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The Rumpus Interview with Karl Briedrick of Speck Mountain

Katy Henriksen — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:01:41 +0000

The core duo of bliss-drone-space-twang group Speck Mountain formed when Karl Briedrick went looking for a singer for his Brooklyn-based band during his days at New York University. That’s when he connected with Marie-Claire Balabanian via Facebook, a fact that he admits really freaks him out, considering they have become best friends and musical soul mates. Now three albums deep, they’re based in Chicago as a legit four-piece, welcoming Linda Malonis on keys/vocals and Chris Dye on drums.

Although Karl and I were initially slated to meet at a coffee shop in Williamsburg because we both found ourselves visiting the borough we once called home, the flu won out, and we connected via phone instead. We discussed topics ranging from rapidly gentrifying New York City’s unfriendliness toward artists to the way the band birthed a vital, wide-open sound for their third full-length release, Badwater.

***

The Rumpus: Sorry I missed you when we were both in Brooklyn. What were you doing there?

Karl Briedrick: My girlfriend lives in Brooklyn. It’s weird: she lives in the same neighborhood I did ten years ago now, off the Graham stop [in Williamsburg]. It’s so different now. Bedford certainly was hopping back when I lived there, but out where I lived, it was a couple pizza places, a deli, and one good breakfast place. Now it’s a bunch of boutiques, and she’s paying the same amount of rent I was paying, but I had a two-story megaspace, and she has a tiny Manhattan-style apartment.

Rumpus: That blows my mind, too. I moved to Greenpoint in 2004, and there was nothing out where I was, on the northern end of Greenpoint on Clay Street. Now there’s that metal bar St. Vitus on the block where I lived and boutiques where you can buy $200 handbags. That rapid gentrification is insane.

Briedrick: It’s one of the things that drove me nuts about living there. Gentrification is something that happens, but the rapid pace of it meant you couldn’t commit to a neighborhood because the next year, your rent would for sure go up, and you had to keep moving farther out. Having a practice space was really hard, too. We had a practice space at the Pencil Factory in Greenpoint. We were paying a lot of money for it and sharing with four other bands to practice twice a week. We’d come in, and people would use our amplifiers and keep them. Because they were old, they were melting. Everything was really hard.

Rumpus: That intersection where the Pencil Factory is has all those bars now.

Briedrick: Bedford Avenue at this point is almost like a circus. It’s a meathead hangout. Bedford is like what the East Village became around the time you moved there. The East Village is probably more pleasant now.

Rumpus: What initially brought you to New York City?

Briedrick: I went to NYU, so that’s what brought me there—school, initially. But really, I just wanted the experience of living in a city on that level. It was great, but once I became serious about music, I realized, being in a band in that city and trying to focus on music, that (a) I couldn’t afford it. and (b) it’s just really hard to be in a band there in terms of van and practice space. It’s really hard to have an open creative mind there, because there’s always so much stimulus. I really craved space to let my imagination be my imagination, not my imagination filtered through all the influence of everything that I was running up against all day long.

It’s almost like a tasteful Vegas, but as opposed to Vegas, you’re able to take in all this amazing culture. But you go there for a week, and you leave completely broke, and you’re thankful to get home. Yeah, that was awesome. Now I can chill out a bit.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about the new album. What was the starting point of Badwater?

Briedrick: When the studio transfers were being made to our last album, Some Sweet Release, Marie-Claire and I were celebrating and starting to talk about the next album. We’d taken this kind of slow music based on ballads and repetitions as far as we wanted to and we knew that a real band, as opposed to constantly changing other members, would be essential to the recording process—that is, a band that was Speck Mountain as much as Marie-Claire and I were. We wanted to make something generous.

We felt like the first couple records, we were hinting at what we could do and what we wanted to do. We wanted to make something, instead of just hinting, that gave a full picture of who we are, so that was the genesis. We had a lot of disappointments right after Some Sweet Release came out. A European tour was cancelled because the dates were just too spotty, and we realized we couldn’t afford it. It took us a while to regroup from those disappointments, and then there was the process of finding band members, and that took a long time. That was 2009.

We didn’t really get going again until 2011, when we found our bandmates Linda [Malonis] and Chris [Dye]. We started rehearsing with Chris and Linda, and things were going well, but there were still some struggles.

We couldn’t quite get a sound that was vital and new enough that we were interested in moving forward with, and then one day, I got stoned and listed to Marquee Moon by Television, which isn’t an album I’d listened to since high school, and also the Soft Boys’ Underwater Moonlight, which I hadn’t really listened to since freshman year of college. That’s when something in me opened up. It was feeling the freedom of guitar and guitar leads from Television. And the Soft Boys have these really nasty lyrics that are kind of mean, like songs called “I Wanna Destroy You,” or a whole song about being jealous, and it opened me up.

They’re these phenomenal pop songs that make me feel complete bliss, and it made me realize you could be a little nasty, that not all lyrics need to be blissed out in order for the music to be blissed out. I needed that, because pretty soon after that, a relationship I was in for seven years ended, and I didn’t really know what to do with myself. It was pretty intense, and I realized the only way to get through it all was to channel it through music and to just work on that and try not to think about what was going on. That’s when things really started to open up, because I had so much to write about.

Rumpus: I am obsessed with the closing track “Watch the Storm.” Tell me about it.

Briedrick: It was one of the first songs we wrote for Badwater. We wrote and recorded “Flares” as soon as the band came into fold, but we really didn’t start writing again for a year. “Watch the Storm” was the first song written in the set of new songs. It’s the longest song on the album, and there are so many ideas in it, and that’s probably why, because there was a year’s worth of ideas coming together in that song. It was also, when we recorded it, the total problem child of the record. The guy we were working with to record the album wasn’t into it at all. He was trying to change all these things. We eventually got really fed up and ended up not working with him anymore.

Lyrically, it’s about longing for something to change, longing for something to happen within the context of a relationship where it hasn’t felt like anything’s been happening for a long time. We’ve been shocked at how that song has been received, and it’s a lot of people’s favorite, actually. Since the person we were working with didn’t like it, we had a lot of doubts. Was it boring or too long? We ended up following our instincts with it, and I’m really glad we did, because a lot of people seem to really like it.

Rumpus: [Can you] elaborate on “Watch the Storm” as different?

Briedrick: It’s a little more epic. There’s a lot of parts. There’s a long instrumental section that changes a lot at the end. To my ears, the first half is a little more mellow than the rest of the record. I guess that’s why it seems different to me: the length, plus long instrumental, plus again, there’s something about the song that’s straightforward, though I don’t think the instrumental part is straightforward.

Rumpus: You have to find a beginning and end. How do you know when a song is finished?

Briedrick: Do you mean how do we know when a song is mixed? There’s three processes I could answer to: in the practice space writing the song, when we’re done tracking, or how do we know when the mix is done?

Rumpus: I like that. Process. Which do you want to talk about?

Briedrick: I guess I’ll talk about when the mix is done, because a song isn’t done for us until the mix is done. Adding reverb, adding flourishes and effects, making sure everything is balanced. You know it’s done when you think it sounds good. But also when there’s nothing, you want to keep going, and you want to keep changing things, but every little change you make doesn’t make it sound better. You realize you could tinker with it forever, but you realize that you’re getting further away. Further away from what? Further away from the final product. Once that happens, you’re struggling to find changes you make, and then you realize that you don’t need to make any changes because it’s done, and that’s that.

The first two records, we were very guilty of turning tinkering forever and not knowing where to start. I think on this record, we were more trusting of what we were doing. We knew it was okay to stop. We knew that striving for perfection actually in some ways diminishes…You know, I think striving for perfection is not necessarily what’s good about art or music, because perfection is something that…there’s something important about what you’re doing being vital and alive and not over-labored, and it was really important for us for things to feel vital and alive. That was worth more to us than editing and just making things…We just trusted ourselves more and trusted the people we were working with. For Marie-Claire and I, our instinct is to always make things better and keep going. We just trusted that when something felt done, it was good enough, and there was something vital about that about being able to say that’s good enough.

Rumpus: Now that Badwater is finished, have you started coming up with new work?

Briedrick: After we finished the album, it’s been a process of getting our live show to where we want to be. We’re also doing all the booking for our tour and a lot of the promotion ourselves. My instinct, everyone’s instinct, is to start writing new songs, but it was really important for me this time to take a step back and say, “We made this thing that we’re really proud of, and we need to give it the attention it deserves.” We’re really excited to write new stuff, and there’s a lot of things we want to explore. We’re trying to give attention to Badwater and to the live show, the way we present songs. We’re really excited to write new songs. I’m going to spend the summer in Maine, where my girlfriend has a place, and Marie-Claire will come up there at some point. I’m hoping a lot of songs come out of that trip.

