At age 47 and with well over 50 recording credits under his belt, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Danny Barnes believes he just put out the best material of his career in the form of Pizza Box, an eleven-track full-length released on ATO records and recorded at Dave Matthews Band’s Haunted Hollow Studio in Charlottesville, VA. Barnes toured this summer with Robert Earl Keen, played with Yonder Mountain String Band this fall and will open dates for Keller Williams next month. The banjo player also appears on a few tracks from DMB’s latest, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King and has played several live gigs with the band. Barnes spoke to jambands.com about his relationship with DMB, where he gets his diverse musical inspiration from (Stravinsky to Wu-Tang) and his insightful opinions on the state of today’s experimental state of the music industry.
You were on tour with Robert Earl Keen this summer, you’ve been on tour with Yonder Mountain String Band since Sept., your new record Pizza Box came out in Oct., and you’re scheduled to open for Keller Williams next month. It’s been a pretty hectic year, what are your thoughts on all of that?
I’m thrilled to have a good job, I’m really excited to have work. I’m 47 years-old and I’ve been working on this since I was 10 and I’ve spent millions of hours working on what I’m doing, I’m excited to be where I am. It’s great to get up in the morning and be excited about your life and to love what you’re doing and the result you’re getting. It’s pretty awesome.
How did you get involved with Robert Earl Keen?
I’ve known those guys since I was a kid. Before he was known as a writer he was just one of the acoustic guys in Austin, one of the bluegrass guys I grew up with in the area. We had mutual friends and went to festivals, and I played in bands with them. I just knew those guys proximity-wise, but I didn’t really record with them too much. My friend Rich Brotherton was producing the record and asked me to play on it, so I did. We had fun and I started touring with them quite a bit and then I played on another record with them, did a DVD with them and have done quite a few shows with their band.
You also have a relationship with Dave Matthews, I read that he picked the album title, Pizza Box; he sings on three tracks on the record and he hooked you up with the producer John Alagia. How do you think the support Dave Matthews Band has given you has helped your exposure?
Well that brings up two different subjects: one would be exposure in the numerical sense and the other is just inspiration, and I’d like to address both of those. As far as exposure, the real trick in music or art, are the people that don’t know about what you do. It’s one thing to play to people that know what you do but it’s a whole other trick to access people that have no idea who you are. And that’s where all your growth comes from is through other people, through lines that you draw professionally, or just other people who have no concept of what you’re doing, so I think much of the numerical attention to what I’m doing, that stuff is exponential. That’s just the thing that happens in music.
If I go play a show for Bill Frisell, there are people that learned about him through me and there’s people that have no idea who I am that learned about me through him, that’s just the mechanics of the business I think. We make friends in music and even though his fanbase is the size of a third world country and mine is like a platoon [laughs], nonetheless, these are subsets. Regardless of the numerical components they still are sets, and they have places that they intersect and I’m thankful for all of those lines that happen.
Just being able to play with them on their record puts me in front of a lot of people who have no idea what I’m up to, and I’m sure there will be people that won’t dig it, but there’s a certain amount of people that are going to dig what’s happening and hopefully they’ll buy the record. The goal is that they’ll tell other people word-of-mouth-wise, but going back to the inspirational thing, it’s funny, I’m an underground person. I’ve been out there since the mid ‘80s and most of my fans are musicians. When I get fan mail, typically it’s somebody in a band, and sometimes it’s a huge band and I get fan mail from guys that are in these big bands that say, “Your record is great, I listened to it in the car and I really dig it.”
That part of it, just going to the inspirational part of it, is the fuel I really run on because I’m an underground kind of person. Most people that know about me are artists or musicians and they’re not mainstream individuals, and that part has been very inspirational to me because I look up to these guys, and they say that I did really good on that record. It lets me know that I’m onto something and I’m working on that batch of songs for that record, and I worked on that for about three years. I’m not talking about having it in a notebook, I’m talking about really working, about developing the poetry, where the elements are very simple but have bolder things that are happening. I kept playing this music for different people, like Robert Earl Keen for example and Dave [Matthews], different writers and composers trying to find out if I was getting somewhere with this. And as I worked, the more and more people were saying, “I think you really got something here.” That really helps you focus because you realize you can worry about execution instead of developing the principal idea.
