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MICHAEL O'CONNOR BIO
In 2010, after well over 20 years of plying his trade in dive bars, listening rooms, theaters and festival stages across America and Europe, journeyman Texas songwriter and guitar player Michael O’Connor finally got his due. Or at the very least, a couple of very fine next best things: co-billing with one of his favorite fellow writers, Adam Carroll, on one of the best albums of both artists’ careers (the acclaimed Hard Times), and his very own star on the South Texas Music Walk of Fame — located right in O’Connor’s hometown of Corpus Christi. Along with fellow 2010 inductees like Terri Hendrix, Ponty Bone and Geronimo Trevino, O’Connor’s name is now part of the same Lone Star constellation as such Texas legends as Guy Clark, Kris Kristofferson, and the late Doug Sahm and Freddy Fender. Overall, not a bad way to kick off a very good year. But in the wake of releasing Hard Times and humbly accepting his Walk of Fame honor, O’Connor did what journeymen songwriters and guitar slingers do best: went straight back to work. On top of promoting Hard Times with Carroll, he hit the road for another long run of sideman dates playing with Slaid Cleaves, capping a 10-year run together with the recording of Cleaves’ first live album, the new Sorrow & Smoke: Live at the Horseshoe Lounge. And on his days “off,” O’Connor also squeezed in several trips to producer Jack Saunders’ White Cat Studio in Houston to record Devil Stole the Moon, his third “solo” album and first since 2007’s Giants From a Sleepy Town. “I started it kind of right away [after Hard Times],” says O’Connor, who lives with his wife in the small town of Brenham, Texas, located halfway between Austin and Houston. “I didn’t have any backers or anything, just did it all on my own, so it took me about a year, on and off. I’d record for a few days, then go back on the road for maybe a month or so until I had some more money for it, and then I’d go back in for a few more days.” O’Connor had worked with Saunders in the studio before, on both his own Giants From a Sleepy Town and as a guitarist on fellow songwriter Susan Gibson’s 2005 album, Outer Space. Before that, they crossed paths a number of times playing in different bands on the Texas circuit. “I actually met Jack probably in ’87 or so, when I opened for Shake Russell and Jack was the guitar player,” O’Connor says. “He just kind of gets what I’m trying to do; he knows the kind of Tom Waits/Townes Van Zandt fucked-up sound that I want, so he’s cool with just letting me wing it and not trying to polish things too much. But I also trust him to tell me if it sucks or not!” In addition to producing and engineering Devil Stole the Moon, Saunders also played bass and mandolin and sang back-up vocals. Rick Richards (Ray Wylie Hubbard, Gurf Morlix) played drums and percussion, and O’Connor played all the guitars as well as lap
steel, mandolin and harmonica. The record also marks the seasoned studio and road dog’s debut playing keyboards. “I’d never really done that,” he says. “It’s just something I started messing with while we were recording. I bought an old chord organ for $30 at the junk store, and then Jack came in one day and said, ‘Hey, I found something in the dumpster,’ and before I even knew what it was, I said, ‘Let’s use it!’ It was a Casio keyboard. So we ended up using both of those. I’m not really a keyboard player at all, but I didn’t really want a bunch of fancy stuff on the record, and being in the studio allowed me to stop and start just enough to figure out a little chord pattern here and there.” Playing keyboard may have been new to O’Connor, but the songs on Devil Stole the Moon all pick up right where Hard Times left off; three of the songs were even co-written with Carroll. “A few of those songs probably could have fit onto Hard Times, but we didn’t write them until later,” O’Connor says. “I didn’t really plan it this way, but I think there is kind of a theme there, about losers and maybe people who had chances to do things but maybe pissed them away. It happens all the time, right?” “I guess I learned to write about what you know,” O’Connor continues with a chuckle, crediting said advice to none other than famed Texas songsmith Ray Wylie Hubbard. And what O’Connor knows is the plight of the down and out, from blue-collar workers to unsung musicians to drunken Gulf Coast ne’er-do-wells. “Michael O’Connor’s songs have that ring of truth,” admires Cleaves, who recorded two of O’Connor’s songs on his 2006 album, Unsung. “You can tell he’s not making anything up. He’s painting a picture of something that’s real. He’s been with those underdog characters; he’s lived in those boarded-up towns.” “I’m pretty happy now, with a nice house and a great wife and a good dog, but I definitely lived in some pretty fucked up situations in my day, so I can draw on that,” O’Connor says, adding that his taste in movies, music (Waits, Van Zandt, Mance Lipscomb) and books (Charles Bukowski and Larry Brown) also leans heavily toward underdog narratives. Across the somber, gritty noir-ish sweep of Devil Stole the Moon, his characters (some fictional, others directly inspired by friends, family, and associates) wrestle with addictions, broken dreams and mortality, while O’Connor himself confronts his own hardscrabble Corpus Christi roots. “I really had a love/hate relationship with Corpus when I left there,” O’Connor says. “I was really glad to leave, because it’s the kind of town where you can get in all kinds of trouble; I spent a lot of time down there playing rough gigs and running around doing stuff I shouldn’t have been doing. But I’ve been going back there more often recently, and I kind of don’t feel that way about it anymore … I’ve grown up enough to realize those were my own bad choices and I can’t blame any of that stuff on geography. Now I’m already thinking about going back down there to start writing the next record. So I
