On always developing and changing

You didn’t perform live until Sub Pop signed you. What was it like stepping on stage for the first time with essentially no experience of performing in public?

I was horrified and so petrified. I was always a behind-the-camera person, someone who liked making art, but liked to do it in private, develop and polish it until it was finished. Whereas performance is the opposite. It is like, just see what happens, get out there and do your thing.

But there was also a part of me that wanted to do that. I was obsessed with records, and with these performers that I love so much. It was just overcoming that fear of being judged, or fear of being thought of as stupid or messing up. I didn’t want to make a mistake in front of people. After a while, you get very accustomed to it. And sometimes the mistakes are what lead you to an interesting idea. You just sort of have embraced them all. I think I’m the only person that I know who has a job where, when you mess up, people clap more for you.

You have been a musician, making and releasing albums for over 20 years. How has the relationship with your own music changed over time?

It is constantly changing. As performers, we’re always eager to have new music to play, but the audience isn’t always as excited about it as we are. So, we end up playing our older material a lot. And I’ve, over the years, found different ways to play some songs. If you get tired of playing one or you don’t have anything emotional to bring to it anymore because you just played it too many times, you put it away for a little while. Then maybe you’ve lived or gone through something, and you’re different when you play it again. It’s an interesting relationship. Some of them you forget what they’re really about, or their meaning is revealed to you in a different way because you’re different. It’s an ongoing thing.

What part of your songwriting process would you never recommend to other artists?

The whole thing, probably. I don’t know. It’s the thing that I love. That’s not hard for me to answer, because I love the project. That’s why I do it all the time, because I love engaging. I will say, if you’re going to do a guitar thing, you should probably learn some music theory or take guitar lessons. I never took lessons, so it’s taken me a long time to get where I’m at. That could definitely save you some time, that’s for sure I love engaging with the process, whether it’s making sounds or engaging with language. I’ve never found any dead end or cul-de-sac, anything that I was working on that wasn’t helpful, whether I used it or not, whether it gave me a finished line for a song, it always helps you develop what you’re doing.

I mean, there are definitely ways to live your life that are healthier as far as being a musician. But the process of writing and working on materials—I like it more now than I even did as a younger person when I started. It’s an art form that gives back as much as you put into it. The more that you work on it, the more it’s going to give back to you, the more it’s going to reveal to you what’s possible. The more that you dedicate your life to it, the more that it will reward you with new things to discover and new things to experience. It’s amazing. There’s nothing that you can’t talk about in a song.

When you’re working on a song or an idea, how do you know when it’s worth pushing forward rather than letting it go?

I think if your goal is to always keep developing and changing, which it is for me, then it’s to stay open. If you hear that voice saying, “Maybe I shouldn’t,” tell it to be quiet immediately and do whatever you can to shut it down and push forward. Because even if you make a fool of yourself, you never know what you also might discover. That’s the only way to progress in the arts, to quiet that voice that’s saying, “No, maybe not.” Always say yes, always say yes.

Does that voice come up often?

It happens all the time. You’re just trying to make it quiet for one moment, where you can do something new. I’m an editor. My thing is I like editing. I like shaping things, and so that editor voice comes in fast. It comes in oftentimes before I get started. And it’s a problem, but that’s the thing I deal with all the time.

You’ve mentioned that evolving and changing is important to you. How do you balance that drive with the fear of repeating yourself?

It definitely happens a lot where you’re trying to push yourself. I feel like a lot of times we don’t really understand what we do the way that an audience does, but you have a sense of what you think it is. And so, you try not to repeat yourself, you try to do something new. But I mean, for some reason, Monet painted a lot of ponds, and Cézanne painted a lot of oranges and peaches, and I don’t get tired of looking at any of them.

But for some reason, with the song of my own, I’m like, “Oh, I can’t use that chord again. I used it too many times.” It’s not really true. You just have to keep pushing and trying to discover something new one way or another. You know when you’re just rehashing or recycling an old idea. And you know when you’re using the tools that you’re familiar to you or essential to you as an artist, and you’re using them in a new way, whether it’s a new subject or a new combination of chords or notes or whatever. You have an intuitive sense, but sometimes you don’t know. You just keep hoping for the best.

Is there a moment when you say, “Okay, this song is done. I can move forward. I’m happy with this, and it’s now done”?

Usually it has more to do with a deadline. Or you worked on it enough that you don’t have anything else. Or you’re tired of it. Or you’ve gone on to something else that’s more interesting. Songs, or any creative thing, you could keep changing forever. You could keep developing it. Any painting you could paint on forever. The creative process will never stop, and songs are no different. But at a certain point, you have to decide, “I’m finished. I don’t want to work on it anymore.”

Is there anything about the audience or the music industry that you think they misunderstand about your work?

I don’t feel like the industry now is one thing. I think they used to have a more solid front that you were faced with. Now it’s just that everyone has their own experience with each work and artist. I definitely feel like early on, I got pegged as the quiet, sensitive guy—for good reason. There’s other stuff that I’ve made that, if you weren’t paying attention all along the way, you would have missed. But I also feel people do dive in get the whole picture.

Your new album is called Hen’s Teeth. You said that it was a gift that shouldn’t exist, but it does. Can you expand?

