[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

Richmond Fontaine – The Boyfriends

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.

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

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.

My fears turned out to be silly, fortunately, as whilst he did come across as very shy and reserved, Malcolm was enormously cooperative and helpful.  He genuinely did seem like an incredibly nice man, and though I’m sure he must have a difficult side, as we all do, there was no sign of it at Homegame.

He was very frank as well, saying that he’d noticed a slight change in the atmosphere from the first Homegames, something he attributed to the large number of ‘industry’ people who were now in attendance – A&R scouts looking for the next big thing, apparently.

There is definitely a danger, as the festival becomes more popular and well-known, that some of its best characteristics will be eroded.  It’s a holiday for the musicians at the moment, but this year the Guardian (here too, and pics) and the BBC were both present, as well as both ourselves, and DC from The Waiting Room.  Much more of this and the festival is in slight danger of becoming just another working lunch for musicians, which might reduce their generally drunken and carefree mingling, which is one of the highlights of Homegame.  From Malcolm’s reaction to this suggestion, I infer that whilst it isn’t a problem at the moment, he is aware that it might become one in future.  Nothing to worry about just yet though.

I also learned a little more about the benefits of being an experienced interviewer, as well.  People like Malcolm Middleton are experienced interviewees, and therefore generous with chat and able to keep an interview rolling.  He’s still a fairly introverted man however, and I definitely feel that it might be my third or fourth interview with the guy before I start to get to the stage where I can confidently ask him more intrusive questions without feeling like I’m being offensive, and where he might trust me enough to actually answer them.  Virtually all musicians have an element of this, and in as much as any arse can write a blog and get access enough to publish interviews like this one, I am gaining more and more respect for the really good interviewers every time I stumble through one myself.

Malcolm Middleton – We’re All Going to Die

Malcolm Middleton – The Devil & the Angel

And here are a the rest of the live videos, all of which can be found either on the Song, by Toad Vimeo page (recommended) or YouTube page (lower quality).

[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.

He didn’t, of course, just vanish. “I did a lot of collaborative stuff, a lot of back seat things. I contributed a lot to M. Ward. The Dangermouse and Sparklehorse record – I’ve got a couple of songs on there. I’ve done some commercial stuff, some remixes of old songs. I kept the studio moving, and kept myself busy which is a good thing, in between spending a lot of time outdoors and just enough time indoors to pay the bills.

“I wasn’t sitting trying to find myself under the guide of some guru in India” he says, rather insistently, “I wasn’t completely removed, but I was definitely on the backburner. I was like ‘how do I fit into all this?’”

How indeed. Even at the height of Grandaddy’s fame, he says, when they were playing all the big shows like Letterman and so on it was “like we snuck in the back door. It was like Revenge of the Nerds.”

In interview, Lytle doesn’t really talk much about music, either- at least not directly. And that’s a good thing, because it’s when you hear him talk about his life now that you start to get some sort of feeling for why Grandaddy fell apart.

“I moved to this town in Montana to be surrounded by mountains, basically. I’ve always read about expeditions and mountaineers and the outdoors, and that’s what fascinates me. I don’t read memoires of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.”
“I was always reading outdoor magazines, and it’s a big part of my life, actually to the point that I avoid it because it’s not very rock ‘n’ roll, it’s like my own personal, secret thing.  In the grand scheme of things it’s my balance. I can easily go on some four hour nature hike and listen to Kaiser Chiefs and Neon Neon on my iPod and it makes no sense with my surrounding environment, but somehow I’m making my own sense, and then I go home and work on music.”

So contrary to what tends to be the received wisdom, Lytle wasn’t turning his back on music at all. He was simply, it appears, turning his back on what his life had become in order to actually repair his relationship with music   “I like it when I can put a cap on things,” he muses. “In big cities with too many stimuli I can’t put a cap on it and I start blowing fuses.”

During our conversation Lytle takes a long time to formulate his sentences; the pauses are occasionally so long that I start talking again, only to realise that I’m actually interrupting. I think of someone that thoughtful and deliberate, and I think of the relentlessly intrusive side of being a famous musician, and the two simply do not go together, and this is where I start to understand.

