Photo by Dean Budnick
Nels Cline may be best known as the wild axeman flanking the likes of Jeff Tweedy, Glenn Kotche and John Stirratt (among others) in Wilco, but with Cline’s latest solo output Lovers, he completes a mission started long before joining up with the Chicago indie mainstays.
It’s hard to call Lovers a “solo” album, as Cline enlisted a slew of close friends to bring the album, which he says has been living inside his head for the better part of 30 years. The album touches on many of Cline’s favorite compositions, highlighted by an instrumental arrangement of Sonic Youth’s “Snare, Girl.”
As Cline explains at length, Lovers is a project decades in the making and has adapted itself to Cline’s current self with the experiences and influences he has gained along the way incorporated into the final product. This, of course, all also coincides with Wilco’s newest effort Schmilco, which he also touches on.
One of the themes in this record is the concept of “mood music.” What does that mean to you and what are you trying to evoke from the listener when you make this type of music?
I think that in a way, me describing Lovers as potential mood music is a bit of me being unrealistic about the fact that it is actually an engaging and dynamic attempt. But the inspiration initially was derived from not just what was called mood music records in the ‘60s, which were often orchestral records made by musicians doing revamped versions of hit instrumentals of the day and there were many in those days, so like the love scene from The Sandpiper, or the “Baby Elephant Walk” by Mancini from Hatari!. Those kinds of things.
But also the romance kind of jazz records of the day, whether it was Ben Webster For Lovers or Stan Getz’s Focus, or whatever. We refer to these things generally as mood music because they’re pretty much soft around the edges and can be listened to or ignored, depending, and that way there are early versions of what we now refer to as ambient music, I suppose, something to create an atmosphere and at their best, are engaging listening, and at their worst, I guess they’re just background music.
I just thought many, many years ago, that it would be interesting, because I like some of these kinds of records, but also I thought it would be interesting to add more darkness, more shadows, and more edge to this idea and make the notion of romance possibly more thorough or more realistic. Hence the conclusion of pieces like the theme from The Night Porter for example, or “Touching” by Annette Peacock, which is not necessarily dark but certainly abstract.
That said, the years passed, the project sort of became, in some ways, more of a jazz record in some regards, and then also it’s just a little more upbeat, and it’s a little more groovy, so I don’t know if it’s really a mood music record anymore.
Mood music sounds like a concept that has certainly evolved over the years, particularly now that you mention what we now know as ambient music.
In my case I was thinking more about the kind of thing that—the super groovy bachelor puts on whatever record on his KLH stereo and mixes the martini and sits a little too close to his date on the couch and hopes for the best.
You mentioned you’ve had this idea for a while. How does the final product compare to how it was first conceived in your head and how has it adapted itself over the years?
For one thing I was going to always do all of the arrangements, but I became more and more daunted by this idea, especially as the record was leaning more towards traditional jazz arrangements and also I was becoming a bit perplexed as to how to arrange my own pieces and realized that I didn’t really have the expertise to make those sound anything possibly beyond interesting, or beyond traditional.
Beyond that, the songs that were originally on my ever-changing list that made it to the record from the earliest conceptualizing are “Cry, Want” by Jimmy Giuffre, the theme from The Night Porter, “The Search For Cat”, the queue from Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Henry Mancini, “Touching” by Annette Peacock, and “Secret Love”. Other songs that came slightly later were pieces like, “Beautiful Love”; I had the piece “Diaphanous” which is the second piece after the introduction on the record of mine from the very beginning, but the other pieces I had written had gone by the wayside.
