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Brian Fallon

Photo by Kelsey Hunter Ayres

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Brian Fallon Talks Third Solo Record, Local Honey' former-punk-frontman-brian-fallon-continues-his-americana-metamorphosis-%E2%80%98local-honey%E2%80%99

Former Punk Frontman Brian Fallon Continues His Americana Metamorphosis On ‘Local Honey’

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The onetime Gaslight Anthem vocalist opens up to the Recording Academy about how present-day moments—fatherhood, therapy, religion and relationships—have shaped his newest collection of solo songs  
Will Hodge
GRAMMYs
Mar 27, 2020 - 9:16 am

"I got my first Tom Waits record when I was about 17 and ever since then I’ve thought, 'I can’t wait to be an old man.' I’ve always wanted to just be a crazy old man musician, banging on pots and pans and playing whatever I want," laughs former Gaslight Anthem frontman and current Americana solo artist Brian Fallon as he reflects on hitting 40 earlier this year. After spending his 20s and most of his 30s interpreting his classic-rock hero influences through a frenetic punk filter, the gravel-throated howler started slowly swapping out his low-slung, amped-up electric guitars for rootsy acoustics on a pair of increasingly introspective solo albums: 2016’s Painkillers and 2018’s Sleepwalkers.  

On Local Honey, Fallon’s newest solo record out March 27 (the debut release from his own Lesser Known Records imprint on Thirty Tigers), the 40-year-old father of two has fully completed his own version of the punk-to-folk pipeline with a musically stark and emotionally vibrant collection of some of the best songwriting of his career. Led by gorgeously spacious acoustic guitars, hauntingly bare pianos, and the pitch-perfect sprinkling of ornamental instrumentation that masterfully shades in the outer corners, Local Honey’s austere musical palette provides the ideal backdrop for Fallon’s elegantly plainspoken lyrics full of diary-close honesty, heart-stirring resonance and vividly cinematic storytelling.        

Fallon recently chatted with the Recording Academy to discuss the shifts in his approaches to songwriting, how taking guitar and piano lessons two decades into his musical career has affected his playing and how his present-day moments—fatherhood, therapy, religion and relationships—shape and define his newest collection of songs.  

Brian Fallon: During the recording of my last solo record in New Orleans, I got to play with a bunch of really great musicians like the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and it caused something to click in my head. I decided I wanted to write and play music that directly gets to the point and is pure. To do that, I had to first analyze my own skillset to say, "I don’t know if you can do that right now with what you have." So I started taking piano lessons—I had never touched a piano before—and I went back into guitar lessons. I also took a course in lyric writing. I did my best to grab all the instructive information I could; not to get more fancy, but to get more direct and to the point. Honestly, I feel like I’ve just started scratching the surface of this new thing in my brain that I’m sure will continue to shape my songwriting from here on out.

To help achieve his new songwriting goals, Fallon set out to identify as many lyrical inspirations as he could find to dissect and analyze what made them work. He even compiled a playlist of over 40 songs that he felt conveyed the most direct and simplest statements to repetitively listen to in hopes of studying their inner-workings.

Brian Fallon: When I was writing for this record, I looked to the best lyricists that I could find for inspiration. Tom Waits is always kind of hanging over my head as someone that I aspire to write songs like. Jackson Browne’s The Pretender record has been a huge one for me, especially after I found out he wrote it after his wife had passed away. "You’re Bright Baby Blues" was the track I kept listening to over and over again. The playlist I made was full of songs where I felt the lyrical statement was just so pure: Nina Simone’s "I'm Feeling Good," Fleetwood Mac’s "Silver Springs," some Springsteen, old Rolling Stones songs like "Play With Fire." I would listen to these songs over and over to remind myself to not use metaphor alone and not rely on fancy language to convey the emotion. I wanted to boil everything down to just true, unembellished emotion.

As Fallon started writing the songs for what would eventually become Local Honey, he decided on two other important elements. First, after years of talking about it together, he knew he wanted production duties to be handled by Peter Katis (The National, Death Cab For Cutie, Frightened Rabbit). Second, he knew he didn’t want to make an album that felt like it had too many songs. In fact, instead of just being an amorphous target to keep in mind, Fallon went into the recording sessions knowingly exactly how many songs he wanted to walk out with.

