Fearful Wiggings. The title comes from a 1920s book of French stories.. I came across a new word and looked up in the glossary and the meaning was puts as “fearful wiggings’. I took it to mean “great anxiety”.
Fearful wiggings is a lyrically freewheeling kind of album. Elemental figures and scenes. Sex, myth, dream cities, shadows, invisibility (a recurring theme in my songs) and the very personal title track. Musically, it’s pretty simple and stark but every song could come from it’s own album. Frenchie (“je est un autre” and “flower of the earth” ) and Australian (“country roads, unwinding”). A best of from the future.
The recording itself was like an arthouse movie. Beginning in early 2013 on a whim when I had a lot of music to unload but wasn’t going to be thinking of releasing anything very soon. I wanted to record things with no shape in mind, to just capture the licks and not try to shove them into any form, not think of the end result. A chance meeting with Lisa Gerrard at a screen composers award night and her invitation to record my vocals at her studio. We had seen Lisa play solo in Melbourne in 1980 and 81 and saw the very first Dead can dance gigs then. We went to see Dead Can Dance again in 2013. She expected me to come to the studio with one song and I turned up with thirteen. A commanding presence. She lifted my artistic aspirations and senses out of the hollows I’d been running through for years. Using Sinatra era mics and beautiful Avalon preamps and reverbs. She’d sit with her eyes closed and say “I don’t wanna do a radio mix- I wanna do a classical mix!” and “That’s fucking great! That’s Russian! I know what we need to do! We need to go North!”. The best was “It’s nice when you can put your hand back behind the voice…” How could you not be inspired?
Then a similar contact- also from a pure musical direction – happened when UK guitarist and songwriter Nick Harper contacted me to sing on one of his songs. I asked him to play on two of mine. He comes from folk rock royalty. His father is Roy Harper, noted player and subject of a tribute from Led Zeppelin. (“Hats off to Harper”)
The rest of the album was played by myself and Clare Moore. Guitars , bass, keys , bass xylophone, percussion and vibes.
The minimal bass left a lot of room for the voice.
The album was mastered in Phoenix Arizona by Roger Siebel and the cover is by Tony Mahony who has done all but five of the roughly twenty eight albums created by Dave Graney over the years.
Fearful Wiggings is an album I could have only gotten to via this convoluted route. All this involvement of chance meetings and luck. Serendipity. It’s full of feeling, colour and drama. Jazz chords, folk forms and country feels. But kind of pop all the

I wanted to make a pretty simple and direct album, so I’d rather not comment on the songs too much. I mean, I hope they just WORK for people. I started it on acoustic guitar, not thinking of the end shape.

Clare Moore, who plays on most of the album on vibes, percussion, keys and vocals, has shared my whole music life with me. I sing about us on the title track.


I wanted this album to really sparkle so I got it mastered in Phoenix by SAE (Roger Seibel) as I loved the sounds on the last couple of Bill Callahan albums.