On finding your way by improvising

When do you decide it’s time to start working on a new album?

I write songs constantly, and I want to release them immediately because I’m excited, but now that I have this band with Mari [Rubio] and Ryan [Sawyer], I need to play them for a year or so and make sure they’re good. Slowly, some ballast builds up, and all of a sudden, the stuff I’m holding onto starts to organize, and I can understand it as a record. This is a recent development. Before this last record, I would release the ones that I thought were best, but this record was very deliberate. When things cohere, you can tell.

Do you think the record starts to take shape as you continue to write more?

When I write songs, they’re like a psychic diagnosis of my world at the time. Sometimes when I have writer’s block, it’s not actually writer’s block. I’m just not ready to hear what the songs have to tell me. Once I get a clearer image of what I’ve been working through, or what the world has felt like to me for however long I’ve been writing, everything becomes easier. You can tell when things start to gel and create a cogent statement. Sometimes it’s chronology, and sometimes I’ve edited down the songs that make sense.

What does the organizational process of an album look like when songs come out of different phases in your life?

Usually, you look for other tips. Ideally, every song you write is coming from a very original, deeply felt place you can’t access except in the world of songs. There’s some urge that requires such a ridiculously detailed form. The song is done when it feels like it’s harmonizing with the feeling that you had that made you write it in the first place.

Making a record is like putting together an outfit or designing a room. Certain things work with the emotional palette, and certain things harmonically repeat. Throughout the self-titled record, certain chords and voicings repeat, which makes it seem coherent to me. Certain chord progressions start to mean something beyond the original song they came from. I never do a passage of chords on purpose. Over time, you keep returning to familiar figures. If you can find a smart way to let them coexist on a record and sequence them correctly, you can see that the feelings you were dealing with in all of these different times actually do have the same origin, which is nothing outside yourself.

When you work on old songs, like for this last album, what did you notice had changed about your storytelling or your stylistic choices?

What changed was my life. We live life, and our frame of reference for everything changes as we do. Before, I was concerned with being more explicit about how experimental my guitar was on the songs. As I play these more and more, I realize there’s a false binary between experimental that sounds experimental and experimental that’s palatable to people.

I didn’t set out on this record to make a different record from the ones I’d made before. You know what you wanna do because of the music you like and the things that interest you. I’ve always been so moved by Willie Nelson and Judee Sill. Those were the lodestars—whereas on Viewfinder, it was more Bennie Maupin or Jenny Hval. The frame of reference will shift as you shift and your interests grow.

A lot of your songs start by improvising. How do you identify a creative lead, and how do you follow it?

When I’m improvising, I feel like a low-flying bird searching for something. It’s so corny, but you know when something strikes a chord for you. You’re improvising, and all of a sudden, something becomes irresistible to you.

I was struggling to write recently, so I decided to meditate, which is always an event for me. All of a sudden, I heard this super hilarious, ultra-basic C chord in 4/4. Mid-tempo, normal shit, and I heard a very basic melody over it. I knew I had to write it. In that situation, I was improvising away from the guitar, but I heard a form that revealed itself. That’s less noodling around until I get something, and more taking an interest in this familiar form. The writing process itself becomes more improvisatory because we’re starting with something basic, but I have too restless a mind. I’ll be like, “Okay, it has to change key within three bars.” These are not conscious decisions. The writing process tells you what you do. You just have to get out of the way.

When you’re working with other people, when do you accept their suggestions and when do you forgo them in favor of sticking to your original vision?

My original vision is an improviser’s vision, so the other people’s opinions about what is happening are as important to me as a momentary reaction. I’ll bring it to Ryan, and he’ll improvise with it, feel his way around the form, and start to understand what’s going on. I bring it to Mari, and since she’s heard every record, she makes suggestions based on her frame of reference. Mari’s living in Mari’s version of the song, and Ryan’s living in Ryan’s version of the song. Trevor [Dunn] plays fretted strings, so sometimes our interpretations are the most similar.

The first stage is their reaction to what I’m bringing in. I’m ruling with a light hand because this project is not so much about, “I’m writing a song, and you’re god now, determining what the song is.” I’m not interested in that kind of control, and I also think what’s so deep about this band is that when we’re live, you can tell they have a say in what’s being played and how.

Some things bother me and I’ll tell them not to do that, but usually it’s not a problem. It’s tougher playing with new people because I get a bit fussy. That’s why I play with my best friend and my girlfriend. It’s the same with my band Editrix. I get to be with the people I love. The music’s great because I love these people. There’s something irreplaceable that only we can do together. It’s way less about me disapproving or approving of what they’re doing, and more about me being existentially comfortable with who they are.

You write a song ‘cause you’re in a specific mental or emotional space, and you have to live with how it sounds. You’re free to release it or not, but ultimately, it’s about whether you can be with this thing that’s outside of you. It’s all about otherness and interaction.

When you’re contributing to someone else’s project, how close do you try to stay to their original vision? When do you decide it’s okay to suggest something or stick with what they had in mind?

It’s difficult to know what someone’s original vision is because you don’t have access to it. Unless it’s very conservative, or references an existing style, someone’s original vision should be pretty much incomprehensible to someone else. That’s what makes it specific and valuable.