When I was working with Dave on his record down in New Orleans, when we had some time, one thing I do with my friends is we pass around guitars and play new songs that we’re writing. Mainly fragments, but that’s really what we do. I could tell from talking to him, he would stop and be really clear and say, “You’ve really got something here, this is starting to sound really good.” As I started to get that same reaction from some of my friends—I really look up to these guys that can really write songs that can really make things happen and really entertain people—those guys are my heroes. So just the inspiration from any guys in the band like Carter [Beauford] and Rashawn [Ross], they just kind of let you know. They go out of your way to tell you that you did really good with that, and they’re not buttering me up because I’m way down, I’m underground, they have nothing to gain from it. It lets me know I’m on to something, it’s worth pursuing and this is worth sacrificing, I made a lot of sacrifices for this work, learning to play and developing ideas and sometimes you kind of wonder—am I doing the right thing?
Sometimes it’s tough, like even your job, it’s a little harder today than yesterday. So just the support of those guys, it means so much to me. If I go play banjo with Robert Earl Keene on a tour, I get to play for a bunch of people that have no idea that I exist, and if I play with Dave Matthews Band and there’s 25,000 people, there’s probably only 800 people that could spell my name or pick me out of a police line-up. Ultimately, I don’t pursue those kinds of things as a mechanism to get what I’m doing out, what’s really happening is my friends saying, “Fly out to L.A. and play with us at the Hollywood Bowl.” Those guys are my friends, so I suppose I could be criticized for trying to promote what I’m doing, but it’s really my friends saying, “I really want you to play on this record, I really think you should come down to New Orleans to hang out and play on this record.” It doesn’t generate from me calling them up and saying, “Hey man, it would be really good for me if you let me stand next to you while you got in this picture you made.” I really don’t think that way, I’m not wired like that, and I just write music and play. I’m fortunate enough that it comes from people saying, “I want you to be a part of this.”
You were in New Orleans to record banjo parts on a few Big Whiskey tracks. Did you record those tracks before Pizza Box?
Yes, because I wasn’t finished yet. When I was at that session [In New Orleans] I was playing [the guys] my songs, and asking where I was at on that, so that was before I started working on Pizza Box.
You’ve been playing live with DMB since 2007 and this fall they let you play some of your original tunes at their shows at the Gorge. The fact that they are willing to play your original songs must be a kick.
It’s so awesome, those guys are my friends and said, “We really want to do one of your songs, show us one of your songs.” And I say to them, “Are you sure? This is your gig.” I don’t want to make them mad. It reminded me of the first time I ever got into a really fast car as a kid. I was really into hot rods, it was like that first time you really get into a fast car, and everything is so nice, and it really runs and it’s like, “Whoa, that’s what this is like.” It’s so amazing playing with those guys, I’ve probably done about 40 shows with those guys, and their crew is like that, every cable, every cord, every box is perfectly placed, if they do something, they do it the best way. It’s just amazing to be able to participate with them; I think they’re the hippest band playing right now, and for them to play one of your songs is really, what can you say? It’s like getting a little baseball practice with Hank Aaron, I mean what can you say?
Back to the record, you said there is a storyline, that there are recurring characters and musical themes. Can you elaborate on some of these themes?
Basically, I think of the album like a movie and the songs are little scenes and these characters keep popping up. The theme about the movie is that these characters are coming to the conclusion that they are architects of their own lives. They are sort of reacting, they are victims, and they’re coming to this epiphany of, “Oh man, this was my idea.” All of these characters are on various sides of learning that. One guy is in the joint and he’s looking back on his life, and he’s thinking about his life and how his mom tried to kill him as a kid. There’s another guy who really loves this woman but can’t bring himself to tell her, and he’s thinking all this stuff but he can’t say it. He feels this for her but he’s made a million decisions that got him right there, and the downside of that realization is that you don’t have anyone to blame, but the upside is that if you realize that, things get better immediately.
