Tag: Music

Oasis in Dublin and the Ghost of Brendan Behan


The Auld Triangle Comes Full-Circle

A few minutes before Oasis took the stage at Dublin’s Croke Park last Sunday, a curious thing happened. A solitary, unexpected voice issued from the PA and sounded over the stadium and rooftops of Drumcondra. It was not the Who, Beatles, or Bowie that heralded the band’s arrival that night — as has been the custom on previous dates this tour — but the voice of Luke Kelly and the Dubliners belting out a poignant a cappella rendition of “The Auld Triangle,” the song made famous in Brendan Behan’s 1954 breakout play The Quare Fellow and first performed by the playwright on a radio program in 1952.

A good contingent of the 82,000 in attendance that Sunday — most of them well-lubricated and braced for lift-off as 8:15PM ticked closer— sang along to the tune, their voices growing loudest when Kelly hit the lines “And the auld triangle went jingle jangle/ All along the banks of the Royal Canal.”

It was a seriously meta moment in Oasis world that, for many, shattered the fourth wall.

Behan, who grew up in a tenement house in 1930s North Dublin, said he learned the song from a tramp named Dick Shannon in Mountjoy Prison, where the writer was serving time in the ’40s for attempted murder for IRA-related activities. Mountjoy is less than two kilometers from the stadium, and one can imagine an inmate in the prison-yard hearing Kelly’s voice drift along the banks of the canal and humming along.

The Dublin gigs were considered a homecoming of sorts for the Gallagher brothers, and the fans knew it. Liam and Noel’s mother Peggy, who hails from Charlestown in County Mayo, where the Gallaghers spent many childhood summers and first cultivated that trademark spirit of lawlessness, was in attendance both nights and got a shout-out from Liam onstage. (The boys’ estranged father, Thomas, who came from County Meath, was not there.)

Noel Gallagher has said there would be no Oasis without his Irish roots, and for the entirety of this tour, he’s flown the Erin go Bragh flag from his speaker cabinet. “We are Irish, me and Liam, pretty much,” Noel once told a reporter. “There is no English blood in us. Oasis could never have existed, been as big, been as important, been as flawed, been as loved and loathed, if we weren’t all predominantly Irish.”

So many of the great English rock bands boast Irish heritage, with the Pogues being perhaps the most notable. Morrissey best encapsulated the Anglo-Irish dynamic with the song “Irish Blood, English Heart.” John Lydon of the Sex Pistols was certainly London Irish, and John Lennon famously embraced his Irish roots later in his career. All of the original members of Oasis had Irish roots, making them the last in a long line of great rock bands molded in the Anglo-Irish tradition.

Noel has said the brash, defiant swagger of Definitely Maybe stems from the Irish rebel songs the brothers were weaned on, for it is there where the edgy, pump-your-fist-in-air element of the music originates. Up to a week before the show rumors swirled that the Wolfe Tones, a group the Gallagher brothers saw as kids when the Irish folkies would stop in to play Manchester, might open the Dublin shows, with the Tones writing recently to Liam on X:  “Well lad, hope you’re excited for Croker this weekend, any idea what time our sound check is at?”

But it was no dice, and one laments missing the chance to hear the Tones deliver the rousing “Come Out Ye Black and Tans,” a song written by Behan’s brother Dominic, delivered to the fiery hordes at Croker.

As “The Auld Triangle” drew to an end at 8:15 and the band came onstage to “F***in’ in the Bushes,” with the words “THIS IS NOT A DRILL” flashing in red letters on an 80-plus-meter screen, one could not help think of the ghost of Brendan Behan sipping champagne and sherry from somewhere in the catacombs, or glugging whiskey on a stool at The Gravediggers, and smiling. 

Illustration: Study from life of Brendan Behan by Reginald Gray, 1953. Public domain.

Steve Earle on the Making of “Terraplane,” And Then Some …

Steve Earle’s old friend has always been the blues, but never has the prolific and mercurial songwriter released a quote unquote blues album. But that will change on February 17 with the arrival of Terraplane Blues, an album that takes its name from the Robert Johnson song about fast cars and even faster women.

Earle, who currently resides in New York City, cut the record this fall in Nashville at House of Blues studios over a 6-day stretch with his band the Dukes. It’s a bit of a breakup album, he says, what with it coming on the heels of his recent split with singer-songwriter Allison Moorer. Terraplane is a raw and dirty affair sonically, and moves from acoustic East Texas blues numbers to boogie-rock to early Stones-type ballads, with one spoken-word piece in iambic pentameter thrown in for good measure. The record was produced by R.S. Field and is being released by New West Records.