Swinging Modern Sounds #45: The Distribution Problem, Part One

Rick Moody — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 07:01:28 +0000

The most significant problem for makers of music today is the problem of distribution. Anyone trying to make a living from recorded music, or even, to some degree, from performance, struggles with the infinite reproducibility of the digital realm, and with the problems of piracy and streaming, with the meager rights that musicians still retain to their work. That is, unless this hypothetical musician is willing to take on some or all of the work of the record company him or herself. In the course of thinking about these issues, I recently stumbled on a compelling example of crowdsourcing as a response to the distribution problem, and from an unlikely precinct. Longtime readers of this column know of my unrestrained devotion to the work of American composer Frank Zappa, and it turns out that Zappa’s widow, Gail, the keeper of that particular flame, has been attempting to farm out distribution of an unreleased project of Frank’s to the fans by licensing distribution rights to whoever is willing to pony up a thousand dollars for the chance. (See details here.) Gail Zappa has also reclaimed rights to all of Zappa’s prior recordings, and zealously guards distribution of those, making her among the most significant of self-distributors of musical product anywhere. The Roxy and Elsewhere prequel, Roxy By Proxy, which is the crowdsourced album in question, therefore represents a new twist in the legacy of Zappa’s music, and, I think, a creative and bold move. Because the original Roxy and Elsewhere was among my most fervently worshipped Zappa albums back in the day (along with Hot Rats and One Size Fits All), I was surprised and fascinated to hear about this project, and, naturally, I gave it some thought. Would I spend a thousand dollars that I don’t really have on a project like this? Am I any kind of salesman? While I thought this through (my waffling has not yet reached a conclusion), it seemed like it would be an illuminating experience to talk to Gail Zappa about her experiment in crowdsourcing and democracy. I worked for a few weeks to procure an introduction (thanks Nadje Noordhuis, you genius). And apparently, sometimes, if you ask nicely, eminent personages who are way more important than you are simply say yes.

So, confabulating a reason to be in LA, I proposed dropping in at the Zappa residence in Laurel Canyon, and soon I was there, in Frank Zappa’s studio, and saw his mixing board, and a guitar or two, and a lot of the appurtenances that would amaze musicians past and present. I actually experienced some symptoms of vertigo while on the premises, because of how important to me this visit would have been throughout my childhood. And still was. Indeed, it is incredibly moving how vitally Frank’s music and presence continues to be felt—by his family, of course, but also by people who care about the further-out fringes of what music is and can be. Frank, in some aesthically rich and material way, lives on, and his work lives on too. Gail Zappa, it’s worth saying, however, is somewhat burdened, or so it seems to me, by the obligation to continue to release work for the deranged fans. We should feel her pain. Still, she is charming, funny, suffers no fools, knows exactly what she wants, and I very much enjoyed talking to her. Let any celebration of the Zappa name and legacy not obscure an important issue here: distribution. Today, Gail Zappa is exhibit A in a much-contested aspect of the musical world. And: if you want to experience some of the rigors of this conflict firsthand, you have, now, the opportunity to be a record distributor of a legendary, Grammy-winning, classically inflected musical revolutionary, and it will only cost you $1000 plus some mechanical royalties. An interview with Gail Zappa follows, and it takes up in mid-conversation because I could not refrain from talking to Gail about everything else, too, in addition to this problem…

***

Gail Zappa: …The problem with composers, as Frank said, is that they are the most unrequired job in America. Frank said he probably would have been a major criminal, given his brain power and his attention to detail, had he not been a composer. But being a composer is not something you can’t help.

The Rumpus: I want to come back to that question! But I want to talk a little about distribution. I got incredibly interested when I read recently about the Roxy By Proxy distribution rights you guys are selling. It seems to me such an unusual and original way to think about distributing music.

Zappa: It is, and it’s an experiment in terror so far, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. You’re asking people to put their money where their mouth is, literally. It is not many people who are prepared to do that, and it’s not for what seems the obvious reason: because they don’t have the cash. People could get their best friends to put up a hundred bucks each and go for it. There are all sorts of ways that it could be accomplished. The surprising thing is that there are not that many people that get it. They all think you’re offering something, that they’re supposed to get their money back, and, you know, everyday people are asking for money for something, and no one gets anything back but the sheer pleasure of being of assistance. In this particular case, they’re all like, “No, the math doesn’t work.” I’m, like, “Yeah, welcome to my world.” I should be making these albums for you so you can throw tons of abuse my way verbally for any attempt I make to honor Frank. It’s just so ridiculous.

I just want to say, for the people that are willing to participate, who really do get it—and there are very few of them, given the potential for what this could be—they are so amazing, because they don’t care if they ever sell a record. They just want to do it. They just want to help or just be part of it. Like you said, it’s an unusual opportunity. Part of the reason I wanted to do it this way was to educate the audience, and they’re finding out exactly what I wanted them to find out. But then they don’t take the next step which is participate. So if you think that you can sell records, as an artist even, I’m saying, “Here, take a Frank Zappa record. You don’t even have to make one of your own. Let’s just start here and see what you can do with it.” And once you ponder the question of distributing a record, you know, you realize, “Oh, this is what artists go through every fucking day of their lives.” This is how it works, or how it doesn’t work, especially if you want to do it without a record company.

Frank did this with no help from anyone for years. For decades. He was probably one of the first independent artists to go all the way, because the first record company he signed with started censoring his records. They told him who he could record with and who he couldn’t. They were trying to build some sort of stable of artists, and so they collected the key people in bands. Those guys were locked down. Those guys were your guitar and your lead vocalist, because those two are the ones who more than likely wrote the lyrics and all of the music. So those guys would be locked up so they could never do anything with anybody ever again, everyone else could go do what they liked.

Rumpus: When exactly did you get this idea?

Zappa: Actually, years ago, I thought that this was possible. But I didn’t have the energy, the time, the resources, to put it to work for me, because I was in the middle of a lawsuit. It’s time-consuming, energy-consuming, like a big monster that has moved in next door to you and who just uses you like the place that you park your trash cans. So you’re dealing with all the bones and debris, all that dead crap left behind. That’s what it was like, just conjuring up all kinds of hideousness. So then I begin in earnest by talking to lawyers about this project and figuring out everything I could: what the consumer issues would be and what the security issues would be, what you have to say and how you have to say it. It’s complicated when you’re doing this with a record, because it’s not just the production quality, which is different. If you’re a comedian, you’re just one guy who goes onstage. It’s so easy—you could turn on any type of tape machine. There are no real production values. Roxy, although it’s not a complicated affair, is really a prequel to the film which everybody has been waiting for.

The problem that you have with these things is that your imagination is so much more powerful than what there really is. If you’ve ever had to recall your past in some way and you open a drawer of old photographs that your parents kept, there are always pictures of you smiling and charming, and then a bunch of people you don’t know who they are. Could be aunts, uncles, could be the postman for all you know. Who are these people? Your parents are never in the picture, because they are the ones taking them. So you’ve got these unrelated images that are disconnected from your memories. It’s kind of that like for the people who have built up this mythology around the Roxy film. They’re going to be disappointed to find out that it’s not the picture of their dreams. But as an artifact, it’s pretty great.

At the time, it was the least conflicted project. In other words, there was nothing about it that anybody could make any demands on. It wasn’t subject to or involved in any way in any lawsuit. So I thought, This is the perfect one. The landscape has changed now, but I’m still going forward with this. Right now, we’re just dealing with the issue of collecting the payment and being able to deliver the goods in a timely fashion. The bottom line is: we have to come up with an end date and a delivery date. We always had to do that, but it has become complicated. How venders collect and what the restrictions are with respect to consumer-issue laws—like that, that’s what we’re dealing with right now. It’s complicated by virtue of the fact that each master is going to be embedded with information. In others words, it would be easy if I say okay and make a bunch of records and started shipping them out. But it’s not like that, because each one has to be embedded with personal information that identifies each distributor uniquely.

Rumpus: The actual product will indicate that this particular distributor is the one who distributed this copy of the album?

Zappa: Yes, and what that does is it tends to protect us both. See, I really wanted people to understand what it’s really like to be in the business. Here’s your master, okay, you’re licensing it. You don’t own it, but you have a certain period of time in which you can exploit this master, and the contract is very clear about what you can and can’t do. That’s point one. Point two is: Okay, now I’ve got this thing, how do I control the quality? Well, I have an opportunity to buy this record directly from a manufacturing plant where each copy is exactly like the next, it hasn’t been interfered with, quality control is absolute. We are offering this opportunity to these people at a wholesale price specific to them. Nobody else can buy it at a wholesale price except the distributors.

Then you have a contract as the distributor and pay a certain price for these records. So with these distributors it’s just like in the real world. And you have a favored price and no one else can get that price, so there’s that, and it allows you to make some money. But the point here is really not to fill your coffers, because there’s a lot of competition, which is exactly like in the real world. The difference is, in the real world, these people are all licensed. They are stealing from everyone, and you’ll never get paid, and how fast can you sell your stuff before the market is saturated?

Rumpus: You mean before there are digital copies of whatever it is you’re distributing.

Zappa: Yeah! Or when there’s a real physical copy. Or when you know when it’s going to be posted, they stick it on their site or whatever they’re going to do with it. So I’m hoping these guys, because they’re fans, will actually pay me royalties. Let’s say you’re one of the distributors, Rick. Put down your thousand dollars, and I send you your master, and now you can make 25 copies of those and give them to everyone as Christmas presents. No one’s the wiser, except it would be nice if you paid me my publishing for the copies you make.

Rumpus: So you’re going to get mechanical royalties, that’s the idea?

Zappa: That’s the deal, that I would get paid mechanical royalties. Now who in the world does that? It’s bad enough they steal the master, but you’ve already paid for the master, but you haven’t paid the mechanicals. That happens when you make a copy and sell it or give it away. There are no free goods in this deal.

Rumpus: Yeah.