I like to leave things kind of open so that people have their own kind of interpretation so that there are other lines that people can draw. I don’t nail lines down, but basically one of the characters robs this other guy, one guy is in prison, one is from the perspective of a woman, and one is a guy thinking about a woman that got away from him, and he is later on in his life and she got away and he keeps thinking about that. So all of these characters made a zillion tiny decisions that got them where they are. We look at our lives as a result of what other people are doing; meanwhile, we went to great lengths to construct the reality that we have, whatever that may be. We may be in great debt, in bad health, unable to express love to our family and spouses, but we can change those things right now. The big goal is to lift people up, because I’m a reformed pessimist and I’m really happy with my life and I want to try to make people smile, and give them a little break and you can find little rhythms and little noises that are sort of buried in these songs that can give people a bit of a diversion.
Have you done that on other albums?
I’ve been developing that for a long time. Paul Leary from the Butthole Surfers taught me about having an idea and how to generate a bunch of ideas, even in one song—one bar of music, one phrase, and once I worked with him on a record. I started finding ideas in literature, and finding ideas in poetry and it’s something I’ve been honing for about 20 years so I’m getting to where I can find a story where everyone can kind of get it. It’s like the way independent movies are made. Now Terminator, there’s only one way you can look at that movie. In an independent film, there are little gaps where you can participate in the interpretation and that’s kind of what I’m trying to go for in my songs. I can leave something in there so a person can use it for their own edification so to speak. I purposely don’t nail everything down. Some songs work a certain way: at this time, this person went to this person, which is great. But my thing is a post-structuralized way of looking at stuff where I get to rearrange things architecturally like the way a DJ would work, like re-contextualize common elements. I’m working on it.
Three years is a long time to be working on the same material and I’m curious as to how your influences might have changed throughout the last couple of years while you were writing?
Just poetry in general is something I really enjoy and a few years ago I worked on this project with this guy Jim Carroll, and I never got to meet him, but I worked on a spoken word record with him. There was a book on CD, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, and I just really got into that guy’s writings because I read his literature in school. If you see his poetry, it’s very intense, just like my poetry in these songs, but I get a lot of inspiration from Blake. Because the way he creates his own universe and his own cosmology and he has these emotions that are named, like his anger and his wrath, and he turns them into characters, and that’s pretty hip. I really like classic novelists, and I learned a lot from the guys I worked with like Dave Matthews, Bill Frisell, Robert Keen and Tim O’Brien. Those are like four guys that I spent a lot of time with. The way that they look at music, they have a really high work ethic and they constantly develop stuff and they’re always writing, I feel comfortable with these people and I don’t feel so weird.
I live in a really small town, there’s no industry, no venues or studios and I don’t feel so comfortable here because I’m more comfortable with guys that are equally obsessed with music. You can talk about stuff like the Stravinsky box set, you don’t have to explain yourself, you can just get to work and enjoy life. I’m really into metal, I really like punk rock, and I really like improvised music, I really like Ornette Coleman. When I was a kid, I was born in ’61, Bitches Brew was a new record, I thought that’s what jazz was, I didn’t know Charlie Parker and all that stuff. So I like Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. I really like Wu-Tang and I really like DJ Shadow’s drum sounds, I’m really into this Roni Size EP that I have called Brown Paper Bag, it’s a 12-inch with these four remixes of this song on there that are just awesome.
