“I wish we were more popular so I could play in theaters and make albums with Daniel Lanois, but we’re lucky we get this much.”
I first met singer-songwriter Jerry DeCicca of The Black Swans when I was living in Columbus, Ohio, a town known more for rowdy college football riots than its music scene. Jerry was working at Used Kids Records, one of those rare indie record stores where you could still find a bargain on used vinyl. More approachable than the other clerks, Jerry offered recommendations from Townes Van Zandt to Tinariwen that were reliably spot-on for where I was at in life. Later, I saw him perform solo with a guitar, harmonica, and a strange voice that conveyed an unusually honest despair. When The Black Swans released their debut, Who Will Walk in the Darkness with You? (2004), I picked up a copy (at Used Kids of course), and found its simple, direct language and sparse arrangements compelling.
I left Columbus not long after arriving but those Black Swans songs stayed with me. A string of excellent releases followed including Sex Brain (2006), Change! (2007), and most recently, Words Are Stupid (2010). Years later I was lucky enough to catch up with Jerry DeCicca for this interview.
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The Rumpus: I was thinking about the Sex Brain E.P – the history of country and folk songs is rife with love gone wrong, heartache, loneliness, but this batch of songs gets right to the point in a way that you’d be hard pressed to find in the songwriting tradition your work stems from. Sure, contemporaries like Will Oldham may be known for letting a bit of pure id-ego slip out into song from time to time, but Sex Brain comes at it with a unique and persistent candor. Did you have to fight your own inhibitions when writing this collection of songs?
Jerry DeCicca: Only for a minute. It began with one song and then turned into a batch of them inspired by the theme. I like how sex is written about in poetry and country blues, but in pop and folk music it’s always done by frat boys or with very polite, played-out euphemisms. Our first record is humorless, lyrical, and super sad sounding. I wanted Sex Brain to be different, funny but sincere, full of concrete details, smart, and with something psychological going on, more sweet than macho. I remember some poems in a Donald Hall book really inspiring me by how blunt and real they were. I remember thinking, I bet his mom hates this book. And that was my cue, really. If this is good, mom will not like it. It isn’t very digestible or the type of thing you’re comfortable taking into consideration. And, because no matter what character you inhabit in your writing, it is the singer that gets tagged. People have a hard time separating the lyrics from the singer in music. There’s the danger of fearing, will people think I’m a creep now? Or, will I lose my job? People did ask me, “Did you really masturbate on your futon while listening to Bob Dylan?” I read somewhere once that Eric Clapton asked Bob Marley if he really shot the sheriff. Really? It’s a bit of a rub because you don’t want people to be so dim and literal, yet you’re hoping they believe you in the moment of the song. It helps to have band mates that are willing and excited to stand on stage and claim those ideas with you. My mom whispered the word “spooning” while scolding me on the phone. Success!
Rumpus: You recently produced an album by Larry Jon Wilson, an obscure 70s country songwriter/storyteller from Georgia. Can you talk a bit about how that recording session came to be? What’s it like transitioning from “knowing” someone through their work to actually meeting and collaborating with that artist on a new project?
DeCicca: I met Larry Jon in Dan Penn’s kitchen. I was lucky enough to write the liner notes to a CD in the UK that allowed me to meet LJW, Dan Penn, Donnie Fritts, Billy Swan, and a lot of the great southern session players. The recording with LJW came out of the next three years of arm-wrestling and trust. He hadn’t made a record in almost 30 years and being a singer-songwriter is his identity, so you can imagine what a big deal a new record becomes. There were a lot of recording options since it was paid for by a Sony imprint in the UK before Drag City licensed it. In the end, we rented a high rise condo in Perdio Key, overlooking the Gulf Shores, where LJW has friends and history. Spent ten days making a solo acoustic record, which is nuts. I guess I can’t say much more than that about the recording because it was a pretty private time, but I will say that all the songs were first takes, except “Shoulders” which was a second take. If you’re familiar with the record, you know that’s pretty intense.
