Eric Leuschner has been active in Seattle’s creative underground for 15 years, as a multidisciplinary artist, producer, and advocate. He has been in a variety of local bands, and his new band, ULGM, has just completed their debut EP that blends folksy instrumentation with alt-rock attitude, and caps it all with a roots country twang and Leuschner’s distinctive voice. I asked him a little about his unique sound, his mystifying yet satisfying lyrics, and about what’s wrong with the world.
Listen to ULGM’s debut EP here.
The Rumpus: Let’s start out with the basics. Who is ULGM?
Eric Leuschner: ULGM is me, Eric Petterson, and Myke Fedyk. In a sense ULGM has its roots way back in the mid nineties, in a slum between the Alpha Delts and a bona fide crack house in the University District (long since demolished and turned into respectable student housing). Eric and I recorded a song back in 1994 called “Stealing Stuff’s Alright With Me”. The band name was “Eric, Eric, Eric, and Some Asshole Banging a Chair with a Golf Club”. There was actually a third Eric and an asshole, and we sat around slapping piles of loose change for rhythm and banging a crappy vinyl chair with a crappy 9 iron and feeling brilliant and free. I couldn’t play guitar by then, so I only belted out “Stealing Stuff’s Alright With Me” over and over again with as much soul as I could manage. I felt invisible, through a kind of the underachiever Buddha mind a la “Slacker”. So I could make art at any time in any way, all without consequence but with what I thought was radical authenticity.
Rumpus: How would you describe your sound? What music is influencing you right now?
Leuschner: The sound we were going for with these three songs was not very deliberate, but we definitely wanted to play with vocal harmonies and show off Petterson’s guitar. I was really into on Neil Young’s “On The Beach” while we put these together and I feel it had an influence. The lyrics on that album are exactly the sort of highly evocative nonsense that I love. The other big influence was obviously ULCC, the last formal “band” I was in, unless you count the Whitey Joe Dork Band. Bear in mind that I’ve been in “retirement” for about 5 years and now that I’ve got the music bug again, not surprisingly I sound a lot the same. This is not a bad thing. I’m looking forward to a lot of experimentation and evolution, but I think I’ll always come back to the folksy bedrock. I’ve been covering a Sun City Girls folk hymn called “I deal a stick” that just hits home for me. It’s a three chord rambling paranoid fuck-you to the conspiracy. A nice campfire song for the end times. This makes me happy and angry.
Rumpus: Can you talk about this “highly evocative nonsense” you mention? Your lyrics, it seems to me, deal in thematics more than linear progression. They seem to have a narrative, in that events or anecdotes are creates or related, but the thread holding them together seems impressionistic. What you say your “concerns” are as a lyricist? Or is that even a sane question to ask?
Leuschner: I may start with an idea when I get to writing, but unrelated phrases or words emerge and stake out territory in a refrain or rhyme, and I always run with it. The story becomes secondary to the mood or emotion, so it’s more expressionist than impressionist. Pixies and Wolf Parade are great at this, dropping you without warning into the middle of a weird movie, you get a sense of action and drama but not much of a thread actually holding anything together.
As for my “concerns”, it might be a sane question if I knew what you meant. Like, subject matter or themes?
Rumpus: Yeah, there seems to be a rather significant political strain running through your songs. Are there subjects–political or otherwise—you find yourself returning to?
Leuschner: Looking back, I’m honestly having a hard time pointing to any strong themes. Apocalyptic colors for sure. Political in that I don’t sing flatteringly about the state of affairs around here. There is an ecstatic tendency in there, sometimes zany madcap EJACULATIONS, other times tense and windswept. But there was some sweetness in there too, like the Pablo Neruda covers or the lullaby for my niece. I like telling stories via hints. I like plagiarism. Combined, you get ULCC’s “Banjo”, Mark Twain verbatim mixed with a story about euphonium player in the Marines who confesses that he had killed Anwar Sadat. That felt political to me. Therefore, I can’t actually write message songs. I can relate to the grumpy Bob Dylan from the 1966 Playboy interview. I don’t necessarily want to be understood, and that’s great.
Rumpus: What’s wrong with the world, and can art make a difference?
Leuschner: There’s no shortage of what’s wrong with the world. Violence, corruption, exploitation, ignorance, complicity, poverty, insanity, catastrophe, it’s hell, really. Now try to conceive of all the bad stuff happening simultaneously, every day with no end in sight. I really like Andy Goldsworthy. He stacks rocks, and I’m suddenly astonished and connected with the cosmos. My life is enriched. Art can move mountains, heal the sick, and entertain. Most art is insipid decadent crapola that diminishes my life (even if I like it). There is no excuse for this much art. We need nurses, dammit. But I won’t stop anybody from making art, and I can only hope that tolerating this many artists means that a handful of them might be geniuses enough to nourish me and save the world.