“In my personal life I’m very on top of my own finances; I love tools, I love accountability. I didn’t get into this line of work to escape work. At some point you need a little help, but the people I end up really looking up to never got into this line of work so that eventually all they do is go to cocktail parties, get flown around and hang out in Monaco. I love getting my boots dirty.”
This comes back once again to the industry itself. To support the juggernaut that it has become, you end up with an amazing system of hangers on circling around the single essential body: the band.

“My friend has a dad who is a car mechanic, and there’s always three or four guys standing around, and one guy’s doing the work and all these other guys are just standing around the cracker barrel telling stories, and I’m just not comfortable with that. And for some reason the music industry breeds it, people just like to stand around and talk shit about stuff. I just want to do good work, and I get in, and I can network to a degree, and then I’m out. Later.”

At the time of this interview Lytle’s band has just returned from a stint at South by South West in Austin, Texas. I wonder how he took the sheer frenzy of the festival, especially taking into account that he seems like a man who has taken a long time and a lot of thought to push the music industry to a safe distance. But instead of just flying in, playing the shows, and flying out again, he and the band took four days to drive from Montana to Texas. They listened to books on CD and stayed at shitty motels. They found a few skate parks along the way and stopped to go skateboarding.

Skateboarding figures pretty heavily in Lytle’s life. He reckons that Grandaddy got out of the music biz at the right time, because just as they did, the whole industry seemed to descend into chaos, something he compares to skateboarding:

“If anything, these are trying times but in a good way. I saw this with skateboarding. Skateboarding has seen three or four big public ‘Hey, skateboarding!’ times where it’s trendy again. I’ve seen big peaks and valleys so it’s easy for me to fall back on the skateboarding thing and see the same thing going on with music as well. A perfect example is Tony Hawke: he has probably seen three of these big peaks, and he remained credible throughout all of it; he never lost his head.”

It’s when he talks like this that I remember that I’ve been listening to Jason Lytle’s music for over ten years now. And it’s when I think about just how much has happened to me in those ten years that it becomes really obvious why musicians find it so irritating to hear people trot out the two-sentence version of their biographies: they don’t even begin to tell the story.

And this is particularly true of someone like Jason Lytle, who isn’t a ‘rock star’ and who doesn’t seem to define himself by what record label he’s signed to or how many albums he’s sold or even, really, by his success. Consequently, we weren’t really talking about the break-up of a successful band and the subsequent re-emergence of the lead singer, we were talking about the last fifteen years of someone’s life.

Jason Lytle – Birds Encouraged Him (Live at Maps)

Jason Lytle – On a Piece of Wood I Go (Demo)

Grandaddy – Lava Kiss

Website | More mp3s | Yours Truly, the Commuter on Amazon

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.”

So like many of us I was labouring under a slightly mistaken impression that the period in his life that he spent with the model girlfriend he would later come to call the Black Widow, and whose high living and drug habits apparently led to his eventual arrest and incarceration, in turn gave rise to a burst of cathartic creativity. That doesn’t mean that his earlier, more turbulent years were not nevertheless an incredibly fertile period in his songwriting life.

“I don’t write as much as I used to. I write differently. I spend more time on the piano, trying to write songs on there and get my skills better that way. But as far as sitting down and trying to write words and tunes, at the moment I feel quite bored with it, and I think that’s why I’m trying to move onto the piano and spark life into something else. But it seems natural to take the new songs and take the old songs and make them all kind of fit in because in the end the songwriting doesn’t change too drastically. And I find it really rad to take out an album that I made when I was fourteen or whatever and listen to that songs and think what could that turn into, what could I do with that, and just revamp it.

“It’s a very tedious thing with me picking out the songs that I’m gonna use and the order that they’re going to be in, it’s a real pain in the ass. In the end I think the songs actually kind of write themselves. We’ll start off with something I think might be my favourite song on the album, but once we get done recording it it’s the worst thing that we’ve done, so I kind of just set that aside. So I think songs have to grow, and you kind of have to let them be, let them use you.”

Given that he seems to both connect very viscerally with his music and yet to also mix the songs of a nineteen year old boy with the songs of a married man in his late twenties, I can’t help but wonder that it might be a little difficult to pick up the emotions of ten years ago and regenerate them truthfully enough to create the kind of simmering rage you see when he performs. But it seems that he doesn’t so much recreate the old emotions as continue to fit those old thoughts into a new framework.