Zappa: Now if you want to buy ten copies from our mail-order company, those are all quality-controlled, and the difference, the amount you pay, already includes the royalties so you don’t have to account. The other thing I want you to do is account to me as a distributor. When I put out the records, when I make a distribution deal, those distributors tell me who they sell it to and how many copies. So I want nothing less. I want to know who you sold Roxy to, who you gave it to. I don’t need any social security numbers or whatever, driver’s licenses, but I need to know you gave away ten copies, and here’s the money. Ten copies were: my mom, my sister, my brother. Then I sold one to Joe Smith—which would be funny, because he’s a record company exec. I’m trying to raise the funds to make the movie. So this is not a reissue of Roxy and Elsewhere. We just did that, we just reissued sixty masters by Frank, and this was one of them.

Rumpus: Of course.

Zappa: This is from the soundtrack. It’s a prequel soundtrack, if you will, to the film itself.

Rumpus: So you’re not worried, then, about how many units it’s going to ship in this very interesting conceptual distribution.

Zappa: Well, I would like to ship 100,000 units to the people that pay $100,000 to distribute it. That’s my dream, that’s my goal. We’ll see how close I come to that, but no matter what, this record’s going out there.

Rumpus: So having now conducted the experiment, or being partway into the experiment—

Zappa: Partway into it.

Rumpus: —how do you feel about it?

Zappa: I feel excited that I made a point. Any artist who has captured the imagination of a fairly significant audience can do this, and they never need to talk to a record company again. Frank and I have always been advocates for the freedom of expression by artists, and early on, that included your right to associate with anyone you wanted to artistically. To work with whom you choose without these conflicts with record companies jealously guarding your output, making you an indentured servant because of your contract.

Rumpus: So would you do it again for another album at some point?

Zappa: I might. I might do it again for something. It just depends on the project. This is an experiment in educating an audience. If I was 22, I would kick some ass with this—but I would have no understanding of it at all at the age of 22.

Rumpus: How does it fit into the larger project of keeping Frank Zappa’s music alive?

Zappa: I’m glad you asked me the question about keeping music alive. I get letters every day from people who have discovered the music. And I’m happy to say there are no ex-fans of Frank Zappa’s. Once you’re there it’s yours for life. The real process is to create as much hubbub as you can to let people know there’s new material coming. There’s more stuff available. I don’t think there’s a problem with people discovering the music unless there’s no way to get to them. That’s the problem that you always have. Frank’s music was never for the mass audience, it’s not designed to appeal to people who want something…how can I say it? Frank says it better, and I don’t know the exact quotation. His music contains specific kinds of information that you won’t find elsewhere in rock and roll. A lot of it is musical information, a lot of it is training your ear. That was always something Frank was interested in. Live concerts were to train the ears and to introduce, constantly, new musical ideas to the audience so the next time they showed up or the next record they got they would be ready and receptive to whatever he wanted to spring on them.

Rumpus: In a way, Dweezil’s doing the same thing by going out on the road and playing the repertoire in the way he is. [For some years now, Dweezil Zappa has been touring as Zappa Plays Zappa, playing the catalogue of his father’s music.] Was there ever a moment where the two of you sat down and said, “Here’s the plan to keep the music out there in front of the audience? Or is it just that that’s what he wanted to do?

Zappa: Initially, it was the three of us. We went on a tour of Europe to promote a series of concerts. It was me and Ahmet [and Dweezil], but then Ahmet wrote a book which became very successful for him and this opened up an opportunity for him to be what Frank said when he was born: This is the mogul of the group. He’s well on his way at this point. But Dweezil being the musican—the guitar player of the group—decided to continue on. He had tremendous odds against him, because the promoters, the venues, they wanted the old band members in the mix. Eventually we were able to convince people that it would be a failure to have those guys in the band. It’s nice to have them invited to sit in once in a while, but how to carry them around on the road when they’re making outrageous demands? And some of them are doing interviews and conducting themselves as though the world revolved around them. So that’s pretty unpleasant to have to deal with that crap, to be honest. And they’re really not doing the music justice. Some of them were doing things that they would have never dared to do under Frank’s baton, never. You know, one of the big difficulties I had with Dweezil, honestly, maybe even the only real difficulty, was that Frank never had, after the initial band, when he broke up the first band, lead singers. After that, all the parts were shared by whoever in the band was most willing to learn how to sell the song the way Frank had intended it. Frank was not a big fan of having lyrics, but sometimes he had things to say that lent themselves to lyrics.

Rumpus: We saw Dweezil play twice so far. I was astounded. There’s nothing out there like it, for that passion and regard for what his father created. And he’s a great player, of course. And this is sort of why I’m here trying to have this conversation with you. There’s seems something really elemental about the way this family is thinking about this man still and how passionately you feel about him. The distribution plan for Roxy, in this light, when considered along with your reissues and Dweezil’s touring, is a creative vision for the Frank Zappa legacy, and it all has a conceptual continuity.

Zappa: Yes, it does.

Rumpus: A continuity that is consistent with the ingenuity of Frank’s work in the first place.

Zappa: I think ingenuity is part of our DNA. That plus curiosity, plus the willingness to commit. Because you know you can’t get a guitar player like Dweezil without his commitment to the work that it takes A) to be the musician that he is and B) to the music itself. I mean he’s playing it in a way that Frank never attempted. He wants it to focus on the melodies that are so beautiful and Frank, you know, he created an organism that toured into which he could throw a wrench in anywhere he felt was necessary to make a point. His favorite way of composing was improvising. Dweezil pays homage to that in this certain respects but that’s not his favorite way of composing. Frank was in the moment. That’s the thing about musicians when you hang out with them. Musicians more than most people are in the moment. That’s the dual nature of that job.

Rumpus: So what’s left for you to do then?

Zappa: What’s left?

Rumpus: I mean, I assume you can open the vault annually for 40 more years.

Zappa: I probably could. I mean I never dreamed that my future would be my husband’s past. But it’s such a huge past in terms of the recorded content. It’s going to take a while.

Rumpus: Is it still fun for you?

Zappa: Oh, it’s always fun. Even when people cover the music. It’s fun, especially if they make you laugh. Usually I give stuff to Joe [Travers, the vaultmeister] or to Kurt. Kurt is the scoremeister now, and he’s also the bass player of the band, and he has a real facility for paying attention to the details. Simple things like which side does the note sit on on the stave? He notices what Frank does, and so if someone writes something and sends something to him, it’s like pulling teeth. “No, they can’t, they’re writing it down wrong!” So it’s one thing to write the music, it’s another thing to write it down, it’s another thing to play it, and something else altogether again to learn how to play it. These are the elements that are fascinating, and, you know, move my world. It’s nice to hear when someone gets something and the sincerity is enough to tickle you. They can have the wrong notes but the essence of it is there, so it makes you laugh, because even when Frank’s music is sad, it makes me laugh.

Rumpus: There are no more studio recordings to release, right?

Zappa: Well, we don’t know. We’re still in the position where we can say, “Oh, let’s do something like that,” and Joe looks for something like whatever we’re thinking about. As far as studio albums, there are still opportunities. There’s a handful of records, maybe less than a fistful of records we can do the making of. So there will be tracks from those sessions. We’re probably going to hit one hundred albums, official Frank Zappa releases, and sixty of those are recordings that he made.

Rumpus: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Zappa: And the rest of them are… The easiest way to explain this is if you look at the difference between the official discography, which is made of records initially released on Barking Pumpkin, and which are now divided into Zappa or Vaulternative releases. Zappa is everything Frank produced himself. Either he put together the whole thing, or it could be a collection of tracks that he produced. Vaulternative is material we don’t know what he was going to do with it, it could have been a mix and match. We have no idea what these things were going to be. It’s primarily live concerts, interviews, maybe a whole section of something that’s not enough to make a whole album but he was putting it together for something.

Rumpus: There’s not more synclavier music anywhere? [The synclavier was an early sampler that occupied a great portion of Frank Zappa's last years.]

Zappa: Yeah, there is. The thing about the synclavier is a lot of it has not been released.

Rumpus: I really love that stuff. I’m a big fan of Civilization Phaze III.

Zappa: That’s really nice to hear. Surprisingly, there are people who say, “Oh, we don’t get any of that synclavier stuff at all.” There’s an equal number of people who are fervent about it.

Rumpus: I love it.

Zappa: The synclavier has about 400 compositions locked in it in various stages of development, so that’s another project, getting the synclavier stuff. I’d like to do two other things. I’d like to do a sound library. Frank always wanted to do a sound library—he sampled so many great musicians. For piano, for example, he sampled every octave, not just one (that you could just transpose electronically), and he did all different types of attack, with and without pedals, all that kind of stuff. He very much had the same approach with other instruments as well. So the orchestral library is phenomenal. But then you add to that the library of samples and bits that he created out of dust and debris—that would be pretty cool, too. Then everyone could sound sort of like Frank—sort of like Frank.

Rumpus: Did he not tell you that you should just sell everything and get out of the business?

Zappa: He said sell the masters and get out of this business—

Rumpus: So why do all this?

Zappa: He neglected to mention the publishing, and without doing that, you’re stuck. And when they start messing with the masters, it’s time…it’s like being in hell. It’s the ultimate identity theft when you start messing with somebody’s work. Thinking that you could edit the work, or mix it differently, or re-EQ it, or make claims about it that aren’t true. Or sample it or use it commercially in some way. Those are things that are unforgivable. I had to deal with that. Now I’ve got the catalog back. For whatever it’s worth, I’m the final word at the moment.

Rumpus: I know you’ve felt dismal about the MP3 situation, too.

