Meet the band: Voodoo Loons

Members: Dennis O’Hagan, guitar, vocals; Chris Hooks, bass; Bill McCarthy, Drums
Hometown: Cincinnati
Sounds Like: Alternative rock with Celtic influences
Latest Project: Currently recording second album The Criminal Ear (working title); previous album Euphobia

Voodoo Loons got their start when found Dennis O’Hagan posted some homemade tracks online. He was then approached by a Dublin-based magazine, which used one of the tracks on a DVD.

Encouraged by the interest, he recruited some bands and turned his musical project into a formal band. We spoke to O’Hagan about his experience as a rescue worker after Hurricane Katrina (and from which the band takes its name) and his reaction to the Japan earthquake and tsunami.

The band, which is taking a break from recording their third release to play the Southgate House on Saint Patrick’s Day, will be joined by mandolin virtuoso Mark Daly.  

How did you get interested in Irish music?
Well, I actually have dual citizenship. I’m Irish and American. My mom is Irish and my dad is German, so I’ve always had that kind of cultural thing, you know, that exposure to it from there. So I guess, you could say part of it was in the blood. When I was starting to get into music growing up, I got turned on to various bluegrass and reggae stuff, which both have strong Celtic roots, and so, um, when I get into music, I tend to dig in and explore the roots and so forth, and they all led back to Celtic, so like that I guess?

When did you start playing music and what instrument did you start on?
Fifth grade, however old that is. I started on guitar and I played guitar for a couple of years. Then I quit guitar and played drums. I played in the school band for a couple of years and all that. When I went into high school, I dropped the drums and school band and got back into guitar. I’ve been playing guitar ever since. I fool around on mandolin and a couple of other instruments, but it’s primarily guitar.

So when did you get bit by the songwriting bug?
I played in cover bands in high school. I lived in Williamsburg, Va., for a while. Luckily enough, being in a cover band, I used to play frat parties in high school. That was fun for a while, but  as soon as I went to college, I knew that if I was going to spend time being in a band, I wanted to be in a band playing original stuff. So I must have been 18 or so?

Coming out of cover band, what kind of music did you start off playing?
No, it was alt-rock influenced stuff, big bands at the time that I was into, and The Replacements and stuff like that, and Jane’s Addiction and that sort of stuff.

Obviously, you’re playing St. Patrick’s Day. Do you have any big plans for after the show?
We’ll actually be taking it easy. Preparing for this show has actually been a break from our recording schedule. We’ve been working on recording our next album here in Cincinnati, so we’re probably about half-way through right now. As soon as the St. Patrick’s Day gig is done, we are going straight back, nose down, into recording. The plan is to wrap that up by early summer and begin mastering it, and by late summer have it all wrapped up and start playing shows the second half of the year.

Who are you recording with?
Chris Hooks, our bassist, actually owns a recording studio, so we have our own studio. It’s called Middle Ground Studios, and it’s here in Cinicinnati.

How did you come up with the name for the band?
I actually worked on the Red Cross Disaster Response Team. I was in Southern Mississippi and Louisiana the days right after [Hurricane] Katrina. When I was down there, there were victims and people still wandering around kind of shell shocked. There was this one man who had his wife washed away from him during the surge and he was wandering around with his little girl. They were both still shell shocked, and they were both still looking for her, obviously still in shock because they thought there was still a chance that they were going to find her, you know, alive and looking for them. And so there were people like that walking around, and there was an old Cajun man who was helping as well, and he referred to them as “voodoo loons,” which I think was a Cajun sort of term, but it got used to refer to sort of the walking-dead-type of people. It caught my ear, and when I got home, I was really deeply impacted by that whole experience when I was out.

I have to ask then, what is your reaction to seeing the images of the disaster in Japan?
It’s crazy, I was just watching that. I think the strangest perspective that Katrina gave me—I was doing rescues and looking for people in Gulfport, Miss., — Gulfport was hit harder than New Orleans. The whole city was decimated. What struck me about it then, was that there were walls of debris that were 20-30 feet high when you walked through. It was just like being on another planet. So when you see these views from Japan, they are areal views, so everything looks so tiny. So what the Katrina thing does, it kind of forces me to feel, like I could feel the scale on TV more than I ever could before.