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.

An Evening with the Clarity

Saturday, June 25th 2011 – 7:30PM

Howmet Playhouse, Whitehall MI

Music:

The Great Unknown

Singing in the Abbey

Fred Thomas

Readings:

John Hemingway

Michael Tyrell

$2 Microbrews

Tickets are $10.00 and are available here or by calling 231.670.7033

 

Credit Cards Accepted

Single Ticket (1) $10.00

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

A harrowing journey related through a collection of songs that are nothing short of raw, gut-shot beauty; Chris Bathgate’s new album Salt Year reminds us that inspiration must sometimes be earned through struggle.

Sorry, streaming albums are only available during the month they are featured.

Chilling, poignant and raw; Fred Thomas records a Clarity session that deserves to be played over and over again.

1. Waterfall
2. Leave It Alone
3. I Don’t Owe You Anything

Also in This Issue:

• Listen to Fred Thomas’ album, Night Times
• Listen to our interview with Fred Thomas

“Thomas has a tremendous range as an artist, with a mix of quieter songs that are captivating and deeply personal.”-NPR.org

Sorry, streaming albums are only available during the month they are featured.

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.

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.

“The Falls feels like my own flesh. That is to say, its something that I could really OWN, and that feeling was present even upon my first blessed listening.” – Folkhive

Sorry, streaming albums are only available during the month they are featured.

• Listen to Joe Scott’s Fogged Clarity Session

My parents must have evolved from frogs. Frogs seldom form families or care for their offspring; they just mate and jump. It took me twenty-three years to have a family; my brother Jack never did; and my sisters married Jesus.

I was born in the middle of a snowstorm in New York City, January 1913. My father left us in 1914. Didn’t come home one day. Deserted my mother, Jack, Elizabeth, Arleene, the baby, and me. My mother took us back to Virginia where her family lived; I guess she thought they would help.

My memory of her is a pink dress with puffy sleeves and lots of light brown hair piled up on top of her head. And she had tiny hands. That’s what she looks like in the only picture I have of her. My only memory is sitting on the floor, rolling a ball to my dog Buster and laughing in each other’s arms. Buster’s fur was soft and golden; my mother’s dress smelled like flowers.

She left in 1915. Went out one afternoon and didn’t come back. Jack told me she had gotten sick and couldn’t live with us anymore. Even though my mother’s parents were still living and she had four brothers and a sister nearby, none of them took us in. My father came down from New York, not to take us back with him; instead, he bundled us off to Michigan, same place he’d been shipped to by his mother when he was three. His father had died in a small dirty fort in the Dakota Territory. Elizabeth and Arleene were put in an Ursuline convent in Detroit, and Jack and me in an orphanage, a place called Home of the Friendless, in Muskegon.

It was raining and cold when the carriage drove up in front of the Home, and the wind stung our legs. We were still in short pants. It was a big house sitting alone in the middle of a field. Very tall with high gables. The walls were wet and yellowish, that yellow you look like when you’re sick. The windows were outlined in black and there was a wide porch with nothing on it. All the curtains were closed so you couldn’t see in. I remember when we got out of the carriage Jack ran the other way. My father chased him, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him up to the house.

Jack was yelling, “I don’t like it here.”

That night after supper, the women in charge took us upstairs to a long green hall. It looked like the rows of beds went on forever. A woman with red hair showed Jack and me the black boxes at the foot of our beds where we were supposed to keep our clothes. Only three lights in the hall: one at each end and one in the middle. They made shadows everywhere. At the back end was a big white room with toilets and sinks where we had to wash before we went to bed. That’s when Jack showed me the bruises our father made when he grabbed him.

We’d been at the Home for a couple of years, and one day a man walked in the door while we were eating lunch. I wasn’t sure who he was, but Jack knew right away. It was our father. He was a big man, tall, with dark brown curly hair, a broad nose, and a big dent in his upper lip. I remember how friendly he was with the women at the Home, draping his arm around their shoulders, telling stories, making them laugh. It seemed this went on for a long time, but finally we went into town and he bought me a tin wind-up airplane and Jack, a watch from Japan. On the way back, I got tired, so he picked me up in his arms and carried me the rest of the way.