Some things were added really at the last minute and really in the eleventh hour just because I wanted the program to be maybe a little more balanced because it’s got a ballad-heavy concept and also I wanted some of the musicians because it’s this incredible group of musicians and they’re basically just having to play parts while I have all the fun. I wanted them to be able to participate a little bit more and have their voices emerge, so “Lady Gabor” was added very late in the game, also because I wanted a grooving drone piece besides “Snare, Girl.” My piece, “The Bed We Made,” which didn’t have a title when we recorded it, was a late addition; I had just finished writing the piece, and had asked Michael Leonhart what he thought, if he thought it would fit in the program, and he said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” That’s a little bit more of an up, ¾ number, and then the piece called the “The Bond,” it concludes the record, wasn’t an eleventh hour addition but when I realized I would love to have an orchestrated version of that song on the record, then I knew how the record was going to end, because that piece has this definitive quality that I perceived right away when Julian Lage and I started playing it as a duo, which is how I first conceived the piece, and that’s how we would always end our concerts. I figured, “Hey, we’re going to end the record with this piece,” which means the record is not going to be as dark and I guess as brooding and ponderous as I thought about it in the ‘80s on a nice quiet G major chord.
You mentioned the large cast of musicians on the record. What were you looking for when recruiting people for this album?
Well besides wanting to involve some of my favorite people, almost all of them live in New York here where I live, not where I was living when I was conceiving the album.
I wanted to have a palette, and this was something I discussed with Michael Leonhart and he basically said, “Please let me help you with this,” and I told him, because I wanted almost no saxophone on the record, I wanted the palette to be heavy on alto or bass, flutes, and clarinets of various stripes, with Ben Goldberg on bass clarinet, and muted brass, and bassoon. Michael added Charles Pillow to the ensemble, who also plays double reeds, oboe, and English horn, which I had not included in my thoughts and I’m very glad he did.
I thought that would be a unique sonic palette and also Michael termed it ‘minimal lush,’ that’s what he likes to call what he felt his directive was.
I had very, very specific ideas arranging-wise for the pieces that were on the song list from the very beginning, so something like “Cry, Want” with the marimba and the bass flute and all of that, was basically how I heard it and Michael nailed it. The heartbeat on, what I call the chord cluster heartbeat, on “Secret Love” which is in 5/8 against the 4/4, and the re-harmonization of the bridge was my idea but basically I would give Michael only sketches and lead sheets and things like that and then we would just verbally discuss what I wanted and other songs like “The Bed We Made,” for example, which I mentioned, I had just told to him to do whatever he wanted and I didn’t hear the arrangements until we were recording because there’s no way to convene a whole 17-23 piece group just to test your arrangements. It’s extremely expensive and extravagant. So only a few revisions were made.
You mentioned it a little bit in there, but what was the recording process like? With all of these musicians was it hard to book time in the studio and get everyone on the same page?
One thing, miraculously, almost everyone I asked to be on the record was able to do it. We recorded the main session without the strings and harp, done in five days consecutively, all playing at the same time. There are some overdubs and I did replay a couple of solos because I don’t always nail it. I just want it to honor the form, but I’m certainly no premiere exponent of the form.
Also, it’s scary, my god, it was scary. I’ve never done anything like this but it’s all done pretty much as you hear it except for the solo that I play at the end of the record, I overdubbed that because I wanted a few shots at that, I wanted a different sound on the guitar. I added a loop overdub on “Snare, Girl.” These are very minimal production touches as far as that goes and then we did the strings and the harp in a one-day session in a different studio and also recorded a version of, “In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning,” with Doug Wieselman on tenor saxophone and the strings and me, which I think will emerge eventually as a kind of B-side, extra nugget. It’s just strings, and me, and tenor saxophone, and harp.
These people are all people that, except for a couple of them, are all people I’ve know and admired for many, many years and in the case of my brother Alex was the only person I ever wanted to play drums on the record, I’ve obviously known him my entire life, he’s my twin brother. Devin Hoff was in The Singers for 10 years, Steven Bernstein and I discussed this project probably 16 years ago. I was saying “if I ever do this, would you be interested in playing on it?” I figured he’d really get it and be into it, and I was right.
Zeena Parkins and I are collaborators for a long time and she’s one of my favorite composers, not just one of my favorite players or improvisers. The whole group, J.D. Parran, I met in the ‘80s and we played together. Doug Wieselman I met in Los Angeles in ’84 when he was playing the Kamikaze Ground Crew and he turned out to be one of my wife’s best friends. When she and I met, it turned out that she loves Doug and his playing and that they’ve collaborated, anyway, it’s just a lot of connections there. Obviously I’ve played a lot with Ben Goldberg and I continue and he came out from California as did my brother and the young woodwind player named Gavin Templeton who nobody knows, but he had been my assistant on a huge project that I did years ago for David Breskin called Dirty Baby, and was my musical sort of assistant and generated scores for me with his computer which I don’t know how to do.