As far as being a fan and transitioning into a collaborator, I was well aware the whole time I was a part of something special. This wasn’t someone that made 20 records like other “comebacks” that get hyped. This was a deeply talented writer and singer and guitar player that trusted my friends and I to make sure that it could stand next to his 70s albums, which are classic. I think the amount of respect I have for LJW and my own ability to be very cut and dry about what’s good or bad, despite my own involvement, helped. I wanted it to be the record I wanted to hear; the record I wanted to see exist in the world. Larry Jon made it for me, whether he knew it or not. When you’re a good fan, knowledge of music and its history is what can ease a generation gap and earn trust. LJW never felt like he was hanging around dumb kids. He had people to talk to about things that most people in the world don’t care about. That was a big part of how I shaped that record, which could have gone a million different ways. Of course, if you’d have asked Larry Jon what I did as a producer, he would’ve told you I just bought the bucket of chicken.
I helped another obscure old-timer named Bob Martin make a record, too. He made an album in the 70s called Midwest Farm Disaster, and it’s one of my favorite songwriter records ever. Not sure when that’ll come out.
Rumpus: Does your interest in obscure and overlooked songwriters carry over into literature? Are there any particular authors or poets that have had a hand in guiding your own writing?
DeCicca: Well, I’m writing a book now that combines interviews/vignettes with pretty obscure dudes from the 70s into essays about work, art, and identity. I drove across the country and showed up at their homes. I ate, drank, and talked for hours with each of them. So, in that way, they are carrying over into my own attempts at literature. As far as writers I like, jeez, there’s the ones from the 60s/70s that everyone seems to mention these days, I guess. Leonard Gardner wrote a book called Fat City that I love and Kevin McIvoy’s Hyssop from the 90s. Some contemporary names you don’t hear as much that really have a more direct influence on my songwriting would be Beckian Fritz Goldberg, James Galvin, Kathy Fagan, David St. John, Robert Olmstead. They all love language. They’re all playful, smart, funny, lots of depth.
Rumpus: In 2007, The Black Swans lost a defining part of the band in violinist Noel Sayre. Can you talk about Sayre’s influence on the band’s sound and how your own songwriting process has changed following his death?
DeCicca: Well, it’s pretty huge as you might imagine. Noel and I started playing together when I was 21, back in the mid-90s. He was the first person I ever played music with in a serious way. Besides the impact our friendship and shared experiences and everything I learned from him had on my songwriting, the way he played his instrument effected how I wrote music – as the use of minor chords, open strings, little things like that. And on record, he was the other big voice in the band. My songwriting started to change a lot before his death, which will be pretty apparent when our next record, Don’t Blame the Stars, finally comes out. He was alive for the basic tracking and played on most of the songs. His role is different, but that’s mainly because it’s more of a band album than a folk duo with a band holding it up. It’s been two years and I’m still in the phase of missing him everyday and hating the sound of a violin. I don’t want to ever hear one again, honestly. It just makes me a little angry. There’s still songs we don’t play without him. Maybe some of those feelings will change. Lately, his absence is affecting my songwriting. I didn’t do any therapy after he died, but two years later I’m finding myself writing about our friendship and dealing with a sudden loss. At first that felt weird, but then I started thinking about all the sad-sack song hacks that write about losing a girlfriend and why shouldn’t my songs be filled with the subject of a deeper loss. It sounds a bit grim, I suppose, but it isn’t like I’m trying to get played on the radio or something.
Rumpus: Words Are Stupid is a concept album that was commissioned by St. Ives Records to be a “meditation on the malleability and fallibility of words.” How does writing for an umbrella concept differ from just plain old songwriting? Were there songs you wrote that just could not be used for the album?
DeCicca: They asked, or invited, us to make a record, but the concept was my own. I started with a couple songs and asked myself what I was saying, how do these songs fit together, what’s on my mind, and then I filled in the blanks. When you’re creating a piece that is conceptual, what you don’t want is it to feel weighted down by its idea. Most concept records are the most awful records ever made. They’re so full of themselves. I mean, I can be full of myself, but you don’t want your songs to feel that way. You want each song to have its own life away from the others. You want it to sound like a song and not someone going to the office. That’s the problem with so much political songwriting. That terrible heavy-handed, “I’m a writer!” stamp. The nice thing about taking on that sort of writing is that it gives your emotional streak a pretty strong intellectual structure. I can’t stand historical fiction, but I understand why writers like a framework and rules. Because of this (and I hate this next word) “project”, I wrote some of my best songs that I wouldn’t have written otherwise. Because it had what you called an “umbrella”, it was more like a jigsaw puzzle than other records that are like, “this is who I am right now”.
