The Rumpus.net » Tom Andes

Rumpus Sound Takes: Creeping Familiarity

Tom Andes — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:37:21 +0000

Junk Culture
Wild Quiet (Illegal Art)

Wild Quiet, Junk Culture’s full-length debut on Illegal Art, consists of eight songs and one instrumental fragment that treat the themes of home, freedom, and growing up. Essentially a one-man band—the project of Oregon native and current Oxford, Mississippi resident Deepak Mantena—Junk Culture here explores traditional pop song forms in lieu of the heavily sampled dance music Mantena created on two previous EPs. While the album’s slickly produced pop music evokes the various senses of freedom Mantena explores in his lyrics, the pop song form ultimately constrains him, and the album offers limited payoff to make up for what Mantena loses in the bargain.

The album begins with a distorted burst of guitar before “Oregon,” one of the catchiest uptempo numbers, kicks in. “She said she thinks it’s time to move to Oregon / I know, I know, I know, I know I’m not free,” Mantena sings over big drums, warm electric guitar, and an array of keyboards, synthesizers, and sampled noises. The driving bass and electric guitars express the freedom Mantena yearns for as succinctly as any of the lyrics do, while the lyrics acknowledge the impossibility of that freedom. The song embodies the paradox of growing up, perhaps of settling into domestic life—it’s hard to say. Like most of the album, it comes on strong melodically, though it lacks the narrative specificity, the concrete details, or the inspired wordplay that distinguishes well-crafted pop music, whether or not of the indie variety.

Mantena’s other lyrics speak to similar themes, often evoking the Pacific Northwest as a kind of pastoral Eden: “I think I’m over it / Live in the woods without a net” he sings on “Dwell,” while on “Indian Summer” he creates a similar soundscape to the one he creates on “Oregon.” Yet songs that ought to be affecting, like “Ceremony,” addressed to a friend in the hospital (we think)—“Please always know that your family cares for you / Age will fade, but your body will come home”—simply aren’t, largely because Mantena’s ruminative lyrics never attach themselves to specific situations. Is the friend in “Ceremony” a war veteran? Is the couple in “Oregon” arguing about leaving the city for the country? We’ll never know—and yet those are the kinds of situational specifics that often as not keep you coming back to a record once the surface appeal of the sound fades.

For all the album’s thematic unity—for all the lush surfaces of the songs—in recasting himself as a singer-songwriter, Mantena plays against his strengths. While the freeform structure of previous efforts allowed for random samples to create fresh sonic textures, implying a worldliness the lyrics didn’t need to deliver, here the music sounds suffocated, as though Mantena finds himself constrained by the form. By hewing so tightly to verse-chorus-verse structure, Mantena denies himself the freedom that energizes his previous records. Even the lone instrumental, “Be Good,” which begins with a collage of sampled traffic noise, winds down into a sampled harpsichord chord progression, as though the progression from unfamiliar to familiar must always end in the banal.

Potentially, on a record concerned with freedom, growing up, and growing old (Mantena says finding gray hairs in his beard inspired the album), this creeping familiarity is a good thing. In practice, Wild Quiet fails to sustain the listener’s interest not because Mantena’s music isn’t artfully constructed but because Mantena’s adherence to form puts too much pressure on the words, and neither the music nor the words quite deliver. “Make up your mind / You’re in love with the thought of freedom,” he sings on album-closer “Washington,” which seems a perfect summation of the album’s themes; yet despite its densely layered (and often beautiful) textures, the record seems less than the sum of its parts. Whether or not this betrays a lack of vision—Mantena’s 26, so the record’s limitations might well reflect his ideas about aging—is hard to say, though there’s certainly enough to like here, and one hopes for better things to come.

The Rumpus Interview with Boots Riley of The Coup

Tom Andes — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 18:00:25 +0000

Since returning from a brief hiatus in the mid-1990s, Oakland’s The Coup has flirted with perfection on three albums: 1998’s Steal This Album, 2001’s Party Music, and 2006’s Pick a Bigger Weapon. Rapping over live-in-the-studio funk augmented by DJ Pam the Funkstress, MC Boots Riley has pushed each album in a new direction while retaining the group’s distinct sonic identity.

For all that he’s transparently a propagandist, Riley’s richly detailed story songs make him one of the most engaging songwriters working in any popular form. The band’s first album in six years, Sorry to Bother You, marks a radical departure, fusing punk and hip hop into a sound that remains unmistakably The Coup’s own. From the infectious uptempo soul of lead single “The Magic Clap” to the blistering funk of “Land of 7 Billion Dances,” it aims to bring about a revolution that’s “both love and lust,” as Riley would have it on the Andy Warhol dis “You Are Not a Riot (An RSVP from David Siqueiros to Andy Warhol).” As politically uncompromising as any of the group’s work, it breaks new ground musically, and it sees Riley experimenting with a lyrical mode of storytelling alongside the customary fight songs and calls-to-arms.

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The Rumpus: Can you talk about where you grew up and what musical influences you first absorbed?

Boots Riley: I mainly grew up in Oakland, but I lived in Detroit until I was six. My older sister was living with us, and she listened to the Ohio Players and Stevie Wonder, so I grew up listening to stuff like that. When I was five years old, me and my cousin got into a fistfight because when “That’s the Way (I Like It)” came on the radio, he said, “That’s my song,” and I said, “No, that’s my song.” In junior high, in Oakland, I was into 80s British Invasion shit, the pop stuff, Tears for Fears and The Cure and things like that, but at the same time Michael Jackson. The overarching biggest musical influence has been Prince.

Rumpus: When did you first become involved with the hip hop community in Oakland?

Riley: In high school, everybody rapped. You just pounded on the table. But I had a best friend named Johnny, he went by the name Julius T. Poette, and he wanted to be a professional rapper. Back then, we had no idea how records were made. We thought what we heard was people freestyling. We had no idea people wrote shit down. At first, I was trying to get him involved in political things. I’d be like, “Hey, we’re doing this rally about police brutality, you can come do a show, there’ll be hundreds of people,” knowing there’d probably be forty people. He’d be like, “I’m only going to do it if you’re my hype man.” There was a weekly hip hop show at a place called Keisha’s Inn in Berkeley. It was put on by Ant Banks, who ended up going on to produce Too Short. Johnny wanted to get on that show, so they told him if he helped carry equipment, he could get on the show. I don’t think he ever got on the show, but the experience allowed me to see some of the inner workings of the music business. At the time, they were putting out this dude named MC Ant, who was headlining the weekly shows, and this other dude Pooh Man, who also went by MC Pooh. They’d gotten some money together and bought some studio equipment and made a record. I thought, “Wow, it’s on a piece of vinyl.” It made it seem doable to me, and that connected with the political philosophy I was learning at the time, which is best summed up as dialectical materialism. Part of it tells you whatever you want to do, you have to identify correctly the steps it takes to get there.

Rumpus: What first got you involved in politics, and how did politics and music begin to intersect for you?

Riley: What first got me involved in politics was being 14, and a youth organizer comes to my house with a van full of 14 year old girls. “Hey, you want to go to the beach with us? But first we’re going to go support the cannery workers’ strike in Watsonville.” That quickly changed because when you present young people with a reason for being, which is what everyone’s looking for, people quickly take to it. I was an avowed professional revolutionary by the time I was 15. I was a member of the Progressive Labor Party. My father had split with them 10 or 12 years before. As opposed to being mad at me, he argued with them, “Why would you let him in your organization? He doesn’t even read.”

Rumpus: Did your parents have a background in politics?

Riley: My father started out in the Civil Rights movement. He was one of the regional coordinators for the NAACP when he was 12 years old in the 50s in Durham, North Carolina. He helped organize the first coffee shop sit-in around integration. After being in the NAACP, he joined CORE, and after that he moved to San Francisco, where he was a bus driver and took part in the San Francisco State Strike, which is what created Ethnic Studies in the 60s. That’s where he met my mother. They got involved in much more radical politics, like the SDS, and then he became a fulltime organizer for PLP. They moved him to Detroit, where he did work with auto workers and was a fulltime organizer, and then he broke with them and moved back to the Bay Area. By this time, he was in his late 30s, and he went back to school and became a lawyer. He’s still in Oakland, still involved in stuff.

Rumpus: After two albums, in the 90s, you took a hiatus from making music. What brought you back?

Riley: When I started doing music seriously, it was with the idea that I was going to make a couple multiplatinum albums, put these ideas out on a large scale and make some money and then buy guns and ammunition and make organizing centers around the country. But the first part of that plan never happened. When I was 24, I felt like all my heroes who had organized were 19, 20. I was like, “I’ve been spending my whole adult life on this music shit. What am I doing?” The Coup was on MTV and BET, but at a time when there was no internet, I had no idea how much the stuff I was doing was affecting people outside Oakland. At the time, also, hip hop wasn’t able to tour because all these clubs that let hip hop come in now, they would never have let hip hop come in. Anytime some independent promoter would put some money together and try to bring us somewhere, before we even got on the plane, the police would shut it down. They’d say, “It’s going to be too rowdy.” But in the interim, while I had stopped, this guy Peter Schwartz at the Agency Group, he’d taken Hieroglyphics, and they told these clubs, straight up, “They have a white crowd; don’t trip.” It’s not like anything got fixed with racism; it’s just that these clubs started being okay with the music because they felt it was white kids coming as opposed to black kids.

After Genocide and Juice some friends and I had started an organization called The Young Comrades. The Young Comrades broke down over stupid shit that a lot of radical organizations break down over. A group of people in the organization turned it into little more than a study group. I was like, “Fuck this, if I all I’m going to be doing is putting out ideas, I might as well go back to putting them out in a much larger way.”

Rumpus: Can you talk about your songwriting process? Do you start with a character, a situation? Do you start with something drawn from life, or do you start more conceptually?

Riley: It’s different with every song. “Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ’79 Grenada Last Night” started because I wanted to write a song about sexism, but I didn’t want to do it in a mechanical way and be like, “Don’t be sexist!” because that’s not how I talk in regular life. Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you’re not writing a song, it’s like that. A lot of what we say and do are regurgitated things that have to do with what we think we’re supposed to be saying and doing. In reality, I know I’m not hurt directly by sexism; however, my life is made less because of it, so I started thinking about the fallout from relationships in which people feed off each other. That’s where that character came from. “Me and Jesus the Pimp” took me, with all the starts and stops, eight months to write after I got that first line. Then there are songs that took me 10 minutes to write. A lot of them come with lying to the label. For Party Music, I said, “Yeah, the first single is done,” because I had the music, and I had a concept for “5 Millions Ways to Kill a CEO.” But I had no lyrics. Then by the end of the album, we had a mastering date, and I had to get to the airport. If I missed that plane, there was no other mastering date for a couple months, so the album wouldn’t come out till the next year. We had a couple hours before I had to leave, and I felt like there was no opening song. I handed the music over to Matt Kelly, “Just start mixing it, I’m going to go out of the room and write the lyrics.” I wrote the lyrics to “Everythang” in 10 or 15 minutes. But I don’t think there’s any rule. I have tried to write songs quickly that get scrapped. I’ve also taken a long time on songs that get scrapped because you can over-think something, and you’ve squeezed the life out of it. As opposed to work of art, it looks like a really great work of craftsmanship.