But he’s a fantastic player so I wanted him to get a chance to play so I brought him out from California along with Jeff Gauthier, a violinist, who I’ve played with since 1980 and one of my best friends, and he ended up marrying Zeena’s sister, Maggie Parkins, who many people are aware of is one of the best cellists around.
It’s just a really happy thing. I’d asked a couple of my good friends who play violin also to be on it, but they couldn’t schedule it, they were the only ones who couldn’t make the session, because everybody else was able to do it. We also started asking people months in advance. If you think about it, it ended up being 23 people, not including Ron Saint Germain who engineered and mixed. It’s just a lot of people involved.
You’ve mentioned a lot of these players are some of your favorite improvisers. How much of the record is improvised?
Pretty small. That’s why I’m saying, in a way it’s this weird embarrassment of riches to have all the people I mention like Erik Friedlander and Kenny Wollesen and all these guys—Alan Ferber playing parts, because the idea was guitar, bass, drums trio with orchestra backing. That’s the concept of all those kinds of things. There might be another soloist here and there, and when there is—there are a couple of trumpet solos from Mr. Leonhart and one from Steven Bernstein. There are a couple of bass solos from Devin, and pretty much, that’s it, except for on “Lady Gabor” where it’s more collective. JD got to emerge on the C flute and Zeena on the harp. It’s really everyone playing parts and now we’ve even performed a lot of this material live, at the Newport Jazz Festival and with almost from the record, I couldn’t have the hugest band, so I only had a 17-piece band.
But everybody is just really into it, they don’t seem to be bothered by the fact that a lot of the time it’s just playing parts because they like the project, so. But there’s hardly any improvisation.
The most improvisation on the record is on two pieces, besides “Lady Gabor” which has some blowing, but on the Annette Peacock suite “So Hard It Hurts/Touching”, that section was just this, what I call this sound cloud, is conducted in determinacy, so the pitches are not written down. Michael just, what I suggested that he do, is conduct people in and out and have them pick any note they want, as long as it’s blending, and I’m just doing controlled feedback through that section, whether it’s sustaining a Tibetan spell or I guess it was maybe a singing goal, I can’t remember now, which is how we transition into “Touching.” That was the one moment, “So Hard It Hurts”, where I intended to make reference to the potentially violent aspects of fashion, love, and sexuality. But I didn’t want to dwell there too long, so it’s really just a burst.
The other place where there’s collective improvisation is on “Cry, Want” where there’s an improvised, and the only sort of trio free improvisation that I do on pretty much every one of my records. The orchestra is conducted by Michael to do these long and short tones with notes of their choice, which was also my idea. And then I’m responding in real time to notes that I’m hearing people have chosen. I do make melodic decisions in the moment based on what I heard them do. So it is an exchange. It’s not a whole lot of improvising for these incredible players.
How did the Sonic Youth cover (“Snare, Girl”) end up on there? I know you have a long relationship with some of the members of that band.
Well, for a long time, I was thinking about doing a different Sonic Youth piece on this record, but lyrically, it didn’t quite fit the concept, even though musically it would’ve been great, and I won’t tell you which one it is because then everyone will be like, “Oh!” Or they won’t, they’ll go “What song?” I’m sure they won’t know it actually, because it was also from the album A Thousand Leaves, the most underappreciated Sonic Youth record.
The songs that have lyrics on the record, the lyrics are printed in the package, I have a weird feeling you’ve either heard a download or seen a double CD without the fleece on the CD’s which has the lyrics and the publisher and writer information, but anyway, I decided I don’t even know how many years ago, but I decided to change direction and do “Snare, Girl” instead because for one thing I think the lyrics are absolutely, fantastic poetry as Thurston Moore is capable of it at best. I think he writes some very serious music, trying to when he’s not just writing a rock song, being ironic and all that kind of art smart thing that Sonic Youth are capable of.
