American Songwriter » Portraits

Tony Joe White On Performing, The White Stripes, and Shine

Davis Inman — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:11:01 +0000

Shine" src="http://www.americansongwriter.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/15.jpg" alt="Tony Joe White On Performing, The White Stripes, and Shine" width="200" height="133" />
A young woman dances seductively in front of Tony Joe White at the Exit/In in Nashville, Tennessee. She extends her arm, snaps photos and videos on her cell phone just inches from his face. But the Swamp Fox doesn’t seem to mind. Tony Joe White’s music has a grinding, sexual heat, and his fans tend to groove slowly to his guitar’s rhythm, while the rest of the band – a sole drummer – keeps a rock steady country backbeat. A few days after the show in Nashville, White, over the phone from his home in Leiper’s Fork, twenty-five miles south of Music City, explains his live show. “The audience is my setlist,” says White. There’s more freedom and his guitar playing can be looser without a full band, he says. “The drummer, he don’t care what key you’re in. He don’t know what key you’re in.” Not having a full band also works better without a setlist, anyway. “I never know what I’m gonna do and people start hollering out things,” he says. “If you had four or five pieces on stage, and all a sudden you wanna do a tune like ‘Willie and Laura Mae Jones,’ [the band is] really gonna have to know the chords.” The two-piece guitar-drummer approach might remind younger listeners of other groups. After a big festival gig in Melbourne, Australia, a few years back, a young woman, accompanied by a young man, approached him after his set. “She said, ‘We do what you just did on stage, you and your drummer. This is my brother and we’re the White Stripes’.” White says he feels a kinship with his fellow Whites, even though their musical origins are different. “It’s raw, I like [the White Stripes] on stage. They’re not down in the swamps, but they are raw.” White grew up the swamplands of northern Louisiana, the son of a cotton farmer, and he’s maintained a rural identity and affection for the woods throughout his life. He first started writing songs after he heard Bobby Gentry’s “Ode To Billie Joe,” in Corpus Christi, Texas, while he was working the club circuit as a blues guitarist and singer. “Man, that is so real, I am Billie Joe. I know that life,” he thought about Gentry’s anthem. “If I ever write anything, I’ll write about what I know and it will be real,” White resolved. Within a short while, he had penned two classics, “Polk Salad Annie” and “Rainy Night In Georgia.” Both told vivid stories that were true to him. His mother had fed him polk, which grew around the cotton fields near his home, and he’d spent time in Georgia with his sister, staying inside to practice guitar when it rained. Now, at age 67, White has again drawn on what’s real to him for a new album called Shine. The album deals with themes like childhood nostalgia, age, and alienation. On “Long Way From The River,” the singer feels out of sorts in cosmopolitan Paris, France. On “All,” he sings of a youthful lover and pictures her jumping into the river, though he says the song is an amalgamation of memories. In the song’s chorus, he sings, “I walk these rooms late at night/Trying to place the call/I can still hear your footsteps/Echoing down the trail home.” On Shine's most beautiful song, the final track "A Place To Watch The Sun Go Down," White vividly describes the place where he builds a fire, plays guitar and works on songs each evening at home. The feeling behind the song “Roll Train Roll,” White says, is about freedom. “At a certain time in your life, sometimes you just need to move,” he explains of the song’s refrain, “I don’t care where it’s going/ I just need to ride.” Fittingly, for a man alternately content to make a fire and watch the sun go down or to play the audience's requests night after night, White is heading out on a tour of the Southeast and Midwest to promote Shine over the next few weeks. On the first show of the tour, in Nashville, the woman who had earlier snapped photos, gets up close again and whispers something to White. He nods his head, smiles, and he and the drummer launch into “Willie and Laura Mae Jones.”

Raul Malo: The Liberated Songwriter

Erin Carson — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:06:09 +0000

On Raul Malo’s upcoming album, out September 28 on Fantasy Records, he’s bringing with him a realization he’s come to over the years. “I think a lot of us pretend to be in the black or the white and live in absolute, but I don’t think life is that simple” Malo said. "Life is far more complex and interesting than just to deal in absolute." It’s an idea that pervades the record down to the last track. The album is called Sinners & Saints. Malo recorded the majority of it at his home studio in Nashville, luckily before the city flooded in May, damaging his house and destroying many of his guitars and equipment. “You’re raised a certain way," he continues, "and you’re supposed to believe these things are absolute truth. As you get older you realize that there’s no absolute truth.” He calls it a reconciliation between the intellect, heart and spirit. Though, if there’s anything that can stand close to being an absolute, it’s that self-producing an album is a lot work. Malo, who fronted the alt-country group the Mavericks in the 90s, was involved in just about every aspect of the creation of Sinners & Saints, down to tracking instruments in his home studio. “The good thing is that you can tinker with it to your heart’s content, and the bad thing is that you can tinker to your heart’s content,” Malo said of the process that eventually lead him to Austin, Texas, seeking the sounds of friends like Augie Meyers of the Texas Tornados. “I wanted this record to be a very personal statement about what I’m thinking and what I’m feeling and about where I am musically at this point, and I think that this record shows that,” he said. To begin with, the ability to do said tinkering stems from Malo’s more recent solo pursuits. The Mavericks saw numerous singles make the country charts and picked up several Grammys before disbanding early in the 2000s. Life post-Mavericks has plenty of gray areas of its own. “There’s one thing about not having a big, popular hit record, is that you can pretty much do whatever you want, and when you’re having popular hit records, that’s all anybody wants you to do” Malo said. “I feel like I have the creative license and freedom, and I enjoy that. It’s ironic because your popular records feed a lot of people, but it’s not always the most interesting music, to say the least,” he said. Sinners & Saints definitely differs from the Mavericks era, whether it’s the inclusion of songs like “Living for Today,” a commentary the fast-paced, short sighted, tech culture of the modern day, or “Sombras,” a Spanish love song, originally sung by Libertad Lamarque in 1943. “Lyrically I think fits the theme of the album, again dealing with that duality,” Malo said of the latter, “Is she a saint, or is she a sinner? Maybe a little bit of both, probably.” The album has it’s bouts of surf guitar sounds and flashes of flamenco. The title track, for example, falls somewhere between mournful Spanish horns and Dick Dale-- and it’s nearly two minutes before Malo actually starts singing. In what he sees as an age of dwindling attention spans and a proclivity toward the Shuffle feature, the extended intro was a point to make. “It’s my own little defiant thing,” Malo said, “I’m perfectly aware that people can just skip right over it, but if you can get somebody to actually sit down and listen to an album, they might actually enjoy it.”