Brian Fallon: Nailing the right song count was a conversation that Peter and I had a bunch of times. I told him that I only wanted it to be eight songs and thankfully he was all for it. I thought he might give me a bit of resistance, but he was into it because so many albums these days just feel too long. Even though I had written more songs, I knew these eight specific ones told the story I wanted to tell. I didn’t want to dilute that at all. Peter really helped me get where I wanted to go with these songs because I wanted them to be really bare and I wasn’t exactly sure how best to execute that in a way that would keep people interested. He responded very positively to the demos I sent him and to the direction I wanted to take them in. He basically just said, "You handle the songs and I’ll handle the sounds."

The first song Fallon and Katis ended up working on for the record was "Vincent," an arresting piano-scored murder ballad in the vein of country and blues standards like "Long Black Veil," "Delia’s Gone," "In the Pines/Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", Bob Dylan’s "Ballad Of Hollis Brown" and Nick Cave’s entire Murder Ballads album from 1996. The stirring narrative that unfolds in "Vincent" came to Fallon in a single night during a rush of inspiration that resulted in so many verses that it took him a month to whittle it down to a manageable song.    

Brian Fallon: "Vincent" actually sprung up from a few different places. At the time, I was reading a Stephen King book called On Writing about his creative process. Then, I saw this documentary on Nick Cave where he was talking about how he creatively allows himself to write character stories. Then, I remembered hearing an interview where Bruce Springsteen talked about doing the same thing when he was writing songs for The Ghost Of Tom Joad. He had never been an immigrant living across the border, but he was able to write all these songs that actually felt like he had been arrested by a border patrolman and crazy stuff like that. All of these things were stirring around in my head and they all kind of oddly coalesced on this one night while I was sitting at the piano. I started playing a little bit and I felt like there was this character in my head speaking to me. I ended up writing something like 30 verses because I had never written in that way before and I really wanted to get it right. I’ve never written so much for one song, but it just wouldn’t stop. It was so weird how real the story felt to me.    

Fallon notes that although he is really proud of the song, the opening line of "Vincent"—"My name is Jolene, but I hate that song"—has prompted a little cause for concern. His hope is that listeners will understand that he is singing in character and that he himself doesn’t actually hate the celebrated, GRAMMY-nominated Dolly Parton ballad from 1973.    

Brian Fallon: I wrote that line because I think it’s funny when people are named after songs—my daughter is actually named after a song—and I often wonder if people hate that when they grow up. I love the song "Jolene" and I think Dolly Parton is one of the greatest songwriters of all time. I hope people get that I’m singing that line as a character. I think that with these types of character songs, maybe as long as the emotion is true, then the details can be more like a story or a novel and not be so dependent on what you actually think or believe yourself.

Back in December of 2019, Fallon announced Local Honey with the lead single, "You Have Stolen My Heart," a swaying, starry-eyed ballad that functions as the “always leave ‘em wanting more” album closer. Marked as “my most direct attempt at a love song” by Fallon, the song’s waltzy-strummed acoustic guitar and love-letter lyricism unfolds as intimately as an overheard conversation.

Brian Fallon: I had almost all of the songs finished up and I felt like I just needed one more that was kind of in this romantic vein. Surprisingly, this one came out pretty quickly. I was listening to The Smiths and that song “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” came on and I was struck by what a good, honest lyric it was. It was extremely direct in a way that could’ve gone so wrong. I think he really meant it though, and that was the trick. When I sat back down to write, I just tried to say exactly what I was feeling and “You Have Stolen My Heart” just came right out.   

For his follow-up single, "21 Days," Fallon drew on his various experiences with therapy; finding inspiration in the targeted focus on process and progress. Casting addictions into a fractured relational context ("I miss you most in the morning, we used to talk over coffee, but now I’m going to have to find another friend"), Fallon’s "one day at a time" lyrics forego any mountaintop platitudes and instead place the listener in the thick of the struggle. "21 Days" also contains an interesting sonic touch that helps to drive the push-pull internal monologue of the song’s protagonist: Fallon double-tracked his vocal across distinct high and low registers and then blended them together into one ghostly reverberating amalgam.