Zappa: There were many problems with the idea of Apple, and I don’t care what anyone says, and I did write my “fuck you” letter to Steve Jobs. He single-handedly reduced music to that old saw, “I got it for a song.” Which means what? I got it for nothing! And he made music worth nothing, and the unhappy result is a world of singles. So there are no more concept albums. The only exception, I would think, is jazz, which should please you, and/or soundtrack work, which is unbelievable to me because they are collaborative events in most cases. So when you have a single composer writing his work, it shouldn’t be doled out in singles based on the length of a piece. If you think about how long it takes to write a piece of music for an orchestra, it’s outrageous to me, outrageous. The sampling rates are a concern. There are so many sampling rates up there now that sound pretty good.

Rumpus: Yeah.

Zappa: Certainly Apple has improved enormously. At the beginning, the sampling rate was an issue for me, but a bigger argument was over digital rights, which I had. I would have exercised them myself and was planning to, with all due respect. I think it’s okay that there’s digital music out there, because that does mean more people have access. I mean, you’re a student, and you’re studying music, and you want to find a CD of a whole work, but there’s one piece that intrigues you. It’s easy to get that piece for a dollar for the most part. And it’s so easy for people to carry around music digitally. Like for Joe and Kurt, the band members, and people who love music anyway, and they can just carry it with them or have access any way they want. My obligation is to release the music the way Frank released it.

Rumpus: Yeah.

Zappa: With the best possible way for it to sound on the day that Frank created it. Then, after that, I can move on, and we can remaster, and some things really need it, because the technology has changed so much. So I’m hoping to do more of that. We’re going to release a lot of stuff on vinyl, too. It’s so shocking to me. I just got proofs of a cover for vinyl, and it’s so big! It’s huge! Oh my God! You can almost count the pores in someone’s photography. Crazy, crazy good. So that’s exciting.

***

Photos of Gail and the studio are by Laurel Nakadate.

The Rumpus Interview with Missy Mazzoli

Joel Hoffman — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:30:38 +0000

Missy Mazzoli challenges the barriers that historically have kept newly composed classical music away from the ears of many music and arts lovers. Her work is part of a movement that connects not only with traditional classical musical outlets but also with the world of clubs, bars, and galleries. She is currently composer-in-residence at Opera Philadelphia and Gotham Chamber Opera, and in 2012 was composer/educator-in-residence at the Albany Symphony. Her band Victoire makes appearances regularly in venues such as Le Poisson Rouge and Roulette in New York, and will appear on July 13, 2013, at the Austin Chamber Music Festival in Austin, Texas.

We talked to Mazzoli about the sometimes invisible world of new classical music, her relation to it, and what she’s doing to help to redefine what it means to be a composer in the 21st century.

***

The Rumpus: Do you think there has ever been such a thing as “common practice,” and if so, is there one today in the United States?

Mazzoli: Well, I don’t think that those things ever truly existed in the way that we like to believe that they do, the way we learn about them in music history class. Those things are defined at least decades after they happen. And even then, it’s a fallacy because when you’re in the moment, when you’re in a thriving scene of musicians, inevitably everyone is going to be doing something completely different from everyone else. It’s only when it’s smoothed out by history and we try to make sense of it—this incredibly complicated period when everyone’s doing something different every day—that we look for those stylistic similarities and we say, “Well, that’s what that was about,” and sort of forget all the other nuance. I definitely feel that that’s true for this time in my community of artists, and I’m sure that it was true at other times too.

Rumpus: My second question follows from the first one: Do you think of your music as being part of a larger stream? In other words, even though there might not be a common practice, do you feel that when an artist working in another medium hears music of yours, they can connect your music to the music of your contemporaries?

Mazzoli: There are some superficial things that connect me to the stream. There’s instrumentation, there’s timbre, use of electronics, the way that samples are used, the way the electric guitar is used. I’m thinking of things that are particular to this era. But I don’t always feel particularly close to the music of my peers. I often feel that I have more in common with writers and visual artists. I try to connect to people in an emotional kind of way.

Rumpus: When someone goes to a concert, it seems to be better if that person has some kind of expectation and can connect that expectation to what he or she is listening to, rather than to go in without a clue. So the question is: What are the clues? I guess what you’re saying is, don’t worry about other musical clues. Just think about what’s going on in the world of the arts in general and maybe even in the world in general. Does that make sense?

Mazzoli: Yes. I don’t think anyone listening to my music needs any special knowledge. They don’t need to have a background in contemporary music. They don’t need to go to new-music concerts all the time in order to be able to understand it. I mean, I write my music with the idea that it will appeal to all of those people, and I want them to go in with all the history that’s within all of us—all the things that they’ve listened to in the backs of their minds, whether it’s country music or minimal techno, or classical music or whatever. I want them to bring that excitement, that love, or that hate, or whatever it might be, to my music. I feel that my music draws on so many different things. The goal is that people will find something of themselves in it. But you don’t need to know what a hexachord is! You don’t need to know what serialism is. You don’t need to know anything technical. It’s more about the state of mind of being open and listening to what’s really going on. And I think that the more open you can be, the better. So maybe it’s not good to have expectations. I have this ideal listener, as John Cage did. This listener doesn’t bring expectations that my music will fit into some part of music history, or that it will do any particular thing. This listener is just open to listening.

Rumpus: There were times when I was at the MacDowell Colony when either I or another composer presented to the whole group and I would ask, say, a writer friend after the presentation, “What did you think? What are your reactions?” The person would say, “Well, I liked it, but I don’t really know because I’m not educated. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Mazzoli: Yes, I hate that! That makes me feel so alienated from people, and it’s completely the opposite from what I want people to feel. I think there’s just been this “thing” that’s developed, this way that we have of talking about our music that alienates people. And I fall into that too! I learned that in graduate school. You just talk about your music in a specific way, and that separates people from you. But some composers like that. Schoenberg liked that. He wanted to feel that he was making music for an elite few. That’s fine for him, but I want to set myself free from that sort of attitude.

Rumpus: What are the things that you do in your concerts that actually prompt the audience to listen in the way that you’d like, rather than in that other way that you don’t like?

Mazzoli: We have a band called Victoire. We travel around and we play my music. I write all the music for the group. It’s the same kind of music that I would write for an orchestra or a string quartet; it’s just as complicated and just as challenging. It’s all there. But I say, “This is my band,” and as soon as I say that a lot of walls fall down. If you say, “I’m a composer,” people are like, “I thought composers were all dead.” But if you say, “I’m in a band,” then the response is, “Oh, my sister’s in a band.” Like they know what that relationship is supposed to be. They’re saying, “You’re going to stand up in front of me, and you’re going to play music you wrote.” So that has been a huge help in getting people to listen to the music, without saying, “Oh, I don’t get it,” or “That’s a string quartet. I don’t listen to string quartets.” Everyone listens to bands. So it’s like meeting the audience halfway with that sort of terminology. I feel like I’m almost fooling them by presenting challenging music to them in a “band” or “pop” context.

Rumpus: When you go to a classical music concert, it’s understood that you’re supposed to keep your mouth shut and you’re not supposed to move for a long time, but when you go and hear a band, that’s not the protocol. When you present your music in this way, do you still expect people to be quiet and sit there for as much as an hour at a time without moving?

Mazzoli: I feel like there’s not this black-and-white division between concert hall music and music that bands play in a bar. I don’t know if this was ever truly the case, but I don’t feel that I need to decide between playing for a sit-down, totally silent audience and playing for a bunch of noisy, drunk people in a bar. What I do with the group is somewhere in between. For example, say we’re playing in an art gallery. Maybe people are moving around. Maybe people leave and they get up and walk around during a song and then they come back. Or in an alternative space, like Le Poisson Rouge or Galapagos here in New York, you can have a beer and there’s a cocktail waitress, but you’re sitting and you’re facing the stage. Of course I love when people are quiet, but I also love when people are comfortable. I love when people emote. The flip side of having a totally silent audience is that they’re less likely to react to you in the space, and I think that’s one of the great things about performing live: you get energy from the audience, and you give energy back to them. There’s interaction.

Rumpus: Would you say that your music is about anything, or would you say that it has its own meaning and that it’s not about anything other than itself?

Mazzoli: It’s definitely about something! For me, writing music is a way of processing the world. It’s not a concrete thing, as in, “This piece is about giraffes.” It’s much more of an emotional sort of thing. I want people to find something out about themselves through my music, something that was inaccessible before, something that they were suppressing, something that they couldn’t really confront. I want my music to be something that people use in order to access parts of themselves. So in that sense, every piece I write is about all emotions at once, about the lines in between. It’s never only about one thing or another. It’s emotionally getting at those things that we can’t really describe—things for which we don’t have labels. So yes, it’s about something, and it has a use. It’s neither about nothing nor about something concrete—it’s about what you bring to it as a listener.

Rumpus: Would you define your music in terms of “narrative vs. non-narrative”? The reason I ask is that this is a question that comes up a lot at artist colonies. When someone felt that he or she really “got” the music, then it didn’t come up. But when someone said, “You know, I don’t really understand what just happened for the last fifteen minutes. Was that a narrative or was it a non-narrative?” What do you think about this in relation to your music?

