Biography
sun dirt water is The Waifs’ fifth studio album and the follow up to their triple platinum, multi ARIA Award winning record Up All Night. Recorded in Nashville and co produced by the band and Compass Record’s Gary West. Josh Cunningham, Donna Simpson and Vikki Thorn were joined by long time bassist Ben Franz and drummer David McDonald as well as some of Nashville's most esteemed session players: Hammond organ by Reese Wynans (Stevie Ray Vaughan); steel guitar by Dan Dugmore (Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor) and a splash of clarinet in the home stretch by Jeff Coffin (Bela Fleck). sun dirt water is an album born of time and distance. The geographical space between singer-songwriters Donna, Vikki and Josh, and the long hiatus since their last studio triumph, created a kind of vacuum that these new songs could hardly wait to fill. It's Vikki who sets the bar with the title track. "sun dirt water" is a worldly, seductive groove that meanders between styles with insouciant authority – slinky jazz, elegant country, smoky blues – and effortlessly nails what Josh calls "our finest recorded moment to date." From the darkly evocative storytelling of Donna's "vermillion" and "sad sailor song" to Josh's upbeat country spiritual, "eternity", this sense of liberation runs an exquisitely loose thread through The Waifs' fifth album. The eerie introspection of "love let me down"; the gleeful, organ-fuelled pop of "stay"; the electric riff rock of "no such thing as goodbye" and the old-time ukulele thrum of "sentimental" are worlds apart stylistically, but they spring from the same well of timeless roots influences, and an instinct for collaborative expression that only comes with years traveling the same road. For those who came in late, the road looms large and long in The Waifs' inspirational tale of self-determined international success. It intersected for sisters Donna and Vikki and guitarist Josh in a remote corner of the Western Australian desert some 15 years ago.
Their mobile cottage industry of campfire-crafted songs and independently recorded, gold-selling CDs slowly reached critical mass in Australia between '96 and '00, while their captivating on-stage chemistry spilled into a contagious festival following through Europe and North America.
With sun dirt water they reach a new benchmark of worldly eclecticism, without surrendering one iota of the homegrown and unaffected heart and soul that's made The Waifs one of Australia's most loved and admired musical exports of this century.
sun dirt water was released on September 1st, 2007 through Compass Records
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