What factors would you say have coalesced to yield this best songwriting of your life?
Constantly working, I guess. I’m always reading novels, studying poetry and trying to get ideas from movies. It’s from talking to people and reading magazines and novels, just everything I can get my hands on and just years and years and years of work. I keep taking lessons instrumentally, I’m still working on that too and I just feel like I’m getting better and better. I just keep working and just keep trying to make more things the music fan within my own self gets excited about.
So I would say the answer to that would be just a lot of editing and lot of work but the more I do it, the better I get. I’m better able to manipulate things, to tie things together in a complex way but present it in a real simple way. A lot of the harmonic constructs of this batch of songs is very simple, the chords are like big boulders. There aren’t these gratuitous chord changes that go up and down the scale, the chords are like these big, giant events. So while harmonically it’s basically pop music, at the same time there’s a lot going on with the poetry and the layers and phonically. There’s also an overall story arc in the way these characters sort of come and go and also a lot of the wordplay. I consider it to be fairly developed in that regard.
On Pizza Box you worked with a new producer, John Alagia. What role did he take in all of this?
It was one of those deals where I’ve never worked with a guy like that before. I never worked with a guy of John’s caliber. He’s an idea person too, he just always has ideas and contexts. You can go in and play him a song and he has ideas. Those are the guys I really like being around and I admire.
It was one of those things where it was almost like an arranged marriage, so to speak. I didn’t really know him very well but Dave, my friend Dave Matthews, was like ‘Man I really need you to meet this guy.’ And he told me that for not quite a year, maybe ten months but he kept saying it. And I kept thinking, ‘Ok well maybe I’ll meet him one day at one of your shows or someone else, I’ll get to meet him.’ And he kept going, ‘No I’m serious, I really think you should talk to this guy.’ And so on. So finally when I did talk to John on the phone, he said to me, ‘Man, Dave’s been telling me about you for like a year, saying I just had to meet you.’
Well I talked to him for maybe about an hour on the phone and I just got this feeling in my heart that this was the right guy to do this project. I sensed that he had that same kind of creative thing going on where we were just going to try and make something happen, as opposed to sort of making it sound like something else or knocking the edges off of it. We were going to go in there and make something happen and that’s the most exciting thing, when you have ideas and you get with another idea person. And you start working and if you get that chemistry going, some really cool stuff will happen.
So it was really exciting and he was a brilliant man, he was very funny and very hard working and has a good work ethic, which is something. I’m a work ethic person, I spend a lot of time at it and so I related to him in that regard. Even though I sort of come from banjo picking and acoustic music, in a way, I’m really a metal fan and I like contemporary composed music and avant-garde and improvised music and things. I like the context of music in terms of it sort of being a fractured pop thing, where it’s pop music but it’s kind of melted. And he was totally all over that and totally understood that and we just we were able to speak the same language right off the bat. It was really good. It was like meeting a sibling or something. We’d come down the stairs in the morning smiling, drinking coffee, and excited to go to work and dive in. It was really a great experience and I owe him a lot. He’s a really brilliant man and I was really fortunate to be able to work with John.
So would you say that previous producers were trying to push you to other genres?
I’ve never worked with that many producers really. I pretty much did most of my own stuff and really the only other guy I ever really worked with much was Lloyd Maines. Wayne Horvitz also produced one of my records. So those are two pretty creative guys and I felt comfortable with them and I don’t have anything negative in regard to either one of them.
I guess what I mean is that I use the banjo a lot and I typically would get associated with this acoustic world and I spent a long time listening to that music and trying to learn that music and stuff like that, but I don’t really belong there so much. If you listen to a lot of country music and picking music, a lot of times within that music there’s a rhythmic element that happens, typically a one or two bar phrase that defines the whole piece. There’s this rhythmic element in it that everything is reconciled to. So much of that music is built around that rhythm but the rhythm that I feel and I work with is a little different feel. I’ve spent my life studying it, so I’m not saying anything negative at all, I’m just making a quantitative statement not a qualitative statement about the rhythms and rock music is more interesting to me because it has these syncopated patterns and it’s just got this groove thing that I’m just more interested in. So that other kind of music doesn’t really get me going too much.
How difficult has it been, incorporating a banjo into the type of music you love?
It hasn’t been difficult because that’s the way it hear it. I grew up with a James Brown record playing or an Ornette Coleman playing and messing around with a banjo on top of that. It just sounded right to me. I always felt sort of weird in that country western polka based situation. It’s cool, I mean, I’m not putting that music down, it’s cool but I have a harder time with that than I do with playing with music that rocks. For me when it rocks, I kind of know when everything’s going to happen. The perfect example is the first couple bars of ‘When the Levee Breaks.’ It’s one of the most sampled drum hits of the world and I’ve used it myself a few times. The first couple bars of that track, it’s like Rock and Roll. If you boiled rock and roll in a pot, the very last thing you’d have is the first two bars of ‘When the Levee Breaks.’
I have a harder time when it doesn’t do that and I thought there was something wrong with me because I’d be in these situations where I was like, ‘Wow, this is kind of weird,’ and it just didn’t seem moving to me. So I was trying to work in that tableau and I wasn’t doing so well in it, you know, like I wasn’t really feeling it. But it really set me free when I realized that my particular flower had to be stuck in a different soil for it to blossom.
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