Part II – Take Me Back in Time

…the music wove a web between the poles of dragon’s-breath wrathful-deity space jamming and simple tunes telling stories full of weird characters and situations out of American legend…

Searching for the Sound, Phil Lesh

RR: With your new record, you wrote songs that are cinematic. You’ll also have one line that stands out, and it’ll tell me different things. What is intriguing about what you just said about Dylan is that Till the Light Comes sounds like the music that comes after the jam is over—like the real songs. I like the ‘density’ word you used because the arrangements will build up to these false endings, much like a film scene where they’ll be a dramatic peak, and then the aftermath. Do you think of those types of things when you are writing?

JG: Right. Well, yeah, in my mind, the idea of the alternate ending is very cinematic by nature because it is like if you have one emotional direction, and then, depending on how different that ending is, you abruptly change it, or you can lift it somewhere else. That’s very cinematic. That happens in films all the time. All that stuff is on purpose because I couldn’t have the song “Stranger in Sand” without that outro. I needed that outro for it to be complete. I don’t know why. I honestly don’t know why, but when I was writing I kept getting to that point, and I kept playing this other part. And I’d think, “What do you think about—well, that works; that’s how it goes.” (laughter) I couldn’t really tell you how else it happened.

I guess a lot of that mentality is some of that Grateful Dead stuff wearing off on me. Those songs, particularly the live versions, have a lot of that going on. After playing with Phil, and loosening up, I guess, if you will, my mind around it, it rubbed off that way in the songwriting.

RR: Yes, there is also a tone of world-weariness in the wise tales and observations of much of the Dead material. Has playing with musicians rooted in those elements contributed to your stage persona and identity as a musician and songwriter?

JG: Absolutely. It has to. I believe in order to continue to write songs and to be relevant, you need to be able to soak up your experiences, and put them into song. You can’t sit there doing the same thing, over and over and over again, because it becomes stale, and it becomes…you might have been relevant and, all of a sudden, it’s not. It’s important to change and grow and allow yourself the freedom to fail. (laughs) That is the biggest thing that Phil [Lesh] ever gave to me—freedom to fail—because he’s basically pretty fearless.

RR: Do you think that’s why a lot of artists get creatively constipated? They have the fear that what they are doing won’t go over with a certain segment of the population? In a way, they turn inwards and become cowardly?

JG: Yeah, I think so. I really believe so, and we all experience that. I experienced that a lot on this record—“what if people think it’s stupid?” And I thought, “You know—this is what I like, and this is what I’m into, so it doesn’t matter.” The freedom to fail—you need to give yourself that because sometimes, you will fail, but the only way to get (laughs)…you can’t hit the home run if you don’t swing. You’ve got to get the bat off your shoulders. (laughs) I’ll stop with the baseball metaphors.

RR: Not a problem with me at all. It’s interesting. I recently read this interview where a musician said, “You could be around for 46 years in the music business, and it doesn’t mean you can just go in the studio, and immediately hit a home run.”

JG: It’s true. Unless…you know…maybe, you’re juicin’. (laughter) Even then…right now, it’s a pitcher’s ball game. (laughter)

RR: There are songs on Till the Light Comes which sound like they’ve been around forever, and have a rich, classic feel. Let’s talk about “1961,” and the story behind that song—the son seeing his father on his death bed after a lifetime spent apart.

JG: I don’t want to say it is autobiographical because I wasn’t born in 1961, but my father left when I was young. It is a story that has been well-told many times, and one night, I was thinking about it, and imagining myself—it’s just that. It’s a story that a lot of people can relate to, and it’s still a heartbreaking story, and it happens over and over and over again, and it will probably never stop happening as long as men are men and women are women. (laughs)

I don’t know. It came out one night. A lot of songs came out that way like “The Holy Land.” The vocal that you hear on the record is actually the demo vocal because I felt like I couldn’t sing it any purer than that because it’s really hard to get amped up to do a song like that, to sing that song. It’s not an amped up song at all. It’s got to feel melancholy. It’s got to feel down.

RR: I love that lyric in “The Holy Land”— but there’s a price for paradise I am made to pay. Where does that come from?

JG: On the first Phil tour, I was reading a lot of books on the Middle East. That situation is extraordinarily complex. I was thinking to myself, “well, what about the human perspective? What is it like to be a human being over there?” I’m trying not to take sides. I’m trying to take the human angle, I guess, and it just came out that way. That song was written, literally, in one evening of just heavy bedroom songwriting. (laughs) It came out that way, the inspiration, the chord progression started off a little bit like “China Doll” [Grateful Dead song]. That song has always been really emotional to me. I don’t really know why, but I always thought it was really pretty. I don’t know. I weaved the two thoughts together, I guess. It’s hard to say. I don’t really know (laughs) how some of this stuff comes out; it just comes out.

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