Song, by Toad

[Click on the images to enlarge them, and go to Blueback Hotrod to view the full set.  I'd like to say a big thank you to Dylan for filming the interview and for letting me use his photos, both for this post and for the titles for the videos.]

It would be a total cliché to describe Willy Vlautin as a natural storyteller, but then again, sometimes the reason that things are clichés is because they are entirely and obviously true.  From the start of the  interview to the end of the gig it is obvious that Vlautin just rolls thoughts and ideas around in his head, around the conversation, just enjoying the process of building phrases and telling you things.

He is also one of the nicest, most unassuming people I have ever met – just a complete gent from start to finish.  I am far from an experienced interviewer, and his readiness to chip in, to participate, and to make the conversation worth everyone’s while turned what could potentially have been quite an awkward half hour into a genuine pleasure.  Maybe that’s why he’s such an engaging performer – he always puts enough of himself into the show to make the interaction worth his and his audience’s while.

Listening to Vlautin’s songs, they are brought vividly to life by what is an understated, but nevertheless phenomenal talent for finding the important detail which turns his broad-brush vistas into crystal-clear snapshots of people and places you can almost smell, they’re so real.

I wonder if it’s his genuine sympathy and interest which allows him to spot that kind of detail, and to communicate it so cleanly.  It’s hard to describe what’s so special about the way he does it, too.  He’s observant, and can be harsh, but never in a judgmental sense.  If ever what he describes comes across as harsh, he manages to do it in a sense that implies somehow that he still has great love for his characters, and it is simply reality which is mean-spirited.  Even describing a van he bought which clapped out five hours out of the lot he imbues the tale with a kind of pathos: “I don’t know what happened to that poor van. It liked me I think; it just didn’t want to drive any more.”

When he talks to me about how he builds his stories, he tells me that there may be a great deal of reality in there but it’s completely jumbled up, although you’d never guess it.  He doesn’t write to expose or to finger point, more as a way of imagining away the injustices and misfortunes of life either for himself or the people he writes about.

In fact, for someone whose stories can be so stark, and whose characters so intensely observational, he is at considerable pains to avoid either being voyeuristic or taking advantage of someone else’s misfortunes, explaining how he’ll exaggerate situations, extrapolate greatly from small moments to create the chains of events which provide the backbone to his plot, and break up and bury the literal observations under layers of new characters, new places and new consequences.

The catharsis, he tells me, is still the same.  Just because the feeling is caused by different circumstances and happening to a very different person, doesn’t mean that demon isn’t exorcised – as long as the heart of it is there, it’s still the same.

I was a little nervous going into this interview not to cross any lines by talking about Vlautin’s books or his music either too much or too little; preferring to try and let him define how much separation he wanted to keep between the two.  It turns out that boundary barely exists, however.

During the interview he tells me about how his latest book, Lean On Pete, was what happened when he sat down and started writing a story which had begun as a song which didn’t really work.  Songs like The Disappearance of Ray Norton from Thirteen Cities remained as songs, but ended up being spoken word because he just couldn’t get the story he wanted to tell to fit into a traditional song format.

As he chats his way through the gig it becomes increasingly clear that the clichés are perhaps still the best point of reference, at least to begin to understand Willy Vlautin.  He is, simply, a storyteller, and the medium is flexible.  What doesn’t change though, to expand on that cliché a little, is that perhaps as much as a storyteller, he comes across as a listener, and that’s probably why he’s so good.

The band have been together for fifteen years, and the obvious consonance between them as musicians seems to flow from that openness to other people, and the performance itself is full of that spirit.  I love an awful lot of Richmond Fontaine’s music, but there are definitely times when it’s not entirely my cup of tea.  Live, though, the generosity of Vlautin and his friends has so much impact that I found myself drawn in by the warmth they project and even loving the songs I hadn’t enjoyed as much on record.

It was a lovely evening in general, and the interview was so interesting that I am going to publish it in its entirety as a podcast in the next couple of weeks so you can all hear it for yourselves.  I’ll intersperse the conversation with the songs which get mentioned, and I absolutely defy anyone not to be captivated.

