Youn Sun Nah
"I always knew that one day I was gonna sing Jockey Full of Bourbon," she said ... "Now the time had come" ... A Korean jazz singer, a Tom Waits song from 1985 that sounds like a man staggering through a carnival at closing time, and the certainty, held for years, that it was hers to sing ...
Youn Sun Nah is from Seoul, and Voyage, 2008, was her first record for ACT, the German label that had never before signed a Korean artist ... It was meant to be a duo record, guitar and voice, with the Swedish guitarist Ulf Wakenius ... Wakenius brought in Lars Danielsson to produce, and Danielsson brought his bass and cello and a melodica, and a trumpet player and a percussionist came too, and the duo became a room ...
She said of those four men that she felt relaxed and secure with them from the first moment ... "You don't need to prove anything to them and that's why you are even more daring" ... That is the whole secret of the take ... a singer daring, because nobody in the room needed her to ...
The measure of it is three days in June ... Nilento Studios, Gothenburg, the second to the fourth, recorded live, everyone in the room at once ... Waits sang it like a man who had drunk the whole bottle ... Nah sings it sober and slow and completely in control, which is stranger and more frightening ... a jockey who has had all the bourbon and is still, somehow, sitting comfortably in the saddle ...