“I guess the main songs on this album that I brought from the old days were songs that I’d written to an imaginary human being. Especially I Keep Having These Dreams, I really really dig that song. Songs like those, Dying Alone, Keep Having These Dreams, they’re tunes that I don’t think held any truth when I was younger, when I wrote them. They weren’t written for anybody, I hadn’t written them for anyone, especially I Keep Having These Dreams. So when she came into my life and I had this song, it kind of clicked. It’s like ‘okay, that was the reason why you wrote that at fifteen years old is because twelve years later you’re going to meet a human being, and that’s going to mean something to you.’”

“Dying Alone, that song came because she went to school under my father – he was her professor – and we met one time at my folks’ house. And I’d just gone through surgery and that stuff, and I met her and I went back to my apartment, and it was hard because I was with somebody else at the time, and sitting on my front porch writing this tune about somebody else felt really really strange. But I had such a draw to her from that very first moment – I know it sounds cliched and Shakespearean and bullshit – but it really did happen that way. And I felt like a creep. I remember finishing that song thinking that’s really weird, you shouldn’t write a song like that – like I don’t want to die without you, basically – for a stranger. But fuckin’ a, man, we got married and I’m not a creep anymore.”

The odd thing about his relationship with Ashely is of course the open and public nature of it. She is the lady in the photos on his album cover, she plays in his band, she is the open subject of many of the songs on his album, if not originally, by the process of reinterpretation and re-imagining of older material. He is more open in his songs than almost anyone I can think of, and now his wife is included in this unguarded exposition. It comes with the territory to a large degree – given the nature of his songs, she knew that in marrying him she must in some way be offering her own privacy up to his audience in the same way that Hinson himself does. Marry someone whose life is out in the open and, suddenly, so is yours.

“I prefer it that way, as to being a different person. I’d hate if he was taking pictures of somebody else, I’d much rather it be me. I mean it’s still his songs and his project and his pictures and things like that.” she explains, “I don’t know how that would not be true for anyone marrying a musician.”

Hinson himself explains her involvement with a near-evangelical fervour:

“We have an amazing friend and he was with his girlfriend for five years and she called herself the tour widow. The guy was out on tour so much that what was the point of the relationship, and they split up. It’s a rough time, fucking five years, that’s not a short amount of time when you’re giving your soul to another person. I guess we have a very good understanding of the fact that we’re follow my dreams. You know, she has her own aspirations, she’s a very smart individual, she has her own things she wants to accomplish and I want to utilise the music and be able to take the time off that she can do what she needs to do, and for right now it’s imperative that we are together. It’s imperative.”

It may be a kind of open window into his personal life, but then even during the interview you can start to see how, for Micah at least, that kind of openness is possible. People put their wall, the point at which they demand privacy, in different places. He puts his quite low. He’s open and incredibly forthcoming, but the wall is still there in evidence, it’s just much further back than most people. Micah is experienced in giving interviews, he writes incredibly emotionally revealing songs, and yet his barrier is still evident when you talk to him.

It’s an odd juxtaposition because he gives a more passionate, revealing and informative interview than I could have hoped for.

“I would say I write pop music, to a certain degree. I think I have some songs that are very poppy, like We Don’t Have to be Lonesome, that’s just pop from a different era, pop form an era that actually meant something. Pop music now, like the Beyonces, and I guess Britney Spears, nobody gives a shit about her anymore, but a lot of those people they don’t do anything. All they are is an ugly face that is put on the front of a song that somebody else has written.

“And you look at people like that and you look at people like Patsy Cline, and yeah, she didn’t write her own songs, but she fucking meant it and you can hear that she meant it. I think that’s beautiful that you can take somebody else’s tune and make it sound so goddamn believable, it makes me ill listening to some of that stuff because it’s so fucking good. And I think that’s something that modern pop music has lost a little bit. We’re not talking about things that matter. We’re not talking about unrequited love, we’re talking about finger-banging and getting with chicks and ‘I’m going to do you in the club and you’re greasy’ and all this crap. I think that’s really sad, and I don’t listen to that shit, but I think it’s very disgraceful. I think music is much more holy than that.”