It’s Hard To Write A Great Country Song: A Q&A With Marty Stuart

Evan Schlansky — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:51:31 +0000

For country stalwart Marty Stuart's 14th studio album, he returned to his roots, both figuratively and literally. Stuart aimed to bring back the traditional country music sound and style that's delighted him since childhood, and picked the legendary RCA Studio B in Nashville, where he launched his career as a 13-year old mandolin player for Lester Flatts, to do it in. The result is Ghost Train: The Studio B Sessions, which is filled with such great songwriting and performances, it could easily appeal to country fans and non-country fans alike. You recorded it at the same recording studio that you were in that you did your first session in, when you were 13 years old. What was that experience like? Well, I just love that space, it’s one of the greatest studios in the world. It’s really not used as a studio as much anymore, it’s more of a museum and a stop along the route for the Country Music Hall of Fame, but we worked it out where we could go back in and take some gear and record in that particular space. It brought back a lot of memories. It was also kind of overwhelming if you think about all the songs that have been recorded there, it’s just staggering. That place as a lot of heavy ghosts in it that you kind of have to get beyond just to get to that music. It was a head full. What’s one or two songs that were recorded there? There's so many. It’s called The Home of a Thousand Hits, historic RCA studio B, there’s probably a listing of everything that’s cut there. It’s just crazy. For this album, it’s being billed as your return to traditional country roots, and you’ve said that traditional country music was in danger of slipping way. Why is that? You don’t hear a lot of it on the radio anymore. It’s almost non-existent. It’s played a lot but it’s not broadcast a lot, and there’s very few TV shows that you could turn on and find traditional country music. It’s just a great American art form, it’s a great part of America’s culture, but it’s a particular brand of country music that I really love the most and I just thought it is too precious to let slip away, so I wanted to jump in there and see if I couldn’t create some new life for it. You co-wrote the Ghost Train track “Hangman” with Johnny Cash, and that's the last song he ever wrote. How’s it feel to know that? Well, it’s kind of overwhelming, but he was my next door neighbor, and I went over there and had that song started, and it didn’t take ten minutes to finish it, and I thought we would—as I left, I said, "Well I’ve got to go to Washington and I’ll see you in about four days". I said, “You feeling good?” And he said, “I’m feeling good.” And I said, “how’s your spirit?” “It’s good.” “You got plenty of rope left?” And he said, “yup.” And I said, “I’ll see you when I get home,” and I got the call on that particular trip that he passed away, so I really didn’t think much about this other song. It was the last thing I thought about when I heard that news and as a little time got past, the song came back to my mind, and I had a visit with it, and the only thing I regret is that he’s not around so we could have done it together. One of the great songs on the record is “Country Boy Rock & Roll.” What was the inspiration for that? We had a bus driver a few years ago who was a big fan of this old legendary bluegrass group called Don Reno, Red Smiley and the Tennessee Cut-Ups, and he suggested that we do that particular song and I vaguely remembered it, so I called and got a recording of it, and we learned it and it’s been one of those songs we’ve included in our concerts, just about every time we’ve ever played since. So that’s where it came from, the bus driver. And the song “Branded” actually came to you in the shower, is that correct? Yeah. Is that a place you often find inspiration? It’s not the first time. It’s like when you write, you write, you know, you never know when the idea is going to hit you. It’s always wonderful though, when a song is kind of born, but that one, it just kept coming. I had to get out of the shower a couple times and try to find a piece of paper, write lines down, and as soon as I got out of the shower, I went to my desk and I got my guitar and I was singing it, and it was like, it was almost like the song had always been there. Is there a challenge to writing songs that are in the sort of traditional country vein where you’re trying to, at the same time, create something brand new? Well, it’s always hard. Everybody thinks that country songs are the easiest ones to write. It’s complex to write something that appears that simple. But I like that particular style, and those are my favorite kind of songs, too. The challenge is writing a good one. It’s easy to write a song. A good one’s the hard part. Can you talk about the song “Porter Wagoner’s Grave?" Well, I produced the last record on Porter and we spent a lot of time the last year and a half of his life, working on the record, he went out and started touring, doing some shows with me and my band, he just kind of became a big part of my life, as a friend, he was always my friend, but he became a close friend, and he got sick and it just seemed like in a matter of days he was gone, and after his service after we’d laid the Wagonmaster to rest, I got on a plane and head to Alaska to play a concert. Somewhere out of the middle of nowhere, I pulled a piece of paper out of my bag and started writing those words, kind of just as a rambling poem or something, or a piece of prose, and never in a million years expected to ever do it publicly, but I did it for my band one time and they said, man we have to do that song. It might be a little corny, but no matter what it is, we’ve got to do that song. So I did it in concert once, got a lot of response. Then I did it on my TV show one time, and got a lot of response, and I thought, well, maybe there is something here. It’s just kind of a tribute to an old friend, is what “Porter Wagoner’s Grave” is all about. You played a show with him at Madison Square Garden not too long ago, opening for White Stripes. What was that experience like, bringing country music to New York? Well, it’s not the first time I played in New York, but it was a wonderful thing, and I think Jack was a big Porter Wagoner fan. If you remember, he’d done a record on Loretta Lynn, so I think Jack was into the concept, taking country legends and doing new things with them, so he invited Porter to be a part of that show, and me and my band went up there to back him up. It was wonderful for me to see young kids that probably had never even heard of him, responding to him because of the way he looked and the kind of songs he was singing. It was a wonderful experience. What are your feelings on modern country music? Are you a fan? Of certain people and certain songs, and I absolutely encourage modern country music, trust me. I totally know that there aren’t a lot of people out there that think the way I do about some things, but we need modern country music as much as we need traditional country music. It’s a balance, and we need bluegrass, and folk music. We need all those divisions of country music, firing on all cylinders. That’s what makes country music so cool to me, but traditional country music kind of got out of balance and it’s starting to fade so it can be disregarded, and that felt wrong to me. So that’s why I followed my heart and did what I did, but absolutely we need young people performing, singing, playing their version. That’s what always made it great.