We hung out with Earle in the studio  and chatted about the album, and a host of other topics, including the Shakespeare authorship controversy, where Elvis really learned how to “shake it,” and why Earle’s writing songs for ABC’s Nashville.

So how long have you been thinking about making a blues album?
For a while.

I’d thought about doing it at some point as long as seven or eight years ago. I basically had a couple of things going. I wrote some songs that aren’t on this record, and they were sort of headed in one direction, and then the blues songs started to come along. And I don’t know why, but I decided that I’d make a blues record and then I’d make a country record, so that’s what I’m going to do. The country record’s like half-written. And some of the stuff [on the country record] I wrote for Nashville, just because T-Bone [Burnett] asked me to.

The TV show?

Yeah.

Now when I think of Steve Earle making a blues album, I think of the Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins kind of stuff.

That’s there, but I decided on the Mance thing – there’s a Mance thing and a Lightnin’ thing. You know, Lightnin’ played with a band whenever he could. Mance didn’t, but I don’t think it was a choice. What Mance really did was he played dance music on one guitar when he first started out. So we did a thing that’s very much Mance, but we did it with a band. It’s all acoustic. You know, I’m playing guitar and Chris [Masterson] was playing a baritone resonator. I think that’s what he’s playing. We’ll get drums on it, and upright bass. It’s very much the kind of thing Mance did, the sort of in-between blues and ragtime. I mean, there’s no such thing as between blues and ragtime. There are people that, most of them wearing bowling shirts, will probably listen to this record and say that some of it’s not the blues. But they would be mistaken.
And “Tipitina” is the blues. It’s the 16-bar blues. And pre-war “St. James Infirmary” is the blues. So that stuff’s included. There’s a boogie. I chose Canned Heat rather than ZZ Top for that path. But there’s one song that’s based on the fact that I very much believe, for me, where I come from, the first two ZZ Top records are blues records. And that one track that rocks pretty hard is kind of from that.

So is “Terraplane Blues” your favorite Robert Johnson tune?

No, my favorite Robert Johnson tune is probably “From Four Until Late.” “Terraplane” just seemed like a good title. It’s a car. It’s a fast car. I’ve never wanted to learn how to play “Terraplane,” and I don’t know for sure if I will do it. I’m trying to figure if I can do it. It’s a hard song to sing, so I gotta find some version of it that works for me. [If I do record it], it’ll be an extra track. You have to have an extra track or two.

I know you’re a big patron of Matt Umanov’s guitars in Greenwich Village. 
I’m a big patron of guitar shops in general.

I understand you’re friends with Zeke Schein who works there. He’s a big Robert Johnson guy. 

Zeke knows more about this stuff than anybody that I know. I spent hours talking to him about this record. He knows what tuning all the songs are in. Zeke’s a really good player. He plays all that shit.

Do you think the general perception of blues these days is that it was just a form of folk music and that the dance element and the popular element of what blues used to be in the ‘30s and ‘40s has gotten lost?

Yeah, I mean that’s one thing – this record’s got a song that’s sort of based on “Smoke Stack Lightning.” And “Smoke Stack” – all those Chess records were jukebox records. They were made for people to dance to. They weren’t long and there wasn’t a lot of improvisation on them. They were improvising, but there wasn’t a shitload of long solos because they wrote two minute and 30 second records. And that’s represented here. But it very much sounds like this band. It’s the best band I’ve ever had. The existence of the band was part of the inspiration for making the record. Finally doing it had as much to do with Chris being in the band as anything else because I never had the guitar player to do it.

Did your time in New Orleans working on HBO’s Treme inform this album? 

Absolutely.

It wasn’t until recently that I learned that “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It” was actually taught to Hank Williams by that blues musician who’s from New Orleans.

“Tee Tot” [Rufus Payne] is the story … I don’t know how much there is [to all that] … there’s all those stories about how black music and white music … I don’t know. The legend says that Elvis got all those moves from watching black gospel groups and watching bands on Beale Street. I know where he got everything he got. It was from Wally Fowler. Wally Fowler was the founder of the Oak Ridge Boys. He was the first white gospel singer to perform the way that black gospel groups did. You know, to not just stand there. He was the first real showman in white gospel music and he founded the Oak Ridge Boys. And there’s been an Oak Ridge Boys ever since.