It’s another completely frank statement, full of sincerity and full of openness and yet still guarded in a slightly enigmatic way. Perhaps the last couple of questions in the interview, as per the last couple of songs in his set, bring us a little closer to something of an unguarded truth. And it’s one of the reasons I am glad I interviewed Micah P. Hinson. He was guarded, but never mean. He was open and talkative and he gave a lot. He wasn’t incautious, but neither was he insincere. Maybe one of the provisos for exposing so much of your inner life to the public is being more careful about not breaching the walls you do have.

But if I were to pinpoint the moment in the interview and the moment in his performance at which he allows us just a little glimpse into something about his life where he allows the control to slip just slightly it is right at the end, where he sings This Old Guitar by John Denver*. Your Dad is a sensitive subject for anyone, but when Micah starts talking about it a lot of the old protections seem to be a little relaxed. They may not be, but that’s the way it seems. He’s a cautious man, a sincere man, a generous interviewee and one of the best musicians I have ever had the pleasure of hearing.

“This Old Guitar by John Denver, almost every night I play that. And the main point of that, I always tell people as well, that the main point of that song isn’t for those people, it’s for my father. If people know anything about me, about my sordid past and stuff, I clearly didn’t get on very well with my father. I think we were so close it kind of tore us apart at times, and the only thing that was solid in that relationship from a very young age was always John Denver. I could hate my father, but if he picked up a guitar I’d get mine and we’d play some songs. Then I’d put down my guitar and flip him off and walk off, and there’s always been something special about that. Even though I’ve been a complete jackass through much of my life he’s always supported me.”

Photos from the show on the Toad Flickr page | Toad Vimeo Page

Micah P. Hinson – For Your Eyes
Micah P. Hinson – I Keep Havin’ These Dreams
Micah P. Hinson – Patience
John Denver – This Old Guitar

*He didn’t sing this at End of the Road, but it’s a regular set closer.

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.

“It’s really different. We’ve got friends who are on labels, they got on labels very quickly, before they’d done a lot of stuff and it’s a really different frame of mind – sometimes they’ll have to write songs to fill out a debut album. We already had been a band who was completely left alone by the world and we never were interviewed, like this, and no-one was all that interested apart from a few friends and we just did shows and sold CD-Rs at shows. So we already were kind of sure of ourselves. So then it’s just different dealing with the speed of labels, how long they want to take on everything. It has its advantages. The disadvantage is that no-one really hears what you’ve done.”

David’s explanation is sensible enough. Even a label as tiny and embryonic as Song, by Toad Records has a lot of bands getting in touch, so the idea of a random CD-R slipping through the net is all too plausible. This impression is reinforced by his explanation of how things started to change after the release of Sophie, their 6th album.

“Even Sophie was put out by a label, a really small label [Smoking Gun], but just putting it out through somebody else rather than it just coming from us, even that made a bit of a difference. It got to more places, and people like you heard it, and we got more reviews and that’s why Moshi heard us and Moshi obviously can get the word out more.

“It is hard to understand because when I’m listening to bands I never think of all the intermediary stages, you know. Like when I watched Pavement when I was 15 I just assumed that Pavement played loads of gigs in their home town, built up a fan base, travelled a bit built up a bigger fan base and eventually they’re playing at a festival in Reading. The truth is probably two businessmen worked Pavement’s image and those guys sat around.”

If they sound intentionally disingenuous, then they shouldn’t. I’ve never met such a non-rockstarry bunch of lads in my life. Not that I’ve met a lot of rock stars obviously, but the idea of these guys turning into high-maintenance primadonnas seems about as unlikely as I can possibly imagine. Even simple things, like asking them about being part of a larger scene in London – witness their appearance on Welcome to Our TV Show, for example – doesn’t bring out the slightest amount of showboating or slyly inferring any sort of hip scenester behaviour; quite the opposite in fact:

“Well that is the kind of atmosphere they want to create for their TV show, like when you used to watch TGI Friday and the settings would make it seem like everyone in the bar was mates. That’s kind of what Jeremy Warmsley’s going for on that. And he does a good job, I don’t mean to be disparaging, but he’s not a mate. He’s a nice bloke, I don’t want to say anything mean about him, he’s very nice, but we don’t hang out with Jeremy Warmsley, we’ve met him like twice. That was the first time we met Hot Club Paris. We were in a roomful of strangers and we sat in a corner and ate all the free food, and yeah, it was a nice day, a nice day. Good people, all good people, I don’t want to diss anyone.”