Vance Gilbert: A Black Musician In A Folk World

Jessie Torrisi — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:27:57 +0000

"Less brisket, more chicken wing!” A Tuesday in early August, Vance Gilbert shows up to his workshop at the Lyons, Colorado Song School complaining about getting older and living half a life on the road. “Singing is an athletic event. I mean look at what you’re doing. You’re working this whole stage,” he shouts. Earlier, he went for a run amidst the Rocky Mountain cliffs. He doesn’t drink too much or eat too late at night anymore. He stops to stretch on long car rides to gigs. But Gilbert – who burst onto the singer-songwriter scene in the mid-‘90s playing alongside Shawn Colvin – is proud of being a late bloomer. Being an African-American in the very white world of folk, he’s taken the road less traveled and found a sense of humor doing it. Today, Gilbert is one of a handful of black artists playing all-acoustic music, a genre black audiences tend to ignore at best and disdain at worst. Gilbert's opened for Aretha Franklin. “Twice I’ve gone over like a fart in church,” he says, at the same theater where he’ll share the stage with Anita Baker in a few weeks. He calls black crowds “the singular hardest audience to play in the folk-singing world.” Not that there aren’t black troubadours. Think of Robert Johnson – all the blues greats. It’s just not a connection audiences tend to make. You strap on a guitar and maybe a hat. The next thing we think about is someone yelling, ‘yeehaw’,” he jokes. Steeped in jazz and the blues, Gilbert’s found a way to straddle worlds successfully – touring with George Carlin one night, packing a jazz club the next. It’s a lesson he aims to pass on. Lesson #1: Tell your story with confidence. One by one, he pulls the Song School students to the mic, American Idol-style, interrupting with advice. Rhonda Lynn, from Canada, launches into a song about not being pretty enough to cheerlead, or smart enough to join the science club, so she became the school’s best stoner. It’s got a core of truth wrapped in a wry smile. Own it, he coaches her. “What do you want to do? Let me throw a challenge out. If people aren’t hearing the story - which is what is most important - if you have to move around & dance to get your story across,” he leaves the thought hanging. He names one folk artist, famous for jumping around the stage. “You don’t think of a story. Song-wise, it’s Chinese food. I’m hungry an hour later.” Lesson #2: Don’t be afraid to get loose with it. Teresa Storch launches into a sultry blues. “When you come into the solo section, what I’d like you to do is go ‘Hey hey’,” Gilbert says. He throws it out like a gospel call. “Then leave a lot of space.” And start moaning. “Moaning?” Storch asks. “For the love of Christ, you’re improvising. Stop asking me questions,” he responds. She tries again. A wide grin spreads across his face. “Wonderful. I want the moans to be nasty and kind of sexy.” Next up is a student of Gilbert’s from Boston. He’s short, balding, in his ‘60s. “Rick is a little white guy – I don’t love him any less. But I’ve been taking money from him every week to blacken him up,” Gilbert jokes. “Everyone playing folk has got a little white guy inside of him.” Rick does an impressive rendition of "On the Sunny Side of the Street." “Moan it Rick,” Gilbert chides. “Less brisket, more chicken wing!” Pretty soon, Rick’s scatting like he’s on Basin Street in New Orleans. Other advice is more technical. Jack the guitar up like a young McCartney. Angle the microphone so you barely have to move. Practice in the dark so you don’t have to look or think – just feel. Ease is everything. “You got to be solid in what you’re doing before you go off. Otherwise, you are a poser,” Gilbert says. “If I don’t move around, isn’t it going to be boring?” pipes in one student. “When Garth Brooks does 'Tomorrow Never Comes,' ain’t no dancin’ involved. I don’t need no dancin’. That songs kicks my ass,” he answers. “Groove is great. But if I want to boogie, I’m going to put on Sly, or The Average White Band, or D’Angelo.” In this music, it’s about how groove propels the story. Lauryn Hill, Jay-Z, D’Angelo, Alicia Keys are among the few who manage to meld songs with great stories and lyrics to a serious beat. But they’re up against the same wall. Lauryn Hill’s live acoustic album tanked, compared to her hip-hop produced debut. Babyface did an unplugged version of his hit "When Will I See You Again." “Does anyone know of the acoustic version? No, no one gives a shit,” Gilbert shrugs. One of the rare exceptions, where 12-string guitars meet clapping, stomping, and sing-along pop, is The Isley Brothers. Gilbert lost his virginity to "Fight the Power." “As much as I want to knock an audience on their ass, regardless of color, that’s our cross to bear. The legacy is a storytelling one.” Many contemporary audiences see an acoustic guitar and hit the snooze button. But a great story can break down the wall. Gilbert picks out the chords to "Guess Who I Saw Today" – a songs older African-American women often request. "You’re so late getting home in the office. Did you miss your train? Did you get caught in the rain? No, don’t bother to explain," he starts singing. The story unwinds. The narrator went shopping then stopped at a French café. Many students don’t know it. They’re hanging on every word. The narrator spots a couple, in the corner, so in love they filled up all the room. Gilbert builds, hitting his falsetto. Guess who I saw today my dear? I’ve never been so shocked before. I headed blindly for the door. They didn’t see me passing through. Guess who I saw today? I saw you. “Sing it girl. No, that Negro did not do that to you,” Gilbert imitates the catcalls he usually gets from the audiences then. While audiences may not see the connections between a song that moves your body and soul, Gilbert does. “That’s where I come from,” he beams, “the jazz storytelling thing.”