Rumpus: Can you talk about “Nowalaters?”

Riley: That was a true story. That was one of the hardest songs I’ve written. I’ve had band members that want to perform that, and I’m like, “I can’t really do that song.” I wrote that right when I had come to a turning in my understanding of those events, and it opened up the idea of me writing about personal things. I wrote “Wear Clean Draws” after I wrote that one. Before that, I thought there were too many songs about people’s personal lives. I was also concerned with the ideas that song might put out there. In writing it, I had to trust that if I wrote the song, if I really believed in those things, my ideas would come through.

Rumpus: How much are the musicians who join you in the studio part of your process?

Riley: Normally, before this album, I would come up with something. “I’m really feeling this bassline on this old record; let’s do something similar to that.” Or I might bang something out on the keyboard. Or I might sing a guitar line. Somebody might be like, “This chord will make it funkier than that chord.” But it’s usually important to me to get my idea out first because a lot of times my ideas will seem weird to musicians. Then I welcome input. However, with this album, I coproduced it with my friend Damian Gallegos. He’s got a studio up the street, and I’ve wasted far too much time talking about music and backwards engineering shit with him, so this time, we decided to make the album together. A few songs, he co-wrote the music; he wrote all the music on “Violet,” and then I changed some of it. “Your Parents’ Cocaine,” I played when I first got the Little Phatty, which is a cheaper new Moog. On “My Murder, My Love,” I was playing around in the studio with these pedals on a Fender Rhodes. Damian being there allowed me to play with a lot of different textures and ways of recording. On “Land of 7 Billion Dances” we discovered he had this broken ribbon mic, but I was like, “Fuck it, it sounds good.” It added something to the kick; it also adds some crunch onto the rest of the drum kit. In fact, the drum sounds on this album can be credited largely to that ribbon mic. On “My Murder, My Love,” even the folks at Epitaph were like, “That sounds unprofessional.” I was like, “Good,” because what you mean by “professional” is “like other shit sounds.”

Rumpus: Was Pam involved with this album?

Riley: She’s always involved. I’ll play her the shit we have, and if there’s something she thinks is really terrible, it won’t make it on the album because I’ll feel guilty. She often doesn’t like most of the shit. That’s just her personality. But since we know each other so well, if she puts down a song really badly, then I know something’s wrong with it. Normally on an album, she’ll be part of it at the end and go through and do her scratches. But Pam has a restaurant and a catering business, and she 95% of the time can’t tour. Pam is still The Coup; it’s just this album represents what somebody would hear when they came to the show. But she was definitely there and part of the thing.

Rumpus: Initial press for the album talked about it being a movie soundtrack. Is that true?

Riley: Yeah, definitely. But the movie won’t come out till the middle of next year. It’s being produced by Ted Hope, who produced “21 Grams,” “The Ice Storm” and “American Splendor.” The director is Alex Rivera. This will be his second feature. His first, “The Sleep Dealer,” came out a few years ago and got a lot of good reviews. The movie is a dark comedy with magical realism inspired by my time as a telemarketer; it’s called Sorry to Bother You.

Rumpus: Do the songs match up pretty closely to what’s in the movie?

Riley: What’s in the movie is a lot of my same ideas, so yeah, the feeling goes with the movie. The songs aren’t related directly with the movie except for “We’ve Got a Lot to Teach You, Cassius Greene,” though. He’s the main character in the movie, and that song is supposed to be a nightmare he’s having, but it deals with some real ideas about the ruling class and what selling out is. That song started as a joke, like the last song on a bad Broadway musical where everybody holds hands and sways back and forth, but it turned into this weird psychedelic dream that held true to the feeling I was trying to get in that part.

Rumpus: Has being part of the Occupy movement changed your outlook? Is being involved in that movement part of what made this such a different album for you?

Riley: Most of the album was done before I got involved with Occupy Oakland. The only song that got created after Occupy Oakland was “Long Island Iced Tea, Neat.” That was because I was doing a show with Japanther, and we went into the studio. Occupy has changed my outlook on a lot of things. A lot of people that were involved in the Occupy movement told me The Coup’s music had some part in their political development. People give out compliments because it’s polite, so who knows? But the Occupy Wall Street Movement reinvigorated my faith in the fact that there will be a movement that will overturn this system; if anything, that gave me a shot in the arm. I’ve been involved in a lot of different kinds of projects. I’ve been on straight hip hop tours. I’ve been on underground rock tours. I’ve been on multimillion selling rock shows. I’ve been in the jam band thing, and both commercial and underground hip hop. Very few people listen to one kind of music. Maybe Deadheads. Also, I have a 15 year old daughter; if you’ve got a pop song that teenage girls are into, then changing your style will get you a different audience. However, for everything else, it’s not like I have to change my style to get to this audience or that audience. What I’m trying to do is make music that people relate to, that talks about ideas that are personal but also make that connection to trying to make revolutionary change, and I don’t need to change my music to get to a certain audience. With all our albums, we’ve been accused of changing a little too much. But in hindsight, those changes are looked at collectively as the group’s sound. So many people, when we did Genocide and Juice, were like, “What the fuck are you doing? This isn’t real hip hop. This sounds like some West Coast G-funk shit.” Then when I did Steal This Album, I had friends that were like, “What are you doing, making music for skateboarders?” Now those same people love that album. Party Music, one reviewer said, “This sounds like Jay-Z.” Our show has sometimes been praised for and sometimes derided for sounding different than the album. This album captures the energy we have onstage.

Rumpus: You have a role as a father, as a romantic partner, as an MC, and as an activist, any of which can be a fulltime job. How do you face the challenge of being all those different people and still being there for the people you love?

Riley: You just laid out the basic problem of my life. There are definitely intersections, though. For instance, on the album, the first song, “The Magic Clap,” is the song me and my now-girlfriend and the mother of my child, Gabby Lala, made the day we met. If you listen to the song, it’s very much about love and sex. But yeah, I am a person who always feels like I am not doing the right thing because there’s always so many things that need to get done, and that’s what led to me stopping doing the music that first time. With Occupy, I feel like those different areas of my life are most connected. In the case of the things we do with the Occupy Wall Street campaign, my music doesn’t necessarily compete with that, so finally there’s something that can be broadcast to thousands and at some point millions of people. It takes so much time to do all this stuff. And then kids need time. You bring them along with you to things, and they’re like, “What the fuck is this? I’m bored.” I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve been able to make things intersect, but it’s still a battle. Before the internet, I was on the phone all day. Now I’m on the internet and the phone and in the studio. If I’m spending time with my family, there’s so much shit over my head that has to be done that it makes it a battle to be present.

Rumpus: How did parenthood change your outlook?

Riley: I think there’s something your hormones do that makes a chemical change in the way you think. When my daughter was born, that was the first time I cried from happiness. Before that, anytime anything sentimental came on TV or on movies, it didn’t hit me, but from that moment on, any tearjerker, it doesn’t matter what it’s about, it could make me tear up and cry. That said, this is my fourth child. It’s a big shock when you have your first because all of a sudden your schedule is erratic, and you’re waking up in the middle of the night, but now my schedule is like that already, so it’s a lot easier because it’s more of the same.

Rumpus: Calling an album Genocide and Juice challenges a lot of the conventions of mainstream hip hop. Can you discuss your relationship with other artists in that community?

Riley: There’s a misconception with the title of that album. A lot of people heard about gin and juice for the first time from Snoop Dogg, but it was nothing new in rap music, and it was nothing new in the black community. A lot of Bay Area rappers had songs about gin and juice including Spice-1, who was a big influence on Snoop. My reference to gin and juice didn’t have anything to do with Snoop; it had to do with a popular drink. Later, writers that weren’t familiar with black culture except through hip hop assumed I was taking a shot at Snoop. I talked to Snoop at the time. Snoop was a big fan of The Coup and would quote some of our lyrics to us just to show he didn’t think I’d been taking a shot at him. But the main thing we would get when our stuff became a little bit more mainstream, people you would call gangsta rappers would come up to us and say, “I love what you’re doing. We’re doing the same thing. We’re dropping that knowledge.” And that’s the truth. Rappers are usually rapping about knowledge they think people need to get by in the world. If there’s no movement that gives the idea that the knowledge people need is how to take over the system, what they see is that people need to know how to hustle; people need to know how to survive. However, in the early 90s, we would be criticized by the hip hoppers that were considered “conscious” as using hip hop for ulterior motives. You were supposed to be about partying and having fun. Of course, that same group of people, when the South started doing hip hop that was about partying, all of a sudden it became that hip hop didn’t used to be about partying; hip hop used to be about putting out a message. Other rappers that are considered lyricists have always given us a lot of respect, but we do something different, so a lot of times, when I’ve tried to collaborate with other artists it’s hard because we have different ways of writing songs and different things that motivate us.

Rumpus: You often seem to collaborate across genres.

Riley: We always have other rappers on the albums. On the first album, we had a few unknown folks. The second album, we had Spice-1 and E-40. The third album, we had Del and STS. The fifth album, we had Talib and Black Thought. This album, we have Das Racist and Killer Mike. There’s definitely collaborations I’ve tried that I feel don’t work. I did an album with Jeff Beck and this weird avant-garde French producer. It was me, M-1 from Dead Prez, Jeff Lee Johnson, this guy Dave King from The Bad Plus and Happy Apple. It wasn’t cheesy, but it was really weird.

Rumpus: Was it ever released?

Riley: Yeah. Ursus Minor. It was only released in France. I’m not encouraging you to go out and buy it. The album would be better if there was no rapping. But it was fun. They’re like, “Do you want to come to Paris for 10 days and kick it and do an album with Jeff Beck and Jeff Lee Johnson.” I was like, “Cool.”

