Chewing Pine

The Dutchess & The Duke – She’s the Dutchess, He’s the Duke (Hardly Art, 2008)

(This originally appeared in Skyscraper)

This debut pretty much has it all. Simple melodies and percussion, ample guitar work and vocals that are friendly enough that one might be able to hear them emanating from your friends’ kitchen. The perverse, self-aggrandizement that tails ‘indie’ releases, and Seattle in general, is auspiciously absent from this work. After producing a single with Boom Boom, those at Hardly Art saw fit to lend their NW peers services of their imprint to release this disc. From the chimes of the first chords on “Reservoir Park” to the hand claps latter found in the song, the ability of this group to simply say what they believe to be true and wrap that concept in a seemingly digestible acoustic pop song is pretty staggering. Along the way, the two principal characters, Kimberly Morrison and Jesse Lortz, evoke everything from fortune tellers to gypsies to chains in a folk-tradition that perhaps they don’t strictly fit into, but surely appreciate. At some points, perpetuating this folk affiliation, the voice of Lortz can recall Leonard Cohen in its deadpan expansiveness on “Ship Made of Stone” or even Lou Reed on “Back to Me”. But the remarkable thing is how the pair’s vocals can summon either Simon and Garfunkel or Exene and John Doe. That’s a lot of ground to cover. And they do it in 10 songs.

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Tracklisting:
01 – Reservoir Park
02 – Out of Time
03 – Ship Made of Stone
04 – Strangers
05 – The Prisoner
06 – Back To Me
07 – Mary
08 – You Can Tell the Truth, Now
09 – I Am Just a Ghost
10 – Armageddon Song

Sighque

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Ramblin’ Jack Elliott – I Stand Alone (Anti, 2006)

(This originally appeared in Impose)

The story is this: While roaming the country playing folk tunes with the venerable Odetta, she and Jack Elliott made a stop one day to see Odetta’s family. Rather taken aback by Elliott’s stories, Odetta’s mother began calling him Ramblin’ Jack. Of course this story must be taken for what it is and considered in light of the source – Ramblin’ Jack himself amidst a show in Cleveland while drinking, telling tales of driving RV’s and recounting history.

Perhaps it’s accurate. Perhaps not, but regardless of that, Elliott’s abilities to interpret folk songs enabled him to tour Europe – even before the folk resurgence of the sixties and influence Dylan. Now, he has released an album on Epitaph subsidiary Anti-.

Through the vast catalog of this man, you won’t find a large number of original songs, but a collection of meaningful folk and blues tunes that speak to the populace at large. This concept actually seems to be missing from a great deal of music today; not everyone can relate to being angry at the government, and not everyone wants to hear about the inequities of the world. Often times, people want to hear simple stories that they understand. There is no shortage of that on I Stand Alone. There are songs about your body aching, there are songs about pets and songs about lost love. Most of the album, Elliott spends alone – just him and a guitar. Occasionally, he is accompanied by Flea and Lucinda Williams which serves to create a fuller sound. Williams seems to have the most incorporation into the album seeing as she and Elliott sing a duet on “Careless Darling.” Again considering Elliott’s catalog is greatly made up of his interpretations of others songs, this album, or any other for that matter, is a good place to discover his work for the uninitiated.

Tracklisting:
01 – Engine 143
02 – Arthritis Blues
03 – Old Blue
04 – Driving Nails in My Coffin
05 – Rake & Ramblin’ Boy
06 – Hong Kong Blues
07 – Jean Harlow
08 – Call Me a Dog
09 – Careless Darling
10 – Mr. Garfield
11 – My Old Dog & Me
12 – Leaving Cheyenne
13 – Remember Me
14 – Willy Moore
15 – Honey, Where You Been So Long
16 – Woody’s Last Ride

Jason Molina: Panning for Gold

(This originally appeared in the Spring ‘08 issue of Skyscraper)

From hearing the man’s songs, Jason Molina should be stoical and or perhaps, perpetually kinetic – unable to remain sedentary for more than a moment. Only the second is true.

Molina, who for the present calls London home, sounds eager to talk. Regardless of the fact that since the mid nineties, part of his job has been answering questions that strangers ask him, he never recedes from a line of discourse. Despite being in constant demand, since December Molina has taken time off, which might belie the perspective he on has on his career, which he perceives as a skill set – he is correct.