The Slippery Slope Of Happiness: An Interview With E From Eels

Evan Schlansky — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 12:00:54 +0000

Eels frontman Mark Oliver Everett (or "E" for short) knows a thing or two about work ethic. He's the son of famed physicist Hugh Everett III, whose theories on alternate universes (and estrangement from his budding rock star son) are the subject of the documentary Parallel Universes, Parallel Lives. Like his late father, Everett has poured himself into his work, which has resulted in a trilogy of interrelated albums; Hombre Lobo (2009), End Times (2010), and finally, the happy ending, Tomorrow Morning. In his spare time, he's also written an autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know. We talked to Mark about his songwriting habits, the relative worth of the '90s, and nearly landing in the pokey. You were just arrested in London on suspicion of being a terrorist, right? I didn’t actually get arrested, but I almost did. It was one of the strangest things that has ever happened to me, which I guess says a lot. I was doing what I’ve been doing for fifteen years, walking around Hyde Park. You know, you go over and do these press junkets, talk about your album. I got my first break on the first day and I went out and left the hotel, I was just walking around. I sat on a bench, smoked a cigar, and as I was leaving the park I was approached by three police men. It was unusual that they were London police, and they had guns, and they said someone had called them and said that there was this suspicious character matching my exact description, and it was my description, is the strange thing, down to the clothes I was wearing and everything, but the strange part about it was that I wasn’t doing any of the things that were described—standing menacingly in front of an embassy, and peering over the wall at my hotel, and that’s eventually how I got them to let me go. They questioned me for about twenty minutes, filed a report, and took all the information, and I showed them my hotel key, and I said, “why would I be staring back at the hotel that I finally got out of?” And they said, “yeah, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.” It’s a very paranoid city, and rightly so, I think some old English biddy didn’t like the way I looked and decided I was a terrorist. [laughs] That’s crazy, I’m glad it worked out. I was worried about it all week, I was afraid they weren’t going to let me out of the country. What happens when you try to go back in, though? I guess that thing is more and more common, maybe they’ll get over it quicker, but that happened to Bob Dylan recently too. At that time, there were probably fifty really suspicious derelicts in the park, and they picked me. With Tommorow Morning, you’ve said that the songwriting is more experimental than on the previous album. In a sense. I mean, Hombre Lobo was kind of a garage rock thing, End Times was more of a traditional acoustic singer/songwriter approach. In those terms, this one was more of an anything goes environment of experimentation. This is an uplifting record. Are there any particular challenges to writing a record like that? Yeah, I do think it’s more challenging. For some reason it’s harder to write a convincingly, blatantly uplifting song without it becoming corny or trite. And to sustain that for most of a record is probably a whole other thing. Yeah. I like the challenge. I noticed recently that if I’m listening to music in my own life, more often than not, it’s something that’s very uplifting. What are some examples of that? What sprang to mind, I was listening to a mix tape I made for someone years ago. And they said “you really are the eternal optimist,” and I listened to it was like, “yeah, he’s right. Every song on here is from some kind of uplifting, positive thing. I think that thread goes through a lot of the Eels albums, but I think journalists overlooks that, they just label it as “melancholic” all the time, when very often it is much more multi-layered than that. Was there anything going on in your personal life that allowed you to make Tomorrow Morning? Hopefully as you get older, you start to slowly learn what things to be upset about and what things to be thankful for. I finally felt like I was at the point where I’m starting to look around me and see all the good things about my life, and I couldn’t help but express gratitude for it. Was writing the book and taking stock of your life a factor as well? I think that definitely helped me get to that point. As hard as it was to do something like write a book about life, it was a great feeling when it was over. They sent me a finished copy of the book, and I could hold my past in this nice little package in my hand. It was like this weight lifted off my shoulders. What's a song on Tomorrow Morning you’re particularly proud of? My favorite is one called “Looking Up” because it was the most fun I’ve ever had in a recording studio. It was just a fun song to make, and it was a fun song to sing, and I felt really uninhibited and free. Did you have the trilogy idea in your head when you made the first record? Yeah, I did. Originally I was thinking it was going to be a two-part story, but at the time we were making the first one I