He saved the biggest treat for last. “I’ll be back in three months. And then, you know what?”

Jack and I shook our heads.

“I’m going to take you to your new home.”

Jack and I skipped a circle around him, “What’s it like?”

“It’s a grand white house with a big yard to play in,” he said. “And you will have your own rooms; even your new sister has one.”

“We have another sister?”

Jack and I looked at one another like we didn’t understand how that could happen.

“But we’ll have our own rooms? For sure?” Jack asked.
“Elizabeth and Arleene, too?”

“They won’t be coming,” our father said. “I talked to them and they said they liked where they were living.”

I didn’t really know them, so I didn’t say anything. Jack squirmed a little.

Our new house was in Syracuse. He was sure we’d like living there, and we’d love our new mother.

“What’s she like?” I asked. “Like the one we had before?”

He said the best thing was to wait and see for ourselves.

That night, after the lights were out, I sneaked over to Jack’s bed, climbed under the covers with him and asked how we got a sister and a new mother.

“I’ll tell you when you get older,” he said. “We’ll be alright; don’t worry.”

The next day we broadcast our news to all the other boys in the orphanage. We were going to have a home, a family. We were going to leave. But three months passed, then four, and our father didn’t come back.

“All you did was hang around his neck the whole time he was here.” That’s what Jack told me when I asked if he’d heard anything.

Maybe that was the reason Father didn’t come back. We never found out; we never saw him again.

The other kids started getting mean: punching and tripping us, putting things in our beds. Maybe we had bragged too much. I stopped paying attention at school. Only did my homework because Mrs. Moon at the Home made me. She’s the only person there whose name I remember. She always wore a dress with flowers on it and she could pick up even the biggest boys, throw them over her knee, and spank them until they cried.

I would throw my homework in the street on the way to school. The result: I was kept in the second grade for three years. The last year my knees were raw from rubbing against the bottom of the desk. The littler kids called me “Henry Friendless.” It didn’t help that I had a lisp. Jack was better in school. He was a whiz at math and his teachers spent a lot of time with him.

When I was ten, the cook at the Home made me a cake, and Jack sat beside me. Usually he was with the older kids.

“Henry, you’re old enough to know. Our real mother didn’t get sick and die like people said.”

I remember he started to whisper.

“She jumped off a bridge into the river, that old wooden bridge across the Potomac. Somebody saw her; they said she kind of floated down to the water and then the current swept her away. They never found her.”

“But isn’t it against the Commandments to kill yourself? Why would she do that?”

Jack said she was depressed about Father. That he’d left. She’d come back to Virginia where she’d grown up and couldn’t find us another father.

“We were happy in New York before you came along,” he said. “Everyone was together.”

This was my fault? Being here like an orphan. I felt horrible. It seemed like I had cramps in my stomach for a year after. The people at the home got worried so Mrs. Moon took me to see the doctor. He poked me all over, I had blood tests, even gave me an enema, but couldn’t find anything wrong.

In the summer they would take us to Camp Hardy at Blue Lake. It was in the middle of the woods, a big lake; even the older kids couldn’t swim across. There’s a picture with Jack and me at the camp. We’d been picking blackberries in the brambles. I remember all the kids had berry juice all over their faces and hands, they had us go swimming to clean off. That’s something I was good at, swimming. Used to win all the races.

In the photo I’m in a too-big shirt with rolled-up sleeves at one end of a line of scraggly looking kids; Jack’s standing five feet away on the other end. That’s what it was like.

He made out we weren’t related. We didn’t look a lot alike, so he got away with it. I had curly blonde hair, a narrow face, and a nose I didn’t grow into until I was eighteen. Jack had dark brown hair; his face was round, and his ears stuck out.

While Jack and I were at the orphanage some of the other kids got adopted. When that happened, the other boys walked around: looking at the ground, starting fights.

The adopted kids said, I’ll come back to visit, but they never did.

