‘Back Home with Drifting Woods’: The album that defines the magic of Michael Hurley

Posted On April 4, 2025April 4, 2025

“The recordings Contained herein are contained here after many years on the shelf…” So begin the liner notes to Michael Hurley’s old folk album, Back Home with Drifting Woods. Quite why the C is capped up on ‘contained’ is anyone’s guess. It also seems apparent that the palindrome-adjacent intent of the sentence could’ve been neatened with a studied edit. But Hurley didn’t do studied edits. In fact, that is a feature that pretty much defined his work.

At no point in his discography is that more apparent than this little-known album. You don’t assign a record to dust-gathering duty on a shelf if you are studious. You sweat over it, wondering about its place in the world and how it might contribute to your future mortgage payments. You rue missed notes, celebrate strong lines, and ponder infinitely over the endless potentialities of what could’ve been.

Hurley, it seems, never did that. He was always onto the next thing. There’s a kayak floating down the stream of a red river on the cover of Back Home with Drifting Woods, the creature behind the nonexistent ores steadfastly gazing forward. I like to think that character is Hurley—a figure who gave himself up to the waves of the world, saw things differently and trusted the coracle of his own imagination to keep him afloat.

In 1964, when this album was first recorded, he was as adrift and determined as anyone else washing up in Greenwich Village to be part of the counterculture movement. Yet, you also sense he was simply there to be part of it in a passive sense. He had floated up from the Delaware River with his guitar, a few cents and not much of a plan. But he soon came to embody what art meant to the beats while the rest of his buddies got busy trying.

Jack Kerouac’s seminal novels might be awash with highfalutin prose, but rather than pretence, that was actually his natural mode, hence how he wrote On The Road in a matter of weeks. The author’s beat outlook was simply to reflect the world – or rather his experience of the world – on the wing. And to present it with expressionist originality. He, too, was largely unedited, unrefined and always moving forward.

Hurley followed the same path. If a would-be classic like Back Home with Drifting Woods sat around, scratchy, imperfect, and potentially forgotten, then so be it. That’s life. And there was plenty more living where that came from. Proving that very point is his First Songs LP, the release born from the very same sessions with his fortunate patron, Fred Ramsey, the famed folklorist who just happened to live nearby Hurley’s childhood home, soon to be brought together by a fateful hitchhiking encounter.

That’s how most things happened in Hurley’s life: he’d stick a thumb out to the world, and soon he was on his next trip. His music followed suit. It was never pre-planned, perfected, polished or promoted in any conventional sense. It just bumbled around, beat up, sometimes broken, often beautiful, but always a bonafide reflection of how he saw the world—which was invariably unique but relatable.

“I like original music,” he told Psychedelic Baby. “I like to listen to people who are playing themselves, not somebody else or who they think they should be. I like a raw truth. I like to celebrate the hilarity of life. The whole deal. The boogie woogie, the bebop and the blues as well as folk music of all nations.” So, on the album that he stowed away for decades, you get smatterings of all of that.

Beyond the bizarre blend of proto-acid folk, blues, simple pop ditties, experimental reimaginings of some of his best-loved tracks like ‘The Tea Song’, and even the original artwork, you also get an unedited view of his outlook on life and art. There is beauty and exultation in the whimsy of it all, but as a man who struggled to sustain his young family in New York City with his music and “jobs ‘o work”, there is that “raw truth” of life that he also craved, and in the slow and staggered way it reached us, you have an accurate depiction of the curveballs and curios that keep life unpredictably imperfect.

His music captures the true enigmatic ways of the world and all the weirdness herein as he sings on this humble record, “I don’t care that she’s left me / Just so long as the cupboard’s full of tea / My nerves are shaking and my heart is breaking / That’s just because of all the tea I take in.” For every sadness, there is tea, time and a joke to go along with it—Back Home with Drifting Woods makes that point about as clearly as oil swirled in a puddle.

But that swirl encourages you to look a little longer, and soon, you start seeing other things, too. Now, looking back at the art of this legend upon the “freak folk” pioneers passing, you can sense how he has quietly inspired a legion of stars with records that would just have easily sat on a shelf forever if his whims didn’t occasionally move him to do a spot of dusting.

There are shades of Hurley in the likes of Jeffrey Lewis, Joana Sternberg, Ivor Cutler and a legion of other artists just being themselves. In fact, many of the folks out there who you could cobble together as creatures cut from the same cloth may never have heard of him; they’ve just hit upon the same easy, breezy attitude towards bittersweet life where you can be weeping over a gravestone when a butterfly suddenly swoops by and averts your gaze to an ice cream parlour. Look out for those butterflies—Michael Hurley sure did, sometimes they’d even make him forget he was in the middle of recording.

Related Topics