On letting the work speak through you

How would you describe your creative philosophy?

There is no philosophy in the sense of an overarching set of principles or an ethic that serves as a filter for the work. The exigency is: work or die. Do the work. The work itself asks and answers the questions necessary to its existence. Dig in and find out what’s what. Shut everything else out. Let the work speak through you. It’s been hiding there, just behind the air, all along.

You’ve written music, lyrics, fiction and nonfiction. What do you see as common threads in your work?

After hundreds and hundreds of songs and stories and various other writing over the course of four-plus decades I guess one obvious answer is the mind of the author behind all this work. But now I’m not so sure of even that. The author himself is suspect, if he exists at all. I question the existence of self, or at least my own self specifically. So maybe a common thread is erasure. I’m always struck by how an adamant statement or proclamation contains inside it its own opposite, which is equally and simultaneously true, and this friction between the two opposite poles serves the function of a positive negation. For all the talk of love, desire, frustration, hatred, contempt, compassion, transcendence, it’s all just phenomena, suspended and rearranging itself in space, all at once, past and future quivering on the same plane simultaneously. But musically, sonically, I guess a common thread has been to find a sound that is so all-consuming that I, and by extension the audience or the listener, disappears inside it, at least for a moment. The obvious analogy to that is the beautiful, selfless act of true sexual love. To me, that’s where God lives.

You’ve worked in collaboration with many musicians, including Swans and Angels of Light, and you’ve written many songs on your own. What do you see as the pros and cons of collaboration versus the creative control of working by yourself?

There are no pros or cons, and it’s all a mystery to me how anything happens at all. Here’s how I see the process. I’ll tell it as a story: Alone in my room, I pick up my old and beaten and broken contraption made of wood and wires and I thrum the thing, waiting for resonance. When eventually a sound evokes meaning I search for another sound, and before long I have a collection of chords. Through repetition, an invisible, shimmering mist of sound envelops me completely, and before long I notice a portal opening and I walk through it and I suddenly find myself in an unfamiliar room, similar to a prison cell without windows. I scratch words onto the wall of this cell, and those words become the lyrics to a song. This is the first stage of elation, and it is solitary. I sing the song over and over by myself until it inhabits me completely.

Then, excited at my discovery, I gather my friends and collaborators in a rehearsal space and together we unfold billowing waves of sound that grow outwards, way beyond my initial childish discoveries. We’re led through the vaulting archways of cathedrals where dancing fractal shards of light sing down to us from above. We’re ushered through tunnels of sound into new chambers connected endlessly, one to another, where the echoes stretch out and reverberate infinitely. We breathe in and exhale the magical dust that is the intangible substance of these echoes, and we’re transformed from within. We travel around the world, making sound in this fashion.

Over time, the music continues to grow of its own accord, and we follow it where it wants to go. We’re helpless inside it. By the end of a tour the songs bear little resemblance to their shape at the beginning, and you’d be hard pressed to recognize the original songs I wrote alone in my room. Finally, we find ourselves in a vast underground cavern and we no longer know ourselves, who we are or where we’ve been. We’re drained and spent, and the songs are then finished and forgotten completely and never performed again. Then, time for something new, and the process starts over. I want to be sure to mention here the current musicians in Swans who so tirelessly devote themselves to this often arduous spiritual quest: Dana Schechter, Norman Westberg, Kristof Hahn, Larry Mullins, Christopher Pravdica and Phil Puleo.

You’ve also produced albums for other musicians, like Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family. What do you enjoy about that process, and what have you learned from it?

What have I learned from it? NEVER AGAIN! I absolutely love Devendra. I have never met anyone so preternaturally talented and magical as he was in those days. He literally quivered with light. Akron/Family were also tremendously gifted and unique, and fine people too. I remember seeing them live a few times and thinking “They’re the Beatles!” or “They’re Led Zeppelin!”–they were that good. But I am temperamentally not suited to working on other people’s music. I care too much and invest too much in the process psychically and it’s draining for all involved. Worse, I’m selfish as regards my own artistic pursuits, and I inevitably committed too much of what should be a personal store of energy into those projects, to the ultimate detriment of all involved.

You could say that I’m too intense, especially when I get into the studio. It’s a sort of spiritual crucible for me, and it’s not correct to involve that level of personal feeling in the work of others. Of course I’m proud of the work we did together, but never again. The only thing that would induce me to produce someone else’s music again would be if they were to buy me, fully paid off in advance, a modest house along the strand in Hermosa Beach, California, where I could finish my days with sand on my feet and salt on my lips. This is a hopeless dream of course, since the Hermosa Beach of my childhood memories doesn’t exist anymore, but there you go.

You moved around a lot as a teenager. How do you think that prepared you for life as a touring musician, and how do you think it widened your creative perspective?

My personal motto used to be, “I’m only happy when I’m leaving.” When I was 15, I ran away from my father in Germany and hitchhiked down through Yugoslavia to Greece to Istanbul, then got to Israel somehow, where I stayed for close to a year as an itinerant hippie kid. Then, when I returned to LA I took off again and hitchhiked across North America twice, with almost no money, sleeping on the side of the road in the woods or the fields, or with people that would put me up, giving me work sometimes. Through all these various experiences I never had the sense to be afraid. I just threw myself out into the wind. It’s what I still do, musically. I have no idea what I’m doing! I just dive in and figure it out along the way. But as for touring, it’s the opposite of adventurous travel. You drive some random long and boring distance, you arrive at the venue, you unload, then set up, then sound-check, then wait a bit, then perform the show, then sleep, then repeat. Rarely do I get the chance to get out and experience whatever city we’re in, and these days I carry my agoraphobia with me, and I sleep and hide as much as possible when not performing.

You’ve said you took a lot of LSD during this period as well. How do you think that affected your creativity?