Richmond Fontaine – Moving Back Home #2

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Richmond Fontaine – The Boyfriends

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

These videos were taken when I interviewed Wild Beasts for Fresh Air Radio a little while ago, and I thought you might be interested in seeing them.  Ben (the wee chap on the left) has a fucking amazing voice.

The Fresh Air broadcast is about to start up actually, and it looks like I am going to get a Wednesday evening slot – hopefully around half six or seven – so watch out for that in the coming weeks.  In fact there’s actually a launch party in the big swanky-looking Uni building thing on Bristo square (Teviot, is it?) on Tuesday.  The beer’s fucking cheap so please come along and help kick things off with a degree of drunken debauchery.

Interview is here.

Fresh Air Radio website.

Wild Beasts website.

Buy Wild Beasts stuff on Amazon.

I’ll admit before I start writing this review that I am oddly ambivalent about Wild Beasts, and that this gig didn’t entirely cure that.  Some of their songs I absolutely love, a couple are just a little too weird, and a couple don’t quite light the fireworks.  For the most part though, I really like them, and this performance generally cemented that impression.

Interviewing them beforehand for Fresh Air Radio was interesting too.  Apart from the fact that they came across as incredibly nice, down to earth guys, it was interesting to hear about the emotional state which led to some of the wilder aspects of their music.  Originating in the bustling metropolis of Kendal*, they decided to make the move to Leeds specifically to take a chance on their music careers.

Consequently, according to the band, a lot of the desperation in the howls and yelps on Limbo Panto was just that: a shrill proclamation of their existence.  The risk they took to arrive in a new city and try to make themselves heard in an already bustling music scene drove them to extremes, and you can hear it in the album, which has a kind of manic, dark energy to it.  Follow up, Two Dancers, is mellower and less ragged, with the band now achieving consistent recognition and admitting to consciously taking it a little easier on their audience.

Nevertheless, the transition from being a band who had to shout just to be heard to a band enthusiastically pimped by the NME and one who are now as cavalierly dismissed as being good as they were previously just cavalierly dismissed has been a little weird for them.  They have only just taken the next big risk: that of becoming full-time musicians.  This is a terrifying time for any band, because it’s a circular dilemma. The only way to become full-time musicians is to take the chance and just do it, because without devoting that kind of time and energy to it, you can’t make it work well enough to justify the decision in the first place.  And even then it might not work.  But basically the only way is to just do it and take the chance and in the current music industry, where no-one really knows where the money is coming from, that’s a big risk – something of which the band are acutely aware.

I can’t really tell whether that newfound confidence which they describe as being present on the album has transmitted in any way to their live performance.  They do strut confidently on stage, but the fourth wall is generally left intact.  Ben talks to the crowd occasionally and a little uncomfortably but Hayden, chatty, thoughtful and sincere during the interview, tends to stay hidden behind a wall of hair.  He has already admitted that he finds the recent increase in demand for live acoustic sessions to be a rather trying because it is a little too personal, and a little too unforgiving, when he would rather keep a little distance between the performer and the person.

On stage you can see that quite clearly, although they aren’t as theatrical or as flamboyant as you might expect.  In fact they’re a pretty straighforward four-piece: drums, bass and two guitars with a bit of keyboard thrown in from time to time, when called for.  The real difference comes with the math-rock flavoured drumming, the simple but brilliant guitar riffs and the interplay between the two lead vocalists.

As my gig companion Morgan said, it’s weird to see a group switch lead singer mid-set, because it fundamentally changes what you perceive to be the character of the band.  I suppose we tend to project a lot of the musical emotion onto the singer, and having to shift that to someone else after three songs is quite strange.  Having said that, the interplay between Ben and Hayden’s voices is amazing, and is just about my favourite aspect of their music.  One is wild and pleading, the other more vulnerable and sympathetic and that seems to be the dynamic of the music itself.  Wild Beasts are simultaneously fractious and vulnerable, and that contradiction is probably what I find so engaging about them, despite the fact that I don’t love every song they’ve ever written.

Even during this set, which I really enjoyed, there were songs I found to be a little too full-on.  Particularly with their early stuff I can find the songs getting away from me a little when the theatricality is at its strongest.  At the same time, and slightly paradoxically, there are times when I find the songs a little bland – where the twin sparks of pop sensibility and innovative belligerence just fail to ignite something exciting and the song never quite gets off the ground.