This is another of the opportunities that working with Moshi Moshi has opened up for them, so they may not have silver jumpsuits in their immediate futures, but they definitely starting to witness a change in how they are going about things. Not least, their recordings have slightly evolved from that gorgeous lo-fi quality, and sound a lot more polished these days. For the most part I think this is only partially successful. I loved the less-polished aethetic of their first albums, but then there are songs which I like better on the new recordings, with Leave the Scene Behind being the most obvious example.

“You get more freedom in the studio to try and do different stuff.” is Franic’s take on it. “When you’re recording on a tape machine you just do it really quickly and you can’t mess around with it too much because you’ve just got two or four tracks, so you get stuff done really quickly.”

He adds: “The [new] Berlin album is slightly different sounding, similar to the home recordings.”

I would have assumed that a band like this would have embraced the new boom in DIY methodology, but David isn’t anything like as keen as I would have expected, especially for a band who have recorded the vast majority of their own material.

“It’s just getting worse I think, with computer recording. It’s easier in a way, but it’s harder to get a good sound than when you’re restricted on a four-track. Most four-track recordings of anyone just sound good, like tape just had a good sound.”

Franic chips in: “We just recorded some Bruce Springsteen covers, and Dave’s old cassette deck has two microphone inputs. Left and right, and that was really good. Two mics and you stand in the bedroom and you record a bit of this and that. You know if you need a bit of mandolin now you walk closer or further away, and if Dave’s singing needs to be louder he takes a step forward.”

“It’s how everything was be recorded for years and years.” David continues. “If you had like a box set of Billie Holiday, there’s like a dozen of them and they recorded with two mics, it’s just what people used to do and it’s really fun. Instead of moving a little controller up and down you’re moving backwards and forwards yourself.

“That’s something about studios in general is that they kind of limit everything. The distance between the quietest thing and the loudest thing is incredibly limited when you’re studio recording as opposed to a live show or a home recording, and it does really change the atmosphere.”

“The main thing with us,” he continues, “is that none of that side of it is all that considered. We never really thought about having a progression. I guess the thing that no-one knows about us is that the first thing we ever did was go in a studio. The first thing. We didn’t know about home recording, so the first thing we did as a new band is what all bands do, which is go and get some random guy to make us a demo and it sucked. So then we tried to record ourselves at home, because my sister’s boyfriend at the time had a four-track.”

It seems reasonable to suggest that the long friendship between Franic and David is partially responsible for their biblical degree of level-headedness. It’s been well documented that they grew up in the same village, within about a hundred yards of one another, although they only started playing together at about the age of fifteen, about eight years after David started playing the guitar.

Drummer Johnny Helm joined the band somewhat later, by which time they already had a sound and had written plenty of the songs still featured today. His rendition of the superlative Now You Are Pregnant was terrific at End of the Road. Given it sings about the loving “the view out of my Glasgow window” I am bit confused though, because David went to university in Glasgow, while Johnny and Franic met whilst studying in Cardiff.

“On all the recordings of it I’m singing it” explains David. “Just because it was a song that people liked to hear, and we’d often come off stage and people would ask ‘why didn’t you play Now You Are Pregnant?’ And the truth is that for a band like us you really can’t play the same song too many times because you end up going through the motions. I ended up with Now You Are Pregnant where I was forgetting the words because I’d be singing and not enjoying it all because I’d sung it so many times.

“Not because it’s not a good song, but the thing about bands and songwriters that’s different from fans is that the person who’s writing the songs likes everything that they’ve written equally – and dislikes them all equally. I don’t think any of my songs are better than any of the others, they’re all as good as I could do, for what that’s worth. I never tried to do something bad. And I was singing Now You Are Pregnant again and again and feeling bad for all the other songs. And because people wanted to hear it and because Johnny knew all the words because it’s a song that he liked and we played a lot, we started thinking that’s a good, fun thing to do, would be to have Johnny sing it, but that’s only the fourth time we’ve done it.”

It’s just such a sensible, plain vanilla story, and seeing as I don’t have a natural end to this interview, I think I might just end on David Tatersall’s explanation of their occasionally rather tortured lyrics. Just read this – they’re so fucking normal. Reassuring isn’t it.