The previous record was called Light Verse, and I went into that thinking I had a certain number of songs, and I ended up having more. They just hadn’t quite finished. I found it hard to finish things during the pandemic. There was a lot of noise. It was hard to focus. So, I ended up with more material than I thought. And the band helped me finish the songs knowing what the character of the sounds we were making was like. It felt like a gift. We had a few sessions over the course of maybe nine months or a year. By the end of the year, I’d finished the other record as well and written some songs for a band called I’m With Her that I went in to do one record and came out with two.

I read that you’re at a point in your life where spontaneity is more important to you. Can you tell a little bit more about what you mean by that and what used to be important to you before?

Well, I was very much into building the perfect fortress of a song, an impenetrable wall of art. Now I think it has a lot to do with what we were talking about before, getting out there and messing up and being a little bit more spontaneous with your life. I find the songs are more fun. They’re no less resonant to me. They’re just a little bit more quirky and odd. I’m embracing a bit more of my whole personality rather than just what I want to safely show to people.

What is an impenetrable wall of art?

Just this idea making a solid song rather than one that takes chances, one that does left turns and unexpectedly does something silly. I was afraid to be silly. I think because I like to joke in my life, jokes come easy. And when it was time to write a song, it was time to be serious and say what was important. And now I feel like you can do both and enjoy doing that.

Where did that part of like, “Okay, it’s time to be serious, because this is work” came from?

I think there are two things. Being young and not having a whole lot of experience with hardship in life. I think a lot of young movie directors, they write these heavy, intense war movies because they’re looking for conflict, you know what I mean? Whereas an older man is like, “I want to write a comedy about war, because I want to sit and enjoy, or at least find balance in what I choose to be entertained by. I also feel like sometimes all the joking comes because you’re afraid to be serious or say what you mean. I felt like when I sat down to write a song, it was time to be serious. I say that in a self-deprecating way, but I also think it’s kind of true. That was my space to actually say what I meant. And so, it’s a little bit of both.

I wonder if being serious also means the market, industry or whoever is out there has to take you seriously.

It’s hard for me to talk about what the market wants, because I feel like I’m so naive. I came from this art school background where you work in a vacuum, you just follow your own muse wherever it’s going. And the only way to make it sacred is if you don’t think about the market at all, which is not really true. I just don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to predict what people would want. So, I just treat myself as the only audience member while I’m making stuff. Then when it’s time to put it out, then you start thinking, “How would you present this to someone in a way where they might accept it?”

When Sub Pop came to you, it was of course exciting, but did you also feel vulnerable or afraid?

I never felt insecure about my relationship with the label. It came about as such a surprise that I had a lot of imposter syndrome for a while, just feeling like I didn’t deserve where I was, what I had been given, and at any moment, people were going to just figure it out and reject what I was doing. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop for a long time, not so much with the label, but my career in general. But luckily, I just kept at it for a while and kept working hard. And, luckily, people are still interested.

I was thinking the other day about when you are a kid, and one day you don’t know how to read and the next day you learn and there is no way to go back to how you were before or how you saw the world. Is there a moment, a breakthrough, or something that came into your life that after that life was never the same again?

I mean lots of them. Yeah, just a music career. I mean, family, I have a bunch of kids. My life has had these huge, starkly different phases, different seasons of life. Kids are probably the biggest ones, honestly. That changes your whole life. The position from which you look at the rest of your life shifts. Career stuff is just sort of like progress along the line, or maybe you shift to another line, but children shift you out of the way, which has been very helpful for me as a philosophy, like: “Get out of the way and just be part of it, instead of always in the center of things.” That was the biggest one. I’m a creative type. It takes a lot to shift us out of the middle, these creative types like me—where it takes a big shove like children to shove you out of the driver’s seat.

How do you balance your work with family life?

You just figure it out. There’s no one way to do it. You always feel like you’re messing up, either doing one more than the other than you should. You always feel like you’re doing it wrong, because both demand everything if you’re doing it the way that you feel like you should. So, you’re always just hoping for balance and trying your best.

You have this extensive career, a new album, touring, family. What is success to you today?

I feel very successful because I get to make art for a living. I always thought I would be struggling to have a job and do this creative stuff in my spare time. And I feel like whatever level it is in my life now, I feel like I can relax and just know that I can be me and do what I want to do. And so, that feels very successful. That was the only goal I ever really had. I don’t have any goals like I have to play this venue, or if I could only sell this many records, I would be happy. It’s all bullshit. I get to do art for life. The only thing that I’m really good at in life, I get to do it, and I feel really blessed. I feel like I work hard on the friendships in my life. I could definitely go down a rabbit hole, but I feel very comfortable where I’m at now. And so, it gives me the space to concentrate on relationships in my life. And I just feel really lucky.

Have your goals remained consistent?

I’ve always been that way ever since I was a kid. I don’t think I would’ve called it that, or I don’t think I would’ve understood how happy you can be doing it. Because along the way you’re sold this idea of success as things that you achieve or things that you wrote, awards or rewards for work that you’ve done, but it’s really not. It’s really the work, the work of doing it and feeling fulfilled during the day, doing something that you love to do, spending your time, your precious moments on earth doing things that you like to do, and that potentially make other people happy, too. It’s a real blessing.