You just finished your fourth album, but what part of you is still that Louisiana pre-teenager listening to Krokus?
You know, right now it is all of me. I don’t care about flutes and harmony right now. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve spent the last sixteen years becoming great at arranging all this beautiful stuff that I love, but right now I can’t muster up. . . .Well, I don’t care about it. I haven’t listened to a 1960s record in two years. I don’t care about that sort of fancypants, flowery psychedelia right now. It’s not that I don’t love it, and it’s not like I don’t relate to it, it’s just that right now there’s just something. . . . I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s September 11th. It was like, how can you be so obliviously happy when there’s terrible shit going on? It’s a typical feeling, I’m not trying to be like, oh, I’m so deep or something. There are a lot of things that have been different. I’ve had a baby. There’s just a lot of stuff that is different and right now it’s hard for me to keep interested in what I was interested in before. I think maybe part of it is that I am really obsessed with R&B. Some of that spilled over, and quite a large chunk of our last record was influenced by that.
The whole thing about R&B is the soul and passion of it. It got discouraging to me, because as a producer and an arranger, I can arrange a song that sounds like “Use Me Up,” by Bill Withers, one of my favorite songs, but there’s this soul and passion I cannot get on there. I am not an R&B singer. I love this music so much and what became important to me was not even creating something that was blissful and sophisticated but creating something that is ecstatic. Ecstatic and wild, you know what I mean? And I felt that the answer was to try to make R&B songs, but that’s not what’s true to my upbringing or my musical roots, even though I love that. What R&B taught me is that what is true to being a rock ’n’ roll band is to be just a rock ’n’ roll band, so instead of trying to flower it up and dress it up, or paint over it with fancy colors, maybe it’s better to let the rust be its own color. I guess right now I’m at this point where all I care about is what I was like when I was fifteen. I don’t care about. . . . Right now I do not care about all the acid trips, I don’t care about the six-part harmony part that could have been on “Please” or whatever; it’s just like I want to use the simplest elements in the loudest possible way to make the shortest statement, then let that statement unfold. I always wanted to be like, you listen to this pop song and there’s all these layers going on, and it could take a thousand listenings, like reading Ulysses, it could take a thousand listenings to try to get the pop song. Good Vibrations to me is like Ulysses. You listen to it over and over and it takes you on this long trip in just a few minutes. In three minutes or something, it takes you on this whole trip, and it comes back to where it started. . . .
Michael Gira: The Sentinel Sounds of the Swans and Angels of Light
Portions originally published in Left of the Dial, no. 2.
There’s a somber poetry in Michael Gira that never seems quelled. His face looks like it is carved from the midsection of a ruined Greek statue, and with one look from his eagle eyes, I want to disappear into my bar stool. I can’t justify describing Swans music in these lines. It’s too disparate and unwieldy. When I was first married, we would turn the lights off and fall flat on the bed, letting the sounds of Lust for Life weave a spiderweb across the room in our 1886 building. The songs on the album were crippling and soft one moment, like an acoustic prayer whirring in the ear, then sonically unbearable the next, like an army had just pushed its tanks over your skull.
When describing Gira, the words “recalcitrant” and “standoffish” seem too mild, as silly as describing Ian Curtis from Joy Division as a candidate for Prozac studies. Perhaps it’s his zero tolerance for artsy fartsy lofty ideas, or the result of being on his own since age twelve—left with an alcoholic mother, living hand-to-mouth in Europe for a while with zero money and no friends, or being jailed for selling drugs in Israel at an age when most kids are failing geometry. When his songs later took hold in (post-Swans) Angels of Light, he evoked a carnival barker, snake conjurer, sallow-eyed healer, and vengeful cutthroat, all of them drifting towards one implacable core of desire and trouble, the twin engines of our lives.
You’ve asserted, “My mistake, always, has been to not be able to rein myself in, to learn when enough is enough. But I accept that flaw.” How have you learned to know when enough is enough? What kind of mistakes had to be made?
I STILL haven’t learned when enough is enough. I can never let go of something until I’ve strangled the last bit of blood out of it. I see that as a definite flaw. Oh well. . . .
Would you abide by Samuel Beckett’s idea to “fail again, fail better”?
Well, that sounds a bit lofty, but I guess so. I’ve only experienced a handful of moments in my life and work where I thought everything came together properly and made something bigger than the elements that comprised the structure of it.
In a Bob Bert interview you joked you had to put up Sheetrock for six years before making your first record, not to forget roofing, plumbing, working in a tool factory, parental alcoholism, dislocation, exile, jail, massive drug use, etc. It would be a cliché to say that you grew up fast. Yet, you are a totally different man now than in the vociferous early days of the Swans. What led you to the contentment, if we can call it that, of the last decade?
