Mason Jennings is on the road through the end of October in support of his recently released new album, Minnesota. Named after the adopted home state of the musician, the nine-track work features Jennings in, perhaps, his most introspective form, but also mastering a collage-like sound that allows the man the ability to pull in a range of unique imagery and instrumentation without sacrificing his thematic arc. In short, Minnesota may be Jennings most personal and best work to date.
Jambands.com sat down with Jennings on the eve of the album release and while he prepared for the bulk of the rest of the dates on his tour card. Jennings’ debut self-titled album came out when the artist was only 22 in 1997. Now 36, Minnesota resonates with a rich profound afterglow by embracing ideas about family, love, alcoholism, and the light at the end of the tunnel after a long journey through yesterday’s often bleak and diffused environment. Cautiously optimistic and somewhat settled, Jennings offers a portrait of someone who has a firm and wise grip on the delicate balance between being an engaged family man and an astute artist who develops through the years.
RR: Tell me about the importance of recording this new album in Minnesota.
MJ: For this record, I spent a year collecting songs. I recorded about 35 different songs. I mostly did them all by myself in my studio out here. It was definitely the most eclectic batch I’ve had. The songs were just stylistically all over the place, so I edited them way down, and went with the idea of a collage-based record where it had every song holding its own space on the record. When I went to think what the theme was, I thought, lyrically, the themes were home and heart, and I felt the one word that could sum that up would be Minnesota. That’s the one word, to me, where my heart is and where my home is, and it felt better for me to call it that than a record that was all about, literally, Minnesota. It just felt more like Minnesota to me for the variety of experiences I’ve had up here. It sort of symbolized it well.
RR: I lived in Minnesota for three years and it is difficult to explain its appeal to others unless you’ve spent time there.
MJ: Yeah, it’s true. It is a blend of really really amazing woods with the sophistication of the art scene. The public radio and the theatres up here are so good. It’s just such a clean place. The winters are intense, but what happens is that the place just gets so cleaned every year by the winters that the spring, the summer, and the fall are so vivid and fresh. There’s just nowhere like it.
RR: This seems to be a recurring theme with me lately, what with my own situation, as well, but how much of your family life impacts your ability to tour?
MJ: Yeah, definitely. I’ve definitely cut back on the touring a ton. When my kids were
really little, I toured a lot. My kids are 8 and 5 now, and as they get older, I will be home as much as possible, so the touring has shifted to where I’ll fly in and do a weekend here, and fly back home, and then, fly back out for another weekend. For this record, we’ll go to the East Coast and the West Coast, but I’ll make sure there’s a break between them, and I’m going to make sure there’s a couple of months between that and when I go down to the south and do a tour. I just try to make sure I break it up enough that I’m not missing any holidays or birthdays or anything like that.
RR: How do you reconcile that with the nature of the music industry these days? Let’s say you record an album that, in theory, should stand the test of time, and should be valued by many people, but the music industry is the way it is, so is it a situation where you fall into a trap where if you don’t tour, you cut back on your chances to be heard as an artist?
MJ: Yeah, for sure. The more the Internet becomes the massive medium for music, it’s like the touring becomes like…that’s what I have to do to make sure that people keep hearing about it. Touring becomes a way bigger part of my life than it did. I shouldn’t say bigger part, but more important part than it did, or has been before. I have to keep doing it, so I just have to keep figuring out a way to do it without compromising my family. I always look at it as my lifelong journey. I don’t feel as much pressure on it; I just make sure that I stay sane about it, take breaks, and I just want to make sure that every show I do is as good as it can be, so I make sure that I’m ready for it and properly rested.
RR: I liked what you said about every show being what it could be because I feel that way about Minnesota —every song is as good as it could be within this context. Let’s talk about the instrumentation on the album. The piano, obviously, plays a pretty large role. Also, there is spare instrumentation, overall, and the music is all wedded in a beautiful way to the lyrics. Was there a conscious choice to focus some of these pieces on the piano?
MJ: I think those are the songs that felt the strongest. There were a bunch of other songs on guitar, but when I’m writing, I hang out in my studio and I look around and see what kind of instrument looks like fun to me that day and that’s usually what I end up playing. I’ll sit down at the drums and write there, and I’ll grab a guitar, but for this record, I found myself at the piano a lot, and then at the end of the day when we had the batch of songs those really felt like the center of the record to me. It was sort of like after the fact, it felt like more of a piano record because I think all the songs I played on the piano ended up on the record.