When Guitar Town was written I was writing for Sunberry/Dunbar, which belonged to the Oak Ridge Boys and was run by my publisher, Noel Fox, who was the last bass singer in a non-secular version of the Oak Ridge Boys. Oak Ridge Boys are a gospel group. And [Richard] Sterban took over. Sterban came from J.D. Sumner, who replaced Noel because Noel quit. Noel went out and worked for Olan Mills or something, you know, selling people pictures of themselves for years. When the Oaks got big they brought Noel back to run their publishing company. He was a great song man. He’s gone now, but there would be no Guitar Town without Noel. He told me to write an album and not worry whether or not it would get you a record deal, and I had just lost my first record deal after being here for 12 or 13 years. I was pretty discouraged, and didn’t have much faith in myself as a writer anymore. And I wrote the songs that became Guitar Town in about 11 months.

But I heard all the war stories from him and from the Oaks and from those guys during that period, and they set me straight on where Elvis got that shit, and I believe it’s true. It just makes more sense. I went back and found a couple of films of Wally Fowler performing and [I was like] “ohhh …”

But it took a while to get poor white people and poor black people at each other’s throats, and it didn’t always take. There was already someone who was interested, like upper middle class kids like Sam Phillips slummin’ just because they loved the music. He ended up starting Sun Records, that kind of stuff. So you know, it couldn’t stay contained forever, the two things. And Sam knew, and that’s not a legend. He looked for years and [said], “If I can find a white kid, a good looking white kid who can sing this stuff, then I’m going to get rich.” He didn’t get as rich as he should have, but he got rich.

You’ve got a history of borrowing from the blues lexicon in your own tunes. And you taught that course at the Old Town School of Folk Music years ago, I think it was titled “The Cool Shit To Steal.” How do you walk that line between borrowing from traditional material and coming up with original stuff? You know, so much of the folk tradition is obviously about borrowing. 

It is, but in the blues it’s really tricky because it’s a limited genre. Some of this stuff is definitely post-Bob Dylan blues. Dylan started making blues records on purpose a long time ago. It begins on Bringing It All Back Home and it’s fully realized on Highway 61. Everything is in a blues form from that point on for a while, until probably Nashville Skyline or John Wesley Harding maybe. And I thought that it would be sort of fun to do something where I didn’t necessarily have to come up with a lot of melodies, that I would find at least the components for the melodies in this toolbox that’s called the blues.

Some of it’s more original that I thought it would be, melodically. The lyrics I pushed as hard as I’ve ever pushed. Some of the best lyrics I’ve ever written are on this record. I wrote a spoken word piece in iambic pentameter again. That’s me making up for my lack of education. I didn’t get a chance to write in iambic pentameter in high school because I only got halfway through the 9th grade.

So are you still a big Shakespeare buff?

Yeah. I don’t think that the glovemaker’s son wrote those plays, but yeah. I think Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote them. So does the greatest Shakespearean actor of our time, so did Mark Twain, so does Meryl Streep.

I don’t know if I believe that. Is there evidence?

There’s tons of evidence. There’s evidence both ways. You should read all the books and make up your own mind about it. There’s no way it was a bunch of people. It was one person, in my mind, and it pisses Billy Bragg off because he thinks I’m being elitist, and I’m far from an elitist.

There’s no way [it was] someone who’d never been to Italy, was illiterate, or in other words couldn’t form words, and that’s probably true of Shakespeare and most actors of his time. He could read but he couldn’t write, because that was a much harder thing to learn to do then. He had no intimate knowledge of life at court, and didn’t have political protection to keep him from getting his fucking head chopped off with some of the things he was parodying and some of the things he was writing about when he was writing them.

So the theory about de Vere is that he was either Elizabeth’s son or Elizabeth’s lover. Some people even think both. My guess is that he was her son, or somehow related to her, anyway. And so he got away with it. But it’s one person, it’s a singular genius voice. There’s no way it was more than one person, no way there was more than one person that brilliant in Elizabethan England, when there were only a 100,000 people in London and the whole area. It just doesn’t make sense.

