On getting out of the way of your art

What’s your routine when it comes to getting home after a long tour?

It used to be a much longer recovery because we used to go out for much longer and it honestly used to be a little more uncomfortable when we went out. Now that we’re older, the priorities are different. We go out for a couple weeks at a time, and we are more interested in taking care of ourselves while we’re gone so that when we come back, it’s not like we’re dropping back in from another planet with wiped hard drives. It’s more like just coming back from work, which is a lot nicer, a lot more manageable.

Are you unpacking anything? Any particular experience that came from sharing the record more widely?

I did book a session with my therapist for, I think it was two days after we got home. I hope this comes off as sincere and not egotistical, but on that Zoom call with my therapist, after we got back I was reflecting on it all. We did a West coast leg and we played these beautiful theaters in California and we did it kind of comfortably. We didn’t run ourselves ragged doing it, and it just felt really good to play with the guys and it felt like we were really hitting a stride musically.

I’m the kind of person who struggles with imposter syndrome pretty seriously. It’s a thing that I talk to my therapist about a lot. A lot of times I come up with different ways to say it so it seems like I’m not saying the same thing over and over when talking about imposter syndrome, but this time I came home and I thought “I think we’re doing good and I think this is our job now.” It’s been a decade of doing it all the time, but there was just something about going to the West coast and playing those beautiful theaters and having people come listen to us play music that we really care about and have worked really hard on, and I just felt so, not just grateful, but also this idea that it’s time to get real with myself about this. I’m a musician and this is what I do, damn it.

If we’re talking about movement and touring, I wanted to ask what your relationship to movement is in your creative practice. What’s your broader relationship to static creativity versus needing movement to get the flow going?

I discovered a few years ago that I’m definitely in the mover category. It’s a bummer for those of us who love writing—it would be nice if it felt really good to sit in front of a computer or a typewriter or a legal pad all day, but my brain just doesn’t work when I do that. I have to really go through all these rituals to make it quasi-bearable.

Living in Philly I totally got in the habit of going on really long walks pretty much every day, then even more so when we moved to the Poconos. I get a lot of racing thoughts, and it would help me clear my mind and sift through everything. It was like emptying out the bucket in order to let the creative thoughts come in. I kept finding that if I just sat down in the middle of the day and tried to write, there was so much just festering in my head.

I used to think that all the creative ideas were hidden inside my brain somewhere, and then at a certain point I realized that for me it’s more like I have to dump everything out in order to make room for something to pass through. I have found that moving is really helpful with that.

You’ve shared that you’ve had a lifelong love of skateboarding–does that help to move the dial for you creatively?

I don’t think I put it together before, but I do think the period when I was doing the most skateboarding the last few years was also the period when I was most productive with writing. I never did it intentionally as a creative thing, but as a diligent meditator, I’ve found that something like skateboarding for me is somehow even more productive than meditation. You’re doing a very particular task and everything goes out of your mind except for that one thing. I think it’s because you’re moving with your whole body and there’s this kind of subconscious element of danger that it feels like there’s more on the line. I have to focus entirely on what I’m doing or else I could do something stupid.

You’ve mentioned before that you’ve had seasons of your creative life where you made it a practice to just sit down and write. How do you know when you’ve gotten through the muck and made it to the good stuff? You also accumulate a lot of work doing that–what’s your relationship to editing?

Editing has freed me because I realized that I don’t have to be good all the time. It’s funny you ask about the muck because I immediately thought, “I know I’m done when it’s turned into muck again.” I know it’s going to start bad and then it’s going to get good. The only rule is while it feels good, I’m just like, “Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Because it’s going to get bad pretty soon and that’s when you can stop.”

Coming to terms with what editing can be was so liberating because I used to be the kind of person who would sit down and be like, “The first line has to be good, and the next line has to be good, and the next line has to be good.” It was exhausting—it’s like a chokehold to your creativity.

Kathryn Scanlan writes these short pieces a lot of the time, they’re so just immediate and clear. Her style of writing definitely strikes me as you’re going sentence by sentence and all the sentences have to be good. I think it might be Amy Hempel, but I don’t know. I’m always looking for interviews with people who do things a certain way that I can try, and then hopefully it turns out to work for me and I have proof that it’s legal because somebody else who I respect or admire does it and people don’t throw tomatoes at them.

