On being open to everyday inspiration

Something that has inspired me about your music from the moment I heard it was this sense of not having to choose—like, I can be into traditional folk music and classical music and free jazz and avant-garde music, but not in a way that was undercutting any of it. You can go deep in all of these things.

That’s beautiful, thank you. I think one of the things about when I was a teenager, when you’re in that really deep-listening exploration space, and with my friends as well, it’s like it was fundamentally open-minded, but it wasn’t just like, “Oh yeah, everything’s cool.” It was trying to be honest about—and it wasn’t even judgmental about the music itself, it was really trying to be honest about my own perception as a listener.

I’d be aware of how much I could hear or not in the music, because on the one hand, genre is so stupid and doesn’t exist, and has been used in all these nefarious ways in terms of culture and businesses. But it’s also the case that within a community, at any given moment, a musical language is very real. You know what I mean? And how you can hear things and be hearing different stuff in it depending on where you are. I don’t even mean, like, your response to it, but just physically the way it sounds.

For example, an early free jazz album that I listened to a lot and really grappled with and loved and was fascinated by was New York Eye and Ear Control, which is Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai, Sunny Murray, and Gary Peacock. And at that time, if I’d heard Albert Ayler, his own music, I would’ve been confused by it because so much of it is not noise. So much of it is these anthemic melodies that he plays. And I would’ve been like, “Why is he playing the melody? I thought the whole point of his music is that it’s supposed to be this aggressive sound.” I didn’t understand the deeper genre of the music that it was coming from, but this album actually was more accessible for me because it was just pure—they’re just playing, it’s full-on free jazz.

But when I heard it, it was like looking at an abstract painting. In terms of the actual sound of the music to my ears, I couldn’t identify any of the instruments. I couldn’t tell you any phrase, whether it was saxophone or trombone. I just heard it as a wash.

And if I go back and listen to that now, it’s interesting because for the first ten seconds, I can hear it through my 15-year-old ears, and I can hear the abstract thing I heard. But then if I listen from my ears now, having listened for 30 years obsessively to various kinds of jazz and related music, I can exactly hear all the notes they’re playing. It’s almost disappointing because I’m hearing it as notes. Back then it was this mystical sound. There’s that weird thing of once you know something and you understand it in a certain way, it can be harder to access the mysteriousness. But the process of trying to get to the higher level of listening awareness is very meaningful.

I’m curious about your development as a bandleader—you’d been in Popcorn Behavior, with your childhood best friend and your brother, and then the Doveman records are full-band records, but you’re not steering that ship. Then, on your earliest records, it almost seemed like you were trying to remove yourself from the role of being a leader. I’m curious if there was a fear there or an apprehension about doing it—because you seem so comfortable with it now—if you have thoughts about making that transition?

You’re absolutely right. You’re the first person that’s ever pointed this out.

That is the thing that’s probably changed the most over time. When I started doing my own songs, it was so radically new for me to be singing as a solo person and playing guitar. I guess I had a vision of the idea of these songs encountering some kind of other texture that would go against it, but I had no vision for what that should be. It could be Thomas [Bartlett] or it could be Nico [Muhly], or it could be Shahzad [Ismaily]. That’s what those first three albums were. But I wouldn’t have been in the position to be a “bandleader” at that moment. I think you’re right, because it was just so new to me to be even singing and playing that that was enough, that was occupying my full consciousness.

I did have some sort of imaginative stuff that I was thinking about around it, of just being in the middle of it and letting [my collaborators] have their own imprint on it without even my input sometimes. And then I did have input always because I was heavily involved in editing and stuff.

And so, as I’ve gone, the thing that’s increased, especially from Bright Sunny South onwards was being more engaged with the group and with the vision of the music, although it’s still very accident-based and collaborative.

I only played fiddle until I was 20. I played banjo on the couch from 16 or whatever as a learner, and I just had this intense confidence in my fiddle playing. And the thing with the Chicken album, which was true for Thomas and I for that record, was it was stripping away all of our zones of expertise that we had.

We were both stripping down to the most unknown parts of ourselves. And that was pretty conscious, I think, because I was aware that I was scared it would be stuck in this other thing because I just knew how to do it—which, obviously you can know how to do something and still be creative with it. It’s the classic cliché about creativity. [But] there always should be something, like—competence is the worst place to be in, right? So it should be some intersection of something that’s powerful and something that’s uncertain, and those things mixing together in different ways, and that’s the mystery.

Does that lead you also to want to work fast and not rehearse too much? Not over-prepare?

I always just enjoy that.

You play with great musicians and improvisers, but also, I know that you’re not someone who’s a snob about musicianship whatsoever, and you like mistakes and you are open to things being a little messed up.

Yeah, no, definitely. It comes from like, listening to fiddle records from the ’70s—there’s a whole era from the ’70s of Irish fiddle and guitar or fiddle and bouzouki records. I was just saying this to a friend the other day: in a way, one of the reasons I’ve become such a deep lover of jazz and music and stuff is, it’s not just this music, it’s the fact that those albums are also documents of people in a room. My albums are not necessarily documents of people in a room, in general, except for the last one and Lily-O. The Following Mountain definitely isn’t, and the early ones aren’t really either, because they’re me alone and then somebody overdubbing. However, there is still always a sense, as you were saying, of mistakes and human textures.