would say it’s definitely had an influence on me, and I’m using it and liking it rather than resisting it. I used to fight it, and now I’m kind of going with it.” In his late teens and all through his twenties, O’Connor honed his chops playing blues, jazz and rock ’n’ roll in the rough-and-tumble shrimper and biker bars of the Gulf Coast before finding his way into the singer-songwriter and folk circles via studio and sideman gigs with friends like Terri Hendrix, Susan Gibson, Adam Carroll, Cary Swinney and the aforementioned Ray Wylie Hubbard. Hubbard, who produced O’Connor’s 2000 debut, Green and Blue, approvingly notes that O’Connor “has the big four: tone, taste, groove and grit. He’s cool.” “Ray was the one who encouraged me to write my songs and start recording,” O’Connor says. “I probably never would have done that otherwise. Before that, I’d been writing, but I’d never had the money or gumption to pursue recording. I guess I just didn’t believe in myself or my songs. But when someone like Ray kind of encourages you, it gives you a little validation.” Nevertheless, O’Connor happily spent most of the last decade devoting more time to sideman gigs than on his solo career. But with the release of Devil Stole the Moon, the 45-year-old songwriter is gearing up to finally shuffle over to center stage. “I’ll still be doing some selective sideman gigs, but I’m going to be concentrating more on doing my own thing,” he says. “Its just time for a change.” He makes it pretty clear, though, that shifting his primary focus over to his own music has nothing to do with ego, let alone aspirations to fame and fortune. “I’m not trying to be famous or nothing,” he says. “I just write these songs that I play on guitar, and I’m doing it because it’s what I think I’m supposed to do. But I can make my records pretty affordable, so I don’t have to sell thousands to make my money back — I only have to sell hundreds. I don’t have the kind of money to do a big campaign or anything, but I won’t let that stop me from having 10 songs and sharing them with people, you know what I mean? All I can control is the work, and I let the universe take care of the rest of it. “I don’t need to be rich,” he says simply. “I just want to make my living.” --by Richard Skanse ......................................................................................................................... Devil Stole the Moon
Track by Track “Raining on the Dark Side” (Adam Carroll/Michael O’Connor) That’s one I wrote with Adam; it’s more of that Gulf Coast loser kind of stuff, which I definitely relate to. It’s kind of about the has-been musician; you know a lot of these guys talk about their glory days, so the guy in the song’s talking about how he used to play like Magic Sam, who was this old Chicago blues guy. And he says he used to “gin ’em up,” which is a term that my father-in-law used to use. He was a musician, too. It just means to rile the crowd up, get ’em going. We were going for a Tom Petty band kind of feel on that one, and it came together real quick. In fact, Adam was still writing it by the time I’d finished recording it. I got home and Adam was sending me tweaks on the lyrics, and I just sent him my version and said, “Here’s my version, I’ve already done it!” He liked it, though. “Devil Stole the Moon” (Michael O’Connor) I used to play with these guys in Corpus Christi who played a lot of Spanish songs, cumbias and stuff like that. I wanted to write a cumbia, but I don’t write Mexican music, so I did kind of a Tom Waits blues thing. Rick did his drums on that in one take. We got it down real quick the same day as “Raining on the Dark Side.” I wrote it kind of at the last minute, too; the beat came first and then the story. It’s about a saxophone player in a band who’s in love with the singer, and she’s not returning his love, so it ends bad — he strangles her. That all comes from the Larry Brown books and murder ballads I like. “Time” (Michael O’Connor) That’s a song I wrote the day my father-in-law passed away. The same guy who used to say “gin ’em up.” He knew he was dying and the pleasure was running out of it, and I think he kind of made up his mind that he was dying and he died pretty soon after that. So it was just a song about somebody realizing that was their life, they made the best of it, and now it’s over. Time’s a motherfucker, you know? But he used to tell stories and stuff about hunting in West Virginia when he was a kid, so I put that in the last verse, because I like to hope that when you die, maybe spiritually or in your head you go back to some place you loved when you were a kid. “Rough Side” (Adam Carroll/Michael O’Connor) That’s another one that came out of Adam and I working on Hard Times. It’s kind of about my dad in a way. Or at least he was like the guy in the song — he was a construction worker, and he would always party his money away, drink his pay in a night, and end up in jail a lot. I wasn’t raised by my dad, but I’ll never forget going to see Charley Pride at the Astrodome on one of the days I spent hanging out with him as a kid. So I had that chorus part first, and just tried to remember those kind of country songs from that time and that image of men drinking and listening to Charley Pride.