Brian Fallon: I’ve been to therapists for a few different things and I've found that the really helpful thing they can do when you’re facing a hard situation is not to give you a solution but to offer you a goal to work towards. Oftentimes, that goal is a measure of time because people always want to know how long it’s going to take before they start to feel better. That’s where that throwaway idea that it takes 21 days to break a habit comes from. But the truth is, going in, you never really know how long it’s going to take and it’s different for every person. That’s what that song is about. I’ve read that it’s about me quitting smoking, but not really, because that’s too small for what the song is saying. It’s about just encouraging yourself and reminding yourself that you will eventually feel better. On the right songs, I really enjoyed doing the double-vocal thing. The first time I heard somebody do that really well was Greg Dulli of The Afghan Whigs; going really high or really low, like beyond his reach in both directions. Mark Lanegan is amazing at it too. I have to be careful with it because sometimes it just sounds like you’re trying to make fun of Barry White or something.   

In what may be Fallon’s most personal song to date, Local Honey opens up with "When You’re Ready," a song Fallon wrote about his two young kids. The song rides along warmly delivered reassurances ("In this life there will be trouble, but you shall overcome") and there’s something soothing in its mid-tempo roots rock shuffle that evokes familiar echoes of halcyon classics like Don Henley’s "End Of The Innocence," Neil Young’s Harvest Moon, and the breezier moments of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers album.        

Brian Fallon: This song actually started off really loud but I couldn’t get it to quite work that way. One day, when I was right at the end of the session and was a little frustrated, I sat down and just started typing some words in what I can only describe as a moment of divine intervention—and I don’t get those moments too often. The words were coming out faster than I could type them and when I finished up, I read back over them and could see they were about my kids. I didn’t even know that stuff was kicking around in me. I guess it was just the timing—I had been off tour for a bit and was getting to be home every day. It was just one of those songwriting moments where the lyrics came out of nowhere and I was just really glad somebody else didn’t get that one.   

Being a parent has also affected Fallon’s songwriting in his poetic use of spiritual themes and religious imagery. Not only recalling fond memories of his mother singing hymns around the house when he was a kid, but he also points to navigating his own approach to parenting as a factor in his existential contemplation. Luckily for Fallon, some of his biggest songwriting heroes have also managed to parse out their own spirituality in ways he connects with; being kind, leaving room for mystery, and operating with more questions than answers.   

Brian Fallon: I learned early on that when you’re in a rock band playing loud and fast, it’s not really the time to get ultra-contemplative about the hereafter. I guess I did try a few times though. Spirituality is something I’ve grown up with my whole life. The first music I ever heard was my mom singing hymns. It’s always been around me, but I will say that having kids can really put your head in a position of considering the hereafter, for sure. You wonder if you’re raising them right and you get filled with these sensations of love that you never knew you were capable of feeling for another human being. I think that any artist that digs into life will eventually have to face their decisions on how they feel about all that. I’ve been really drawn to Iris Dement’s hymns record because she has such a beautiful voice and it was all songs I knew from when I was a kid. I’m also influenced by Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and of course, Tom Waits when it comes to that too. I’ve always come at it from a place of it being something to be discovered, not to be understood. I mean, I personally don’t understand it at least. Maybe one verse, "Love thy neighbor," I get that one.

With Local Honey, Fallon now has three solo records under his belt—meaning he’s only two away from equaling the five full-length studio albums he recorded with the Gaslight Anthem. Although, when comparing the two seemingly disparate chapters of his career, he doesn’t actually see that much of a difference between his past punk roots and his current Americana aesthetic. While some of his fans may not be ready to place the two collections right beside each other on their record shelves, Fallon sees his whole musical body of work on a singularly threaded continuum.

Brian Fallon: The punk and Americana communities are so similar in the way that they allow artistic freedom but the funny thing for me is that what I did then and what I do now are so closely married to each other. When I was in the punk scene, so much of what I did was by default. Even in just the first few practices with the Gaslight Anthem, I told the guys that I didn’t know if I could write punk songs. I wanted to write in a more country or folk vein and they were totally cool with that. I wrote acoustic songs liked I wanted and they turned them into loud, fast punk songs. Almost every single song I wrote with them can be stripped back to those acoustic roots. To this day, my approach has remained very similar. When you get older, I guess you just don’t have to make your point so loud. I’ve learned that sometimes it can hit harder when it's quieter.