I asked Mrs. Moon, “Why can’t I be adopted?”

She said, “As long as your father is still alive, you can’t be. It’s the way it works.”

By this time, I was probably too old to get a family anyway. All the people that came to the Home were looking for little kids.

But, when I was fourteen I got adopted, sort of. Because it was too far to walk to St. Jean’s High School, Dr Wilson, the man who took care of my stomach aches, said I could have a room in his house. And they promised the Home that he and his wife would watch over me. I think he felt sorry for me. That’s how he looked after the tests showed nothing, when I told him what had happened with my mother and father.

I had a room in the attic, my own room, where the ceiling sloped down on the sides and I had to bend down to get into bed. I put my pants under the mattress every night so they would look creased in the morning.

Dr. and Mrs. Wilson were in their sixties I think. They both had gray hair, though hers was more silvery, and they had what everyone said were “kind” faces, wrinkled into smiles that came easily. It was a quiet home. Nice after living with forty other boys. In the evening Dr. Wilson read books, like Tale of Two Cities and Don Quixote. Mrs. Wilson usually sewed or played the piano. And he would see I did my homework and quiz me on my lessons, especially biology. When I had trouble in lab, he found a couple of frogs and showed me how to dissect them.

“Here, Henry, hold the scalpel like this.”

He put his hand over mine to show me how to slowly and lightly glide the scalpel across the skin without cutting into the muscle.

“Now for the abdominal muscles, same light touch. There, you did it. Now there’s the heart and the liver.”

Then he explained about how they lived, and how they reproduced.

With his help I raced through high school in three years. I was determined to make up for taking so long in the second grade. And maybe I wasn’t going to Harvard, but I was going to learn as much as anyone who did. I put together a “Map of Knowledge.” In a little blue notebook I outlined every subject in the world and the best books for each. For History of Economics, the best book was Hobson’s The Science of Wealth; for Social History, Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Then I started to read. I was on my way.

Jack? I forgot to mention. He went off to Harvard the year before I moved to the Wilson’s. Got a scholarship. Haven’t seen him since.

My grades weren’t quite good enough to get a scholarship and I didn’t have any money, so after I got my high school diploma I went to Washington to look for a job. I didn’t know anybody, but like everyone else in the 1930s, I went there because the government was hiring. I started by digging the foundation for a new building on 14th Street. That lasted six months. Then, I was a clerk for the Department of Agriculture for six months. Then I repossessed cars for the Capital Service Bureau.

One day, out in Virginia, I found the red Chevy I was looking for. Parked in front of the guy’s apartment. Scanned the area, no one in sight, had the key in the car door. I was five-six, 120; a guy twice my size came bursting out of the building, a baseball bat in his hand, swinging it in my direction.

“What you doing with my car?”

“Mr. James, you haven’t been making your payments; it’s not yours anymore,” I said. “I’m here to take it back.”

“Hell you are.”

He kept coming. I ran. Back to the office and resigned.

About this time I met Martha. She came from a family with seven kids; they all grew up in the same house in a small town in Massachusetts near a lake. Her father came home for supper every night. They had a garden in back of the house. I took her skating; she was good. And she had an infectious, throaty laugh.

A month later I inherited two thousand dollars from an aunt I’d never met. Jack, Elizabeth, and Arleene inherited too. I don’t know what Jack did with his. My sisters had to give theirs to the convent.

Me, I bought a used Model A Ford, a sporty tan coupe, with a front seat that folded down for a bed. Then took off for California. One of my ancestors had captured Monterey from the Mexicans; another was a 49er who had tried to get rich panning for gold. I drove the southern route so I wouldn’t get cold sleeping in the car. When I got to the top of the Tehachapi’s at El Tejon Pass, I figured I could save gas by turning off the engine and rolling; the car cruised right into downtown LA.

At the end of three months I’d seen the Observatory, MGM, the Pier, and gone to the movies at Grauman’s. Spent time at La Monica Ballroom on the Pier trying to meet girls.

“Hi, my name’s Henry. Would you like to dance?”