“Above” (Michael O’Connor) “Above” is a made-up thing, another kind of loser tune. I’ve known some musicians who would have been out on the street if they didn’t have their girlfriend; I was never quite like that, but I did live in my car and out of hotels for awhile. So it’s just about someone who always makes bad choices. There’s kind of a Bukowski thing there, too, because he would always write about betting on the horses and stuff. Those guys in Corpus that don’t have jobs, they can wait around and sometimes they can get a day’s work or a morning’s work just loading or unloading ships. And there’s a motel there called the Sea Ranch that I picked as a place where someone down and out might spend $100 to stay for a night or two. My mom actually ended up living there later on in life, too; she was kind of like my dad in that she didn’t always have her shit together. “New Year’s Eve” (Adam Carroll/Michael O’Connor) Adam and I recorded that song for Hard Times, but he sang it on that record and I wanted to do my take on it. We kind of gave it the Let It Bleed treatment — the guitar’s kind of jagged and fucked up on it, and I dig that about it. There’s a line in there about the guy being born in a room above the Party Doll on New Year’s Eve. My mom had to leave the man she was married to when I was born because I wasn’t his son, and she got a job as a waitress at this place called the Party Doll and we actually did live upstairs. I wasn’t born there, but that’s pretty much where I came home to from the hospital — a room above the Party Doll. “Lora” (Cary Swinney/Michael O’Connor) Writing with [Lubbock songwriter] Cary Swinney is a big deal, man, because he’s a peculiar dude and doesn’t really write with a lot of people. But he sent me a CD with about 30 songs on it, just all bits and pieces, and told me to pick one. I loved this one but he didn’t have a last verse on it yet, so I wrote one and kind of changed the music a little bit and sent it back to him, and he liked it. It’s about his Uncle John, who I guess really did have polio and rode in the rodeo and sold Chevrolet’s and all that stuff. I loved Cary’s chorus, but the verses and the chorus were completely different, so I tried to make the last verse fit the chorus. That part about the old folks’ home, I was thinking about my grandmother, who had dementia at the end of her life but seemed happy just being lost in her own mind. So that’s kind of where I put Uncle John — he’s back riding in the rodeo and stuff instead of where he’s really at. “Poor Eddie” (Michael O’Connor) “Poor Eddie” is just fiction — it’s a Bukowski kind of poem, about a guy who marries some girl when she gets out of prison, and has a street preacher do the ceremony. It all came out of that guitar part I had. When we cut that song, we just set one microphone up in the room and did it Robert Johnson style. You’re kind of stuck with what you get when you do it that way, but I think it worked for us with that one song. I might try doing some
more songs that way one day. “Burn” (Michael O’Connor) I don’t usually tell people who my songs are about, but the people who knew Rocky will know that it’s about Rocky Benton. He was this blind singer and blues musician who passed away a while back. He opened for Billy Preston one time and Billy gave him his coat, and Rocky wore that coat everywhere. He had a gunslinger belt with all his harmonicas on it. I really looked up to him when I was a kid, and I used to travel around with him, lead him around, look out for him, play gigs with him. He blew his face off every night if there were 100 people there or 10 people there, he didn’t care. He just played like he was going to die the next day. He ended up dying at 57 — his heart just gave out. Rocky just slugged it out for 40-something years. He was super talented and a big influence on me for sure. I got to play on his record, and Double Trouble was the rhythm section. People should definitely check him out on YouTube. “Homesick Boy” (Michael O’Connor) Unfortunately, I wrote that after another friend of mine passed away. It’s not really about him so much as it’s about just being in that feeling of losing him. But I’m proud of that tune and really like the way it turned out. That’s a Magnus chord organ I’m playing on it — I paid $30 for it here in town, and we had to tune all the other instruments to match it. We tuned a $3,000 bass and a $3,000 Martin to be in tune with a $30 Magnus chord organ!
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