RR: The center of a record. How do you determine the center? Is that a difficult process for you, and how do you translate that into the sequencing on the album?
MJ: I don’t know. It is more of a feeling. It’s a feeling like a completeness of a certain song. I can’t really put my finger on it. I can tell you for different records what it was. For
Blood of Man, when I had the song “The Field” and “Tourist,” and also wrote “Pittsburgh,” all of a sudden those three songs the record felt like it had its center, and I felt like I could go off from there. I remember with Century Spring, “Sorry Signs on Cash Machines” and “Killer’s Creek”—those were the center of the record, and everything went off from there. With Minnesota, I wrote “Raindrops on the Kitchen Floor” first and I felt “Wow, this song is a really different thing than anything I have ever written and I really like this song.” Once I started on the piano, then I wrote “Clutch” and I thought, “O.K. “Raindrops” and “Clutch” together have a piano theme,” and then I wrote “Bitter Heart,” and I thought, “there’s a real theme going,” and that is the emotional center of the record—to me, I don’t know, the feeling of it, they all kind of string together.
As far as sequencing, I try to make sure that at least that part of it is represented right away. If the casual listener only listened to the first two or three songs, they would definitely get the feeling off the whole record from the first couple songs. And then, I make sure I bookend it, the last song on the record bookends. On this record, the first song [“Bitter Heart”] and the last song [“No Relief”] both start and end with piano lines.
RR: I love Jason Schwartzman. How did you get his involvement on “Raindrops on the Kitchen Floor?”
MJ: He’s a great guy. I felt that “Raindrops” could use a little bit of something in the choruses and could use a little outside energy to add a little magic to it. He’s such a great musician. He has that band Coconut Records. I asked him if he’d be up for it and he was stoked and he really had fun doing it. I’m not sure exactly what instrument he is playing on there; it’s some sort of cool piano with cool vocal parts, and he just sent the stuff back to me and I thought it sounded really cool. I was happy he was up for it.
RR: I am glad you mentioned “Clutch,” as well—an interesting narrative and one of those songs where one wonders who the singer is referencing in the lyrics.
MJ: Yeah, I don’t know, I guess. (laughs) Yeah, I just go for a feeling. I’m following a feeling on it and trying to hit that spot in my chest. It’s like trying to clench something in my chest. I can’t really close it in. I’m not sure what it’s about.
RR: Speaking of Minnesota, that’s a very Dylanesque answer about songwriting. I came across a quote in Twin Cities Unplugged : “If you ask songwriters under 30 who their inspiration is, a lot of them will say Mason Jennings. Not Dylan.” That makes sense to me because as each generation of musicians comes into play, one would think an artist needs new inspiration to grow. Being a Minnesota musician, how difficult was it for you to appear to have a modern, original voice? And how does that make you feel that you are considered to be a modern influence on artists?
MJ: It’s awesome to have people feel like that. For me, it’s definitely not a conscious thing with my voice. I just try to make music that I like. And I always try to make something that feels new and fresh and something that I’ve never heard before. That’s something that I am excited about with this record. The structure of a song like “Clutch” and the structure in a song like “No Relief”—that is something new to me; I haven’t heard that kind of structure in songs. That is exciting to me.
As far as the community and when I was coming up through it, people and the community were just so supportive. Bands like the Jayhawks and Soul Asylum were supportive of what I did. They’d come to the shows, they’d sit in with me, and it just gave me a lot of encouragement. The local press was so kind. I just felt really fortunate to be in a city like Minneapolis. I’m from Pittsburgh, but I moved here, and I felt like maybe it would be a city that would be open to music like mine where it’s not as traditional and it’s not mainstream. I guess it is in the world of popular music, but I’m not even sure how to categorize it. I just liked to be open to a new sound that I was going for and they were, so I am really grateful.
RR: You mentioned “No Relief,” which is the bookend to the opening track, “Clutch.” Let’s talk about that writing process for that piece.