I thought it was a beautiful song in general, but Thurston really croons the vocals on it, it’s as close to crooning as I think he had gotten with Sonic Youth at that point. I always thought it sounded absolutely beautiful and gorgeous, I found out only recently that it wasn’t even going to make, or it wasn’t going to even be recorded, it wasn’t going to make the cut and that it was Steve Shelley who lobbied for it, so I thanked him recently when I heard this.
Including the Sonic Youth song, it wasn’t really a novelty idea and I have to say that I thought of the idea of including a Sonic Youth song long before Brad Mehldau was doing Radiohead songs and everybody had to do some kind of contemporary rock song to prove that they could transform these things or saying “we appreciate beautiful melodies or cool chord changes” or whatever it is. And not that it takes anything away from Brad because he of course is a complete wizard and did beautiful renditions of these songs as have The Bad Plus and others but it’s not a novelty thing.
It’s basically like many things on the record. It’s not just a concept of a romance record or mood music or an idea about love and intimacy as it could be expressed musically, in lots of traditional and non-traditional ways, it’s a series of homage and it’s layered sometimes of homage to various artists and guitarists.
It’s always crucial to me to see if Sonic Youth could sit alongside Jerome Kern and Jimmy Giuffre and Annette Peacock and it’s this desire of mine to sort of include all of these people and the same goes for the Ambitious Lovers song “It Only Has to Happen Once,” which I’ve always thought was, not only a beautiful song, but very sexy. I think that when I became inspired to do something with this song was many years ago. And I also wanted something on the record that at least was a nod to Brazilian music, and we did our version kind of close to the Ambitious Lovers version, in a weird way, and my guitar sound on playing on that is maybe obviously an homage to Marc Ribot with Los Postizos playing 12-string, but that was my intent.
Also he played after Arto [Lindsay] in the Lounge Lizards, Ribot, this is like what I’m talking about, multiple layers of homage built into a lot of the tracks, the homage to Jim Hall, Bill Evans, and Duke Ellington at the end of “You Noticed” which is the most saxophone present on the record, that’s Michael, I said, “please, when we get to the end, can we go full Ellingtonia, and do the Ellington Strayhorn live,” and he said, “Yeah man, Charles has got an awesome Johnny Hodges alto thing he can do,” and I said, “Incredible, let’s do it.”
There are a lot of these elements, and then some of them are direct. It’s like, ok, Henry Mancini, he had huge pop hits but the man is a genius at composition and orchestration in my mind. And this queue from Breakfast at Tiffany’s that was not on the soundtrack album, you used to only be able to hear it if you watched the movie and it turned out that Michael was as obsessed with this queue as I was. And it’s one of the reasons we got together on this project, was discussing that queue, the “Search For Cat.”
There’s no guitar, we were just playing a written part on that piece. It’s just there because to me, its appearance in the movie, when it happens, when they’re in the rain looking for the cat that Holly Golightly has thrown out of the window of the cab and then of course realizing this horrible act and then they find the cat and that’s when it goes into “Moon River,” we go instead into “The Bond.”
That is an incredible piece of writing and an incredible way to inform that potent and emotional scene, so really, that piece exists just to say, “Listen to this incredible piece of music that Henry Mancini wrote,” and also because Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a hugely important movie to me and my parents growing up. The movie became incredibly important to me because of my association not only with my family’s love of it and the Truman Capote story which is far darker than the movie, but it holds up this ultra urbane idea of relationships and romance and how you meet people in the big city and what they do to survive and I think it’s a crucial, thematic element to why I even wanted to do this record. It’s a big part of it, just as is The Night Porter which is a very transgressive and I guess tasteless movie but at the same time, I find it incredibly romantic, so I guess I’m fucked up.
I added “Max, Mon Amour” late in the game and I realized not only do I love the music from it by Michel Portal, my brother Alex and I used to listen to Michel Portal records in the ‘70s when he was doing these amazing pre-jazz groups, but it’s another really transgressive Charlotte Rampling film and I’ve been sort of in love with and obsessed with Charlotte Rampling for a very long time and I thought that it would kind of balance also the sort of sadomasochism aspect of The Night Porter’s inclusion by having another reference to a Charlotte Rampling film about a very taboo sexual love, romantic relationship.
