worked, what didn't. His name and lifestyle change allowed him to literally become another person. But he discovered that people in Ireland still found it difficult to get past his background and accept this new incarnation. Barry made a decision to completely change his surroundings and, on a flight to America, he became Luka Bloom. He spent two years in the States playing standing gigs in bars in New York and Washington, D.C., shuttling between the two cities and perfecting the dynamic performance style he's now become well known for. Along the way he recorded two albums that gathered good reviews and a growing base of loyal fans.

Bloom has successfully made the transition from his old professional life to the new. While he lives in Ireland with his family, he frequently performs in the States, creating a sort of long distance commute, and he still has strong feelings for his adopted home. "It's a friendship. When I strap on my guitar, and walk out on a stage in New York to sing, it's a home gig. That's my home show. I live my life in Ireland and I'm with my family in Ireland but when it comes to performing and singing, this is my home town. It's very natural for me now. When I left Ireland in 1987 and came to America, this became my home, my working home and still is. I'm very comfortable with it. I love working in America. I love being in America. I love traveling in America. I like being around American people. There's an energy here that really works for me. I love it."

This year Bloom went back to basics and recorded Turf, an album that captures the essence of what he is and what he does on stage. For those fans of Bloom as a live performer, the only thing they will miss on this new album is the visuals and the active interplay with the audience. During his live shows one is instantly struck by the energy emanating from Bloom. The rocking, bouncing, and pacing onstage make you wonder if he's got hydraulics in his knees or in his shoes. Frequently before taking the stage he will announce himself: "Hello. I'm Luka Bloom. Please make me welcome." He connects with the audience with a look or a comment to an especially boisterous fan in ways that few singer/songwriters with acoustic guitars can. The long surveying look during the break of his cover of LL Cool J's rap, "I Need Love," sends yips and screams through the crowd. He is indeed delightful onstage. Like many performers, he professes to getting energy from his audiences but in this Irishman's case there's a step-up transformer somewhere; this isn't ordinary energy.

Calm and relaxed offstage, he's not as willing to expound on his craft as might be expected from such an extroverted performer. He's still charming, but a bit on the shy side. He stays after shows to talk to fans, patiently listening to their stories of how his music has affected them. A flip comment to the effect that Bloom was a good performer even offstage resulted in his quick retort, "I never perform, this is what I do."

Admittedly, Bloom truly likes his audiences and finds it rather peculiar that people even think of asking him if it's lonely being on stage by himself. "I always find it a surprising question because I don't think of myself as being alone. I always think of myself as being in a room with a whole lot of people.

"I'm sharing something with them. That's one of the reasons I like those European audiences, the Dutch audiences. They don't just sort of sit back and wait to be entertained. From the very beginning they want to be a part of the whole thing. A lot of American audiences are like that, too."

In fact it was a Dutch audience from a show Bloom did at Tivoli in Utrecht, Holland that provided the introduction in the form of a mass chorus to the song "The Fertile Rock" on Turf.

With Turf, Bloom has finally made the album that begins to define him, the one he always knew was there. In December of 1993, he went into a Dublin studio with his engineers and co-producers, Paul Ashe-Browne and Brian Masterson, and carefully miked the performing space. Adding concert lights, monitors and everything for a live show except the audience, Bloom began to record a set of songs that were as close as possible to his live shows. He called on a loyal group of fans to be there for one of the sessions, but there was one hitch. They couldn't make any noise during or immediately following each song. That's asking a lot of any fan, especially Bloom's, but they complied and the resulting album is one in which the listener feels he is the sole member of the audience. "They were amazing," said Bloom. "I talked to them about it and I said I really appreciate your coming, but I don't need your approval. That's not the reason we're here. If anybody really needed to express themselves, I just asked them to be quiet for 10 seconds after the song was over. The song would end and there would be 10 seconds of silence for the fade and then they could do whatever they wanted."

Turf is a sometimes global, sometimes very intimate look at what is important to this songwriter. The turf, the land, the soil and all that it involves is paramount here. Turf to an Irishman can mean many things. It's something used to fuel fires in the winter, it's a treasured land often left behind. It's taking a stand when your back's against the wall. It's sacred ground that is not meant to be messed with.

Bloom's feeling for the land, for Ireland especially, gets to the heart of the fact that Ireland is a country that people seem to be constantly leaving, usually not voluntarily, but either because they were physically forced or because they had to leave to earn a living. "Diamond Mountain" is a wrenching song that expresses the grief and longing of a people forced to leave their homeland. "It's unusual in that it's not a song that's born out of any huge personal emotional difficulty or anything like that," said Bloom. "It's a song that came about after physically being on the mountain. So it is a very physical song. Diamond Mountain is a real place. It's the most westerly of the 12 Pins in Connemara. You're on top of this hill and behind you are the other 11 mountains and on the other side are the Aran Islands and the ocean and the next stop is America. It's in an area where a lot of people emigrated from over the last 150 years. There's a dual thing going on in this area of a great sense of desolation and of loss and of almost a bleeding of people, but also there's an incredible sense of permanency from this amazing mountain."

While the subject of leaving and longing can get very depressing for anyone with that experience, Bloom sees things in Ireland looking up. "Freedom Song" reflects the thought that perhaps there are some positive things happening, especially where more and more women are assuming positions of power, both in the States and in Ireland. Impressed by the number of women getting elected to office in the U.S. and the fact that Ireland's president is a woman, Bloom wrote this song to try and distill these feelings into a concise song that uses Rosa Parks and Nan Joyce as focal points and symbols of things even more universal.

