Moving towards the present, you have been playing together for several years and now you have a new album out which is recorded with the help of Jack White. How did he get involved in the project and end up bringing you to Third Man Records?
Chris: Well, that was interesting. Mike and I both had Jack at the top of our list to record with for this project for a variety of reasons. I think one is that he has a similar approach: He’s almost entirely writing the material that he puts out but he’s also tapping into sort of an old sound at the same time. He makes it current just through force of will and ability. Everything he does sounds urgent and powerful and even revelatory at times.
I think we both thought, “What a great guy to get involved with something like this, where it’s old material that we’re feeling as new.” So I e-mailed him and he got right back saying, “Well, I don’t have time to produce a whole record but I could do a couple songs.” So we did two songs with him for Third Man and then sort of parlayed that into actually cutting the whole record there with his engineer. He was in and out—listening to takes and sort of sprinkling his vibes all over the place. It was an incredible experience. His studio is an amazing place to make music, and I think we were really lucky to get that to happen. Vance Powell deserves a lot of credit for how the record turned out. He had an old school approach, where we would bang into the same old Ribbon mic. from the 1950s. It’s kind of vintage-y in a way but it’s not like anything else either. He just had a sound for what we were doing that we both feel was perfect. He taught an old dog new tricks, which may be a good way to summarize what we’re trying to do.
Actually, I think he’s trying to teach a new dog some old tricks!
Chris: Absolutely!
Do you feel that this shift towards music that is inspired by the blues, bluegrass or folk is a reaction to some of the more electric sounds that have crept into mainstream music in the past 10 years?
Chris: I think people are desperate for things that smack them as being sincere. I think that it’s a pretty natural step to look at some older things. from what we consider to be a simpler time—at least musically speaking…
Michael: And the format…
Chris: Yeah, as far as the actual format is concerned. But I think that saying, “God, everything sucks right now, I’m going to go back to when things didn’t suck,” is a dangerous proposition for creative musicians because it quickly turns you into an archivist. The point is to make good music—now. That’s what those people were doing. They were thrusting forward: they were trying to come up with new things, and I think you do have to operate under the naive assumption that there is something new under the sun. But sincerity is why people yearn for progress, and why they say things like, “I just wish things were the way they used to be.” You have the whole Oh Brother [Where Art Thou?] thing that happened a while ago and the folk wave that happened in the ‘60s. I think these things happen over and over again. That’s why I feel like it’s such a dodgy thing to sort of involve yourself in those ways. I think they’re sort of fickle and predictable. I think you really need to approach music as a product of your time and just listen to everything that’s available and see what kind of reaction that elicits in you.
Michael: In college, I was studying jazz and getting into the understanding of theory and composition, but I was also studying musicology. Part of moving to New York for me involved leaving the jazz world behind and leaving academia behind. I feel like the one thing in New York is that there’s an expectation that you do something fresh and interesting with music. It’s kind of across the border in all genres because it’s a place where people come to really be as good as they can at what they do and it just so happens that bluegrass is part of my upbringing and that’s a part of me that I like, so I chose that as a vehicle. I enjoy singing high and loud and playing fast. [Laughter.]
The tradition means it’s kind of integral and cathartic to me, and I came to New York hoping to really put as much of my own experiences and emotions in the music as possible. My goal was to not be playing something as a museum piece, which is something I had been more interested in when I was younger. You have to live your life and have experiences, and you realize you have to do something with what you learned. If you can put your own experiences in the music then it’s going to be a lot more valuable than mimicking something, even if you’re skilled at it. And so I developed the desire to do that with bluegrass music and when I met Chris, I could tell he wanted the same thing and that he had done a lot of different things already in various projects. I sensed that he also would be willing to set everything aside and express what he was going through in his life and I felt like, “great, we’re on the same page, let’s do it some more.” I think it’s still like that. Chris is not one to get lazy, so I trust that he’ll continue to be of that mindset. [Laughter.]
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