So I come back to where I started: Wild Beasts have done a lot of brilliant songs, and the ‘one hand giveth while the other taketh away’ dynamic is something I find really exciting, but there are definitely times when I don’t really connect, for various reasons.  An intriguing band though, and a really good gig.

Wild Beasts – All the King’s Men

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Wild Beasts – We Still Got the Taste Dancin’ on our Tongues

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from Domino Records

*For anyone who doesn’t know Kendal, this description might not be entirely serious.

This weekend I am going to be publishing a mammoth post of Broken Records live videos from their Bedlam Theatre gig in March of this year.  The band suggested we get the cameras in and so we’ve got about ten songs, all with top notch audio mixed by Kas, their sound guy, and honestly, I think they look fucking incredible.  I know that’s a bit wanky to say, but in terms of the quality of material that’s been on this site, I think it’s a big step forward, and I am really pleased with how they turned out.  They also give you a really good idea of just why people love this band, and how immense they can be in a live setting, which can often be hard to get across.

Anyhow, at that gig, Jamie and I sat down and discussed some stuff after the show, and I’ve interspersed some of that footage with some teasers of the live stuff to make the above video.  It makes for a really nice ten minute inro to the band and the album and stuff like that, so have a watch, and I expect you all to be waited with bated breath for Sunday’s video extravaganza.

My favourite bit is when we’re discussing lyrics, and more specifically the ones to If Eilert Loevborg Wrote a Song, it Would Sound Like This, and Jamie says…  well, you’ll have to watch it and see, won’t you.

At this year’s amazing Homegame Festival, run by our DIY pals at the Fence Collective (who have been incredibly helpful in the start up of Song, by Toad Records), I had the chance for a bit of an interview with Scottish indie hero Malcolm Middleton.

Neil from Meursault, who is a longstanding fan, conducted most of the interview itself, and we teamed up with Andy from the new Edinburgh live session showcase Off the Beaten Tracks, who shot a couple of session videos at the same time.  You’ll have to go to their site to see the session videos, but it’s well worth the visit as they have stuff from Team Turnip and Come On Gang already up, with Slow Club, Meursault, Randan Discotheque and, I think, Found all to be added in the coming weeks.

The interview itself was really nice, as can be seen in the video above.  Malcolm himself has a reputation for being a miserable bastard, and I have to confess that made me a little apprehensive about talking to him.  I’m still new to interviewing people and, whilst it’s piss-easy when things are going well, turning things around when they are going badly is something of a skill, and one which I am yet to come anything close to mastering. Read the rest of this entry »

[I wrote this article for the good folks at The Skinny, who were kind enough to give me the opportunity in the first place.  Song, by Toad does not, yet, have enough pull to swing interviews with the likes of Jason Lytle, so I am very grateful for the chance, and a big thanks to Milo from Products of a Gaseous Brain, who suggested me in the first place.]

When Grandaddy dissolved in 2005, their lead singer disappeared to the mountains in Montana, essentially turning his back on the industry to reinvigorate his relationship with music. Jason Lytle sits down with Matthew Young to explain how he found the road back.

King Creosote didn’t just vanish for ten years in between the fall of the Khartoum Heroes and the release of his first album on Domino Records. Micah P. Hinson wasn’t saved from self-destruction by the redemptive power of music. And Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle didn’t just run away to the wilderness to live in a cave for three years after the demise of one of the most successful indie bands of recent memory.

This is the vague story that percolated through to my mind when, after more than ten years of what any independent band would consider wild success, Grandaddy finally imploded. Lytle moved out to Montana and made a clean break ostensibly, it seemed, to retire. But like Hinson and Anderson before him, Lytle seems to bristle slightly when faced with the simplistic version of his own life story. Read the rest of this entry »

One thing everyone knows about Micah P. Hinson is the fairytale story of his fall and rise from the depths of a drug related incarceration after falling in with the wrong woman, to the valedictory release of his beautiful debut album Micah P. HInson & the Gospel of Progress back in 2004. He was saved by the music, we tell ourselves, fitting the whole thing neatly into a nice, Meg Ryan-friendly narrative that fits the kind of one-dimensional storytelling to which we are becoming increasingly adherent.