MJ: That one was the last song written for the record. I have a little Casio keyboard setup for my kids in my house. We’re always playing “Beat It” or whatever; I’m always teaching them little melody lines on this keyboard. One day, I started playing that opening melody on that keyboard, and I remember some kid in the neighborhood came over and said, “I like that sound. I like that song.” He was playing Legos or something, and I kept playing it over and over again for a long time. For a couple of months, I’d just sit down and play with it, and then one day, I was by myself and I sat down and I played it and that second part came in, and then I sang the whole song, and it was like the instant completion of the song. I love that. I love when songs sit and marinate and they kind of get finished in the second verse. That doesn’t happen to me very often. It usually is a single sitting for writing, but that was over a couple of months.
RR: A more sobering song, literally, is “Wake Up”: a litany of attempts to find peace, or a way out, or a way to be free, and also a statement about alcoholism, which struck home. When I lived in Minnesota, it seemed anywhere I turned, there was quite a party atmosphere, but I was aware of the roads one could head down.
MJ: Yeah. I don’t know. It’s hard. I’m not sure how much I want to talk about that one necessarily. It’s a song for me that is personal, but, hopefully, by putting it out there, it could help other people see that kind of struggle inside. I think a lot of people have that kind of struggle is a good way to say it. It just fit on the record. “Rudy” is almost the same song as “Wake Up,” but it is done in a metaphorical, fairy tale way. The idea of “No Relief” is the same idea, too. I don’t know. I am not sure what else I could say about it other than what is in the song on that one.
RR: “Rudy” made me think of Dylan, like a tone poem from John Wesley Harding.
MJ: Yeah, totally. That’s one I’ve been sitting with for years. That was the first one written. I’ve had that song bouncing around since my Boneclouds record. I just couldn’t quite get the lyrics totally nailed, and then I restructured it and recorded it for [ Minnesota ]. It was fun for me because it was the only acoustic song on the record. I think a lot of people think of me and think acoustic guitar. I thought it was fun to have this one acoustic song be this total fairy tale, fantasy-based song—you drop into a dream state, and then, the one most traditional-sounding song is the most far out lyrically.
RR: “Well of Love” is a departure on the record, but somehow it fits in, and it is beautiful that it was placed near the end of Minnesota. There are so many elements in it—a slice of Latino folk music with a hint of Italy, Midwestern polka, and the Latin Playboys meet Willy DeVille. Let’s give some space to The Living Room who played on this piece with you.
MJ: Yes, fantastic. My friend, Adam Topol plays drums with Jack Johnson. We were on tour with Jack for a long time, and Adam was always coming up to me after my sets and he’d say, “Man, you’ve got to sing a cumbia.” And I was always, “What the hell is with a cumbia?” I didn’t know what he was talking about. And then, one day, he said, “I’m going to send you a cumbia, and you are going to sing on it, and it’ll be obvious.” I said, “All right; send me something.” He sent me this long piece of music and, sure enough, it was really easy for me to sing over, and I wrote the melody and the lyrics and the song. We took this long piece of music and edited it down to the shape it is now. It was just so fun. We did that for fun, and I played it for people, and my manager would play it for people, and everybody really liked the song. When we were editing down the songs to get on this record that one just kept popping up as people were saying, “Is that “Well of Love” song going to be on there?” I kept wondering if it would fit. I didn’t know if it was going to fit. My friend, my co-producer, Dan Field said, “Trust me; it’s going to fit. You need it. It’s really a collage record and it is one that will really fit.” I trusted him on that, but I was still: “Are you sure it’s fitting?” He liked it.
RR: He’s a smart man. What was Dan Field’s importance to this record?
MJ: Yeah, he’s huge. He co-produced Blood of Man, too, so he was really really instrumental on both of those records with just getting it down to its essence, and not having any filler, and making sure that every song was holding its place on the record, and making sure that what I was trying to say got said. He brought in a lot of instrumentation, and was a lot of influence on who I brought in to help me with instruments, like bringing in Jake Hanson for guitar parts and Jason Schwartzman, and he definitely helped me with sequencing—what to get help with, how much to leave raw, and how much to clean up. He’s just been an incredible help with that process.
RR: Tangents within a framework—a favorite concept of mine—can be found on “Hearts Stop Beating” and “Witches Dream.”