In the case of Max, Max is a chimpanzee that she has an affair with, because she has a disenchanted life of a British diplomat living in Paris, and the British diplomat husband learned to love Max. It’s a dark comedy, but I think it’s brilliant and it’s very underappreciated, and I think the music, which is pretty much the only music in the movie, is this little theme, is so cool. So I just decided to put them together, and take away a little of the sadomasochism, put some bestiality in it.
Let’s jump to Schmilco for a bit. Another surprise album of sorts. How did these songs come together?
Some of this stuff has been around, it was growing and germinating at the same time as the Star Wars material, primarily because Jeff was just exploding with productivity, he was super prolific. He basically generated a lot of rough material by himself in the loft while a lot of stuff is going on with his personal life with his family.
And I think he thinks of Shmilco as this sort of sparser, more dulcet brother to Star Wars. Whereas Star Wars is pretty much a rock record, this is a little breezier. It’s not down-tempo, but it’s based around Jeff playing acoustic guitar and not singing full voice, he’s doing a more winsome or airier vocal thing on most of the material.
We’ll attempt to play a lot of this material with a smaller setup on stage, to try to scale things down as the material on Schmilco is more scaled down. I also have to say, from my own perspective that I think that lyrically this record is just pretty mind-blowing. I think people are going to find lots to delve into there and a lot of marvelous writing. Like Star Wars, it’s a very pressed listening experience. The songs are all pretty much classic pop length and the record is of classic vinyl length. So it is a barely compressed, not jammed out, there’s no “Art of Almost” on this record. It’s just about songs, some really beautiful songs in my mind.
At recent Wilco shows, there have been sections of the show where you guys have scaled down the instrumentation. Did that process help feed into Schmilco ?
I think that’s the intent. We’re about to begin experimenting with how this will work for real, but I know that the original goal is to blend the acoustic and electric aspects in one show and not separate them, and we’ll see if we can actually pull that off. Technically meaning sound=wise, but especially in some of these larger venues, but that’s the goal, and you’re right.
I think that we’re really loving playing these acoustic sets and on my part it takes a certain amount of ingenuity because I’m playing almost all of the songs on squareneck dobro in open G, and I’m thinking, “whoah, if I’m playing ‘Jesus Etc.’ on squareneck dobro in open G, I’ve got to have some strategies.” I think that the desire is just to see electric material with the same kind of continuity that we’ve had to come up with to play the acoustic material and not necessarily have all the exact same arrangements and the safety net of knowing exactly what we’re going to do.
One more for you: You’re coming back to do The Last Waltz celebration.
I am. As Clapton again.
What do you like about that big ensemble and that show as a whole?
I have to say that when this was first offered to me, I was not thinking this would be a good idea for anyone to do this and not because I’m super reverential to The Last Waltz because I think that’s a really important musical event but as a film, it doesn’t rate super high in my pantheon of concert films, it does with just about everyone else I know. And the idea of playing the Eric Clapton stuff, I just thought like, “God, what am I going to do? Am I going to sing?” and he said, “No, you don’t have to sing,” and I said, “Well Eric sang,” so I’m going to get up there and try to sing/”
Everybody played so well and knew exactly what to do and what not to do and there’s this really great feeling that comes out of it that I did not expect at all. I expected some kind of maybe overly-reverent, still kind of playing and it turned out to be so lively, and the music sounded so alive and as I say, it just really held up and the audience got super into it because that stuff is great and they play great. I just feel proud to be apart of it and I love listening while I’m waiting to play.
There’s a lot of people that go up there and play songs, so you got to keep your eye on the list, but man, it’s super fun. I would never have imagined that I would do it more than once, let alone that it would always be this kind of fun, celebratory and musically satisfying experience.
I’m not sure that my portion is particularly satisfying to listen to. Let’s face it; Eric’s performance then, I think he was at a crossroads in his life and going through some personal problems, it’s not exactly work of genius, so I was trying to infuse a little more into certain parts of the two songs. Now I’m playing a little on the Joni portion as well, that’s something that got added later. It’s fun.
