Fogged Clarity contributor Jim Rioux discusses music and meaning with songwriter Guy Capecelatro III.

The great American poet joins Ben to discuss his life and craft.

The winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize and former Stegner Fellow discusses his latest collection, Paradise, Indiana.

The prolific poet sits down to discuss his roots, his process, and the importance of closure. During the course of this interview Mr. Hicok reads his poems “Making the list I will never make” and “Happy anniversary.”

photo: Sigrid Estrada

In an intimate interview, the award-winning author discusses his process, growth, and the relationship between creation and mortality.

Days before the release of his new novel, The Marriage Plot, author Jeffery Eugenides sits down to discuss his craft, approach, and the premise behind his forthcoming book.

*Listen to an excerpt from “The Marriage Plot”Download audio file (MarriagePlot_webclip.mp3)

*Purchase “The Marriage Plot” here.

Also in This Issue:

• Madly Love
• Listen to our an interview with Katharine Whalen

A look into the mind of a great artist, and a great man. This one should be listened to in its entirety.

Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This evening I’m pleased once again to be joined by prolific songwriter Will Oldham. Will, thanks for taking the time.

Will Oldham: Thanks for hollerin’ at me, its funny cause I always think of it as fogg-ed.

BE: It can be pronounced either way, the ambiguity I guess is something that fits the name itself.

Well, over the past couple of months I’ve found myself going back to a lot of your older work. And perhaps it’s where I am in my own life right now, but a couple of your past album titles have just now struck me as particularly resonant. The first is: “There is No One What Will Take Care of You,” and I know one could interpret this as a suggestion to seek a truth outside of the divine. But I guess I’ve come to view the title as an assertion of the spirit of self-reliance you seem to embody. Can you talk about the title a little bit, and am I even close?

WO: I believe so, say the song “(I Was Drunk At The) Pulpit”—and the title of that record is something that I get worried about every now and again, just in terms of: Where did it come from and where did it take a person to have that stated so clearly? On some levels it’s sort of the braggarts version of the already bragging phrase “If you want something done right you have to do it yourself.” At the end of the day, you don’t have to want something done at all, there are not eyes watching over you, but there are not really eyes watching you either.

BE: That’s fucking insightful. So the compulsion to act and to do something great, if I might, must come from within, and no one’s expecting it; or, you have no obligation outside of yourself, you have that obligation, perhaps, to yourself?

WO: You make the world—with enough strength and enough luck you make the world that you live in. If you accept that there’s participation to be done and an existence to be had—I tend to think there is only one way I want to go through this existence and that’s with my eyes open and my chest out as much as possible. That’s how I’d like to.

BE: Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah, Will. Fuck yeah, man, I could not agree more, and this ties into the other album title I’ve thought a lot about, “The Letting Go.” It seems to me that every man or woman has to come to a point in their own life where they must learn to let go of guilt or anguish or triviality in order to progress and to move forward. I don’t know if that’s where that title came from?

WO: It seems like there’s a crucial time, which for some people can come way too early and can throw shit way out of whack, but there’s a crucial time in which you feel like your paying attention to the rules of others so much and, which is important because there is a lot of existence to get through and it would be stupid to try to get through it without some sense of cooperation and some sense of community, but at a certain point it’s letting go of learning what other people do and saying: From now on I’m going to take everything I’ve learned up to this point and go, and go forward with it. It’s kind of a turning inward with ideally some degree of faith and respect still to the outer world, but saying: You know, I’ve spent so much time looking out, now I’m going to sorta fly blind for as long as possible with the idea that I’ve been in training to live.

BE: Absolutely. I find one of my own weaknesses is I’m too impressionable, something someone says to me can circulate in my head for days and prove to be an impediment in my own life, and I’m only now learning to shut that out. I wonder if you ever experience that, or if at times in your life there are certain books or films or music that you try to avoid because your not prepared or you don’t necessarily want to go into that state of mind, or that place, or where that piece of media will take you?

WO: Oh for sure, all of the time. All of the time. But I don’t like the idea that that’s a willful ignorance, I like the idea that that’s not denying any kind of engagement. And so sometimes that means if I’m going to say no to this experience, if I’m going to say no to this book, then my defense mechanisms go into overdrive and I’ll say: Well if I have to say no to this book then I’m going to read these two books, or if I have to say no to listening to this musician, this artist, this record, this set of songs, then I’m going to listen to twice as many others to prove to myself that I’m not denying; because I don’t know the reasons why something is intimidating to me or disgusting to me and I don’t like feeling that way, either. I don’t like it when something turns me off, on any level. So, its a matter of saying: Well, I can either sit here and reject, or I can do double-time embracing of something else just to reassure myself that I’m not against the world.

BE: Yeah, and I don’t view it as a weakness in ourselves. I view it as if we are curating our moods, but that’s a dangerous game too.

WO: Its very dangerous because, as far as implying that we know what we’re doing for example, that we have perspective enough—by diving fully into something it requires a lot of denial, and denial is always dangerous even if all of your intentions are good and all your preparations are good; It’s still, when you make a choice your denying an infinite number of other choices.

BE: But that’s what you spoke about when you said you have to learn to trust your own perspective at a certain point, and stick your chest out and go “I’m going to go ball the fuck out.” (laughs)

WO: Exactly, you have to learn to trust your own perspective. And be prepared to change course if you have to, but the best thing you can do is to not make the wrong decision in the first place.

BE: Yeah, absolutely, given all the information you have and the trust that you have in yourself. This is kind of changing courses, but, and this would be a great comfort to me— Do you take comfort in the fact that, after you die there will be a chronicle of your life, of your writing and music, that will be preserved and stay alive for centuries, I imagine, in the future?

WO: No, well, I don’t…No, no, I don’t know… No. I don’t necessarily believe that, whatever… If, for example, if there were some kind of a revolution in which some political party or leader decided to destroy a large number of people that I had either an ethnic or ideological kinship with, who would want a presence in the world beyond? You know, the future is so uncertain; it’s just a joy to be around and be able to participate now I think, and to the idea of doing work as sort of broadening the navigable atlas of what can happen just during a lifetime. Again, no one will take care of you now and certainly no one will take care of you or you’re legacy after your gone in a way that you might find recognizable or trustworthy.

BE: I think… I’ve found writing and doing this Fogged Clarity thing that the work is a way of coping with kind of the minefield that is existence, and putting your head down and really working. I just talked to Michael Tyrell and he said the same thing, he said: Work is good, work is healthy; especially if you’re doing something that you’re passionate about.

WO: I mean, I think our brains are created to be used. They’re purpose is to figure out either physical, mental or emotional survival, and if you’re not figuring out one of those things then your brain gets lost.

BE: Yeah, and I think that’s exactly what it’s doing for a lot of individuals, particularly around this country. I know this has been said and it’s really passé, but I feel as if we’ve become hyper-stimulated and that a lot of individuals are kind of becoming sedated into ease.

WO: Yeah, hyper-stimulated and hyper-satisfied, exactly.

BE: It’s scary. That’s why you gotta keep pushing, keep moving, like we talked about. But what keeps… I mean we’ve touched on it but, your longevity impresses me as much as anything. What keeps you hungry, what keeps you pushing, why do you want to keep making music?

WO: Hmm, its the twin motivations of… Fear is definitely a big one all the time, but also, it’s reward as well. The sense of waking up in the morning and knowing that there is music ahead of me in the day is such an incredible feeling. If you have two choices: To wake up and have fear in front of you in the day or to have music in front of you in the day—and the more I engage with music the more days I wake up and know that that’s what’s going to be there, as opposed to fear. And the things that come with music, because of the people, and because of—I don’t know, whatever it is in music itself— because of melody and harmony and lyric. I’m thrilled at most corners that I turn walking down the street, I’m thrilled by most pages I turn when I’m reading a book thinking of what it’s going to show and what it’s going to make possible for tomorrow. Its wondrous I guess.

BE: That’s awesome. A human being, you know, who doesn’t make music can choose the music of the day over fear, and that’s a critical point that we have to get to when we lift our head from the pillow every morning: Am I going to succumb today, or am I going to emerge and act in harmony with my surroundings?

WO: Yeah.

BE: That’s really nice. Well, as someone who writes poetry, one of my greatest ambitions is to have a piece appear in The New Yorker, the publication that did a feature story on you a couple years ago. Can you talk about your experience with the magazine, and the interviewer, and how you thought the piece turned out?

WO: Yeah, the piece turned out— You know it was one of those things where, and it may even be in the content of the article, I don’t really know a lot of things how… With the work that I’ve done, because I dropped out of school, for example…

BE: Didn’t you go to Brown or Dartmouth?

WO: Yeah, I went to Brown for a few semesters.

And dropped out of school and decided to make my own way, I guess, and that was disappointing to my folks. And so I don’t know how to, you know, I haven’t known how to do things for my folks that reflect the appreciation or anything, any sort of respect, and that was something that I knew that they valued. And at the same time, once again, it’s a fairly simple story because a lot of it is in that article; one of the few interesting and satisfying pieces of writing on a musician that I’d ever read was in The New Yorker and it was about Merle Haggard from about 1992 or ’93 or something like that. And so when this guy contacted us to talk about doing a story, I thought, you know I don’t really like… Especially the story he was proposing was going to be super in-depth and he was going to do this research over the course of six months and it was very intimidating, especially because, I don’t know, I like to engage with the people that I’m involved with, and I was thinking like: this is going to be really dangerous if I’m around this guy whose intelligent and I can’t ignore him and so I’m going to engage with him but than also he’s going to leave and go do his thing and that will also leave this gaping hole in my existence and why would I, you know, if I’m making a piece of music one day and he’s there, what part will he play in the making of that music? I mean, its not like he is negligible, he’d be a human force who ideally is a creative and intelligent person, but do I want that in the making of this music or in any of the things that I’m involved with over the course of the six months?

BE: His influence is going to permeate your vision.

WO: Yeah, but still, you know every once in a while an opportunity comes up where I feel like this is not my dream but I can do something for the musicians I work with, I can do something for the record company I work with, I can do something for my parents, I can do something for my friends, whatever. So, it was one of those things where I was like: Ok, I’m going to try to do this because I know that this is something that does not, is not, going to come up many times, its going to come up and then go away. And also I had read the guys writing because he had come from The New York Times previously and I’d read his writing for a long time and liked his writing. But then he came down and, you know I really tried, and I just felt like it was just kind of devastating. Even, like I said, he was a nice, smart guy, but the experience was kind of devastating even just in the four days he was around.

BE: Was it kind of oppressive?

WO: It was kind of oppressive and, I like, also, I like to do things right, so that can be problematic. It means, if you have that tendency, you should only engage in the things you have the strength to commit to and that was not something that I necessarily had the strength or ability to commit to and I could feel it, you know, pulling things away from me that I needed, just for my own sanity if nothing else. So after what was to be his first of many trips to Kentucky and first of many trips to wherever activity was going on, I said that I needed to discontinue the process, and I sort of expected, not that I wanted this, but I sort of expected at that time that he would say: Well, this is about a tenth of the work I expected to put into this article, let’s just trash it. That’s what I expected, and like I said I didn’t necessarily want that, because at that point I’d raised the expectations and hopes of Drag City at the very least, and of this guy. But I was surprised some months later when we got contacted by The New Yorker saying they wanted to fact-check the story, and they are very intense fact-checkers and essentially they read or paraphrased the entire article to me over the phone so I could fact-check it, which was pretty great just in terms of a publication that takes that kind of responsibility, it was pretty cool. And I don’t believe they would have taken me as the end-all authority either, because I could have told them anything of course at that point. I think they double fact-checked numerous points. But I still… You know, I think he could have written a better article had I been more cooperative and he could have written a longer and more complex and interesting article if I had cooperated some more. So it had a kind of incompleteness to it, more like a snapshot than a real portrait I guess.

BE: But I guess, doesn’t that itself kind of fit your whole public persona?

WO: Yeah, and I guess the reason is because that’s kind of what ends of happening. I can engage and give only to the making of the songs and making of the records and making of the shows, and outside of that, I fall short. It’s not for… You know, I would like to be able to do more, I would like to be a superhero.

BE: Well, there’s only so much you can do. It’s funny that you mentioned making your parents proud or doing something for them, because Jonathan Franzen, one the reasons he obliged to the Time cover last August after he’d written Freedom is because his dad was never a man of literature, but he recognized the names like Updike and Cheever because he would get his Time Magazine with them on the cover. So it’s kind of neat that you mentioned that.

WO: Yeah, its the kind of thing where there’s not much else I can do. I’m never going to be able to show them a diploma ever, I’m never going to be able to introduce them to my boss or show them my retirement plan or anything like that, but at the same time I want them to know that they are… I do feel like they instilled in me a work-ethic that is invaluable to me and other senses of morality and a way of dealing with the world that are valuable that, you know, its hard for them to understand without something…

BE: Some connection to what they know, to what they recognize.

WO: Exactly.

BE: Yeah, well I read the article, I think it was my third or fourth time, the other day and it mentioned the mushroom smuggling and what not. Drugs as escape or inspiration?

WO: Well, I feel like we can be inspired by escape. Yeah, never as escape, maybe as departure… I guess I always feel like; I know there will be a permanent departure, a permanent escape and so all of the… My dad took a lot of pictures when we were growing up and he said: Always take a picture with somebody in it, if you go to the Grand Canyon or if you go to the Empire State Building take a picture with somebody in it, because you can get a postcard of the Grand Canyon or the Empire State Building, but make the picture valuable to you, make the picture unique to your experience. But also something that’s not just for you, but that… Say, if I’m out there in my mind, whether its on a musical thing or an emotional thing or a sexual thing or a chemical thing, the peak part of the experience is how it relates to other things to me, and it’s the kind of thing where I’m thinking: I want to write a postcard from this state of mind back to a loved one or something like that, you know, this is great because of the way that it relates to the rest of my life, not because of it in and of itself, but because proportionate to other things or compared to other things or in direct relation to other things in my life, its awesome. And that includes, you know, any valuable state of intoxication or inebriation or transportation, it’s like, it is a kind of escape, but it’s value is knowing that it’s not a permanent escape, so it’s not really escape, it’s this departure or orbiting, you know?

BE: Could it also be viewed as a postcard to your stasis consciousness to your sober consciousness?

WO: For sure, for sure. You know the only thing to worry about there is getting too insular. I’ve always felt like, I’ve always been afraid of the figures in literature or when I see someone who is mentally ill in real life or in great pieces of literature, like Bronte- style. You know I always think like, that’s because… You know I can see why someone could get into that place, either by weakness or out of survival necessity. Sending too many postcards from me to me.

BE: Yeah, that’s funny you say survival necessity, because essentially that’s what I’ve come to think—and I’m not conservative at all—that’s almost what I’ve come to think of some types of mental illness as. You know: I can’t deal so I’m going to retreat to, or submit to, say OCD or panic disorders. Even though it’s terrifying, it in and of itself is a way of coping.

WO: Yeah, and it’s either because the equipment that some of us are given is not sufficient or because the circumstances that have been laid upon us are too extreme, or the training, support, education, and experiences that have shaped us are not enough, and the best place to go is inside.

BE: Yeah, and now I guess that we’ve labeled it it’s easier than ever to find a niche if you will in the mental illness categorization.

WO: And easy to find… You know there are times when, you know, I’ve never taken a prescription medication for the purpose of long term emotional modification, but at the same time I know there have been many times when I’ve taken recreational intoxicants and thought: Oh, this is a fix, this really works, this is a repair. And if someone were to say, and you feel it yourself, you know this is actually not a long-term solution. But if someone were to say, like a doctor or something: This is a long-term solution, this is ok. I could see saying: Alright this is great, you know I’m going to stick with this for a while.

BE: This is changing course once again, but I wrote this line in a poem (laughs) and I see I have written here that “as someone once said,” but that someone was me…

WO: (laughs)

BE: I wrote that art is created in a seclusion lovers only dilute. What do you think about that?

WO: I think that there… You know, that that can be true because with some people art can be a step towards completion in the same way that a relationship with another person can be a step towards completion, and there are very few people, I think, who can handle both, or need both. You know, it’s a great, you know, I think many great pieces of work come from the idea of wanting to see a concept or an idea or an emotion through, and sometimes the communion with another person is so significant that if you tried to make the same concept real, but you already had this sense of completion, you would have a diluted piece of work; which isn’t to say you couldn’t make a different piece of work, but the drive of a single solitary force is different from the drive of a united force or a satisfied force. But at the same time there are some in music, there are some united forces that are super powerful, like for example when Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema were the Royal Trux or when Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash were a united front, they create a new individual that is not diluted by a lover or another, but it creates this insane double-wide (laughs).

BE: It’s furthered; the vision is fulfilled by the other person. But I also think that the relationship between art and artist is a form of intimacy and a form of communion, and perhaps those four hundred pound writers or poets or musicians find that intimacy within the work they create, perhaps with another part of their brain: the creative part.

Well, we’ve corresponded a little about Ray Kurzweil’s theory of Singularity, a concept that essentially states that most human beings will be inextricably linked to machines by the year 2045. I just wanted to discuss a bit about how Kurzweil’s assertion effects the individual and whether or not the concept of the individual with free will that we’ve spoken about so much tonight is in jeopardy given our swift evolution, especially in terms of the digital, in terms of technology.

WO: It seems like it’s in jeopardy… You know, using the term “jeopardy” implies a value system that you or I might have, but that the people who are now and in the future will very, very willingly… He seems to be writing even to the idea that this is something to look forward to, and that’s interesting and I think it’s kind of cool. But it’s not my frame of mind and I don’t think it will be, and in that way I am an outsider. But it’s obvious that people are embracing the idea of giving over more and more and more to artificial intelligence.

BE: There seems to be almost a sense of fanaticism in it, lying subtly beneath. I think that’s what scares me so much. And the people who are turning the wheels and pulling the levers… I have no say if there’s going to be an Ipod 300,000 you know. So I’m not in the discussion, I’m bringing nothing to the table, and am therefore just subject to whatever comes out.

WO: No, you don’t. But once again, we have this incredible equipment; our bodies and brains that are just not being utilized and it leaves people with a real sense of uselessness—purposelessness, directionlessness, uselessness—and you know melding with the machines is saying you know what: It’s ok to be useless, it’s not a bad thing, it’s ok, we’re going to get through this together. Its not saying: No you’re not useless. It’s actually saying: Yes, you are useless, your brain is relatively useless, your body is totally useless, but it’s ok and we’re going to work through this problem together. It is a problem, we’re going to work through it together, were going to have a lot of fun doing it, you know, come along on the ride, and everyone is like: Yeah, “thank God, ya know, thank God someone is saying something nice about this crazy feeling that I have. Because all it would take is for somebody to tell me something, tell me: You’re right, you are useless and I’d kill myself and I don’t wanna do that, I want it to be ok. And so they provide for us and say: We’re going to take care of this and all you have to do is sit back and upload yourself.

BE: Spot on.

WO: But I like the idea of the decomposition of my body, you know, to some extent I don’t mind the idea of the decomposition of my brain, although I won’t be aware if and when that happens of course, which is kind of a bummer. You know, since I was a kid I’ve always liked the post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies and identified with the sort of societies that exist when everything has gone a different direction. Not that I imagine that I could hold my own necessarily, I just think it sounds more fun to me. You know, I heard George Clinton on the radio last night say something like: Everything that is good is nasty. And you know, no matter how nasty three girls and a cup, two girls in a cup was, it wasn’t really that nasty because it was on a computer screen, and therefore it wasn’t that good, you know. If it was in the room with you, no matter what it is… It’s like, its better to smell your grandmother’s shit than it is to put her in a nursing home for example.

BE: You know I never thought of that, the excitement on behalf of the people advocating for technological progress and the fusion of A.I. with human beings, I never looked at it… That’s perfect, the excitement: “Oh here, here you go.” It’s a constant reaffirming of people’s doubts and even their own doubts in creating this stuff.

WO: Everything that our bodies and minds were created for, we’ve inadvertently, totally unintentionally, we’ve taken it away from ourselves so that we’ve become useless. Everything that your body is for, every bone, every ligament, every emotion that you have is created for certain purposes that no longer apply, and rather then giving up, they’ve created virtual uses for at least everything internal that you have, they wont create a virtual use for everything external. If there’s time left for our species there probably would be an evolution away from needing all of our little tendons and nerve endings and things like that.

BE: I don’t think the cohesion can be found, truly found, on anything but an organic level; the truth comes from within. That’s a fucking long lesson, but I feel as if it’s one I’ve learned. I’ve actually found, as I continue to grow and age, that I like spending time outside, particularly in the water, a lot more. I’ve gone swimming in Lake Michigan or Lake Huron nearly every day this summer and just played like a seal in the water, and I feel a wholeness, I feel a oneness, and it’s almost as if… It’s like absolution I guess, and it’s strange, but it’s true I walk out feeling cleansed psychologically as well as physically.

WO: It’s very true, yeah, it’s very true. But we have to accept that there are people who will, now or in the future, get that say from listening to a Justin Bieber song or a Bon Iver song or something like that and say like: Oh my God I never felt so clean before, I never felt so alive until I saw Justin Beiber play in Madison, Wisconsin. Or something like that, and it’s just like: No, no, wait a minute, No, no you don’t understand, and they’re like: No, no, I really do. And you have to say: Whoa they do, that’s their experience. But they are also the same people that would say: Eat a vegetable? Yeah, I mean probably at Thanksgiving I totally have, I have sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce.

BE: (Laughs) I’m thinking about that episode of The Office when Michael feeds Kevin the broccoli, stalk first. Do you remember that?

WO: No, I didn’t see that.

BE: You’re absolutely right (though), so I have to have a conviction that my sense of the emotion, and this might be selfish, is more substantive than the same evocation that comes from a Justin Beiber song or a candied yam at Thanksgiving.

WO: Or just have a sense that it’s, it’s our place. And our place may be… You know everybody’s place is going to be outside most prophecies, just because what we have in common with other individuals will always be the minority in terms of the world at large. But even in our own society to say: We are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is proven ever harder because of my existence. Because I like to swim in Lake Michigan or Lake Superior for the real bracing cold and cleaner water, I like to swim in Lake Superior and it’s all the more important to me because it’s not important to other people or something like that, you know? Not that you are positioning yourself or that we would position ourselves outside of another group, but because you can sometimes only see the value of something in relation to other things, or just accept the role that some people are created as negative forces, some people are created as pariahs, some people are created as leaders and some people are created… You know, its part of the balance. You know my place in this world is going to be somebody who does not appreciate The Singularity. But there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s not a choice I’ve made, there’s nothing I can do about the fact….

BE: You can only affirm yourself.

WO: I can only affirm myself, yeah.

BE: You know, I’ve gotta talk to you about something real quick, I’ve been mind-fucking myself over it since yesterday. I met this old lady at the post office that I vaguely know, and she’s kind of senile, but I was like: Yeah, I’m going to Oregon. And we started talking politics and I told her how I was kind of disappointed in Obama and that I felt like he’d abandoned the platform that he advocated so hard, and she got upset with me and I go: Well, you know I could bring real change or something. And then I stumbled over the way I said it and then I thought: Dude you sound like an idiot… Because I’m always questioning my own… I don’t know, there’s still a creeping sense of doubt. And she goes: “You don’t even wanna go to Oregon,” and I mean I don’t even know how that made sense at all, but it fucking scared me and it’s in the back of my head. Its like: Of course I do, it’s in my fucking heart man, I’ve wanted to do this for a very long time and I just let those little fucking stumbles, those little things fuck me up, and I can’t do that anymore man, I can’t do that anymore.

WO: Yeah, I mean it’s good that you’re not proceeding blindly, it’s good that you’re listening to other people. You know, pretty much every good decision that I’ve made, I will make the good decision, I will get closer and closer to that decision, and usually the eleventh hour is, no matter how much I’ve prepared for it, how much I’ve thought about it, the eleventh hour that decision becomes the wrong decision one hundred percent, and its repulsive or frightening or its just wrong. And then it takes every bit of strength and inner-reassurance and turning around to say “No, you know, this is like a nightmare, a waking nightmare where you’re testing yourself, and the only way you can earn what you’ve always wanted to do is by breaking through this eleventh hour doubt and doing it.” Then you deserve it. And it’s whenever you’ve said, you know at the last minute like: “Ah fuck it, fuck it, I’m unprepared” or whatever; that’s the worst thing you can do to yourself.

BE: You know, I got a tattoo at two o’clock today right over my heart that just says: “Keep Going.” Because that’s the only answer I’ve fucking found for anything after twenty-seven years and a month, that’s the only answer I’ve ever found: Just keep going.

WO: Yeah, and, you know, I don’t think he wrote it, but a song that Willie Nelson plays a lot and Jerry Jeff Walker played is “Pick Up the Tempo.” They say, “Time will take care of itself, so just leave time alone.” Just the idea that there’s no reason to ever back off or to yield or to give in unless it is out of kindness or compassion or to gain perspective, but for the most part it’s like, to ever say or to ever pretend that, or take the role… It’s already taken, there’s one thing that’s taken in your life and that is that time will continue and then it will end. And if you ever say that you want that job, that’s retarded, you don’t need that job, that’s taken care of, everything else is up to you. Time will continue then it will end. There’s no reason for you to ever say: “I’m going to end something,” because everything will end anyway. You just, you continue, run alongside of time, run apace with time, rather than say: If I don’t do this time will stop or an end will never come or an end will come sooner. It’s like no, no, no, that’s got nothing to do with it. You just do your shit, march on.

BE: Yeah, hell yeah. Hey Will, I’ve got a great admiration for you as a thinker and a musician and thanks so much for taking the time tonight, I really, really appreciate it.

WO: I really appreciate it as well. I’m glad you gave me another call.

The Oklahoma songwriter sits down to discuss music, literature, and shirts with three wolves howling at the moon.

photo: Doug Schwartz

Also in This Issue:

• Listen to Samantha Crain’s You (Understood) in its entirety.
• Listen to Samantha Crain’s Fogged Clarity Session

The lead singer of the Portland-based band Starfucker talks openly about death’s influence on his music, and the making of his latest record, Reptilians.

photo: Victoria Smith

photo: Kim Selling

Also in This Issue:

• Listen to Jeffrey Paul Lupo’s Fogged Clarity Session
• You’re in Golden Light

The best banjoist in the world sits down with Ben to discuss his life, his band, and his latest album, Rocket Science.

*Purchase Bela Fleck and the Flecktones latest album, Rocket Science here.

**To see the Flecktones summer tour schedule click here.

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: Talk to me about how important freedom is to you as a musician. Over your career you’ve seemed never to constrain yourself with style or genre.

Bela Fleck: That might be an illusion, but it’s an idealistic illusion and its one that I fight for. Every band that you put together you have to figure out how long your going to play and you have to make a lot of decisions for a long period of time and then commit to it, so if your in the middle of a tour and you suddenly want the freedom to go and do something else, you don’t have it. You know what I mean? So even in the case of this Flecktone’s tour, which we are super thrilled to be doing, we’re committing to a year of playing together, so that means we’ll be free within the constraints of the band, but then we’ll be free after the band is done to do whatever other projects we want to do. So it’s freedom, but with sort of a clock ticking and figuring out when you can do the different things you want to do.

BE: Well, you and Victor Wooten and Future Man have been playing together for over twenty years, so I have to imagine you get along fairly well…

BF: Yeah, we really do, we really do, and in fact, the last three years where we haven’t been playing together that much except at Christmas time has really just been because we all respect each other and want the opportunity to see ourselves and each other do different things with other people too, you know. But whenever we see each other and whenever we get to play, there are sparks. It’s fun. We’re happy, we’re happy to be together, and bringing Howard back into it is really, really interesting.

BE: How did your approach differ on this album, Rocket Science, as opposed to past Flecktone’s releases?

BF: It’s a lot more like being in the band when it started in the first three or four years, when Howard was in the band. In fact, I feel like Rocket Science picks up where UFO Tofu left off — that’s the album we made in 1992 — rather than where The Hidden Land left off, which is the album we put out in 2006, or for instance, the holiday record, which I guess is an abnormality that sits out in the middle of the ether, not really connected to the other albums, but it’s a Tones’ sort of gesture or whatever; although I really like that album. It’s not like a continuation of the band’s work in the same way. But this is like going back in time, but a different time where we’re all more mature and more able.

BE: You seem to like to sample from a variety of musical traditions in your work, I was wondering where the desire to explore emanated from, this going back to my first question about your seeming unconstraint as a musician. Does the constant quest for newness that one hears throughout your catalog extend to other elements of your life? I guess, are you a seeker?

BF: I think not as much in the rest of my life, because so much of it is happening in the music and it takes a lot of effort and time to make it all happen, whether it’s practicing, or doing the logistical stuff that has to happen to get a bunch of people together, so that when I actually get away from music a lot of times I’m a pretty conventional person, although I don’t live on the clock. I was just reading this book about Keith Richards and I recognized a lot of things about my life that are similar, you know, I don’t eat meals at mealtimes, I eat when I get hungry; my hours can.. I could be up in the middle of the night, or I could be up in the middle of the day, its very different based on what just happened, what tour I just finished and where I’m going, what country I might have just been to, our what schedule you were on, you know, that sort of thing.