Cosmic Americana Duo Mapache On 'From Liberty Street,' Honoring Neal Casal & (Briefly) Going Electric

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Joan Osborne

Photo by Jeff Fasano

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Joan Osborne Gets Political On Trouble And Strife joan-osborne-talks-getting-political-trouble-and-strife-singing-jerry-garcia-songs-phil

Joan Osborne Talks Getting Political On 'Trouble And Strife,' Singing Jerry Garcia Songs With Phil & Friends And More

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The GRAMMY-nominated "One Of Us" singer opens up about the "all-hands-on-deck moment" that led her to address current events on her latest LP
Will Schube
GRAMMYs
Sep 17, 2020 - 9:18 am

Joan Osborne is one of those artists you’ve heard before even if you’ve never actively searched for her music. Her song, "One Of Us," written by collaborator Eric Bazilian, is one of those songs that transcends time, space, and individuals. It’s catchy and powerful, and landed Osborne three GRAMMY nominations. Not bad for her first single from her debut LP. Though Osborne, born in Kentucky but residing in New York, has never penned a song as culturally captivating as "One Of Us," her career is a sterling example of craftsmanship and dedication to superior songwriting.

Osborne plays with a number of genres, and on her new LP, Trouble and Strife, she bounces from Americana to bar rock to pop with ease and style. Though the album is her boldest political statement to date, she wanted to blend the serious moments, like the powerful immigration tale, "What’s That You Say," with moments of optimism and celebration. "I really wanted to make this record a fun and joyful album and something you could dance to," she explained to GRAMMY.com. "It's about staying connected with your joy and allowing that to lift you up," she added. As the world continues to crack and we fall under the weight of it, Osborne hopes to be a source of positivity and hope. Though songs like "Hands Off" deal with the prevalent corruption of our modern era, "Never Get Tired (Of Loving You)" is a heartwarming ode to her daughter, and "Boy Don’t You Know" wraps themes of female empowerment and misogyny in society around warm piano chords and silky guitar runs.

Though Osborne's songwriting is subtler and more nuanced than her defining hit, her voice continues to be a revelation. From her days of singing Jerry Garcia songs in the Grateful Dead after the legend passed away to her Bob Dylan covers album from 2017, Osborne continually displays why her vocals are some of the most iconic in modern rock ‘n’ roll. Trouble And Strife is another example of her power and dexterity, a beautiful encapsulation of our times, warts and all.

What is it like releasing a political (and fun) album in this particular cultural climate?

Because of the pandemic, the process that we would normally be going through to release a record and support a record is, of course, different because we can't do any live shows. We can't go to any radio stations in person, and we're limited with the amount of stuff that we can do to promote the record. We're, of course, doing a lot of phone interviews and Zoom interviews and things like that remotely to be safe, but it's not the same as going on a tour and playing your songs in front of audiences and stuff like that. It feels a little weird, a little abstract in that way.

This is not a good thing, but I feel like the record, being a very political record or at least the most political record that I've ever released, it feels like there's an audience that's going to be receptive to it. That's the response that we're getting. People are saying that they're happy to have music that is addressing what's going on in the world. It makes them feel less alone and it can be a useful thing to help to navigate this particular moment. That's gratifying. I'm not happy for the reasons behind it being so relevant, but I'm happy that people are responding to it in that way.

When you are interacting with moments to inspire your songs, like "Hands Off," is it draining being inundated by negativity and awful things happening all around us?

It can be very difficult to navigate a time like this. Every day seems to bring some new crisis and some new disaster. If you have kids, you're thinking about the world that you're going to leave to them. That's a difficult thing just as a person and as a citizen. But as a writer, it lights a fire under you and gives you a lot of energy to put the things that you're thinking and feeling into your music. There's a real urgency that I've felt about having songs like this that address this current moment. It gives you a real push in that direction of trying to wrestle with this moment in a creative way.

Having the platform to be able to illuminate a story like on "What's That You Say," is so important, too. Can you talk about how that song came about?

I'm dismayed by the immigration conversation that's going on in this country right now. I believe that America is great because it's a country of immigrants and because of the mix of all the different cultures and artistic traditions that different groups of immigrants have brought with them. That's why American culture is so fascinating. People bring their different traditions with them and then those different traditions and styles have mixed together and created brand-new forms of art in this country. I think that's part of what makes us an amazing country.