Actually, my experiences with drugs began much earlier. I had a completely unsupervised, pretty horrible childhood, from an early age. This is decades upon decades ago, so my memory is hazy, but I must have started taking drugs as early as 11 years old, first with inhaling glue, gasoline and spot remover, then barbiturates and amphetamines and ultimately by 12 or 13 on to LSD, which was ubiquitous at the time. So right at the age when one is first discovering or formulating who they are, developing what we call an identity, I took rather large quantities of a hallucinogen that said instead, “No, actually, you are NOTHING” and I still don’t necessarily disagree with that realization. The thing about LSD, or at least the versions of it that existed back then, is that it came at you in waves, washing over you and dispersing your self and your molecules out into the surrounding world, so that there was no separation between you and everything else. I used to lie on the beach late at night and stare up at the stars and feel myself rushing up and out through the universe, vividly conscious and unconscious simultaneously. Paradoxically, this kind of vision or experience imbues you with a sort of faith, or a certainty of the interconnectedness of all phenomena, and I suppose I’ve since sought out that experience in various ways throughout my life, perhaps especially through music.

You went to art school at one point. What was that experience like for you, and what did you learn from it?

Once I discovered, in my late teens I guess, that I had a natural facility for drawing, I threw myself into it absolutely, drew constantly, and it became a sort of religion for me. Pretty quickly I knew that this would be my path in life—to be an artist. I had no idea what this entailed, how one might go about it in their life, but I’d found something that gave me a conduit to meaning. So I ended up in art school, where my most productive time was spent in the library, devouring art books and reading art magazines. I don’t recall teachers imparting me with any special knowledge or technical skill, other than to perhaps point me towards artists I might not have otherwise known about. Gradually, I discovered that contemporary art was considered to be a profession, replete with its own specialized, recondite language, and that if one were to succeed at it a certain amount of social skill and networking would be involved, and that I, generally feeling like a leper amongst other people, wanted no part of it. I might as well become a lawyer. Around this time Punk Rock happened. I quit art school and threw myself into that milieu, for better or worse. I started a band, and it failed. Then I eventually moved to New York City, where Swans was soon formed.

How do you deal with writer’s block, either musically or with the written word?

For me, that’s an ironic question because I have never known anything other than writer’s block. I liken my process to trying to carve an image in a granite cliff face with a steel toothpick. But through persistence, something eventually emerges.

You’ve spoken of a voice that channels through you called “Joseph” that you credit with many of your songs. What can you tell us about him, and how would you describe your relationship with him?

That’s just a trope I’ve used a few times to depict the unknown entity that reaches into the back of my head somehow and writes the words through me. I have no idea how else to describe it. I sit for hours sometimes staring at a blank page, but eventually when I give up completely something gets written. In the best instances, I don’t really feel like I wrote the words myself at all.

You’ve written two collections of short stories, published nearly 25 years apart. What do you like about writing fiction, and why do you think the impulse to do it (or at least publish it) came at such a vast interval?

I have always written, for as long as I can remember. I suppose I started doing it at the same time I started drawing. I hesitate to call the writing “stories,” since in most instances very little happens, there are no clearly drawn characters, and certainly no plots. I don’t even know who the narrator is—it’s certainly not me personally. It’s more like a disembodied mind dissecting itself, taking a scalpel to itself, tearing apart and arranging and rearranging memories and sensations, putting them in a form that makes an intuitive sense. The collections you mention occurred only when I felt there was enough compelling material to include. My primary focus has been music. It takes up all of my time.

You’ve also published a collection of Swans lyrics/stories/journals. What was that process like for you? In reviewing your own lyrics and experiences, did you learn anything about your own creative process?

During Covid, like everyone else, I had an overabundance of free time. I decided to use the opportunity to finally go through the trunks of journals and ephemera I’d collected over the decades. These plastic trunks had traveled with me from abode to abode over many years, usually residing, never opened, in a basement wherever I lived at the time. I lugged the onus of my past along with me wherever I went. When I opened the lids to these containers, I was sickened to discover a thick carpet of mold over everything, and it permeated the journals, staining the pages. It reeked and was toxic. I have asthma, so the effect was not insubstantial.

Nevertheless, I was determined to go through the writing. I was forced to wear a respirator, eye protection and surgical gloves as I worked. A fitting metaphor for the writing that I encountered! In much of the early writing and unused song lyrics I hardly recognized the author. Truly a maniacal, but focused and determined character. It was interesting to see. I definitely lived in a world of my own making in those days, very solipsistic and self-obsessed, and unapologetic about it. After a long, slow period of trying to type the stuff up for future editing I finally found an obvious solution and took hundreds of pictures of worthwhile pages with my cell phone and was then later able, unencumbered by my ridiculous hazmat protections, to go through the material, type it up and edit it.

Fittingly, as the decades approached more current times, the mold was less pervasive, and eventually of course the writing took place on a computer and was easily accessible, though about a decade was lost when a computer was stolen. But what did I learn? I don’t know. Maybe that work is what matters, just doing the work. The early writing was done during a period of extreme hardship and poverty and general isolation, but I persisted, and then here now is this much older person with an entire life history behind him, and certainly no longer hungry, going through this stuff and mining it. In the end, I used a relatively small portion of what I found, and I excised the material that I thought too personal. There’s tons of it left, enough to fill another book. But my hope is to find the courage to take all those trunks, the entire mess, to the public dump and dispose of it once and for all.

Do you read reviews of your own work?

I have read reviews in the past, yes. It’s always a mistake. A bad review can be misguided and stupid, which has hardly any effect. Or a bad review can contain some truth, and that can be devastating, but perhaps productive in the long run. The worst is a good review, because it can foster complacency and self-satisfaction, which equals death.