Mazzoli: Well, I think you just explained it. If the music is good, and if it makes sense as a strong structure and as a drama, and things happen as a result of what happened before, not just as a string of unrelated events, then the question doesn’t come up. I really think of my motives, my melodies, my harmonies, as being these things that are very much alive. They have these little lives of their own that are stretched and pulled, and I do conceive of my music in a very narrative way. For example, what happens if this motive is in a spiral? What does that mean? What does that look like? How does that translate musically? In my piece for eighth blackbird [a wonderful American sextet of musicians who focus on music of our time], I had this idea that the percussion would “eat” the rest of the instruments? It was just this silly visual image from a kid’s book, but that drove the whole structure of the piece. The percussion takes over, and by the end, the percussionist is playing all the parts that you previously heard played by all the other instruments. Things like that, I think, are really important for a composer. And it’s also a personal preference. I just don’t like music that goes from idea to idea to idea without any logic. I mean I know that this is something that a lot of composers my age are doing…and I don’t get it, and I don’t like it.

Rumpus: So do you believe that music really can be “non-narrative,” that things really don’t have to have consequence?

Mazzoli: Sure! I’m not going to say that that’s bad, but I’m really not moved as much by music that does that. There’s some ambient music that doesn’t do anything. I wouldn’t say that that’s narrative. It is narrative in that it creates a sort of world where nothing happens, where really nothing happens, so you become a different person after hearing eight minutes of exactly the same thing. Yes, I hear music all the time in which one idea is strung together to another idea, and I feel that such music is non-narrative.

Rumpus: Who are some writers, visual artists, theater/film artists, and multimedia artists whose work you’re following and care about?

Mazzoli: Oh, so many people! Off the top of my head: I’m really interested in Matthew Zapruder, who is a really fascinating and very musical poet from the Bay Area. His poems read like lyrics, and I feel very connected to them. I’ve always loved the work of Cynthia Hopkins who is a multimedia theater artist and who I actually met at the MacDowell Colony when I was there last year. She is doing a new piece about climate change called “This Clement World.” I’m very excited about the director Robert Woodruff, a theater director here in New York who I worked with a little bit on a piece at BAM last week called “Elsewhere.” I’m really obsessed with his dark vision! I’m reading the new Michael Chabon book, Telegraph Avenue. I’ve always loved his writing. He’s another big MacDowell guy. Visual artists: I’m less up to date on what is hip in the art world right now, but I have some constant favorites. I’m in love with Tim Hawkinson, the sculptor. Sometimes you feel some artists are doing the same thing that you’re doing but in a different field. But they have the same approach. Their method of research and gathering data is the same as yours. I really love the artist Amy Cutler. She does these beautiful drawings that are delicately colored in. They are usually of women doing extreme things. My favorite is one in which four women are pulling a house with their braids. I love magic realism and again, in a convoluted, translated way this is something I try to bring into my music.

Every Noise at Once

Caroline Kangas — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 20:00:48 +0000

All-powerful algorithms strike again!

This time, they bring visualization of relations between all genres of music from Chinese Traditional to Dirty South Rap to Turbo Folk.

Each genre includes a sample of its stylings with further breakdowns of the artists in that genre algorithmically arranged as well.

Call This Playlist Ishmael

Lauren ONeal — Fri, 31 May 2013 15:27:30 +0000

Kick your summer off right with a different kind of beach read: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. (Okay, it’s more of a sea read than a beach read.)

To put you in the right mood, Liberty Hardy over at Book Riot took a stab (from hell’s heart) at a Moby-Dick playlist.

From Tom Waits’s “Starving in the Belly of a Whale” to, well, “[e]very Decemberists song,” the lineup will have you shaking your fist at the heavens with impotent rage in no time.

Songs of Our Lives: “Angel from Montgomery”

Marc Lewis — Fri, 31 May 2013 14:00:45 +0000

If you chase a song from the tips of its branches down its broad trunk, you’ll eventually hit cold soil and muscular roots. Good songs lead somewhere. They are present and fruitful when you need them. You can follow them the way a family follows a name to a great-grandfather on a boat, follow a song backwards and see where it appeared in your life and how you changed, how it changed you. “Angel from Montgomery” is my shadow. The song has been everywhere, and I follow it back.

***

My sister is sitting next to me in the backseat. The top of her head is against the window, the seat belt propping up her chin, and her eyes are closed. She is sleeping the way little sisters do, the way butterflies land on petals, with her eyes shut loosely, the pause fragile, like sleeping is only waiting to get up again. The song comes on the radio of the old blue Volvo and the flick of a Bic lighter makes the dashboard blush. A window is cracked. The song comes into the backseat with the first exhaled drag of a Marlboro Light.

“I am an old woman,” Bonnie Raitt sings. “Named after my mother / My old man is another child that’s grown old.” I remember feeling sorry for the lady, the angel, and looking at my sister and hoping she never found her life coming to a slow-winding close in a kitchen hoping for something more. I remember thinking how sad other families must be, families without the wholeness of my own.

“Angel from Montgomery” is seared to all the perfect moments of my life—there like a blinking light forever reminding me how good things were and how bad things could be for others. It made me want to tell stories, to make a life worthy of a story, to never leave the backseat of that blue Volvo, with the headlights quick in their coming and slow in their red departure, the green street signs sneaking up and flashing by like tombstones in a cemetery I made my sister hold her breath the whole way past. I wanted life to stick right to that moment, there in the backseat with the quiet rush of air from an opened window lifting the edges of my mother’s blond hair and making my sister’s bangs dance above her open, sleeping mouth.

Life doesn’t stick. It doesn’t even linger. Life is butter on a hot rock, holding its constitution until the inevitable pressure of time and heat do their work. Those car rides home from my aunt’s house, the whole family in one car, the smell of gravy lingering on our clothes, were only faded memories when the song came back to me at an apartment in Boone, where I sat stoned and lazy, listening to the wind play with the hills. The screened porch door was open, and the thick smell of a Camel lifted into the apartment’s vaulted ceilings. And there it was, “Angel from Montgomery.” This time it was a man saying he was “an old woman”—John Prine singing about my angel.

“He wrote it,” a friend said when I asked. “Prine writes them all.” Them being either all the good ones ever or all the good ones we were listening to in that apartment overlooking King Street. John Prine. A new name put to a familiar song.

The song entered my life that second time ten years later, around 2005, and lingered. At the time, my sister lived with my mom in Raleigh in a house way too big for just the two of them, and the song made me think of them. It made me wonder if my sister still slept with her eyes barely tucked closed, waiting for something new to come or fearing she might miss some family joke. Maybe, with dad gone and me gone and just mom there, she slept harder, knowing nothing would happen in her absence now that she was the family.

As I listened to Prine coming through a collection of thrift-store speakers, I decided I liked the former better, my sister’s childish, drifting sleep, like she was ready to open her eyes and smile. It’s funny how things like that go. At one point a song comes on and you think it’s the perfect song, that you’re part of the perfect family in a nice car cruising through a calm Raleigh night, and the next time you hear it, you’re on a couch thinking about how, here at school, you’ll start collecting the bricks needed to build a family with a better chance of surviving.

The Old Crow Medicine Show was a college favorite, too, a band that played strings and talked about Raleigh and the Blue Ridge Mountains. But I was out of school when I heard them sing “Angel from Montgomery.” I was riding with my wife on the Beltline around Raleigh, the same road we took home from my aunt’s house all those years ago, just a different part this time.

My wife was next to me, tired and not paying attention, so I turned the music up and let it crawl all over. I was smoking a cigarette, and the air was moving things in the car. The song came back like a habit. It found me again the way an ego finds a mirror in a crowded room. A song sticks better than life; it doesn’t melt. My sister was now off at school up in the mountains I’d just left, with mom alone in the house too big for her, and I was married and having a smoke. The backseat was empty save for some rustling trash and I imagined the next time the song played the backseat might be fuller.

I imagine a kid in the back seat the next time I hear “Angel From Montgomery” on a quiet night riding around Raleigh’s Beltline as the day begins to surrender, and I’ll think of the kid as me. I’ll hope he has perfect nights and envies how his sister sleeps. I’ll hope he smiles at his mom as she wipes a wild strand of hair from the corner of her eye. I’ll hope he remembers how good nights with full families smell. That kid in the backseat listening to the car speakers will be my son, and I’ll hope with everything I’ve got that somewhere along the way he finds a song.

The Rumpus Interview with Dawn Oberg

Rob Rubsam — Wed, 29 May 2013 19:01:43 +0000

Dawn Oberg’s writing covers a range simultaneously comedic and biting, sad and sardonic. Her music finds a new way to twist the knife in, or maybe deliver an earnest compliment, while never allowing a listener to pin her down. When I listen, I imagine a particularly diverse lounge or club, with punks and hipsters uneasily nudging into people who, for whatever reason, are wearing their grandparents’ finest evening dress. It’s a strange image, but it works.

The songs on her newest album, Rye, are jazzy and accessible, hitting classic rock and country targets with ease. Her lyrics can be witty but sincere, honest but sarcastic. They are also frequently hilarious, drawing on unique images and turns of phrase that recall John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. It’s an album that, in Dawn’s words, will “give you head and do your taxes.” Sounds about right to me.

On the phone from San Francisco, she talked to the Rumpus about moving from a red state, having people laugh at painful songs, and seeing old friends while on tour.

***

The Rumpus: How long have you been playing piano?

Dawn Oberg: Since I was seven. I guess 39 years. Except that I didn’t play for all but a few years in my 20s. For some reason, I was just playing guitar.

Rumpus: This is something I realized, given that I’ve played guitar for a really long time and only recently started to learn piano, but piano seems like more of a songwriter’s instrument, in the sense that it’s very malleable. Would you agree with that?