BE: It seems that when one’s identity is so wedded to something, as yours is to music, it might be difficult for the person to be regarded or understood through any other lens. Do you ever feel slightly confined by preconceptions in your day to day, non-musical interactions?

BF: I don’t know, that’s a good question, I have to think about it. But I don’t think so, because mostly when I’m not in a group or on tour in a band I’m just a regular person who’s going to the gym and trying to eat healthy and have quality time with important people in my life, so, those people understand me. Although there is a tendency to want to isolate a little bit, from people that might look at me from a fan position, because it’s hard to be a real person around them, and I really want that when I’m not out on tour and in that sort of public eye.

BE: Absolutely, some sort of normalcy. That’s what I was referring to, it must be difficult to distance the banjo player Bela Fleck from the person Bela Fleck, unless you go out with a hat and sunglasses (laughs).

BF: Well I mean, I don’t get recognized walking up and down the street, but in Nashville, people don’t really bug you if they do recognize you, I might not even know they did. But on an airplane, if I’m flying a lot and I’ve got my banjo with me I do get recognized a lot. Especially since that movie, Throw Down Your Heart that I filmed in Africa has been up on Netflix, and a lot of people have been seeing it and now my face is more familiar to some people. But I figure complaining about that is like… I remember somebody once said, “Wasn’t that the point of this whole exercise?” So, stars that complain about their stardom I don’t have a lot of patience for, although it actually can be very frustrating and taxing at times. But not for someone in my position, I’m not that kind of a…I mean a very small bunch of people think I’m a star, but that’s about it, and I can go to the grocery star and go to a movie and have dinner and not be bugged.

BE: I would buy your produce for you if I saw you at the grocery store (laughs).

BF: (Laughs) Every once in a while I think I’m having a quiet dinner with friends or something, somebody buys it without telling us and that sort of thing. It’s sweet though, I know that it means that they were moved by the music and that means that what I’m doing is working, so I love it. I mean, I do it for me and I do it for other people, but I think that I have to live an ideal for it to be right for all of us.

BE: That’s well put. Yeah, I associate your music with, almost bliss, I’ve seen you out in the sunshine at Fredrik Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids several times, and other places and the weather always seems to be nice and you just bring such a calm and professional and happy demeanor with you wherever you go it seems.

BF: Well, I feel very fortunate. I’m always aware of how lucky I am to be able to do what I do and have the most important thing in my life be music and the banjo. Like, I know the banjo and how you play the banjo is not the most important thing in the world, but I get to make believe it is in my life and that allows me to get really focused on it and really search out the nooks and crannies of what can be special about it, you know. So I feel just very privileged that I get to do that. So I take it seriously and that makes me want to work very hard and deserve it, you know, that position that I’m in.

BE: Is there a plateau for growth when it comes to music?

BF: Oh yeah, all the time (laughs). Yeah, it’s very frustrating. I mean like we just started up a new band, with the Flecktones again, and there are times when I’m just like “God, I just suck.” You know, in fact, between phone calls today I’m practicing. I’ve got the metronome on, I’m trying to learn how to get through these songs. It’s one thing to go in the studio and get a great track down and hone your parts, or really work on the solos or whatever, but out on stage you can’t hide it if you don’t really have it down, and we’re early enough in the tour that I don’t have the music totally down, and so I was a little surprised last night when the audience went berserk for the show because I was like “Cant you tell I don’t know this stuff yet?”

BE: I don’t know if everyone’s ear is as well-honed, nearly as well-honed as yours.

BF: No, mine’s painfully well-honed and I hear things that nobody else hears, and I’m also critical, self-critical, which is a funny part because when you’re trying to be free and open being critical actually isn’t that helpful, so I do battle with that side of my personality, but I have to kind of drop it when I’m on stage, or I should, but I have to remember to let go and everything that happens has to be okay because it happened, and then follow it with something meaningful. Sometimes you can fix something that went wrong with what you do next and make it better than it would have been if it hadn’t gone wrong, as an improviser, and I do know how to do that.

BE: That’s wisdom.

BF: It’s harder to do on a record, but in a live situation you can reach down deep and find a solution to the problem you’ve created for yourself with what you started with.

BE: Yeah, I’ve found that in my own life: when I’m flowing and I’m not thinking and I’m not self-critical, you know, that’s when I’m at my best.

BF: Yeah, but the critical part helps me do the work that’s necessary to get to the next level. It can’t all happen by osmosis or just sheer innate whatever, a lot of it has to happen because you were willing to do the work it took, and however much work it takes, is how much it takes. If it’s not happening and you’re out on stage and you don’t feel like your getting it, having everybody tell you it’s great doesn’t really help you because you know you haven’t got it yet. For me, I usually…if it is flowing and it’s happening naturally and I’m not straining the whole time, I usually feel like I’m getting it, but if I’m straining and fighting for it… it can be a lot of fun to listen to for the audience, but I don’t necessarily feel good about it. I want to be inside it, and have it so down that it’s not going anywhere.

BE: Yeah, and that’s when you can truly be free.

BF: Exactly, its funny how all of that hard work results in freedom.

BE: Your persona has always struck me as being incredibly tranquil, I kind of view you like the cool uncle who disappears for six months every year to be a dive instructor in the Caribbean…

BF: Well, I might put that out because I have to stay very cool, like, as an improviser you cant get all; I can’t get all heated up and out of breath and concerned, so when I go into show mode there is a calming thing that comes into it, and it works, I mean it keeps me relaxed. Not only do I have to play at my best, I also have to speak to the audience, and tell the guys what were playing next, and if were running out of time or something, you know there are a lot of things you have to do as a leader that aren’t music. So I just have to be cool, but afterwards I might come off stage and go, “Boy, I wish I could have played that better,” or things like that. Once I’m in it, a week or two into any project, I’m usually pretty happy about everything that’s going on.

BE: Are you able to maintain your relatively calm nature throughout the rigors of a tour and your demanding schedule?

BF: Yeah, I think it’s important not to get too caffeinated. So I really like to drink coffee and get charged up and practice in the afternoon, but sometimes it leaves me let down at the show, so I actually have to watch out for those kinds of things, because I do want to be very relaxed at the shows and I want the music to flow through. Caffeine can be an impediment, it can get in the way of the music flowing through, but other times when you’re really tired sometimes it can give you the edge you need. So you try to figure out what you need each day, each night and throughout it all, that’s part of the trick too: how to manage your body.

BE: You know, one of my favorite pieces of work that you’ve done is the three album set, Little Worlds, will you talk about that project a little bit? It seemed to be so expansive and so dynamic, it really changed the way I listened to music for a couple years.

BF: Well, I remember we started recording on that one, I think it was our second Flecktone’s record on Sony, and we had a budget and everything to go and really… there was no excuse not to make a great record, so we just started recording everything that we had around that we liked, and pretty soon we realized we had over-recorded dramatically, drastically. And so finally the record company said, “Hey when do we get to hear something?” I said, “You can hear anything anytime you want to come down to my studio in Nashville and I’ll play you what we’ve got.” Because I don’t like sending out tapes before things are done, but I’ll play anybody anything in the studio because its really helpful to have people hear it while your working on it. So I played them everything and they kept saying, “What else you got, more, more…” and so I played them the whole thing and I said what to you think. (The record company said) “We love it, but it’s too much stuff. So what do you think about a double album, lets put it all out?” They said it. And I said ok, and then we started talking about it and it became “what about a triple album?” because it was actually more than we could get on two CD’s. And at first everybody said, oh that will be too much in this climate, and then we said, “Well maybe it will be different, because it’s bigger.”

BE: And it was, it was a bounty, it was a feast of music.

BF: Well thanks. And then we started getting people in on it that we hadn’t played with before and that really helped to flesh each song out and make each song a little bit different.

BE: Well, you spoke to this: you’re a showman and you perform to large crowds all over the world. What’s your ideal venue, is it sitting down with a couple of fellow pickers and passing a bottle around and just playing, is it sitting down in your apartment by yourself and just playing? When are you at your most content playing the banjo?

BF: I like kind of relaxed situations with a lot of interaction, and it’s usually not the biggest gigs that are the best music, although they can be very exciting, like we’re playing Bonnaroo next week and that will be a big gig, and we played summer camp for ten or fifteen thousand people a couple of days ago, and it was exciting, but it wasn’t the place for the intimacy and the conversational things that I love about music, where you’re really in…you know everyone’s in their center and there is plenty of room for everything to happen. So I do like sort of more, not super small, but I mean I am happy… I mean last night we played in a twelve hundred seat theater and it felt very intimate and connected. I guess I would have to say I like them all for different reasons, and I do like that push when you have to play a big show, but I also like those really, really quiet gigs where you can really bring it down.

BE: Yeah, I think it’s probably a question of an atmosphere in which the music is going to resonate most with the audience, and that intimacy you spoke of, that’s what I seek in a concert as a listener.

BF: Yeah, if you can get to that place where everybody is just breathing together it’s really cool.

BE: And that refers to what you were talking about earlier, when everyone’s putting aside their thoughts and kind of just breathing as one, it’s a pretty neat dynamic.

BF: The entertainer side of our job is to be interesting enough to make the audience forget about whatever else was on their mind when they walked through the door, and hopefully present them with something idealistic and warm that will give them a good feeling to take away with them.

BE: You’ve managed that at every show I’ve seen.

Well, what’s your take on the business aspect of music and how it has changed over the past fifteen years? Do you feel as if the increased digitization of the medium in both its recording and distribution has sort of compromised the integrity of the craft at all?

BF: There are certain things that I’ve had to get used to. For instance, we used to do new songs on stage before they were ready just to force ourselves to sort of get it together in front of people, but pretty soon we realized that they were going up on the web and people were making their judgments on those songs based on our first performance. Now I feel like it’s really a lot better if the band, whatever group I’m in, has really rehearsed a lot more so that we’re going to present something we’re really proud of since it is going to be recorded– someone’s going hold up the telephone and record it or someone’s going tape it and we’re not going know; and we’ve always let people tape, but the way it’s digitized and the way it’s around the world in a second is a little daunting sometimes. If you played good you’re happy, you’re really glad it’s out there, but if you felt like it was not as good or the sound was tough or something was going on that was distracting you go, “Man I wish that wasn’t what was getting around the world in a second.”

Aside from that… There used to be more money to be made as a musician, as someone recording, but that’s just… we’ll look back at that as a golden period for musicians, when they were getting paid that way– You’d get all these publishing checks if you sold 50,000 records or 100,000 records, you could buy a house in those days if you had written everything, but those days are gone, the records aren’t selling like they used.

BE: But you’re established to the point where you don’t have to worry about getting signed or having gigs or being able to put another record out, and that must be nice.

BF: It is nice, but I have friends who are not in that position and they might be having what would have been a solid career twenty years ago, with the amount of people they’re playing for and the kind of reaction they’re getting, but now they’re barely making a living, they can barely survive, and they don’t know if they’ll be able to be musicians.

So maybe what this is going to do is…There’s been such a glut of people getting involved in the music business over the last twenty years to where so many things are coming out all the time and everybody’s fighting for the same audiences, it’s almost like there’s too much for everybody out there, in a way. Maybe it’s going to force some people to get out of the game eventually, if they can’t make a living and then it’ll be one of those evolutionary things where the strong survive. But I don’t really know, we’ll have to see.

BE: I’m torn, because part of me feels that it’s diluting the quality of music in that it’s driven for economic purposes now, the other part of me feels that, now, more people than ever have access to recording equipment and built-in listenerships on the internet so that they can have the opportunity to be heard…

BF: Well that’s good, there’s no doubt that that’s a good thing. That’s positive for humanity and art and expression, so I celebrate that aspect of it too. It’s just a change from what we’re used to, you know, or we’re used to– the older guys like us who have been around doing it for thirty years. It was a different game when we started, so you have to get used to it and you have to evolve, because if you don’t, you should get out of it. You know what I mean, it’s just the way life goes, you can’t expect things to stay the same.

BE: You know, I loved your Bluegrass Sessions: Tales From The Acoustic Planet, Vol. 2 .

BF: Thank you.

BE: There is something to be said for stripped down acoustic music, it’s more palpable I guess, its more vulnerable.

After years of albums and recordings, do you still get the same thrill upon releasing a new project?

BF: It’s different, it’s definitely different to put out your twentieth record than your first or your fifth. Sometimes with a brand new project, like something you’ve never done before, there’s a special buzz that comes with it, you can’t wait for people to hear this thing, you know. I definitely felt that way about Bluegrass Sessions, we had shot the moon and everybody had played their best and it was something everybody was going to be proud of a long time, and I feel that way about the Rocket Science album for sure. When we made the first Flecktones’ album it was like, “Man, if anybody hears this, we’ll just be so thrilled.” We were just so excited about it ourselves. So we kind of got back into that zone on the new album, like “Hey, this is really different from what we’ve done and it’s different than anything else out there; so looking forward to finally getting it out there.” And now were getting a great response.

BE: Within the first twenty seconds you know it’s a Flecktone’s album, you’ve got that swooning banjo coming in. I love it, it reminds me of summer.

BF: Well, having Howard Levy back in the band playing the harmonica and the piano is sort of a key to what made it new again. All of his creative and intellectual powers really add something different to the band. He’s a very esoteric, wild, crazy player, but because it’s a harmonica and piano it ends up making the band seem very warm and close, so having him back is proving to be a wonderful experience.

BE: Did you listen to yourself on Piano Jazz when it re-aired two weeks ago?

BF: No, I didn’t that was done at least eight, ten years ago, maybe longer…

BE: I wanted to hear how you felt hearing yourself ten years ago, I thought it would be interesting.

BF: Yeah, how did it come off?

BE: Really well, you’re humble brilliance shone through.

What do you listen to? What are you listening to right now that might be outside of what people expect in terms of contemporary music?

BF: Lately, I’m listening to a lot of classical music, and it’s because I’ve been working on a banjo concerto that I was commissioned to write for the Nashville Symphony, and its about a 32 minute piece with banjo and orchestra and I wrote every single note and I’ve never done that before by myself, I’ve always written with great classical writers like Edgar Meyer, who is a great classical composer. Whenever I’ve gotten to write for orchestra it’s been with him, and he knows what he’s doing, so I kind of had to prove to myself that I could do it without him.

So I’ve listened to a lot of classical stuff, things that I had never really gotten to know before, especially Bartok, who’s my namesake, but I’d never really spent the time getting to know his music, so this was a great time for that. So, I’ve been soaking up a lot of great classical music.

BE: Do you speak with Edgar Meyer and Jean-Luc Ponty anymore… Stanley Clarke, that’s who I was thinking of actually, the stand up bassist you’ve played with.

BF: Yeah, I’ve seen Stanley a lot more than Jean-Luc since we finished that project together. Stanley’s great, he’s a great guy; and I really, really enjoyed Jean-Luc as well, he’s a quintessential Frenchmen and violinist, he was a real treat to be around that year.

BE: How many days are you playing out of the year, do you think; concerts?

BF: You know I haven’t counted it in a while, but this year the Flecktones are playing from now until next April, but there will be months off. Like the whole month of September is off, but that’s when I’m doing my concerto, so I’ll be home, but practicing like a demon to try and survive that piece.

BE: Are you going to be performing it in D.C.?

BF: No, in Nashville, at the Nashville Symphony. Hopefully I’ll be going out and performing that piece a good bit after the Flecktones get done with this year together. But when we tour, for instance, we’re out for eight days, we’ll be home for five days, and well be out for another ten days, home for a week, then well be out for another ten days, home for a week and a half; ya know, its like that. So in a month that we’re on, we’re still not on non-stop, because we just don’t think it would be great for everybody to be sitting on a bus for six months, we can’t do that anymore. But we can go out for two weeks, three in a rare instance, and then you need to go get away from it and clear your brain and go be a human being, outside of musical touring for a while.

BE: Yeah, do you have little ones?

BF: I don’t, but almost everybody is married.

BE: That’s good that you have some, freedom…seems to be the buzz word here.

BF: Yeah, my wife is a musician too, so she understands what I’m going through, which doesn’t make it not hard, the fact that we both travel, because sometimes when I come home she’s not there, and sometimes when she comes home I’m not there, but we do understand and support each other, so that’s been working out good. Howard’s lady is also a musician, she’s a violinist in the Chicago Symphony, so they have a really good understanding. And Victor’s wife was actually was involved with shows, a singer and performer in shows. I don’t think she ever performed on Broadway, but she did a lot of performing, and so she understands.

BE: It would be great if you could bring the concerto to the Chicago Symphony.

BF: Yeah, it would be very exciting. I’m crossing my fingers, well just have to see.

BE: I’m sure it will be fantastic, if it’s good enough for you, it’s more than good enough for anybody else I’m sure.

BF: Thanks, I’m pretty excited about it actually.

BE: Well, you’ve played everywhere and done almost everything, if you had to pick one pinnacle moment, one performance in which you simultaneously achieved elation and perfection, what would it be?

BF: Wow, I don’t know.

BE: There has to be one moment where it just swept over you and you just said: “I made it.”

BF: Oh, there have been some wonderful, wonderful nights, and I have to say its happened in every group I’ve been in, there have been those nights. I do things enough that it gets to that point. But yeah, I don’t know if I can pick one, but Flecktones have had hundreds of them, probably over the last twenty years…

BE: Is that your baby, the Flecktones’ project? Is that what’s closest to you?

BF: It’s a big, big thing for me, but I’ve also learned how to set it free and let it go away when its not right for everybody and let it come back when its time. Because I never would have put the band on hiatus if it wasn’t necessary for the whole group to survive. So, I’ve learned to let go of it, but I’m very proud of it now that we’re back together, I’m proud that we can come back together and feel this way again.

BE: It’s good you have that sensitivity.

BF: Well, you have to, if you want it to work you can’t say: “This is what we’re doing,” you have to say: “What do you want to do?” You can’t say: “It’s time for us to play,” you have to say, “Is it time for us to play?” and then see what everybody thinks, see if people can feel like it is the right time. Because everybody is, you know, some of us are…You know three of us are in our fifties and one’s almost there, and so it’s a little different than when you’re in your twenties, you’ve got a lot of other things going on in your life. But I’m really glad that we could bring it back together now, and I can’t imagine that we won’t do it again some day, but we don’t have any plans, we take it one thing at a time.

Dolorean founder and frontman Al James discusses some of the themes at work in the his band’s latest album, The Unfazed.

An intimate discussion with Pen/Hemingway award-winning author Justin Cronin. Justin’s latest novel, The Passage, was released in paperback this month and can be purchased here.

photo by Gasper Tringale

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: When I spoke with you last week you said something that intrigued me; you related that you felt fortunate to have this story, The Passage, and impending trilogy, drop in your lap. It was as if you were referring to a muse. You almost suggested, as many authors have, that you were more of a conduit for this epic than a creator. Can you describe that feeling of inspiration as an author, and do you truly think it comes from somewhere outside of yourself?

Justin Cronin: Well sometimes you do, there are moments that you can’t really account for. You don’t know why, all of a sudden, a sentence kind of lays itself bare to you. But, on the other hand you can also say the reason that it does is because you’ve sat down at the keyboard everyday for twenty years making yourself ready and practicing your art. So while there is some part of it that’s mysterious, all of it is deliberate and all of it is yours. My approach to writing is quite thorough, I plan everything in advance, I sit down to work everyday, typical business hours 9 to 3; I’ve got kids so I have to keep a kind of ordinary domestic schedule. And it’s worked so far, no complaints. It’s produced three books, the last one of which was 300,000 words. So do I take credit? Sure, why not.

BE: You are more than entitled to it, you take your craft incredibly seriously and you’re incredibly committed. I just thought it was interesting that you had said it fell into your lap.

JC: Well I think, as I said, there is some part of this that does seem to sometimes come from above. Like my teacher in graduate school Frank Conroy said, writing is basically a daily practice to maintain a steady state of readiness for when something came your way that was worth writing. A lot of writing is failure; a lot of it is running scales up and down the piano until the concerto one day just shows up.

BE: You just said that some parts of the novel may have come from above, and that leads to my next question. There seems to be a sense of the spiritual running through The Passage, a certain otherworldly prescience, where certain characters are impelled to act, I presume by some kind of divine mover. Sister Lacey’s cross-country journey for example. Do you yourself have religious inclinations? And was it important to allow for spirituality in this book, as it can be a convenient explanatory device?

JC: Well, I begin by admitting that I practice no faith in particular. I was raised Roman Catholic with all the mystical trappings and no doubt some of that became part of my firmware, but when I wrote the novel you know part of the original conceit of the book was that the story that I was telling was the truth behind something that at some distant future time, a thousand years in the future, has become in a sense its own creation story. So it’s become a myth and–– here’s the story behind it, as I think most religious scripture is. It may not be based on divine occurrences, but it’s based on things that actually happened in some way, so that I always planned on as part of the underpinnings of the project. But one thing I discovered very quickly was that you could not write a book about the end of the world without questions of, for lack of a better term, divine intention leaking into the text. I meant to drag my feet on this a little bit, it wasn’t something that I was in a hurry to take on; not because I was afraid of it, but because I didn’t know how it would appear. And in fact it appeared very, very quickly in the book in the form of Sister Lacey Antoinette Kudoto, who is a nun from Sierra Leone. The one thing to do was give the reader some space to decide about matters of divinity, some invisible plain of existence operating in the world of the book. Just as people get to decide that about the world in which they actually live. So you could take a character like Sister Lacey, and decide if she’s an authentic mystic in communion with some divine force. You could also look at her as a woman with extremely bad post traumatic stress disorder, “that crazy nun,” as somebody else says. So when we’re inside her point of view, we’re inside a place where someone believes that they are in direct communication with the divine. Is that what’s actually happening? The reader gets to pick.

BE: And therein lies the author’s skill. Well if I remember correctly Mary and O’Neil were agnostics.

JC: Yes, they were agnostics, yes. It’s actually Miriam who gets that word, she’s O’Neils mother. She’s a Jew who has become agnostic.

BE: Was it more comfortable going into the writing of this book – a kind of science fiction project – knowing that you had already established yourself as a preeminent author of literary fiction with Mary and O’Neil and The Summer Guest?

JC: Well you know every book is practice for the next book, so sure, I felt more….

BE: I mean more in terms of your reputation as an author; this is a person (Cronin) who doesn’t need the shtick of vampires or anything, he’s already developed characters from nothing and done it exquisitely. I guess that’s what I’m asking in that sense.

JC: Well you write the book that wants to be written, the one that gives itself up to you most readily. I wasn’t really thinking so much about reputation as I was thinking about… Hmmm, I’m trying to find the right way to express it. Sort of the thing that makes me write, what keeps me writing, what makes it interesting, is not ever writing the same book twice. Mary and O’Neil and The Summer Guest were both on that broad shelf of literary fiction, but I had gone about those two books very differently. I mean Mary and O’Neil is really a novel built out of short stories, which was the literary form to which I was first apprenticed, the way most writers write short stories before they hazard the novel. And so from there to The Summer Guest which is more or less a conventional sort of novel, although it is four points of view in eight time frames, that was the next logical step. What I decided to do with this book, I had this conceit, I had this idea for a world in a lot of trouble and it had always seemed to me that every narrative of course has to be driven by some kind of urgency, its driven by moments where something changes that can’t be changed back, and I was very intrigued by essentially tightening the screw on that, making the decisions that my characters made and the situations that they encountered, to make them matters of life and death, to put my characters in a state of almost constant, overwhelming peril. So it was, in a sense, just sort of the next thing I wanted to try, and in order to try it I needed something really, really scary and dangerous. And as I said, I had this idea. This conceit came to me over a period of about three months chatting with my very precocious, at that time, 8 year old daughter. And it seemed kind of consistent with what I thought a novel could do, and what the next thing for me to try would be. I was perfectly willing to fail at it, which I think is the other thing you have to do as a writer, you have to be willing to have the whole thing not work, to come to a point where you see that “I’m not ready for this” or “I’m not up for this” and I was lucky that while I was writing this, it never came to that point.

BE: Is there ever a point, I’m asking this just after realizing that the cottage scene with Amy and the agent who takes care of her in Oregon, strikes me as somewhat reminiscent of The Summer Guest.

JC: Bingo, good job, you’re the first person to say that and you’re absolutely right. And its also a father daughter moment, which is in fact the central relationship in The Summer Guest.

BE: Yeah, I really loved him bringing his family on the roof of The Summer Guest and just taking in the panoramic view of the Maine wilderness.

JC: The Summer Guest, absolutely, and I didn’t realize it until after I’d done it, which is probably the best way to realize things about your writing. I came to it, and eventually said “oh I know what story I’ve gone back to” because it has some kind of real magnetic effect on me. I’ve often said that I’d be perfectly happy spending a few years alone in a cabin with my daughter playing board games. It’s absolutely true.

BE: I never forgot that I was reading a Justin Cronin novel as I made my way through The Passage. This book seems to stand out from others in the genre in that it both immerses the reader in a sprawling story, while also prompting them to pause in admiration of the prose. That being said, what is Justin Cronin’s most pronounced characteristic as a writer, stylistically or otherwise? What do think it is that distinguishes your work from other authors?

JC: Hmmm…that’s a good question and its hard to answer without sounding self-adoring.

BE: Do your best to be objective.

JC: Ok, I think probably my most distinguishing feature, and its not original to me, its one that I learned from other writers, is a desire to be absolutely clear. Which means when I write a scene I work extremely hard to know its physical and temporal reality with totality, and secondarily, it’s emotional and psychological reality in some totality; and then find, and this is always my ambition, not always achieved, the crispest, most compact way of naming that reality. The person I learned this from, and I’ve used his name already in this discussion, is Frank Conroy who was my teacher, who was a great teacher by example on the page and through his writing. He didn’t do very much of it, and I think that’s probably good, I think he wrote exactly what he wanted to write and nothing else. His sentences have an unbelievable sturdiness to them, they have no encumbrances, every word feels like exactly the right word. That’s what I always hope to try to do. Is that a style, is that a theology? I’m not sure which; I think it’s probably both.

BE: Throughout all your books, to me, the most marked characteristic is the sincere compassion you exhibit for your characters. What experiences can you point to in your own life, outside of the classroom, that you feel helped to shape your sensitivity as a writer?

JC: That’s a good question. I’d say some of the obvious ones and some maybe not so obvious. The most obvious is watching babies be born (laughs); and I’ve been in the room for two of those. I really like to write from the point of view of women, and I think that’s part of our job as writers–– to write with psychological clarity and insight about people who are not like us. The experience of watching a baby being born is a putting aside of your own ego. As the man in the room, I mean they give you these phony jobs to perform, you know they are kind of just keeping you busy. And at the center is another person, it is in effect one and a half people becoming two people and it is a situation where tremendous strength is called upon, and of course you’re emotionally involved in this, these are not total strangers, its your wife, its your son or daughter about to step on stage. And there is something very transformative about that that enlarges your sense of yourself, and maybe even by doing that actually sort of eradicates yourself temporarily and you come away fattened by it.

So that’s one, the other one I’ll say, and I wrote an essay about this long ago and I’m still not quite sure what it did to me, but I think something started there–– I was a young man, I don’t remember how old, I think maybe ten, ten years old, and for whatever reason I was driving on a dirt road near a reservoir with my father. I think we were going to the hardware store, and we came upon a car, a battered old Mercedes parked on the side of the road, it was March, it was raining a little bit, it was very muddy, and there was something about the car that seemed odd and as we drove past it I said to my father “I think we should stop, I think there is something wrong,” and we stopped the car, we backed up, and to kind of make a long story short, indeed something wrong, there was a man in the car who was nine tenths of the way to successfully committing suicide with a bottle of pills and a fifth of whiskey. There is more detail to this story that captured my attention, but it was the first time I had ever been in a situation even remotely like this, and where essentially it was my job, and my father’s job, to save somebody’s life who didn’t want it at that moment. The only thing to do was, my father tried to keep away, while I ran about a mile up the road to the next house, it was actually the house of a friend of mine, to call the ambulance. And this memory has stuck with me a million years and in fact it’s the basis of something, I wrote an essay about it many years ago, it actually is sort of replayed in a way, in the second volume of The Passage. But it was on my mind very recently, and as I said I think it’s a place where something started.

BE: Wow, that’s a complex and contradictory emotional event for a child I’d imagine.

JC: Yeah, it was completely perplexing; it was one of those things you don’t understand till many years later, if at all.

BE: I may be arching here, but at the conclusion of The Passage one of your characters, Sara, has a baby, and the way in which that’s written, it almost seems as if the birth is a metaphor for your creative process. As if you’re referencing this world that you yourself have given birth to with the book and the triology. Am I even close in assuming that?

JC: Hmmm…that’s a question about my unconscious mind as opposed to my conscious mind. I didn’t write that scene saying, “Oh, its time for one of the moments like at the end of The Tempest where Prospero comes on stage, becomes an actor and says, “Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill or else my project fails”” meaning I got to go home, can I leave.