Molina is candid and unsparingly anecdotal. Assumingly this comes from touring for a decade. If Dylan wasn’t a mid-Westerner, Molina would be the mid-Western Dylan. And since Neil Young is Canadian, a fact that is endlessly confounding, I guess that could make Molina the American Neil Young. These comparisons aren’t original, but hardly are they fallacious.

Coming from places I know, he seems familiar, although I’ve never spoken with him. Growing up on the far west side of Cleveland has indelibly effected the outlook he possesses on life. At times it seems that the surroundings of his childhood are exaggerated, but I recall seeing Songs: Ohia flyers in my home town and only fleetingly felt that I lived in a wasteland. Molina is relentless on this topic, insisting that there was no sort of positive creative force at work in Northeastern Ohio nor rural West Virginia. I must concede the second point. But while Cleveland isn’t a hub of industry or creativity, it still has Dennis Kucinich. Adorable, environmentally friendly gnomes must count for something.

During the hour I spent on the phone with this gentlemen, who has created a life-time of work in just over a decade, one subject that didn’t arise organically was that of his bassist. Evan Farrell, who died late last year in a fire, left behind his wife and two sons. Molina implored that some mention be made of this and pointed me to a memorial fund for the man who he described as someone that, “just never stopped doing music from the minute his feet hit the floor in the morning.”

Evan Farrell Memorial Fund

I have an idea of the landscape that you grew up around. There are a lot of place names in your songs, or they’re related to landscapes in some way. Is that something that you cultivate? Are you trying to write about setting as opposed to girls and cars?

Well, girls and cars need a place to go, don’t they? I definitely concentrated on the idea of putting a place into a song. Just because mentioning a word or a place doesn’t mean that that’s what the song’s about. It might be about a very specific sliver of time and it’s maybe about something that happened there or an impression that I got. And I travel so much and I move so much. I guess if you pick it apart, I’m more firmly grounded in the songs, which are these intangible things and not so much connected to one specific place, because I’m always really on the move.

You’ve always been compared to uniquely American singers. Do you see yourself in some sort of progression from Woody Guthrie to Ramblin’ Jack to Dylan?

I look at it this way. I’m not a music historian by any means. I don’t really keep up on many contemporary bands, and it’s not because I want to lock myself away and be a hermit. It’s just that I find if I’m listening to a lot of contemporary stuff, I gravitate quickly and a little too easily to accidentally sounding that way. If you want to look at it as a progression, I feel comfortable in a line of songwriters. And I happen to be an American songwriter, but it’s entirely beyond my imagination to see how exactly that progression really goes. It definitely helped me, I just wrote songs out of the blue since I was a small kid. I didn’t grow up around a musical family, no one showed me how to play the guitar. I have no strict concept of how a song should sound. I never sat down and tried to learn other peoples songs. I never learned cover songs.

Then how did you acquire knowledge if you never paid attention to other musics? Or does that not even matter?

It has a lot to do with being very isolated. So, people who are from bombed out towns or middle of nowhere towns or places where there is no spark of any artistic scene – these are the places I grew up in. Getting music was like searching for the Holy Grail, because we didn’t have record shops. None in Lorain and definitely none in Southern West Virginia. Some teenager would have a seven inch from some SST band. We would make these mix tapes of all of this music and it was all over the place. It was pretty much any music that you could get that wasn’t the shit on the radio. At that time, I was specifically rebellious about things like Hank Williams Jr. and that kind of stuff because, the stigma of that, especially in the mid to late eighties, was pretty heavy.

There were many hundreds of hours sitting around a turntable, late at night in someone’s basement, plowing through all these classic rock records to find a song that was really great instead of really stupid.

You mentioned SST. Apart from Sonic Youth, I’m hard pressed to think of another popular band that uses alternate tunings.

Well, My Bloody Valentine.

I guarantee if you walk down the street and ask random passers by who My Bloody Valentine is, nine outta 10 people would have no idea. At-least Sonic Youth was on the radio in 1994. But how did you get into using different tunings?

