Danny Barnes is a fascinating individual. The Bad Livers co-founder is a banjo player who grew up playing his instrument to Ornette Coleman and Led Zeppelin records. He’s gone on to develop his “folktronics” approach in the live setting which he describes as “a highly processed banjo sound with a lot of loops and atmospheric samples flying around.” In early 2009, while recording on the Dave Matthews Band’s Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King an invitation from that band’s namesake led to a deal with ATO Records. John Alagia (DMB, John Mayer, Ben Fold Five) produced Pizza Box which ATO released earlier this year. The following conversation offers deep insight into Barnes’ creative process as well as the development of Pizza Box, which Barnes marvels at as “the best record I’ve ever made.” Ladies and gentlemen, Danny Barnes…
I’ve heard that you recently came to a significant conclusion about your musical focus. Can you talk a bit about that?
Well I tell you, I struggled. I didn’t come to this realization ‘til I was 46 or 47. It took a lot of years. I guess part of it was that I have different things that I can do. I’ve always been interested in music since I was a little kid and I’m always researching it and practicing and taking lessons and writing and studying and working, regardless of what’s happening with my career or whatever. I was just kinda ate up with it as they say in Texas but I had different expressions of that. Sometimes I would go and I would help other people make records and then sometimes I would go and be a side person in a band and sometimes I would put a band together and I’d write records and songs and orchestral pieces. I just had a lot of different things that I was doing but I couldn’t figure out how I need to focus my attention.
I didn’t know how I should channel all that creatively. I had friends that were doing things and they seemed to be clear on what they were doing and I wasn’t able to get there. I was always a little frustrated. Finally, I realized just through constantly working, that what I do is I make context, I make ideas and I re-contextualize things and I make things. And so when I realized that, everything got a lot clearer for me because I discovered my raison d’etre. I realized that my job is to make ideas. And it really just streamlined my whole process because I realized that that’s what I’m supposed to be doing, making ideas, making contexts and stuff like that. When I came to that conclusion it just seems like my life got a whole lot cleaner because if something comes up I can go, ‘Is this helping me make ideas or to get my ideas out there or is this not?’ And if it’s not I can just let it fall by the wayside and continue on with what I’m doing.
I realize it’s pretty late in the game to come to that conclusion but just answering that question for myself, why am I here? What am I doing? What’s my purpose here? What is my thing? But when I came to that conclusion, man, it was really great. I was so happy. I still am really happy, because when I get up I know what I’m supposed to be doing.
How does play out in terms of the dynamics between art and commerce?
Well I try to play my ballgame and live with the result. I was watching a basketball game on television and one of the players said that, “I’m just gonna play my game and live with the result.” That’s just kind of what I decided to do. I just play my game and, as far as how it interacts, I think that it’s productive economically because how I get paid is to have ideas.
I think that what I was doing was I got kind of messed up on short term things. Ultimately what I needed to do was kind of step out in faith on what I was led to believe that what my purpose is. It takes a little bit of a while for your navigational direction to adjust and for it to sort of come to fruition because your focus is kind of in a different place.
Would you say that coming to grips with your role manifested itself in the creation of Pizza Box?
I think it was a part of the process but when I finished it, it really put the cap on. It really made sense to me because I just thought, ‘Well, I’m just going to try and write the best batch of songs that I can make.’ I’m around songwriters a lot and a lot of my friends are composers and musicians and directors and stuff like that. So I was working on this batch of songs and I thought, ‘Man I just want to make the best batch that I can get. I want to really work on it.’ And I put a lot of time in it and at that point I was really just focused on writing stuff and I wasn’t really thinking so much contextually or how it fit into any kind of life decision or how it reflected on my life. I worked on that material for about three years, but after a couple years through playing this music for some of my friends, I started getting some good feedback and I started getting excited about it.
It’s almost like when you’ve been at it as long as I have, the process is almost external to your own sort of cognitive thought process. It’s like sometimes when you’re playing, you just look down and your fingers are going crazy and all this music’s flying around and you’re just sort of like letting it happen, you’re not really thinking about it or whatever. It was the same thing with writing. I just looked at it as like an external work and I thought, ‘Man I feel pretty good about this.’ It’s good to be my age, 47, 48 years old and say this is the best record I’ve ever made. I’ve been at this since I was in my 20s and it’s pretty exciting and I think that just sort of helped me to understand that my ideology or my equation of how I was going to make decisions was valid.
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.
Was there a defining moment in this regard?
I started thinking about it on this Bad Livers record called Blood and Mood. When I made that record I began to realize what I need to be doing is making ideas and making things happen and making new contexts and stuff. And that record’s all based on samples and loops and stuff like that. I wrote out some of the drum parts and had my friend play but then I’d chop them up in the computer. Back then it was pretty primitive, we didn’t have Abelton or any of these contemporary programs that we have now. It was a little rougher I guess. But that was part of the cool part, that it was a little bit unsteady.
When I started working on that record and going back a couple of records, on this record called Hogs on the Highway that I did, there was a track on there called “Falling Down the Stairs (With a Pistol in my Hand)” that I just put on there, just sort of at the end of this track, but it was like my first experimental kind of thing where I was really beginning to use the studio as an instrument and beginning to paint pictures with sound as opposed to trying to get a performance. And that just kind of put a little bug in my head. It didn’t come to fruition until many years later but those two events just really got me thinking about ‘Wow, I have a totally different tool palette.’ Typically in the acoustic world or the banjo world, when you have bands that have mandolin, banjo, bass, whatever that instrumentation is, they’re not thinking like that. They don’t look at music architecturally that way. I have more in common with DJ’s and techno guys or say hip hop musicians or metal musicians, the way they sort of start with the beat and work from there and sort of build something off of a groove. I’m certainly not trying to be derogatory towards any genre or anything, I’m just trying to explain it the best I can.