“You don’t look like you’re from around here. You going to be here long?”

“Don’t know; it depends.”

“What do you do?”

“Well, nothing right now,” I said. “I’m thinking of going to law school though.”

“Yeah, sure, let’s hook up when you’re ready to go to trial.”

I went north to Monterey to see the Mexican Customs House my great-great-grandfather, Commodore Sloat had captured. Then to Angels Camp where my great uncle Henry Perrine had panned for gold. It’s a place Mark Twain visited some years later.

One night, I sat down under a tree by the Stanislaus River and looked at the water milling against the banks. Heard the croaks of distant frogs. That’s when I put it all together, about how even I had been jumping around. And I thought about Martha. And I went back.

Samantha Farrell

Strand of Oaks

with opening act White Pines

Saturday November 7th 2009, 7:30PM

Wealthy Theatre – Grand Rapids, MI

Tickets are $10.00 for students and $15.00 for general admission and are available below or at one of the following locations.

• 711 Bridge Street NW (CMC/GRTV/WYCE) 1-6 p.m. weekdays. (2nd floor)
• 1130 Wealthy (Wealthy Theatre) 5-7 p.m. Tuesday through Friday.
• by calling 616.459.4788 (x131)

The first week in July marked the second annual ROTHBURY Music Festival. For five days (July 2nd-July 6th) a huge plot of farmland in rural Western Michigan played host to over 40,000 people and 100 bands, all of whom seemed to be quite happy dancing about in the Midwestern amber. Whereas many people came all the way from Oregon, Maine, South Carolina and Louisiana for the celebration, I was fortunate enough to live 35 minutes away. I could say that my close proximity to the festival allowed me to take a more business-like, objective approach in covering the event, but I will not tell a lie. Six of my best friends flew in from all across the country and we drank the experience like our 10am gimlets.

Photographer, web-designer, visual arts editor and friend Ryan Daly is the man behind all of the ROTHBURY photos enclosed. Head over to his Flickr page to see more photos from the weekend.

While some complained that 2009’s lineup of performers paled in comparison to last years (Dave Matthews’ Band, Steel Pulse, The Black Keys, 311, Of Montreal, Modest Mouse), Bob Dylan, The Dead, Damien Marley are nothing to sniff at. However, as is often the case, the more arcane performers provided most of the excitement.

Toubab Krewe – a dynamic group that blends contemporary American music with the percussive tones of West Africa – kicked off the festival Thursday night by deftly swimming through a flavorful 90 minute set. There’s a free download of the set on archive.org if you’d like to take a listen for yourself. The Krewe’s distinction comes, in part from a gentleman named Justin Perkins. Mr. Perkins has studied drums extensively in Mali, and plays them like a native. I was so entranced by his prowess on both the kora and the kamelengoni, that I felt compelled to sit him down for a brief interview.

After speaking to Justin I overheard a man talking openly about his recent cancer diagnosis. That man turned out to be Ralston Bowles, a well-known Midwestern songwriter in town for the weekend to open up for Willie Nelson. Because I am, perhaps unhealthily, pre-occupied with death I decided to see if I could get Ralston to sit down and share the story of his illness. He obliged.

On Friday afternoon I stumbled upon Martin Sexton coaxing blue silk ribbons out of his throat like a magician. The soul and earnest with which the Syracuse native played lured me in and I stuck around to listen to the rest of his set. Later I sat down to speak with Martin, and even though most of his music and philosophy is a bit too Utopian for my taste, he is a class act.

As a long time fan of the Toronto indie scene, Broken Social Scene was probably the performance I most enjoyed over the course of the weekend. They played an early evening set in caramel sunlight, and the Magic Hat was hitting my grey matter just right as they ran through some of their classics.

It was also incredible watching Bob Marley’s progeny emote onstage alongside Nas.

A festival like ROTHBURY can be anything you want it to. Some folks come in search of liberation, some inebriation, some music, and some company. As for me, I opted for a melodic combination of all these elements and breathed it deep…like the sweet summer air amidst.