I grew up with folk music, attending schools run by hippies and a summer camp run by Pete Seeger’s family. But I didn’t realize that folk music could be cool until I got to college. It was there that my friend Jeremy Withers turned me on to a band called Cordelia’s Dad, fronted by a singer and multi-instrumentalist named Tim Eriksen. The band did extremely loud punk rock versions of old hymns, sea shanties, murder ballads, and other traditional repertoire not normally performed in a loud punk style. They also played more “normal” folk music on acoustic guitars and fiddles and dulcimers and such, with a bleak and gothic vibe. Sometimes they would do one acoustic set and one rock set at the same show. The Venn diagram overlap of people who like both of these things is not large. But a small group of my friends adored the band, and we followed them around like puppies. Cordelia’s Dad albums aren’t easy to find, and they’re not always easy to listen to when you do find them, but if you’re a certain kind of angst-ridden person, they can cure what ails you.
Tim has had a long and colorful career since then, and has gone on to be one of my favorite musicians in the world. He continues to play (mostly) traditional music on traditional instruments in a variety of non-traditional ways, for example, by playing banjo with a bow.
A few nights ago, I went with my wife and six-year-old son to see Tim do a solo show in a church in Greenwich Village, which is where I took the picture above. (Tim’s own young son was in the audience too, and both kids were sleeping peacefully by the end.) I look at some of my musical enthusiasms from my late adolescence with embarrassment, but the older I get, the more sense Tim’s music makes, and I keep learning from it and being inspired by it.
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