Like with Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Their voices were so different from the Shakespeare plays, there’s just no way …

Yeah, and Ben Jonson is where a lot of the clues that it may have been de Vere come from. Ben Jonson wrote the preface to the First Folio, he’s the one who called him “The Soul Of The Age” and all that stuff. And they all were writing really great stuff, but nobody was writing anything like that. And nobody really emulated him in his time. Shortly after he died people did. And he became a big deal – Shakespeare’s plays were being staged and they were hits in London. And at that moment Elizabeth was patronizing theater. She didn’t go out to the theater, she couldn’t do that, but plays were brought in and performed at court. And she was the very first monarch in Europe that did that, which is another clue.

But there are a lot of books about it, and there’s a lot of evidence, and people are horrified of it. There’s a film called Anonymous that’s about the authorship and it’s just a shoot-em-up. Every theory is about Edward de Vere being the actual William Shakespeare, and who the real William Shakespeare was, and why he got set up. I think it’s really simple. I think he had to have a front because he was the Earl of Oxford and he couldn’t be a playwright, so I think he just set up a guy and paid him, because Shakespeare retired and went back to his hometown and set himself up in a wool business and fucking sold wool for the rest of his life after becoming the greatest playwright and actor of his age. It just doesn’t make sense.

He was a hoarder too; he hoarded grain during the plague, which was a bad thing to do.

Yeah, he was a businessman. That’s what he was. He was a Republican. But yeah, I believe that.

(American Songwriter, April 2015)

Hippie Beach

Hippie Beach is not on any map. Tucked away in the woods along Halls Mill Creek, this small stretch of sand is a place where folks beach the boat, ride jet skis and kick back with friends.

The waterside area, about a mile northwest of where the creek meets Dog River, made headlines the weekend of July 4, when a Mobile man critically injured himself after falling from a tree.

Wade Findley, 32, had intended to jump from the tree into the creek, Mobile police said. A rope swing, which dangles from one tree, is a favorite pastime at Hippie Beach. But Findley slipped while climbing and landed headfirst on the ground, police said.

Findley was taken by helicopter to the University of South Alabama Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition the day of the fall. The hospital declined to release updated information. Attempts to reach family members were unsuccessful.

Greg and Chris Motes, who live close by near the Cypress Shores community, harbor fond memories of afternoons spent on Hippie Beach. Greg, 19, recalls the time he and his girlfriend swam with manatees, the endangered marine mammals that have begun cropping up in Alabama waters. “A family of five came up behind the boat,” Greg said. “(My girlfriend) said, ‘Baby, I want to go swimming.'”

Last week, the brothers rode their four-wheeler though a network of dirt trails behind the beach. To cool off, Greg performed back flips off the rope swing into the creek.

Hippie Beach has long been a haven for local river rats. Faye Haas, who visited the beach with her family last week, said she had been coming since the mid-1970s, back when people called it Hippie Hole. “Because we was hippies, ” she said.

“We used to come and camp out and stay here all weekend,” continued Haas, 52, who soaked up rays while her daughter and granddaughter splashed about in the water. “I remember a couple of friends skinny-dipping.”

A few years ago, Hippie Beach was a well-known party spot for high-school students, said Krys Bolton, visiting last week with her family.

Bolton, 18, spun tales about female mud wrestling and frequent fights. Broken bottles, trash and a burned couch testify to the bedlam she described.

As high school students, Alex Joy and his friends said they partied at Hippie Beach many a night. Last week, they beached their boat and went swimming, if only to reminisce.

Colin Hartery, 18, remembers seeing a shiny brand-new Ford Mustang parked on the beach one night. That was not the case when he returned a week later. “It was burned from top to bottom,” he said.

The parties drew patrons from several area schools, said Joy, 19. The revelry would begin in August, he said, and continue through the school year.

Then the cops caught on. But that didn’t immediately put a stop to the partying, Joy said.

“You could get a few hours in before the cops came,” said Joy, adding that several of his friends got arrested there.

The police drove four-wheelers and SUVs back in the woods to catch those fleeing on foot, Joy said.

Mobile police have made arrests in the area after responding to calls complaining of disorderly conduct and minors in possession of alcohol, said spokesman Officer Eric Gallichant.

Gallichant said police could not specify how many arrests have occurred on Hippie Beach, because the spot does not have an address. He said police consider the beach private property but don’t know who owns it, adding that the beach is largely inaccessible by car.