BE: Or Breakfast of Champions with Vonnegut.

JC: I’m not meta-fictional in that way. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, I come back often to the experience of babies being born and a kind of, this kind of battlefield you go through, that people pass through and come out the other side changed. And I was thinking of that scene in terms of what my character Theo needed, and you know this is a book in which a lot of people die; babies should also be born, it seemed only fair.

BE: You’ve already committed immense amounts of time and energy to writing this epic which I imagine will come out to be somewhere around 2,500 pages, did you have any hesitation in starting a project this large, one that might impede you from exploring other things?

JC: No, not really you know I just felt lucky. I didn’t know quite how long the first book would be. I knew it was going be long, I didn’t really fully apprehend its length until I was maybe three or four hundred pages into the manuscript. The actual manuscript, I mean the book as a book is about, I guess, just under 800 pages in its English publication–– you should see it in the Norwegian, it takes forever, this book is the size of four books. But, I knew it was going to be long, the actual manuscript ended up in its longest version, from which I retreated somewhat, to be about 1400 pages. Which takes up a lot of room on your desk, and I had a good time with its length actually, I was really sort of excited at its length, like weightlifters are really excited about lifting something really heavy– its hard to do, but there’s a moment where you just want to say, “Look at me, look at me! Look at this heavy thing I can lift.” Writers are competitive you know, to my friends who have written 300 page novels, ha. So I didn’t worry about that, I still don’t, I look forward to writing other things but I also look at these three books as being separate challenges, its not just a continuation of story, each of the books resets the terms slightly, I want them to stylistically have little adjustments, and that’s as much for my amusement as anything else, but I think the reader doesn’t exactly want to hear the same thing over and over. I have a lot of faith in readers, I think they’re smart…

BE: Stop pandering (laughs).

JC: No, I think they are smart, I really do. I think a lot of writers write essentially episodic television by writing the same thing over and over, and I think that is pandering in a sense. I think readers are… they like something dense that has freshness to it and that challenges them a little bit. I know I do, and maybe I’m just assuming other people are the same as me, but I think its just… I think part of the book isn’t just for reading.

So yeah, this is going absorb a great big chunk of my, for lack of a better term, mid-career, but I’m lucky to have that. I don’t have to go hunting around, kicking over every rock looking for the next project and worrying if one will ever show up. I know what I’m doing from now until, I don’t know, the next five years or something, and that’s a tremendous load off my mind actually.

BE: Do you think, and this is somewhat of a generalization, that an author’s abilities and faculties diminish as they get older. I mean, how different of a writer do you feel you’ll be at fifty-five or sixty compared to what you are now?

JC: I hope better. I feel like… I don’t think I wrote anything interesting until I was close to 40 years old. And there are younger writers through maybe preternatural wisdom, they succeed earlier in saying something worth saying in a way that makes it seem true. But I think writing comes from two qualities: one of them diminishes in theory and one of them increases. The diminishing one is stamina, I suppose at some point I’ll have less stamina. And the other one, for lack of a better term, wisdom, is based on observing human life for a long period of time. In my case I hope that always increases, I hope the day I die I’m the smartest I’ve ever been. I do know stamina tapers off, but at the same time writers seem not to retire. Their careers seem to be the span of their adult lives. That is something to wonder about, you know, will there ever be a day when I say, “I think I’ll spend the last ten years fly-fishing,” and if that’s the case, I hope I catch a lot of fish.

Fly-fishing discussion ensues…followed by a discussion on obesity in Houston, TX.

BE: Can you talk about the relationship between experience and training in fiction writing–– how much can be taught and how much must be lived?

JC: I think the craft is both taught and observed. I think mostly how you learn how to write is by reading in some attentive way with piracy in your heart…

BE: Was there a point in your life when you changed the way you read; a light came on and you started observing craft and diction, as opposed to just being immersed in the book and the story itself?

JC: Yeah, I suppose there would have been, I’m trying to think when that would be. Probably not until graduate school because that’s when I started really kind of building a glossary in my head of the various technical and stylistic tropes that hold a fiction together. It wasn’t actually until few years after that though, when I began in an intelligent way observing the patterns of a novel, sort of the large super structures that make a novel work, and that was a case of me learning entirely on my own. That subject never came up at Iowa, where pretty much everybody at that time was writing short stories. I think that’s changed, I think graduate programs now at least make some gesture toward the novel. I’m actually much more of a novelist than I ever was a short story writer. I find the short story enormously demanding and exhausting to write, I’d rather go write the chapter of a novel any day. So, somewhere in there I made the transition, but it wasn’t all at once, and it wasn’t all forms simultaneously.

BE: I read a couple reviews of The Passage, and one reviewer said that there is a portion of the book that is written perfectly, and there was another reviewer who said you were over-reliant on kind of common overused tropes. I wonder how you’d respond to that, not the perfect part (laughs)?

JC: I would respond to that by saying let me come over to your house and do a load of laundry (laughs). But, you take the criticism of your book with a grain of salt. I’ve never found book-review type criticism to be something that I say, “oh gosh maybe that’s true I should be a different writer.” Because the truth is that any book is going to be met with a variety of responses and experiences, not every reader… For god sakes why would we expect everybody to love a book, that’s crazy, that’s like expecting everybody to love brussles sprouts.

BE: There also has to be a certain sense of envy there (for the reviewer), somewhere deep, buried in the subconscious, “I wish I could have written this.”

JC: Well, you like to think well of your fellow man and woman, but you know I m actually tremendously thin-skinned. I do want everybody to love me– men, women and dogs. So you know, I read the reviews, and thankfully most of them were positive and encouraging. What I decided to do, because this book was reviewed more than anything I had written, because among other things, since The Summer Guest there have been all of these online venues created for people, not professional critics, but just readers to post their thoughts… So literally, if you wanted to you could read thousand of opinions of your book, thousands. So what I decided to do was look at what would be helpful, that was sort of my standard, and if somebody just went on a rant, you know you could say, “Well I guess my book is just not for them.” We probably wouldn’t agree on many things: music, television, film, food, architecture, you know. Some people just don’t think the way you do. You know I did read a lot of them (the reviews) and thought about what people had to say. Both the praise of course and some of the criticism.

BE: If they’re not envious of the literary aspect of the book, Then I’m certain they are of the 1.75 million dollar sale for the movie rights.

JC: A book that kind of goes out to the world with a big number attached to it…

BE: I was living in France and I hadn’t heard of anything about you or your writing and one day, there’s your picture next to a story about vampires. I was shocked.

JC: You think you were shocked (laughs).

BE: Prior to embarking on this project, did you have disdain somewhere in you for genre fiction?

JC: Well, I think there is great genre fiction, and there is stuff that is kind of junk…

BE: Don’t say anything about Sweet Valley High (laughs).

JC: (Laughs) I will not talk trash about Sweet Valley High.

You know, there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s written for entertainment. In general it doesn’t entertain me because I’m a college English major and I’m in the business you know? What I really like is something different, the experience of language itself is part of why I read.

BE: Yeah, a pro baseball player is not going to go see a little league game.

JC: Exactly, unless his kid is in it. So, my point of view on this is a little bit different. I think disdain is probably just a bad feeling to have for anything. I mean you know, each to his own, god bless. That’s how I take it. The one thing that I do take exception to is sometimes there is sort of resentment going back and forth between the two camps. I’ve heard commercial writers say that literary writers would do what we do if only they could, and I’ve heard literary writers say commercial writers are always upset about not getting review attention but they don’t write well enough to deserve it. That’s kind of…

BE: I’d say the latter is far more accurate.

JC: Yeah, I mean you can pick a side, and I won’t do it here, but of course I have mine. It’s not a pleasant discussion and its kind of mean spirited and it mostly comes down to business. There’s a perceived dichotomy between critical respect and what you get paid and I’ll be perfectly honest, when I wrote The Passage I wanted both. I didn’t believe that they were mutually exclusive.

BE: No, there comes a time when you get paid for your craft and you go out and you hustle, and that’s what you did.

JC: Yeah, there was no reason not to try, because if it didn’t work, it didn’t work. It wasn’t going to cost me anything.

BE: While you’ve put your whole life into developing your craft as a writer, why not? Talk to me about getting plopped into the world of science fiction conferences. I saw some abhorrent interviews with you on YouTube (laughs). Not that you were bad, just that the questions were so inane.

JC: My relationship to the science fiction world is actually a slightly different world because it comes from the 1970’s principally. I’m still kind of first in line at the multiplex for what my wife – who prefers movies where people are trying to decide who marries the vicar – what she calls “outer-space shit.” I love it, I love science fiction. But most of my experience of it in the last 20 years has been through movies, I mean some books, Children of Men I think is a great novel.

BE: I just talked to Jeff Daniels and I guess he’s making a picture with Joseph Gordon-Levitt called Looper that is kind of science fiction-based. It integrates time travel and what not, so keep an eye out for it.

JC: I love good, high-concept science fiction when its well-executed and it has something stylistically innovative going on. I grew up on a steady diet of, at first the sort of juvee Robert Heinlein novels, you know Space Cadet and Farmer in the Sky, and Have Space Suit—Will Travel, and then graduated on to meatier stuff like Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov.

BE: Who wrote A Swiftly Tilting Planet?… Madeleine L’Engle, did you ever get into that?

JC: I did, I read her stuff absolutely. A Wrinkle in Time was a really important book for me when I first was kind of reading fatter books, I couldn’t say exactly how old I was when I read that. You know the young mind is enormously receptive to the sort of catch-all category of fantasy and science fiction because you sort of spend all your brain time there anyhow in some way. And I was particularly attracted to the end of the world apocalyptic narrative, because it was the cold war too, I mean it was the kind of mental anxiety that I was living with, its like an itch you have to scratch. So I read all that stuff. Now I go to Comic-Con or whatever and it is a different world. It’s a lot of stuff that wasn’t around when I was young. I mean, just the idea of the graphic novel, nobody called it a graphic novel when I was a kid, it was a comic book.

So there is a whole other thing going on, but I assure you that when I went to Comic-Con I was prowling the bins for Planet of the Apes action figures.

BE: Well, its funny, you go to something like that now and you’re the center of attention. You’ve inserted yourself into that world.

JC: Yeah, its as unlikely a development in my life as I could possibly imagine, but the whole thing has been, it’s sort of been one shock after another.

BE: You know just reading your writing, at least the first two books, and knowing that you grew up on the east coast, I kind of envision you as a younger (John) Cheever, minus the harrowing psychological journey.

JC: Without the alcoholism, ya, (laughs).

BE: It seems to me that you grew up in kind of, dare I say, waspish environs. Is that accurate?

JC: Yeah, I always say I grew up inside of a John Cheever short story, although I didn’t understand most of what was going on. I did, I grew up in suburban New York not far from where he lived, which was Ossining. His short fiction was enormously important to me, still is.

BE: It’s the best.

JC: No dispute. I encountered the first story of his when I was a senior in high school. I was taking a creative writing class and a friend of mine who was a very intelligent reader and a really gifted writer handed me one of his stories. It might have been “Farewell My Brother” or “The Worm in the Apple,” I’m not sure; it could have been a number of them. And it was my first real encounter with sort of ecstatic language applied to a diurnal reality that I recognized. I was just an unrepentant lover of his work, to the extent that in the summer that he died I was working in a deli, I was painting houses during the week and working at a deli on the weekends, you know, making sandwiches and making coffee and working the counter, and I wore a black armband (when he died). And this is sort of in a working class neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut. The major patrons of this deli… There was a post office near by with a big depot so all the postal workers came in, and I was wearing this black armband and they were like “Whose that for?” “Why are you wearing that?” And I’d say, “John Cheever died.” And my favorite response to this was a woman who said… This woman who is wearing a postal delivery uniform, looks at me and a great sadness comes over her face and she touches my hand and says “I’m very sorry for your loss.” (Laughs) I think she thought we were related.

BE: I have a copy of him reading “The Swimmer” that was recorded, I think in the 70’s sometime, I don’t know if you’ve heard it.

JC: I have not, I have not. I would love that.

BE: Do you think Carver a bit over-valued as a short story writer? He’s often lumped in with Cheever, and I understand the minimalism and the genius there, but there’s really no comparison for me I guess.

JC: Well it is…I’d say there’s no comparison in that its kind of apples and oranges. Cheever offered a richness of words and Carver offered a richness of silences.

BE: Very well put.

JC: So they are very, very different and I think they each made a significant contribution. The third leg of that stool for me would be Flannery O’Connor, as sort of the great American short story writers of the 20th century. You know, there’s the competition and it’s a three-way tie.

BE: What did you think about Dubus?

JC: A wonderful writer, I loved his stories. I thought he was a great novella writer, which I admire a lot because it’s such a hopeless enterprise in American publishing to write a novella. I mean it’s great if you’re a 19th century German, but nowadays its about as doomed a thing as you can do.

Some of his stories I think are just about perfect. I think “A Father’s Story” is the best story he wrote, or “The Curse,” and so he’s right up there, but I still would give special honors to Carver, Cheever and O’Connor just as people who really shaped the way we write short stories. They were very, very good, they were the best at it, but they also sort of shaped what we think of as a story. So I’d say, since Chekhov, those are the three.

BE: Is writing cathartic for you Justin?

JC: Yeah, something comes out of you that needs to come out. It’s an internal conversation that you externalize, you know, kind of getting at what’s eating you–– What’s eating you? What are you afraid of? What are you worried about? What’s on your mind?… And you know, you can only shout it so loudly at the hotel bar (laughs). You have to have some place to put it that’s actually useful, and building a story around it is a good way to tell it.

BE: Have you found yourself finding answers on the page, working things out of your head and actually coming to some resolution through what you’ve written?

JC: Yes, absolutely, there’s no question. Some of them are really deeply personal, nothing I would tell anybody but my wife. I think my first book was a place to put a lot of that, and I think that’s usually what drives, or customarily what drives first novels. I mean everybody’s first novel tends to be the most autobiographical and then they have to move on to other people and other lives. But my first book definitely, which I spent a lot of time writing, I mean among other things it was constructed of short stories which, as I said, are enormously time consuming and demanding; but that book came from more of a personal face. My other books did more to metaphorize those thoughts.

BE: There was more of Justin Cronin the person in Mary and O’Neil.

JC: No question, Justin Cronin the writer is in the other two books.

The Papercuts’ frontman sounds off on Kanye, epiphanies, and the anxiety-quelling power of liquor.

Also in This Issue:

• Listen to Jason Quever’s Fogged Clarity Session

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: After releasing three prior records under the Papercuts name, do you still get excited on the eve of a release, or has the digital age drained a bit of that enthusiasm.

Jason Quever: No, its really exciting, I mean…Really the first one was in 2004 and it wasn’t super different back then. It’s maybe more nerve-wracking right now because so much focus is on immediate press. I mean we try not to look at that, but you know that the label and everybody is paying attention to it. I mean I love making records it’s my favorite thing to do, but there’s a lot of anxiety with it to.

BE: Do you think there is more expectation on behalf of your audience now that this is your fourth Papercuts record?

JQ: That’s a good point too. You have to keep moving and hopefully keep people interested, and feel like your going somewhere. Otherwise, people feel like “well I have the other records, why do I need all of your records.” I feel like I have to reinvent myself every time, but I like that idea.

BE: Conceptually what are you bringing to the table on this album, Fading Parade, that’s different from your past records?

JQ: Well, I think conceptually it is the most… I have always kind of shied away from love songs, and this is kind of a more romantic record. So, that is sort of a first, where I sort of embrace that. Production-wise there was a lot of different things, I worked with an outside producer and went to an outside studio. That was a first.

BE: Had you been producing everything yourself prior to this?

JQ: Ya, up to this point I was the only person who ever twiddled the knob.

BE: If you’re the sole producer, as you were on past records, is it difficult not to have a critic when your making an album; you know, not to have someone to run things by if you are putting everything together yourself.

JQ: It’s funny that you say that, because in some ways it’s the opposite whereby I feel like I tend to be overcritical when I’m working alone, and sometimes you need someone there to say “No that was cool.” or “Go off in that direction.” So in a way, having someone there sort of feels like I don’t have to be so much of a critic.

BE: Yeah

JQ: Do you know what I’m saying, because you’re overworked. You’re basically overworked when you do everything yourself, and you have no perspective on anything.

BE: Do you find that establishing a vulnerability as a songwriter creates a stronger bond to the music for the listener?

JQ: Its hard to…I think in my situation yes. Ya know, I can only come from a place of total honesty. I don’t think that’s necessarily true for everybody. It’s just the only way…The thing with interviews I’ve always thought about is that I’d love to be witty and give smartass answers but I just can’t. It’s the same with music, I can only be sincere and honest ya know, for better or worse, I’m not putting anything on. So it works for me, probably because I lack the wit to pull it off any other way (laughs).

BE: It’s almost as if with this record you start with one emotion and then sonically you add texture and depth and subtlety to that emotion. As a unifying aesthetic, what do you think it is on this record? What is the central mood, the driving force behind the record?

JQ: God, its so hard to see it for what other people might see. I mean, it’s funny because if I described it, it would be totally opposite from what other people would describe it as. Whereas, for me this is kind of an upbeat record, this is an exciting record, it’s more of a major key record. I mean there is a point where it gets a little darker, but, for me, I found myself kind of feeling really exuberant when we were recording. Which, maybe when other people hear it, they hear this sleepy, dreamy, or whatever the word you wanna use is. But from where I’m coming from it’s a more exciting record for me. I found myself sort of…just kind of throwing my arms around when I was singing and stuff like that.

BE: One of the songs I really like on the record is called “White are the Waves.” Can you talk a little about the impetus for that song, and emotionally where that song came from?

JQ: I feel like musically its some sort of nod to Kate Bush. Lyrically, it’s the one song I talked a lot about with the band. I remember writing that song and saying “What is this about?” And I sort of started saying white are the waves, and wondering what that could be. Usually I don’t write that way, but it started to take shape like Kurtz. I think we started to think about it like Heart of Darkness, sort of like his psychotic logic.

BE: Do you still live in San Francisco?

JQ: Yes.

BE: Is there a San Francisco sound? Do you feel like you make music similar to Belle and Sebastian and that crowd?

JQ: I don’t know, people always say there’s this laid back thing that we do, but, like I said, to me it seems upbeat. So its weird, if it exists its totally unconscious. So I don’t know, I cant think of any San Francisco bands that we sound like, in my mind. I feel like a lot of San Francisco bands are influenced by some sort of psychedelic music, maybe that’s it, theres such a rich history of psychedelic music that you just can’t help but be influenced by it. But people always use the words laid back. So, I’ve always made laid back music, I guess, I’ve never been into super fast rock and roll?

BE: I find there to exist a tension in your music, actually, does that make sense to you? Do you think there is tension there?

JQ: Ya, totally, its always the best when your working out some problems, or some epiphany or something. Usually that’s what a good song is, it feels like you’ve worked through something painful and come out the other end in a positive. That’s what I try to do usually. I usually try not to make it mopey, it might start out mopey, but usually I feel like the thing to try to do is make it upbeat on some level.

BE: I was reading a press release for your new album and it said that you don’t like to be the center of attention. I imagine that’s kind of difficult being in a band and playing shows; how do you approach that?

JQ: Lots of alcohol (laughs).

BE: And your dead serious (laughs).

JQ: I am serious, and I’m trying to figure it out. Its funny, I’ve been asked that question; people ask me, “What do you do on tour?” I am sure no one expects that. Yeah, it’s a just coping mechanism of being in the middle (everything). But I guess there’s a part of me that likes it (performing), I mean, I love playing music and I like conveying something to people so, not every single fiber of my being hates it. But I definitely cope by… I get more into it ya know. I have a lot of great people playing with me now, so it’s like I have to step it up and try to enjoy it. If you’re not having fun everyone knows it, so I can’t let everyone down, all the people that go, and so I get into it just on that level, wanting to do a good job and make people enjoy that time their spending there. So, I can get into it on that level. Though, it’s true that I generally don’t like to be (in the middle of things). It doesn’t make a lot of sense on one level of my personality.

BE: Do you approach going out and playing live shows as if your there to please people and entertain people, or is there still an element of it that is truly pleasurable to you?

JQ: Oh, its totally fun. Especially when your playing with people you like playing with. So, its fun, its not hard. It’s a lucky position to be in. Its not like I have to try that hard to enjoy it. But there are moments that are really trying and difficult.

BE: What songs closest to you on the new record? What came from a poignant, personal experience? You mentioned this was a love album, did you have a relationship in your life that led to these songs?

JQ: No, its not really from my point of view. I think the first song “Do you really wanna know”… I wasn’t taking it seriously, I was just like, I should play a happy song. So I started playing that and it came out And I didn’t think much of it. But Tom who produced us, really liked it and the band really liked it, so I guess I have a lot of positive feelings about it because it was kind of easy to do and it seems to be a song that people like. It does kind of convey…it says, “I don’t know if I love you” that’s kind of the chorus and I guess that’s kind of the idea of the record, that feeling of being totally torn and not sure about where you are.

BE: I take it that since you don’t like to be the center of attention that you don’t like to meld the personal and the musical too much; at least in discussing the work.

JQ: I really feel…I’m totally honest about it, I just don’t ever write about my own specific experiences, there (the songs) more just like vaguely colored by memories and things like that. But I think I would be honest about it, I mean, maybe you’re right maybe I wouldn’t be, its hard to tell. But theres nothing to hide, I guess you’ll have to trust me on that. Theres nothing really terribly autobiographical about anything.

BE: That’s interesting, I watched the Thom Yorke video of him dancing from the new Radiohead album, and I just have to believe watching him gyrate that he hears the music differently; that he hears something different or more completely then I am hearing. I’d describe your music as very colorful, I think if you shut your eyes and listen to this album a couple times, the colors start to come out. Does that make sense?

JQ: That’s what our drummer said, he was using the term “Technicolor.” I do think in colors a lot kinda of when I’m trying to put sounds together, so I guess that makes sense. We tried to make it as rich as possible; fun to listen to, headphone candy and things like that. Yeah, that’s cool. Thank you, I appreciate that.

BE: Do you ever enjoy stripping it down, just grabbing a guitar and playing?

JQ: Yeah, I’ve had this rule for a long time that the song has to be able to survive with just an acoustic guitar and vocals.

BE: Whats your ambition as a songwriter, if you could accomplish one thing through your work what would it be?

JQ: Man I just think about staying alive, I feel like I’m just a survivor. If I can trick people into keep putting my records out (laughs), that’s kind of my goal. I love writing so much, and I love having the funding to make records. I just feel like every song I make…its fun, but also, I write a lot and pick the ones I think will enable me to keep making records. I just really want to be able to keep doing it, and have it be exciting for us. Ambition wise, there are songs that I could think of that I’m like “God, I wish I could write a song that good.” But that’s about it really, I just wanna hit people immediately, ya know. I just like to try and write songs that come from some sort of magical place, just like Kanye or something, you hear it and it hits you so strongly. That’s what I always wanna try, go for that real epiphany and magic feeling you feel when you hear Kanye or something.

BE: There’s so much to be said for the slow burn though, ya know, for something that it takes you four or five listens to warm up to, those are oftentimes the most lasting songs or records, and I know that with the hyper-stimulated age were living in, the digital age, I know it is more important than ever now to hit people immediately and generate interest. Have you found that your songwriting, your discipline has been influenced by that fact?

JQ: I don’t know if it’s the digital age or what, but I’ve definitely, over the years, have realized that it needs to change more than I might naturally do. When I first started recording it was all over the map ya know, so I just made demo after demo and there was all kinds of styles, sort of experimenting, and when we made Mockingbird, which was actually the first record, I tried to put a bunch of things that made sense. But I think, getting feedback from that era made me realize that you don’t have to, so I’ve kind of gone back to trying to make it as diverse as possible. I don’t know if that’s the digital age or just the nature of making records and people critiquing them; and taking what you feel like is real. So I don’t know…maybe…I mean I think it’s just the same as always for my kind of music I just always wanna write like singly kind of songs anyway, so you always need those kind of songs, in the digital age especially, you just have the few songs people might hear on the internet.

Author A. Manette Ansay discusses her prose, process, and playing on the boys basketball team.

Singer and songwriter Chris Bathgate revisits the “salt year” that led to the creation of his new album.

Jose Gonzalez calls in from Sweden to discuss humanism, happiness, and his band Junip’s latest album, Fields.

Songwriter Jose Gonzalez

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: So how did your approach to Fields; constructing it with two other people, differ from the creation of your solo records?

Jose Gonzalez: For this album we decided to write everything together; we feel like it’s a band, that everybody should be involved and everything. So we just spent a lot of time jamming and recording into the computer; and so hours and hours of jams, and after a while we took the parts that we liked, and at the last minute I would go home and write the lyrics.

BE: Did you find that you evolved, that collaboration allowed you more freedom; that you grew as a musician throughout the process of recording this album?

JG: Ya, it’s liberating in some senses. When we’re jamming, and the guitar parts- there not in the front of the mix so I can get away with simpler stuff than when I write my solo stuff. It’s more about the whole. So yeah, I feel like when we’re writing (as a group) and when were playing live I’m able to be more free and improvise a bit more. And also, while we were producing I was able to… I would play bass and synthesizer and percussion and congas, so it’s been like a musical…what do you call it? It’s been inspiring to play other things and not only guitar.

BE: Well, I’m going be honest, one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you is because I think your one of the most thoughtful musicians writing and playing today; and all of your music, whether your playing with Junip or on your own, it seems to be under-laid with these potent, meditative undertones, these kind of philosophical currents. Who do you read and can you talk about some of your spiritual and philosophical influences?

JG: Ya, I mean for me it’s always been important for music first, and then lyrics. But I feel like for people who are interested and want to know more, I think they can notice that I come from a humanistic background. When I’m writing it’s usually from a humanistic perspective.

BE: I see a little Kierkegaard and a little Kant…there’s a song, on your last solo album, In our Nature, that’s called “Cycling Trivialities;” that’s always been a pretty poignant song for me, especially when you sing, “Oh, What is this thing in me.” Can you talk about that line, and have you identified that thing as of yet?

JG: I don’t think I sing that.

BE: “Oh what is this thing in me?”

JG: No, (laughs) but it’s a nice interpretation. It sounds like something I could write, but its not.

BE: I’m abashed. Well, can you talk about the song a little bit then?

JG: Ya, I had the song for a very long time, and I had the chorus (it) was ready a couple of years before I recorded the song. I knew I wanted to sing about when you get caught in trivialities and you can’t see past your own horizon, and basically how you can make things seem bigger and more difficult than they really are. Almost sentimental, the lyrics about…

BE: It seems to be almost in opposition to a humanist philosophy though, suggesting that we’re cycling trivialities. It’s kind of interesting.

JG: Ya, I mean its more of an observation, and not…Almost like complaining about yourself and how you get stuck in small things, and you want to change that.

BE: Well, I seem to have misinterpreted the song and I apologize.

JG: No, no worries. Its open for interpretation. I like it when people hear other things that mean something. It’s cool.

BE: Can you talk about the cultural differences between Sweden and the United States, and whether either atmosphere is more conducive to being successful in the arts, and in music?

JG: (Sweden) Its known for…When I grew up it was easy to get rehearsal spaces, and when I was a teenager I played classical guitar in a place where young people were able to play on big stages with a professional P.A. Then when my friends started releasing albums; it was really easy to get grants from the state to produce an album or release an album or go on tour. But, ya, I think it’s a good country for the arts, but apparently lately its been getting worse.

BE: Lets get back to the Junip album real quick. What do you think is the central sentiment or emotion that the album (Fields) is organized around? Or what is the general feeling your trying to convey with the record.

JG: I don’t know, because I feel like there are different themes on the album, and there are different songs. So if you look at a song like “Always” or “Off Point”…those songs are like sort of accusing songs or ????. Then you have a song like “Its Alright” that’s open and positive. So, yeah I don’t feel like there is one common theme on the whole album. And the song “Without You” is kind of a relationship song…

BE: Did you set out to weave the record together as one piece, or do you feel like its made up of disparate songs?

JG: I feel like what holds it together is the sound. The songs are very different from each other… I feel like the sound is similar, and people who write about our album seem to think the songs sound similar and that the record is cohesive.

BE: How does your reception, doing a live show in Sweden, differ from your reception in the United States.

JG: Well, it seems like its different from show to show actually. The shows in the States have been pretty good, we toured in June before the album was out and had pretty good crowds and were able to connect with the audience.

BE: You should be a national hero in Sweden, there should be a statue of you.

JG: (Laughs) Ya, I’m telling the politicians that here in my hometown.

BE: I don’t know if I’m making a leap or inferring too much again; but is music a tool you use to search for answers? Is there any instance when after writing a particular song you’ve discovered you’ve learned something about yourself in the process.

JG: Ummm, I think its more about having music being…Ya know I think it can be liberating in a way, meditative…

BE: Is it cathartic?

JG: Ya, exactly, like your doing something creative and you feel really good while your doing it, or after. So it’s not so much about finding out who I am, but about feeling very excited when you come up with a riff or a line that you like. It’s more like therapy than a way to know yourself.