I wanted to write something about a person who has come here and brought the best of themselves to this country and really contributed. And so I wrote this song, "What's That You Say," about this character. There were these moments in the song that were instrumental passages that didn't have lyrics and there wasn't singing. I kept hearing a spoken voice in those passages. I thought, well, why don't I turn the mic over, so to speak, to someone who has actually lived this immigrant journey? That's another thing that frustrates me so much about this issue, is that we talk a lot about immigrants and immigration, but I don't hear a lot of people listening to actual immigrants. I don't hear their stories that much. That's very frustrating for me.

I felt like this would be an opportunity to allow somebody to talk about their experience, someone who's actually lived this experience. I can come at it from an artistic perspective and try to have some connection to someone else's story, but no one's going to tell it like someone who's lived it. That's when I approached this organization called RAICES. I've been aware of the work that they're doing at the southern border, trying to help people who are attempting to immigrate to the U.S. from Central America and Mexico and people who are trying to navigate this really dehumanizing system that is in place at the border and helping them with their legal applications for asylum and things like that.

I called them up and I said, "I'm really a fan of the work that you're doing," and I told them about the song and I asked them if they knew someone who might be interested in telling their story to become a part of this song. They introduced me to Ana Maria Rea-Ventre. She is very much the kind of person that this song is written about. She's someone who came to America as a child and has lived the rest of her life here and has been someone who's contributed to her community. She's this shining light to the people around her. She agreed to tell her story.

When your songs began to take a political angle, did you watch what was happening in the world and think to yourself, "I need to make my next album a certain way"? Or had you already started writing and that's just the way that the songs were taking shape?

It's a little bit of both. I wrote these songs in a big rush in 2018. It was before the most recent disasters, but this has certainly been a rough four years. These things were on my mind and a lot of ideas for songs about the current state of our country and of the world kept coming to me. I feel a responsibility as a citizen, a parent, and an artist to try to do what I can to effect some positive change. As they say, "It's an all-hands-on-deck moment." None of us, I don't think, have the luxury to just sit back and watch it unfold. We have to participate.

There’s a cautious optimism that prevails over the entire album. Is that something you really had to work towards? Or is that your MO as a person?

I've been reading a lot of this writer, Sarah Kendzior. She was one of the people who believed that Donald Trump was going to win the presidency. She's an expert on authoritarian governments and she's brilliant. I don't think I can quote her directly, but she said something about, "I'm not an optimist and I'm not a pessimist. I believe that we have to do the work that we have to do, whether we know what the outcome is going to be or not. There's no guarantee that the work that we have to do is going to bring about the change that we want, but we have to do it anyway."

With the revitalization of the Grateful Dead in this modern era, your time playing with Phil & Friends is particularly relevant. Do you have any fond memories from that era?

I was able to work with the Dead after Jerry Garcia passed away and went on a big tour with them. Then I went on a bunch of tours with Phil Lesh & Friends since then and have a real lengthy connection with those guys and with that music. It's a really interesting phenomenon because you have the Grateful Dead and you have their fan base and then you have this larger jam band scene that has spun off from the Dead and from that world.

I have so many memories. I think I was very nervous before my first handful of shows because I sang a lot of the Jerry songs and I felt like, "Wow, is this audience going to accept me? This girl singer doing these songs or are they not going to accept me?" But the audience was very welcoming. I remember it was my birthday and we were playing part of a five-night stand at Red Rocks in Colorado. I got to sing "Stella Blue" in that beautiful setting. There was this gorgeous moon and it was a clear night and it was just one of those moments where you could have heard a pin drop. The song is so delicate and so emotional and it was this moment that's now frozen in my mind. It's this pure, beautiful moment of being on stage with those guys and performing that song in front of that audience in that beautiful space. It was really transcendent.

"Hack The Planet!" An Oral History Of Hackers' Soundtrack & Score

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The Jayhawks

Photo by Vivian Johnson

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How The Jayhawks Opened Up On 'XOXO' jayhawks-new-day-how-americana-pioneers-overcame-decades-turbulence-and-became-full

The Jayhawks' "New Day": How The Americana Pioneers Overcame Decades Of Turbulence And Became Full Collaborators

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For the first time in 35 years, the Gary Louris-led rockers pivoted to a full democracy on their new album 'XOXO.' Will it last?
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
Jul 9, 2020 - 11:39 am

The Jayhawks are generally seen as the rootsy, easygoing Minneapolis band that helped pioneer alt-country 35 years ago. But their leader Gary Louris hardly touches the stuff.