I see a lot of interviews with songwriters who are asked questions like, “How do you know when something’s done?” Or, “How do you know when it’s good?” And you’re working with folk songs where it’s done and it’s good. [laughs]

Right, right, totally. It’s the advantage.

I’m wondering where you’ve seen yourself either second-guessing your process, or like—ego death can be such a blessing when you come to it, but if the ego’s already out of it, where does the creative struggle come from in there?

Yeah, it’s less struggle and more like that it just can take time to gather the stuff that’s there. Because it’s a very haphazard process for me. It’s like: you leave the instruments out, you have your voice memo nearby, over the course of a couple of years of just picking up the guitar before dinner or in the middle of the day, or while you’re doing emails and just like, getting some riffs.

And then you can go back through and you find melodies and some combination of the folk songs or whatever come in there, hopefully. And I guess the thing for me is—and it’s a big decision—who to do it with. And I think those choices are huge. When you make those decisions, it’s not like you can just do it again. And so you can overthink that, but at the same time, you do have to figure it out. And so, it’s always trying to follow fate a little bit, and just randomness, but just keeping the antenna up for it all.

I guess the thing for me is that my conscious self is—and I feel like if I say this, it’ll sound like a weird boast or something, but it’s really not. It’s just a weird fact about me. It’s not even necessarily a good thing. My conscious self is much, much more interested in just like, art and music that’s already in the world than it is about my own making of stuff. What I love is listening to music and reading books and watching deep films. That’s what I’m obsessed with. So it’s not like I have to motivate myself to be creative because I feel like that’s a creative act.

That’s another thing I was think about with you—is that something that I feel like you made me realize was that creativity can be very detailed decisions, like the way a particular singer phrases or a particular fiddler phrases a melody or plays a melody –

Yes. That’s been crucial.

And the idea that your voice comes through and what that means and what that looks like. I wonder if it’s just that at a certain point, or at a young age, you were able to internalize and realize that creativity wasn’t this big, capital-C, scary word that you had to take super seriously?

Right, right. Yeah. I mean, that’s just the thing that came from folk music, which was the whole idea of originality just wasn’t the point anyway, but creativity was valued. What I mean is the idea of originality, like, “this is my thing that I invented,” is not important.

Yeah, from listening to tunes, it was always the fiddle player. It wasn’t about their originality, but it was about their spirit and their musical creativity. The way they approached the tune was their creativity. So what you just said, it’s very, very true for me. But I do just love things that are strange and weird…and then also, of course, there is the thing of: you imagine things that don’t exist and you want to hear them, so then you make them. “What if there was an album that did this and this and this?” and like, “Oh, I guess I could just try to do a version of this imagined thing,” or whatever.

But I guess I just have a bit of laziness, to answer your previous question related to this one, it’s like, left to my own devices I could just play a fiddle, but then I was like, fuck, I guess I should do something. But then I do love to sing—so then I have to find something to sing. And then I love to learn stuff on guitar. And then if I learn stuff, that’ll lead me to try to make something.

I was re-listening to your last record today in the car. It’s simultaneously the most jazz-sounding and also the most ambient, where if you took out the guitar or the banjo and the vocal, it would sound like spiritual jazz or ambient music a lot of the time. But instead of that sounding like a mishmash, or one put on top of the other, it sounded like the folk song was giving birth to these other genres. I was wondering if that was something that you—I mean, obviously you’re encouraging good musical choices that are happening and letting people fly—but if you were thinking about that?

Yeah, I think the thing with that record was, on all the previous albums, it’s always like, “Oh, what if I try this? Or what if I try something like this?” And then meanwhile, I’m going out and doing all these gigs with these people and we’re just having so much fun. And that was almost like, “Oh, well, why don’t I just bring the people into the room and we’ll just do a gig and play.” It felt more like what we were just doing in our concerts, because [drummer and percussionists] Chris [Vatalaro] and I had this whole relationship that we built up as a duo, which hadn’t really been documented on the records because it’s always bringing more people.

And when Chris and [multi-instrumentalist] Shahzad [Ismaily] and I played trio with Bert [Cools] and whoever, when we played gigs, it just had this—that’s what it felt like. And then I was never really doing that on the albums because I was always trying to do some other idea on the albums, like Bright Sunny South is the beginnings of that, but it’s much more spare and tentative. And then Lily-O is with Frisell, and then Following Mountain is more constructing something from zero with Leo [Abrahams]. And so each one had those people on them, but it was never just knocking it down like we would in a concert.

When you make an album, it’s a chance to try some weird shit, because you’re not in front of an audience. So in that way, it’s a very open space. But that was the one where it’s like, it feels like the arrival or whatever. It’s a cheesy way of putting it, but it’s like, that was the one where it’s like, “Let’s just do what I’ve built up over all these years with you guys, let’s just do that.”

And Beth [Orton, Sam’s wife], and just having everybody on it and just have it feel like…So what you’re saying around the electronics and the improvisation elements, just being really folded in, it’s because I’m not trying to prove anything. There’s no concept for that record. It’s just like, let’s play all of our stuff together and listen and just engage with the music. So I’m glad it sounds that way.