Backstory: "Love of Mine" by Paul Hunton
Paul Hunton under the mulberry tree. Photo by Clarke Condé.
Paul Hunton is a singer and songwriter in Albuquerque. With his band Dust City Opera, he has crafted songs that have a bit of a dark side to them, masked often by a musical current that doesn’t linger long. You may be reminded that sometimes bad things happen at the circus, but soon enough the elephants and acrobats are back in the center ring showing off their stuff.
Comparisons to Tom Waits come often, though likely due to the band’s orchestration rather than Hunton’s singing or songwriting. There is nothing gravelly about Hunton’s voice and nobody is going to pawn their clarinet in any of his songs. The music Hunton writes may occasionally veer towards the theatrical, but any campiness that might emerge is tempered by sincerity and craftsmanship. These songs come from a real place. Alien Summer, sure, but it is after all a summer in Albuquerque.
The Albuquerque Courier’s editor Clarke Condé sat down with Hunton at his home to find out more about Alien Summer’s fourth track for this edition of Backstory. The following is an edited version of Paul Hunton’s story of “Love of Mine.”
“I was thinking of it as like a bluegrass song. There's some harmonic fuckery on there, but there are also some pretty straightforward diatonics. I wanted it to sound familiar and folksy, but then to put this wild key change in there that you wouldn't hear in a bluegrass song. It's just in an unexpected key that turns everything around and makes it feel kind of dark to me. It's gotta be dark, that's my whole thing. It needs to be kind of upsetting and violent. I think that was a result of growing up on Soundgarden and stuff like that. I heard that in fifth grade for the first time and I was like, oh, there's a whole world of music that I didn't know about and this is it. I just immediately gravitated to that dark and upsetting grunge stuff that was out in the mid-nineties.
It's got this sort of cowboy thing. He's on a horse and he's been marked for death by some evil spirit. He’s got this curse on him. He's galloping away trying to outrun this fate. It’s a song of desperation and speed, just hurdling recklessly. Then, there's this contrast with this woman that he's trying to reach. I know that songs have done this, folksy songs like The Handsome Family's. I don't know if they wrote this one, but he is like, it's just a few more miles to Maryanne and he's freezing to death. And he's a hundred miles away. And he's 50 miles away. And he's 10 miles away. And he ends up freezing to death 50 feet from Marianne. You think he's gonna get there and then he doesn't make it. There's the tragedy. Right? So close, but so far. So, it kind of plays off that theme. I'm struggling over here, but there's that woman over there. I'm trying to reach there. But then the twist is in the second chorus. The reunion is he's died and maybe when she dies, they'll be together. It's a spin on that.”
“Love of Mine”
By Paul Hunton
Off the album Alien Summer