Orange Raja

“Orange Raja, Blood Royal” is a collaboration EP with John Darnielle (under the name the Mountain Goats) and Alastair Galbraith. The two met in 1993, in Pomona, CA where they played the same show. Both expressed appreciation for one anothers' work, and soon began collaborating on this record.

After a trip to New Zealand, Galbraith received some tracks from Darnielle. In the liner notes for Ghana (on which all four of these songs were collected), he writes:

I had these songs I’d written after seeing Chicago for the first time, and experiencing humidity the likes of which we never have back in Southern California. I transferred them to quarter-inch reels and sent them down to New Zealand. A couple weeks later the phone rings at 4:30 in the morning. It’s Alastair Galbraith. He holds the phone up to his four-track reel-to-reel and plays me the first of these four songs. Hands-down one of the best moments I’ve ever had, listening to what Alastair had done, lying on my bedroom floor in the dark with the phone pressed up to me ear. The violin wailed through the earpiece like a newborn infant.

Galbraith, for his part, has said:

I ended up thinking I wanted to put more than just violin on, so I ended up using old, fake, third-world-shop tabla and a little bit of mouth organ which I had never played before, and a few violin tracks and sang, or repeated, some of his lines, although he’d asked me not to (laughs). But he ended up liking that.