The Rumpus Interview with Mary Chapin Carpenter

Tom Andes — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 19:00:17 +0000

Throughout a recording career that has spanned nearly three decades, Mary Chapin Carpenter has consistently topped Billboard’s US Country charts while identifying as much with singer-songwriters like Steve Earle, Tom Waits, and Lucinda Williams (whose “Passionate Kisses” Carpenter covered, helping introduce Williams to a broader audience) as she has with mainstream Nashville acts. Atypically outspoken for a politically liberal contemporary country singer, Carpenter has succeeded critically and commercially while honoring her own artistic inclinations.

Inspired by three life-changing experiences—a pulmonary embolism Carpenter suffered in 2007 and a subsequent depression, her divorce, and the loss of her father—Ashes and Roses, Carpenter’s third album since defecting from CBS/Columbia Records for Rounder imprint Zoe, explores darker themes than Carpenter’s previous work; nevertheless, the album ultimately affirms the possibility of survival and redemption. An artistic accomplishment in its own right, Ashes and Roses also affirms the possibility for musicians to survive a changing industry by making music on their own terms.

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The Rumpus: What initially drew you to folk and country music, and how did you find your voice as a songwriter?

Mary Chapin Carpenter: My mother and father had a huge record collection, everything from Fats Waller, Billie Holiday in my dad’s collection, to my mother having Woody Guthrie. I grew up listening to everything, and when I got signed to a record deal out of Nashville, that was my introduction to what was happening in country music. The people I started discovering were songwriters like Guy Clark, Lyle Lovett, and Steve Earle—I’d loved Emmylou Harris for years—and when I realized those were the people that were considered great country artists, I felt really drawn to them. Maybe it was the storytelling imbued in their songs or something unique to them, but I was really enchanted. To this day, those are the people that I think of as magnets for anyone discovering great country music.

Rumpus: How old were you when you first started writing songs?

Carpenter: I was really young, but I can’t say that I wrote much of anything. I liked to scribble; I thought of it as that. But I was playing guitar and ukulele when I was in second grade.

Rumpus: Did you think of yourself as a musician or a songwriter first?

Carpenter: They went together. I suppose when I was a teenager, it was something I was doing a great deal of, but I don’t know if I committed myself to it. I just saw it as something I loved to do.

Rumpus: How did your first record contract come about?

Carpenter: A tape that I was working on to turn into a record fell out of my back pocket and found its way to an A&R person at what was then CBS Records in Nashville; that was around the time in the late eighties when artists like Lyle Lovett and Steve Earle were being signed to record deals, and somehow the right person at the right time heard me.

Rumpus: How old were you then?

Carpenter: That was 1986. I’m 54 now, so you can do the math.

Rumpus: Were you gigging regularly at that point?

Carpenter: I was playing little bars and clubs in Washington DC, and during the day I worked at a small philanthropic foundation answering phones and doing paperwork and that sort of thing, so I had a day job to support my low paying night job.

Rumpus: Do all your songs reflect intensely personal experiences, or do you feel this album is an exception?

Carpenter: It’s very personal, obviously. When I got sick, I was just about to go on tour for a new record, and I had to torpedo everything. I was home for a couple years trying to get past that illness, just feeling so lost and confused, and then the end of my marriage, which was just dreadful, and then losing my father last October. Honestly, I don’t know what else I would have written about. It seemed inevitable to try to address my feelings about everything that had happened. To a certain degree, it felt cathartic, but it’s less cathartic to me than it is illuminating and helping me navigate my own feelings. What people will hopefully take from this record is that there’s a narrative arc to it; there is an other side that exists that you find yourself eventually rowing towards, and the arc of the record hopefully mirrors that.

Rumpus: Did you attempt to create an arc as you created the record?

Carpenter: Yes, definitely. The first song, “Transcendental Reunion,” on the surface, it’s a song about traveling, flying to England, but really, it was important to me that I start with that song because I feel like it sets up every song that comes after it. The first verse is about being suspended in the air, and you’re not really sure where you’re going to land. And then the idea that your suitcase is really—I don’t mean to get all Freudian—but your suitcase holds everything that’s important to you and informs you, and you want it to come out all right. And then the idea that people you’re elbow to elbow to with, these are the people that start out as strangers, but at a certain point in time, you realize you’re fellow travelers, and you have so much in common. Once you get there, you come out into this garish, neon-lit hall, and you’re rubbing your eyes; you’re not even sure where you’ve arrived. But this idea that there are people there to meet you, there are people there to be connected to, and you have come from night to day. Although everything that comes after that is the unknown, you can have hope and faith that you’re in one piece, and you’ll be all right. It’s important to know that and to recognize it.

Rumpus: Do you start with the melody or a chord progression, or do the words hit you first?

Carpenter: I sit at my desk, and I have a guitar on my lap. I like to have a yellow legal pad and a pencil with an eraser. 20-some years ago, I’d have a big old radio with a tape deck, and I’d hit record and try to get something down on the tape, but nowadays, I can use my handy little smart-phone; I sing into the app for voice memo. The thing about it is, you can either put an idea down, or I’ll sit here, and I’ll finish the song. I’ll record it into the voice memo, and then I can email it to myself; then I can dump it into iTunes. That’s how I did all the demos for this last record. I sent them to my co-producer, and he was laughing because I usually send these shit sounding Garage Band demos.

Rumpus: Do you wake up and write every day?

Carpenter: I like to feel that every day or most days, I do a little bit of writing. I am a creature of habit in terms of the way I live. I get up in the morning, and I work out, or I take a hike. I come back, and around lunchtime, I start work. I work in my office through the afternoon. Having said that, I spent a lot of time at night writing these songs, and that was different.

Rumpus: To what extent do you collaborate when you go in the studio? How much changes from those initial demos to the product we hear?

Carpenter: In the case of this record, because my guitar and vocal are so front and center, the songs didn’t change all that much from the demos. The wonderful musicians that I work with, they certainly contributed to everything that you hear, but the foundation of those songs pretty much stayed the same. That said, I think in previous records, there’s been enormous reliance on my part on the generosity and the creativity of the players I’m working with. The joy of being in the studio is having people being utterly free to throw out their ideas. I know some artists who come out of country music and the three sessions a day work ethic where you walk in, and you’re told you play this note, this note, and this note, and you don’t vary it. I know that works great for some people. It wouldn’t work for me.

Rumpus: How many takes do you typically play through?

Carpenter: There’s been any number of times where we’ve felt like the first or the second take has been a keeper. But I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I want to try it again and again, and a lot of times my fellow musicians have to hold me back and say, “Nah, I think we got it.”

Rumpus: Do you find you understand the songs differently as you play them in the studio and on tour?

Carpenter: Oh, yes, absolutely. You excavate different things in them as you play them live and realize what is possible to reproduce well and what is not. I feel like they’re different creatures, live and in the studio, but that’s what makes it so interesting to me. If they didn’t have any different shadings or colors, you might as well be a hologram or something.

Rumpus: Do you tour mostly with the same musicians you use in the studio?

Carpenter: I have a different group of musicians I play with on the road, and I’ve been very lucky that they’ve been with me for a long time. Even after I had to take a number of years off when I got sick, they still played with me. I’m grateful for that.

Rumpus: Your albums have generally charted on Billboard US Country charts, and you’ve thrived both critically and commercially in the mainstream of American country music. You also identify politically as being left. I was wondering how you see yourself in relation to mainstream country as a genre and also the rest of the Nashville mainstream, which I’m guessing politically doesn’t lean too far to the left.

Carpenter: When I was finding a spot on what we think of as country radio a number of years ago with Lucinda Williams’ song [“Passionate Kisses”], for example, that was tremendously exciting and unexpected to me, but I feel like the reason that was able to happen—certainly because of a lot of hard work and support and belief by a lot of people—but the bedrock thing of country music is, it’s about storytelling. I feel like I was able to find a niche because I connected to that in some way. But everything changes in every genre, whether it’s pop, rock or country, and maybe had I come along at a different time, like right now, that might not have happened. As far as politically how country music goes, it’s true that it’s regarded from a distance as a genre of music that at different times, the more right elements of the political spectrum have claimed for their own; at the same time, I can name any number of known country artists who support more liberal or Democratic candidates, so it just depends what the spotlight is on at that time.

Rumpus: Do you think about politics when you write, or is that something you consider separate from your musical identity?

Carpenter: I feel like politics have always informed what I do. If you know anything about my music, you know I’ve never been shy about stating how I vote—everything from doing Voters for Choice concerts with Joan Baez and the Indigo Girls to doing a rally for Joe Biden last weekend. There was a time when I was starting out in country music when it was sort of implied, do you have to be so in there with that stuff? I felt like, okay, maybe the powers that be don’t take it that well, but that was who I was. But let’s face it, the Dixie Chicks, people lobbed amazing professional grenades on them, and I never experienced that. I have certain songs that have been unequivocal about what I believe, like “Stones in the Road” or “On With the Song,” but I think topical songwriting is a real gift, and it’s hard not to be pedantic and show up with the sledgehammer message. Songs that do that, I’m kind of allergic to.

Rumpus: Do you feel like you naturally had a persona you’ve filled from the stage?

Carpenter: I gave the new record to a friend, and he said, “It’s very you.” I was pleased by that. It made me feel like, “Oh, wow, I never really thought there was a me in there.” I don’t know if I set out almost 30 years ago thinking I’m going to try to craft a persona. I love to write songs and sing them, and I didn’t really know much more than that. Somehow it’s gotten to the point where a friend can say, “It’s very you,” and that made me feel good.

Rumpus: Do you feel more comfortable on the stage or in the studio?

Carpenter: I think on a stage in front of thousands of people is a wildly invigorating and amazing experience, and it requires a certain skill set; then being in the studio, and being curled up in the fetal position under the piano, that requires another skill set. I’m being silly, but they are different, and it’s their difference that draws me toward both of them. I love working in the studio and the sense that we have all night and all day to be as experimental and creative as we want to be. I also feel that it’s nothing if not an incredible privilege to be able to get up on stage and play for people, and I don’t ever take it for granted.

Rumpus: You recorded for Columba throughout most your career, and you’re now on Zoe, which is an independent label. Why did you make that change? What is your experience making records for those two entities?

Carpenter: At the time at which I elected to go to Zoe, which is an imprint of Rounder Records, I had been with Columbia for 20 years. About eight or nine years ago, things were changing in the delivery system of music, and it was important to acknowledge and embrace all the different things that were happening. As amazing as it was to be on Colombia, if I wasn’t on the radio toward the end there, I felt like I was letting them down in my part of the marriage. The decision came down to what kind of pressures and artistic sense of yourself do you have? It made sense to start out somewhere new, and I was delighted to find myself at Zoe Rounder. I haven’t had that sense that I’m letting them down if I submit a record that doesn’t have songs that they feel they could take to radio. It’s almost like I could stop reading the charts.

