About Hommage County

For my friend Leo Meijer. Thank you for your support and your kind words through the years. Love, CA

A Hommage is a respectful imitiation of another artist’s work.

It’s been thirteen years since Cecilie Anna wrote her first songs for Bill Callahan and Will Oldham’s voices. Tom Waits, Mark Lanegan and Joe Henry adds to the list of singing voices Cecilie Anna adores to the point that they stay in her head, in a positive way, contributing to the writing of songs that will suit their voices like gloves.

After spending some years wondering how to get the gloves sent to the right hands, Cecilie Anna recorded “Morning Star” (for Bill Callahan) and “Old Love” (for Joe Henry) on her record “I’m Here” (2017). “Hommage County” is a continuance of this gesture, providing the songs a fair chance to fly ashore where they belong and somehow originated from.

Endre Olsen is a friend and fellow artist from Stord. Anne Gjerstad is not an artist but she’s a friend, and to Cecilie Anna, their two voices align with the rest of the voices. All freed from status, gender, time, and place.

In 2010, Cecilie Anna heard Bill Callahan’s song “Too Many Birds”. She listened to it again and again and has never stopped.

Cecilie Anna went to one of Will Oldham (a.k.a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy)’s concerts in Bergen 2010. She was immediately hit by a strong sense of wordless significance. The following night she made her first song for his voice.

Many years went by, and when Will Oldham and Bill Callahan started releasing covers together in 2020, Cecilie Anna’s head nearly exploded. The day she listened to their version of Cat Steven’s “Blackness of the Night”, she made “Lights Low”. Not only does it pay tribute to their voices, it’s also a hommage to Cat Steven’s song telling the story of a young soldier lying dying on the battlefield in a war not of his own. Listening to Bill Will’s take on Dave Rich’s “I’ve Made Up My Mind”, Cecilie Anna had to turn it off after 1:30 because she was already making her “Before I Go”, and her song “Bout the Crows” was written after hearing Bill Will’s take on Heather Summer’s “Red Tailed Hawk” for the first time.

As Cecilie Anna decided to make a compilation of hommages, her first thought was for Bill Callhan to have another song for his voice and made “Bring This to Bill”. She also wanted to do a cover of Will Oldham’s “I See a Darkness” and did what she always does cover-wise: Find a different version inside the song making new chords and a new melody but keeping the original lyrics intact. After recording it, Cecilie Anna wrote new lyrics. She had now changed the original song’s chords, melody, and lyrics, making the transition of the soul of “I See a Darkness” complete, from Will Oldham to Cecilie Anna. Bringing her back to the concert thirteen years ago, “Hommage” has made the very same wordless significance audible to the world.

Arrangements
For Hommage County, Cecilie Anna wanted something different for the arrangement. She’d done two piano-records and one with band and wanted to do something in between. Since she is a keyboardist, she chose pump organ as the base. She’s never played it before and enjoyed the exploration of a new instrument. She also wanted soundscapes made from analogue sounds for the tracks to be surrounded by. Her husband Vidar was asked if he could record sounds. Any sounds, really, and he recorded such as electrical toothbrush, stamping of a chair, jingle bells, closing of drawers, rain staff and others. Cecilie Anna then began exploring and voyaged herself into heavy manipulation of the sounds, so heavily she no longer can tell for sure where all of them came from. One of her favourites, though, which has been used on several of the tracks, is jingle bells slowed down so heavily that she could pick just one of the ‘plucks’ moving it up and down and placing it manually to mimic the pizzicato of strings. At the same time, you can hear it’s something else, because of the wind inside the bell being audible. The track “Hommage” consists entirely from these plucks and it took Cecilie Anna several months to finish the work of placing all of the notes individually, not only tone wise but timewise.
The deepest of all sounds on the record is Cecilie Anna's own voice singing a word in a very low key in a very slow tempo.