realized I wanted it to be three. Do you find yourself writing all the time? No. And these all three were made individually, as albums unto themselves, and there would be long periods in between where there was no writing or recording going on. It comes in spurts. I used to write all the time, when I was younger, but as time goes on, doing things like going on tours, it gets broken up. Do you prefer to write on guitar or piano? I don’t have a preference as far as that goes. I keep my studio stocked full of all sorts of different instruments and I keep them always plugged in and ready to go. And sometimes what I’ll do is if I feel the urge to write a song on guitar, I’ll force myself to go over to the organ, or the autoharp, or a different kind of tuned guitar, or something, because that will force me into a different world. If you keep writing songs on the same instrument, you tend to put your hands where they feel comfortable all the time, and that’s not good. Do the lyrics come to you first? Do they come spur of the moment as you’re writing the song? Both of those things can happen. I like it when the lyrics come first because I think that it makes it a stronger song, because it means it has a very strong, cohesive lyrical idea because that’s where you start. Do you have any rituals when you write? No, there’s kind of two different approaches. Sometimes you set aside time, you say tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, and you go down in the studio and just see what happens and try to write something. And the other one is that you’re in the middle of doing something else, trying to live your life, and you’re suddenly struck by inspiration and you have to stop everything, and it ruins whatever you were doing and you can’t avoid it because you’re so inspired. Both of those work out pretty good for me. Your first hit was in ’96. What does it feel like at this point to be able to sustain a career and thrive? You’re albums sell more now than they ever have. I feel successful just because I’m still doing it. All I ever wanted to do was do this. I feel so fortunate that I got to do it and I got to do it for this long. It’s a great feeling. Tom Waits has said he looks forward to every new release from you. Is that in your head much? That’s an even greater feeling [laughs]. When one of your ultimate heroes says he’s interested in what you do, I can’t even tell you how great that makes me feel. Tom Waits is someone that, I’m such a fan. I remember sitting in the audience at one of his concerts, and I couldn’t imagine him being a real person off stage. I couldn’t imagine that you could actually bump into him on a street or something, that he was a real person. I was so in awe of him. You can imagine what a great feeling it is to hear something like that. I mentioned the ‘90s a minute ago; is there anything you miss about the ‘90s music scene? I don’t miss anything about the ‘90s. [laughs] I was never that into the ‘90s. So you would say things are better now, across the board? Yeah, I think so. The ‘90s were just a step above the ‘80s, and the ‘80s were pretty terrible, c’mon. How important to your career has having songs in big movies like American Beauty and Shrek been? I don’t really know how important it is. For me it’s just kind of a side project, to have songs in films. You try to choose, but you can’t really tell. The trick thing about films is sometimes they can look great in the early stages and turn out terrible, and then vice versa, so it’s a little tricky. I enjoy the process, it’s so different from what I do normally, that I enjoy the process of being part of someone else’s art. I watched the Nova special last night. Now that you understand parallel universes better, do you find yourself thinking about that a lot? Yeah, every once in a while, something happens that makes you think about that, but it’s so complicated, it involves everything, literally everything, it’s difficult to wrap your brain around for more than a few seconds at a time. Do you ever experience moments of synchronicity with music? Like a song will be commenting on what you’re doing or thinking? I know this one interesting thing, that very often I’ll write a song in character, I’m writing a song that’s not blatantly autobiographical, and years later I’ll play the song at a concert or something, and I’ll be paying attention to what I’m singing, and realize that was completely what I was going through, and I fooled myself into thinking that had nothing to do with me. Interesting how that works. You’ve put out a lot of material over the past couple years. Did you ever have any reservations that it might be too much? No, I don’t, because we went four years without any new albums, so I thought it was a good time to make up for lost time, and three out in a year and a half. I had this thing for my family history, where I do feel like quite possibly it’s a race against the clock, better do it while I can, but that said, I’m not going to keep putting an album out every six months, that’s just for these three. I’m going to take a year-long nap. Anything else you want to say about the new record? I think it’s a record for the whole family and that means that every member of the family can buy a copy. You don’t want to fight over it.

