HUMBOLDT — The Horse's Mouth will be releasing their second album, titled “Horsin’ Around”.
The band is made up of Bob Henderson of Watson, Margaret Henderson of Watson, Andy McAnally of Humboldt and David Martinuk of Humboldt.
The group worked for about two years on the album.
“We said we’re not going to do any more gigs, or very few, just so we can work on the songs that we’re preparing for the CD,” Bob said. “Because every time you do a gig, you change your variety of songs and then brush up.”
The album will contain nine original written compositions and seven covers. The cover songs are traditionally Irish and east coast tunes and east coast music.
“For instance we do one song we’ve been playing many years, ‘Heave Away’, and it’s one of the songs used in the Broadway play ‘Come from Away’. My wife described our music coining the phrase ‘Celtic-eclectic.’”
Bob said this is a change from their first album, “Straight From”, which was more Celtic-traditional.
“Andy was quite determined to keep us on the Celtic trail there for a long time but over the years we ended up sliding in songs that weren’t starting with east coast and moving around.”
They found getting the royalties for all the songs they made covers on was easy, with the exception of the song Lukey’s Boat by Great Big Sea.
Lukey’s Boat had five different royalty representatives The Horse’s Mouth had to get permission from to make the cover.
This song took them the longest, with them only able to receive the rights to the cover on Aug. 30.
“After all the trouble my wife, Margaret, has went through to get the royalties for the cover songs I certainly understand why most of the bands coming out today don’t do covers.”
Bob said all the rest of the covers were easy to get the royalties for.
“Only Lukey’s Boat, which we thought would be the easiest one, turned out to be the hardest,” he said. “I’m sure professional bands all hire an agent to make sure who to contact... I know why they hire agents now.”
Their own compositions differ from the Celtic-eclectic feel that their covers contain.
“For instance I’ve written my own song about the island people. I spent three years in Papua New Guinea many years ago, and I loved living on that island and I’ve wrote a song about it,” he said. “It’s jazzy, a little bit of reggae style.”
One song written by the group is a waltz, and another is a ballad.
“There are four of us and we all have very different and wide ranging tastes in music and I guess that’s eclectic in its own way,” Bob said.
One piece in their upcoming album is a tribute to the Humboldt Broncos, titled Humboldt Strong. The piece was written by Andy, the day after the accident occurred.
“It has taken us awhile to get it into musical form,” he said. “I do believe it will be appropriate for play at certain times whenever those thoughts come up.”
For this piece they invited local singers to be their “angel chorus” in the song.
The original planned release date for the album was Sept. 19, to go with their performance for the Humboldt Area Arts Council on the same day at 7:30 p.m. in the Humboldt Gallery. Bob expects due to the delay with royalties, it will interfere with the release date.