“The guys you’ve got to worry about are the guys who sing really happy music. Read the story of the Beach Boys, it’s a tale of misery and woe. Read the story of John Lee Hooker, where every night he just sings the blues; every night he comes off stage feeling good. He’s got his suit and his sunglasses on and he’s got some whiskey and he’s happy – he’s sung his blues. That’s the truth of music. The sad ones are the happy bands, that’s who you’ve got to watch out for.”

Toad Vimeo Page | Wave Pictures Photos on Flickr

The Wave Pictures – Leave the Scene Behind (Old Version)
The Wave Pictures – Leave the Scene Behind (New Version)
The Wave Pictures – Long Island
The Wave Pictures – Now You Are Pregnant

Website | More mp3s | Buy Wave Pictures music direct from the band

Again, the sound on these things is appalling, so feel free to watch them anyway, but you have been warned. Hopefully it won’t happen again.

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.”

This kind of approach is probably related to the nature of their live shows, which are supposed to be raucous as hell. The footage here is dubious at best, and is from a gig they played as a support band at Portland Zoo. The stage was pretty big and the sound turned down far too quiet, so between that and the distance from the crowd it was impossible to really gauge anything much about them as a live act. The reports I have from regular readers Campfires & Battlefields and DC are really positive, as is this from Linda over at Speed of Dark. I am at once delighted to have had the chance to see them during our brief stay, and a little bit gutted that it wasn’t somewhere more suitable.

Quite how they made it from there to being named the best new band in Portland by Willamette Week seems a little higgledy-piggledy at best. Bladen County Records are one of the nicest, friendliest labels in the industry, but it is only recently that Matt has started to make that extra step to being a little bit more ambitious, both for himself and for the bands he works with.

“The label’s grown up so much since these guys started.” he says. “They were the first real effort, you know, for us to really say shit, here’s a good album let’s get it out there. We had no resources – nada – we grew up together in a lot of ways. I knew a lot of people so I introduced these guys to the right people and a lot of people fell in love with their music. A lot of things came together like that. It’s a small town with a lot of resources – pretty much anything you need to make things happen in music you can find here.”

I find myself reminded of Alela Diane, and her slow route from tiny runs of hand-made self-releases, to a deal with another Portland label, Holocene, from there to an equally small label here in the UK, Names Records, and eventually to Fargo for European distribution. She was essentially touring the same album for about five years, and there’s something a little similar about the Builders’ steady progress from the streets to the clubs of Portland and now beyond, to the rest of the nation.

“We’ve retired a lot of songs. Right now we’re playing a lot of new stuff. We recorded a new album recently, but we’re not going to release it before Spring. We’ve written some new songs since that, there’s lots of new stuff.”

Although, of course, the people in DC have only just recently heard the old ones, so the news ones are somewhat caught in limbo until the process of getting the name out there is a little more complete. Reigning in artistic energy is a dangerous thing though – you don’t want to smother it altogether.

Lead singer and main songwriter Ryan Sollee might be a little more focussed, and Matt Brown from Bladen County might have suddenly decided that it might be time to step things up a notch, but the guys in the band still seem able to take it pretty easy. Portland is such a musical town that more or less everyone has a couple of side-projects and other bands which they help out.

I wonder if there comes a point at which you realise that one of these four or five bands in which you might be involved suddenly and obviously becomes one that is going places. Can you tell that one is a cut above the others and might stand a genuine chance of going places? The consensus is that you can’t really, and there is no real desire shown to give up the side projects, although Harvey, the banjo player, confesses that he has somehow ended up giving up all his extra-curricular projects.

So by hook or by crook the Builders & the Butchers might end up being famous. I bloody well hope so, because this chatter may be amiable and harmless enough, but their music has genuine purpose and venom. A friend and I were recently discussing that what the modern folk revivial lacked, for all its fey obscurantism and prettiness, was someone with the bite and snarl of The Pogues. Then I played him this. Or alternatively you could just read this quote from Campfires & Battlefields from the end of his email to me after seeing their show in DC: “I said hello to Ryan for you after the gig, and he expressed much love for all things Toad. He signed my CD and tee shirt. I’m almost 40 fucking years old and there I was grinning like a kid while a rock star signed my tee shirt for chrissakes.”

The Builders & the Butchers – Black Dresses
The Builders & the Butchers – When it Rains

MySpace | More mp3s | Buy from Bladen County Records