Are there any other practices that you’ve come to through that idea of creative permission from other artists?

Have you ever read John Williams? One of his books recently got a new treatment from the New York Review, and in the back they stuck an interview with his widow. In the interview she was describing how much of a diligent outliner he was—he would outline a novel to death before he even started writing it at all. I used to always think that the idea of outlining or planning your art was so uncreative and suffocating. That it was the kind of thing that somebody would do if they didn’t really have the spark or whatever. Then suddenly I’m reading this interview with the wife of the guy who wrote two of my favorite novels and she says “Oh yeah, he would outline a book to death before he would even write the first sentence,” and I was like, “Oh my god, permission. This is cool. You’re allowed to outline.” I’m kind of always looking for that. I wish I didn’t have to, but I’ve kind of resigned to the fact that that is what I do.

I think it’s a pretty natural impulse, to need to be guided in some ways. There are a lot of aspects of being an artist that aren’t part of learning the exact technique of your art that very heavily affect what you allow yourself to do. This ties back to the idea of editing but also works along the lines of permission–but you have a few long form songs. Was there anything that you had to do to give yourself permission to let the idea of the three or four minute song go?

It’s funny to think about this idea of permission with a long song because “Engine” was the kind of song that I always wanted to write. I had a lot of people I idolized who had put out songs like that, like this song Craig Finn put out maybe two records ago called “God in Chicago.” It doesn’t have an extended musical part or anything, it’s just a long spoken word story. I think it’s like six minutes long, very paired down and lyric focused.

A while back I started getting into some longer jam-geared music that would have these very long sections of meditative playing. For a long time I had wanted to tap into that, but I don’t know, it felt like such a kind of a grown-up guy thing to do. It felt like a very Nick Cave thing to do, and I think, “Nick Cave has given me permission, but I am not Nick Cave. I’m not dyeing my hair black in the sink every night. I’m not wearing the suit. This is not going to work. I can’t sell this.” But it came to a point where we had assembled this band between Ian and Adam and Zach and Logan, where everybody’s playing was just so on fire, and I was like, “Okay, we can do the musical part of this. No question.”

Before that, I had written “Black Oak,” which was kind of the first foray into that kind of song. I was doing more stream of consciousness writing that I actually liked and that didn’t feel like just navel gazing. With “Engine” it was a matter of those two things coming together and me realizing that now felt like the time to do it. I was like, “You know what? I’m not Nick Cave. We are not The Bad Seeds, but we can do this Slaughter Beach, Dog version.” That’s the thing that feels so good about playing it now is because it came out of this very organic place. I wanted to do that kind of thing, but I wanted to get to a place where it felt like we could do our version of it. When we play it every night on tour, that’s the part in the set where it feels like, “This is us.” If I had to describe our band to an alien, I would probably just send them that song to their alien@gmail.com address.

You’re just “getting your groove on.”

That’s the thing. I say, “I’m getting my groove on” in the song…that’s so dumb.

It’s so good.

When I sing that, people react, people smile. I see people mouth along to that lyric and I’m like, “Oh my god, how lucky are we? That’s the kind of song we get to play, and people react to it that way.”I really appreciate the response that we’ve been getting, it means a lot that we get to play a song like that.

Have you thought about leaning into more instrumental music because of those longer, meditative moments?

It’s been on my mind for a few years now and “Engine” does feel like our first legitimate foray into that space. But yeah, I don’t know. Since the band has come into its own with the five of us, it really feels like everything we do goes well when we don’t try to scheme and we just let it happen.

I’m always fantasizing about these different ideas, like “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if we made, like, a silly spiritual jazz record made by rock musicians?” But it’s the kind of thing that I know if we went in the studio and said we were going to do that, it would just be kind of ridiculous. I think we all are just keeping our antennae up for that kind of thing to happen, and if it does happen, then we will get the fuck out of the way of it and let it do what it wants to do. I think that’s kind of the main difference between how things happen now and how they used to happen. But yeah, it would be really lovely if something like that started happening anytime soon. That would be cool.

To getting out of the way!

To getting out of the way.