BE: You seem like a very grounded, balanced person; are you happy?

JG: Yes, I mean I have my ups and downs like anyone else; but especially now, I am very, what do you call it?

BE: Content?

JG: Yes, with both Junip and my solo-stuff and my relationship with Yukimi (Nagano), so life in general feels pretty good for me now, and balanced. But I mean I’ve had my ups and downs; I’ve had periods of time when I’ve been really down and super unbalanced.

BE: And I’m sure you’ve turned that into beautiful music.

JG: Yes, but afterwards.

In a truly classic interview, Canadian actor John Dunsworth drifts in and out of character to discuss politics, liquor, and the inspiration behind his signature character:Trailer Park Boys’ Officer Jim Lahey.

Jim Lahey / John Dunsworth

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: What are you working on now? Where are ya?

John Dunsworth: We’re in Peterborough, Ontario and were doing a show here tonight. Were going to zip over to Lindsay and do a show at the university.

BE: Is this an offshoot of Trailer Park Boys, or is this something different?

JD: This is Randy and Lahey doing a live show. We’ve been traveling around Canada for about five or six years now.

BE: So, talk to me about the live show, what’s it like, what does it entail.

JD: Well, ordinarily its two 45-minute sets and it can go well over that depending on what time we start and how voracious the audience is, but essentially its physical comedy; we have a lot of props, we play songs, and involve the audience as much as possible. We’ve discovered that audience participation is golden. When you get people from the audience up on stage, for some reason it makes the show better in the eyes of the audience, I don’t know if its because they feel represented or if you need to embarrass people to have fun nowadays, I mean that seems to be almost the new ethos in television entertainment, someone has to take it in the face or something.

BE: Do you find there to be some general thematic and conceptual differences between the American and Canadian comedic approach?

JD: Well, I’m not that up on it, but if I had to say…and I read an article in the paper today saying that they relaxed the rules in Canada for CRTC, the Canadian Radio Television Commission, they relaxed the rules so that you don’t have to be accurate in your commentary; and one of the comments was made was that the American style radio has turned to hate radio. Now I haven’t heard a lot of American radio, but I know what that means. But when I put it up against the republican attacks- Sarah Palin-type crosshairs, and I compare that to our own prime minister Stephen Harper, who is really – I don’t know if its him – but certainly he’s in charge of what goes on in this country and he keeps a very tight rein, and he is going, pushing as much as possible toward the American style. And to me, we are different here…Last week this new arrangement between Obama and Harper about having a unified protective agency around both of our countries…that’s the kind of thing that is going to marry us. But, if I can be specific, the reason that the trailer park is appreciated north and south of the border is because its not derivative, it isn’t Hollywood, it doesn’t copy, it doesn’t have the shoot-em-up, ugly nature of the….it doesn’t have races…you know, go on for fifteen minutes with these stupid car races and high speed crashes and impossible events, nowadays we’re into things that can be presented as truth, and they’re not truth at all, its just fiction. And Trailer Park Boys… it’s a mock dock, but you look at it and you think “that us, that’s who we are.” We’re losers trying to do little plans and always getting screwed up doing them.”

BE: So, let’s talk about your character, Jim Lahey. How much of an influence was Hunter S. Thompson in the creation of that character?

JD: Ya know, I know about Hunter S. Thompson, and I think his ashes are probably circling the earth as we speak; but, very little, I know so little about him. When I was a kid I knew about Lenny Bruce, and he was quite influential in terms of the anti-establishment stance that I personally have. The thing about Trailer Park Boys is there’s no politics, there’s no evil intent. I would like to think that… its so hard because John Dunsworth wants to be political, he wants people to be taking a look a look at the given circumstances in the world and saying “why is this happening? This goes against every single grain of common sense; and why do we allow the American military to dictate whats going on in the world?”… That’s what I would like to do; but what I find myself doing as an entertainer is completely ignoring that and talking about bullshit things like over-consumption of alcohol and shit jokes and things, and I find myself feeling like I’m pandering to the masses when I do that.

BE: Ya, I imagine it must be frustrating for someone who is politically informed and who has a platform from which to comment…

JD: Well, when I say frustrated… its not that I’m frustrated because I do find vent, ya know, like I just did right now, but its hard for me to hold it back. For example, we did a show last night here, and I think it was our funniest show we ever did. I mean, there was some politics there, I was poking fun at the Pope and all kinds of things; but I really was playing as drunk a Lahey as ever there was and really, totally enjoying it; and enjoying it because the audience was cracking up… I think I love to be; I love to perform. I mean you said that 1987 was the start of my career. I started way back in the 60’s at the University of Guelph playing Charles Manson and Shylock, and started my a theatre way back when I went to Halifax in 1970. I’ve done mostly theatre until the 80’s, live theater, and I still do it today when I’m lucky enough to get involved in a good production. But I’m kind of a will-o-the-wisp, I go where I’m wanted. People tell me that there’s a movie, and I go and audition for the movie. Only lately have I decided, have I been able to pick and choose. I had an offer today to be a spokesperson at a certain function and it didn’t appeal to me, so I made an excuse and said I wasn’t available. But for years…I mean, I ran for politics because I was asked, I did everything. I did writing commercials and directing and teaching at university and work-shopping and producing; anything that came along I would do. Now I’m 64, (and) there’s a luxury here because I get to choose a little bit.

BE: I didn’t mean to sell you short in the intro there.

JD: No, no, I’m just pointing out that I’ve been around a long time, and I’m still like a kid and I’m not jaded at all. I look at the world as a very exciting, wonderful place and I’m just wondering why we have to be hamstrung by so much bullshit, like the drug industry and the fear factor, and the people who are fighting over religion. Have you ever heard of something more ridiculous in your life than people who believe in a great creator wanting to kill someone else who believes in a great creator? It just sounds ridiculous.

BE: Well, its incredibly contradictory. It’s very easy, I’ve found, to become apathetic when you look at all of this, all of what takes place in the world. But there are great things, and there are funny things, and Jim Lahey is certainly one of them, and we thank you for that.

As you said your 64, what do you think the advantages are of finding the success you’ve achieved with Trailer Park Boys later in life?

JD: Well, I give in to any creative urges that I have now, including painting and sculpture, building with granite rock and writing stories. I just finished a book that’s being printed right now in the States and were going to get it in the first week in March.

BE: Is it fiction?

JD: I just put out a CD in December of 16 stories that I wrote and it’s an audio book, I’ll send you one if you like. You can go to johndunsworth.com and download it; matter of fact if you go there you can checkout some new stuff, see a couple of pilots we just put up over the past two years. Me and Randy did one of them, its called “The Lot,” and (we’re) getting really good reviews and reception on that. But a lot of the stuff I do now, I’m not doing it to make any money. I’m doing it because I really enjoy doing it.

BE: Talk to me about how your relationship with Randy developed.

JD: Well Pat and I never, Pat Roach, never knew each other before Trailer Park. He was a friend of Ricky, of JP Trombley and Rob Wells, and they had a pizzeria over in Prince Edward Island, which is a small province in the gulf…

BE: Anne of Green Gables

JD: Exactly. And they used to, for entertainment, used to make videotapes, and they’d send them to Mike Clattenburg who was their friend in Halifax who was making films and things; and he thought they were hilarious and he said “lets make a movie.” So when they found success in their first film, which was called One Last Shot, which nobody can see because its never been released, well it was a small release but…when we finished editing it a half an hour before the drama festival, the film festival, he got best director and I got best actor. So when he decided to do the Trailer Park Boys he thought, who would be better to run the park then old Jim Lahey the drunk? So that’s when I got involved and I’m so happy that I did, because it was the best ten years of my life.

BE: Ya, and we touched on this, but you’re a talented actor and I know you’ve worked very hard at your craft. Do you ever feel that as a comedy actor, especially playing someone as funny as Jim Lahey, that the skill and attention you put into the character, I guess the craft of comedy itself, is under-appreciated or overlooked?

JD: Well ya know, I don’t have any great insights into it. As I said, I played Charles Manson, but I didn’t play him as evil; and, and Shylock. I didn’t play them…I played them as human beings. I think that…same thing with Jim Lahey, I didn’t play him to be funny, I played him to be a guy who was seriously interested in trying to quash the recalcitrant, recidivist reprobates who live in the park. And, because you know yourself… I’m going to speak as Jim Lahey right now…When you give vent to what it is that you truly believe…sometimes I have to admit that alcohol gets in the way a little bit…I think that I have a mission in this life and ill be damned if I’m going to let those guys wreck this park, cause I am the park.

BE: Mr. Lahey, is that you or the liquor talking?

JD: Randy, I am the liquor.

BE: (Laughs loudly) The best line, perhaps, ever spoken in contemporary comedy.

JD: (laughs)

BE: I don’t know if you understand why that character resonates with so many people; its because we’ve all been that fucked up, that belligerent, and that, I guess, unconcerned. There’s this disregard, that I’m sure comes with drunkenness with Jim Lahey, that just seems to be… its pathetic, but it’s also freeing…it is truly the most pure form of escapism with Lahey.

JD: Well, I have to give credit where credits due here because Mike Clattenburg…the most disparaging thing you could call actors nowadays are meat puppets… and if you actually look at the industry and you see what people have to do to be a success in the in industry, whether its (being) beautiful, like Jolie and all those, ya know, the movie stars… But Mike Clattenburg actually said, “John, give me a six on that for drunkenness and give me a four for anger.” Ya know, he actually told me what it was he wanted and that’s what I did. I taught a lot at the university and directed a lot over the years and I never minded giving readings— because, two people cant… there’s no way, I can say like “I love you” in a certain way and you can say the line with the same cadence that I said it, but when people see them (on stage) its meaning is totally different. So somehow there was this lucky coincidence between Mike Clattenburg saying “John do it this way” and me doing it that way; and then he would laugh and then I would know that I hit the right note. But I just really have to give the credit to the script and to Clattenburg…uh, because I’m an actor and, to the best of my ability, I do what I’m directed to do. It’s a diarchy, it is. It is two people contributing to the role.

BE: Well one looks at you play that role, and I know you’re not much of a drinker, but I’d have to imagine that you’d spent some time in that state to know it and portray it as well as you do.

JD: I can’t remember anymore than a couple times I got drunk in my life, and I only did it once on purpose when I had 16 draft when I moved away from home and went to Toronto, Ontario, and I got arrested that night for jumping on a policeman’s motorcycle and going “Vroom Vroom.” But, another time I was on a Russian ship and they were plying me with orange juice laced with vodka, and another time I got drunk inadvertently, but… a half a dozen times in my life. And I don’t enjoy being drunk because…I love playing drunk, and I tell all my audiences (Lahey voice): “Look boys, its more fun to pretend to be drunk than it is to be drunk ya know why, cause you get to say stuff to people. Ya get to say, “Listen you know that hundred bucks you owe me? Ah fuck I shouldn’t have brought that uh ah cause I’m drinking.” or you can say, “Ah listen honey, I really, listen, please excuse me, but I think you’re the most beautiful woman I ever saw.” You can be very, I think ingenuous is the right word here. It’s fun to pretend to be drunk because you can get away with anything and then you can drive someone home. But people phone my daughter, my daughter Sarah who plays Sarah on Trailer Park (Boys); every once in a while one her friends will say, “I saw your dad on the street driving his car, Sarah he’s drunk out of his mind you’ve gotta do something.” But I value my license, I think that might be one…I mean, I don’t like the taste of beer. It’s an acquired taste and I never acquired it.

BE: You’re a liquor guy.

JD: I like a little Blackstrap rum with my Coca-Cola; but I love Coca-Cola. My favorite drink is a chilled glass with ice and a freshly popped tssssh, Coca-Cola.

BE: Nice are we talking glass bottle or can?

JD: Oh I don’t care.

BE: Really well you have to go with…the bottle is phenomenal.

JD: I can tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke and I can tell the difference between Coke that’s been open for three hours and Coke that’s fresh.

BE: You’re a connoisseur

JD: Ya, I am. I started drinking it when I was two years old. My dad was a psychiatrist and worked in Topeka, Kansas at the Menniger Institute there way, way back when I was a kid. And so we’d drive back and forth to Nova Scotia, which was thousands of miles I guess, long ways, and I’d go into the service station at two years old and say, “Coke, man.” And I still have all my teeth.

BE: Well, what do you think the perception most Canadians hold of Americans is?

JD: Pepsi and Coca-Cola

BE: Commercialism?

JD: Um…which one’s are the republicans the Pepsis or Cokes; and which ones are in Russia, Pepsi or Coke; and one’s in China, tell me. I mean, if you start drawing the lines down between Republicans and…, or Catholics or Jews, it just seems to me that there’s just too much combativeness. Ya know, the United States prides itself on freedom of thought and stuff, but it doesn’t; it isn’t; it doesn’t wanna be. People are convinced, and I think that that’s the problem that’s wrong. Canadians aren’t convinced of anything, except, in the winter it gets cold, and, if you can you go south. And the thing about it to me is, when you’re convinced, “My country right or wrong,” then you’re going down a path to perdition. You have to say right comes first, and than family.

BE: I think there are…though it might not appear so, I think there are many different sects in terms of what people believe and how they’re reacting to the U.S. government and really the ideology that we seem to be purveying to the world. But, I know that a lot of us get lost in art, and, as I said, some of us have become so apathetic that we get lost in things we can control. Because when George Bush got elected the second time you really felt helpless, and then with Obama there was this onrush of hope and ambitiousness, and then…we’ve been kind of disappointed. I can’t speak for all Americans, obviously, but I have… I thought there was some real, for lack of a better word, change coming.

JD: When the American people will put up with lies, knowing they’re lies, but lies told by guys on their team, whether it’s the Packers or the Steelers, then, then your in trouble. Because, if you can’t say the truth is more important than the team, than your in trouble. And that’s the zeitgeist in the states right now for me, is that although they know that its right to do this…I mean how many people are still saying there’s no such thing as climate change? Tell me. And when there are things happening in the Gulf of Mexico and Louisiana gets inundated with oil, which, probably in three or five years from now, probably… I mean… I don’t know how many people down there made a lot more money saying they lost money; but the thing is that over in places like Somalia or places like that they report; there’s a spill over there every year, every two years. So why is the environment of the U.S. more important than the environment of the world? Because aren’t we world citizens, isn’t the world important? Doesn’t America believe in equality for all? Or is it just equality for Americans? I mean, its not fair. I mean, I think that the government…and I’m not trying to pull anything here, I don’t think Canadians are superior for a minute, but I just think that if you dumb down a population on purpose, your going to get a dumbed-down population. And the education system, unless it embraces the truth as something that’s sanctified, unless we are allowed to tell the truth…people here…I was in a town the other day, its called Swastika, during the second world war the government came in and tore down all the signs and put up a sign calling it Winston, Winston Churchill of course, not Swastika. Swastika was named after…it’s an Indian name and it means a meeting place. When these guys go down to the states wearing there Swastika shirts they almost get killed. Now why does a symbol, why does a word…Why do people get so upset with things that really, in and of themselves, are not threatening at all?

BE: Whereas, they don’t become angered at all by things that truly are?

JD: Exactly, why do we have all of these people being hired to repress our citizenry at the airports, at… ya know there’s stories of people a hundred miles from the border being pulled over with plates on and being run through the mill students at universities down there from Canada who are being thrown in jail for days…Why is it in Canada right now are we training ten times more people that we need to do security? If I wanted to go on an airplane and bring that plane down, I could. Why do they pretend that they can protect us? They take away my little jeweler’s screwdriver from my little jeweler’s screwdriver set from my sunglasses and I can’t go through. I’m allowed to take one of them on the plane with me but I can’t take the set of three. There’s a tiny little blade about an inch long on it, but when I sit down in first-class and I have breakfast they give me a stainless steel knife with a serrated edge. Now you tell me what the hell is that all about? It doesn’t make any sense. All of that is based on this kind of let us assuage the population and let them think that we are taking care of business, when we in reality… the future is the future and there’s no way you can… You can’t defend yourself against a hurricane that hits and inundates New Orleans. You know? You can make political hell out of the aftermath, but the things that are happening in the world are things that you have to, aw, man…

BE: I don’t think there’s the level of political activism. It peaked a little bit when Obama was running for President, but I just don’t think we’re a very politically engaged country.

JL: Who isn’t?

BE: America.

JL: Are you kidding?

BE: No. In terms of being heard and standing up. Well, look. We declared war on Iraq in March of 2003. The true outcry didn’t begin until, I want to say, January of 2007, when people would actually go protest the war. We’re very late actors, it seems. So in terms of maybe partisan engagement…:

JL: We’re delayed because who controls your media? That’s why you’re delayed. People that were saying there’s no weapons of mass destruction did not get a platform in the United States media, and they didn’t get a platform because it wasn’t au currant. It wasn’t what…. Oh, man. There’s so many things. I mean you hear about the fall flag and you realize that the USS Maine that blew up in Havana harbor… I mean, who made the money on that? I mean, who started the newspapers down there? What was that chain of newspapers… Hearst. I mean it all comes down to money. Who’s making the money out of the Iraq War? Who? Halliburton and Dick Cheney, and don’t I hear that. Oh, man. When you say that the American people are not politically engaged, you’re absolutely right, but they’re convicted. They have conviction. “My party is right and nothing you can say or do is going to change my mind.” Period.

BE: And there is opposition. Not all Americans are like that.

JL: Oh, I know. Are you kidding? I know. I absolutely know.

BE: It’s incredibly frustrating. Isn’t it interesting, the dynamic that’s there? Whereas most Americans couldn’t tell you who the Prime Minister of Canada is, and yet here you are, with insight on every significant historical event that’s taken place here? Educated insight. I just think it’s interesting.

JL: Well, I love the American people, and I love the Canadian people, but I hate the politics of both countries because…

BE: Do you feel that Canada and the Canadian government is kowtowing to the Americans?

JL: I hate politics. If you… In Canada, right now, there are attack ads by the conservatives against the liberals, IE the Republicans against the Democrats. And the conservatives win every time, because they scare people. They say, “We’re going to get rid of crime in the streets!” And who doesn’t want that? But they lie about the crime in the streets. In Canadian politics now, the lies that are being told and perpetrated… We have a Prime Minister that stole two-million dollars from the Canadian people. Karlheinz Schreiber, of Germany, talked the Canadian government into buying the Airbuses. Right now, I’m going to deviate for a sec, the F-35 or whatever that new plane is that cost eighteen billion dollars, and don’t forget there’s going to be a hundred percent cost overrun. It’s going to be over thirty billion. We have a Prime Minister that stole money from us who’s walking the streets! And they say there’s no double standard in the world of politics and free democracy. It’s a sham. Don’t get me wrong. Winston Churchill said democracy is awful but it’s the best possible form of government, and I agree. But true democracy is when people have a government that represents what the will of the people is. I mean that stolen election down there in Florida or New Jersey or wherever it was… It’s sick! And yet American people, when they look abroad and see people stealing elections in Haiti or wherever, they stand up and say, “This can’t be!” but why can’t they do it in their own country? Because they’re afraid. Because there are so many people who will bat them down.

BE: All your points are well-taken.

JL: It’s the same thing in this country. The only difference in this country is that you might get a brick through your window, but no one’s going to shoot you. And when they do have something, like we had in Nova Scotia last year – a couple young guys put a cross in somebody’s lawn and burned the cross – now the person that they put the cross in the lawn of was black, and with a white wife, and so people immediately said it was a hate crime. These guys are going to jail. They’re talking about it in the papers, making a big case of it. But instead of talking about the true racism that exists, they take this little incidence, which isn’t racist at all, and they pretend that that’s what the essence of it is.

BE: Well, back to Jim Lahey.

JL: What we can do is we can ignore the last twenty minutes, and we can move on, and we can talk about art, because I think that that’s where it’s at. All of these people in the States right now and in Canada who are out of work, who have nothing to do, who spend their time watching TV and wanting to have the latest gadget, and not being able to afford it, and who are all sucked in by twenty-three percent interest rates on their Master Cards instead of being told and warned and educated… I mean the government of Canada, right now the provincial governments are killing people in this country by getting them to buy lottery tickets and to play the electronic gaming machines – we call them VLTs – there’s thousands of people in Canada who kill because of their addiction to these machines, the government knows the machines are addictive, but the governments themselves are addicted to the money and the revenue that they get, and that is the problem in a nutshell. The government… In democracy the government is supposed to stand up for the rights of people, and protect them against hawks, and that’s what’s wrong in North America today: the hawks have taken over, and Eisenhower was right when he called it the industrial-military complex. So let’s move on from this into something wonderful, like art!

BE: Well, I think in a way what we have been talking about relates very closely to art, because art is a response to political and social turmoil, but also because the funds are being suffocated and choked off because of a lot of poor political decisions. I know the state of Michigan, where I live, our arts budget went from 19.6 million in 2005 to 2.4 million.

JL: But here’s the thing: populations under attack are much more fecund. If you take a tribe and you start to oppress it, there will be way bigger birthrates, and it’s the same thing in art. I actually read it in The New Yorker last month, and it compared the amount of money that is given by different governments, and it turns out that countries that have less money have more artists. And I could be misquoting this, but what I’m simply suggesting is that in this time, when so many people are out of work, and in desperate situations, they can improve their lives by being creative. Because this thing that is called dopamine that makes us feel good about ourselves, I think there is a paucity of dopamine in North America. I think it’s drained by the negative aspects of our reportage and of all of our media. Even when you look at reality television, it isn’t real at all. It’s pretending. Like when we present our guys from Trailer Park Boys as losers, and depicting that as the reality, it feels good because it’s true! These other things about these big busted or blond beautiful or Angelina Jolies or Sean Penns or the successful people, when we hold up Two’s Company or… I don’t even watch television, I don’t know, but there are so many people living vicariously through these dreams that are not true. Like I talked to a guy last night. He wants to be a porn star. I said, “Do you know what the chances of you being one and what the rewards are of actually being one? Buddy, look at the given circumstances in the world.”

BE: Was he in school?

JL: What?

BE: Was he a college student?

JL: Yeah.

BE: I bet his parents are going to be happy with his career choice.

JL: Well, he’s not going to get to be one. He’s probably under-endowed. The thing that I’m getting at is that if we are taught in school that creativity and following your bliss, if you like, that’s not one of my words, but if you know what you can do to help other people and to make yourself feel good, then that’s the way you should go. If that’s what we’re taught, instead of “You’ve got to make lots of money” and “You’ve got to be like these people who you watch on TV”, that’s why Trailer Park works: because it doesn’t say that. It doesn’t make you unhappy with your life. It makes you happy with your life, because you say, “Hey! I’m not that bad.”

BE: What do you think art’s primary function is?

JL: Oh I couldn’t tell you. I just know that I push myself in every direction that I can, that I feel comfortable, from sculpting to painting seascapes. I do it. Last week I engaged in all of it. Writing and painting and sculpting…

BE: Do you find that when you spread your talents out, and I guess your intentions out, that the quality of your work suffers?

JL: Well, what they say about multitasking, and you read the studies on it, and you can’t do anything when you’re multitasking, you lose thirty percent efficiency – I disagree. I think when you can go from one thing to another thing, to another thing, you’re carrying with you as you move through that a kind of inertia, a kind of confidence, an ability, and the ability to express yourself… Some people don’t have it verbally. Some people have it in their hands. I find that if you don’t express yourself that just taking that first step sometimes is impossible to do because you have no dexterity at all. You don’t have the ability, but if you do it, if you say, “What I want to do is I want to create in me a feeling of feeling at home in my community, or in my environment, and I would like to…” Shakespeare said it best. You hold the mirror up to nature. That’s what art is. Of course, life mirrors art. It’s what’s happening now. And that was Oscar Wilde who said that a hundred years ago. And he was right, and now days, they say, “Big Brother is Watching You”, well that might be true but worse than that is that we are watching Big Brother. All of our values are being inculcated by the silly… I mean you watch television now days and you get programmed. There’s not any question that that is true.

BE: I couldn’t argue with that.

JL: But television done well is art. I’m in a series now called Haven, and I think the guys that put it together decided they were going to put together a hit show. That’s what they did. Now, some people decide that they’re going to write what’s in their heart, and they’re going to follow something that they sincerely believe in, and that’s what happened with Trailer Park Boys. How it became a hit I have no idea, because it was Michael Clattenburg following his heart.

BE: Well, that happens, and I think that that’s when the best work occurs – when someone follows their heart. Well, at least the best results, and it’s adopted by a larger audience. So where did your legendary shit analogies originate?

JL: The book I told you we’re working on, it’s called Dick-shit-nary. It’s a hundred and twenty-four pages hard cover with gold emboss, and it’s illustrated, and we did it. We decided to spend one month on the project, kind of as an homage to Lahey. It’s strange because although I’d like to re-brand Lahey to Dunsworth so that I can continue to work as an actor, former lecturer, teacher, whatever, because everyone knows Jim Lahey but no one knows John Dunsworth, what we’ve done is that we’ve gone all the way, we’ve pushed the envelope as far as possible. Although the book does not have any grothy shit stuff in it. It is an attempt to be clever with the word that wasn’t even in dictionaries until ten years ago. For some reason, this thing people can call it ca-ca, or feces, or excrement, or poo-poo, or whatever it is, but the word shit for some reason is not as accepted as… I can go around staying, “Jesus Christ!” I can go around saying, “Oh, God!” But to me, that’s way more blasphemous than saying shit, because everybody shits. Does the word… Like people can say frig instead of fuck but it means exactly the same thing, and if you say excrement instead of shit, why is it more polite? And the reason it’s all right is because of O Tempora O Mores. For some reason, that little word, that little word shit gets so many people so upset. “Listen, honey. I’d like to watch the show Trailer Park because my friends like it, but I just can’t get by the language.”

BE: Here I am thinking you said, “Oh, I write short stories and I sculpt and you said, ‘I have a book’” and I’m thinking it’s this novella, this work of literary fiction, and here it’s called the Dick-tionary.

JL: Dick-shit-nary. If you look up dictism, it will say, “A word coined by John Dunsworth to describe his philosophy or religion of dictism,” and I totally believe it. I mean, with tongue in cheek. But if you take any dictionary, and you ask a question and point at random, nine times out of ten it gives you some really insightful, specific word, and I discovered this way, way back in university. I started. I looked up the word theater, and I noticed that the word before theater was the, the most specific word in the English language, and then one day I just looked it up in a different dictionary to see where the word theater was, how they described it, but it was the theater of politics, the theater of education, or the theater of the absurd, and I discovered that there’s a word between the and theater, and that’s theanthros,or theanthroplogoy. It’s the combined study of god and man. And that really got me interested, because I decided that if I ever have to play a character, he needs to have a spiritual as well as a physical being. So when I’m playing a character, I like to ask the question, “What does my character believe in?” And when I do that, I have to ask myself, what do I believe in? But how many people actually… one guy today I was talking to… I went to an antique store and I found this beautiful white tiger, ivory tiger, and I was showing this guy and I asked him if he was happy. I said, “Are you happy?” and he said, “Well jeez, I don’t know.” I said, “Oh. If you could have anything in your life right now, what would you want?” He said, “Ah. You mean physical or emotional?” And I said, “You pick.” And he said, “My head hurts.” I said, “No, it doesn’t hurt. It loves it. You’re just misinterpreting it. Think about it for a second,” and he thought about it, and he said, “Can I want something for someone else?” And I said, “Now you’re talking, buddy.” Because what are your values? Like, nowadays we talk about what’s selfish. What is it we want? What is it we desire? What is it we have? And a lot of times it comes down to the exclusion of everybody else, and when that happens the world becomes a frightful place where everybody’s just moving ahead, trying to accomplish their own goals, and if you extrapolate that, what it comes down to is that we have a society that needs growth. It needs growth for progress, and that is the wrong paradigm. We need to make sure no one in the world is starving. That’s what we need to do. But it doesn’t become a principle in this free world, because we are the ones with it, and everything that we are doing here is to preserve our way of life, to go back to the old days if we can, put let us not let those other heathens, those other people who want what we have, we can’t let them have that. Anyway, I get political here. But what I wanted to simply say was about creativity, that this dictionary, if you don’t have an imagination, and you need one, you point at random and the dictionary will give you lots of food for thought.

BE: Do you think people would be surprised to know, after watching you play Jim Lahey, that you seem to posses a real, intellectual curiosity. You think people would make that connection, or people do make that connection?

JL: I like playing Scrabble. I like playing bridge. I like chess.

BE: I love chess, too.

JL: And I don’t know if that’s intellectual curiosity or not, because it is a pastime…

BE: Well, no, you’re engaged. Just listening to you speak, you’re clearly someone who’s thoughtful and engaged.