Oberg: Yeah, I would now, but it’s weird: when I started, my first songs that I wrote were on guitar. When you’re starting out, it might be even easier to do it on guitar. I don’t know, maybe my path was just weird.

Rumpus: Comparing a lot of guitar-based songwriters with piano-based ones, they seem to have a grasp of a wider range of styles, because just speaking of the instrument, it’s easier just to look at the keyboard and modify certain notes.

Oberg: Well, I feel like it’s physically easier to have more harmonic possibilities on the piano, so there’s that. I have kind of a crazy chord vocabulary. I couldn’t play the songs I’m doing now on guitar to save my life. I’ve had really good guitar players complain about it.

Rumpus: What kind of music did you start playing when you were younger?

Oberg: I took piano lessons, so I played beginner classical stuff, and whatever they had—school songs, church songs. I played in church a little bit. And then I started doing more poppy stuff, when I was maybe 11 or 12. I would get sheet music for pop songs and stuff.

Rumpus: You said during your 20s you were mostly playing guitar. Was the style of music you were playing significantly different from what you’re playing now?

Oberg: Yeah, the stuff I wrote was really twisted drinking songs, folk and country. I ended up having this band for a little bit called Honky Tonk Happy Hour. We put out a whole record of that stuff called You Drank My Backwash.

Rumpus: When you write, do you have the larger arrangements in mind?

Oberg: Not really. Sometimes, depending on the town or what’s available, it just sounds out like something I wouldn’t have thought of. That was especially true with my last record, where the producer brought in different people, and maybe it wouldn’t have been something I’d have thought of, but they were great. This record, I would have probably had more similar arrangements to the last record, but in San Francisco the studio talent just wasn’t as good as it was in Nashville. I brought in a couple people who didn’t give me anything I could use. So I didn’t plan on having any guitar on this record, but I ended up having like six tracks of guitar, and what I ended up with was really great. Roger Rocha was fantastic, and Chris Von Sneidern did a great job on the first track. I like how it ended up, it just wasn’t what I planned, you know?

Rumpus: Can you describe what your process is like for coming up with a song?

Oberg: Usually it’s a concept, and I try to do the best job I can to articulate that concept, and what happens is I’ll scribble or type for six pages. This is never ever in one sitting—it usually takes me a few months to finish anything. I’ll have a whole bunch of psychic vomit on a page or Word document or whatever, and of course I have to do a lot of editing, but pretty soon, maybe a form emerges. I get some kind of meter and form happening, and a structure, maybe a verse and a chorus. And by then, I’m usually hearing the music in my head when that happens. And then it’s a matter of working it out. I’m totally Zen about melody. I assume it already exists in the words, but chords are a matter of working things out.

Rumpus: If and when you have writer’s block, do you have any specific tools to break it?

Oberg: Yeah, you just write down all your bad ideas. Because the thing is, you have—well, I have anyway—tons of bad ideas, and if you don’t have any good ideas, the bad ideas are there, and you just have to get them out of your head and onto the page. It’s important to actually just write them out, to clear the way for good ideas.

Rumpus: I saw in the press release that you’re involved in the literary scene in San Francisco. What have you done there?

Oberg: My own involvement is mostly as a listener, and I’ll go to a lot of events, but I also am asked to play at some of the events. They’ll have a musical guest. I’ve played in a couple Rumpus events—those are a lot of fun, I like those a lot.

Rumpus: Do you think that being involved in that sort of thing impacts how you write or how you think about writing?

Oberg: Not really. I think I kind of had a solid sense of my voice before getting involved in that, before moving back to San Francisco. I think I’ve found a good audience for it that maybe I didn’t have before, so it’s a good match, I think.

Rumpus: This seems obvious, but things are pretty different in San Francisco than they are in Nashville, in that regard?

Oberg: Oh yeah.

Rumpus: How long did you live in Nashville?

Oberg: Fifteen years.

Rumpus: Oh, okay, so a while. This is a very vague question, but what was that like?

Oberg: First of all, there’s a sick amount of talent there. There’s a reason people like to record there, and I hope that for my next record I can go there for overdubs. I really liked doing my basic tracks at Hyde Street, and I definitely would like to work with Roger Rocha again, but for instruments like pedal steel and cello, stuff like that, I definitely want to go to Nashville. But what was it like? It was weird. I feel like I didn’t fit in anywhere, like I didn’t fit into the songwriter scene there, or the country scene. I hung out with the punks until I got too old to stay up ’til 2 in the morning and go to work the next day. Sometimes with my country band I would open up punk shows, but after that, I didn’t have any community, so that sort of made that isolating for me.

Rumpus: I remember in a video of one of the Rumpus events you played you said that you were happy you were in San Francisco after living in a red state for so long. Did that have to do with helping to feel out of place?

Oberg: Yeah, maybe, it’s definitely politically liberating to move back to SF, to not feel like I could be discriminated against for having an anti-war stance, for example. Nashville, the city itself is blue, like Memphis is blue, but you have to have your reality impacted by these people with a really Republican mindset. Maybe not all Republicans are assholes, but they’re out there, and sometimes you’re subject to their bullshit. I don’t know how else to say it.

Rumpus: Why did you decide to move back to San Francisco?

Oberg: Oh, it was just because I could. It was the most amazing thing: I went there for a vacation in March 2009 with my partner at the time, and we were just smitten with it. And when we got back, that Wednesday I was accepted to an online grad school program. I had lost my job, I got laid off, and I was working at the First Amendment center, and then that Sunday, my old roommate from the first time I lived in SF mentioned on Facebook that he was subletting a room. I mentioned this to my partner and he was like, “Ask him when and how much,” and from there it snowballed into this thing where it was like, “Yeah, let’s move.” So I sold my house in the worst market in history, and my house sold in two weeks.

Rumpus: Have you seen any long-term trends in your work, or have you majorly changed your work ethic or your focus over time?

Oberg: In the last 10 years or so, not very much has changed. I feel like I’ve kind of been lazy the last couple years, and I need to fix that so I can write my next record.

Rumpus: About Rye: over how long were most of the songs written?

Oberg: Oh, two of the songs were outtakes from my last record, but other than that I’d say there were all written during the last three or four years.

Rumpus: In terms of lyrics, do you have any particular touchstones that you think really influence you?

Oberg: I think I was kind of influenced by Cole Porter. God, it sounds so pretentious to say that, but I mean, I learned the guy’s songs, like off of records and stuff, and learning other people’s songs by ear on a chordal instrument will influence you. I know that Bob Dylan influenced me because my writing changed after going through a Bob Dylan phase in my 20s. It was almost like a cruel joke on the part of my muse where I would start alliterating to an obnoxious extent, without even trying. That’s just the shit that would come into my mind. For better or worse, it influenced me. I can’t even blame Bob, because he was never that obnoxious about it. [laughs] It’s just what my brain did to it, you know.

Rumpus: I guess it’s just how you processed what you were listening to.

Oberg: Yeah.

Rumpus: When you’re writing, do you try and have your lyrics cover a lot of ground? I noticed that a lot of the songs on the album are pretty funny, in a pretty wide variety of ways. The first time I listened to the song “To That Extent,” I laughed. Do you try and have them cover, like I said, that amount of ground, or different kinds of emotional reactions?

Oberg: No. It’s funny—when I recorded the vocals for “To that Extent,” I was pouring my heart out in that little isolation booth, and I saw the engineer just like laughing, shaking. And holy shit, here I am, singing this sad song, and he’s laughing. But I’m glad, because it makes people laugh, but I don’t try and be anything, I just be. [laughs]

Rumpus: Does that happen a lot, where what you’re putting into it is not how other people are seeing it?

Oberg: Well, it’s weird. People do bring their own interpretations to things. Someone compared the song “To That Extent” to “The End of the Continent.” I was writing about a really cruel person, and I was writing about myself, you know? And “Gentleman and a Scholar,” I wrote that as a birthday present to someone I really admired, and a journalist said I was skewering a pretentious kind of person. And I didn’t mean that at all—it was a very sincere compliment.

Rumpus: When you’re planning a tour, are there certain kinds of venues, or certain cities you aim to be at?

Oberg: You know, I would have liked to include more cities on this tour. I had a booking person do it for me, and he wasn’t able to get venues for every city. Definitely one day I’d like to play in New Orleans, and that’s not on this tour at all. For me, the most fun, exciting things are places where I get to see old friends or people I haven’t seen in a long time, so like Minneapolis and Nashville are great that way. I’m excited about playing in New York, never done that before. But I might know like one or two people at the show, and Boston I think I have one friend coming, so maybe I’ll see people I know. Chicago, one journalist came to see me, and it was nice to talk to him, but no one was there to see me, and that’s what it’s been like, except when relatives and friends show up.

Rumpus: It seems like you’re playing a pretty broad cross-section of venues; I saw you wereplaying a couple bars and cafés and things like that.

Oberg: Yeah, most of them are bars. Minneapolis, I just played at this café, and I asked my booking guy to move it to a club, like a real club, because I had people coming, and he was unable to get another place. And I tried myself to book it in a real venue too, and I wasn’t able to get it. I guess Minneapolis is hard or we didn’t do it far enough in advance.

Rumpus: If you could have a listener hear the record in an ideal situation or circumstance, what would that be?

Oberg: The first thing that comes to my mind is in my car, because I do all my important listening in the car. If they don’t have a car, and they’re a green-friendly pedestrian or public-transport-taker, I would gladly have them hear it on headphones or earbuds.