Well, I still do. My first guitar was a little Harmony acoustic. My parents picked it up at a garage sale or something. It sat in the house and I never saw anyone play it. But as a kid I started to mess around with it. This thing was so beat up and had been neglected for so long, you couldn’t actually tune it. The tuning pegs were so rusted and bent, the gears were totally shot to hell. I got a can of WD-40 and sandpaper and toothbrushes. I tried to get the keys to turn a little bit and had to use pliers to get them to turn. And when I could get it to a relatively decent sounding open tuning, I’d leave it like that until, on its own it changed. Probably, with the same set of strings, I played it for 10 years, just learning how to invent melodies and strange chord progressions out of what I had to work with. I was fascinated with that. I would even use really weird tunings when I played bass guitar, which was my primary songwriting tool for a long time.

I’ve got an answer, but I’ll go the long way.

I was at the Salvation Army in Chicago, dead of winter. Snowing like crazy and I’d never found that Holy Grail instrument that people say they find in pawn shops. I bought some book and it was like 60 cents. I reach into my pocket and as I’m getting money out to pay for this book, I look above the head of the clerk and on a shelf, behind a bunch of decorations and shit is a Harmony Sovereign, which is an excellent mid-grade guitar. Jimmy Page used them. They’re a great sounding guitar. I was like, ‘Holy shit, how much is that?’ It was 40 bucks or something. The guy gets it down and the thing is a fucking train wreck: someone pulled the bridge off and using big wood screws, screwed the bridge back into the guitar. It split the body and the neck was all warped. It was a disaster. But I strummed it and it was in this insane tuning, ya know? The most rusty, destroyed strings – the thing hadn’t been played in years and years, but this tuning was amazing. I paid the 40 bucks and ran out in the snow with this guitar with no case and sat down and wrote a song without touching the tuning.

Axxess and Aces, which I was listening to yesterday or the day before, is all in one tuning right?

Right, the first record is all one tuning, although there are a handful of different instruments. It sounds as if there’s one guitar, but sometimes there’ll be a tenor guitar and an acoustic guitar – they sound very similar because of the way it was recorded. Sitting around a microphone, it bleeds together and makes it sound very complicated, but it’s actually not. Axcess and Aces is one tuning all the way through. Actually, most of them are except for Protection Spells.

When you tour, are you restricted by what you can bring with you?

Absolutely, I can bring pretty much one guitar. The Magnolia songs are basically in standard tuning and it’s just by necessity. But if we get to point where we can each have several guitars in working order, I’d be able to introduce a lot more material into the set.

There are a lot of things to overcome. Especially when you’re playing with a traditional bass-drums-guitar arrangement, there’s no way you can switch guitars for every single song unless you have a guitar tech and you have some serious backing. I’m not trying to make spacey music, I’m trying to make it tight and melodic. It’s not like I’m hitting the distortion and strumming an open chord, I’m trying to make it sound fluid and it should naturally sound that way. So it’s difficult in a live setting to do a lot of Songs: Ohia material.

Part of that problem is that you release an album every year. You must constantly be working with your instrument. Can you keep the same kind of output going until you’re 70?

I could, if I had the desire. I think so. I mean it’s January 17^th. So, I’ve written 40 songs since January 1^st. That doesn’t mean that I feel like I should record 40 of them and do complicated demos of them or work up arrangements for the band.

Immediately before that I hadn’t written a ton, since I’d been on tour so much. My last show, last year was December 15^th. Magnolia toured a lot and then I toured solo a lot last year – literally went around the world. When I’m on the road I just write lyrics, nothing really gets finished. There’s no time on the road, it’s work. Trying to find an hour where I’m not obligated to be doing amps, moving gear, shit like that – just finding a place to be alone to work is a huge thing that’s almost impossible to find.

Do you need isolation to write? Do you need to be sedentary to finish an entire song?

I need peace and quiet. I can’t just sit down with a guitar in a loud club, where there’s music going, it just doesn’t happen that way. I prefer to write very early in the morning. My ideal writing situation is I get up at about four and just write for a few hours. Sometimes it’s just like mechanical exercises, I’m just writing, there’s no song in mind. After an hour or two of that, I start to concentrate really hard and pick out what seems interesting. That’s the time that I sit down at the keys or get the guitar. Then I ignore the song that I just wrote, the lyrics. I try to see if I can come up with something musically interesting. So, I’ll try to see if they fit together and if they don’t, I just give up right away. I move on to writing a new song, because the best songs, for me, were a quick and easy match.