JL: But I’m only half-there. I mean, it’s a constant, constant thing. Even today I heard on the radio someone talking about the contemporary state of the art in philosophy, which is the same as it has been since Alan Watts suggested it in the fifties, is that you have to be in the moment, which is a zen thing. But the truth of the matter is you have to know where you are. You have to know what’s going on in the world at this moment, and if you’re not then you’re living in a dream-state and so you’re not connected and to me people can live that whole way through their life in sort of a dream-state and they can live and die and they haven’t missed anything, I suppose. But that’s not what I want to do. I want to feel like I’m in charge of my destiny. I want to feel like I’m the star of my own movie, that I get to choose where I go and who I hang with, what I read, and what I eat. And when I drive somewhere I want to drive down a different route. If I’m going downtown I like to take different streets every time just because, to me, the most important thing to my life is variety. I think that is the spice of life. I have not excelled in any particular… I mean I think I’m a better stage actor than anything, and I think that I’m a really good voice for radio, I like doing very strange voices and I really appreciate playing different characters, that is from England or Russia. I didn’t do a Russian one there, but all you do for Russians is you go down deep into your chest, and you say “I’m drinking a lot of vodka until they doubled price last year. The Russian government changed the rules on what could consumption because sixty-four percent of Russian men are alcoholics. That’s why the Russian women are all going to the poor Chinese guy.” There’s four-hundred million extra Chinese guys now than women. Where do you think they’re getting their ladies from? These big strapping blondes from Russia coming down there boys! Ha ha ha.

BE: How’s Barb?

JL: Barb’s got great breasts. I want you to know, but she run off, she’s run off with that caveman. Now see talk about creativity here. You know Sam Lasko from the show? They gay man? His real name is Sam Tarasco. Well, a couple weeks ago, Sam phoned me and he said, “I need you to do me a favor.” I said, “What’s that?” He knew I was making little documentaries, like I have a young videographer that hangs around with me. He’s making a doc on me so I put him to work and we’ve made a whole bunch of little docs on some interesting people, like three-stringed guitars with electrical hook ups. So I bought one and I’m teaching myself how to play it.

BE: Are you funded at all by the Canadian government?

JL: No.

BE: Could you apply for funding?

JL: I have advice to anybody who wants to apply to funding for anything: don’t.

BE: Why’s that?

JL: Because it’s a waste of your time and talent. The people that you apply to are all getting paid to make you rework your stuff, and then they’ll move on and the program will be discontinued. Do you know how many thousands of people do prep only? They get money to develop a script and then the script never ever ever makes it past… maybe they might get a pilot made. But there’s ten thousand, a hundred thousand in Hollywood, a hundred thousand scripts a year, ten thousand get played with, one thousand get done, and one hundred are good. But regardless, if you want to, you could buy a video camera for two-hundred dollars, and you could put something on that video camera, and you can download it and put it on the internet, and you can share it with the world, and that to me is the new way to express. This other thing about having millions and millions of dollars to put a program on prime time television, for people to actually… if that’s what they really want to do, that’s why they do when they’re going out and asking for funds to do stuff. I mean it’s so much easier to get a group of people – I think the most important thing is the people you’re working with – that they’re progressive and they share your ideas and they share your enthusiasm, and nowadays if you are hanging with a group of shit apples or shit weasels or shit monkeys or shit birds – birds of a shit feather flock together – if you’re in a morass or living in a dead end community and nobody has any dreams, move. To be able to express yourself in your own art, in your own way, is way better than going to somebody with a proposal and saying, “Hey! Check this out. Can you give me some money for this?” I learned when I went to the Canada council back in 1972, when I had a theater in Halifax called Pier One, and I applied for some grants, and, man, it was so disappointing when they turned me down and all the work we did toward it, and then again I applied. I had a publishing company, and it was called Solid Image, and these guys got in touch with me out of the blue from the government and said, “Hey! We’ve got funds. You should go to the stationery and variety show in Toronto and show your wares. If you fix them up like this and you do this and you make some business cards and you do this…” We only had about ten grand in the bank, but we weren’t drawing anything. We were putting all our profits there. I was traveling around the province when I was directing and acting, and we had a whole product line. We went to Toronto to a trade and variety show, where nobody came except for the exhibitors, we came home, gave them our bill, they didn’t pay it, they said their criteria had changed, it cost us all our profits, and we swallowed up in our own self-pity and closed down. And that has happened so often. I went to CBC with a great idea for a script about Wilhelm Reich, who was one of your American FDA victories when they shot him down because he said he had a cure for cancer, and I wrote this great little script, and they reported after I did three rewrites that it was still too turgid, so I put it away and about six months later didn’t I hear a program on Wilhelm Reich.

BE: Really?

JL: I get so disappointed when I hear people saying that they’re going to do this and all they need is the funding to do it. Just do it. I mean if you think you’re a great director go to grade three, and get the third grade kids together, and write a little play with them, and put it on for their parents, and charge ten bucks and move on. And if you’re good at it, if you do what you love to do and what you want to do and you just do it for that reason, like when people come to me and say, “Do you want to help me do this?” and I say, “What is it you want me to do?” and they say, “I’m auditioning for a part in a movie,” and I say, “Great. Why are you auditioning? Why do you want the part?” And they say. “I want to be a movie star,” I say, “I don’t want to work with you.” If you want to do this audition to do the best work that you can, and get better at doing auditions, and act, then I’ll work with you. But I don’t want to… People come to me all the time and say, “I want to go to LA.” Well, go. How many people there, how many broken dreams… stay in your own community. That’s what I learned with Trailer Park Boys, that in Nova Scotia, in this little backward place on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, there’s so much art and creativity going on there by people who not only are from there, but have come from all around, at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and there’s a feeling, kind of a renaissance feeling of freedom that you can express yourself there, and I just love being a part of it.

BE: Well, hey, John it was an absolute pleasure talking to you.

JL: We haven’t finished. We haven’t even scratched the surface. I wanted to make a point.

BE: Go ahead.

JL: It’s this: you can, I can, I have, I have spent a lot of my capital, my energy on lots of things that – they’re disparate in nature. But every time I’ve attempted one of them, I learn skills in that area, and every single time that I’ve discovered that I’m not good at something, that’s a revelation too, and the ability to know that the world is a place of amazing potential and possibility, but that we have to sometimes chose what it is we don’t do. That’s where I started in this conversation. Now I’m sixty-four years old. I get to be a little more selective in what I do, and what I try not to do is to do it for the money. I try to do it… I try to do it now because I’m going to enjoy doing it.

BE: Absolutely. And I think you have. At least, what you say suggests that you have.

JL: I’m thinking of putting my seascapes up…

BE: You know what I was thinking about as we’re having this conversation? I think it would be neat to put up all of your art, at least selections, maybe a short story, and a portrait, or a gallery of portraits you’ve done and just kind of illustrate your diversity as an artist, and I think it will help people relate to what you’ve been saying.

JL: You know, when people ask me – I’m an actor; I like to say I’m an actor – but more than that I know in a kind of faux-humility, I know that I’m a student of the theater. I know that, and I know that every role I play is a brand new experience, and I take with it all the doubt that’s from the very beginning at every audition I do. I have a doubt, and I have found in my career that the plays and the performances that I’ve had the most doubt over are the ones that are really the most successful, because it propels you and pushes you further than if you’re confident. The worse thing that can happen to me when I’m halfway through developing a role in the theater, say after a couple weeks rehearsal, is for someone to say, “You’re really great,” because it takes the drive away. Only incrementally, but it does. And this book, if anyone wants to back, this Alan Watts book from 1958 I think, The Wisdom of Insecurity, I call it the wisdom of doubt, is way better than conviction. Like for you to be convinced of something that is black and white, is really unhealthy, I think.

BE: Oh, I agree. There is no true objectivity, and you have to always be willing to reformulate your web of beliefs if new information should enter, and there’s a real unwillingness to do that.

JL: And the sad thing is if I was in a room right now with George Bush, after an hour I’d leave thinking, jeez he was right to go in there. It’s true. It is sad, but I have fun.

BE: You have a show tonight?

JL: Yeah, I have a show.

BE: What time?

JL: Eight-thirty.

BE: So do you go out and hang out with the audience when you’re done?

JL: Well, the reason we’re going to have a full house tonight is because, when we did this show here last year, we went out afterward and partied with them, and so they’re all calling the venue saying, “Are they going to party tonight?”

BE: Better strap on your Lahey shoes.

JL: Well the thing is that since I don’t drink, I can outlast any of them. They’re only twenty

BE: What’s your favorite line you’ve ever uttered as officer Jim Lahey if you had to pick one.

JD: The next one

BE: The next one?

JD: The next line… The reason I’ve loved touring with Pat Roach is because we change every night. Like last night, ten different things happened that never happened before at any of our other shows. When I have tears running down my face, or he has to turn away from me because he’s laughing too hard, I know that we’re doing it right.

BE: What do you think the compliment Randy provides is? How would you best characterize it?

JD: This guy in Britain wrote a book on Laurel and Hardy and he compared us to Laurel and Hardy.

BE: Really

JD: I don’t know any secrets about comedy. When I have a good script, If it’s an… that’s a different kind of comedy. I love when Mike says “Trip over the lawnmower” and I just pretend it’s not there and just go for it. I get used to the lawnmower first and I step on this wheel and I step on that wheel and I step on the top of it and I see what happens if I push down on that handle and then I just go for it and whatever happens. Or I’ll catch my bathrobe on the door, you know. I’ll put it on there, hook it on and pull away a little bit at it and see it go, but when I’m directing people for comedy, I have a really good eye for physical comedy when I’m directing people, but when I’m doing it myself, it’s kind of mechanical and I don’t see it as funny.

BE: Yeah

JD: I just see it as kind of interesting because that’s what it comes down to.

BE: When you’re giving the speech and the lectern is moving and you’re pushing it along. (laughs)

JD: I did that the other night too. We were in a beautiful theater up in Kirkland Lake, which is… I drove for seven hours straight to get there through the snow and it was wonderful. A stage, a theater, I started doing Shakespeare because I loved that theater. But, the acoustics were incredible; you could turn your back to the audience and 50 seats away, they could hear you whisper. That’s how good the acoustics were.

BE: Wow

JD: And when you’re in a theater like that, you can control the audience because you go “shhhh” and there won’t be a sound and you can say “Randy, can you feel how the shit clings to the air bud?” People love it when I go shit barometer. I don’t know why but I think it’s because in a way we’re all bad little boys and we like to talk about poop and stuff.

BE: It’s injecting the creativity and the spontaneity and using it with a very otherwise dull word.

JD: Yeah. Like the shit abyss, when you think about it, everybody who hears that term will have a slightly different idea of what the shit abyss actually is. There are some people who are truly anal, you know, they’ll know exactly what it is to them. The way I envisioned the shit abyss and the way I say it, you know… or if I talk about a shit spark, and say “Ricky grew up as a shit spark he started as a shit spark and fanned by the flames of his monumental ignorance, he grew into a raging shit firestorm Randers.”

BE: (Laughs)

JD: You know, what makes that funny? I have no idea. Or, shit moths. Like, to me, shit pupas or talking about the metashitmorphosis. (Lahey voice): “I’m telling you buddy, when I get control of this park, I think it’s gonna be the shit spark that is gonna change the world because, just by example, one utopian trailer park. It will ride like a wave of righteousness in the world. And Randy, ya know bud, I’m thinking of running for prime minister of Canada. Who knows? Like, I could say I was born in Hawaii and then I could be president of the United States of America. Kenya just imagine that?”

BE: Do you guys ever perform in Windsor?

JD: Kenya. Was that the country?

BE: Yeah, it was Kenya

JD: There you go, I am funny and I didn’t even know it. Yeah I do, I’ll tell you one thing… What was your question?

BE: I’m wondering if you guys ever perform in Windsor, near Detroit.

JD: Yes, several times.

BE: Really, do you have anything coming up there?

JD: No, but there’s a good chance we’re doing four venues in the states this fall, me and Randy. And then there’s a chance that we’re doing a Christmas show with the boys. But I can’t tour after the end of March because I’m in two different television series in Nova Scotia this summer. Haven…

BE: Yeah, what is Haven?

JD: Haven is a sci-fi Steven King thing. We’ve done 13 episodes and we’ve got a really great fan base already. The guys that are putting it together are out of LA and they really know what they’re doing. It is so much fun, I mean, I drove three minutes to get to the set from my house. They’re shooting on the south shore of Nova Scotia and they picked the most beautiful place to shoot. The whole team is really very excellent, I mean, the director of photography, to the directors that they get in, to the producers, the whole thing is just top notch and what a joy.

BE: Are you familiar with Tim and Eric? Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim down in the states?

JD: No

BE: I think you would be perfect… They do this comedy like you’ve never seen. It’s absolutely hilarious. And we just talked to another songwriter who works a lot with them and I think it would be something interesting to hook you guys up.

JD: Well, you know, I love working. I’ll go to the ends of the Earth to do a play. I’ve been so lucky in my life that I’ve had so many fantastic experiences in film. You know, I got to be in a film this year with Michelle Williams?

BE: Oh, Blue Valentine?

JD: No, amazingly, I don’t think it’s out yet, it’s a film… the title just escapes me. It’s one of Leonard Cohen’s song titles.

BE: “Chelsea Hotel?”

JD: No, keep going. Good for you. I love Leonard Cohen

BE: As do I.

JD: See though, that guys a flaming narcissistic, oversexed, piece of poop. But I saw him in 1967, in the very beginning, at a university, him and Joni Mitchell.

BE: Oh wow. I just got Blue on vinyl today.

JD: The guy’s an inspiration, He was a poet… But, I can’t remember what my point is.

BE: You went and saw Leonard and Joni. I mean, look who Canada’s churned out. It’s phenomenal. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Do Make Say Think, Broken Social Scene, so many, you know? Mmm… I’m throwing in a plug of tobacco. So, did you used to gamble? That’s what I saw on Wikipedia.

JD: Well, my brother-in-law stole a half a million dollars from my wife’s family and gambled it. And I started doing a little bit of poking around and I found out that 80% of the billions of dollars that the government are taking is from people that are stealing money from their families. And I thought that maybe I should, since I played the machines myself and have probably lost over 50 grand over the years. I think I did that for the dopamine, I’m sure. But, I never spent anything more than what I had in my pocket. I didn’t use credit cards or spend rent money or anything like that but I decided to set myself up as a little bit of a poster boy if I could. And I did. I’ve done several documentaries. One of them was on CBC last year, and it was very effective. I deal with quite a few people who call me every once in awhile and talk about their problem and give them a little bit of help here and there. I’m a very poor gamble but I love cards. I like bridge… I love bridge. I play duplicate competitively and I find the most incredible thing about when you’re playing bridge is that all the other things in the world go away because it takes all of your concentration to do it. And the difference between that and gambling, it’s a tiny difference, but somehow it pulls you out of everything and puts you in this state. So that if I had two hundred dollars in my pocket, the whole thing can go in the machine. I’ve done purposeful studies going in with a hundred dollars in my pocket and said, “I’m only going to spend twenty,” and walked out spending the whole hundred. I’ve never been able to not do that. The only time I’m able to do it is when I have a camera crew with me

BE: When you able to stop?

JD: Yeah, I’ll say, “We’re going to go in and I’m going to put twenty bucks into the machine and we’re going to time how long it takes.” The last time we did it, about three weeks ago, I put a twenty-dollar bill in and it lasted two and a half minutes. And that was just a $2.25 bet. I could go on for days about the government being culpable. In the same way that residential schools and the priests abusing people and how that has come to be criminalized and recognized. The same thing is going to happen, I think, with gambling. It’s going to be recognized. It’s murder, it absolutely is, its government-sponsored murder.

BE: Wow, this is unanticipated, really interesting.

JD: You know what? I just looked at the clock. 6:24. We’re leaving in 20 minutes to drive over to the university and set up the show. I’ve got to do a quick shave and a shower and I’ve got to get into my Jim Lahey duds.

BE: Alright, well hey, John Dunsworth. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much for taking the time

JD: You know, I love the opportunity

BE: Send us out with some Lahey

JD: Alright. (Lahey voice): “You have to know what’s going on around you. You can’t stick your head in the sand. You have… ych… if there’s some… Randy! Bring me double cheese… yeah. No no no, the other forget it. Listen. Wait a second bud. You know what I gotta run right now, I gotta go. Who am I talking to?”

BE: This is Ben

JD: (Lahey voice): “Buzz Aldrin? Asimdlg? Holy shit! Hey Randy! George Sheppard or whatever the fuck his name…” (hangs up the phone)

BE: (laughs)

In a rare interview, the prolific musician sits down to discuss his time with Saturday Looks Good to Me, his creative process, and his cyclical youth.

Also in This Issue:

• Listen to Fred Thomas’ album, Night Times
• Listen to Fred Thomas’ Fogged Clarity Session

TRANSCRIPTION BY DYLAN BROCK

Ben Evans: I’m always interested in the way emotion shapes a musician’s work. I’ve found that some artists approach music with more of a clinician’s eye for tone and cohesion, while others are more concerned with the raw release that playing music permits. How do you approach making your albums?

Fred Thomas: That’s a good question, but it probably doesn’t fall into either of the criteria that you mentioned. I started playing music, as a lot of people did, in the punk and hardcore scene of early adolescence, and quickly at the same time found a home in improvisation and a love of early free jazz. And so I had this weird dichotomy going on where I wanted the fast and aggressive release of punk, but I also wanted to stretch out and explore the possibilities around me. So it’s always confused by that approach to music. To answer your question though, as formed from that approach to music, I just start playing and whatever happens that’s what the song is.

BE: What jazz musicians were you attracted to?

FT: I had a friend who was a roommate of mine who was about three or four years older and he was just really into early 60’s stuff like Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Art Ensemble of Chicago, and I kind of approached it the same way. There’s always this arc of disgust to curiosity to complete love with anything that you really love. For some people it starts out, “That’s annoying,” or “That’s kind of repulsive to me,” and then eventually they are obsessed with it, and that’s what it was for me with those artists and that kind of music.

BE: It’s funny, oftentimes music that you dislike upon the first, second, third or fourth listen, you later fall in love with.

FT: There is a reason you’re listening to it over and over again, even though it seemingly annoys you so much.

BE: Yeah, this free jazz, almost stream of consciousness approach to songwriting you take really seems to fit into your lyrical style. Your lyrics, especially in some of your solo work, they seem conversational with a heavy dose of literalism. Can you give me an idea of where you’re writing from and what you hope to accomplish with some of the prose in your work?

FT: I couldn’t completely say I understand it myself either. I definitely, like I said, start going, and I find that when you do that whatever your thinking about the most comes out in what you create. Whether it’s musical, lyrical, whatever kind of art you’re making. If you’re just expounding on your feelings, whatever’s weighing heaviest on your mind is going to come to the surface, so I think it makes sense that a lot of literal prose comes out when you’re going at it that way.

I write songs a lot of the time about either things that are happening to me in a very overt, direct manner like people’s names, situations, places… don’t care, everybody is represented as actual literal figures, or a complete fiction that’s based on something –maybe the way I want things to be, maybe the way things are, but with kind of a different take. It’s either one extreme or the other. It’s either like, “Yes, this is exactly what’s happening!” and it’s no holds are being barred, or it’s kind of just utter nonsense. I have definitely had people come up to me and say, “That song about that one situation, I could tell you were singing it straight from your heart.” And I’m like, “Nope, that’s just a dumb song I made up. I m sorry to let you down like that.”

BE: Talk to me about the song on your album Night Times that talks about attending a blind play where there were costs cut on costume design.

FT: Yeah, complete fabrication. I wanted to write a song for this kind of music I started, and I was staying in Olympia, Washington for a little while at the K Records studio ’cause I just got done with a big tour that ended in Olympia. So I was exhausted and sick, and I was sleeping all day while the people were working upstairs, and then by the night time I’d wake up and play on the piano and dick around in the studio and cough a lot. And that was a song I made up on the piano at K, and was like “Oh this song’s so good. I wonder if I should write something.” I started writing this thing and I wanted to write a song that references my friend Amy because her name alliterates with this one thing…But yeah, the whole song, it never happened. I don’t smoke pot, Amy’s married, she certainly isn’t having trysts with anybody or one night stands, which is kind of…for those who haven’t heard the song…it’s this weird stoner’s tale about this completely impossible thing….that kids would be doing a play for blind people? That doesn’t even make sense. I don’t even think there even is a center for the blind in the town where I lived. That’s just something that came out of my head.

BE: So that’s where the freeing element of music comes in: for you to be able to just pen a tale and bring it to life at the piano as you’re dead sick in Olympia, Washington.

FT: I think that’s what draws people to music even as children. People start their love affair with songwriting when they’re just kids singing into the tape deck, or just singing into the iPhone now. I have so many friends who are like “Yeah, I made tapes of fake radio shows with my sister” or, “I had a band that was just me in my head and here’s the tape of it.” Or, just this crazy, outlandish stuff that is purely from your imagination and anybody can do it. It’s really one of the most beautiful things.

BE: You were the one saying that you have a tape of girls talking about boys and why they like them or didn’t like them that you play at shows… Am I recalling that right?

FT: Yeah, my really good friend Amber left the tape in our car – Amber plays in Swimsuit with me and we have a band together called Damn Dogs; we’re very very close – this tape of her and her friends. I think she was eight, and having fallen so deeply in love with her as a person that hearing the young her taunting her friends and being like, “Say it in the tape recorder! Say why you don’t like Dan Evans!” It is just heart melting. It’s such an amazing thing and I just play it through delay at City Center shows, and I’m sure it came off as just a spectral sonic background for the audience, but for me it was definitely a tribute to this person I was missing very much while I was on tour and also just made me think about the beauty of youthful innocence. And it’s just great, y’ know?

BE: Yeah. Especially in your Saturday Looks Good to Me stuff there seems to be a large element of nostalgia in that work, kind of harkening back and imagining adolescence. Am I on point there?

FT: Well, yeah, I’ve kind of had this thing for that as long as I can remember. People I see sometimes, people I went to high school with I see, and they’re like, “Hey, what’s going on?” and I’m like, “You remember when I was fifteen and I was in bands and trying to play music with people?” and they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” “Well it’s almost twenty years later and I’m still doing the exact same thing.” And maybe they’ve moved on and have more normal lives, or more traditional family structures forming, and I’m still stuck in the excitement and rapture of these feelings that started when I was very young. So for me, it is a nostalgia, but it’s also this weird, potentially unhealthy – but who knows – trap of being like, “Yeah, I still play music. The same way I ever have been.” I’m still playing the same types of shows that I did when I was first starting, and I’m no less excited about it, and a lot of my audience is people who are between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one who are just getting into it for the first time, and I’m connecting with people who are significantly younger than me, because I’m thirty-four now, and so I still have this – it’s sort of nostalgia, but sort of like an on-going nostalgia. It’s hard to get away from. You know what I mean?

BE: It’s a cyclical youth.

FT: Yeah, exactly. Cyclical youth. It’s much better said, and much more succinctly said. Thanks.

BE: A few years ago you made a move from Michigan to New York City. How did that transition affect your work, and do you ever find yourself feeling lost, or somehow less artistically relevant in a big city like New York?

FT: Well, I don’t want to bore you with the time-line, but I don’t live in New York anymore. I lived in Portland, Oregon for a minute, I lived in New York for two or three years, I kind of floated for a little while, and I’ve definitely been back in Michigan for over a year now, but there was definitely a big shift in what was happening moving around for all that time. I had toured a lot before then, and spent years and years on tour, but there was always an address, and there was always, like, the record shop I could go to and the bar where my friends would be, and I could always call that home. But for a while I felt very displaced, it didn’t feel home, and New York especially… I feel New York is such an amazing place and a place I think everybody should spend some time – whether or not it’s good time – I think everybody should spend some time living there, ’cause it really can… It’s just not like any other place, and I was certainly challenged by trying to make ends meet in New York, trying to just deal with the whole unending hustle that New York City proved to be for me.

BE: Yeah, and I hear that from a lot of people.

FT: It’s the classic story, right?

BE: Yeah. Although it’s this hyper-stimulated place and so much is going on, really the only place to look is inward after a while, and I think you can do quite a bit of self-reflection or grinding and hustling, as you suggested.

FT: Well, I felt like it was a hyper-stimulated, over-saturated, full, full place, yet I didn’t have a job for a while there, which is murder, because it costs so fucking much money. But I would just see the same people all the time. I’m not sure the exact dimensions, but I think it’s around nine square-miles for Manhattan and Brooklyn, so I would bump into people as much as I would in Ypsilanti, and I was like, “This is kind of weird.” Or people are always visiting, so it’s like, “Oh, here I am at a show and I know fifty-percent of the audience from all over the world. This is really, really strange. It just doesn’t make any sense.” So with the feelings of displacement and big city existential angst, there’s also this almost comical… Yeah, it’s just a little town that thinks really big, and to me, looking inward was definitely one of the results of that living period. And that’s when I started doing City Center, which was way different than anything I’ve done before, and definitely a direct result of not really knowing what to do with myself, not really having any money to do anything, not really having the space for a bunch of friends to jam with. I just was in headphones every single day, trying to connect with some really, really displaced feelings, and I thought it was really positive. I thought it was really a success for me.

BE: What were you able to do musically in City Center that weren’t able to when playing with Saturday Looks Good to Me, or by yourself?

FT: Well, it’s really strange. City Center just started as… a friend of mine was doing a CMJ showcase, and she was like, “I really want you to play this. I really like your songs.” I was like, “I’m so sick of my songs. I’m so sick of singing these songs I wrote five years ago” that to me just range kind of phony or love struck about feelings I didn’t have anymore. And I’d been playing this kind of like weird, troubled music in my bedroom, and she was like, “Just do whatever you want. You’re going to play first of seventeen bands anyway.” I was like, “Okay.” Call it City Center, and do something for it, and that was November of 2007 at the Cake Shop, and we did this… There were songs in there, but it was really a very emotional, kind of experimental thing, and everybody hated it who was there to see me play songs that sounded like Jonathan Richman waxing nostalgic or waxing heart-struck, and for whatever reason – maybe I was being contrary or something – but I was like, “Yes! This is what I want. I want to say goodbye to this feeling I felt kind of trapped in.” Saturday Looks Good to Me would go on tour, and people would be like, “This isn’t the band I like. You’re not playing… Where’s the girl singing about cupcakes and bobby socks?” and whatever the fuck. I was like, “Well, I’m actually thinking about how I have terrible nightmares every night about violence, and I’m thinking about the breakdown of the human body, and I don’t really feel like singing about happy shit right now. I have some way more damaged feelings that I want to express for myself. And I was a little bit bitter and obtrusive about it because I was reacting, basically, to people saying, “You should do this because we like it,” and basically saying, “I don’t care what you like,” and “Fuck you! I hope you don’t like this.”

BE: And it’s cathartic.

FT: It’s so cathartic, and it worked, because a lot of people didn’t like it. It was cool.

BE: Did you consciously want to reshape your identity then?

FT: No, I didn’t really even think about it like that, because I just felt like… It wasn’t for me a reshaping, because I felt like the last several Saturday Looks Good to Me records I was trying to warm people up to the idea of all the stuff I felt like I was interested in the entire time. Like the early stuff was a little bit lo-fi and had some dub influences, so I’d like to do something that’s really, really messed-up sounding, and it was met with lukewarm reception, so it was like, “Now that the band is kind of done, I’m just going to take this as far in whatever direction I want it to be.” And it wasn’t necessarily looking to re-invent or to even try anything new. It was just going to shed a skin a little bit and be like, “Yeah, if you were wondering if I’m ever going to do the exact same record that you heard again, the answer is, ‘No, I’m not going to do the exact same record again’.”

BE: Are you still playing with City Center? And how many bands are you in right now?

FT: Well, I don’t want to embarrass myself by talking about all the bands because I definitely have… I haven’t had a job for a long, long, long time and I’ve just been working on music for a long time. Not successfully, mind you. It’s definitely been one of the more trying times financially, because I haven’t been touring, but I have been jamming with people all the time. City Center toured for the majority of 2009. I’m in a band called Swimsuit, we’ve been playing a lot and touring, and people have been kind of interested in that band regionally, and we’ve done some shows out in New York, and we’re getting ready to do a record and a full tour. I have a band called Mighty Clouds, which is basically like a duo between myself and Betty, who was the main vocalist for Saturday Looks Good to Me. She lives in Sweden, and we made a record recently, and we’re going to tour Europe in March and April. Here in town, like different noise stuff all the time. I have a band called Damn Dogs and a project with a friend from Kentucky that we do through the mail called Settle.

BE: That’s cool, man.

FT: I don’t like talking about it sometimes because I feel like it’s almost like a gimmick. Like, “Oh, yeah. I’m in like fifty bands.” That’s boring. Who cares? I’m sure that if you could only praise even one of them, it’s good. Y’ know?

BE: It’s what you love, though.

FT: I know. I totally… I like all of them, but it’s basically… it’s not really for any sort of press release, y’ know? It’s hard for me to talk about it and not feel like I’m trying to sell it to people, ’cause I really am not. Some people like to hang out and socialize and go to parties, but I would much rather make some recordings for people that I love, y’ know? So that’s how it happens for me.

BE: What are some of the best stories you’ve accumulated over the years being on the road and playing with people? What are a couple of moments that just stand out in your mind as being, I don’t know, magical or significant?