You Ought To Be In Pictures: The Ballad Of Mike Viola

Erin Carson — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:59:59 +0000

In Judd Apatow’s latest comedy Get Him to the Greek, Russell Brand takes the stage as Aldous Snow, the rowdy rock star Jonah Hill is put in charge of herding to the Greek theater in Los Angeles. In one of the film’s final scenes, Brand sings a song called “Furry Walls.” It’s a fast-paced, funny tune that musically sounds like a lost hit by the British rock band Oasis; supposedly written after the effects of Hill’s bad drug trip are alleviated by the soothing effect of stroking a, well, furry wall. In reality, “Furry Walls” was written in part by songwriter and musician Mike Viola, who's also one of the musicians backing Brand in the performance scene of the song. Viola isn’t a stranger to the Apatow music-comedy hybrid; he’s written songs for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. He’s also not a stranger to being featured on the songs he’s written for films. The namesake tune from the 1996 Tom Hanks movie That Thing You Do, was co-produced and performed by Viola himself. Not a bad turn for someone who initially had reservations about going for the gig at all. “I was a little bit reluctant then because I’d just gotten my first record deal and I was really just hellbent on getting a recording career going,” Viola said of being approached by his publicist to take a shot at penning the movie’s signature track. He teamed up with then-roommate Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne) and the pair produced the catchy, Beatles-esque song. Despite this initial foray into the world of writing songs for films, Viola had doubts, and turned to his own musical career instead. In the '90s, he fronted Candy Butchers, a band that released several critically well-received albums of mid-'60s influenced rock. They toured with the likes of They Might Be Giants and Barenaked Ladies, and appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Last Call with Carson Daly, but never quite hit it big. It was with Walk Hard, the 2007 film starring John C. Reilly as an Elvis-like figure that parodied multiple musical genres, that Viola came back around to movies. “That was really the biggest break I ever had,” Viola said. He was initially tapped to do a Roy Orbison-esque rocker called “A Life Without You (Is No Life at All),” but one song lead to another. It also lead to an introduction to iconic singer-songwriter Dan Bern, a man who used to write a song a day. “We both became just totally enamored of each other’s work and became a prolific team that could crank out any number of songs at any given moment,” Viola said of the partnership that carried through to Get Him To The Greek. “Dan, he’ll bring the angle, he keeps an eye on keeping the meaning original, and not just rhyming “moon,” “June,” and “spoon,” Viola said. “And he's is one of the most expert absurdists I’ve ever met.” And “absurd” fits much of Viola and Bern’s exploits while writing for Greek. At one point the pair took off on a writing binge of sorts at Viola’s home studio. Without the direction or approval of the movie studio, they fully produced five or six songs and just sent them in. “We were like... ‘they’re probably so blown away, they just want to kind of save it, and send us a bottle of champagne’ or something,” Viola said. When the studio called, the verdict was that they strayed too far from the script, rather than created any champagne-worthy tracks. Yet, instead of reeling things in, Viola and Bern went for “the big stray” with a song called “Searching for a Father in America,” which, by Viola’s account, “had nothing to do with anything--” not that it mattered. The studio wound up loving the song so much they included it on the soundtrack regardless. Viola took it as a example of the fruit born from not “losing your teeth” and following some sort of crazy passion, even one that involves recording cello overdubs at 3 a.m. “I enjoy writing for movies more than I enjoy anything else besides my own artistic career,” Viola said, partly for the process of tailoring songs to a specific context. He talks about the challenges of being just an artist. Viola’s learned to be a survivalist, involving himself with a variety of projects and placing weight on cinematic pursuits. Money is by no means the sole motivating factor, but it is certainly a consideration. He also talked about finding the sweet spot between achieving mass exposure and producing works of artistic integrity. “You’re able to reach more people with your ideas, and if you stay true to what you consider a solid song form, a piece of music that’s artistically balanced and has form, it’s something to be reckoned with.” That said, Viola seems to have plenty going on. He’s collaborated with many artists including Mandy Moore, Ryan Adams, and Marshall Crenshaw, to name a few, and he’s got new a band going called Winston. Writing songs for the band has given Viola a new way to write and collaborate. “My favorite way of collaborating now is to have these songs that are living, breathing little things, but if a band or a group of musicians doesn’t latch onto them, then just throw it away,” he said, about “not be[ing] too precious about every little thing.” More recently, he played a string of shows in New York and Philadelphia with Schlesinger. “We’ve done lots of music for movies and we thought it would be kind of a cool thing to play that stuff live,” he explained. He also hopes that more movies are in his future. For Viola, it’s this flurry of activity that helps him navigate the music industry and stay alive in an age fraught with uncertainty. As he put it, “I’m just looking for a drop of gasoline.”

An Interview With Vic Chesnutt

Evan Schlansky — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 20:00:02 +0000

"I ain't got time for the niceties." So sang Vic Chesnutt in 1996. The Athens-based singer/songwriter is a legend in his time-his songs have been covered by everyone from R.E.M. to Madonna. His latest record, Dark Developments, is a collaboration with his neighbors, Elf Power. This interview was conducted in March 2009. "I ain't got time for the niceties." So sang Vic Chesnutt in 1996. The Athens-based singer/songwriter is a legend in his time-his songs have been covered by everyone from R.E.M. to Madonna. His latest record, Dark Developments, is a collaboration with his neighbors, Elf Power. How did this collaboration come about? I became aware of Elf Power in the ‘90s. I kept up with them because I loved their music. And years later, Andrew asked me if I'd like to do some jamming, and I said I'd be honored. Also, besides Elf Power, there are two other dudes-The Amorphous Strums. Those two guys used to be in a metal band in the ‘80s, in Athens. How did you choose the song that ended up on the record? I wanted to exploit Elf Power, what they do. There were a lot of songs that I'd already had written, where I thought, "Wow, we could do a really good job on this," like "Bilocating Dog" and "Phil the Fiddler," these kind of pop songs with psychedelic overtones. Other songs like "Teddy Bear," we kind of just made up-I had this idea for a song one night, the next day we all got together and I said, "Hey everybody, I wrote this song last night." And it turned into a kind of weird reggae thing. Scratch that. Don't say reggae. I'm just kidding. It was a cool little groove, and I had these lyrics for it, and when I listened to it the next day to sing on it, I realized that the lyrics were stupid. Idiotic. I was like, what was I thinking, so I had to make up new lyrics. When you write, do you often reject what you have, and fix it later? A lot of times it'll go though five versions, with five totally different themes. That song is the only one that had two different versions on this record. But the rest of them are first drafts, with little tweaks. Do you typically write using stream of consciousness? No. Never. No, my songs are pretty thought out. I read something where someone described the record as having a "sinister vibe." Really? Hot damn. You like that? Well, I'm glad they noticed. So yeah, we think it has a sinister vibe. Can you elaborate? Well, we're sinister motherf**kers. I know I am. Especially when I have, um, a gang at my back. Sometimes maybe when I'm on my own, I'm meek and sad. But with a posse, you know, I'll cut ya ass. You don't shy away from things in your songwriting-you're not afraid to put yourself out there in all aspects. Yeah, in general, that's true. I'd say anything goes. If I'm gonna sing about something, I wanna sing about something that is worth singing about! I don't wanna sing about sappy shit You know? I wanna sing about something that fires me up! I wanna be about to cry when I'm up there, you know what I'm saying? Or I want to be so mad, I want to be spitting...I want spit to be flying out! You know what I'm saying? That's how I want to be when I write my songs.
AGE: 44 HOMETOWN: ZEBULON, GEORGIA FAVORITE SONGWRITERS: Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Bob Dylan