Rumpus: I loved the story you recorded for Daytrotter about your balloon-sculpting alter-ego, Dr. Silverfoot. At first, it’s simplicity, silly sound effects, and subject matter (the lives of balloon animals) struck me as having been written for children, but by the end, a sort of weighty life perspective emerges, one that might leave listeners of all ages moved. In listening to Words Are Stupid, I was similarly caught off guard when songs marked by your woeful voice were suddenly interrupted by a light-hearted monkey or rooster impression. Is there a conscience effort in your writing to play with audience expectation, whether in story or song?
DeCicca: Ah, thank you. So I do have this alter-ego named Dr. Silverfoot. It is, in part, how I support myself. I wear a silver ascot, silver vest, black tuxedo and top hat, and I make balloon animals for children’s parties and events. I wrote the story to publish as a children’s book, but never really chased that down. I wanted to write a story for kids about learning to deal with death and loss. It turned out pretty good and I hope Uncle Shelby would be proud.
There is a conscious effort to play with expectations. You don’t want, or I don’t want, an audience to get too comfortable in whatever emotion they are in. It’s boring and manipulative. You want to take them out of the emotion and then let them re-evaluate things so they can go back in with a clear head. You see zombie shit all the time at these (indie) folks shows where everyone thinks they are in this shared experience or shit like that because they’ve been mind-fucked by a cult leader with an acoustic guitar. It’s like, Wake up! Keep thinking! That guy on stage is cutting-corners on every basic human emotion and that girl next to you is going to cut you off in the parking lot! The art matters, not some comfort music that short-changes the little that’s good about the singer-songwriter genre. When you think about it, it’s barely music. The language/voice should matter.
So, in Words Are Stupid, I made animal sounds to break the narratives, which also fit with what the songs are about. Painting a rooster isn’t enough to communicate how a character feels, so he has to cock-a-doodle-doo. I’m a monkey man so, yes, I make monkey noises. It’s shocking, but fits in the song. A couple lines in the song “Friends” from Sex Brain do that, too, and so does “Mary Price”. When I was in high school, I heard the filmmaker Lindsay Anderson talk about this sort of thing in regard to color/monochrome changes in his film If…. It really struck me. Anderson cited Bertolt Brecht. The next day, Anderson and I ate hot dogs on a park bench and watched Chris Whitley play this genius set in a city square. At the time, I had no idea Anderson liked young men! One of my best days ever. I was impressionable and he had a massive mind.
Rumpus: Your records have received glowing reviews across the board from such Internet taste-makers as Pitchfork Media and Dusted Magazine. Has this critical acclaim translated into a broader fan base or have you noticed a gap between Internet popularity and real live people attending shows?
DeCicca: Well, it hasn’t hurt. And it’s nice to be recognized and all our good reviews have been the gateway for a lot of people hearing about our music. They’ve allowed us to build a small fan base, enough of a draw to get shows, and they help all The Black Swans to feel good about themselves for a couple of minutes. These good reviews come from me sending out a dozen CDRs, writing some emails, playing good live shows. We’ve never had some machine, or even a label, really, behind us, which is what you need to bridge that gap. I’m sure if we grew little moustaches and drenched our recordings in digital reverb, moved to Brooklyn, compressed our recordings more, sang like Jeff Mangum, and wrote less complicated songs, or just yuppied it up, we’d be a more popular live band because that’s what popular song based music is these days.
There’s a formula to popularity. Even though we’ve got a stupid color/animal band name, we’re not douchebags. We had labels and managers approach us when Sex Brain came out, and we turned down those opportunities, because they were gross and crass or they disappeared because we made Change! and not Sex Brain 2. There’s really no more than a handful of people that have come around in the last ten years that I really admire and interest me artistically as songwriters, so I guess that makes it easier for me to stomach the lack of commercial success. I remember finding a review of David Blue’s album Stories in an old Rolling Stone when I was in college. That’s pretty much my favorite album of all time. Four stars and glowing, but that didn’t make him the Eagles. In the last few years, there are more and more spaces for music like ours across the country where you can play a show where people show up, listen, engage and even buy records. But if you don’t have some people pushing you along, there isn’t going to be much money involved. I wish we were more popular so I could play in theaters and make albums with Daniel Lanois, but we’re lucky we get this much. I mean, when you sing about existential crisis, your hard-on, and make rooster sounds, how popular are you going to be?
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Photo of Jerry DeCicca by Michelle Maguire.