FT: Well, the magical moments are so many. I think about… there’s an Elliott Smith song that says, “Happy and sad come in quick succession.” I think he’s probably talking about addiction, or maybe not, but I always thought of that any time I’d be on tour because it would be these incredible mood swings. I definitely… I had this a moment at one point… this spanned-out moment. We were traveling. I can’t remember where. Somewhere in the United Kingdom on the first Saturday Looks Good to Me tour overseas, and that just blew my mind completely that we could even do that, this kind of like scrappy band of basically punks was able to get it together enough to cross the pond, y’ know? And we were taking this long ride on a ferry, and everyone got sick as hell, myself included. I just remember being in the car just trying not to vomit, and we looked over out the window and in this field, there was a flock of birds, seemingly thousands of black birds were in a migrating cloud together, and it was the most calming, natural sort of reset you could possibly hope for. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “Whoa!” I’ve seen birds flying around, but I’ve never seen a cloud of four thousand birds all the same, all moving in unison, and it kind of struck me that here I am in this foreign place I’ve never been to just to play music for people, and they’re excited about it, and I get to… I don’t know… Through the waves of nausea I was like, “This is the best life I could hope for.”

BE: Do you aim to get back to that point, where you can be in a project that is as big as Saturday Looks Good to Me, and go do some of the same stuff you were able to do when you were touring with them?

FT: Well I don’t know. I never thought about it in terms of a scale like that, because it just doesn’t seem to be a healthy way to look at things. I definitely… People sometimes ask me about Saturday Looks Good to Me as though it was…

BE: Your prime?

FT: Maybe that, but maybe more like I think that other people think it was more like a bigger deal than I did, because I feel like I’m still constantly going and playing shows and doing stuff all the time and touring a lot, and I just feel like there’s… maybe it was just more like a moment that I wasn’t recognizing. I have conversations with other people who are in bands that started in like 2001, and kind of toured and reached their apex in the 2004 era when people were still buying records and CDs, and it seemed like there were less than forty billion bands. It seemed like you’d actually be excited about it and not like, “Oh, another show tonight.” It seemed more like a thing where we’d go to places then and it would be like, “Oh we’re so excited you’re coming! We heard your song on the college radio, and it’s good!” And now it’s the kind of thing where it’s like, “Yeah, we were going to try to swing by your show tonight, but we downloaded your first five demos, and I’ve got to do my DJ night tonight at someone’s house in this weird crunk bass-off down the street.” And so I think it’s just a different time, and I prefer to think about it in those terms, rather than like, “Why am I not more famous?” or “Why am I not selling tickets or records?” I never really felt like that was actually happening. I feel bad to actually break it down to numbers and be like this is the amount of records sold, or people who actually bought T-Shirts or saw shows because that’s disgusting to me.

BE: It also minimizes the importance of the music, which is the only thing that really should matter.

FT: Yeah. Definitely I feel like that’s right on and that’s what I’m trying to work towards, because I feel like a lot of bands that move me so much, sometimes it’s about the music and sometimes it’s not. I love certain personalities, and a certain… Some bands, I can listen to their records all day long over and over and over again, and I’d never want to see them play. I don’t think I’d ever want to be like a fan of, like, the Beach Boys, in the way that I’d want to go check out the show. But I’ve listened to those records religiously, and sometimes I’m like… I just want to look at this amazing Aphex Twin record, and I don’t really want to listen to it right now. I just want to feel the cultural elements of what it means to see a record cover that looks like this, maybe hear the first thirteen seconds of the song. I don’t know. I don’t know if that even applies to what we’re talking about, but I feel like music is this unnamable thing, and what makes the band big or not big doesn’t even really apply anymore.

BE: There’s so much that lives within the music, in your thoughts of listening to a record, like… I don’t even have an album player, but I ordered Blue by Joni Mitchell on vinyl two nights ago just because I wanted to have it.

FT: It’s a perfect record. I mean, you just want to stare at it sometimes.

BE: Yeah.

FT: It’s good.

BE: In listening to your solo records, I’ve found that there’s a greater degree of sophistication there, a sharper vision, I think, than in the Saturday Looks Good to Me albums. Do you prefer working by yourself, and do you feel as if your solo LPs like Night Times and Flood are more intimate records?

FT: Well, I guess that would be hard for me to say. I love pretty much most of… at a point I love most of the music I’ve put out. I had to care about it to some degree to release it, and I don’t really ever revisit stuff all that much, but I do remember feeling more pressure, or intensity about making the Saturday Looks Good To Me records– these perfect capsules of… I wanted to have every sound imaginable. I wanted… It would start with a demo, just me singing and playing guitar, singing and playing piano, and after a time there were eighteen instruments on it, and a string section, and several thousand backing tracks, and so maybe a little bit of the intimacy was lost in the production and the mayhem of it all. Whereas for the solo records it was really just like you and I talking right now, except there’s like a song to it, and I guess that I’m doing all the talking. But for me it seems more conversational and more… I don’t really feel like keeping things in very much in any of my songs, and I guess if it’s something where I’m just going to be by myself in a room, there are even less walls. I just let it all go.

BE: I must say I’d been familiar with the Saturday Looks Good to Me albums before this interview, but this really gave me an opportunity to check out your solo albums, and I really like them. I think they’re very, very well done. When do you plan on releasing another one of those?

FT: Well, thank you so much for checking it out. I record music pretty much every day, or every week. Something gets put down on tape, and I have so many songs, and for every one song that finds the light of day, there’s about five or six that just get thrown out, or put somewhere to be reworked again. So I’ve got a bunch of songs for a solo record that I’m just waiting for the best articulations of. And with Night Times, the last record I did, I think it might be one of the stronger solo records I’ve done. But I just couldn’t really be bothered to deal with like, “Okay, I’m going to master it, or I’m going to make CDs, or try to get a label to put it out, or make some artwork for it,” but I was like, “let’s finish it on Monday and put it on the Internet on Tuesday.” And I feel that people really responded to that in a big way, and people seem to like that record a lot. I’ve gotten lots of comments like, “Oh I really like the songs! Thanks for giving that away.” And with City Center blog… I’ll go on record as saying that the Deerhunter blog was the direct and only inspiration for City Center starting a blog where we gave away free mp3s every couple of days. Any time I recorded any song with City Center, in the beginning, I would just put it online, and that’s because I was so taken with Bradford Cox, not as much his music as him being like, “Oh yeah. I made this song and I might be in a band that could easily sell it to you, but I’m just going to give it to you because, why not?” And I love that. I think that’s where music’s going. So I stripped that idea and stole it and put my own name on it, and so I got really into… every time I’m working on something, it’s mostly free, online, so I’ll probably just keep doing that and maybe start leaking songs out as they go.

BE: Well’s it’s nice to have that communal feel, and I do totally agree, that’s where music and literature and poetry are going, but at the end of the day, I mean, you’ve got to get paid. You’re in seventeen bands and you’ve released this great catalog of work, and I hear you saying, “Well it’s a grind right now,” so how do you reconcile that? How do we, I guess, reconcile that?

FT: That’s the question with no answer. This is the ultimate punk moment I’ve been waiting for… We have the tools now, that anybody… the barricades between audience and performers are broken down. That was the goal for me all throughout high school and college, and to this day, and now it’s here! And so it’s hard for me to feel too bad about eating beans and rice every day, because I’m stoked about it. I think it’s so amazing that I mean everybody has access – I guess not everybody, because not everyone owns a computer, not everyone has internet savvy; there’s definitely issues of class and other stuff that goes into that – but if you’re already into the Zombies, and you want to download everything they’ve ever done, you can do that, and you don’t have to be smarter than someone, or cooler than someone, or more attractive than someone, or wealthier than someone to do it. You can just fucking do it. And I’m happy to… my passion and my heart is in music, but if I have to find some other way to get by because music is free, that’s totally fine.

While cruising through the desert in a tour van, Wye Oak’s lead singer and guitarist Jenn Wasner takes time to discuss “The Wire,” her baby teeth, and the sentiment at the heart of her band’s new album, Civilian.

Baltimore's Wye Oak

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: Well, I’ve been watching old seasons of “The Wire” lately so Baltimore is fresh in my mind. In that show the city is portrayed as a pretty rough-hewn, gritty place, and although I’m sure you’re not running on the Westside with Avon Barksdale, can you discuss how living in the city has…

Jenn Wasner: Don’t be so sure my friend. No…Baltimore is not only as it is portrayed on “The Wire,” but I’d say that “The Wire” can be fairly accurate at times. I actually live across the street from the school in season four and about a block away from the corner where Bodie was gunned down in season five, I believe.

BE: End of season four.

JW: Season four. Yes, there you go. So I have a lot of “The Wire” in my life on a daily basis, at least reminders of it. I love the show. Its fiction, but it is inspired by reality, and fortunately there’s a lot more to Baltimore than just what you see in “The Wire.”

BE: Absolutely, and I’m sure it’s highly dramaticized; but how has the city itself influenced your sound, if any of that grittiness is indeed there?

JW: Well, um…I don’t know about the grittiness, but I do think that a certain type of person chooses to live in the city of Baltimore these days, and that bodes very well for Baltimore’s music scene, because the kind of people making music in Baltimore tend to be really genuine, really honest, true people that make really exciting, interesting work. It’s kind of because you sort of have to be willing to sacrifice some of those amenities of other bigger, nicer, safer cities to live there; for the people, and the music and the art that’s being made. So the city itself, if anything, has influenced our music by the sheer volume of incredible work being made there, and everyone is really really genuine and everyone is really supportive and people work together and collaborate in ways that I think would probably never happen in other bigger cities, in other bigger music scenes, and so the different types of music that we are exposed to, that we are really moved by is made by friends of ours in Baltimore, which is a really special thing.

BE: A lot of musicians now seem to view lyrics simply as another form of instrumentation, so that lyrical content becomes secondary to phonics, and to the actual sound of the words themselves. I don’t find that to be the case with your music; I hear introspection, I hear hurt, there seems to be a necessity to the lyrics. Talk about where you are as a writer, and where your coming from, and what your thinking, trying to explore, when you put pen to paper.

JW: Well, I do think that the sounds of words themselves, phonetically… its really important, and a lot of the times when I am just coming up with the bare bones structure of a song and I don’t have the precise words to say exactly what I want to articulate, I do rely on use of syllables and the percussive sounds of the words themselves. But then, at that point, once you get that under control, I really do spend a lot of time trying to pick the words that will fit into those phrases and those cadences that say what I want to say. I think that’s really an important step for me, and its almost like a puzzle, ya know, writing a song, completing a song, you have the flow of it, the feel of it, the sounds of the words, the length of the phrases, then you have to go back and really…I mean, for me, I have to absolutely agonize over it, and figure out what word is going to fit and make those sounds, but also have the meaning that I want to have. So that’s what I spend the most time on: writing, and that’s one of the things that’s most important to me. I take a lot of pain over making sure I’m saying what I want to say in a certain way, and with as much attention to both sides– I want to make sure that the words are musical and that they flow and don’t sound forced, but at the same time, that they have the meaning that I want them to have. But, I don’t know, as a writer I definitely….making this record, writing these songs, there is a lot of time spent kind of pouring over words and also kind of pouring over my own brain, and trying to just make sense of the place I was in at the time. So I’m glad that you noticed the care that I took, because there was a lot of time spent over it.

BE: (There are) A lot of narrative lyrics, not in general, but coming from your life, your experiences in particular.

JW: Yeah, I think a lot of the narrative in these songs probably wouldn’t be apparent to anyone but myself and my close friends who really know me. There are specific references, but I like to keep things generally, somewhat vague because it’s personal information. But I think that the feeling is there for those who don’t necessarily know the story behind it.

BE: Is their a certain fear or thrill in releasing a record like this, one in which you seem to expose some of your vulnerability?

JW: I mean, I think I’m always afraid and nervous to share songs with people for the first time, and every time, I mean, its always most frightening the first time, when I finish a song and I’m playing it for someone… for the very first time its incredibly scary to finally release that and let it out in the world, but its also a really really empowering and healing process, to be able to let them out in the world…yeah, that’s why I do it, I’m sure. That’s why I feel compelled to share them (the songs) with others once I finish them, because it is an incredibly important part of the process, to be able to let those words go and then move past them. I don’t feel frightened by it now, but in the making of the record it is hard not to be overwhelmed at times with wanting to do your own feelings, and your own words, and your own thoughts justice.

BE: As in any art, I’d imagine you come face to face with yourself in creating a record that’s as personal, at least as abstractly personal as this.

I guess for me there is a different dynamic with a female vocalist and it seems a good songwriter, a good female singer can explore places and lend certain emotional insight to things that a man just can’t. Do you see that, and, as a woman, do you find that the opposite is true?

JW: It’s funny, because I’d like to think that my voice is somewhat genderless. Not necessarily that I want to disavow the feminine part of myself, because I don’t, because that’s definitely very much a part of who I am, but I don’t necessarily want to be limited by it. I feel like one of the things I struggle with is just having range, and not always sounding classically feminine when I sing, but also being able to delve into some deeper, darker, more traditionally masculine sounds as well. I think the important thing is to not over-think it, and to be yourself, and to sing the way that feels comfortable to you, and (sing) the way you think the words are supposed to be sung and delivered. That way it won’t sound like a put on, if your just not focusing too much on the thought of it and the concept of it, and your letting yourself voice it in the way your comfortable with, then it will sound natural, it will sound real. I think I’m getting a lot better at embracing what my own voice is, and the fact that it is a female voice. I know growing up a lot of my favorite singers and songwriters voices were male and were nothing like mine, and I had a really hard time understanding that, and coming to terms with that, and I feel like I’m more comfortable with it than I ever have been before.

BE: Do you ever feel as if your sexualized, being a female singer, and if so, has that feeling ever hindered, or maybe even empowered you as an artist?

JW: I try not to think about that too much. It’s not something for me to be concerned with. I feel like…I’m sure that has happened, but I’m sure it happens with every artist and every singer and everyone who chooses to step in front of an audience and deliver their songs or perform their music. There’s a certain power in that and there’s also a certain vulnerability that I think people are attracted to, whether you’re male or female. So I don’t know, it’s not something that I necessarily encourage or discourage.

BE: What are you reading right now?

JW: I’m reading a couple of books, which is something that I very rarely do. But the book that I’m reading primarily is called The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.

BE: What do you read typically?

JW: All sorts of things. I went on a little bit of a non-fiction kick for a minute, I read some Tracy Kidder books. I read the books that he wrote about Partners in Health and Paul Farmer. I read Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor recently, and I thought it was one of the best things I’ve read in a really long time. It was an extraordinary book, and I’m kind of obsessed with Flannery O’Connor right now, I think she is amazing. And then my friend recently gave me the book, The Snow Leopard, so I just dove into that in the van yesterday.

BE: I’ve really been taken by the title track on Civilian, particularly the line: “I still keep my baby teeth in the bedside table with my jewelry.” Can you discuss the impetus of that song?

JW: Thanks. It’s based in reality; I mean I actually do have some relics like that from my childhood. Ya know, it was more of an image than anything else, I definitely took some artistic license with it, and they are not necessarily where I claim them to be in the song. But I think that line in particular is more about my tendency to be a little bit of a pack rat physically with object, and that song “Civilian” is about that same impulse, but emotionally– hanging on to things past the point of reason and being dependent on others, and unnecessarily and unrealistically hinged to your past and being afraid of change. So that is kind of the point, it’s a more physical, more specific example of that larger idea of dependence and change.

BE: Do you find yourself threading back to the past a lot in your music, because there does seem to be an almost nostalgic quality to some of the songs on this record?

JW: I’m always thinking backwards, but I’m trying to think forwards more in my life. I think it is impossible not to let songs have nostalgic components to them because I’m usually writing about events that have happened to me or feelings that I’ve had, or things that are of the past. And then of course when you write it and then you record it, these things become more and more entrenched, and more removed from the moment and the present. So I think in a lot of ways writing songs and recording them is a way to preserve those moments and a way that helps me to access them again as the memories fade, and to have some sort of document of experiences and feelings from a time of my life. I feel like Civilian the record is very much a document of a specific time of my life that is slipping away from me a little bit more everyday, for better or for worse, but at least I have this way to mark it.

BE: What is the time line? Where do most of the songs come from?

JW: About a year ago, pretty much exactly a year ago, I wrote the bulk of the songs that ended up on Civilian. The writing process started right about this time last year, but the songs that made the final cut I wrote almost entirely between the beginning of June and the beginning of July, and then we recorded the songs in July and the beginning of August and then mixed in September and then it was finished in September.

BE: There’s such a lag between when an album is recorded, much like a book or a film, and when it’s released. Is it difficult to create that same passion in the work, and bring it to your live shows, given that you’ve recorded those songs a little more than half a year ago?

JW: Yes, sometimes I do struggle with… I mean, I think writers and artists and songwriters in particular, they crave new things. I am certainly the same way, once I complete something I am usually the first person to want to move forward and think of something else. But doing this for a living requires of you that you’re willing to retread that same ground over and over again, and I guess the point is that it’s new to others, if its not new to you. I’ve just had to learn to think about it in a different way. It’s a different kind of creative impulse than the writing impulse, it’s a different kind of feeling, but performing and being able to sing them (the songs), and make them new, and figuring out how to make them new every night is an exercise I enjoy. You just have to learn to expect different things out of it.

BE: You touched on it a bit, but do you know when its time to write another album? Do you have a build-up of experience and emotion that kind of bulges and presses at you, until you say, “Ok, its time to sit down and write songs.”?

JW: I knew this time. Civilian was a…I worked hard at writing these songs, but in a lot of ways it was also just an effortless expulsion of material. I think you can’t really plan it, ya know? I know now that I’m not at a place, right now, where I’m ready to make another record, I’m starting to think about it, I’m starting the process over again. And its kind of a vague-feeling process, but I know when I’m at the beginning and I know when I’m at the middle and I know when I’m at the end. Civilian is out in the world and it makes me feel really good, but it is somewhat daunting to be embarking upon the task of a new record, and I’m only at the very, very beginning of it, so hopefully…Part of the work of being a songwriter and making art is accumulating the experiences that allow you to translate them into that art, so right now I’m more at the accumulating experiences stage, then the actual writing stage.

BE: How did you get the name Civilian?

JW: Well, I’m drawn to words that are kind of ambiguous. I love Civilian because it’s obviously such an emotional record, but “civilian” is such a cold and detached and harsh-sounding word. It represents a certain distance, a clinical distance that I take when I step back and look at these songs, or when I was making the record. But also, I like that it is both an inclusive and exclusive word, I like that, in and of itself, it means someone who is not a member of the military, but it also essentially encompasses almost everyone. The record in a lot of ways is about yearning for that normal life that most people think is possible, but very few people actually have. There is this concept of normalcy that I think is a part of our collective consciousness, but isn’t really real, and no one ever really reaches it, and everyone strives for it. For us especially, being in a band and traveling and moving and having very little stability, the only stable element of our lives is our impermanence, is our instability. So, in a lot of ways the record is about yearning for that, which is something that I’ve certainly struggled with, but I think its something that everyone struggles with, regardless of who they are or where they live or what their life is like.

BE: I heard you use the word “clinical.” Do you have to get in that space, that objective, distant space to assess yourself, get inside yourself?

JW: Ya, I think that’s absolutely true. Being able to do that is probably the only reason why I’m able to process anything that I experience into something valuable.

Acclaimed actor and musician Jeff Daniels talks about his upcoming work, his love for the theatre, and his latest album, Keep it Right Here.

Jeff Daniels

TRANSCRIPTION BY KIRSTEN CLODFELTER

Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans, and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This evening, I’m speaking with actor and musician Jeff Daniels. Mr. Daniels is perhaps best known for his work in films like Terms of Endearment, Dumb and Dumber, Gods and Generals, and The Squid and the Whale; however, he’s also the founder and the Executive Director of the Purple Rose Theater in Chelsea, Michigan, and an acclaimed touring songwriter. As a musician, he’s recorded five albums, the most recent of which, Keep It Right Here, was released late last year. Jeff, thanks for joining me.

Jeff Daniels: Sure.

BE: Well, now that you’ve had your foot in both worlds for awhile, how have you found acting and making music to differ as expressive outlets?

JD: Well, in my case, the biggest difference is that I write everything. It’s a one-man show—there’s no band; it’s just me and a guitar. So, it’s a bit like a one-man show with no band. I’m the director, I’m the editor, I’m the writer, I’m the studio, I’m the marketing—everything. I don’t mind that. I don’t mind that creative control over what I do. As an actor, you’re always at the service of somebody else’s vision. In a play, it’s more of the director’s vision, and he or she’s got their hands on you all the way up to opening night, and if it’s a film, there are even more people. The Director, as you’re shooting it, you give him five different takes on how to do a certain thing—five variations on it—and then they take that away, and then a year later you go to the premiere and you find out what they did with what you gave them. You kind of do it and give it to them and watch them walk away with it. So, I like the creative control of the music. I like not being told what to write or what to do. The older you get, and the more you’re in this business, the more you kind of feel like, “Why don’t we just do it my way.” Those are the biggest differences. The similarity is that it’s creative. It’s all part of that big creative process that starts with a blank page or an actor sitting there going, “How am I going to pull this character off?” Or a songwriter with, “Should I start in the key of G or A?” Or, “What’s this song going to be about?” It’s the journey of creating something that ends up being finished.

BE: You make mention of it in your song, “If William Shatner Can, I Can Too.” Do you feel as if you’re afforded more leeway as a musician because of your big-screen fame?

JD: When I wrote that, that was nine or ten years ago. That was just me getting ahead of the critics, or even those that were going, “Okay, another actor sings. Great. Terrific. Very exciting.” It was me acknowledging the big elephant in the room, which is that I’m known for something else, and you’re paying money to see me not do that. So, it was me sort of going, “Look, I know. I got it, but I’ve been doing this a long time, but if you bear with me, after fifteen minutes you won’t think you wasted your money.” I know there are people, if I go into a market or a city for the first time, there are people that are there that just want to see the famous person, or the guy from Dumb and Dumber or whatever movie they liked. And that’s fine, it gets them in the door, but then it’s my job to give them something different.

BE: How difficult is it to present yourself—you as the person—and erase all of those preconceptions people have of you, when you take the stage as a musician?

JD: You know, it’s really strange now with the Internet, with everyone having an unsolicited, anonymous opinion. I don’t spend a lot of time reading comments—first of all, I don’t Google myself; my wife does that far too much—but everybody’s got an opinion, and everybody’s got things to say about you, so the perception of who I am is so screwed up, it’s not even like it’s controlled. It depends on what blog you read or what website you read, I guess. Hopefully it’s more positive than negative, but as the guy that is the subject of that sometimes, you just throw up your hand and go, “Fuck it.” There’s nothing I can do about it. So you just walk out there and go, “Guess what, you don’t know me. You may think you do, but you don’t.” And I’ve said this before, if you wanted to get to know me, you should probably read all of my plays and listen to all of my songs. There’s more information in those than on any blog or website or interview I might have done.

BE: I’d imagine that having put yourself out there as much as you have that a resentment or a resignation creeps in.

JD: The resignation creeps in. I’m not even a guy that they take shots at—I’m not a tabloid guy. Nobody has to sign their name. They can say whatever they want and they can have a username. It’s great fun unless you’re famous.

BE: Yeah, I heard a great comedic rant on that just today, actually.

JD: Louis Black, I hope.

BE: No, no, if you haven’t heard Bill Burr, he’s been on Fogged Clarity before.

JD: I’ll look him up.

BE: He’s hilarious. You’ve been a great advocate for the arts in Michigan over the years, and a lot of Great Lakes imagery finds it way into your songs. Can you talk about how your affection for the state developed?

JD: Initially, in some of the earlier CDs I was writing about home and liking it here. I also didn’t think the CDs would sell beyond Southeastern Michigan or the state of Michigan, so I wrote about Michigan. Since I’ve done a little bit of that, I’ve kind of gotten away from that a little bit in some of the later stuff, though it still pops up. But, you know, it’s home. Especially now that economically we’re in such trouble, and we still are, and in a way we became the laughing stock, and we were certainly viewed with great pity from around the country as we went belly up. As one of the people who’s still here, I wrote stuff about wanting to still be here. This is home. This is who we are, this is what we are, and many people had to leave because they foreclosed and they had to leave, and other people just left, but for those of us who stayed, in a song like “The Michigan in Me,” it speaks to those of us who stayed.

BE: How’d you hook up with the two other musicians featured on this record, Brad Phillips and Dominic John Davis?

JD: I have great respect for a lot of the musicians who, for as long as I’ve been an actor, they’ve been chasing the whole music thing. This state is full of really great musicians, some of course have broken out, the obvious ones [are from] way back when Seger did, but Kid Rock and Eminem and Jack White and others, I suppose, but [Brad and Dominic] they’re artists. I’ve been playing around Michigan a lot, I play all over the country, but I’ve dropped into Michigan a lot, and there’s Brad Phillips at Blissfest. It’s this kind of Woodstock up near Petoskey every July, and they had me play one year, and Steppin’ In It—which is a band I’d heard and then used on a couple of songs on some CDs—they’re just great musicians. I get better playing with them; I learn from them. So, Dom was the bass player for them, and then Brad Phillips is a mandolin fiddle player who was in a band called Millish, and he kind of sat in with me at Blissfest when I played my set. Then in front of two thousand people we went out and did “The Big Bay Shuffle” and “The Ballad of the Buckless Yooper,” and you know, those guys, you just tell them the key of G and then you look at them and they do the break. It’s just fun to watch them. You know, they say it’s called playing music—it’s playing. They really made music fun. So, I took Brad on a two week tour; I was out from August until January, or December into January, and for two weeks of it in August I went down to Nashville and assorted other cities on the way down there, and I took Brad with me. That’s up on the website. There’s a five-part documentary—a forty-five-minute documentary that we broke up on the official Jeff Daniels channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/OfficialJeffDaniels) up on Youtube, and it’s me and Brad and my son Ben in this RV gigging our way down to Nashville. I enjoyed playing with him, and we came back from that tour and just went into the recording studio and put down the seven or so songs that we had done while we still had them. Then we added Dom, and then I added three more, and then I said, “We might have something that’s pretty good.” We released it in December up on the website, and we’re pretty happy with it.

BE: Are you guys getting together and playing still?

JD: We did. I do ten shows at the Purple Rose every Christmas week and New Year’s week, and I did that again this December, and I brought Brad and Dom in for all those shows. So, basically I did a solo set and then I had them come out and we played the CD. It was fun.

BE: Between the Purple Rose Theatre that you founded and are Executive Director of, and your music, are you placing your sole focus between those two things right now? Are you leaving the acting behind for awhile, or what’s the story?

JD: I love the music. I enjoy the music. The music I do, whether I’m gigging or whether I’m recording, I do that year round. And I can take that with me when I go do an acting job. The acting jobs—you don’t control that. You’re not in charge of that. The phone rings and then someone wants you. They want me this spring. So, “Oh, good. Okay.” I did a play called God of Carnage on Broadway for about a year.

BE: Yeah, you were nominated for a Tony [Award] for it.

JD: Yeah. They’re getting the original cast together. Jim Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden and Hope Davis and myself, and we’re going to do it out in L.A. in April and May.

BE: Cool.

JD: So, the music stops, except that I’ll take the guitar with me and write during the day, and you know, it’s with me all the time anyway. Then I’ll be done with that in June. There’s some things that are happening in the television world: I’m in development with Showtime on a series, and there are a couple other things that might happen when I hang up the phone. So, it’s a roller coaster of a life, I’ll tell you.

BE: I feel as if this is rather indulgent on my part, but you were phenomenal in The Squid and the Whale, I thought.

JD: Good script.

BE: I felt like I got punched in the gut when I walked out of that, and I know you did Howl with James Franco. Are there any other opportunities arising in the independent film world?

JD: The independent film world: I did a movie with a kid named Aaron Paul off of Mad Men. They shot it in Detroit, and they called up and wanted me to shoot a week on it, and so I said, “Great.” It was fun to shoot in Detroit and shoot with a Michigan crew and kind of see how much people appreciated jobs here in the industry. We’ll see what Governor Snyder and company decide about that. I think they’re going to re-title it, so I don’t know what it will be, but Aaron Paul is the star of it. Then I just finished a part on a movie called Looper with Joe Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, written and directed by a guy named Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed Brick, which he did with Joe Gordon-Levitt. Joe and I did a movie together called The Lookout.

BE: Yeah, The Lookout was excellent. I really liked that film.

JD: Yeah, it’s a really good script. It’s about time travel, so all those guys who are in to time travel are probably going to love it. It’s a very smart script, and Rian’s a really good director.

BE: You were Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s blind roommate in The Lookout, and you were excellent.

JD: Yeah, I went to the Michigan—I believe it’s called the Commission for the Blind or something—down in Kalamazoo I believe, and they were very, very helpful. I did some research down there for that movie.

BE: Are you as good a cook in real life as you are in the movie?

JD: No, no. I’ll eat anything put in front of me, but it’s got to be put in front of me.

