On a warm Saturday night you might hear some wild and crazy music down on the Matinicus Steamboat Wharf. There’s a crowd there, singing and dancing, and everybody knows each other.
And they all know Nat Hussey, who has adapted to this remote Penobscot Bay island after a dozen years as a conventional lawyer on the mainland. Now he’s a sternman on a Matinicus lobster boat, although he is using his legal skills to help fishermen protect their rights and explore their regulatory options.
“In the summer, when you don’t have to haul the next day,” Hussey brings his amp down to the old dock at the harbor and sets up next to stacked lobster traps. Islanders flock to the dock; who says there’s nothing to do on Saturday night on Matinicus?
The dock parties “have been really gratifying; it makes my whole week,” said Hussey, who has put together a You Tube video of island people dancing and hamming it up to his rollicking music.
At 46, Hussey has just released his forth compact disc, but it’s his first CD produced on a commercial scale, and he hopes people on and off Matinicus will like his contemporary folk ballads, songs that evoke a salty sense of place, a sense of belonging to a vital community.
The album is titled Diesel and Driftwood, and most of the 14 cuts by this singer-songwriter are island-influenced like the title tune itself. Other songs include “Haul Em Up!” an upbeat number of hauling lobster traps; “Starfish’s Memory,” “Lonesome Seagull,” “Offshore,” “Trying to Make a Living in Paradise.” You can guess what that refers to.
Hussey’s songs are paeans to people and places he loves. His lyrics are poetic and sometimes haunting. The stringed accompaniment is performed on various tracks laid down by Hussey in his makeshift home studio. On two tunes, “Haul Em Up,” and “Water and Stone,” daughter Lydia, 14, sings with him.
He made an entire recording and rejected it, then recorded this one. “It took months and months of spare time,” he said, conceding that between lobstering and being a husband and father he doesn’t have a lot of time on his hands. It was his “winter project” and took a lot of tweaking, he said.
“I can never settle down to one thing,” Hussey joked, saying he plays guitar, bass, mandolin, banjo and ukulele. He has been playing music for years. Growing up in Bowdoinham, he studied piano and guitar and got excited about a jazz program at his high school, Mount Ararat in Topsham. He tried a semester at Berklee College of Music in Boston before earning an undergraduate degree and a then a law degree from the University of Maine.
Over the years he has played at colleges and fairs.
Hussey practiced law solo, then worked seven years for the state Department of Corrections, living in Hallowell with his young family and continuing to play music.
Hussey and his family moved to Matinicus four years ago. In liner notes, Hussey calls the move to the 20-mile-offshore island an experiment, a “divorce” from a “sensible lifestyle.” But one senses that his life in this tiny community nurtures him in ways that his mainland career fell short.
In a song called “Offseason,” he writes about the chill of “still hanging around, when all my friends with any sense have all left town,” and it’s lonely. “Your picture is fading.”
These are gentle songs, songs that seem to capture the sea swells, the seasons, the reward of hard physical work, the power of a kiss from a loved one, the “dream of driftwood and diesel, and blue horizon coming ’round.”
Hussey has added some audio clips of a nearby bell buoy, a chime that blends easily with his music.
Nat his wife, Lisa Twombly, have three children: Ryan, still at home, Fiona, one of six students at the island school, and Lydia, a freshman at Putney School in Vermont.
Hussey seems committed to island life. I his song “Offshore” he sings, “My sense of direction is fine, I’m staying offshore.”
The album is available at Archipelago at the Island Institute in Rockland, and online. Here is a link for those curious about Hussey’s music: www.youtube.com/nathusseymusic