I get so much inspiration from all of this stuff, engineers, and recording engineers. I really like this guy Morton Feldman, this composer I got this piece from him where he wrote music to these Jackson Pollock paintings and I really got into that. I spent a fair amount of time working on serial music, 12-tone music, and also Joseph Schillinger, his technique for generating rhythmic and melodic ideas. I study his books some. These are all places I look for inspiration. I just like all this stuff, it’s weird. That’s one thing I never understood about music is the genre-based trip. Like when you’re listening to the radio, say you’re trying to drive somewhere and you want to hear Van Halen’s “Panama,” or AC/DC or Black Sabbath or something really great on the radio—horror of horrors you left the iPod in your bag or somethin’—you always catch stuff in the middle. If you listen to a rock radio station, they’ll only play about one in five songs that technically rock. So after they play something really rocking, then they’ll play a power ballad. So you go looking somewhere else, and you come back in the middle of “Back in Black,” you didn’t get the beginning of it.
The genre-based thing is kind of a barrier. I look at music as all the good stuff in a set. Instead of the set being just mambo or bebop or reggae, within a forum—say take metal. If you go down to the record store and pull 50 metal records, a lot of them are not going to be that great. That’s why I thought that guy Alan Freed was really a badass. He was like, “Hey all this rock and roll stuff is pretty cool.” I think he was a DJ in New York [Editor’s note: he moved to NYC after starting his career in Cleveland], and he started playing all those records that weren’t really from the same place, but he sort of made a place for them, you know. It’s like when I hang out with some of my friends, they know Toots and the Maytals, and Megadeth and Aaron Copeland, and T.S. Eliot, and directors and conductors and sculptors and painters, people who are aware of that stuff know about that stuff and it’s so much easier for me to talk to people like that.
I spoke with Jeff Coffin in September and he seems like the kind of guy who doesn’t feel weird talking about all this stuff.
Yeah, Jeff is like one of those guys I go to for all of that stuff. He’s a smart guy and a fun guy to talk to. We do a lot of video chatting on G-Mail. Every time I talk to him, we start talking about records, art, books and poetry. He’s one of those guys that are on my list of people that I can relate to. One thing I think is important to say: My take is that this is the best time ever to be in music and I’m just so excited. And a lot of people are saying negative things about the reality of music right now, and I disagree. It’s easy to get, you can find it, you can enjoy it and you can share it. I think it’s the best period for music ever.
There are a lot of people who said that music is becoming more de-valued because of illegal downloading and may disagree with you. What would you say to them?
When I was studying audio decades ago, you had to cut tape [destructive vs. non-destructive editing], and when you wanted to order records you would have to order through the mail. Things are so much easier now!
Now I find out about music so quickly, and it’s what I do. I think as an artist, I’ve spent a fair amount of time researching those guys in the 1920s, birthing the modern world so to speak, all of these painters and architects, and they were often friends with each other and invented all of this stuff from just hanging out and bouncing ideas off each other.
Artists have always had to economically adjust up or down—maybe we have to wait a few tables. Read Man Ray’s biography.
But I don’t think personal economics comes into play within the art discussion and I feel like people mistakenly look at music the way they look at sports teams or politics. There are certain variables that are easier to quantify, so a certain type of mindset will focus on this data. But as far as it’s relevance in determining the value of a work of art, I’m sorry, these figures are of no use.
They ask why so much money is spent on a player when his batting average is only this? I think this line of reasoning as applied to music may be technically correct numerically, but is of no use to anyone, artistically.
In years past, I’ve collectively spent way over 40, 50, 60 thousand dollars on various record contracts, maybe waaaay more, to pay someone at the label to stick a record, at wholesale price to me, into an envelope with postage that I pay for to be sent to the program director of a radio station that has no interest in the record. In some cases it would have been cheaper to just burn them. Not always of course, but sometimes.
With downloads— promos are free. I never downloaded anything that I wasn’t already predisposed to like. In other words, my guess is that the promos are going to folks that want them! If I’m going to offer my promo for download or streaming, it’s going to cost me nothing, and that’s significant. So the way that I look at today’s musical calendar, it’s perfect for a guy like me. The way people find out about stuff, the way people work together, it’s a perfect time for me to do what I’m doing. I’m not a fan of the cash bonfire.