How does _Pizza Box relate to your folktronics approach?
Well Pizza Box is just about songs. I just wanted to make a record where when you came away from that you just thought about the songs. That’s what I really wanted to do. There’s looping on there but there but there’s not a lot of effects on there. It’s really a song-based record. What I wanted to do with that record was make the songs big.
So are you moving away from folktronics?
Well I just make ideas, you know, all of the above, forward in all directions. For instance, I’ve been doing a lot of my performances behind this record with folktronics. A lot of my promotion for this record has been playing these songs chopped up on the computer and improvising with a highly processed banjo. It’s like I’m just realizing my trip is to move forward and make ideas. Before I would think in a linear way, like ‘Because I did this, I’ll need to do this and I’ll have to do it in this way,’ and what I’m realizing is what I need to do is just keep making ideas and keep moving forward. I’m using a computer approach, like I’m using this banjo and laptop thing, really to play a lot of that material.
I have a band that I play with that has a really good friend of mine, Jeff Pinkus from Butthole Surfers and when it makes sense for me to have a band, we do a sort of metal rock version. But a lot of this stuff that I’m doing is promo stuff and opening dates and kind of small format. I’ve been doing a lot of shows this year since that CD came out just by myself and what I’m doing is using the computer. So I take the banjo and I chop it all up and I play the material off that record but I take the folktronics approach which is like a highly processed banjo sound with a lot of loops and atmospheric samples flying around.
That’s what I call my folktronics thing when I’m using like the loops and the banjo in a lot of different ways. When I started doing that, I used pedals. I had a tabletop full of pedals and I kind of got that idea from my friend John Paul Jones and from Bill Frisell, you know guys that sort of work in that way. They kind of got me interested in that idea about how to do that and I was using pedals for a while. But about six or eight months ago I got hit with this program called Abelton Live and I use it just with a laptop. It has all of the effects built into the software and what Abelton allows you to do which is really far out. It allows you to take a nonlinear view of your set. So say when you have a band playing the set, you’re going verse, chorus, solo, but you don’t have access to what you just did. But with Abelton I have all my stuff up, I have my whole set available at once. So if I’m playing, I can grab anything I’m doing and I can use it again later in the gig and I can also melt the songs together and I can take the drum part from this song and then build this other song around that and then drop that drum out and bring the new one in, all while just manipulating this little grid thing. And that’s pretty far out and it’s really creative because you can do all of this stuff without having to rehearse a band or anything. If I think it, I can just do it and that’s just amazing. I’ve been really freaking out with this program.
You mentioned that Dave Matthews put you in touch with John Alagia. How did he become involved in the development of Pizza Box?
I guess when we really started talking was when I was in New Orleans working on his record down there. I played banjo on some of that record and one of the things that you do with writer guys is when you sit around, you just play what you’re working on. He was still writing a little bit and I had all these songs and we just passed the guitar around. A lot of my friends when we sit around, we just do that, play new music that we’re working on and just check it out. I realized I was getting pretty close on this batch and he said ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ So we did and then he told me, ‘We want to help you make this record. We believe in what you’re doing and we have some resources and we want to help. What can we do?’ And so at that point we kind of started talking about how we could move ahead and that’s when I realized I felt like I had something pretty good.
You’re obviously quite contemplative. To what extent do you find that this is at odds with going out and making music live?
I think that when we practice and we’re developing and we’re in the lab, that’s when it’s the right time to be contemplative but when it’s time to actually play, I use what one of my teachers taught me which is called ‘calm unfocussed attitude.’ When you go to play I think that’s the time to just let it happen and not get too worked up about it in terms of trying to choke the energy with your head, getting too far ahead of yourself in terms of thinking about things.
I think that the best place for heads-down work is in the lab, which is what I call when you’re practicing or working or writing or developing or editing or whatever. But in terms of performance, I think what we have to do is just breathe and make something happen. It’s a little bit elusive, but man, I tell you I’ve been at it a long time and I get where I feel pretty good that I can make something happen.
I really feel that’s kind of helped me, looking at it like an external work, like a statue out in the yard and going, ‘Wow that turned out pretty good, that feels pretty good.’ And there’s a lot of different little levels, like if the punctuation is in a different place, the meaning changes, like there’s a lot of little things going on and layers of stuff. For an example there’s the song “Road” where the meaning kind of changes depending on where the punctuation is, and the record is just chock full of those ideas where the sentence has a little bit of a different meaning if you read it all at once or if there’s commas, which is pretty cool because then these people get like all these different reads on it which is pretty fun.
What I try to do is leave some stuff open because when I was a little kid I used to listen to Radio Mystery Theater by E.G. Marshall on the radio. These little mysteries would come on for an hour and it was in between reading and watching a movie in that you could still participate in the interpretation, you could paint a little picture in your head. And so I’ve learned that to me if a song is like super nailed down, it’s kind of boring. If a person says, ‘Well I went down the street and I met this person and he said this and we went over here and this happened.’ That to me is not so interesting. But say ‘Tyger, tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry,” [William Blake “Songs of Experience], now that has something. We can hear that in so many different ways. Those are the kind of things I try to do. I like to leave the door open a little bit for people to kind of mess with it in their own way. It just seems like it’s a richer experience as a music fan myself.