Songs of Our Lives: Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” and the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy”

David Grossman — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:30:15 +0000

It’d be a stretch to say that Johnny Cash and Iggy Pop are connected in any meaningful way. Both are patron saints of The Holy Order of White Dudes With Guitars, sure, and drugs, but that’s about it. They’re forever glued together in my mind, tied together by my putting a razor blade to my neck when I was 16.

It wasn’t because of Johnny Cash or Iggy that I did what I did; I’ll get that out of the way right now. I was 16 and didn’t understand a lot of what was going on in my own mind. I imagine that’s a common trait among everyone who is 16. Like the Italian noble convinced the world had to be flat, I’d spend an inordinate time after high school tearing down established fact. I knew I had ADHD when in reality I had Asperger’s, I knew I was hopelessly addicted to masturbation when in fact I was just 16. But above all, I knew that I was dead to the world, that I’d never feel anything. I often imagined myself as a cold, practically dead body, floating down a river until I actually died. After the razor blade I’d be diagnosed with clinical depression, but before that, the only real kicks I got were out of listening to The Stooges Raw Power.

That’s an oversimplification, of course: I listened to other music in 2002. But somehow, thinking about The Vines doesn’t conjure as powerful memories as coming home from yeshiva and blasting “Search and Destroy,” the original testosterone blast from Hell. “I’m a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm!”, it begins. What does that even mean? It’s insane, it’s horrifying, and when James Osterberg brings it to your attention, you know it’s true. It switches between desperate cries for help and endless machismo, the type of things that would later mark the best Black Flag songs. And on top of that add a boa constrictor guitar, one that paralyzes and strangles you until you’re just left with twitching, unable to comprehend anything that isn’t James Williamson owning your soul. I’d put on headphones and stare at myself in the bathroom full-length mirror, pacing back and forth while silently mouthing the lyrics, hitting my chest in the faint hopes that the pure rage of the song could wake me up somehow, make me alive again.

When that didn’t work, I’d put on Johnny Cash. As American IV’s name suggests, it was the fourth in Cash’s series of comeback records under Rick Rubin’s direction, a Lana Del Rey-type “new music with old roots” thing that was, like Del Rey’s rise to fame, helped by the fact that Cash had a voice that could cut through any barrier, time or otherwise. Any song he covered, it turned out, would instantly be his, torn asunder from its original form and born anew, rising from the gravel and the dirt into the stars. That’s what happened with “Personal Jesus,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and it’s what happened with “Hurt.”

I didn’t know who Trent Reznor was back then and didn’t need to; the song was Cash’s. The video, set in a decrepit Cash family museum, sets the tone: falling apart, physically, spiritually, emotionally. “What have I become, my sweetest friend? Everyone I knows goes away in the end.” The video makes it clear that Cash is talking to his departed wife, June, but there’s a universality in Reznor’s words that could apply to anybody. What got to me was, “You are someone else, I am still right here.” That was it, that’s what I had been trying to tell the therapists and the doctors for all those years. At yeshiva, Cash was mocked as feeble and weird, an old guy putting his hat on backwards and rapping. But I was convinced that if I just listened to the right songs for long enough, things would get better. They didn’t.

Through no one’s fault I had been taking a medication for my ADHD/Asperger’s that triggered terrible brain chemistry, tacking paranoia onto a growing depression. My therapy sessions started getting creepy, I would stare at a wall in Dr. Selin’s office in silence for an hour, convinced that I was proving something to the world. Even if they couldn’t completely heal me, Cash and The Stooges provided the only bandages that felt like they were worth a damn.

So, the actual suicide attempt? It came on one of those nights where I would yell along to Raw Power (“Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell”), insulting myself as usual and trying to force some semblance of what I had deemed “real feeling” (a shorthand for “happiness” since I had dismissed the idea that depression could be a real feeling, a real place that it was okay to be in at times). The blade only moved a couple inches along my neck. That was enough to make me nearly collapse in tension. Mad at myself for failing and happy, for the first time in a while, to be alive, I turned to my mind’s “Pretty Face” b-side: Cash’s cover of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Fiona Apple’s background vocals make it a gorgeous duet, one full of love and tenderness. “I will ease your mind,” they both sang, and they did. I listened to that song about fifty times that night, crying and figuring out two things: that I’d hit rock bottom, and that even if music couldn’t save me, it could be my best friend, for arguing and for reminiscing and for feeling like tomorrow might be okay. I haven’t listened to either album since.

For me, to paraphrase the poet Wallace Stevens, Raw Power and American IV are one. Raw Power and American IV and a razor blade are one. Music doesn’t just change us, I learned. We change the music we listen to, just by living every day around it.

The Rumpus Interview with Julianna Barwick

Erin Lyndal Martin — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:18:24 +0000

With her haunting voice looped in a wordless glossolalia over pianos, keyboards, and other instruments, Julianna Barwick makes music like no other artist working today. She’s as winning as she is distinctive, judging by the rave reviews she received for her 2011 Asthmatic Kitty debut The Magic Place—not to mention her two prior albums, Sanguine and Florine. In addition to building up a host of good press, Barwick’s charming music has earned her invitations to perform at Connecticut landmark The Glass House and at the Guggenheim, where she accompanied a sculpture exhibit.

No stranger to collaboration, she has remixed the likes of Radiohead, contributed backing vocals to Sharon van Etten tracks, and released an album with Helado Negro (aka Roberto Carlos Lange) as Ombre.

Fall of 2013 will find her releasing a new full-length record, this one recorded in Iceland. We spoke together about the release of her two-track EP Pacing.

***

The Rumpus: I’ve been listening to your new EP a lot. I just put it on and realize I’ve listened to it seven times! Where did you record that?

Julianna Barwick: I recorded that in the practice space ’cause there was a piano. I actually just got my own practice space. This was a borrowed one during the cold months of last year, sitting around with more piano-driven stuff.

Rumpus: Where do the titles come from on this EP?

Barwick: Actually, “Call” has been a song I’ve had for many years. I used to perform it, and it’s one of the first things I made with my loop station. I think I built it up on a keyboard first with very little vocals. So it was a song that was always in my head, but I played it on the piano, and it sounded different and way more beautiful than the keyboard arrangement. I always remembered that song and wanted to kind of flesh it out in a different way.

“Pacing” is a new one, and when I make a song, it usually exists for a while before I name it. I usually just listen to it a lot and see what it feels like. And that seems to fit.

Rumpus: How did you come to make vocal music without lyrics?

Barwick: I think it was just kind of happenstance. I didn’t mean to do that, not intentionally. When I first started playing around with my voice, I had a guitar pedal that would loop. But you could only loop one thing. With the thing I use now, the RC-50, you can have three different ones going at the same time—a lot more dynamic. I just started making sounds. Instead of saying something on the spot, I would just sing, kind of like I’ve always done. I’ve done it my whole life. My mom does it too, humming, singing.

So I just started making music that way. My first album is pretty much all those loops I made when I first started playing around with it. It’s completely wordless. I just liked the way it felt. It was fun to sing that way, and I’m also really nervous and shy about committing to lyrics, so the two go hand in hand. I really appreciate when people are great songwriters, because I feel like that’s something I would struggle with, writing song-songs and committing to something so concrete.

Rumpus: If you look at Meredith Monk or Elizabeth Fraser or Lisa Gerrard, they’re all still really expressive without words. I don’t think it’s a necessity.

Barwick: With soundtracks or Sigur Ros, it’s either wordless or I have no idea what they’re saying, but that emotion comes across regardless. I like that idea.

Rumpus: How much of your music is improvised and how much is planned?

Barwick: I don’t ever go into recording and think, I’m gonna do this and it’s gonna sound like this. A hundred percent of the music I’ve made has started out with jamming, basically. Plugging my stuff in, singing what comes to the top of my head, and then building on that. Later, I’ll get nerdy about it and do things: fading in and out, putting instruments on top. I can’t think of an exception, unless it’s a remix, and I’ve only done two of those. It starts with me playing around and then piecing it together later.

Rumpus: I watched the video of your Glass House performance. I don’t even know the Glass House, so can you talk about that performance?

Barwick: I’d never been there before. I was really excited to be asked to do it. I know that no music had ever been performed in the space there before—ever. The space is so beautiful and so special and so unique. I just felt flattered and honored to play in there. It made me a little nervous, which I usually don’t get nervous. The setting was really inspiring. It made me think about the importance of environment. It’s just visually stunning, and it felt great to be in that space. Just an extremely unique performing experience for me.

Rumpus: You’ve also performed at the Guggenheim, accompanying a sculpture exhibit. Did you feel that the sculpture was an influence on what you were performing?

Barwick: I got to walk around the Guggenheim before I played it. There was an amazing Francesca Woodman exhibit there also. I’d never seen her work before, somehow, even though I did photography in school. I can definitely say that the Guggenheim and the Glass House were similar. They made me feel reverent. Such a great thing to be in a historical place and playing there! Visually, both places are stunning. Normally, when I’m performing, I kind of hide behind my hair and do my own thing, but both of those places, I kept reminding myself to look around and take it in, because both of them are extraordinary places to play.

Rumpus: Do you think you’ll do another Ombre record?

Barwick: I could see that happening. Roberto and I are really good friends, and we liked doing that record, and he liked hanging out with me. I wouldn’t be suprised if we did something in the next year or two. I’d say there’s about a 65% chance there will be another Ombre record. This was the first time I made a record with someone, collaborated with someone several times a week for a long time. Roberto was the perfect person for me to do that with. We’re both easygoing. Roberto was the perfect introduction to collaboration.

