Darren Hanlon: on searching and songs from the south

The last thing she said before she got in the taxi, the girl who was living upstairs, who sings on the record, and whose boyfriend also sings on the record, the boyfriend she’s leaving right now, the last thing she said was: “Don’t forget to take your vitamins.”

This was in Nashville. Darren’s room was a basement without a door. “You could hear everything that was going on in the house,” he says. “There was this dehumidifier that would hum all the time. You could switch it on to shut out upstairs.”

Darren pulls an old New Yorker from his drawer. This is in Melbourne. He is set up in the Paterson Building – a flaking old department store on Smith Street, Collingwood, soon to be gutted and filled in with apartments. We’ve been friends for I don’t know how long and I’m writing a film in the big empty room at the back of the floor.

Darren has a pile of books on one side of his room and wants to show me the André Gide paperbacks he just found. A stack of records is backed up against the wall, Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells A Story facing out. Looking across at it is a drawing Darren entered into the Gympie Show when he was at school: an earnest sketch of the Minogue sisters, their perms and leopard-print leotards greyed by the rubbing out and redrawing of a teenage perfectionist. Every picture tells a story, I think to myself. “It came first or second,” Darren says. “Someone said I traced. But have a look at those hands. Mate, that’s not tracing.”

The magazine is folded in two lengthways and a loose page wraps once around it like a parcel. The loose page has the caption contest on it: two lions talking, one of them sitting beside a ribcage and stethoscope. Julie Schuman of New York City is the winner. Her caption: “I still have room for a second opinion.”

There is a piece in the magazine that had become a kind of talisman for the album. By the time Darren reached Nashville, he had read it twice. By the time he gave it to me, it had been folded and refolded so often it looked like a scroll. I’ve listened to the record, but Darren wants me to read this Burkhard Bilger piece. It’s a profile of Art Rosenbaum, called “The Last Verse”. The subhead reads as a question: “Is there any folk music still out there?”

The article is a paean to one man’s obsession, a wandering account of his quest to find an authentic folk music and set it down in field recordings. It’s a long piece, almost defiantly so, but you need only finish one column length to find the paragraph that put its hooks into Darren. “He’d taped one old singer through a screen door – she wouldn’t let him into her house – and another shortly before she was sent to prison, at the age of 82, for dealing marijuana. ‘That jury’ll never convict me,’ she reportedly said. ‘I’ve sold moonshine to half of ‘em and fucked the rest.’”

The album starts in Broken Hill, in the far west of New South Wales. Darren had a fracture in a relationship and a standing offer for a pub room and he took it. It was the kind of pub room with wallpaper and a sink and not much else. There was a television, but you had to stand up to watch it. He was there a month and wrote one song, Letter From an Australian Mining Town. Although it is the fifth track on the record, I still hear its first line first: “If it wasn’t for the blinding sun, I might enjoy the view.”

The album, like the Rosenbaum story, is a search. Darren was looking for musicians. He ended up recording with about 27. Darren is always trying to find his place. It’s the dream at the other end of his rootlessness. He is a hoarder without a home. The further you get into the New Yorker piece, you start to find words underlined. A questing biro has picked out the small American label “Prestige” and, further on, the term “Wesleyan”. A map was being assembled.

Darren told me about the article before he gave it to me. “I was in Portland after Broken Hill, and there was this pile of New Yorker magazines. This one didn’t even have a cover. There was this article about Art Rosenbaum, about field recording. I wanted to go and find people like that.”

After Broken Hill, Darren found his way to America and on to the Amtrak. In New Orleans he taped a teenage busker for what became Manhole Cover Tap. In Athens, Georgia, he went to church twice, trying unsuccessfully to convince a gospel band to sing on Trust Your Feelings. “They didn’t like the lyrics, basically,” Darren says. “Which was a shame.”

Midway through the New Yorker piece a definition of folk is offered. It is worth reproducing. “A good folk song is easy to learn and hard to forget. Its melody is brief, its chorus repeats, its rhymes lead from line to line like the base pairs in a chain of DNA.”

You can hear on the album as Darren daisy-chains his way through the US, looking for half-heard sounds. He travels on phone calls and couches. Eventually, he meets Rosenbaum. This is not unusual for Darren. He has a strange way of willing people into his life. “I didn’t plan any of it, but in the end we ended up friends,” he says. “I called him up and we went straight there and spent a few days with him. Every step of the way, someone said you’ve got to meet such and such.”

I think about this as I read Bilger’s piece: the way that, as you pass things along, you strip them down. I start to hear the record’s title as the question Darren would have heard when he knocked on doors: “Where did you come from?” Perhaps it’s a question about life. Perhaps, just directions. “A folk song is a meme, an evolutionary biologist might say – the cultural version of a gene,” Bilger writes. “It passes from generation to generation, evolving as it goes, till every clumsy or extraneous line is stripped away.”

The New Yorker’s definition ends with a test, a means of deciding if you have the real thing or not: “You only have to hear it a few times to know it by heart.”

I listened to Darren’s record a few times while I wrote this. Maybe three. I thought about the songs. You don’t forget them. They’re not vitamins.