Well, yes, I was essentially on my own from the time I was twelve or so—I won’t go into this here—and that gave me a sense that since I’ve been able to survive, say, with zero money and no friends in a foreign country—that I could do anything. But that’s false, actually. Maybe I’ve learned there’s more to life than surviving the odds and would very much like the experience of joy, personal freedom, love, things like that. Still, I’m not saying I’ve reached that point! I still seem to manage to fuck up a good thing when it comes my way most of the time. If the idea didn’t repulse me so much, maybe I’d see a therapist. On the other hand, the idea of being “well adjusted” is somehow repugnant to me!
You used to read Genet, Celine, De Sade, Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism), and Jerzy Kozinski (Steps), noting, “I just wanted a methodical blunt language without metaphor. That’s how I wrote. The music just seemed to slow down and slow down; it seemed to become this pulse instead of this rocking thing.” Do those writers still imprint the music at all, or have others replaced them?
I return to those writers occasionally, but I’m a different person. The favorite book I’ve read in the last few years is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. That and anything by James Ellroy and Russell Banks. I kinda doubt they have any influence on what I write, though.
Speaking of influences, you asserted, “I didn’t want it to sound like any fucking punk band in any way, although there was a certain energy in, say, the Germs that I really liked,” yet have also stated, “I got involved in the nefarious activities of punk rock, so that ruined my life for about fifteen years.” Are you suggesting that seeing bands like X and the Screamers and moving to New York to catch the tail end of the No Wave movement actually sidetracked you for fifteen years?
I was just saying that I regretted getting involved in music in any way. What a horrible career choice, especially for me. I’ve developed a few now, but for most of my life and career I’ve had absolutely no social skills, and to make music you have to work with other people, from beginning to end, in most situations. So, I would have been better off personally to have remained a visual artist or a writer, where I could do the whole thing in solitude. But I’m addicted to the rush of sound, even now, so that’s how it is.
Touring early on, whether playing with Sonic Youth across the Midwest or ending up broke in London opening for the Fall, seemed rather disastrous and brutal. Even today, when you play to small audiences in the Southeast or large ones in Austin, is touring a kind of necessary evil for the sake of promotion or something to be relished?
There’s nothing in life I lov
e more than performing music when it all comes together, when you, as musicians, are just the vehicle, and something outside yourself is carrying you upwards. I suppose you’d say it’s a moment of self-actualization, sometimes for the performer and the audience mutually. But you can’t control it. In fact, if you try, you ruin it. I think I’ve come to the realization lately that I don’t really have much hand in writing the songs or producing the records, etc.—I’m just trying to uncover what’s already there.
After the series of 12-inches called Greed, Holy Money, Time Is Money, Bastard, I started incorporating other elements like early sampling, like the kick drum and the snare on Holy Money were a nail gun I got from work. [Things] slowly transmuted. It was just Jarboe and me working with simple means. A little piano, a little guitar, and samplers with strange sounds, and then we got ridiculous and got a string section for a few songs.
Changing directions is no easy task, so what paved the way—just an earnest desire to experiment with an acoustic guitar and samples, or something as far back as seeing Pink Floyd in 1969?
No, I’m just always happiest when I’m leaving.
After finishing Soundtracks for the Blind, you admitted, “Frankly, I’m having trouble finding a new voice.” Could you explain what led you to finding it and forging Angels of Light?
Desperation! And stubbornness. I just don’t give up. Another character flaw.
By and large you hate artsy fartsy concepts and irony and you “just try to make things simple and clear,” yet you are a fan of Bob Dylan, whose writing like Tarantula seems steeped in those things. Would you consider yourself more akin to the directness of people like Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, as well as early Kraftwerk?
No, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson are just gods, in my opinion, and I’m just me, trying to make do with what I have. I try to remain true to myself, but that seems like an impossible task sometimes too. A few times I’ve been able to make something pure happen, but not often.
You enjoy soundtracks like Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, Heart of Glass, Aguirre: Wrath of God, and even Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and have delved into it a little bit with Two Small Bodies and promoted your interest on the YGR website, but what makes it so appealing?
I think I enjoy the wistfulness, the “other world” aspect of good soundtrack music. I grew up listening to psychedelic records in the late 1960s, and the whole point was to lose yourself in the experience. Quasi-religious, in a sense, I suspect.
Even though you don’t profess any religious inclinations, you do understand the potency of people like TV evangelists and roadside tent revival preachers. Do you feel, even perhaps unconsciously, that there is an underlying notion of that within your personality?
Elvis was to me the same as Jimmy Swaggart, or Patti Smith the same as James Brown. They’re just perfectly tuned conduits for the massively powerful life-creating/destroying energy that exists inside us and around us, and they managed to find a form that it could inhabit and use as a voice. A very, very few times, I’ve been able to occupy that privileged position too, but not often, and I don’t feel any personal responsibility for it or even feel that I had much to do with it, except for maybe arranging the circumstance that made it possible to exist; then, since I’m there, it comes through me. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately—who writes my songs? As I said, I don’t think I do it. So, naturally, I just wrote a song about the subject, but again, I don’t think I wrote it. It’s a prayer, sort of, to the “entity” that writes the songs. It’s like a hymn. The chorus is “may freedom and love come through to you, through this song.” Corny, I guess, but it seems right.