Austin City Limits: On The Money

Lynne Margolis — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:00:21 +0000

When Austin City Limits aired its first show in 1976, its originators had no idea it would make it past one season, much less become the longest-running live music show in television history. Thirty-five years later, the PBS program that helped put Austin on the map as the “live music capital of the world” is celebrating this anniversary with an amazing season featuring acts from Allen Toussaint and Esperanza Spalding to Elvis Costello and Pearl Jam, a successful namesake festival, a new Web site and a new studio under construction downtown. Oh, and official designation by Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum as the nation’s 10th rock and roll historic site. When rock hall president and CEO Terry Stewart came to Austin to announce the site’s selection, he noted, “We’re landmarking the physical space, but more importantly, we’re landmarking the program. … it’s been a part of everybody’s life who loves music.” That the show, taped in KLRU-TV’s Studio 6A on the University of Texas campus, has remained on the air so long is an extraordinary feat, especially when one considers the vagaries of funding in the non-profit public broadcasting realm. That ACL taped its first hip-hop acts—Mos Def and K’naan—on Oct. 1, the day it received the rock hall plaque, is an indicator of how it’s been able to do so. Though it still carries an allegiance to the roots/Americana acts that formed its foundation (Willie Nelson taped the pilot in 1974 and Asleep at the Wheel was the debut-season opener in 1976; they finally performed together for a show that will air in November), ACL has since diverged widely into indie rock, soul, jazz and many other musical idioms. The 35th season opened October 3 with the Dave Matthews Band’s maiden appearance—which aired just as the band walked offstage after its debut gig at the Austin City Limits Festival, now in its eighth year. The festival itself, now the fifth largest of its kind in the country, was an attempt to draw younger audiences to the show and expand the “brand.” And the new studio, funded in part by Nelson, will become a year-round live music venue in addition to allowing studio configurations for audiences of up to 2,500, instead of the current 300. That means more potential donor support; the show is funded largely by corporate and individual donations, and donors do get free tickets (as do lucky members of the public). Musing about the secret to ACL’s success as he introduced a sneak-preview airing of the Willie and the Wheel segment at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville last month, executive producer Terry Lickona said, “I often think it’s the free beer that we distribute to the audience at the tapings, because it loosens everybody up.” Of course, the show’s musical evolution is not universally applauded; one still hears grumblings from Austin icons who have never been invited to appear. Others fear that tickets will no longer be free at the new venue, though Lickona assures that they will remain so for the time being. Maintaining its intimacy despite the capacity growth (which will increase vertically; the 10,000-square-foot floor area will be about the same) is another issue. As he taped his second segment in five years, Costello remarked, “I hope they take a lot of the magic with them.” But even veterans like Matthews share the sentiment uttered by Gordy Quist of Austin’s Band of Heathens, whose segment airs with Costello’s November 7. Quist called playing on that now-landmark stage, where the ghosts of Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Stevie Ray Vaughan and so many others have stepped, “a check-it-off-the-list kind of gig … one of the things to do before you die.” And Costello also noted, “When you stagger back to your hotel room after your own show, you can turn on Austin City Limits and see how it’s really done.”

THE XX: On The Horizon

William Hooker — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:00:47 +0000

The xx make dark, tightly composed and sensually delivered pop music, a unique result that sounds a bit like Interpol or Young Marble Giants, certainly in the indie rock tradition; therefore, in slight contrast to bassist Oliver Sim’s claimed influences: TLC and Aaliyah. That The xx embrace ‘90s r&b artists without a hint of irony is believable when (bassist and singer) Sim remarks, “I enjoy the melodies from those artists, but that’s about all I take from mainstream music,” rejecting the band’s propensity to sell out. Claiming disinterest in mainstream appeal used to be code for artistic purity; however, considering the meta-genre that indie rock has become lately, who’s to say one can’t embrace the highway and the road less travelled without confusing everyone in the process? It’s clear that the band has had a lot of time to share ideas with each other; according to Sim, “Romy and I have known one another since nursery [school], and we met Baria and Jamie in secondary school when we were 11… all our houses were about five minutes from one another growing up.” The band immediately became fond of playing shows at venues rather than playing at school, “We could have played talent shows at school but we avoided them; we were kind of secretive about the band, and it’s a lot easier playing to people you don’t know than the ones you go to school with.” Possibly, this secretiveness has something to do with the highly personal, sexual and discernable lyrics prevalent on their self-titled release; if the band is comfortable letting us in on their personal lives, perhaps that’s because we don’t have P.E. with them Monday morning. According to Sim, these lyrics serve as the foundation for the band’s catalogue, and, when asked to reflect on a trend in their writing process, the bassist states “the songs start with lyrics, what Romy and I have written, and we come together and collage… adding bass and guitar to that. Baria and Jamie fill it out after that into a proper song.” When these songs possess beauty, it is always a dark charm, a characteristic Sim chalks up to influences: “A lot of my favorite songs are very dark. Whether intentionally or not, that darkness has made it into my songwriting,” he says, adding, “However, many of the lyrics are not dark and I like how you can be singing a pretty optimistic song and deliver it in a dark way.” These favorite songs include Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” (whose influence is very obvious on the slow and shadowy ballad “Infinity”) and the Cure’s “Lullaby,” which he calls “very dark but quite fun at the same time.” Sim admits that the band’s parents (most of whom are also big Cure fans) enjoy the band, and if they don’t enjoy their children’s professional path, then they at least tolerate it. According to Sim, “All our parents are friends; they sort of chose us to be friends, actually.” At this point in the conversation, talking about elders, I relate an anecdote I heard recently about U2’s guitarist, Edge, who once said he disliked telling his grandmother that he was a guitarist, since someone her age wouldn’t respect that sort of profession. Asked about his own granny, Sim relates that he has “a younger granny who checks my MySpace and she’s down with the band, got the album and everything and is quite on it. Whereas, I have a great aunt who is like 94 and I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m, like, in an orchestra or something so… as long as she’s happy.” On the theme of age and taste, I ask Sim which he’d prefer attending: the symphony or a really good horror movie? “Probably a symphony just because it would be a first and I’ve gone to many a horror movie in my time.” We agree that this would make his great aunt proud.