BE: Well, as somebody who’s dedicated as much of your life to the stage as both an actor and a playwright—I think you’ve written eleven, now?

JD: I’m up to fifteen.

BE: Fifteen?

JD: I’m up to number fifteen. I just turned in number fifteen.

BE: Forgive me. What’s your take on the state and direction of contemporary American theater?

JD: Well, it’s always dying. Theater’s always dying. Whether Broadway or regional or wherever, it’s always dying. It’s an antiquated art form; it’s been around for hundreds of years, but it keeps surviving somehow. There’s something about a live theater performance, when it’s done right and done well, that damn near beats everything. That’s the fun of music too—is when that’s done well. It’s that, “It’s happening right in front of us, just for us,” thing, which is different than a movie or TV. I think the American theater can be exciting. I think a lot of it is boring and overly serious and important. It’s kind of like [the idea that] asparagus is good for you—eat it, and sometimes we don’t want too. Sometimes we have to find ways to get people who care less about theater in the door. So how do you do that? At the Purple Rose, we’ve used comedy to do that, and humor, and we get them in for a great night out for this comedy or whatever that’s got more too it, but still, they’re there to have a great time on a Saturday night. Then maybe they’ll come back and see that thing that isn’t as funny, that’s going to rock their world, where it’s written and blows them away. You’ve got to build an audience, and I think sometimes the American theater is a little too self-important.

BE: Yeah, perhaps much like symphony or poetry. You know, you need to have a Baroque, Brandenburg Concerto night where everyone can recognize the music. I really like the asparagus analogy; but I wonder if there’s a point as an artist where you wish it were easier to communicate with an audience and present them poignant, serious material without having to filter it through this comedic screen.

JD: Well, I think you can. I think you’ve just got to look at your audience. Marsha Norman’s a great playwright, and she said, “If you just write for yourself, you’re going to play to an audience of one.”

BE: Yeah.

JD: So, look at who’s sitting in the seats. That’s what I try to do, and I tell the playwrights at the Purple Rose to do it. Write about them. Write your take on what they’re going through, what they’re familiar with. We don’t care about you. I really don’t. What I care about is you writing about those people sitting in those seats, so that when they leave this thing that they just saw—they’re changed. They’re different because of your point of view, because of what you wrote. That interests me. I think that’s the connection that I got taught in New York when I went there. They said, “If there’s no connection between the play and the audience, you have nothing.” That connection has to start at 8:00 and then when the curtain comes down, that’s when you release them. There’s an art to that, and I think when theater’s do that, instead of just at times being very self-indulgent, and back to the asparagus thing, [acting like] “What we’re doing is very important; you should enjoy this,” even me, I’m sitting in the audience going, “It ain’t affecting me. You didn’t pull me in. You didn’t do it.” There’s an art to that. It’s really hard to learn, but once you figure it out… That’s the similarity with music. When you write a song like “Grandfather’s Hat” or “The Michigan In Me,” in my case, it’s not for me. It’s for that woman out there who’s wearing her mother’s ring or her aunt’s necklace, or that guy that’s staying in Michigan despite the fact that he lost a job because his family is here, and he doesn’t know why he’s staying. It’s for them. I think that’s what good plays do.

BE: Do you have some songs that are just for you, just for Jeff Daniels, or have some plays…?

JD: Yeah, and they’ll never see the light of day. It goes into the notebook and into the archives. Do a demo recording so the kids will have it when I’m dead, but otherwise no.

BE: You made the film Escanaba in Da Moonlight. I remember watching that at Christmas with my family. Was that ever an experience you had as a young woodsman, a young hunter?

JD: No, it really wasn’t. My wife’s family hunts, and I have friends who hunt. It’s their religion. She has family in the Upper Peninsula, and we wrote the play back in ’95 for the theater. Dumb and Dumber had just been out, and we knew twelve-year-old boys would think Dumb and Dumber was funny, but we weren’t prepared for seven to seventy—that demographic. So, I said, “How do I get that crowd into my theater without writing Dumb and Dumber or something? What do I do?” What is the onus of five guys at a deer camp? There we go. Put a little flatulence in, drop a love story next to it, beer, and then it kind of made sense. It became this huge, huge Rocky Horror Picture Show of a play for us.

BE: Isn’t there a part where you go on a hallucinogenic trip?

JD: Yeah. A yooper’s version of a hallucinogenic trip.

BE: What do you prefer, if you had your druthers, would you do a role like you did in Gods and Generals or The Squid and the Whale, a more serious role, or something like you played in Dumb and Dumber?

JD: All of the above. I love the variety; I love mixing it up. I guess what I really like is working with people who are really good who have been doing it a long time, or who are legitimate and on their way up. Rian Johnson and Joe Gordon-Levitt were the reasons I took the movie last week.

BE: And Eisenberg, who you worked with in The Squid and the Whale.

JD: Jesse, yeah. Jesse’s going to the party next week. I just like working with really good people. After fifty movies or so, that means I’ll be challenged. That the script is good, that I don’t quite know how to do it, so I’ll have to focus. I’m just not one of these guys that comes in and [says], “Could you just do what you did for that other movie, can you do it for us?” You know, where you play to an image. That bores me. That’s what I look for—people that I’ve either worked for and loved it, or respect, and suddenly they want me to do such and such. Then I get excited again.

BE: Great. Well hey, Jeff, thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate it, and best of luck.

JD: Thanks Ben.

BE: Take care.

JD: Take care.

Eric Elbogen, conductor of the one-man band Say Hi, discusses heartbreak, growth, and the making of his latest record, Um, Uh Oh.

Eric Elbogen of Say Hi

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: Talk to me about the creative freedom making all these records by yourself affords, and is there ever a case where that much freedom can prove to be a disadvantage for an artist, when there is an absence of criticism or filter during the recording process?

Eric Elbogen: Yes, it’s awesome and terrible all at the same time. I mean it’s awesome because I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. I can play a drum part or a bass part that isn’t very exciting at all; that a normal drummer or bass player wouldn’t want to do because they’d feel it wasn’t showcasing their talents enough. But, yeah, it ends up taking me six, seven, or eight months just to make a record because I have so much freedom, and not having an extra set of ears can prolong the process sometimes.

BE: If you had to pin it down, what idea or emotion would you say is the central theme running through your new record, Um, Uh Oh?

EE: Heartbreak, definitely.

BE: Yeah, it seems that after writing your 2006 album concerning vampires, and subsequently, writing songs in 2008 about magic beans and truth machines, you have come down and taken a more earnest approach on this record.

EE: Yeah, I think that that is accurate. I’m older than I was when I first started making the Say Hi records, and I am concerned with different things in the world, and I conceive of myself in a different way, I conceive of my friends and my loved ones in a different way, and I’m into different music than I was when I began making the Say Hi records. So I think what your hearing is a reflection of that.

BE: What are you listening to, what are you influenced by now?

EE: These days, I honestly have gone back to all the classic rock: The ‘Stones and Petty and Springsteen and the Beatles. For a while, everything that was in rotation was current indie-rock bands, and now I’m just more turned on by some of the older 60’s and 70’s records.

BE: Well it has remained resonant for so long, and I think that that’s a testament to the lasting power of the music and why it’s important to listen still.

I know you moved to Seattle from Brooklyn a while ago. How has that shift contributed to the shape of your music?

EE: It’s hard to say, I mean The Wishes and the Glitch, the record that you mentioned that I did in 2008, that’s sort of a record about moving from someplace that I lived for a long time, to a new place. I mean I’ve been in Seattle for more than four years now, so I don’t necessarily know that the geography of where I’ve been, having been here for so long, really influences what I’m doing. I mean, I sit in a room and I think too much, and I don’t think it matters where that room is. I think that I’m going to think about some of, or most of the same things, regardless of whether that’s a room in New York or a room in Seattle or a room in the middle of nowhere.

BE: I hear that man. Do you find yourself getting trapped inside yourself? As you said, oftentimes, with me as well, geography doesn’t much matter. If I’m inside my head, I’m inside my head, and that’s where I am.

Is there any way that reflection manifests itself through other mediums, do you write, do you take photographs, or is it primarily music.

EE: You know what, I’ve dabbled in everything throughout my life, but music is the main focus of my creative medium these days. It just becomes hard…I feel like you can spread yourself too thin if you are putting that creative energy into too many things, and so, rather than having a thought or having an experience and thinking about the best medium through which to express my reaction to it… that’s not something that I do, I just filter it through the “Would this make a good song filter?” and I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon, if ever. You know, I’ve been doing this for a very very long time, and I still find it compelling and I still feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface in terms of what I want to do, and I feel like that’s going to be the case for a while.

BE: Where did the heartbreak come from? Do you want to talk about the impetus of the record and the relationship that spawned it?

EE: Yeah, you know, a lot of songs don’t come from concrete examples, they come from emotions and experiences based on a variety of concrete examples. The new record is about heartbreak and love with a few different people, but it’s also about heartbreak and friendship and heartbreak in a working environment and sort of the…there’s a lot in there about the depression involved with having to end a friendship, because I had a working relationship with someone, or several people that just didn’t turn out right, and sometimes I just try to distill what I’m feeling at that moment, at the moment that that situation either ends, or at the moment when I realize that it is going to end, and I base a song, or fictions around that feeling.

BE: Yeah, the press release that I received for this album indicated that you are quite the autocrat when it comes to your music. It spoke of you kicking out bandmates mid-tour, talk to me about that a little bit.

EE: Well, being in a band is hard. I’ve seen so many great bands over the years just call it quits because it has been a democratic situation, and I think more often than not, once you spend that much time with people you just start to hate each other. You know, people don’t talk about it a lot, sometimes they do, sometimes, you know, it becomes a reason why people like to go see them, because they like to watch and experience the drama. There’s the cliché “creative differences” as the reason for splitting, which every time I hear that I’m like: “Well, no, it’s obvious they just hate each other and don’t want to be in a band together anymore.”

I think that… You know, it’s been a different line-up for every single tour I’ve done over the past 7 or 8 years, and sometimes I don’t get along with people, sometimes people don’t get along with me. Sometimes people quit, sometimes I fire them…Sometimes it’s mutual, sometimes people just decide they want to spend more time with their family, or want to start a family, or they don’t want to be away from their girlfriends or their wife for that long. I’ve really experienced so many scenarios.

BE: I’d have to imagine that it’d be difficult for someone else, from the outside, coming in to Say Hi, to match your intensity and your conviction in the band, and I think that’s probably the challenge that presents itself.

EE: It is, I’ve revised my standards, I continue to revise my standards for who I want to play in my band. On the best day, I find people who are friends of mine, who are respected musicians, and they come on, maybe they have their own band going on, but they have some time to do a tour or two with me, and those are the best scenarios. And then sometimes those people just aren’t available and I make an educated guess about someone new that I find out about through a friend of a friend, or…the Craigslist thing doesn’t happen so much anymore, but there were a few tours that I did with random strangers I met through Craigslist. But I think that the situation that I have now…we’re touring as a three piece and some of the guys I have coming out with me are just great, were having a really good time, been rehearsing a ton, and we actually did our first show with this lineup last Friday and I was really happy with the way it went.

BE: Have you found yourself as an artist having to adjust to the increasing digitization of music, and do you ever find yourself compromising your aesthetic in the interest of a particular trend.

EE: It’s an interesting time for music and it has been an interesting time for the last ten years. It will continue to get weirder and darker I think. I don’t know that I’ve compromised anything. My most important belief is that I need to make art that I’m 100% comfortable with at the end of the day, otherwise I can’t sleep, or I can’t live with myself. But I’ve certainly made different business choices, different aesthetic choices for the touring band, because of the way things are. You know, it’s important these days, crucial even, to take whatever film and TV licensing opportunities that come your way because people are buying fewer records, people are going out to fewer shows. And so I guess that would sort of be an answer to your question. Perhaps in an earlier time I could just put out records and tour those records. But you know, even with all of those (media opportunities), it’s not like I have to pace back and forth and ask, “do I really wanna sell my soul to this corporate entity?” The offers we’ve gotten have been really inoffensive and really cool, and I thought that what they were proposing worked aesthetically, so it was kind of a no-brainer.

BE: You have a pretty intensive tour coming up, 30 or 40 dates in the next month and a half. Do you enjoy the road? We’ve talked about it a bit, but what does a Say Hi live show look and sound like?

EE: I enjoy the road half of the time, I love the hour that we’re on stage and I get to make music, and interact with the people who come to see us. But, as I’m sure you know, its long days and hard work. I end up doing most of the driving, which means 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 hours of driving a day, and you get to the venue and your already exhausted and you need to try to figure out a way to muster some energy to put on a compelling show 6 hours later. So, I like some of it.

The show right now is a trio, and I’m actually playing drum kit for the first time in my life, and singing and playing drums, and playing sort of drums with my feet on a few songs, and then I play acoustic guitar as well. My friend Luke is playing guitar and keyboards and my friend Trevor is playing bass.

BE: Well, I really like the song “Bruises to Prove It,” the last track on your new album. Can you talk to me about how that song came about, and what’s behind that particular piece?

EE: Yeah, it’s sort of about being at your wits end, being at the bottom of things. That’s an example of a song that is not intended to be listened to from a literal perspective, if you take it literally it’s about drinking yourself silly and getting in fights and waking up and doing it all over again. It’s really not about that, it’s about feeling beaten by the world and life. In the case of me, it’d be the past almost 3 and a half decades of chugging along, trying to figure out how I fit into everything, you know, trying to stay happy as much as I can.

BE: I definitely, after listening to your songs and just in talking to you, I definitely detect a resignation, and I don’t know, would you consider yourself an isolated person…someone who struggles with some existential issues, as we all do to some extent?

EE: Yeah, I don’t know, I have no way of knowing if other people my age in a similar situation think about the same things I do. But yeah, there’s a weariness in my head pretty frequently. And I think that it definitely comes out a little bit more when I’m talking about this record, because I can be a pretty fun person, and I do have a sense of humor and I joke a lot, but you know thinking about my headspace and making this record, definitely makes me shove that aside and think about the weariness.

BE: Do you feel that weariness can be a strength that you can use to create with?

EE: Absolutely, it’s actually my favorite thing in the world, as masochistic as it sounds… those days when I just feel dark, and I’ve just been dumped by someone… And it actually feels, physically feels, like my heart was punched— It’s my favorite thing in the world to pick up a guitar and take advantage of the emotion that I’m feeling. And I guess I’m thankful for that, I’m thankful that somewhere down the line I’ve learned that that can be a cathartic thing. Because I think that it’s important for me to capture that (feeling) in a song or on a recording.

BE: It’s scary to think that not everyone has that outlet, although I think that creative people are more prone to catastrophize things.

EE: Its true, like we were talking about before, we spend so much time in our heads. Yeah, but, your right, it is scary. I think that… I know people who cope with that sort of thing by drinking or ingesting various substances or taking it out on their significant other or their family or their coworkers, and I do my best to not take that sort of thing out on other people in my life, and use music and my creativity to channel that stuff.

BE: That’s really beautiful… I just talked to Fred Thomas of Saturday Looks Good to Me about two hours before I you, you guys are about the same age, and I hear a lot of the same sentiments echoed between you two guys. Not to minimize the individuality of it all, but its pretty interesting to me.

As of late I’ve been talking to people… You know catharsis has always been what I’ve been concerned with in the journal and I’ve been hearing more musicians and more authors turn around and say, “yes, this is catharsis and I embrace it for that…” And thank God, thank God you have it man…the results are beautiful…you make good music because your hurt, that’s what it comes down to.

EE: Well yeah, and it does bring me joy to think that somewhere, someone can be listening to what I’ve written and what I’ve recorded and relate to that, and maybe that will make that person feel less lonely, because they understand that there are other people in the world that are experiencing what they are experiencing or have experienced it.

BE: I quilt to cope with my depression.

EE: That’s awesome.

In an intimate discussion, the bestselling author talks about her writing, overcoming a psychologically abusive childhood, and her dances on the dark side.

Kathryn Harrison

TRANSCRIBED BY DYLAN BROCK

Ben Evans: I’d like to begin with a quote of yours from an interview you did a few years back: “In fiction and in non-fiction, I’m someone who really wants to vivisect myself, to really just cut it open and to show…” Given that philosophy, how do you as a writer, as someone who I have to believe is an intensely passionate person, go about establishing the right balance of gut-shot honesty and artfulness in your work?

Kathryn Harrison: Well, I don’t think it’s one or the other. I think there are ways of being artfully honest and artfully dishonest. I’m not sure it’s an either/or. Do you see what I mean?

BE: Oh, that’s what I’m saying – embracing that philosophy of cutting yourself open and wanting to make yourself visible on the page, especially in your memoirs.

KH: I think I see. How do I do it. Is that what you’re saying?

BE: Yes.

KH: I’m sorry. I was making it more complicated than it was. I think it actually provides a level of relief to establish a clinical perspective on oneself, if you know what I mean. I suppose if you tried to come up with an analytical term, it would be that the narrator is the observing ego in a way, and it just allows you… I think writing is a discipline that allows you, or creates for you, a distance between you the observer and you the observed, and that it’s an interesting, and useful, and essential difference.

BE: Do you think you lose an edge, I guess, an advantage as a storyteller, this now concerning your fiction, when you expose so much of yourself and your history in memoir? Is some of the mystery behind you as an author gone?

KH: (laughs) I don’t know, I might be the wrong person to ask about the mystery of me… I think that there’s a temptation to read a book like The Kiss, and because it is so intimate and naked a revelation of part of my life, there’s the tendency for people to believe that they know me through and through, that I’ve exposed my whole self, but that actually is not true. Those were four years out of fifty, and one particular relationship, one particular lens through which to see my family and myself, and, you know, there’s a lot more, but people forget that.

BE: In that respect you’re kind of like, having written The Kiss, like Reggie Jackson – he had this great career but everybody remembers him for the World Series and the three home-runs.

KH: Right. (laughs) That’s not a terrible thing to be.

BE: No. It’s great, because you knocked it out of the park, right?

KH: Well, thank you. That’s very generous.

BE: Do you ever feel pigeonholed as a writer, or constricted, because you had such success with that
book, when entering into different projects?

KH: No. I think actually the book was the opposite for me. It was freeing in a way, because the three books that were published before had been well-reviewed, and I had been a meticulous literary novelist… sort of like a goodie-two-shoes A-student, and I think it’s very easy, maybe even – no, I don’t know that it has anything to do with gender – it’s easy to get trapped in the box of, oh, I did this and it was good, I did this and it was good, and say, “What’s the next thing I’m going to do that’s going to be really good?” and that’s not the way to go at it. In this case I wrote a book to which people had wild, intense responses, both negative and positive, that I heard and had to deal with such vitriol that it was kind of like an inoculation. I felt like, “Wow, I don’t have to be careful anymore. Nobody can say anything more shocking or worse than they’ve said so far, so I can really do anything.” That just opens up the world of possibility for a writer, an artist of any kind.

BE: It’s really interesting. When I began these interviews almost three years ago, I’d ask everyone, every author or poet I interviewed, “What role does mortality play in shaping your work?” I’d always try to get them to say that their work was catharsis – and so many authors are reluctant to say that, and I understand why: because at some point, to refer to my earlier question, I think they feel that if it is just this belligerent emotion, then they’re compromising the artistry in the work, and it’s unfiltered. Still, it’s really nice for me to hear you say, “I’m scared of death,” and “This is really my catharsis.” Actually, after three years, you’re the only one to finally establish that and come out and say that.

KH: Come clean? (laughs) Yeah, I’m like that, I guess.

BE: It’s really nice to hear.

KH: I’m the kid in the street saying the emperor has no clothes. Well, have your read The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker?

BE: No, I have not.

KH: Oh, well, it’s a book that you, I think, should read.

BE: Have you yourself, having gone through all this crazy, crazy stuff you’ve gone through, have you cobbled together a good philosophy of life and your life and living, now you think?

KH: I think I have. I’ve had the blessing and the curse to have been exposed to quite a number of religious faiths: I was raised by my Jewish grandparents, but my mother and I, we were Christian Scientists until I was ten, and then she became a Catholic, and I followed her, so I was thoroughly Catholicized, and then by the time I gave it up in college, in came my father, who was a Protestant minister, and I married a Quaker, so I’ve see a lot of the pursuit of faith up close, and I’ve probably come to a point in my life – I’m going to be fifty in a couple months – that I’m not just a cafeteria Catholic, I’m just a cafeteria everything. I pick and choose. I’ve chosen from different disciplines and faiths, but there’s a Catholic theologian and archeologist, actually, who was excommunicated for heresy, but one of the things he said was that everything that rises must converge. His name was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and that’s what I believe. There are a lot of paths up as well as a lot of paths down.

BE: To have that kind of black and white, well, not black and white, but definitive moral belief…

KH: Well, the rigidity… But I think it’s because people are scared.

BE: I’m scared. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. If anything…

KH: A lot of people can’t take that. A lot of people really just don’t want to say, “I’m scared, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if there’s a God,” or if when all is said and done, my life will be meaningless…

BE: There’s a freedom there.

KH: They would really rather subscribe to dogma that tells them a different way with some kind of authority: the Pope, Jesus, Buddha, Allah… You create these huge authority figures. You know it’s all very Freudian, isn’t it?

BE: It is.

KH: Sadly. I mean, not sadly because I actually love Freud, but it is. It’s really all very Freudian.

BE: It goes back to Kant who actually established an objective grounds for morality with the absence of a God, and if that can exist, I just believe in the power of reason. I’m hoping like hell that seventy-two years, when mouth cancer ends up getting me, will not be the end. As I’m sure we all are.

KH: (laughs) Most of us, yeah. Unless you’re sixty-two and have mouth cancer and are just hoping to live ten more years.

BE: That would be bad news bears… So, there’s this beautiful line in The Kiss, and I’ve crammed: I’ve read six of your books since we decided to do this interview.

KH: Oh my god. My apologies.

BE: No, I enjoyed them. But this line from The Kiss kept coming back to me, of your mother, you wrote: “I cannot remember a time that I was not aware of my mother’s fragility. That’s part of what has convinced me of her surpassing worth – the way only the best teacups break easily.” It’s really in stark contrast to your depiction of your mother that, you seem to be and sound like, a pretty strong person. And I guess we’ve already touched on this a little, but how much did the memoirs and writing those empower the strength and resilience you now posses? And when did you choose to write it – I know you had dabbled and you had thought about writing the memoir because your previous three novels dealt with that…

KH: Right.

BE: So how did you decide to write it, and can you just go on a bit about how freeing it was to finally write?

KH: Yes, I think that writing was not something that enabled my strength, but something that was probably an expression of my strength, or having reached a point of strength from which I could write it, and it was never a book I planned to write, I think maybe the opposite was more true. It was a book that I planned not to write. But I was working on a fourth novel, and I had turned in a draft, and it was, as everybody who read it says, my agent and my editor, “Well, you know this is really wonderfully well-written, but these characters are totally unsympathetic and you don’t want to read about them.” And I said okay, and I agreed to have a meeting with my editor in a week, and in that period of time I tried to go through the book and figure out what was wrong with it. I arrived at a meeting having some things written down that I planned to do and she said, “So, Kathryn, what are we going to do here?” and I said, to my surprise, “Well, I don’t even want to write this book,” and she said, “Oh. Well, what do you want to write?” and I said I felt I needed to write a non-fiction account of what happened between me and my father, and she said, “Oh,” because she knew what that meant. She had been my editor from the beginning, and my first novel was one of those palpably autobiographical first novels that were sent off to… for legal reasons I made extra changes so that it was… the identity or the likeness of any family member of mine was completely disguised. She knew that that was more truth than fiction. So she asked me if I felt that I really wanted to do that, or could do it, and I said, “I don’t know, and I don’t want you to tell anybody else in the company that I’m doing it, because I really don’t know if I can do it.” But I wanted to try, and I left the office with my head spinning, thinking, “What did I just do? What did I say?” I was shocked, and I just remember my heart pounding, thinking, “Oh, I must be nuts,” but I was also kind of excited because… because I’m not… there was a corrosive, wearing effect of keeping that part of my life walled off and secret. It was finite – I haven’t been in touch with my father for many, many years – but it was a huge experience and a formative one, in many ways for me, and it wasn’t really possible to wall-off such a large chunk of who I was and how it related to who I became without having these defenses erected within me – period. I knew that for my children – not for my husband, because he knew – that they’d run up against this place in me where I said, “This far and no further.” I didn’t want to be that as a mother. I mean, I knew that was the kind of mother I had, so I guess I made the great over-correction as I made the great over-share. I was also tired of living in a culture that sent me many messages that it wasn’t okay for me to talk about this. One of the things that was really shocking to me when the book came out was how many reviews took the position that this was not something that should be written about. I just thought that was… I was literally flabbergasted to read something like that. I wouldn’t say that this is cocktail party chatter, but I thought this kind of thing is what books were invented for. And, you know… I was glad that I had sort of thrown down the gauntlet and said, “No. I don’t agree. I refuse to keep my mouth shut and say this never happened.”

BE: Ten years from now people will be writing about something that’s faux-pas now and it will be… the same controversy will arise.

KH: Right.

BE: Forever and ever.

KH: The French have an expression for that. “The more it changes, the more it stays the same.”

BE: Well, even after reading six of your books, that is obviously the most poignant to me. I thought it was written just beautifully. Everyone wants to call your writing sparse on the back of every book. Sparse! Beautifully sparse!

KH: (laughs) That’s good. That means that I rigorously edit my own sentences, which is what I intend to do.

BE: If the picture you paint is so expansive, it’s difficult to call the prose itself sparse, for me. The pictures, especially in The Seal Wife that I got of Alaska, I feel like Michener couldn’t have done it better and integrated the emotion in there.

KH: Well, thank you.

BE: But I… I know these questions, so many of them, revolve around having read the memoirs, for me, because so many times as a reader I think I con myself into believing I know an author’s person through their work, but after reading your memoirs, it’s difficult for me to read your fiction and not probe for connections.

KH: Right. I’m sure.

BE: So, on that note, many of the male characters in your novels, notably Will Moreland in Envy and Bigelow in The Seal Wife, seem to be almost hyper-sexual creatures, do you think your image of your father, your relationship with your father, led you to shape your male characters in this way?

KH: Well, that’s an interesting question, because it’s turning it around for me. I have considered the type of males that I write about, and I would connect them more with my mother, actually. Perhaps my experience with my father underscored something, but the fact of… I discovered that it was not only possible, I won’t say easy because it never is easy, any of it, but when I discovered it was possible for me to write in a male voice, I just loved it because it gave me a way to linger on my relationship with my mother, in which I really was the unrequited, frustrated lover. She was always out of reach, in contrast to my grandparents with whom I lived, she was twenty or twenty-two and young and beautiful and just seemed as if she were covered in fairy dust and always leaving, so I have a keen sense of a decidedly female love object always slipping out of grasp, fear that there is no possibility of salvation from the misery of being human unless one can reach and obtain and touch that female ideal. I think you see that in Bigelow with the kite and the seal and his pursuit of this woman who won’t speak to him, and in The Binding Chair, the Arthur character and his pursuit of the Chinese woman, and any number of male characters, and they are hyper-sexualized and hyper-sexual because I think this ancient part of myself, this early part of myself was not a particularly sophisticated creature. I think that I was somebody who just wanted my mother, I wanted her. I wanted to posses her. I wanted to somehow break through her surface. I wanted her in a very rudimentary way and it worked out well for drawing in male sexuality, if that makes sense.

BE: You have… It’s crazy. You must psychoanalyze or have psycho-analyzed yourself all the time, and just mind-fucked yourself time and time again.

KH: (laughs)

BE: I’m serious.

KH: The one true onanism: the auto-mind-fuck that never ends.

BE: You know, I’ve had OCD and I’ve struggled with that and panic attacks and what-not, and I can’t imagine going through (what you have), but I suppose we have as much strength as we need it always seems like, until we need to summon it, we don’t know it’s there.

KH: Right, right, and that’s one thing, I actually have been through psychoanalysis, glory be, because I don’t know what I would be without it. Really it just saved my life. Really.

BE: It’s so interesting.

KH: Yeah, there’s such a sort of… well, it allows you to just sort of escape the whole notion of judgment, humans judging other humans, and just begin to perceive them for who they are: creatures of needs and vulnerabilities, and the world just is, I think much richer and with many more levels once you’ve begun to see it through a psychoanalytical eye. But anyway…

BE: And when you can take the ego out of it, you know, it’s really helpful.

KH: Yeah.

BE: I don’t know, but on a lighter note, let’s talk about the mass-murder book you just wrote.

KH: (laughs) It’s no wonder that I’ve been told that there’s a sort of sense out there in the world that I must be a very dark and twisted person, and so people are often surprised to find that this isn’t so, that I’m lighthearted and full of pranks.

BE: Well that’s the catharsis. Pranks! I can see you with pigtails running down the street after breaking Mr. Hooper’s window or something…

KH: Right, right – Pippi Longstockings.

BE: All right, so your most recent book, 2008, was While They Slept, which examines the 1984 case of Oregon teenager Billy Gilley murdering his abusive parents and sister. Talk to me about just the experience of researching and recounting this happening and writing this book. I have to imagine it was difficult.

