We are currently onboard Jam Cruise. Brad, this is the first time you have been on the cruise and Nathan this is your second trip. What are your thoughts on the event so far?
Brad: It’s really something. I’ve never seen anything like it. Just the boat itself is crazy and being this far out in the middle of the ocean is dizzying. It’s disorienting in a nice way and people seem hell bent on a good time which is great.
How do you think it compares to last year Nathan?
Nathan: It’s funny: for me, I’m wearing such a different hat. I came here as a folk singer last year and now I’m here with Davis. It definitely colors my perception of things but, beyond that, I think the food tastes better.
I’m still blown away by the whole experience. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that will ever not be just riddled with magical implications. It’s a bunch of great musicians and beautiful people ready to party on a fucking boat. We were talking the other day: when else do you play music while you’re in motion? That never happens. I mean maybe on a train or something like that but there’s so many things happening on so many levels.
Brad: And you’re always just one leap away from death all the time. There’s a danger element that almost spurs people on. I think it’s there somewhere—the high seas. The oceans are battlefields. I did notice the water when we did the Rocks Off cruise many years ago with The Slip and I actually fell over a bit. That was a much smaller boat, though. With such a huge ship, you feel it in a different way. It makes you really think about the swells in the ocean and what they’re doing and the ship’s relationship to the ocean. It’s quite something.
Nathan: It’s intense.
Brad: It’s really interesting and it is one reason I think people on this cruise should really give thanks that Nathan is here. There’s so many musicians on this boat but only a handful could just get out there by themselves and turn a room into a magical place. Nigel Hall’s amazing at that and Ivan Neville can do it but besides Nathan there’s not that many other musicians who can captivate an audience on their own.
That’s not to take anything away from those other musicians. The whole history of music is filled with that: some people play as groups and do a more esoteric kind of thing and some people go out there by themselves and are storytellers. In the midst of such a jam situation, I think it’s really important to have people like Nathan who slow it down and remind us to think in a different way.
Nathan: I told this story the other night and it’s very true: Someone recently asked me on my website what accomplishment I was most proud of. Number two was getting on Jam Cruise [in 2011] as a folk singer. To me, it was such a telling moment that they’d ask a folk singer to play Jam Cruise. After years and years of being in this scene, it felt like a cumulative experience that I was asked to play folk music on this boat. I think it gave me a lot of courage for the Hippy Fiasco tour that soon followed after that.
But my first favorite accomplishment was being on stage with the guys from Davis. First off all, I am a huge Slip fan and a huge Marco fan, and I never thought I’d have a chance to play with that caliber of musicianship. When I started out, when I was young, my gift was not raw musical talent. I wasn’t one of those guys who picked up a guitar and could automatically play. I knew dudes like that who were almost like athletes who just picked up a baseball for the first time and could play without any effort. I’m sorta like the Pete Rose of music. That’s what my dad says—it wasn’t talent that got me into it. It was love of the game. I just love the game and—through years and years of playing and being onstage with that caliber of musicianship—I still blow my own mind that I am in Davis.
After years of playing with Marc Friedman and Andrew Barr in The Slip, what drew you to Nathan as a performer?
Brad: It’s great having a leader. There are so many different kinds of groups out there, but I like having one where someone is able to really speak onstage. In The Slip, none of us are incredibly extraverted and able to do that. We have a knack for looking out and seeing what a room needs, but we would just get up and do our thing and be sensitive to everything, musically. But there are times when you really wanna interact and Nathan’s really good at interacting.
Nathan, you say that you never possessed raw musical talent. Do you feel like you were always a natural songwriter?
Nathan: It definitely developed later. I’ve got a good twelve years of songwriting—a couple hundred songs—that no one will ever hear, which I think is sort of rare. It’s part of the Pete Rose thing. Nobody wants to hear the fucking songs I wrote for the first ten years of my career. No one would ever want to hear that. I don’t want to hear them for sure.
I heard you and Keller Williams actually wrote a song together when you were both living in Virginia over ten years ago.
Nathan: “Sideways Tree” or something like that. He actually just reminded me about that when I saw him on Jam Cruise. I went through a lot of different phases, whether it was completely emulating one of my heroes or an awkward year-and-a-half when I just wanted to be Tom Waits. I hear bootlegs of that stuff and I’m like, “Are you crazy?! What were you thinking?” And after years and years of thinking I had to come up with the most complicated chord progression and words that didn’t make any sense, I stripped things down. For a while, I thought that if my lyrics made sense, I was doing something wrong. Everything had to be tricky or complicated to really feel like I’d done something and it just was later in life when the simplicity started creeping in and then it just eventually boiled down to this essence. I don’t know how it got to be such a nostalgic vibe or whatever that is but…
Brad: That’s pretty cool. I think that’s the archetypical path of the artist, we all start out by emulating someone else. It was the same way with everyone in The Slip. For a while we tried to imitate the artists we admired and then we tried to make things as complex as we possibly could. We tried to test your cerebral virtuosity or lack thereof and find those limits. There are a couple of other stages in there as well: defeat, considering working at the 7-11, pushing through and finding some kind of revelation.
Nathan: I still go through those levels—sometimes all eight of them in eight days. And I come out of the end of the week with a nice, little, simple song about what a fucking amazing weird exciting week that was. But the three songs I wrote earlier in the week probably wouldn’t be as interesting as that final one.
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