Member	Age	Role	Influences
Oliver Sim	20	Vocals, Bass	TLC, Aaliyah
Romy Madley Croft	20	Vocals, Guitar	Distillers, CocoRosie
Baria Qureshi	20	Keyboards	Electro-clash
Jamie Smith	20	Production	Future Hip Hop

AMERICAN ICONS: Mitchell Parish

Paul Zollo — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:00:12 +0000

He’s written the words to many of America’s most cherished standards, starting with the classic “Stardust,” with music by Hoagy Carmichael, a song which he said he knew “in his gut” was important. Other standards to which he concocted the lyrics include “Deep Purple,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Stars Fell on Alabama,” “Sleigh Ride,” “Moonlight Serenade” and “Volare.” He was born in Lithuania in 1900, and came to America with his family in 1901 on the S.S. Dresden when he was just a baby. The family went first to Louisiana, but quickly surmised New York City was a more hospitable home for a Jewish family. His given name was Michael Hyman Pashelinsky. As a kid, he fell in love with books, and was writing poetry and short stories by 11. A decent pianist, like George Gershwin, at 18, he got a job as a songplugger—traveling around performing hit songs at music stores in order to sell sheet music. It was, he has said, his “apprenticeship” as a songwriter, in that he learned from the inside out the structure and mechanics of hit songs. He was a lover of recorded music even before the record industry was in its infancy. “I’d go to the penny arcades,” he remembered in a 1992 interview, “and they had all these machines lined up—with Edison cylinders. You dropped a penny in the slot and the cylinder would play a song.” Above the cylinders were the song’s title and its writers, so Parish quickly grew wise to who was authoring hit songs. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which was one of that era’s biggest hits, was, he noticed, written by Irving Berlin. Prior to then he had considered becoming a writer of novelty songs—jokey, punch-line ditties for vaudeville. But seeing Berlin’s name there, as well as the names of other successful songwriters, set him on the songwriting path from which he never veered. He teamed up with scores of composers, all who needed someone to write a lyric first—to which they would then compose a melody—or to match lyrics to an existing tune. “Stardust” emerged by this latter method. Hoagy Carmichael, who usually wrote his own words as well as music, had composed an extended melody that was beautiful, but which was a challenge for him to write words for. Parish heard it and was unimpressed. “I didn’t like it,” he said with a sly smile. “When I heard it, it was a swing tune, but I didn’t write it that way. It sounded just like another swing tune. It was nothing like the way it is now, which is sweet, mellow and romantic.” Victor Young did an orchestral arrangement of the song as a ballad, as opposed to a rhythmic swing melody, and Parish heard it then as if he’d heard it for the first time. “It was altogether a different mood, a different feeling. Really beautiful. And it became what it became.” Asked if he knew how important this one song would be, he said he did have a gut feeling that this was a momentous one. But had no idea it would become a standard. “You don’t sit down and write a standard,” he explained. “A standard evolves.” With Hoagy, Parish wrote two other songs which, though never as famous as “Stardust,” also became standards—“Riverboat Shuffle” and “One Morning In May.” Parish understood that a great lyric often emerged over time, and cannot be forced or contrived. “If I had to labor over a lyric too long,” he said, “if it became an arduous task where I sweated and toiled and struggled, I would drop it. And not because I shunned arduous work, but because I felt it wouldn’t be fair to the composer. The lyric would show its toil and sweat and that wouldn’t be good for the song. The sturm und drang would be evident.” Known for his famous titles, he was asked if he thought of the title first before writing a lyric. “In general,” he said, “most songs are written in that manner. Usually, the lyricist would think of the title. And if he had a good, catchy title, half of the song was written. Let’s say I got ‘Stars Fell on Alabama.’ I got that title and went in the arranging room, and there was Frank Perkins, the arranger. I told him the title. Told him to fool around with it, see what he comes up with. A few days later, he came in with the melody. Well, the song was already half-written! And that happened often like that—I would give a title to a composer, he would compose the melody, and then I’d write the rest of the lyric to his melody.” As for advice to today’s songwriters, he decried the lack of quality in most modern pop songs, saying “If Irving Berlin were around today, he’d go unpublished,” and then said, “The advice I’d give is to keep in mind this isn’t easy. Songwriting is a tough struggle. It wouldn’t be easy for me if I was writing today. But I say if you enjoy writing song, then keep doing it. That alone should be reason enough to continue. Remember, you never know when a hit song is going to come along!”