KH: Yeah, it really was, and in ways that I actually didn’t anticipate. I’m never sorry that I did it, but I entered into it with the sort of pure sense of intellectual curiosity and, of course, identifying with Jody as somebody whose life just sort of cracked open, or cracked into two pieces, and there was then and than there was now, and the two weren’t connected anymore. You were the same person, but something had bisected your life. I heard about her through a friend, who’s also my agent, and we were just chatting on the phone one day, it wasn’t even a business call or anything, and she said, “Oh I just spoke with this young woman today. She was so interesting. You would have found it fascinating,” I said, “Oh, really. What? Why? Who?” and she told me about Jody, who had taken her thesis that she wrote for Georgetown, that creative thesis about her brother, looking at the murders through his eyes. I’m blocking the name of it now, a strange, famous Catholic term… anyway, she was going to see various editors to sell it as a book or a book proposal, and it was ultimately turned down, because everybody thought that it was a very strange idea to tell the story of what happened in her family from her brother’s point of view rather than her own. So that’s sort of interesting from the start – her desire to do it that way – and then I’m somebody who’s sort of a sucker for true crime anyway. I just really love it.

BE: Just like the wife in Envy.

KH: Exactly. It’s almost impossible for it to be too down-market. Lurid is an essential part of it. Anyway, here was this lurid story, which was that one day, this eighteen-year-old kid, shot and killed, or rather bludgeoned his parents and his little sister to death in the middle of the night, and then wanted to run away with his sixteen-year-old sister, and I thought, wow, that really is a story. I asked about it every year or so, not religiously, but just when it popped in my head, because it was an interesting story, and finally one time I asked about it, and my agent just threw her arms up in the air and said, “Jody’s never going to write that book,” and, sort of analogous to what happened with The Kiss, I heard myself say, “I will.” Then we both looked at each other and she said, “Are you being serious?” and I said, “Yeah, I’d love to write that book,” and she said, “Well, I guess I need to put you in touch with Jody,” and we met, and she’s not someone who’s quick to trust. Why would she be? We had a long dinner in Georgetown, in Washington, DC, and then she got back to me, and I told her the reasons why I found her story compelling – as I did. I felt really drawn to it – it was pulling me; I wasn’t going after it – and she talked about her frustration about the fact the she really felt that she was not… she didn’t have the psychological strength to undertake the writing of the book. You know she took a whole year off from work, and every time she really sat down and returned to that world, she just fell to pieces, and she couldn’t do it. She decided it wasn’t worth sacrificing her mental health. But she really did want the story to be told, so once I understood that I wasn’t exploiting her – sort of writer to writer – that I wasn’t taking her material away from her when she wanted to write it, I felt a little more comfortable with the whole idea of writing the book. But it was not… that didn’t mean that it ever became a comfortable book to write because I was feeling…

BE: This might be.. I’m sorry to interrupt.

KH: No, no. Go ahead.

BE: I know this is dangerous ground, but when writing the book, was ever there an impish voice in your head saying, “This could have been me. I could have responded to kind of the psychological abuse that I suffered the way Billy did?”

KH: Oh! Well, I don’t think I could say, “Well, this could be me,” because I didn’t believe that I did have that capacity. I think that… I know that pushed to the end of my particular rope, my tendency is toward self-destruction rather than attacking outward. But that is not to say that there was not vicarious gratification or pleasure that I experienced in Billy beating his father to death. Yeah, is that pretty and politically acceptable? No. But did I feel it? Yeah. So I am somebody who’s in a position in which I am inherently exploiting other people’s lives, you know, the narrative of their life together and apart, because of my own psychic agenda.

BE: Well, I think there’s an empathy there.

KH: Yes, there is empathy, but you know one always… there is definite empathy but that doesn’t mean you can relax and stop holding yourself to a kind of ethical auto-interrogation every once in a while just to make sure that you’re staying on the right track, because after all, these are people whose lives have already been…

BE: Decimated.

KH: …walloped with a completely enormous and unjust amount of pain and you don’t want to add to it at all. You just really have this sense of “Do no harm,” and both Jody and Billy were people who had very clear ideas about who they were, and they saw themselves in one way, and I don’t know that I represented them as they saw themselves. That had to be hard, because I was never going to allow my sympathy for one or another of them to sway my attempt to reveal the story as honestly as I could. I actually found it easier to talk to Billy, because he’s less emotionally defensive than Jody, and you know he’s kind of good at making an emotional connection. You know, leaning forward, and seems relaxed when talking, and cracks jokes, and makes eye contact and stuff like that. He’s easier… you have a sense of somebody who’s allowing themselves to be present with you… so even though Billy did bludgeon his parents to death, I have this sense of sympathy for him, whereas Jody is very defended and does not betray emotion, and, I think, found the project much more debilitating than she expected it to be, and was sometimes highly defensive in a way that I completely understand, yet it made it very difficult for me as a writer.

BE: How do you inhabit that world, and just write this book and then go cook dinner for your family?

KH: Well, I think if I couldn’t just… I think if the demands of family and regular life…

BE: I don’t mean to say that you’re a woman and you’re cooking dinner for your family.

KH: No, no. That’s fine.

BE: How about eat?

KH: Well I often am a woman cooking for her family, and my husband would prefer that I didn’t do that, so yes, I do cook for my family.

BE: Okay.

KH: And thank God, there’s a reason that I have to just stand up at a certain point, and I just really have to stop working, because otherwise you know I just get very fixated on things, and I think it would be a horrible thing to really just enter that world and only come up for air or a sandwich every once in a while. I think that would be… I found it hard enough to write as I did, you know, with periods of normalcy – laundry, dinner interspersed – you know it was really hard material.

BE: You’re dancing in the dark, Kathryn, and you’re coming up for air.

KH: (laughs)

BE: You’re “dancing on the corpse’s ashes” as the song says. That’s amazing to me. I don’t know if I could get that deep into something. I was really reluctant to read While They Slept because, I don’t know, it’s just something that’s really disturbing to me, and I don’t know how you do it. I think that’s really a testament to what you’ve been able to overcome and come out of in your own life, that you are able take on that subject.

KH: I know there’s also that old saying that “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” and I wonder if I’m in the first group.

BE: Well, let’s talk about your next book.

KH: Okay.

BE: Polygamist mass murders a cult…

KH: Not polygamist, although I have to say I really have enjoyed Big Love.

BE: Yeah, that show?

KH: And you know it didn’t really occur to me until maybe after eight episodes that the person in the show that was sort of the sinister, compelling heart of it, Bill, you know the polygamist, really reminds me of my father.

BE: Really?

KH: And not physically, not in the way he looks, just in that sort of patriarchal and parently, misogynistic, I’m-declaring-how-the-world-is stance, and it’s just it’s not so creepy and so strong that I can’t watch it, but it’s definitely creepy enough that I feel I must return to it and study it.

BE: So were you, I mean, I get this from the memoir, but were you so direly in need of affection and acceptance? You know, is that how you kind of got lured into that whole thing, the relationship with your dad?

KH: Yeah, I think so. I think that you know, that if my relationship with my mother had been different, then I wouldn’t have been vulnerable to my father, but two… there were two aspects to my childhood that made me vulnerable to him. One was what I did and did not know about my father. You know I wasn’t… I understood implicitly that there was a tacit rule that we never spoke of my father, so that we never brought him up, and most of the time nobody else did, either. Every once in a while my mother would give me some bits of information about him, and you know I knew he was a minister or, as somebody put it to me, a man of God, and I was young enough and it was about the right time that I got him really all confused with Martin Luther King and these really sort of sacred, powerful, superhero figures, and that idea, coupled with the fact that he abandoned me, perhaps not intentionally, but in the completely, hopelessly egocentric child’s perspective – you know, that if he went away it was because I wasn’t good enough – you can’t escape feeling that way, so there was that, and there was my really anguished relationship with my mother, from whom I was deeply alienated and at whom I was furious in ways that I couldn’t begin to admit at the time, and then in comes my father. You know he is just like… Well, the thing is that I think I had so, so complex and fully fleshed fantasy of who my father was that I almost didn’t see my real father’s personality behind that created image.

BE: It’s amazing how you make it… You kind of convey how it could happen, you know, and you’re able to map yourself emotionally throughout the process and you make it really understandable as to how it did develop.

KH: Yeah, well I think you know that was really the… If I had one agenda in writing it, it was just to make it understandable, because I think that the power of the taboo is such that the mind naturally and normally recoils from the idea of incest, and there’s a really reflexive, knee-jerk response, of “Well, you know, that doesn’t happen, that can’t happen, that can’t happen in a nice family, that can’t happen in somebody who isn’t, you know, retarded or on the wrong side of the tracks,” or whatever, but it… it’s really something that requires examination and understanding in order for it not to happen, and instead the very opposite occurs, in which people flinch away and just refuse to see it.

In a rare interview, the songwriter and actor discusses his work, philosophy, and the motivation behind Bill Gates’ philanthropic efforts.

** Also in this issue: Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s acoustic Fogged Clarity Session.

** Will Oldham’s latest work is the album, “The Wonder Show of the World,” it can be purchased here.

Ben Evans: Will, thanks for sitting down.

Will Oldham: I’m standing up.

BE: Well, thanks for standing up… I talk a lot about catharsis in these interviews, but I can really think of no better term to characterize some of your music. It’s haunting, melancholy. Is there a point where you embrace and come to rely on hurt as a muse, as an empowerment toward creative vision?

WO: I hope not. I have wondered that myself in the past. It’s hard to tell… From what I’ve seen in others, I don’t believe that I would have less pain in my life were I to embark upon another career path. It seems that pain is fairly equally distributed among people… I strive for joy and communion definitely more than striving for anything that resembles pain… We’re going to get our share of pain anyway, no matter what we do, and if that is sometimes the point from which we write, that’s good. Better to use it than to let it fester.

BE: I’d imagine that writing the songs themselves is great ventilation, emotional ventilation.

WO: I’m not sure that it is any more than any other kind of work. The idea of making a song is that it can be an emotional experience for the listener, but it would be impractical for it to be an emotional experience for the creator.

BE: What if the song emanates from an emotional place?

WO: It’ll have its roots in emotion, otherwise it won’t have any emotion to give to the listener, but it’s not therapy, y’ know?

BE: Right. Is there an existential conflict you try to work out in your music- a fear of mortality, a search for meaning? How would you describe your approach, your ideology?

WO: I don’t approach it. It’s ever changing. It’s different on different days, different with different songs. I’ve always had kind of a sour grapes feeling toward the field of philosophy or philosophers as much as toward a lot of people, theologians for example… I guess I’ve always wondered, “Why ask questions? It’s such a circular activity, such a waste of time. If I see somebody who’s really smart, who has a great sense of humor, and she’s really hot, or he’s really cool, and I see that they are also into philosophy, I get really angry. I get angry at the world that this mind is being turned back on itself, that this human being is eating his or her tail rather than looking outward and trying to answer questions that on our time here on Earth, could be possibly answered rather than those that will never be answered.

BE: I don’t know. I think the intellectual conflict and the ideological struggle lends itself to new insight and development in a lot of people.

WO: Yeah, I’m in disagreement with you there, a fundamental difference I guess.

BE: Your 1999 song “I See a Darkness” [was] covered by the late Johnny Cash. Can you discuss the place that song personally was written from, where you were at in your own life in 1999, and why you think the song resonated with Johnny Cash?

WO: When I wrote this song, I was living just north of Shelbyville, Kentucky, in a house, a fairly remote house, living there with my younger brother and it was far enough away from things that that was what there was to do in the day, work on songs. I had a friend who I still have who was at somewhat of a confusing point in his life, wrestling with ideas of creativity as well as addiction… The voice of the singer imposes upon the object of the song a kind of a hope, or an assumption that that person will rise and keep rising, even though that person, the object of the song is not displaying those qualities at that moment, that that person will rise and keep rising… and its an entreaty or a prayer that as that person rises, he or she will have the strength in hindsight to carry the singer up with him or her.

I think Rick Rubin and his team, his crew, his assistants, were foraging for material, and I’m not sure how many songs Johnny Cash heard. I have heard, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, that Rick Rubin had originally presented the song “Death to Everyone” from the same record as an appropriate song for Johnny Cash and somehow the song “I See a Darkness” rose above that in Cash’s eyes and ears. And it seems like it’s almost a caricature, sort of a melodramatic expression, the comic booky kind of song, like one of his signature songs, “Man in Black”, where he makes in three minutes on country pop radio a song that’s a call to arms, and a description of his stance and his intentions as a warrior for good. So it’s apparent that these kinds of things resonate for him, or resonated for him, and it feels good to be able to encapsulate telling emotions in a song, and it feels good when some of those emotions are carried to the brink of being ridiculous and to know that that’s what resonates with people are things that teeter on the edge of complete absurdity. Everybody can talk about their place in life, but it takes pushing it to the edge of absurdity for people to understand that people are on the same page as them.

BE: Although you sing about these incredibly serious things, there’s always a tone of, what seems to me, sardony of… subtle irony. Is that the case?

WO: I don’t know. What does that mean, subtle irony?

BE: As if you understand how emotionally vulnerable you’re making yourself… and it’s the absurdity you touched on. I feel as if you’re fully conscious of it.

WO: Well, it’s the absurdity of expressing it, the absurdity of commerce… making records is commerce and it’s about fooling yourself as a writer and a performer and fooling the audience into not thinking about it and accepting it. It’s like when you walk down the street, and you say, “look at that girl’s ass, it’s so great.” You’re ignoring also the fact that she farts and shits out of that ass. It’s the same kind of thing. And it’s ridiculous that we look at girls and say, that is amazing, that is so awesome, but we’re trying to do the same thing with a song, saying like this song that addresses the more terrible sides of our character is awesome. Now that’s kind of fucked up. But that’s our goal. To make a song about fucked up things that is awesome, and that makes people point and look and say, oh my fucking God.

BE: I think it’s that a lot of people empathize with the hurt and where it’s coming from, panic attacks, death in the family, whatever that is, everyone’s felt that and for you to characterize it in a song… you talk about that communion – I think that’s where it’s established.

WO: One of the paths that I feel is important to making music that goes to any of these places we’re talking about is to be sure that the progress of the song is considered, that the arrangement and the melody are considered, so that it becomes not just a support group thing, but something that keeps the mouth and nose of our character above water. It gets constructed. It gets built. It gets recognized as something that’s beautiful, or potentially beautiful, or potentially admirable, and the only way to make it admirable or beautiful is to put energy into it, and not to take energy away from it, not to hide it away, not to criminalize it or criticize it, but to acknowledge that it shares a place with courage or nobility, or with charity. We seem to say that depression is wrong, and so we medicate it, because it’s “wrong”. That’s so disturbing and messed up to say that we fix people by giving them anti-depressants, because they are broken if they’re depressed. We are broken if we are depressed, we’re broken if we’re down. We need to be fixed so that we don’t feel bad. That’s the society of the future or the society of a future. I don’t know.

BE: So basically you’re saying that the song has to go past brooding and achieve something?

WO: Go past brooding and the statement of fact and make it into something beyond the statement of a fact. It’s not two chords. It’s multiple chords. There’s not a repeated pattern from first verse to second verse, because it’s more complicated than that.

BE: It’s very similar to poetry as a medium, especially your songwriting, to me, I think that something needs to be resolved, or established, or celebrated. You’ve been in so many projects and put out such a catalog of work, but I’m always impressed that you’ve never compromised your vision, and never allowed yourself to be constrained by a particular image. How have you managed to do that, and what commercial sacrifices have you had to make, if any, to maintain your artistic freedom?

WO: What’s an example of a commercial sacrifice?

BE: A collaboration, perhaps an album that you didn’t want to do, a video that goes on popular television… have any of those opportunities arisen that you’ve declined.

WO: I think so, if I understand what you’re saying. I think they happen on a regular basis… sometimes it hurts a lot to say no to certain possibilities or opportunities because it feels like a shortcoming of mine that I can’t see the value in a certain experience, or the money that’s being refused… it’s painful to refuse certain figures… I don’t always feel that fully, but I feel it enough to make those decisions. It’s based on the idea that by saying no something better will happen. I’ve always believed that, that when you begin to say yes, to things that you really don’t want to say yes to, it’s not just painful then, it will be painful for a long time to come. Whereas when you say no to something that you don’t want to do, it’s painful for a while, but that pain goes away and you feel better.

BE: To your credit, you’ve certainly maintained your integrity as an artist by refusing to do these things. There’s a certain mystery that revolves around, and contributes to your… persona.

WO: What is that mystery? What does that mean?

BE: Hemingway said that the beauty of writing is what is left out. A lot of you, your image, is left out for some of your listeners, and I think it creates a mystery in your music that adds to the intrigue and the beauty of it…by not knowing the artist… though here I am trying to delve into that, to spoil that… .

WO: Unless someone is going to help you out with your life there’s no reason for them to know anything about it. It’s a handicap and a hindrance for people who do not participate in your life to have a relationship to it or a knowledge of it.

BE: I always have this urge to share things.

WO: You’re not alone. That’s why we have social networks.

BE: I don’t social network.

WO: But that’s what it is. People have this desire to share things that is baffling.

BE: No, [I share] through my work as a poet, and you have to do it very subtly and very artistically, so it’s not belligerent catharsis. It’s ventilation, but it has to be done eloquently and it has to be done right. That’s what I’ve been trying to talk to you about. You say it’s this craft and you’re trying to create a song for the listener, but when I hear an album like Days in the Wake, that album physically hurts me. I feel my heart beating. I worry about my chest. I feel this dread and beauty… there’s beauty there. I have to think, if that is not Will Oldham, if that is not your rawness, than I’m not sure I believe in anything as art.

WO: But I think the reason I feel comfortable with that record existing is because… what you describe you couldn’t map using the lyrics. But that’s the idea. To some extent, some kind of struggle is inherent in some things. What is it? It’s trying to assemble a bunch of elements with that record…. going from what key of one song to what key of another song, or how long should it be, or where should the songs go, and in performing the song again and again, and figuring out the takes, it’s trying to get something across that has to do with the relationship of the instrumentation to the voice, to the lyric to the speed and energy and volume and juxtaposition of one image to another, or one song to another that brings an overall thing that can’t be, at least by my little brain, explained, and just to know that there’s a reason for it all being together in the way that it is, and what comes across is an emotional experience, but again that emotional experience I don’t think in my mind can be traced just to the lyric. It’s about all these things. It’s about the very existence of the record. To me, the existence of that record, that it exists, and that it sounds the way that it sounds, but also that it exists, is the central theme of that record.

BE: The nuance and the merit and beauty of it really goes far beyond the songwriting, and it is… it’s the orchestration of the piece, of the album as a whole, the songs belonging where they are, that make it what it is. Was it consciously done as a minimalist piece?

WO: With different records, and Master and Everyone was the same, in that they both began their existences, they were conceived as bigger pieces, especially with Days in the Wake coming on the heels of There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You, and Master and Everyone coming after Ease Down the Road, both of which were big, lots of people involved…Big casts involved and thinking well this is the goal, working with people, and then going in and trying to make a record that has a similar volume of characters or talents involved in bringing it to life, and then finding that the material couldn’t sustain all these contributions, which was disheartening, but looking back it seems like the communion ends up being with the audience, or just a smaller group of collaborators on the making of the record. But I believe we tried a couple of different ways of making that Days in the Wake record, but finally, out of a combination of desperation and determination, figured that on a practical level it had to be this relatively solitary endeavor. But in order for that to not feel like a compromise or a failure, starting to think about what would make that work, what records do I have to look at and listen to, that function, that I will know that this won’t be an indulgence or a compromise that sags under the weight of giving up.

BE: I think in hearing you talk, and your music evidences this, that you’re very deliberate. It’s almost as if you’re a painter putting together a project, as opposed to just hammering out song after song, and that’s a testament to your thoughtfulness as a creator. I wouldn’t expect anything less. In asking these questions, I don’t want to paint you as a dark songwriter. You actually have a pretty great sense of humor; you appeared in a Kanye West video with Zac Galifianakis, which I watched last evening for the second time, and on the bizarre and under-appreciated comedy Wonder Showzen.

WO: They seemed to each lead from one to another. I think that some of the people who have been involved in comedy these last few years, Galifianakis, Hamburger, Tim and Eric, and Vernon and John from Wonder Showzen – they have questions; they have problems; there are things that strike them as offensive or absurd or horrifying or ridiculous about what we do and what we’re confronted with and a refusal to regurgitate it in the same way or to let it be an oppressive force and say what we’re going to do is… we’re going to work hard and make this funny in an intricate and complicated way, and use lots of resources and turn it into something funny. Turn it into laughter. And so it’s been pretty nice… being able to do things with these guys, and it’s said that, and I think it might be true among comedians that a lot of them have a secret desire to be rock stars. I don’t think the reverse is necessarily is true. I think it’s something that singles me out among a lot of people involved with music, is that I would prefer to be a Marx Brother rather than Mick Jagger if I had my choice.

BE: Speaking of which, Tim Heidecker is releasing an album. Did you see that?

WO: No, but I know they make all that music in every episode of Tim and Eric. They make all that music, and they just toured, doing a comedy tour. But I’ve heard that that incorporates a full set of music, so it doesn’t surprise me.

BE: Did you watch the Chrimbus Special?

WO: No I haven’t seen that yet.

BE: It’s quite funny.

WO: I just saw last week that it existed. I saw a DVD of it and I was like, “Where did you get that?” but I haven’t seen it yet.

BE: It’s a DVD that they plug throughout the show. Purchasing the DVD is actually part of the comedy in the show. Those guys are great.

WO: You mean the live show?

BE: The Chrimbus Special… Do you write outside of songs? Do you do fiction, poetry, essays?

WO: Not really. No. I think I’ve had two poems published in my life…I just got to interview Merle Haggard last year for Filter magazine, I got to interview Dwight Yoakam, also for Filter magazine, maybe a year or two before that. I got to interview R. Kelly for Interview magazine. So I get to be this sort of kid on the beat… Its painful to me when they say, okay now if you could just write an introduction to this interview you just did, it’s just painful, putting prose together. I don’t know why it is but it is. Usually in my letters or email correspondence, I’m fairly terse. I get to cite that Hemingway rule that you cited earlier.

BE: How has Louisville and growing up in the south, your geography influenced your music?

WO: It’s pretty unconscious. I think there’s just a little more acceptance of certain kinds of religious traditions, certain kinds of racial tensions, certain kinds of music that is maybe more of a given… That I’ve learned as I read about comments on work that I’ve done, or I go to different places, I learn when I go to other parts of the country what people think of this part of the country or parts further south, more specifically, and I can’t really relate to it. A lot of what they say seems like a given, I guess.

BE: Not brilliantly insightful.

WO: It seems as if they’re saying, oh you write… There’s a greyhound and someone asks it, why is it that everything you write is about running around the racetrack?

BE: What do you read? Outside of songwriting, what do you enjoy?

WO: A friend of mind gave me a book that I just started that’s very promising. It seems to be a combination of literature – by a guy named James Crumley – and it seems to be high-brow pulp. Some kind of hybrid between a refined world and a non-refined world.

BE: Did you read Franzen’s novel yet?

WO:, No and I’m not sure if “yet” qualifies. I haven’t been able to get into a lot of… I feel like there’s maybe there’s a school of writing that comes from Pynchon and DeLillo. It feels like someone sitting at a typewriter pouring their brilliance out. I can’t find anything to relate to, and I don’t know if Franzen falls into that or not. It seems like those books are exclusively for smart people.

BE: You’re a smart person.

WO: I’m not sure if my brain works smart in that way. If something is going to be… I don’t know for some reason. It’s like writing prose. I can’t write prose. For some reason I can read a Capote book really well, and get high off of that reading experience. But when it comes to reading something more cerebral, my concentration goes some place else

BE: I wonder what the chemistry is behind that?

WO: It feels very chemical. It doesn’t feel like it’s a personality thing… I feel like I have an inability to take these kind of books in.

BE: I’m that way about drawing and painting. I have absolutely no skill. It baffles me how other people can do that.

WO: Yeah, that’s true You see people who can sit down and make sense of line and make sense of shadow, and some people are trained, and some people are just natural, and I sit down, and I just think there’s the apple. Why should I draw it?

BE: That literalism centers around everything you’ve said. Were you religious growing up down there?

WO: We went to church in my earliest years, and there was some religious iconography around the house, and some religious music around the house. But at the same time… at our grandfather’s house we said grace, but at our own house we didn’t say grace. Sometimes I think that the religions of the world including Scientology in all of their expansiveness and intricacies… seem like one day, fifty years, a hundred years, five hundred years in the future, if there’s anybody left, I could imagine there might be a way of mapping human consciousness, picking a religion and it might even say, this is how memory works, this is how thought works, this is how instinct works this is how they’re tied together and how it’s related to this chapter, or this directive, or this commandment.

BE: That’s really interesting. You might be right. Just as I can’t draw and you don’t like to write prose, maybe our affinities to certain religions are chemically determined.

WO: They just feel very organic. I wouldn’t say that someone born in the Middle East has a brain like Islam… Any one of our brains could be mapped. I think a model of the brain could be made from any given religion.

BE: Want to hear something crazy?

WO: Sure.

BE: My buddy, he’s a Baptist or something, and he said if you don’t take Jesus into your life you are going to go to hell, and you have no chance at heaven. And I asked him what about a child who has AIDS who lives three months and has a slightly developed consciousness, and he said, yup they’re going to hell. Just obstinate in it. I just don’t understand that intolerance.

WO: I have a friend who’s a theologian and he’s baptist and he belongs to one branch of the baptist faith, and he believes that baptists from other branches are going to go to hell because they are interpreting scripture improperly, which I find to be pretty amazing. He’s a guy I’ve known all my life, he’s a compassionate person, a friendly person, a warm person, an open person and so it’s… staggering.

BE: Same case with this guy, but I feel like the problems of these religions is that they feel like intellectual laziness, an inability to look beyond, to look outside, to challenge belief.

WO: Well, it’s created to be the mortar of alot. Our brains are so powerful and language is so powerful, but language that is so incomplete is like the bricks, and religion and philosophy end up becoming like the mortar that holds those bricks together. And we don’t have time as individuals to understand the history of how this language that we’ve been forced to learn came to be. And yet there are so many gaps in the logic of this language and how it can explain our plight, our existence, our successes, and that’s where religion seems to fit in… Many people who are very religious, they just want to hold these bricks of ideas and concepts together because they don’t make sense to them on their own. Language is too incomplete and religion fills in. Why do I feel bad when this happens? Well, religion comes in and says why you don’t have to think about it. You can go to work the next day or do whatever you don’t have to think about it. It fills in the cracks of what we can’t speak, what we can’t say.

BE: It is, and when you keep pushing and asking the questions like I have a tendency to do – I love Kantian philosophy – it only leads to real conflict, and real struggle, and real dissonance in your mind, and I don’t know why I continue to do it. Perhaps I’m hard-wired that way, but I keep asking questions. I wish…I didn’t question everything like you. It seems like I’d be a bit better off that way.

WO: That’s the thing… we feel like we’d be be better off, and then we would be people that we despise if we don’t question. People that we fear. People who don’t question are like Dick Cheney. It’s very frightening. If I didn’t question things I’d be like, Dick, way to go!

BE: What’s the difference between what we talked about earlier?…Ah, You’re saying the philosophical questions, the redundant questions that we continue to ask ourselves. The cyclical reasoning…

WO: Exactly. I’m going to write twenty pages on this question so that I can write a hundred down the line – that’s what gets me frustrated, rather than saying, why don’t I write a paragraph or two. And if that doesn’t solve things, let’s move on to something else. We have a limited capability for the answers we’re going to be able to come up with, and the more answers we try to get the more the illusion we have of the progress of the human race. We’re seeking answers and the answers that we come up with are giving us iPads and Nuclear War. You know we want to eradicate cancer and eradicate colds and eradicate malaria so that we can destroy people with weapons. That’s why we want people to be free with of these diseases: so that we can control who dies and how.

BE: I don’t know about that. But I will agree that there’s many contradictions in being a human being.

WO: Or like Bill Gates… ‘I want to eradicate cholera, so I can get another motherfucker to buy my computer.’ That’s why he wants people to live: because if people are alive they have money to spend and they will buy his fucking computer. He doesn’t really want people to live. He loves people because they have made him wealthy beyond every human being’s wildest imagination. That’s why he loves people.

BE: So you’re taking out the altruistic motive, you don’t think he has any true desire to help? None?

WO: No. I don’t. He loves people because they made him wealthy.

BE: Well that’s a good reason… What are you working on now music-wise? What are your plans?

WO: A single. We’re in the process of laying out the artwork, and actually, just before you called I was listening to the final test pressing of the single that’s by Bonnie “Prince” Billy and the Cairo Gang. Depending when we get another test pressing in should be out in January or February.

BE: Hey Will – I really enjoyed it. It’s was great talking to you and thanks a lot for taking the time today.

WO: All right! It was quite an adventure.

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