Ulidia Digs Into Rural Northern Irish Memories on 'Black Shirt, Black Jeans'

At 54, Northern Irish songwriter Stephen Cooke started putting down tracks to document the farming town he grew up in and the people who used to knock around it. Writing under the name Ulidia, he recorded 'Black Shirt, Black Jeans' in a small back room, running a Gordon Smith guitar through a handful of Boss pedals straight into an old digital eight-track recorder.

The volume clearly rattled the next-door neighbors, but Cooke kept the takes rough on purpose. There is no pitch correction, no quantized drumming, and no digital cleanup on the guitar squeaks, just dry downstrokes, amp buzz, and unvarnished memories told straight.