I myself had pretty much that basic story in my head when I met him at the End of the Road Festival, in September 2008. Fortunately, before I could stray too far down a path that seems to quite irritate him, Micah himself decided to make sure I knew that was bollocks from the beginning. “The music for me wasn’t like a saviour to pull me out of the dark spaces” he told me early on, after explaining that the narrative in most people’s heads is a pretty superficial charicature of years of his life, the actual story much less neat and tidy than that.

“Even on the new album [Micah. P Hinson & the Red Empire Orchestra] there’s songs, like Keep Having These Dreams that I wrote when I was 19 or something. There’s some other songs on the record that are quite old. On Opera Circuit there are some other songs that are pretty damn old that didn’t come from that exact time. By the time I recorded the Gospel of Progress record I had a lot more than just a couple of dozen songs. By that point I’d been recording songs for eight years. Not sending out demos or talking to labels of any of that shit, but I had a four track and then I moved up to having a computer. By the time I had the Gospel of Progress I probably had five hundred songs maybe, I mean a shitload of songs, and so the Gospel of Progress was when we went back through all of those tunes and decided what the best ones were and that’s what made up the Gospel.

“So the Gospel didn’t come out of a certain time in my life, it wasn’t like there was a fall and there was this rise and all these songs came out, it was nothing like that. And even getting signed to a record label, from the time I lived in the hotel and I was writing songs, and you know my life had fallen apart, and I was bankrupt and all of that shit, to the time that I actually got signed by a record label like at least three or four years had passed between those points.” Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago I interviewed Monkey Swallows the Universe, a gorgeous pop band shortly to be going on “indefinite hiatus”. This was a bizarre turn of events for almost every fan because their second album The Casket Letters had recently broken pretty significant ground for the band, helped particularly by a plug on Gorilla vs. Bear, according to the band. They seemed to be on the way up, their audience was rapidly expanding, and people seemed to be getting really excited about them. They seemed, in short, on the up.

The indefinite hiatus came as something of a shock, and so I thought I might have a try at interviewing them before the Edinburgh date of their farewell tour. I was curious to ask about the past, what had caused the split and things like that, but if they didn’t want to talk about that then I was equally happy to discuss their plans for the future. What I got was interesting, funereal, and if the interview had been a professional assignment, something of a disaster.

The first question I asked was whether or not I was allowed to ask about why they were going on hiatus or whether they’d rather I just ignored it and concentrated on the future.

“Yeah, why are we going on hiatus? We’d all like to know that.” was the only response I got. There was an uncomfortable silence, into which Natalie Johnson, the lead singer, inserted some platitudes taken straight from the world of professional football when a manager’s contract is terminated by ‘mutual consent’: not permanent… still good friends… just exploring some different things… the usual way of making it obvious that the different parties to the agreement might well give some very, very different answers to the ones they were all presenting to the public, but that that was all the answer we were going to get.

Okay, so the future, then. I tried that one, but was met with the same sort of stony, glum, painfully awkward silence. No-one, it seemed, had any plans. And then it really struck me what sort of a situation everyone in the room was in. A guitarist without a band is really nothing at all. Everyone had just gone from being part of a much-loved, upwardly mobile indie band with modest but respectable ambitions and a healthy chance of achieving them to the equivalent of the bartender who calls himself an actor. A band is something. A musician, not so much.

Basically, it takes an incredibly long time and an awful lot of energy to build up momentum in the music industry, and that was now all pretty much for nothing. It’s like a relationship – part of the horror of breaking up is not just the personal loss, but the aching weariness of having to go through all that again. The only person who had any sort of direction for the future seemed to be lead singer Natalie Johnson, who already by this stage had a MySpace page with a couple of good songs up and at least half an idea of what was going to happen next. Now it is easy to suggest that the band split because she wanted a solo career and no-one else really had any say in the decision whatsoever, but I really have no idea. Based on the information I have, which is minimal, it seems plausible, but then so does almost any other hypothesis you could put forward.