On his own time, the 65-year-old prefers to zone out to ambient drones by Cluster and Neu!; he's effusive about the hallucinogenic hard rockers Hawkwind. His bandmates, too, don't exclusively sit around listening to the Flying Burrito Brothers. Lately, keyboardist Karen Grotberg has been revisiting the French prog band Magma and German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk. Bassist Marc Perlman cites R.E.M. as a major inspiration. Drummer Tim O'Reagan was partly reared on 1970s power-pop like Badfinger, Cheap Trick and Big Star.

These influences have bubbled up in their music since the 1990s. This has been something of a liability. "A strength of ours is that we’re hard to pin down. We’re eclectic. But it’s also been a hindrance," Louris tells GRAMMY.com. "I don't take it personally, but I feel like it's because we have a little too much of a British pop element that mixes in with the roots. Only in the 1980s — when I was 26 or 27 — did I discover American traditional music. That was added into what was already our DNA and that’s what makes us kind of in-between."

The Jayhawks exist in an awkward limbo — too rootsy for experimental rock fans, too left-field for those with a closetful of Western snap shirts. But that in-betweenness gives them longevity and range. The band has swerved between soothing Americana, morose pop, and art-rock meltdowns over the years, but their new album XOXO (out on July 10 via Sham/Thirty Tigers) marks their most profound shift to date.

For the first time ever, Grotberg, Perlman and O’Reagan, all who have been in the band for decades, contributed their own songs and sang lead vocals throughout a Jayhawks album. When Grotberg's "Ruby," Perlman’s "Down to the Farm" and O'Reagan's "Dogtown Days" ricochet off each other and Louris' contributions like "Living in a Bubble," the effect is of a songwriters' guild a la Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac.

To hear the Jayhawks tell it to GRAMMY.com, they're pleased by this development. "It's fun in a way that wasn't there before," O'Reagan says of the open format. "It gives some variety and depth." Perlman concurs: "It does help to get a band's interest and focus on recording to have them included from the writing stage through the production stage," he says. Most important, "I feel like I had equal opportunity to express myself and to have those expressions heard and respected," Grotberg explains. "Gary opened it up. Wide open."

But when the Jayhawks began, they were anything but.

 

GRAMMYs

The Jayhawks perform at The Greek Theatre on October 21, 1992 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Lindsay Brice/Getty Images)

 

Crowded In The Wings

The band was formed in 1985 in Minneapolis by Louris, Perlman, drummer Norm Rogers and their founding co-leader Mark Olson, who has since left the band twice. "Mark had the idea of putting the Jayhawks together because he had songs," Perlman says. "Good songs that he wanted certain musicians to flesh out for him." Their self-titled 1986 debut album and its 1989 follow-up Blue Earth were almost exclusively written by Olson, and on each, he and Louris honked together in ragged, gorgeous harmony.

The cocky pair's breakthrough came in 1992 via Hollywood Town Hall, which was released on Rick Rubin's fledgling label American Recordings. On that album, Louris emerged as Olson's co-writer and competitor. "There was a lot of blood spilled and sweat poured out and feet stepped on," Louris recalled to The Aquarian in 2011. "It was just our transition from being kind of a regional band to being internationally known."

"When we were younger, our edges were sharper," O’Reagan says. "Our egos were bigger."

Hollywood Town Hall featured Benmont Tench and Nicky Hopkins trading off on piano duties. When their mutual friend Mike Russell learned they needed an onstage keyboardist, he referred Grotberg, who lived around the corner from their frequent haunt the 400 Club and had seen the Jayhawks a number of times, She met up with the band at their rehearsal space and had one practice: "I guess it must have gone well, because I got the job!" she says.

But the spotlight unwaveringly remained on Louris and Olson. They got brasher and more ambitious on 1995’s Tomorrow the Green Grass, dabbling in psychedelia and breaking into an exuberant cover of Grand Funk's "Bad Time." "I just remember us all kinda rubbing our hands together going 'I think we’re onto something here,'" Louris told The Aquarian of songs like "I'd Run Away"; "Miss Williams' Guitar" and "Blue," the only Jayhawks song that came within spitting distance of a hit.

"I think we pushed it a little bit more on that one," Louris added. But they might have pushed it over the edge altogether: that Halloween, Olson abruptly left the band.