It’s a good time for experimenting.
It’s like in the ‘20s, those guys probably didn’t know what they were doing when they were coming up with all that stuff, they didn’t know that contemporary composition was going to be born right there, and that was a very dark time historically. We are still dealing with their innovations today.
This whole thing came out of that. I just look at the bright side of all this stuff, just the ability for most everyone to freely consume music, like how can that be bad?
You mentioned John Paul Jones, how did you meet him?
Just how I met many of these guys. One day I just got an email from him saying, “Hey, I like your records, you really did well with that record.” And I couldn’t believe it, so I started writing the guy and when I went over there and played in London, he came to the show and we hung out. These people that are my friends that I have on speed dial they’re way up there, and they’re fans of what I do. I’m a big fan of his work, not just in Led Zeppelin, his orchestral works, and his scoring work and his solo work. He’d come to a couple of shows and one time I called him and he took me on this rock and roll tour of London, where all these studios used to be. He took me to this Indian restaurant where Zeppelin would hang out and the Beatles would hang out, and we went over to his house and played his giant three-necked instrument, it was just fantastic. It means so much to me for someone like that to tell me that they liked my record, because I really look up to these guys, and I don’t compare myself to them by any means. He’s kind of my model too, doing a lot of stuff, having a really good attitude and being great, and being into stuff. He’s a little older than myself, and I want to have that attitude, I want to go the distance. I don’t want to be a bitter or negative person, and a person like him is someone I model myself after.
You wrote on your website “It’s a very odd conversation when your record label wants you to be less commercial than the music that you have written.” That’s pretty outrageous. What was your initial reaction when you heard this?
Well I was just stunned and I couldn’t understand it. I like pop music, I like fractured pop music, and I’ve always liked that. I consider myself to be a fractured pop writer, and it’s just tough because I don’t want to rag on labels because they have a hard road on holding a lot of expenditure and a lot of them don’t know what to do. But there are some that are doing really great, and they’re going to continue to do well. That’s just one part of the industry that can’t give up the anvil or the typewriter, so if they can’t function in the contemporary world, I don’t know what to say. I think it’s good for that part to go away. I want everyone to have a job and that kind of stuff, but I think it’s okay for us to change and for things to happen. I went from selling a certain amount of records to selling a whole lot less records and I just had to deal with it. That happened to me way before the economy went bad, about six or seven years ago, and it was considered a horrible thing but we just dealt with it. Artists had to deal with the depression, wars, and we just keep making stuff, and we adjust our lifestyle to fit what we’ve got and just keep moving.
I’ve been in this bluegrass/acoustic world for a long time because I play a banjo, and it’s been hard for me because I’m a subgenre of a subgenre. I’m the weirdest guy because I have limitations upon limitations. Really what I do is that I’m a songwriter, and if you listen to my records, I have all kinds of different stuff. In that world, it’s always kind of stressful for me, I’m on a label with records that I just don’t dig, and then I’ll be on tour with bands that are nice, but I just get tired of that stuff. I mean I grew up playing the banjo and grew up playing country music, and wanted to do something beyond that.
This kind of goes back about what’s so great about right now. We have a giant database to build ideas on. Johnny Cash had musical history only up to that point in time. Now we have that, plus all this other stuff. So we have a bigger database to build ideas from, and that’s awesome. To ignore that is very difficult. It’s funny as a person in this business when you say, “I got this batch of music that I think people are going to like.” Then they say to you, “Can you not do that? Can you do a banjo instrumental?” And then I’m like, “Oh maaan.” I mean how many records is that going to sell—1,500? I don’t do that very well. That is really difficult. I mean I’m really thankful to be in a situation with people where if you mention Soul Coughing or Ghostface Killah or Metallica, they know exactly who you’re talking about. I just feel like I’m amongst friends, and I enjoy working in that world, it’s just that my ideas are more contemporary.
