There Are Still Plenty Of Miles In "Homesickness & Heartache" Blues

With her young family in tow, Americana singer-songwriter Eilen Jewell manages a busy touring schedule and when we phone her she's enjoying a brief period of downtime at home in Boise, Idaho after a busy European trip.

"It's great to be home but it was a good tour," reflects Jewell. "Every country is a little bit different over there and I forget that. Some are a little more reserved and some are a little more raucous. That can even vary from town to town or venue to venue. It's often hard to predict what each night is going to be like. They have great government support for the arts over there. They have great hospitality, beautiful venues and  professional lighting. We get very spoiled there. Then we come back to the US and very little government support of the arts."

"We did go into the studio over the summer and recorded some of my favourite old blues songs..."

In the year since her last album, Sundown Over Ghost Town, was released, Jewell has also been making tentative steps in the studio, working towards what might constitute her next album. "I've been mostly touring like crazy. It's been pretty rare that we've had our feet on the ground for very long. We did go into the studio over the summer and recorded some of my favourite old blues songs and we're not sure yet if that will be an EP or a full-length album or when it will come out. We started it and we like how it sounds so far. I might try and add some originals onto it or it might be an all covers album, I'm not sure yet. It kinda gives me hope for the future, that we can move forward still, even while we are touring non-stop," says Jewell.

With a decade of recorded music now behind her, how does Jewell view her back-catalogue, dating back to her 2006 debut Boundary Country? "I don't really see those songs as being much different from the others. That's interesting because it means I started out in the place where I already knew how I wanted to write and play. I started writing the songs that seemed right to me at the time. It turns out ten years later I still like those songs, I'm still playing them and I'm still writing in a similar style even though that doesn't mean I haven't changed as an artist," stresses Jewell. "I think that songs I write nowadays are different but not fundamentally different. I'm still in love with the same concepts in a song. I still really like to write about the western part of the US and I still like themes of homesickness and heartache. I think a lot of that comes from having listened to blues and country music for so long. It's just in my blood."