Her solo career seems to be in good shape though, because she’s back working with the eminently splendid indie label Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation, after the equally excellent Loose Music (think Felice Brothers, Willard Grant Conspiracy, The Handsome Family, The Ralfe Band) released The Casket Letters. Her first single is now out, it’s called Dirty Rotten Soul, and it’s really very good indeed. There’s a little more country in the mix than in MStU stuff, but the lovely voice is intact, as is the knack for a sweet melody. The b-side, Mexico, isn’t quite as arresting for me because it doesn’t fell all that distinctive, despite its prettiness. The two bonus demo songs on the CD are lovely though, so it seems that something good might at least come out of the demise of such a good band.

It was a shame though, because I loved their music. At the end of the gig, as an unusually emotional Edinburgh crowd asked for an encore I suggested Chicken Fat Waltz, and the same band member who wanted to know the reason for the hiatus just started playing the song without waiting for an answer from his lead singer. I don’t know, I could so easily be making a mountain out of a molehill, but it seemed just a little symptomatic of the unhappy atmosphere in the dressing room before the show. Who really knows though. I certainly don’t, but it was a weird, weird interview.

Nat Johnson – Heart of Clay (Demo)
Nat Johnson – All This
Monkey Swallows the Universe – The Chicken Fat Waltz
Monkey Swallows the Universe – Sheffield Shanty

Nat Johnson’s Website | Buy the single from Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation

“I don’t think we’ll ever feel cool.” reckons David Tatersall of the Wave Pictures, despite their being recently signed to one of the hippest labels around: Moshi Moshi. Nevertheless, they’ve just played the main stage at the End of the Road Festival and had people bellowing requests at them left, right and centre. So cool, maybe not, but something is certainly bubbling away in the land of the Wave Pictures. It was the same last year at their show in the considerably smaller venue, The Local. They could have virtually played a whole show of requests.

“That was really strange,” admits David, “and again today, I don’t know how they get this crowd, they do such a good job. For all our friends as well, all our friends play bigger gigs here. Like Darren Hayman, say, and Jeff Lewis, and I don’t know where they all come from because most of the time we play in bars and nobody knows us and every gig is their first time hearing it. It does seem like End of the Road really know what they’re doing and really get an audience that’s into it. Like last year in the tent we had no idea what happened. There was lots of people and they knew songs from CD-Rs that I’d forgotten that we’d done, and it was really, really fun. These are CD-Rs that maybe 50 people in the country have, maybe 100 people at most, but it seemed like everyone who had them was there.”

The video is taken from our interview, and cut in with some footage of their live performance. The sound for the live show is appalling because the sound system overwhelmed the mics on our wee camera, but we’ve learned our lesson and won’t make that mistake again. The wavering crackle of their early CD-R recordings is replaced by a more strident, polished sound on stage. Simply put, they make a racket.

I think I got into The Wave Pictures, about a year ago or so, at the very end of their status as a CD-R band. I obviously caught something of a wave of interest, because within a month or two of my noticing them they had been signed to Moshi Moshi, and vinyl singles and shiny new albums were being discussed. I couldn’t help but wonder exactly what it was that finally made a band that had actually been around for a while seem so suddenly palatable to a record label. Partly, it must be said, it’s unfair to blame labels for not signing a band they probably just hadn’t heard. Read the rest of this entry »

It can be a little difficult to interview a band in the absence of the main songwriter, so certain questions about the slightly arcane, grotesque nature of the subject matter can’t really be put. Other rather brilliant ones can, though.

Like how on Earth the band ended up guerilla gigging the lines for other people’s shows early in their days. Apparently they’d just rock up to group of people queueing to get into a gig and play for them, and when I ask them about it they just shrug it off.

“We’d been practising for a while and we didn’t have any shows booked, so we thought ‘we wish we were playing this show’ so we would crash the show. And when there’s tons of people standing in line for a show, they’re already there for music and you can see what kind of a response you would get.”

I can’t quite imagine that sort of habit working very well in the drizzle of Scotland, but The Builders & the Butchers seems to have a pretty relaxed attitude to what constitutes a performance. The fourth wall barely seems to be there at all.

“We ended up playing on the street a lot in downtown Portland. Mostly just practising, we were just kind of playing, seeing what would happen with it.” Read the rest of this entry »