Rumpus: Did you feel more pressure by the end of your tenure with Columbia than you did at the beginning?

Carpenter: In the late 80s, artists could be signed to labels and be nurtured. It wasn’t, “We’re going to give you one shot, and if you don’t measure up, you’re gone,” which is the way it is now, even with only two major labels left. The pressure is enormous. If you fail, you’re gone. When I started out, it was this sense of, ”Let’s put out a record and see what happens and see where you go and see how you feel and where we can take it.” That was a very different world back then. I certainly felt the desire to reach as many people as I could; I wanted to make the most of this opportunity, sure. But I wouldn’t call it pressure the way we’re thinking of it now.

Rumpus: Are there any other ways you feel the record industry has changed since you’ve been recording?

Carpenter: Just the most obvious thing, all the delivery systems for music, and the fact that if you’re 16 years old, and you’re passionate about music, you can do it yourself. It used to be, in the Dark Ages, the only sort of on-ramp to that would be getting signed to a record deal. That phrase alone is antiquated. Nowadays, anybody can do it, and that makes it tremendously exciting. As a result, you can’t keep up with everything. There’s just no way. But at the same time, I wouldn’t want it to go back to the old way.

Rumpus: Do you still live in Nashville?

Carpenter: I was born and spent the first 10 years of my life in Princeton, New Jersey. My father worked for Life magazine, and we moved to Japan for a couple of years for his job there. When we came back, we moved to Washington DC. I lived in DC for 27 years until I got married, and then I moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. I’ve lived here for nine years, and now I’m moving again, back towards DC, essentially. I owned a house in Nashville for about four months during an ill-fated relationship; I thought I needed to move there to be with him, but the relationship didn’t last, and neither did my ownership of the house. So I’ve never lived there, but I’ve toyed with the idea because I have a lot of friends there, and I think someday I might end up there.

Rumpus: Are most of the musicians you work with Nashville-based?

Carpenter: It seems like everybody’s spread out. My engineer, Chuck Ainlay, and Glenn Worf, my bass player, live in Nashville, but everybody else came from different areas. It just seems like you really can come from anywhere and do what you want to do.

The Rumpus Interview with Nikki Lane

Tom Andes — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 07:01:09 +0000

Rarely do musicians arrive on the scene as fully formed as Nikki Lane. Her full-length debut, Walk of Shame, on Los Angeles-based IM Sounds, reveals a performer with the confidence to move fearlessly between genres while retaining her own singular identity. An American from the South who moved to Los Angeles and then New York City to achieve actualization as an artist, Lane eventually settled in Nashville, away from the coastal centers of cultural production. In that respect, she embodies the conflict many artists, writers, and musicians experience as they try to deal with the cost of living in contemporary America. In conversation, Lane proves unfailingly generous, entirely willing to discuss her process as a songwriter and what she’s learned from collaborating with other musicians and songwriters as well as the life experiences that led to her becoming a professional musician. Though she seems to have a knack for being in the right place at the right time, her enthusiasm suggests she’s the kind of person who creates her own opportunities, and she seems thoroughly aware of the various contexts that have shaped her as a musician, contexts that have informed the way she presents herself in song and in visual media, all of which has contributed to her putting her own unique stamp on contemporary Americana.

***

The Rumpus: You grew up in South Carolina, and you live in Nashville. In between, you lived in Los Angeles and New York City. I was wondering if you could talk about how you got from one place to the other.

Nikki Lane: I lived in South Carolina until I was 18 years old. I was working at a bar called Bubba Annie’s, and I decided I wanted to move to California. I’d never been to California. I just knew that people I knew in rock and roll said it was cool. I packed up my car, and me and my girlfriend Krista, who just wanted to go on vacation, drove to LA. I got out there and saw the Pacific Ocean and realized I was in for a rude awakening. Nevertheless, I lived there for five years. I moved to Redondo Beach. I was working in fashion. I had my own shoe line. Four or five years later I talked my way into a job in New York City. In New York, I worked in denim for four years. Once I signed a record deal, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to work sixty hours a week on top of being a musician, so I knew I couldn’t live in New York anymore. Nashville seemed like a good place to get a country band together.

Rumpus: Can you talk about your influences? What kind of music did you listen to growing up, and what got you started writing your own material?

Lane: When I was young, I listened to what my parents listened to. My mom’s into Motown, classic 60’s radio pop, and my Dad was into 80’s radio country, Reba McEntire, George Strait, Aaron Pippin, stuff like that. I remember trying to win CDs on the radio using the phone. The first CD I won was Celine Dion. Once I was 16, 17, I was rebelling against my mom, so I tried to listen to punk rock and pop punk. I was religious, so I listened to Christian punk, too. It wasn’t until I moved to California that I developed my own personality. Once I was out there, I got into going to Coachella. I had never listened to bands like Morrissey or the Smiths, and I was hanging out with dudes who listened to them. Then I found the Nuggets collection of 60’s psychedelic rock. Once I realized what I liked I went and bought the entire Standells catalog, the entire 13^th Floor Elevators catalog, the entire Yardbirds catalog. At first it was psychedelic and rock, and then I got into stuff like Waylon Jennings and Neil Young. I remember the day I first heard Neil Young; I remember what everything looked like, what tennis shoes I was wearing. It just blew my mind.

Rumpus: Have you always been interested in country and rockabilly?

Lane: When I lived in New York, I was writing alone. I knew the chords D, A, and G. People would say, “Country only plays three chords.” All right, I’ll learn a Loretta Lynn song. When I started co-writing and meeting people and learning stuff, it became a lot easier to see that I could still get what I was looking for and throw in a couple of extra changes. All I really did was keep playing what I taught myself to play, which was country songs, and start hanging out with people playing different types of music, and trying to fine-tune what I liked about it. I like to co-write, but I’ll co-write with somebody, and it’ll just be polar opposites. I’ll be like, I do not like the kind of music this guy writes, but maybe he’s taught me some chord that sounds crazy awesome that I never thought to use. You can draw something from a lot of people, and I think that’s all that really started to happen with me, is I just allowed myself to work with a lot of different people and try a lot of different things. That’s what the record is. It’s all the little secrets that I tried to get from other people.

Rumpus: Do you tend to write by yourself, or do you tend to collaborate?

Lane: I’ve gotten to the point where if I feel like I’m stumbling across something, I save it to go write with someone else, and I’ve been battling with that. I’m trying to do this song over the next couple weeks that I want to write by myself. I like writing with people so much, that it’s almost like I don’t want my song to miss out on something I didn’t give it. But I also feel like I have to try write on my own because the majority of the first record that was never released, I wrote all by myself. There was very little participation from anyone, while on this last record, almost every song was co-written, and I like the new record better than the old one just for the sake that I was able to branch out and have songs like “Gone, Gone, Gone,” that aren’t one hundred percent country but still sound country. It’s hard for me to want to write alone again because I don’t want to write only country. You have to keep pushing yourself to try different things, so you don’t get stuck. Maybe I’ll write the next record on a keyboard, since I don’t really know how to play that, so it’ll be like learning all over again.

Rumpus: Do you have specific people you like to collaborate with?

Lane: I’ve probably written with 20 people, but I’ve found three I feel comfortable with. You don’t want their contributions to be so different than yours that you don’t feel like it’s your song. But also, you want to be willing to try something embarrassing and weird, and sometimes writing a melody sounds awful the first few times. That’s the benefit of writing alone; you can wail and whine and sound as awful as you want trying to find something great, and no one’s going to look at you like you’re nuts. I think sometimes to find a really brilliant melody, you have to do something weird that doesn’t always sound good the first time. But I have found people. There’s this guy Chris Lindsey. I wrote four songs off the record with him, and I know if I have a good idea, he’s going to help me write exactly what I want and not change it based on the fact I don’t know the chords to put under it.

Rumpus: Do you feel like you have unique access to the kind of music you play because you come from the South? Do you feel like country music is more a regional or an American music?

Lane: I don’t know if you can even call it American anymore. I found this girl Lindy Ortega. She sounds almost like Dolly Parton. She’s from Canada. People just kind of get into a certain lifestyle and a certain set of influences, and that makes things accessible. There are people that live in Australia who are listening to deeper country cuts than I am and sometimes sound more country than I do when they sing. I feel like it’s natural for me because I have a real twang when I talk, but there are people from all over that are so heavily influenced by it that it’s just seeping out of them. I think it’s good; the more the merrier.

Rumpus: When you write a song, do you start with the music, the melody, or the words?

Lane: This morning I had a co-writing session at nine in the morning with this guy I’ve been writing with, trying to write some rock and roll songs for fun. He was noodling on the guitar, and I wrote what became the first verse. And then he said, “Okay, we’ve got to write the second verse,” and I said, “No, now we’ve got to write the bridge.” And he was like, “What?” It doesn’t normally come exactly like that. I just try to roll with it. I feel like if I had too much of a set formula, then my songs would all sound the same. There are a lot of people, and I’m not going to name names, but some of my favorite musicians, when it comes down to it, a lot of their songs sound the same. I want to make songs that are reminiscent of what’s happening to me at the time. Sometimes I’ll be in the car, and I’ll hear a melody which will end up being the chorus of something, but then I’ve got to take it home and write the chorus and figure out what should come right after it. This song that I wrote today, we’ve got to go make up the rest of the verses for it. We accidentally made up everything else, but we don’t have the storyline. I wrote what the song was about before I even knew what it was about. I feel like you have to wait and see how the first part of the song comes to you, and that dictates how you’re going to finish it.

Rumpus: Do you sit down and write every day? Are you disciplined about it?

Lane: No. The first record I wrote, I wrote the whole thing in a month. It was winter, and I locked myself in the house, and I wrote this record; that’s just how it happened. The second record, I flew all over the country and met with people and talked about different things that were happening, and I co-wrote it. But for me, when I’m working, when I’m traveling all the time, there’s so much going on, I can’t write. I finished the record in February. I haven’t written a song since April, until last month, when I started talking on the phone with someone about co-writing. I don’t feel like I had writer’s block. I just didn’t have anything that was busting out of me that I had to say. Now I’m committed to doing it, and I’ll probably hone in on it and get really into it around the record, and then I’ll be like, I’m not writing for a while.

Rumpus: Do the people you write with tend to be other musicians? Do they tend to be professional songwriters?