Rising Son

Jay Farrar has always been known as a songwriter’s songwriter. Even during his salad days with the seminal alt-country group Uncle Tupelo , the Belleville, Ill. native was writing world-weary, poetic songs that belied his young age.
Farrar formed Son Volt shortly after Uncle Tupelo called it quits in 1994 (with Tupelo band mate Jeff Tweedy starting Wilco). The group’s first album, Trace , was a mostly acoustic affair that now ranks as one of the musical high-water marks of the ’90s. The band released two more albums before going on hiatus in ’99.

After two experimental solo projects, Farrar resurrected Son Volt in 2005. But this time around, the band had a new lineup. Their first comeback album, Okemah and the Melody of Riot , found the group moving away from its signature traditional sound into more rock-oriented territory.

With their latest effort, The Search , Son Volt continues to plow new ground musically. With frequent looping, horns and the occasional sitar, it sounds far more like The Beatles circa 1968 than any neo-traditional band you’ve ever heard.

But despite the new sound, Farrar’s lyricism remains the band’s hallmark. His surrealistic evocations of the American road on The Search affirm that he is, first and foremost, a songwriter. Richmond.com recently spoke with the Son Volt frontman, who comes to Richmond this Thursday with his band “Groovin’ in the Garden.”

Since your first solo album Sebastopol , you’ve been a lot more experimental with the instrumentation and the arrangements. Was that a natural evolution for you, or more of a conscious decision to break free from the alt-country pigeonhole?

It felt natural. So I guess it was evolution. Coming off a period where the instrumentation was fairly static but it remained the same, I think the solo records just sort of represented a challenge to see where things could go.

Are you listening to completely different stuff than you were listening to, say, 10 years ago?

Probably. You change over the time. I think there was maybe a song on the first solo recordat that period, I was even listening to jazz. That was something that I definitely wasn’t listening to [in the past], and trying out some jazz time signatures and things like that. I try to keep an open mind and learn from whatever I’m listening to.

Other than yourself, the current Son Volt lineup features none of the members that were on the first three albums. Why did you keep the name?

I felt like there was unfinished business. I felt like Son Volt had more to offer, so I stuck with it.

Your lyrics have always been more impressionistic than narrative-driven. I’ve always heard a strong Townes Van Zandt influence. Who are some of your guiding lights, in terms of songwriting?

Townes Van Zandt would be one of them. I didn’t actually hear Townes Van Zandt until ’94 or something like that. I’d been doing a fair amount of writing before I came across him. He definitely left an impression. Maybe even certain writers have even as much of an influence, whether it was Jack Kerouac, who had more of a stream-of-consciousness style that I could really relate to and learn from, I think, as far as the idea of just getting your thoughts down on paper and not editing them along the way. I could relate to that and I’ve done a lot of that. I feel like that’s a good way to create.

A lot of the songs on the last two albums decry conservative, Middle America politics. Yet you still live in the Midwest. Can you explain that?

In the Midwest, I guess you can keep your finger on the pulse really. I prefer to live in a place where, in like St. Louis especially, it’s primarily a more working-class city. There’s more realism there than there is, sometimes, on the coasts. Anyway, that’s my take. I never really considered living anywhere else, except maybe during the period of making the Okemah and the Melody of Riot record, and that only lasted a couple of days.

In the press release you say the Beatles were the first band you were really into, though you suppressed the influence for a while. Any other influences you’ve consciously suppressed, like ABBA?

Reggae was probably one that I consciously suppressed for a long time. In our live shows we sort of adapted an Uncle Tupelo song, “Life Worth Living,” that has some reggae overtones now. I think it just took me a long time to be able to actually appreciate reggae in a certain way. I think a lot of it is as a result of finding out more of the history of it.

Many of the songs on The Search draw inspiration from the road. Is the American road still romantic, in the sense that it was for artists like Kerouac and Woody Guthrie?

I think there’s still a lot of Jack Kerouac and Edward Hopper out there. Especially in the west, in the middle and the south. I shouldn’t leave out the north. It’s out there, especially late night. You find it in the truck stops, the diners. They’re still there.

You’re often labeled as the godfather of alt-country. Is that a title you’re comfortable with, or do you find it ridiculous?

I see it as more of a continuum where you’re inspired by people that came before you. You give some, you take some, and that seems to be the way that it all works. I don’t see that anything’s starting at any one discernible point. I guess that’s looking at it from more of a historical perspective. It’s hard to really say that anybody really started anything.

