When Diesel started work on his new album ‘Alone With Blues’, a chance email from Ross Wilson with the rediscovery of an old song ended up being the lead song of the album.
‘Six Steel Strings’ was written around the time of Diesel’s first solo album ‘Hep Fideility’, released in 1991. It was considered for the record at the time, didn’t feel right and went unnoticed until now.
Watch the Diesel interview:
Diesel recalls the day Ross Wilson came over and write the song with him all those years ago. “I remember him coming over to my house. I think I had just become a solo artist. I had just left the band and I was embarking on a bunch of co-writing with people. It was the first of my foray into going in to write with people. Ross came over to my house in Paddington.
“My studio consisted of a four-track on an ironing board and a couple of computer speakers. We made this really crude demo. The way he processed it, he asked me to tell him my story, where I came from, and about my life. I thought ‘you really want to do that? Okay lets go with it’. It ended up being this ‘Johnny B Goode’, ‘Stone Free’ telling the story of someone obsessed with a guitar. It’s my loose story. When I told him I was born in Massachusetts and lived in Rhode Island in this blip of a town. To this day it doesn’t have a McDonalds. Its like a Norman Rockwell painting, little houses spread apart, a potato field, a beach. Across the border is Newport with wealthy people. Where we were was Portugeuse families with 14 kids and potato fields. It was a state the size of a Melbourne suburb. That set him off and it was all he needed.
“We made a demo of it with the band I had assembled at the time. When I started writng ‘Hep Fidelity’ it didn’t kind of fit in. I remember Nathan Cavaleri a couple of years later was making one of his records and got throw into that but didn’t make so. Then it got throw into a storage tub until recently when Ross moved house. It was a timely thing that he was moving and saw that and I was looking, he sent an email and I downloaded and played it and could not believe the timing. I emailed him right back and said that I was actually making a blues record right now and I’m going to include it. It was a real moment of serendipity”.
Diesel will be back in the road with Red Hot Summer in October.
Diesel ‘Alone With Blues’ was released today.