MJ: Yeah, totally. “Witches Dream” was the first song that I recorded for this record [As mentioned, “Wake Up” was recorded and then reshaped after the Boneclouds sessions.]. That was one that [Field], for sure, was adamant about putting on this record. He said that he really thinks that so much of what I do is all about the creative joy, just creating a song in the moment and having fun and just doing music for the joy of it, and he was just making sure that that spirit got on the record. That song was written and recorded really fast, and it was really fun to do. I said, “I don’t know if it is as strong a song as something like “Clutch.”” But he said, “It doesn’t matter; it’s the feeling coming off of it, and go put that beside a song like “Clutch” to get the contrast,” which he thought was really important to let the listener hear and to show the whole picture of what I actually do, and the spirit of what I do.
“Hearts Stop Beating” was the same kind of thing—just wanting to get something faster, and more in the vein of bands like The Cure or R.E.M., or something like that, where you get a different kind of sound, but still based on the heart. It fits to something like “Raindrops” as it gives it a little more energy, a little more raw flavor to it.
RR: There is also an otherworldly aura to it, as well.
MJ: Yeah, you drop into a dream a little bit.
RR: “Witches Dream” also sounds like a song that Wayne Coyne from Flaming Lips would like to write.
MJ: Yeah, for sure. They are a huge…I love those guys. That’s one of my favorite bands. That’s always the sort of thing that I’m trying to figure out—to bring that side of what I do into a more folk sound, and that one just felt like the most natural on the record. I definitely have that side of my musical personality. A lot more songs got recorded for this record that were pretty far out like that that didn’t quite fit. We’ll have to see how that direction goes in the future.
RR: Let’s talk about direction. You are in the midst of a theatre tour with the Pines opening up for you. They are from Iowa, but now live in Minnesota, I believe.
MJ: Yeah, Chicago and Minnesota. For this tour, I really wanted this to be a song-based tour, and keep that collage spirit alive. We have a bunch of instruments on stage, piano, small drum kit, couple of different guitars, and bass. I bring out my friend Jacob Hanson, who plays all the instruments. It is a more stripped-down show where we switch off on instruments—he’ll play the drums on one song, and I’ll play the piano, and then, I’ll play the guitar, and he’ll play bass; I’ll play some autoharp. Just keep the songs pretty minimal. When we were rehearsing for this, I tried it with a band, and I tried it with [Hanson], and I thought, “Wow, these songs really work real sparse,” which is piano and maybe, a little bit of tambourine and bass, or something like that. I really wanted to make
sure that these songs really stand out in that form. Coming off of my last tour for Blood of Man was a full rock band tour and I thought it would be a nice change of pace to have it based around that. I’d be able to talk more and tell stories. At the end of the show, the Pines come up and sit in with me. The last four or five songs is the full band with my friends, The Pines. There will be an evolution throughout the night—starting solo with my friend, we’ll switch around, and then, we’ll end up a five piece. That just seems like a really fun way to try this once.
RR: Will you be heading back into the studio after the New Year?
MJ: I don’t know what I’m going to be doing. I haven’t been writing much lately, which is interesting for me. After recording that much music by myself over the last few years, I think I’m looking for a more collaborative spirit for the next record, or maybe, record it somewhere else or something. I don’t know what that means yet. I’m going to go out on the road and do this and focus on the tour and see what kind of new things come my way.
It’s interesting. By this point, I usually have a bunch of new songs working out in the studio, but I think I’ve hit the wall with what I feel I can do right now, so I’m looking for a little bit of change of pace.
You asked about The Pines. I thought of those guys because I just love Benson Ramsey. He’s a good friend of mine, and we’ve been friends for a while. I just love his songwriting so much. I want more people to hear it. One of his songs, “Shiny Shoes” is one of my all-time favorite songs. I just thought these guys would be a great band to hang out with for a long tour like that. I think that people that would like my music would enjoy their music, and they’d be fun guys to have sit in, too, and to augment the sound with what they do. It should be a really fun tour.
RR: Minnesota had a positive impact on me—sparse instrumentation with music that is naturally wedded to the lyrics; definitely an album to be proud about, right?
MJ: Thanks a lot. That means a lot to me. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for taking the time to really listen to the record and really get in there with it. I really appreciate that.
RR: And touring behind a record like that is important, but also a show like you described has to have value because, again, it takes you away from your family.
MJ: Yeah. It’s always about being more myself and bringing as much of myself out there as possible and being open and having people feel like I want to have every night be a special experience and a personalized experience. That is why I like going to shows and, when I leave, I feel like I have connected more with the artist that I like, and had a special experience that can only happen once. That is the whole beauty of a live show.