What can we expect next from Jay Farrar more Son Volt albums?

I guess we’ll see. That’s the focus for now. We’ll be touring through the fall anyway. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’ve been in contact with Anders Parker some, and we’ve done some demo work towards another Gob Iron record. It could be Gob Iron. I’ll just have to wait and see.

(Richmond.com, June 2007)

A Blessing after the Curse

Before the Drive-By Truckers took the stage Thursday night at Plan 9’s Carytown location, Jay Leavitt , who manages the store, told the crowd of 200 or so that he had checked the concert listings for all of the great rock ‘n’ roll cities in the world that night. And he said, in all earnestness, that there was no better place for any music fan to be than at 3012 W. Cary St.

“This is the center of the music universe tonight,” said an emotional Leavitt, who has known DBT’s Patterson Hood since their boyhood days in Florence, Ala. “Blender [magazine] called them America’s greatest rock band. I call them the world’s greatest rock band.”

Judging by the intensity of Thursday night’s crowd — Mike Cooley also called them the best in the world towards the end of the show — it’s safe to assume that most of the fans in the store that night would agree with Leavitt’s remarks.

And the show was special for other reasons. For one, it marked the 25th anniversary of Plan 9, the independent music retailer that started in Carytown and has expanded throughout the state. But most importantly, it was a benefit for the Bryan and Kathryn Harvey Memorial Endowment Fund.

During the middle of the show, Leavitt, also a close friend of the Harveys, said that every cent of the proceeds would go towards the fund. He then thanked the Truckers, whose compensation included a case of beer and a fifth of Jack Daniels, for playing the show. Leavitt spoke touchingly about the Harveys, and told DBT how much their song “World of Hurt” had meant to him this past year. “That song is a song of hope for me,” said Leavitt, who concluded his remarks by saying, “It’s great to be alive.”

And it wasn’t just another show for the band, which has a long, loving history with the River City, dating back to the days of the Capital City Barn Dance. After taking the stage for the encore, Hood said, “From the bottom of my heart, this is the most important show, for me, our band will play this year.”

It was also one of the more impassioned shows they’ve played. Recently, DBT has been opening for The Black Crowes, which means they have to play 40-minute sets. As an opening act, Hood said their audience usually entails a sober crowd that is just walking through the door. So, for this show, they were like a beast that had just been let out of its cage. “We’ve been looking forward to Richmond where we can turn it up and play what we want,” Hood said.

And turn it up they did. Some of the highpoints of the night included “My Sweet Annette,” a countrified sh–about cheating on your old lady with her best friend. “This song’s about our first tour,” Hood said in his raspy north Alabama drawl. “Some of the names have changed, but the facts are the same.”

Another highlight was Jason Isbell’s rendition of “Moonlight Mile,” the closing track on the The Rolling Stones’s “Sticky Fingers” album, which, to these ears, strongly influenced DBT’s latest, “A Blessing and A Curse.”

To close out their first set, the band played “Let There Be Rock,” from their album, “Southern Rock Opera.” “This song’s about how rock ‘n’ roll saved my life as a teenager,” Hood proclaimed over that crunchy opening guitar riff and solitary drum-kick. And then the beautiful scene of the whole crowd pumping their fists in unison, singing along to these words:

Dropped acid at a Blue Oyster Cult concert, 14 years old

And I thought them lasers were a spider chasing me


On my way home got pulled over, in Rogersville, Alabama


With a half-ounce of weed, and a case of Sterling BigMouth


My buddy Jim was driving, he’d just barely turned 16.

All in all, a magical night.

Steve Earle, The Revolution Starts Now (Q&A)

How does this album exactly define the word “revolution”?
 
The Revolution starts now in that it starts as soon as you wake up and realize that it’s been going on with or without you, and that your input is needed. I’m not a believer in violent revolution, but only because a lot of people learned that for me, that came before me. I don’t blame the shape the country’s in on them –I blame it on us. I blame it on people that think like I do that went to sleep, that became less involved. And I think the part of it that people have a hard time getting through their heads is there’s never going to be a time that we can coast. Our brand of democracy just doesn’t –and I’m not sure any brand of democracy- lends itself to that. Ours definitely doesn’t. I don’t really have a problem with conservatives –I don’t agree with them. But these guys that are in power right now aren’t conservatives, you know, they’re neocons, which aren’t conservatives. What scares me more than anything else right now is we’ve got liberals that are afraid to call themselves liberals, and conservatives who won’t say out loud that this guy isn’t a conservative and he’s running the country into the ground, because he’s not [a conservative]. These are not conservative policies. I voted for Bill Clinton twice, the only Republican that I ever voted for. And he was a lot more conservative than Bush ever thought about being, with most of the thing conservatives are normally worried about.
 