First of all, I have to trust they’ll tell me if they don’t like something. What I value in collaborators is clarity of intent. They don’t have to know what it is; they just have to know when it does or doesn’t work. I observe their body language and try to see where their ears are coming from. Anyone who says they have an original vision for something that doesn’t exist yet is correct, but that vision only happens when the other people are given a fair space to play with it. It’s tough because you don’t know how much freedom you have until you test the limits of it.

When I toured with Bobby Previte’s band, I played conservatively in rehearsal to see what others were doing. One day, he was like, “You should always be playing every hit with the enthusiasm as if you’ve been doing it for way longer, as if you’re hot shit.” And he was right. That’s the way I approach these things now. If I bring my full self to it, the self that’s perceiving why the person I’m collaborating with makes the music they do, I have to exhibit as much faith in my own vision for what they’re doing. Otherwise, they would’ve hired a far more normal guitar player.  They usually hire me because I’m weird. I just have to figure out what flavor of “weird me” they want.

How do you balance your day job with your creative work?

I’m very lucky that my day job is in music. I’m a full-time professor at the New School. I’m counseling talented, driven people on how to achieve their goals. Every day I’m talking about theory, and now I’m better at it. I get to hear their work and see how these brilliant young minds engage with the received forms we call western music theory.

I do get burnt out. The difficulty is only on the level of time. Emotionally, teaching is one of the most rewarding things you can do. It’s generous in every direction. I get to keep my finger on the pulse ‘cause the kids are gonna have a different listening diet than I do. They have a whole different relationship to finding new music than I ever have. I learn a lot, so they feed into each other. When I’m having a good season in my career, or if I’m writing a lot, my students benefit from what I’m learning at these new plateaus and about the industry. It feels very holistic.

It’s hard to have the kind of dumb, bored time that you need to as a songwriter and as a creative person in general. Within the semesters, you’re totally back-against-the-wall busy, and that’s not good for the creative process. It’s tough to carve it out.

What have you learned about the way your students discover music that has clashed with the way you discover music?

I’m a reluctant streamer. I listen to a lot of music on this. *holds up iPod Classic*

One of the joys and tortures of teaching is seeing yourself become the old freak that taught you. I love it because I’m a freak—and I’m actually not old, but to them, who knows?

My students are more comfortable with the algorithm and forces like Spotify. I’ve always been such a tinfoil hat person about that stuff, not even necessarily because of the exploitative practices that make sure artists stay poor. They find amazing stuff that bubbles up on the algorithm, or they’ll find a song on TikTok by somebody I’ve loved since I was in middle school.  I can’t make a blanket statement, but they have a lot more faith in forces beyond themselves when it comes to finding music.

Myself and the people in my life are digging around. We’ll dig on the internet, we’ll dig in the record store, we’ll dig in our old CD collections. When I was a jazz student, I remember having these hard-drive parties where people would share whatever they had. It’s totally illegal, but who gives a shit? The real ones are always digging and connecting the dots. There’s always gonna be people who do that, and I feel lucky that when I teach, I can usually find them.

What is your relationship to social media, email, and other online distractions, and how do you separate that from your work?

It’s amazing that you refer to email as a distraction. I don’t know how casual [you meant it to be], but it felt incredibly poignant and true. That kinda distracted me, which is amazingly meta. I remember loving email in 2017, when I was super fucking DIY. It was so intimate and romantic. I have not had that experience in a very long time because my inbox has been overtaken by the champagne problems of, “Do you wanna play this? Do you wanna do this?”

I’m fortunate to be in a season of my life where email is overwhelming, and I’m getting a lot of cool information from it, but it has taken away that fascination… My relationship with email is pretty much, “I miss romance; thank you for emailing me; I’m gonna have my manager help me with it.”

I try to make the internet fun by having an actual, rich physical life… On the internet, the more physical the joke is, the funnier it is to me. I love language. If you can say anything kinda generally good about the internet, it’s that even the most fucked up linguistic formations with the most shadowy origins are fascinating. It’s crazy that these words and memes bubble up in this extreme vision of post-modernism.

What is a creative instinct you have to fight against, and how do you do it?

The only time I genuinely feel 1,000,000% comfortable is when I’m in the moment of problem solving that is songwriting—when I’m sitting there, and I’ve found the thing that might be the song in the array of emotional stuff. My tendencies are so far from the front of my mind when I’m solving this kind of existential problem. This isn’t to say I’m pure or that I don’t have any bad taste issues. I have a thousand issues.

I have to fight against overcomplicating certain things. One of the best songs in the entire history of humankind is “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder).” It is the most complicated piece of music that I can think of, just in terms of harmony alone. If Mike Love thought he was making things too complicated, the song wouldn’t work.

I don’t have to fight against this, but a closed mind is the worst thing ever. If you’re making music for imaginary fans, you’re only writing music for people who only know this corner of your songwriting now. It’s so rude to assume an audience likes something. I think the algorithm’s pretty daring at times, but that’s what I hate about this mediated reception of music. You assume, based on some kind of data-driven demographic information, that people are gonna like this. What about all of the evidence to the contrary?

When you do that in your own music, it’s the same thing. Polonius-core: to thine own self be true. Whatever bad artistic impulse you have is probably pointing at something else that needs to be met. If you wanna communicate something complicated, sometimes you do it through complicated music. Sometimes, you do it through simple music—whatever the hell simple music is, ‘cause all music is crazy.

The things that make you write a song are beyond human comprehension. Whatever people hear in the song is what they need to hear.