You were in New Orleans to record banjo parts on a few Big Whiskey tracks. Did you record those tracks before Pizza Box?

Yes, because I wasn’t finished yet. When I was at that session [In New Orleans] I was playing [the guys] my songs, and asking where I was at on that, so that was before I started working on Pizza Box.

You’ve been playing live with DMB since 2007 and this fall they let you play some of your original tunes at their shows at the Gorge. The fact that they are willing to play your original songs must be a kick.

It’s so awesome, those guys are my friends and said, “We really want to do one of your songs, show us one of your songs.” And I say to them, “Are you sure? This is your gig.” I don’t want to make them mad. It reminded me of the first time I ever got into a really fast car as a kid. I was really into hot rods, it was like that first time you really get into a fast car, and everything is so nice, and it really runs and it’s like, “Whoa, that’s what this is like.” It’s so amazing playing with those guys, I’ve probably done about 40 shows with those guys, and their crew is like that, every cable, every cord, every box is perfectly placed, if they do something, they do it the best way. It’s just amazing to be able to participate with them; I think they’re the hippest band playing right now, and for them to play one of your songs is really, what can you say? It’s like getting a little baseball practice with Hank Aaron, I mean what can you say?

Back to the record, you said there is a storyline, that there are recurring characters and musical themes. Can you elaborate on some of these themes?

Basically, I think of the album like a movie and the songs are little scenes and these characters keep popping up. The theme about the movie is that these characters are coming to the conclusion that they are architects of their own lives. They are sort of reacting, they are victims, and they’re coming to this epiphany of, “Oh man, this was my idea.” All of these characters are on various sides of learning that. One guy is in the joint and he’s looking back on his life, and he’s thinking about his life and how his mom tried to kill him as a kid. There’s another guy who really loves this woman but can’t bring himself to tell her, and he’s thinking all this stuff but he can’t say it. He feels this for her but he’s made a million decisions that got him right there, and the downside of that realization is that you don’t have anyone to blame, but the upside is that if you realize that, things get better immediately.

I like to leave things kind of open so that people have their own kind of interpretation so that there are other lines that people can draw. I don’t nail lines down, but basically one of the characters robs this other guy, one guy is in prison, one is from the perspective of a woman, and one is a guy thinking about a woman that got away from him, and he is later on in his life and she got away and he keeps thinking about that. So all of these characters made a zillion tiny decisions that got them where they are. We look at our lives as a result of what other people are doing; meanwhile, we went to great lengths to construct the reality that we have, whatever that may be. We may be in great debt, in bad health, unable to express love to our family and spouses, but we can change those things right now. The big goal is to lift people up, because I’m a reformed pessimist and I’m really happy with my life and I want to try to make people smile, and give them a little break and you can find little rhythms and little noises that are sort of buried in these songs that can give people a bit of a diversion.

Have you done that on other albums?

I’ve been developing that for a long time. Paul Leary from the Butthole Surfers taught me about having an idea and how to generate a bunch of ideas, even in one song—one bar of music, one phrase, and once I worked with him on a record. I started finding ideas in literature, and finding ideas in poetry and it’s something I’ve been honing for about 20 years so I’m getting to where I can find a story where everyone can kind of get it. It’s like the way independent movies are made. Now Terminator, there’s only one way you can look at that movie. In an independent film, there are little gaps where you can participate in the interpretation and that’s kind of what I’m trying to go for in my songs. I can leave something in there so a person can use it for their own edification so to speak. I purposely don’t nail everything down. Some songs work a certain way: at this time, this person went to this person, which is great. But my thing is a post-structuralized way of looking at stuff where I get to rearrange things architecturally like the way a DJ would work, like re-contextualize common elements. I’m working on it.

Three years is a long time to be working on the same material and I’m curious as to how your influences might have changed throughout the last couple of years while you were writing?

Just poetry in general is something I really enjoy and a few years ago I worked on this project with this guy Jim Carroll, and I never got to meet him, but I worked on a spoken word record with him. There was a book on CD, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, and I just really got into that guy’s writings because I read his literature in school. If you see his poetry, it’s very intense, just like my poetry in these songs, but I get a lot of inspiration from Blake. Because the way he creates his own universe and his own cosmology and he has these emotions that are named, like his anger and his wrath, and he turns them into characters, and that’s pretty hip. I really like classic novelists, and I learned a lot from the guys I worked with like Dave Matthews, Bill Frisell, Robert Keen and Tim O’Brien. Those are like four guys that I spent a lot of time with. The way that they look at music, they have a really high work ethic and they constantly develop stuff and they’re always writing, I feel comfortable with these people and I don’t feel so weird.

I live in a really small town, there’s no industry, no venues or studios and I don’t feel so comfortable here because I’m more comfortable with guys that are equally obsessed with music. You can talk about stuff like the Stravinsky box set, you don’t have to explain yourself, you can just get to work and enjoy life. I’m really into metal, I really like punk rock, and I really like improvised music, I really like Ornette Coleman. When I was a kid, I was born in ’61, Bitches Brew was a new record, I thought that’s what jazz was, I didn’t know Charlie Parker and all that stuff. So I like Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. I really like Wu-Tang and I really like DJ Shadow’s drum sounds, I’m really into this Roni Size EP that I have called Brown Paper Bag, it’s a 12-inch with these four remixes of this song on there that are just awesome.

I get so much inspiration from all of this stuff, engineers, and recording engineers. I really like this guy Morton Feldman, this composer I got this piece from him where he wrote music to these Jackson Pollock paintings and I really got into that. I spent a fair amount of time working on serial music, 12-tone music, and also Joseph Schillinger, his technique for generating rhythmic and melodic ideas. I study his books some. These are all places I look for inspiration. I just like all this stuff, it’s weird. That’s one thing I never understood about music is the genre-based trip. Like when you’re listening to the radio, say you’re trying to drive somewhere and you want to hear Van Halen’s “Panama,” or AC/DC or Black Sabbath or something really great on the radio—horror of horrors you left the iPod in your bag or somethin’—you always catch stuff in the middle. If you listen to a rock radio station, they’ll only play about one in five songs that technically rock. So after they play something really rocking, then they’ll play a power ballad. So you go looking somewhere else, and you come back in the middle of “Back in Black,” you didn’t get the beginning of it.

The genre-based thing is kind of a barrier. I look at music as all the good stuff in a set. Instead of the set being just mambo or bebop or reggae, within a forum—say take metal. If you go down to the record store and pull 50 metal records, a lot of them are not going to be that great. That’s why I thought that guy Alan Freed was really a badass. He was like, “Hey all this rock and roll stuff is pretty cool.” I think he was a DJ in New York [Editor’s note: he moved to NYC after starting his career in Cleveland], and he started playing all those records that weren’t really from the same place, but he sort of made a place for them, you know. It’s like when I hang out with some of my friends, they know Toots and the Maytals, and Megadeth and Aaron Copeland, and T.S. Eliot, and directors and conductors and sculptors and painters, people who are aware of that stuff know about that stuff and it’s so much easier for me to talk to people like that.

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