“I don’t draw any parallels between live and the studio—they’re two different worlds.” Could you explain a bit more?
It’s just the difference between recording a band in the studio, and that’s what it is. Or recording a band, or anything in the studio, then looking at it as a place to begin. I lean towards the latter, having been weaned on everything from early Pink Floyd, to George Martin’s work with the Beatles, to Phil Spector, etc. I absolutely am not making a value judgment here. I’ve produced several albums by other artists where the former is the case, and I think that, for instance, Nick Drake’s Pink Moon is maybe a little more complete (though it’s hard to make a distinction, since all of his work is so beautiful) than his other records (Pink Moon is primarily just guitar and voice). I just lean towards making a special sonic world for each album I make. Again, probably a personal flaw.
“The most pleasurable moments in music-making, for me, are when I’ve first worked out a song, and I play it for myself. As soon as it transfers from that moment, it’s polluted.” Does that suggest that the recording process itself is a pale, twice-removed, tainted imitation of that moment too?
Maybe that’s why I try not to hang on to the nostalgia of the initial moment and use the material from that point onward to make something else happen. Sometimes it ends up in the same place anyway.
Jarboe: The Artful Lady Awakes
Originally printed in Left of the Dial, 2004.
Jarboe was the seductive, confessional, and willowy other side of the Swans that balanced the guttural, bellowing voice of Michael Gira. Interviewing her after the collaborative album The Men Album was released, I felt she seemed to survey the myopic underbelly of the world, the sadness stretching in every direction, only to be outweighed by the brief bursts of tenderness, no more than the fleeting breath of men flickering in the heart, like the piano notes in the songs. With slightly muted dissonance, a taste for kaleidoscopic multicultural sounds, and a candid intimacy, the record carved out a feeling that listeners witnessed the deconstruction of a relationship with all the weight of empathy that seemed more immediate than her earlier, more avant-garde works.
What led you to work with Neurosis?
I have known Neurosis for years. We have always felt a sense of camaraderie and understanding of each other’s work. This collaboration has been years in the making in terms of the goal to make it happen.
How exactly does one convey solitude when working on a project full of people?
When I write words, I do so alone. We didn’t dialogue per se over the words or music. They came together from our own places. I think the resulting album sounds personal and intimate.
Your online, open-access web diary seems as honest as Anaïs Nin and Walt Whitman decoding not to fear candor and transparency. What led you to make daily thoughts available to the public?
I am regularly told that it is surprising how I am “down to earth.” Well, I have always believed that there is strength in vulnerability and strength in having nothing to hide. For example, I have talked about the fact that I have never known stage fright. I believe that stage fright comes from having something to hide. Through my open thoughts in “Artery,” as my online journal is called, I have realized from the resultant feedback that the more open and real I am to the people who have an interest in my work, the more they see themselves and find a connection. There is universality in human experience.
Also, even though I am conscious to remain open and vulnerable, that is not to say that I do not have an awareness to take things in stride (i.e., “thick skin”) at this point from years of being a public persona. You cannot be oversensitive and conduct a popularity contest if you go into the public arena. You may resonate with some people and not with others. Ultimately, I have learned from keeping “Artery” and being so open. It is at the core of what I do in my songs.
Anhedoniac, an album you now call “harrowing, harsh, and the most beautiful album I ever made,” was partly a response to paintings you saw in Atlanta that pushed you to use the “hideous fear and pain” you were feeling to make an album during a period when you painted your room black and lost twelve pounds. What was it like making the album with Neurosis—how was the process and context different?
Anhedoniac was a result of extreme loneliness and loss. It was a disease in full grip. A type of brea
kdown. Technically, the process of the Neurosis + Jarboe album was that I had a notebook of ideas in terms of words, and when I heard the initial music, certain words responded to the music and attached to it. They presented me with music in the form of ideas and rough drafts and then I set my voice and words to it and then they fleshed that out with more music to respond to the voice. Emotionally, the music guided me.
How do you identify with the work of Richard Kern, who shot you for the Anhedoniac album and has worked for Sonic Youth and nude magazines?
I worked with photographer Richard Kern and Kembra Pfahler as “scar and gash” makeup artist because I wanted to have the visual images for the album documented and presented by people from “the neighborhood” that gave birth to the Swans. It is where Michael and I lived (the East Village, New York City) for many years, and both Richard and Kembra are part of that original scene to which I am strongly connected, as is Swans. I respect both Richard and Kembra. And yes, both have been featured in “nude” magazines. One behind the camera. One in front of it. Richard Kern is also published by Taschen and Kembra Pfahler has shown at the American Fine Arts Gallery.
Do you feel there is always some essence of physical movement, gesture, and dance to all of your albums, even in the most quiet of moments, from the Swans and Sacrificial Cake to your new work?
Yes, I do. Outside of metaphor, as I love to literally dance and run and use my body to express myself, it is a good thing. At home, I may run as many as six miles a day and I have been known to put on a trance CD and dance around the house with no clothes on! This is when living alone. Is it a good idea?
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