Lane: Of the people I like, one is a songwriter, and the other two are musicians. Chris Lindsey, the guy I wrote “Walk of Shame,” “Coming Home to You,” “Save You,” and “Book of Life,” off this record with, is a professional songwriter. That’s what he does; he writes big country songs all day long. When I met him, I was nervous. But what made me like writing with him so much is that he thought it was cool that I was like, “No, they’re probably not going to play this video on CMT, so I’m just going to write this the way I want.” He’s such a good facilitator. I’ll be like, this is my idea, but then he will give me a line, and it won’t sound like something unlike I would say. Sometimes you’ll be writing with somebody, and they’ll pitch you something, and you’ll say, I would never say that. I’m not co-writing so that somebody can teach me my sound. I need somebody that can help me find my sound, so I have to work hard to find people that are helping me do what I like and not showing me what they think I should do. A lot of songwriters are really just co-writing because they wish they were making records. They’re writing for themselves, but they figure if they write for other people, it gives them twice as much exposure. I want somebody that thinks it would be fun to help me dig in and figure out what my record should sound like.

Rumpus: You wrote your album while you were living in New York, but you recorded the album in Nashville. How did you find the musicians on the album?

Lane: I wanted to make a country record. People in New York were like, great, we’ve got a studio here, down the road. I was like, no, I’m not going to make a country record in New York. I’m going to make a country record in Nashville. I started calling studios, and they were like, great, you’re going to bring your band down? Do you need a producer? Do you need an engineer? I got on MySpace. I found this guy, Justin Collins, who was in three different bands, and I liked the quality of the recordings on all these projects. I wrote to him and to various other people; I sent probably 10 different emails, and I said, I really like your project, I’m trying to make my own record, and I have no idea what I’m doing; what are your thoughts? Probably seven of them didn’t write back because who wants to answer an email from a weird girl who doesn’t know how to play guitar and wants to make a record? But a couple people wrote back and told me different options, and Justin was one of them. He said, well, my friend makes my records, and I have a band that sounds like it would be good for your backing music. Do you have charts? I was like, what are charts? He was like, never mind, we’ll make the charts. I sent them these 10 tracks I’d recorded myself on Garage Band. There was no rhythm to them because I was very poor at strumming guitar. They learned them off these dime store demos. The week I went to Nashville, we did 10 tracks, and I came home with a record. All of a sudden, when people would say, you’re a musician, I would say, no, not really, but I have a record. I was one step closer to being able to say I played music. The rest just kind of snowballed. I got a band in New York and then accidentally got a record deal. Finally, after I signed my record deal, I would say I was a musician, not until then.

Rumpus: Was it a difficult transition starting to play live? At what point did you start playing out?

Lane: Right when I got home from making the record, I started playing live. Those were just small gigs. People would say, we’re having a birthday party, there’s two bands playing, do you want to be the third? I started saying yes. I got to open for this Canadian band called Blue Rodeo at the Mercy Lounge, and there were a couple hundred people there. I was like, Oh, it’s more fun when there’s a couple hundred people. It kept making me want to push a little harder. I went this summer on my first tour. We drove to California and back and played our way across, and people were like, oh, you guys were great, you must have been doing this for years. No, this is the second time I’ve played outside the city I live in, which makes us really late in the game. I should have been touring for the past couple years, but I wasn’t. Now I’ve got to play catch up and get good at guitar and get out there and get some shows. I’ve probably played 200 shows so far. I’m a baby.

Rumpus: Your video for “Gone, Gone, Gone” refers to a number of classic country videos. It seems like your experience in fashion also influenced the video. I was wondering if you could talk about the process of planning and shooting it.

Lane: Obviously, I’m on an indie label. We don’t have big budgets for videos. The director, Jared Eberhardt, came out, hopped on a plane and crashed in the back of the office in my house and said, “I want this to be really mellow and reflective of you.” I would have had people come in with all kinds of clothes if I had the budget because I think it’s fun to dig through other people’s clothes, but he was like, we’re going to take stuff out of your closet, and being that I love to buy crazy amounts of clothes and hate to leave them behind, I had all these things. He was like, do you like the old Loretta Lynn videos? And I was like, of course I do. He’s like, well, what do you think? And I was like, look at this ridiculous yellow dress I have. It was very organic. We just kind of combed through my house and picked some cool outfits. He was like, do you know how to ride a moped? I just kind of laughed because I’ve got scars all over me from riding stuff. The way I grew up, my dad thinking we should have been boys, I can drive almost anything. I don’t really know anything I can’t, backhoe, bulldozer, all kinds of weird stuff. He has an asphalt paving business, my dad. So I was like, moped, no big deal. We just honed in on all the things that were accessible for very little money and tried to make them look cool. It’s almost more fun that way. I’ve worked as an assistant on a lot of big production things, and they haven’t always looked as cool as I think our video does because no one was holding a gun to our head. We just challenged ourselves to have fun.

Rumpus: You said when you recorded your first album, you went back to New York afterwards. How long after that did you move to Nashville?

Lane: A year and a half. I made the record in the spring of 2009. I went home, and for one year, until February 2011, I was just working my butt off at a bunch of stores. Then I went on vacation to LA in 2010, and I went to one meeting which I thought was just a handshake to be nice to this miscellaneous girl that was a friend of a friend, and I ended up getting a record deal with IM Sounds. It just kind of happened. We stumbled across each other and thought it was a good match. Six months after I signed the deal, I couldn’t work. I was trying to travel and do everything the record company needed me to do, and you can’t live in New York and not work. You can, but you’re going to need a different dad than the one I’ve got. You’re going to need a bigger bank account.

Rumpus: How do you find the music scene in Nashville? You’re a country artist, but you’re on an indie label. Your appeal doesn’t seem like it’s necessarily to mainstream country audiences.

Lane: I moved down here, like, game face. In my mind, the style wasn’t as good, the people weren’t as cool. But I wasn’t coming down here to make friends. I was coming down here to make a career out of music. But when I got here, I found more musicians whose music and whose personalities I enjoy than I did in New York and LA combined. Not only is there an awesome scene here of old school country throwback and rockabilly and garage rock and punk and whatever else, but they’re real musicians. In New York and LA, they’re real musicians, too. Don’t get me wrong. But they’re paying 2000 dollars a month in overhead, so they’re practicing one night a week. In places like Denton and Austin and Seattle and here in Nashville, people’s responsibilities are a lot lighter. These kids, they’re touring all the time, they’re playing music all the time, and they’re going to shows and hanging out because there’s not a lot of stuff to pay for. It’s so refreshing to see an actual music scene, not a music scene where all the participants have to go to day jobs.

There’s less to do in a place like this. I do get bored. But then I’m like, oh yeah, on Sunday, I go to LA for a week. And next week, I go to New York for a week. I can go party, like, true Hollywood style in Hollywood next week and then come back and live my normal life. It’s the best of both worlds. I feel a little spoiled right now.

Rumpus: What are you listening to now?

Lane: There’s this band from Nashville I’m crazy about called Natural Child. I throw their record on all the time. There’s this guy in the UK named Pete Molinari. And old stuff like Flamin’ Groovies and Gun Club. All the time, people turn me onto new things. Any new band I can find where I can listen to the whole record and be pleased for the whole hour or 40 minutes or whatever, that’s what I get turned onto and stick with.

Rumpus: Do you associate yourself with a particular genre?

Lane: I try to say I’m acid country. Some people go, don’t try to steal Gram Parsons’ words because he was cosmic country, but I thought of that on my own. I love country, but I love psychedelic and grunge and rock and roll. I’ve met people that I’ve worked with that have been like, oh, you’re 100 percent Tammy Wynette. No, I want to be Tammy Wynette on acid. I love country, but I love rock and roll, too. Just because I have a twang, I don’t want people to think I’m only into country. I guess it’s a little bit Americana, because I feel like I’m just about as American as they come. I’m just trying to steer clear of being in a box but also trying to be aware of what I am, which is a weird country singer.

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The Rumpus Interview with Todd Snider

Tom Andes — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 07:01:22 +0000

While the electric guitar marks a departure from Todd Snider’s last few records, Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables falls squarely into the groove he hit after 2004’s East Nashville Skyline. A laid back traditionalist whose wry lyrics belie his stoner persona, Snider trades in smart, sharply observed songs delineating the travails of American have-nots. On his new album, he speaks from that same underbelly, employing a live-in-the-studio feeling and a deceptively casual vernacular that makes this his most engaging effort in years.

Snider and bassist and producer Eric McConnell aim for a shambolic mess, pitting Snider’s electric guitar against Paul Griffith’s crashing drums and Amanda Shires’ fiddle. Snider’s best lines emerge from the clatter, demonstrating an offhand and often humorous brilliance. “If I had a nickel / for every dime that you had / I’d have half of your money / you talk about not half bad,” Snider sings on “In Between Jobs,” a bluesy paean to unemployment that ends with an unexpected threat of violence. Class anger simmers just beneath the song’s surface, yet like most of his downwardly mobile characters, Snider’s cannier than you think.

At times, Snider’s humor allows him to make some pretty pointed jokes. “Come here, kid / let me hitch up your britches / and while we’re at it / let’s fix that hat,” he sings on the acoustic “Precious Little Miracles” before suggesting disadvantaged urban poor take up community theater. One of the album’s sharpest compositions, it makes an interesting companion to the lone cover, Jimmy Buffet’s “West Nashville Grand Ballroom Gown,” which tells the story of an upper-class Southerner who rejects her heritage. Snider reinvents the song as a country blues stomp, doing away with Buffet’s professional sheen.

From the jilted lover in “Too Soon to Tell” to the Arkansan high school teacher in “New York Banker”—the true story of how Goldman-Sachs defrauded investors with Abacus Bonds—Snider’s characters take struggle, heartache, and a sense of cosmic, political, and personal injustice for granted. “We’re afraid to die / every goddamn one of us / I swear to God / it’s like You’re making fun of us,” he sings on the former, while the latter sums up one of the album’s themes: “Good things happen to bad people.” Without glossing over any political realities, Snider depicts a universe in which faith offers few answers, instead demanding we ask more questions.

By now, Snider’s cultivated the voice for this material. He started recording in 1994, and his self-reinvention over the latter half of his career testifies to his perseverance. Since making a pair of watershed albums, East Nashville Skyline and The Devil You Know, in 2004 and 2006, respectively, he’s had us rooting for chronic failures, fuckups, and other victims of American capitalism. One of the new album’s strengths is the way Snider’s familiar persona—a combination of sly humor and aw-shucks folksiness—lends itself to material which is always more considered than it seems.

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The Rumpus: Your new album has more of a rock than a folk sound, and you’re using a lot of electric instruments. What made you decide to take that approach to these songs?

Todd Snider: Even as I was working on the songs, I knew that it was going to be an electric affair. I had just done the acoustic thing, and I wanted to try this kind of thing. I was hoping I was ready as a guitar player to do it.