"I didn't want to write a song necessarily about those two people. I wanted to write a song that reflected a feeling I had that if women were in charge of the world it would be a better place. I just think that it's so obvious that if you look at power and politics in history, the wars were started by men; the wars were fought by men. Women, children and old people were victims of these wars. The imbalance is just so obvious as to be outrageous. I just found it very encouraging that so many women are coming to the fore in politics in America and its happening in Ireland also. It really is quite remarkable the extent to which the new Irish president has managed to effect the whole psyche of our country. The way that she has influenced not just the way Irish people feel about themselves but the way the world perceives Ireland." said Bloom. "I think that's a very positive thing.

"I just wanted to write a song which reflected the struggle that particularly African/ American women have had and the dual discrimination of being both women in a male dominated community and then also with the color of their skin. Having that sort of dual discrimination and seeing how through that many of the women who have emerged from that community have just been the most incredible people. Rosa Parks is an example to me of someone who came from a very humble background, but whose determination and courage had a huge impact on the whole society. Nan Joyce is somebody who had a family and came from a position of powerlessness and whose voice in the early '80s came at a time when the traveling community was just reaching a low ebb. The way they'd been treated in Ireland they're not being allowed to live their lives the way they wished with their culture of mobility."

While much of his songwriting does have political overtones, Bloom insists that his purpose in writing is not to proselytize. He sees himself more as an observer, vehemently insisting that he doesn't profess to know how to make the world a better place and declaring that he wouldn't be the one to do it anyway.

"I do believe I have a responsibility to myself to be honest with myself and, as another human being who makes observations, I sometimes communicate my observations and people can choose to get off on the guitar or get off on the sound or get off on the voice or get off on the lyrics or not get off on any of it if they choose not to."

In fact one of his songs speaks to people who can't easily accept things the way they are. "Right Here, Right Now" is his "carpe diem" song of sorts. "I think that everybody arrives at a point in relationships with people where they get engrossed in analysis. I have this great phrase that says that `analysis is paralysis.' There are certain things that just can't be analyzed. It's so easy sometimes to forget just what we have; to lose touch with the simplicity of good health, a roof over our head, a bed to sleep in, food in stomach. These kind of basic things that we just lose touch with sometimes. Sometimes I get really frus- trated when I'm in the company of people who are just constantly analyzing and studying and analyzing and intellectualizing and I just want to shake them and go `Live now. Today. Now. This is it.' It was one of those moments when the song just sort of exploded."

It's not surprising then, that Bloom is a bit reticent to talk about his work and his music and isn't always eager to do "press tours." He admits Turf is different because he's so enthusiastic about the result. He feels somewhat the same about video interpretations of music as he does about having to explain his work. "I think it's wrong to talk too much about songs. For me songs are never completely finished until the audience listens to them. When you talk too much about songs or you present songs with video, very often you deny the individual the right to interpret the song. I think that that's a great mistake. In the case of a song like `Freedom Song,' there are specific individuals involved so it's worth shedding a little light on the individuals. In most other songs I think you're better off in just literally allowing the songs to speak for themselves and allowing people to interpret them."

He shows a similar attitude in a stance he and many others have taken concerning an area in the Burren, County Clare, but this time it's an interpretation of the environment and not a song. The Irish government wants to build an interpretive center on a piece of land that Bloom and many others feel needs no explanation. The movement to stop the center spawned an album, including a song, ("The Fertile Rock") which Bloom recorded for Turf. Bloom was given a tour of the area at the foot of Mullaghmore Mountain several years ago by P.J. Curtis, an Irish musician/producer and one of the leaders of the movement. "He didn't even actually have to explain it. He talks so passionately about it really affected me. When you're in this place you realize two things. One, how precious it is in itself, and two, how precious the silence is there. It's a very unique place and very magical place. There's just no need to build something in the heart of it that interprets what's going on around it. I just believe that there are certain places in the world that should be hard to get to. People should really want to go there badly enough that they have to make an effort. It's this conflict between the people who want the tourist dollar and the people who want to preserve something that's precious that's been there for thousands of years. Like other songs, when I sing it in America or Australia, it tugs at something in every heart because its a universal problem."

While Bloom sings of many issues particular to Ireland, he is not one to use his Irishness as a promotional tool. That would be limiting. "Being Irish is so important to me that I don't have to think about it. I don't analyze it, I don't study it, I don't intellectualize it, I don't preach it, I'm not proud of it, I'm just happy with it, I'm comfortable with it. It's who I am. I feel as proud of being Irish as I am proud of being white. In other words I'm not proud of it. It's an accident of birth that I am both white and Irish. It's a geographical accident. Of course it affects the way I sing and the way I write songs. Not in a conscious way. Most of my influences are American or from other places. My musical territory is in a sense bigger than Ireland."

Realizing the power that music has for many people, Bloom also recognizes it in his own life. Were it not for performers like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, Bloom may never have found the inspiration to play himself. He continues to look to other musicians today for renewed inspiration, claiming Chet Baker as a current one along with some of the rap and hip hop groups. Mitchell was an obvious influence and her Blue album affected his musical journey. His song "To Begin To," is a tribute to Mitchell, whom Bloom has never met.

"That song is dedicated to her. That song is about her and dedicated to her. It's a song that's primarily about inspiration and about being inspired. I feel that there's a line `and now a young man sits alone in a world of information/Still he ploughs the song fields for inspiration.' I think in these days when people are bludgeoned with information it's very hard for people to be connected with anyone long enough for them to be inspired by them.

"I definitely am a music fan. My life is and has been and hopefully will continue to be affected by the work. Even in the last couple of months, I've tapped into the developments between hip hop and jazz and it's a whole other new world for me and I'm totally fascinated by it."

Perhaps a new avenue for Bloom to explore? "It's already beginning to affect the way I'm thinking about songs. I went to see US3 in Dublin about a month ago and they had the most incredible band. There was no sampling, no scratching. Just three rappers and a jazz band. It was an amazing show."

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