I was just completely blown away that you said you get up at four am. I don’t know how many other musicians can say that, but it almost sounds like farm work to me.

Yeah, it’s definitely like that. It’s sorta like farmer’s time. I’m lucky because I don’t have to work nine to five. The reason that I’m able to do music is because I keep doing music. This is me going to work. It’s a tool that you need to keep sharp and if you don’t, you have to take a lot of steps back to get it sharp again. After doing this for many years now, I’ve trained myself. If I have a free hour, and I don’t have to run across town to do something crazy, some weird errand or something, I can sit down and start to have something if I just concentrate. I have tons of ideas already just sitting there.

Does that perspective on work make it less fun?

Songwriting – there’s a tremendous amount of joy that I get out of being able to do music and I’m always surprised by it and excited by new things that I come across. I wouldn’t call it fun. It’s not like riding dodge ‘em cars or something like that. Like that’s fun.

I do approach it like work, but it’s my name over the door. So, it’s not like I have to report for duty everyday and do something that I don’t want to do. This is something I want to do and something I need to do. This is a skill I’ve developed and now I’m putting it to use. I never wake up and say ‘Awww, now I have to write a song!’

You did the artwork for the Sojourner box-set. Is the process for you doing visual art the same?

Yeah, it is. Although, the little paintings in there aren’t really representative of what I do. Normally, I do more abstract stuff. I wanted these to be specific images that paired up with the music. That’s why I used some noticeable images like people. There are actual objects: there’s a canoe and there’re animals. But the way that I do that is pretty much the same. I start with no idea. I don’t say that I’m going start with a picture of a house. I don’t work that way. I just start drawing and maybe a house will come out of it and maybe something else will. It’s the same process.

One way that I’ve explained it to myself is that it’s so difficult to produce the same level of artwork as music, because it comes from the exact same place and it’s so draining to do either one. I have to say, ‘Today I’m just going to do art.’ The idea of picking up a guitar and writing a song after working on something all day and night, is just mind numbing.

You’ve been in England and traveled around Europe for while now, has that been beneficial for the process that you’ve mentioned – creating stuff; music or art? Or does it not matter as long as you have time?

It doesn’t matter so much as long as I have time. I put a lot of value in just having a little notebook and writing. It could be as simple as starting with the name of a town. I’ll see that we’re 20 miles outside of some town and I know that we’re going to stop to get gas or eat or something. I’ll get out of the van and try to see as much as I can about the town. Grab a local newspaper, go into the local coffee shop and listen to what the people are talking about in that town, see what they’re driving, see what their houses look like. 30 minute later, we’re back on the road. But out of that I get an impression of something. And that goes in the notebook.

I mentioned this before, you’re seen as a uniquely American figure. But, you’ve been taken out of your natural setting. Are you as comfortable in London as you are in Chicago?

There’s no comparing London to Chicago. I love Chicago and I wrote so many records there. Actually most of the material I’ve written over the years was in Chicago. I don’t know what about that place made me write so much, but a part of it is that, everyone there in the musical community is always working. No one ever seems to be just sitting there. All the Chicago bands are always gone ‘cause they’re internationally and nationally touring bands. There’s a high standard set for doing good work, getting it out there and working your ass off.

I’ve always said, it didn’t matter if I lived in a city or the country, I’d still be writing songs. I maybe sometimes more happy in the quiet or the calm of the middle of nowhere, but it doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop writing.

I haven’t been here very long, I don’t really have a sense of how the local and regional musicians work. Culturally, it’s night and day. In that way it’s a very difficult adjustment. I’m burying myself in work, because that’s a good way to adjust to the change. Pretty much every time I’ve done a record, it’s been right on the cusp of a move to another city, to another state, to a different apartment.

There is a small community of people here that I’ve gotten to know. I live just a couple of blocks away from Rough Trade. I go in there and kinda have gotten to know some of the people who work there. They’ve shown me some good records. Like I said, I just moved here, so it’s hard to really say. We’ll see how it goes.

When you went to the record store, did they know you?

I’ve been recognized on the street here a few times. And at Rough Trade there were a few people who recognized me. It’s not totally surprising, because I play in London once in a while. Also based on what I buy, they probably figure, ‘O.K., this guy buys shit loads of folk and special orders obscure blues and country music. It’s probably that guy.’