Rumpus: Switching subjects, what are some of your non-musical obsessions?

Barwick: I would definitely say the top three that spring to mind are traveling, photography and the visual arts, and food. I love all of those things, and that’s why in late 2007, I had probably maybe played five shows ever and went over to Lisbon and lived there for a few weeks, just flying by the seat of my pants. [I] lived there and played a few shows and did some radio. I thought, If I did this for real for real, I would get to travel and try new foods and meet these people and see all this beauty and take these pictures. That’s when it sealed the deal for me. I thought, If I can make this happen, I’ll be the happiest person ever. It’s true. All of those things are my favorite in the world. I think if I had one wish—I’ve thought about this—I’d be able to speak every language and go everywhere and try every food. I’m super happy that music is letting me do those things.

Rumpus: What projects do you have coming up?

Barwick: I have a new record coming out probably end of August, early September. Full-length. I recorded it in Iceland last year. It was just beyond an amazing experience and I’m super, super excited about it. I can’t wait to see it make its debut. I’m still working on [the title]. With The Magic Place, everything came so easy. I did the art and the design by myself, and the titles came super-easy. I don’t know what it is about this record. I just want it to be absolutely perfect, so it’s taking me a lot longer to decide on this one.

ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE

Helena Fitzgerald — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:01:33 +0000

I’m seventeen, and my Dad and I are on a train between Boston and New Haven. We’re visiting colleges, and we’ve rented a car to drive up and down the Eastern Seaboard. This plan, however, has been derailed by a snowstorm, which is how we’ve ended up on a train between Boston and New Haven one desolate, snowy February afternoon. In Boston we stopped at a record store where I bought a Counting Crows album while my Dad made friends with the Nick Hornby character working at the register and I, being a teenager, did my best to ignore them. Now, on the train, my dad hands me a stack of CDs he’s bought. “Here,” he says. “This is important. Don’t talk to me again until you have an opinion about Bob Dylan.”

I had never listened to Bob Dylan before except in the way that it’s impossible not to have listened to Bob Dylan. His unfriendly, indecipherable whine and mumble is ubiquitous to American culture, to the air and sky and car radio and malls and Starbucks of the nation and probably the world. But if I’d listened before, I’d never noticed. I took the Counting Crows out of my portable CD player, and put in Blonde on Blonde. My Dad had also bought me Highway 61 Revisited, Blood on the Tracks, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home, and Desire, and I’d get to all of them, eventually, each one its own singular obsession and backdrop to a particular section of my life. But during that train ride, the rest of that year, and in a way the rest of my life, I never really got past Blonde on Blonde.

Blonde on Blonde is, admittedly, kind of a weird album to give to your teenage kid. Although I know I’m not the only child of the I-Had-Tickets-to-Woodstock-But-Didn’t-Go generation whose parents put Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and the Stones on the You Need To Know This list along with great literature and Carl Sagan and geometry and how to drive.

But my main memory of that first listen is of being plunged into the depiction of experiences I had never had. As the album begins, the harmonica and the guitar and the rest of the band, exhausted, high out of their mind and fed up with this byzantine ritual of a recording session, assaults you with the opening of “Rainy Day Women Nos 12 & 35.” Dylan, according to legend, wrote the songs on Blonde on Blonde in a minute-beyond-the-last-minute speed-fueled race, locked in the studio after the time they were supposed to start recording had come and gone. He didn’t emerge until around 4am, and the session men chain-smoking and playing cards while they waited for him had never seen the songs before playing them. They had no idea how long these tracks would be, no idea Dylan would, in the era of the three-minute radio barrier, ask them to record five and eight and ten and twelve minute songs. Much of the energy and noise of this first track on the album, the giddy, drunk-parade build of it is the sound of a bunch of the best and most famous session-men in Nashville growing more and more confused as yet another verse comes after the last verse they played, as one more time the song, for some reason they can’t understand, doesn’t end but insists on repeating its nonsense. The album is the sound of a bunch of people trying to learn how to do something while doing it for the first time, baffled at what it asks of them.

The first words Dylan utters are about getting stoned. So is the rest of the four minutes and thirty seconds of the opening track. Everyone was getting stoned — Dylan, Dylan’s band, the people they were singing about and the audience they were singing to. I was a very sheltered teenager and had never done any drugs at all. If everybody was getting stoned, I wasn’t everybody. The album reminded me that I was waiting to enter the experiences everyone else in the world was already having.

In the thirteen other tracks that follow, Blonde on Blonde moves through lust, regret, adultery, love, marriage, divorce, and why it’s a bad idea to mix whiskey and gin. I had never done any of these things. I wanted to be the person singing, and I wanted to be all the people Dylan sang about, all the begging and heartbreaking and abject and unfaithful women. I wanted to be all the train-jumping cowboys and drunks and liars and poets passed out in alleyways as whom Dylan disguises himself. I wanted to be Joanna and Louise and Marie and the debutantes and chambermaids who betrayed him and lied to him and bummed cigarettes from him, and were such crazy bitches that he had to write a song about them. I wanted in. The album was the warm yellow window of someone else’s house as you walk by on a cold night. Listening to it was the feeling you get when you look into this stranger’s window and wish you lived there.

I liked the complexity of the songs. I liked that I didn’t get it. I liked that it didn’t seem to want me to get it. I liked that Bob Dylan didn’t seem to like me and seemed annoyed that I liked him so much. I listened to that album every night as I fell asleep the entire year before I left for college, not to mention in my car and in my room and on my headphones walking around while awake. It became the language for the new world of adulthood that was approaching,that as far as I was concerned couldn’t come fast enough.

Arguably, the defining experience of adulthood is falling in love. Dylan is disdainful of or resigned about or angry at all the Louises and Joannas and Maries and women-who-are-probably-Joan-Baez in the first thirteen songs on the album. He launches a whole host of emotion at women, in general and in specific, but it’s not until the final track that he deals with the central experience of maturation: Falling in love. Knocked on your ass, whole life given up to another person. Gone, surrendered, fucked, whatever you want to call it. Falling in love.

“Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is eleven minutes and twenty seconds of infuriating, boring, indecipherable music that has been accurately described as the greatest love song of the 20th century. For the length of an entire side of a record (as it was originally released), Dylan does nothing but list nonsensical attributes of the woman to whom he’s singing. The lyrics are even more opaque than most of his songs. The music has no variation, dragging around and around in a circle. It feels like the end of the night, after the party’s been dismantled and the bar’s been closed and everyone’s gone home except one last drunk couple, half-asleep and slow-dancing to music only they can hear. The song is a closed experience, and feels the way it does when, in loving one person, you are happy to shut down and ignore the rest of the vivid, pointless, crowded world that isn’t them. It’s not for the people listening, the people buying the album, playing it in their homes, playing it at parties and on the radio. It’s for one woman. The list is an accounting; in love we want to gather the object of our feeling to us, as though if we could know them well enough, could list them comprehensively, we could finally fully possess them. The repetition, starting over again and again, shows how we never quite do, how we always fail.

I grew up, got into college, left home, moved to New York, got laid, got stoned, fell in love, betrayed people, left people and was left, hurt people and was hurt. Eventually I did all the things Dylan whines about on Blonde on Blonde. I never stopped listening to the album. When I finally did get stoned, it never felt enough like “Rainy Day Woman No.s 12 & 35.” Every time I take any kind of drug, I hope this time it will. But it never has, and being in love has never felt quite like “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” either. Not that the songs were incorrect about the experiences, and not that the experiences have been unspectacular or lacking. But that, spectacular as they may have been, they never lived up to the Dylan songs that had first imagined them for me.

I tend to share albums and songs with the people I date, and therefore tend to lose a lot of music in breakups. I have ruined every single song and album and band and artist I have ever loved by associating it with a relationship. Every single one except Blonde on Blonde. Perhaps that’s happy accident, but I don’t think so. My relationship to the album is already a complete relationship, in and of itself. Not only does it not need a flesh-and-blood relationship to link itself to, I don’t think it has space for one. I think the things we love most, we don’t want anyone else to understand. We are selfish with them as with the people we love, feeling that we will dilute their importance through sharing.

The way Blonde on Blonde sounds is what we miss about the people we love but choose to leave anyway, what we never get over about them. A friend of mine would say, much later, Bob Dylan made her feel like she’d known her Dad when he was young. When she told me this, I’d realize, perhaps just a little, why my Dad had bought six CDs on a train ride from Boston to New Haven and told me not to talk to him until I had an opinion about them. This is literally the music of my parents’ past, but it’s also the music of the things we can’t quite share with people, the attempt to make someone part of your past despite the fact that they can’t ever quite understand your past because they weren’t there. This album makes me feel like I knew my parents when they were young, and at the same time reminds me how much I didn’t, how much I can’t ever know what their life was like before me. When you love someone, it becomes painful that you weren’t part of their past, that they weren’t part of yours. This album is the attempt to make someone part of a past experience by telling them about it, the attempt to enter someone’s past by listening closely enough to the stories about it. We build our expectations of love, of getting stoned, of any life experience, from someone else’s stories. Those stories are always fictions. When we encounter the actual experience in our own life, the distance between it and the expectation is always present. This album manages to be an expression of that omnipresent distance, the ache and comfort at the center of it, raucous and elegiac, passed down imperfectly through generations.

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