Rumpus: Did you write the songs mostly on electric or acoustic guitar?

Snider: I made them up on an acoustic guitar that I got last year. Sometimes when I write, I don’t even have a guitar. So no, I hadn’t picked up the electric guitar; I just had it in my mind I wanted to have an electric guitar and a violin when we went into the studio.

Rumpus: Were there any particular influences on the sound?

Snider: I was thinking of Muddy Waters and Django Reinhardt, that kind of gypsy shit and Southern bluesy shit. For a few days before we started recording, we sat around and got drunk at [bassist and producer] Eric [McConnell]’s house and talked about what we were going to do; we were talking about being sloppier than we’d been before. Tonight’s the Night, that Neil Young record, came up, because that seemed like one where he deliberately allowed himself to be sloppy. Dylan’s got a few records like that. I know we’re just a little Americana group, and it’s like a high school football team talking about the pros when I talk about those guys. But Lou Reed made some records like that, and those are the records I like. They don’t seem labored over. I like The Eagles, but I don’t think I could ever get into making the kind of record where you just sat around working on it until everything was perfectly pitched and timed.

Rumpus: Can you talk about the music you listened to growing up and who your influences were?

Snider: The Doors, was probably my first one, which is very far from what I do now. Jimmy Buffet, too. I came from a jock-y place, so not much music got into there without being called homo or gay. My main one was Lynyrd Skynyrd, and also Creedence Clearwater Revival, but for some reason, those other two pointed to a life that was not the life I grew up in, so I really gravitated toward that. I thought I could be a singer in a band. I would have been a roadie; I would have been anything that had to do with music. But I couldn’t get any bands into my lyrics. And then I saw Jerry Jeff Walker play by himself, with an acoustic guitar. By that time, I was about 20, and I said, I’m going to do that.

Rumpus: What made you decide to settle in East Nashville, and how long have you been there?

Snider: I went from Oregon to Santa Rosa, California and then to Austin, and then from Austin I went to Memphis. I lived there for four or five years, and that’s where I got a record contract; my first band was from there. And then I moved to Atlanta with a girl and stayed there for about two years. And then I went back to Memphis. And then I met a girl in a drug rehab in ’97. I was living on a little farm between Memphis and Nashville. She was a painter. She was from New York, and she went into Nashville and got a deal where they were selling her art at this gallery, so she needed to be at that gallery every day. One day I was on the road, and she decided we needed to get a house. She got us this house in East Nashville, and I trusted that I’d like it. I came home, and I loved it. It’s been 12 years I’ve been at that house, and I wouldn’t leave it for the world. They say East Nashville is a place to go when you first get to town. I just like to stay over there. It’s all got all these great musicians and great bars. It’s a very carefree lifestyle. It’s not country music at all. It’s sort of artsy. I’ve heard it’s like Austin in the ‘70s.

Rumpus: Has the way you write songs has evolved over the years, or have you always approached songwriting the same way?

Snider: I get them every kind of way you can imagine. But I was working on them a certain way for my first three records, and then I started spending a lot of time with John Prine. I have days where I hate all of it, and then I have days where I like all of it. But working and studying under John and having that connection to him, I know it changed the way I saw the world, and sometimes I think it changed the way I wrote my songs, too.

Rumpus: Were you hanging out with Prine around the time you made East Nashville Skyline?

Snider: Yeah. He came in about Happy to Be Here, and that was the beginning of the idea of trying to find my own way, where I wasn’t totally copying him or any of those other great heroes. I had studied under Prine for a few years, and then I met Eric, who’s on the bus right now; he’s in the band, but he’s got this studio where they made that Loretta Lynn and Jack White record. Usually when you make a record you have to write the songs, and you go tell the record company, “I’ve got those songs”; and they say “Can we hear them?” and you play them; and they say “Okay,” and then they pay the studio. East Nashville Skyline was the first record where I just went to the studio, and I said, “I don’t want to go through that process. What if we record, and if they hate it, they hate it, and I’ll figure out a way to pay you?” When I look back on that era, John was in my life and Eric McConnell, he was in my life and sort of stayed, so if something good happened, it was probably those two.

Rumpus: Did you make the new record the same way, at the same studio?

Snider: Yeah, though I let the songs cook a little longer before we went in, and then when we went in, we put a cast together. Eric figured out who he thought would fit. It was kind of a drunken brawl, by design. I don’t think you could have had kids or been sober or anything to participate. There was a lot of drugs involved, actually. We wanted to make some chaotic, messy shit. I didn’t want anybody chickening out, like a lot of musicians do, even some of the weirdest, greatest ones. I didn’t want anybody going home. I was like, we’re signing on for a week, for a big, messy drunken week. Nobody gets to go home. So we found this group of people that were up for it, like Paul [Griffith], the drummer. Everybody kind of produced the record. Everybody came up with their own parts. We never talked about anything. We just got fucked up and wrote. That sounds terrible. My mother, when she reads this, she’s going to say, “oh, son, you make me so proud.” I hate to say it, but it’s not the stupidest thing in the world. You read about records you like, and they made them like that. It’s really not that different than a jock lifting weights. I had to take drugs, Mom, I was working on my album.

Rumpus: There’s a story about Captain Beefheart locking his musicians in the studio and making them take drugs and psychologically abusing them until the album was finished, so you’re in good company.

Snider: I think I’ve read about that. I like that. I’m not interested in fitting in or getting together with a group of people to try to figure out how to be liked. That doesn’t seem like a fun adventure. That seems like joining a frat. I never understood the professional recording studio thing. That seems oxymoronish to me. Maybe if you’re making gospel music or something that needs to be pristine, but not for the kind of music I like.

Rumpus: Are a lot of the musicians on the record from East Nashville?

Snider: Sure, the whole tour bus is from East Nashville. I can walk from my house to the homes of all the people on the bus right now, and the touring band is basically the band on the record, but then we brought [violinist] Molly [Thomas] instead of Amanda [Shires] on tour. Amanda did the record. Yeah, that neighborhood’s just getting cooler and cooler. There’s so many good bands now. There’s a band called the Turbo Fruits I really like. Everybody’s moving there, too. Tim Easton just moved there. It’s becoming quite a little art community.

Rumpus: What are you listening to now?

Snider: I’m kind of going through a metal phase. I never have done it, I never got it, but then this kid made this 10 hour documentary on the history of metal, and I’d just had an operation on this tooth that I had lost. I sat there and watched this whole fucking thing, and now I love Black Sabbath. I don’t know how I missed Black Sabbath. Iron Maiden, I still don’t need. My favorite’s King Diamond, though. That guy’s badass. I’m not sure if it’s high art or high comedy, but I don’t think it matters. I’ve also been listening to a lot of forties shit.

Rumpus: One of the things I really appreciate about your songs is how funny they are, like “Just Like Old Times,” which is also very touching. How intentional is the humor in your music?

Snider: I don’t try, but it doesn’t bother me when it happens. Actually, “Just Like Old Times,” the people that song’s about, they didn’t like it till they saw a crowd liking it. There’s a moment in the song where the cops let them go, and when I sang that part, the crowd cheered. The people, the girl especially, were shocked that they were being rooted for. She hadn’t wanted me talking about her at first.

Rumpus: In general, how do the people in your songs react when they hear your songs?

Snider: I’ve had people get mad, but most people like them. I’ve found that especially if I’m telling a story onstage, almost 100% of the time, I can lie. It seems like anytime I’ve heard someone say, “Hey, I saw that person, and I asked if that story was true,” my friends embellish, too. Although the stories are mostly true. There are teeny bits of shit that aren’t true, but they’re mostly true.

Trogg was mad I said he weighed so much. There’s a guy named Trogg I talk about on a live record, and I said he weighed 300 some pounds. He was a little upset about that. He heard it from his son. His son brought the record home from school. I hadn’t talked to him in years.

Rumpus Sound Takes: California Bubble Pop

Tom Andes — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:50:19 +0000

Ty Segall
Goodbye Bread (Drag City)

Orange County native Ty Segall weaves garage, surf, glam, and psychedelic rock into a collage that plays as self-consciously with its sources as any post-1960s folk music. Where folkies value authenticity, Segall’s post-indie rock references a good record collection, incorporating a wide array of influences into an artful homage that adds up to more and less than the sum of its parts. Goodbye Bread layers Segall’s overdriven guitar and muddled vocals, quoting popular and underground music from the last 40 years in order to interrogate the vacuity and appeal of suburban California culture.

Throughout the album, Segall’s voice and guitar establish a distinct sonic identity, one with a strong debt to lo-fi guitar bands from the 1990s (who in turn owed their sound to garage and glam bands from the 1970s). The title track exemplifies the artful pop Segall seems to be half borrowing, half inventing: “’Cause who plays the games we all play? / Won’t you play me today? / And who sings the songs when we’re gone? / Won’t you sing along?” Delivered in an amateurish falsetto over bright, distorted guitar, the offhand lyrics make good on pop’s promise of pleasant diversion, while the music’s jagged edges suggest the dark side of those same pop dreams.

The most obvious songs on the record, “California Commercial” and “Comfortable Home (A True Story)” amount to pro forma shots at the Californian incarnation of the American Dream. As such, they’re too reminiscent of early ’80s punk to be convincing. Because we’ve heard the sentiment before, it seems feigned. Furthermore, Segall and his record collection are clearly products of that same comfortable home of which he sings. Indie subculture remains profoundly middle-class, and when Segall doesn’t acknowledge the contradiction between the culture that produced him and the pose he’s striking, his songs verge on mere pastiche.

Nevertheless, Goodbye Bread offers more than a convincing replica of its sources, and when Segall digs into the way both suburban California culture and indie subculture value style over substance, he achieves minor conceptual coups. Though the title track’s cool braggadocio is older than the blues, Segall pulls it off like he invented it yesterday, and he lets a sinister undertone seep through the pop cliché on “You Make the Sun Fry.” If the shots at suburban California ring hollow, “Fine” (“You / you are so fine / In my / mind / Oh, you don’t know / just how fine you are”) does more to interrogate that culture’s allure—and its malaise—than any of Segall’s more direct assaults.

The Rumpus Interview with James McMurtry

Tom Andes — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:25:33 +0000

I call James McMurtry late one morning when I’m visiting Austin, Texas. By now, I’ve seen him play three times, in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and California, and I’m always struck by the way audiences in different parts of the country identify with his songs. Live with his band, McMurtry plays a catchy, danceable mixture of roadhouse blues, swamp pop, rock and roll, and country, while his acoustic shows feature his songwriting more predominantly. At first, on the telephone, I find it difficult to draw him out. As the discussion progresses, though, we return to certain points from earlier in the conversation, and his willingness to discuss music and regional history proves as interesting as his insights into his songwriting and creative processes.