In the liner notes, you used the word “immediate” to describe the atmosphere surrounding the recording of the new album. Is this an album just for these times, or is it meant to reverberate beyond that?
 
Some of it is just for this second, but some of it is not. I think “The Revolution Starts Now” is for all times. And I think Rich Man’s War could be about any war. It’s about three wars that are going on right now.
 
It takes an interesting turn with that last verse.
 
Yeah, well the deal is the people who sit around and decide it’s time for us to go to war very rarely get shot at, and I think that’s part of the problem.
 
Is it harder for artists to speak out and be heard now than it was, say, during the Vietnam era?
 
Well, we’re just living through this weird little pocket of time we’re somebody came up with this bizarre idea that it wasn’t appropriate for artists to comment on the society that they live in. That’s a new idea.
 
Mark Twain said the artists are the true patriots.
 
That’s it. That’s what Kerry meant when he was speaking before all those artists and said, “you are the heart and soul of America.” It probably wasn’t his best way to phrase it, but that’s what he meant. We’re people, you know, and a lot of us come from pretty humble backgrounds. And I come from a moderately humble background. My dad was an air-traffic controller and a GS-13 when he retired. We were comfortable but there were five kids.
 
You’ve started to write poetry and prose over the last few years, as well as paint and act. Has working in these mediums had any effect on your development as songwriter?
 
Oh yeah, I think “Warrior” would have been completely impossible without my involvement in theater. It would never have occurred to me to write a spoken-word piece in iambic pentameter if I had not been heavily involved in theater for the last five years.
 
Who are you trying to reach with the new album? I think it’s pretty safe to say that the people who have bought your other albums will buy this one as well.
 
Yeah, they will. I’m trying to reach the people that have been quiet and aren’t O.K. with what’s going on. They know something’s wrong, but haven’t been comfortable with saying something about it. I think that’s happening and that people are starting to look for something. The reaction to this record so far has been so overwhelmingly positive. It’s very early but it’s much different than when Jerusalem came out. I had the usual squawkers [with Jerusalem]–the people I was trying to piss off, and they responded the way that they normally do.
 
And that was mostly just because of John Walker’s Blues.
 
Yeah, and with this one I even got a four-star review in the New York Post, which kind of concerns me. My one-star review for Jerusalem [in the N.Y. Post] is one of my prouder moments. It’s been much easier to get [this album] on radio so far. It’s the second day out, we’re number five at Amazon, and that’s a pretty good indicator for me. I’m an adult artist, so I sell records at Barnes & Nobles and Amazon and Borders –those are my biggest retail outlets. I think I’m hoping to reach people that are not necessarily hard-core progressives but are starting to realize they got lied to. It’s regular people that will go and die if we keep pursuing this policy we’re pursuing. And it won’t end in Iraq. It’s not designed to end in Iraq. It’s really insane. They’re talking about us never not having troops in harm’s way. That’s what they want, and it’s not their kids.
 
Truman said Korea was going to be a police action over the weekend.
 
Yeah, and we’re still there.
 
You’ve helped a lot of young bands and artists get their start with E-squared. I’m thinking specifically of Marah and the V-Roys. Was that a way of doing the same kind of thing Townes and Guy did for you?
 
Yeah, producing records and signing bands like that was a teaching process. I like to teach – I do sometimes. But I try to approach that [producing] as a teacher. And some people are more teachable than others, and sometimes it’s a better experience than others.
 
Any advice for aspiring young songwriters?
 
It’s tough nowadays. Always be willing to do the work, but always be suspicious of anything anytime anybody asks you to change the art itself, because probably the people that are asking you have never made art before. Especially if someone who has never made any art before tells you how to make art, you should definitely process that information very, very carefully.
 
Would this album have come out differently had you spent more time writing songs and recording in the studio, or do you like the sense of urgency it has?

It would have been different and it probably wouldn’t have been as urgent. I think it was made exactly the way it needed to be made and I’m pretty proud of it.

(American Songwriter, 2004)