***

The Rumpus: You seem like you appeal to both country and rock audiences. How you navigate the space between two different commercial genres?

James McMurtry: I think a lot of people exist between those genres. We’ve toured with a lot of bands that fit into that, the Bottle Rockets or the Dead Ringers, people like that. We listened to country music growing up, and we also listened to Crazy Horse and the Rolling Stones. We’re not trying to appeal to any particular set. We do what we do, and it just so happens some people like it.

Rumpus: What got you started writing political songs?

McMurtry: I did one called “Safe Side” many years ago that was sort of social commentary, not so much political. I didn’t get political until the Childish Things record, about 2005. I felt powerless because I tend to vote Democratic. In Texas, that doesn’t really matter in the national election. I felt like the only power I had was a record deal. Steve Earle was influential in that because I’d always shied away from political songs. I was afraid my songs would turn into sermons, and nobody wants to pay a cover to hear a sermon. I noticed Steve Earle could write pretty good political songs. He got his point across, and they were good songs. He put out a whole album of those right before the 2008 election. I figured if he could do a whole record, I could do one song, so I put out “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore.” I got lucky with that one. It did turn out to be a good song, and it also had the quality of a popular song in that the listener could hear his-or herself in it. Suddenly I’m a political songwriter; that’s what I’m supposed to be. I put out Just Us Kids, and the single was “Cheney’s Toy,” which was kind of a cool song, but it didn’t have a chance like “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore” because it’s more of a rant. It’s not written from the point of view of a character the listener can identify with.

Rumpus: Do you resist being labeled a political songwriter?

McMurtry: You don’t want to be labeled anything. Unfortunately, you have to, or they can’t package you. I don’t mind if people listen to my political stuff, but it’s a fraction of what I do.

Rumpus: Who are your main influences as a songwriter?

McMurtry: Kris Kristofferson and John Prine, mostly.

Rumpus: Are your influences as a guitar player different from your influences as a songwriter?

McMurtry: Yeah. I’m not sure who they are, though. I’d have to say Keith Richards. I like to listen to a lot of guitar players that are so far beyond me, I can’t really call them influences. Like Sonny Landreth. That guy’s out in space somewhere, an absolute wizard. He’ll do things you’re not supposed to be able to do. He’ll play behind the slide and run it off the end of the neck so it goes off the audible scale, that kind of stuff, but it’s still soulful; it’s still music.

Rumpus: One doesn’t hear many songs about people who think about selling their stock and moving to the coast. Where do you find the inspiration for the characters in your songs?

McMurtry: A lot of it has to do with what I need the next line to do, what rhyme scheme I have to satisfy. That can change the whole character. That’s where selling the stock and living on the coast comes from. I had to wind up with ghost.

Rumpus: Nevertheless, that’s not something one expects to hear in a rock or a country song.

McMurtry: Country songs are generally selling fantasy, and so am I. I’m just selling a different fantasy.

Rumpus: How would you characterize the fantasy you’re selling as opposed to the one mainstream country artists sell?

McMurtry: I sell the fantasy of the disgruntled third son that sees through the myth. I can’t blame country for wanting to sell the myth, but they’re still selling what they have done with the old home place. They’re rewriting that constantly. The last big one was that Montgomery Gentry song, “Daddy Won’t Sell the Farm.” “He’ll live and die in the eye of the urban storm / Daddy won’t sell the farm.” I try to do it the other way and write it from somebody that knows what they did to the old home place. Your evil aunt Francis got power of attorney and sold it out from under everybody, and they developed it. That’s what happens in real life.

Rumpus: Do you think of yourself as a realistic alternative to the fantasy mainstream country sells?

McMurtry: Certainly, but it’s still fiction. It’s not reality. It’s just a more twisted fiction.

Rumpus: In the current political environment, people often talk about what they feel America used to be. Do you feel like you hear a similar nostalgia in contemporary country music?

McMurtry: In mainstream country, it goes back to the question of hearing yourself in the song, but it’s not so much hearing the self you know as the self you want to be. You want to be the guy that will stand in the way of the urban storm, but you’re probably not. But that’s how you want to see yourself, so that works. I can’t tell one country song from another anymore. Since the eighties, it seems like pretty much every hit was written by the same five guys, or different teams of five guys, and then all the records are recorded by another team of five guys. And then they find the pretty artist that can sell it. There are exceptions. I’ve seen Kenny Chesney play guitar, and he’s a badass.

Rumpus: Where else have you lived? Do you write about places you’ve lived?

McMurtry: No. I write about places I’ve seen through the windshield, as often as not.

Rumpus: How did you get started writing songs?

McMurtry: I was playing these outdoor beer garden gigs in Tucson when I was a student. I hadn’t written anything, so it was all covers, and I got tired of doing that. I wanted something that was my own. When I moved to San Antonio, I was doing the same thing. I got involved in that Kerrville Folk Festival, and they had a songwriter contest, so I managed to scrape some songs together for that. They have six winners. They say they don’t have places, but you know the guy that really won is the guy that gets invited back next year. I was in the winner’s circle, but I didn’t get invited back to the main stage. But it was a little bit of a boost. From that, I could start getting gigs in Austin. My plan at that point was to move to Nashville and try to be a staff writer, one of those guys that pieces together the next hit.

Rumpus: You wanted to be one of those five guys?

McMurtry: Yeah. Actually, at that time, there was one guy, Don Schlitz, who was writing songs by himself that were killer. He ruled the roost back then. And then there were a couple of two man teams. Fred Koller and Pat Alger had a pretty good run. I knew Fred Kohler, so I could go up there and co-write with him. I never got anything cut, but that’s what I thought I could do. Around that time, my dad was working with Mellencamp on a screenplay, and they were supposed to get together and do a rewrite. I had a cassette demo of what I’d written, and I said, “Give that to John” because I was hoping John would cut one of my songs, and then when I got to Nashville they’d rent me an apartment because I already had a cut. To my surprise, John didn’t want to cut my songs; he wanted to produce my record.

Rumpus: Did you not see yourself as a performer, then?

McMurtry: I was a performer, yeah. I just didn’t think I could get my own record deal. I didn’t have that confidence. I always liked to play live. I got tired of doing Jimmy Buffet covers. I did mostly obscure covers, John Hartford and David Bromberg, people nobody I was playing to had every heard of. I had to throw in something they’d heard of, so they’d order another pitcher.

Rumpus: When you started playing out, did you make a living doing it pretty quickly?

McMurtry: No. I was working in restaurants in San Antonio. A friend of mine was renovating a restaurant and bar, so I went down there and worked for him for a while. About the time I bailed out, Lonesome Dove was getting made into a miniseries. I knew the producer, so I got a reading for that. That was the first good money I made.

Rumpus: And then you moved to Austin in 1989?

McMurtry: Yeah. By then I already had the record deal.

Rumpus: Too Long in the Wasteland came out right around then, right?

McMurtry: It came out in August of 1989.

Rumpus: How has Austin changed over the years? How has the music scene changed?

McMurtry: The cost of living has gone up, so it’s harder for musicians. Also, physically it’s changed a lot. For a while, they were building so many hi-rises we’d leave town on tour and come back, and the skyline would be different. There were cranes everywhere building these tall glass structures. Most of them are condos. I don’t know who’s living in those things, but it’s completely transformed downtown. Down where Liberty Lunch used to be, it’s the whole city hall complex now, a bunch of glass towers. It has improved the food considerably, though. You can go down the street and get a good glass of wine and some Indian food. You couldn’t do that 20 years ago.

Rumpus: When the culture artists and musicians create draws people to cities, cities become saturated, and artists and musicians can’t live in them anymore. How do you feel, seeing that as a musician? You still live in Austin, yes?

McMurtry: Oh, definitely. It’s a good place for me. It’s a good place for my son to grow up. He and his buddies run up and down South Congress a lot. Well, 20 years ago, that was crack central. Right where the Continental Club is, it’s all spruced up. They fixed up the old Santa Fe across the street, and the Austin Motel. Those are nice little motels now. Those were roach motels then. That was where the drug dealers hung out.

Rumpus: Are you married? Tell me about your family.

McMurtry: I’m divorced. One boy. He just drove home from college yesterday. Now he’s a good songwriter. He can compose and everything. He’s got a couple bands.

Rumpus: Did you encourage him to go into music?

McMurtry: No, he found that on his own.

Rumpus: Do you find you prefer urban or rural life?

McMurtry: I don’t know. I’m torn between the two because I like to hunt, and I like to fish, but I also like to be able to walk down the block and get a good glass of sauvignon blanc. The problem with the city is, it takes me 45 minutes to get to the fishing hole. I’ve got an old truck with a canoe in the back, and I never take the canoe out because if I do, I’m liable to talk myself out of going. To hunt, I’ve got to drive five hours. I’ve got some family land up in North Texas I can hunt on.

Rumpus Sound Takes: Inside Outside

Tom Andes — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:53:50 +0000

Iceage
New Brigade (What’s Your Rupture?)

Perhaps because the band consists of four clean-cut Danish teenagers, Iceage’s brash, discordant punk has made it the darlings of both the Pitchfork and the Maximumrocknroll sets. Whatever one says about its music, Iceage certainly thrashes, and isn’t too listener-friendly, either. While punk has come to denote a sprawling genre that includes mainstream acts, Iceage’s music owes far more to hardcore bands from the early 1980s than it does to Green Day—which is perhaps why Iceage is being hailed as a savior.

Whether Iceage plays a convincing replica, the real thing, or something in between, it does so well enough to convert all but the most strident naysayers. Propelled by the bass guitar, employing sudden, abrupt tempo shifts, with one and sometimes two tinny guitars riffing and chording in imperfect time with one another, the band’s sudden bursts of melody surprise as much as the intricacy of its arrangements. If you like one track, you’ll like them all; if you have favorites, there’s still not a dud among them.

In part because its concepts boil down to the familiar stuff of rock and roll, New Brigade gets across remarkably well, considering how many of Iceage’s English-language lyrics remain unintelligible. Despite the militaristic allusions, “White Rune” and the title track concern belonging and the doomed pursuit of the unattainable other. Anthems in spite of themselves, “Remember” and “You’re Blessed” contain moments of surprising lyricism that work against the cold surface of the band’s sound.

Musically, New Brigade sometimes sounds derivative, but find a band of 19-year-old punks whose album doesn’t sound derivative. New Brigade also stops short of being the revelation it’s sometimes made out to be. And yes, one might hope for a greater degree of intelligibility. Nevertheless, because the music so successfully embodies the raw contradictions of growing up—a desire for belonging coupled with a feeling that belonging is impossible—the band turns the age-old trick of making the old sound new.

The Rumpus Interview with Jolie Holland

Tom Andes — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 07:01:59 +0000

In July I speak to Jolie Holland on the phone the morning after she plays Norman, Oklahoma, two weeks into her tour to support her new record, Pint of Blood. Though her answers often surprise me—she’s the kind of subject who keeps you on your toes—I find her one of the most engaging people I’ve spoken to in recent memory. Laid back and easy to converse with, she demonstrates a searching intelligence that’s keenly aware of who she is and how she belongs to a particular context in contemporary American music. By turns funny, guarded, candid, proud of her accomplishments, and humble, she generously provides insights into the creative process behind the songs on her new album, which mask depths of pain and sometimes violence beneath their surface.

***

The Rumpus: You’re originally from Houston. You often draw on folk and other traditional forms of music with regional or geographical roots. How have the different places you’ve lived informed what you do as a musician?

Jolie Holland: I love Chinese music. It’s awesome when I get to hear it live on a regular basis. I used to live in LA, and I got to see the Chinese orchestra play there. I live in New York now, and there’s this one erhu player I see on the subway every once in a while when I go through Chinatown. He blows my mind, he’s so beautiful. I’m really into the different ways people all over the world resolve a musical phrase, but I do what’s culturally appropriate for me. I don’t even know where Appalachia is, and I don’t know if I’m necessarily influenced by Appalachian music. There’s so much music in Texas. There’s so much music from the Gulf Coast. It’s the musical estuary of America, and there’s no getting around that. But it’s not folk music in a certain way. You can’t write it off with an anthropological label. I remember growing up and hearing Cajun music on the radio and so many different flavors of swing and hip-hop and stuff from all over the place, and then all the Mexican music, which is so killer.

Rumpus: As a singer-songwriter, you play in a genre that draws on traditional music, and yet you also play in a genre that values innovation. Do you feel like you belong to a particular tradition, or do you find those distinctions superfluous?

Holland: I don’t want to assume something is real if it’s not. I don’t want to say I am part of something I’m not part of. That would be obnoxious. One thing I believe will answer your question, and it answers the question for me, is that every single living hero of mine, without me having to look for them, has contacted me and told me they liked my stuff. That includes Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Michael Hurley, Mavis Staples. To me, that says however you want to think about it, I am part of some tradition.

Rumpus: Can you talk about your songwriting process? Some of your songs, like “Sweet Girls,” play on turns of phrase. Some, like “Remember,” seem more narrative. When you write a song, where do you start? When you start writing, do you have a sense of how it’s going to sound at the end of the process?

Holland: The normal thing for me is to write a song in my head—music and lyrics both—because that way the song is not tied to the constraints of an instrument. A song like “Springtime Can Kill You” really shows its roots in that sense because it’s a pretty difficult melody to sing. I didn’t think about that when I wrote it. Some of my friends who are great singers have said, “I can’t even sing that.” When I wrote it, I let the melody lead, and I had to establish what the roots were. I had to learn how to play it, and then I had to teach the band how to play it, which was fun. I did write the rhythm. I guess that’s what comes first for me. The lyrics don’t come first, and the ideas are always cooking in their own way—I’m always being my own sous chef about concept and structure—but really, the rhythm comes first, which is why it’s important for me to work with a creative and sensitive drummer.

Rumpus: You’ve been referred to as a confessional songwriter. How would you describe your relationship to your characters?

Holland: I love songwriting and poetry that’s totally, embarrassingly personal. That doesn’t have anything to do with me; I like it when I read other people’s stuff like that. When I started writing songs, it didn’t occur to me to not write that way because that’s what I like. That’s what I like about any art form, awareness of the human mechanism; that’s where the good stuff is. I never feel like any of it is too personal. If I think I may have gotten to that line in some songs, I don’t release those songs. Sometimes you know more in the act of doing the work than you do with your regular conscious mind. That’s true for a lot of songwriters and writers in general and other types of artists. I’ve had songs out me about stuff I was unaware of, and I decided not to release those songs, even though I thought it was good work in there.

Rumpus: Do you work to a schedule? Do you have particular habits or disciplines?

Holland: I’m a writer, and I think a good rule for me as a writer is to wake up, make coffee, and write, either hang out at the piano with the coffee, or hang out with the computer and work on the book. But that’s not how I write songs. The way I write songs is, I make them force me to write them. I was going through some super rough personal life shit a while ago, and these songs would come to me and try to get written. I would tell them to fuck off because I didn’t want to write them. I didn’t want any person outside myself to be attached to those songs and want to hear them. I don’t normally push songs away that hard. But it was amazing because the songs would come back in complete form. They would come harass me, and I’d be like, I know that fucking melody, you can fuck right off. Eventually, I think they moved on. They’re going to go pick on somebody else. I hope so. Actually, I don’t hope so. It’s some sad shit.

Rumpus: Do you take notes and write things down while you’re walking around out in the world?

Holland: I send myself text messages. I call myself, and I have a little book I write things in. I use a Moleskin for a wallet. It’s got a little pack in the back where I stick money or a Metro card, and then, in the rest of it, I can scribble things to myself. I’m not very disciplined. I don’t really try to write songs. I haven’t tried to write songs since I was 14, and I thought the songs I tried to write sucked, so I got intothis different method, which is kind of like fishing. I’d be interested to see what it would be like to try to write songs. I have a sly, backwards way of trying to write songs now. I’m always thinking about structure and form, and then whenever the emotional material shows up, it might or might not fit into any of the available ideas I’ve been thinking about. It’s not a forced thing. I’m just constantly interested in structure.

Rumpus: You mean song structure?

Holland: I like to notice how a song works. A lot of times, the songs I’m writing will have a completely improvised structure, like “Tender Mirror.” I didn’t think about the structure while I was writing it; it came through pretty much in that form. You could say there’s an A and a B section, and it doesn’t go back. It’s all in the same key, and there’s a refrain. I also like to think about the psychological structure of songs, like the song I wrote, “Sweet Loving Man,” is based on this one Memphis Minnie song I heard a long time ago where it’s really conversational, but you can’t tell what the people are talking about.

Rumpus: Your new record has been described as having a loose, organic feel. Were the songs fleshed out before you went into the studio, or were you still writing them when you started recording? To what extent does the process of recording become part of the songwriting process?

Holland: I don’t ever walk into the studio without songs being completely written because I can’t afford to do that. I’m not interested in writing on the spot. Some people do, and I think that’s cool. Kyp Malone, my good friend, who’s in TV on the Radio, loves writing in the studio. I think that suits his type of music better than mine. The way he approaches structure is really different than the way I do, so it can work for him. For me, it’s much more of a quiet process, and I don’t want to be under pressure when I’m doing that. As for the looseness, I think that’s a collective hallucination because this is the only record I’ve ever done that was predominately to a click.

Rumpus: You mean a metronome click?

Holland: Yeah. We didn’t use it on every song, but we did on most of the songs, and I think the presence of a totally steady rhythm allows people to hear my rhythmic improvisation in the singing because I wasn’t listening to the click; just the drummer was. It was in Shazad Ismaily’s headphones. Also, there are so many terrible writers that are just copying each other. They don’t really have strong opinions, and they don’t know what they’re talking about, so the word loose might be partly from the telephone game, and then also the hallucination created by using a click track.

Rumpus: How much improvisation do you and Shazad do in the studio? The two of you play just about all the instruments except for another guitar player, right?

Holland: Yeah. Grey Gersten was the third most represented player. A great deal of it was improvised, though we were aware of the structure. That’s what it’s like with the kind of music I play. Everybody knows the structure, but what you do inside the structure is always open to how you feel in the moment.

Rumpus: In the promo stuff I’ve read, you said the recording was done in the studio and also in private spaces. Did you also record at home?

Holland: Shazad and I cut a couple tracks in our homes. On “Tender Mirror,” that’s my piano. We cut “Wreckage” at his house. The equipment he has is nicer than what you find in 90 percent of the commercial studios around the country, so it wasn’t inferior recording quality.

Rumpus: Hearing the album, it feels like you’re hanging out in the studio with the band. I don’t know a better word for it than vibe.

Holland: That’s great. That’s what I’m always going for, and I thought the working environment of this record was particularly sweet.

Rumpus Sound Takes: Appalachian Punk and Authenticity’s Chimera

Tom Andes — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:00:04 +0000

O’Death
Outside (Ernest Jenning Record Co.)

Don’t let the banjo fool you. For all their eclecticism, Brooklyn-based O’Death’s frame of reference remains firmly indie—strained male tenor singing abstruse lyrics over pop arrangements. Of course, considering the band takes its name from an Appalachian folk song, it’s not surprising their sound evokes that world. Besides banjo, they boast fiddle and ukulele. The lyrics appropriate their source material’s darkest elements while their music weds folk melodies to punk tempos, resulting in Appalachian punk.

Lyrically, Outside consists of murder ballads, ghost stories, a couple paeans to the elements, and any number of gothic evocations of old, weird Appalachia. Tellingly, though, the album works best when the band breaks from their formula. “Bugs,” the first single, layers banjo, fiddle, and Greg Jamie’s voice over an upbeat chorus, conveying a tenuous sense of joy: “I’ve been wasting most my time / living for the day / when like bugs we figure out / how to make light stay.” Likewise, on “Pushing Out,” they juxtapose their uniformly dark subject matter against a poppy chorus.

Halfway through Outside, O’Death’s dirges begin to sound familiar, as does a characteristic chord change. Ultimately, a limited sense of their source material hamstrings the band—as if the world they evoke consisted solely of ghosts, dead girls, and windstorms. Not that it matters whether they’re authentic. Elvis, Dylan, Tom Waits—they faked it, too. They succeeded because of the breadth of their respective visions. By reducing Appalachian folk to a one-dimensional tale of woe, O’Death reveals the narrowness of theirs.

Nevertheless, rather than limit themselves to two speeds (fast stomp, slow stomp), as on 2008’s Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin, on Outside, O’Death engages several middle gears. Improved production doesn’t hurt, either. Though the Waits comparisons might be off the mark, they’re useful. Consider how limited Waits’ range would be if he never ventured outside the carnival barker mode he employs on “Eyeball Kid.” While they’ve built their reputation on Appalachian weirdness, when O’Death expands their range, they get somewhere. Witness “Bugs,” the album’s wisest track. Authenticity’s a chimera, anyway.

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