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The Jayhawks at Farm Aid in Ames, Iowa in 1993. (Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

 

Olson Leaves The Band

"It wasn’t a joyous ride, man!" Olson told Popmatters in 2011 of being a Jayhawk. "I'd been in the band for quite a while. I'd just got married [to singer-songwriter Victoria Williams, the namesake of 'Miss Williams' Guitar']. I found a house down in Joshua Tree. And I wanted to try something else with my life. I felt like we’d given it 100% on those two records, and we’d landed where we’d landed. And those guys wanted to go on, and I wanted to stop. And they went on."

Louris struggled in his new role as the band's leader. "A concern of Gary's was whether or not he could handle being the frontman himself," Perlman recalls. "He went and did it out of necessity. It’s like second nature to him now." Fearing the end of the band and hitting the bottle hard, Louris let his inner Anglophile take the controls, and he wrote a handful of rattled, despondent pop songs that became their 1997 masterpiece Sound of Lies.

"It is the f**k-you record. It really is the f**k-everybody record," Louris told San Francisco Bay Area Concerts in 2015. "I was going through a divorce, I was a mess, I was drinking too much, I was unhappy… I really felt this was the last Jayhawks record, and why not go out with a bang, so f**k it?" One line from opener "The Man Who Loved Life" predicts how the album would fare commercially: "The traveling band was not well-received."

Still, Olson's absence created a clearing in which the other members could flourish. O'Reagan, who replaced their third drummer Ken Callahan, wrote and sang "Bottomless Cup"; Perlman contributed “I Hear You Cry,” one of the album's B-sides. "I learned how to write songs by being in the Jayhawks," Perlman explains. "I didn’t really have any interest in it in any band I was in before. It kind of took me years to understand the concept of it."

Smile, their 2000 album helmed by star producer Bob Ezrin, was their shot at a full-bore pop record with co-writing credits from all Jayhawks. Sunnier than its predecessor while thrumming with slightly unhinged energy, Smile has aged terrifically, but the slickness of songs like its title track, “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” and “Queen of the World” came to some fans' chagrin. Louris was unmoved by the pushback: "I get bored easily… I don’t like doing cookie-cutter things," he plainly told Yahoo! in 2014. "I didn't want to blindly follow what we were supposed to do and play country-rock."

Which is ironic in light of its 2003 follow-up Rainy Day Music, which completely abandoned synths and drum machines and took shelter in Americana. "People say that it's a return to our original sound, but sometimes I think of it as a retreat," Louris told City Pages in 2014. "We licked our wounds and said, ‘Well, that didn't work.’ And, I mean, we weren’t going to go in another direction of weird shit and drony music."

On that stripped-down album, the other Jayhawks continued to step up in Olson's absence. O’Reagan contributed “Don’t Let the World Get in Your Way” and “Tampa to Tulsa”; Perlman wrote “Will I See You in Heaven,” which the band sang in harmony. While lovely song-for-song, Rainy Day Music was a safe move instead of a surge forward, and it arguably cemented the Jayhawks’ image as an easy-listening band. They wouldn’t release another album for seven years.

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The Jayhawks' Gary Louris and Mark Olson perform onstage at Barbican Centre in 2012 in London. (Photo by Roberta Parkin/Redferns via Getty Images)

An Ill-Fated Reunion

While the Jayhawks quietly puttered along, Olson was engulfed in a tailspin of his own making.

At home in Joshua Tree, he was a full-time caregiver to Williams, who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. During periods of remission, the couple performed and recorded as the Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers. After an exhausting 2004 tour of Europe, Olson decided to clear his head and enroll in a geology course at Barstow Community College. "One day, I drove the half-hour to college, and I kept driving," Olson told The Independent in 2007.

Olson didn’t stop until he arrived back in Minneapolis, where, he told Williams, he was crashing with Louris. In reality, Olson had gotten back with an ex-girlfriend. Williams quickly found out and filed for divorce. "The episode put such a strain on me that when I was in Minnesota my behavior wasn't rational," Olson recalled. "I mean, I was eating and doing normal things, but I was actually insane."

A bright spot emerged soon enough: Olson and Louris had reconnected back in 2001 when they were asked to write a song together for the Dennis Quaid-starring sports drama The Rookie. In 2008, they released Ready for the Flood, a duet album produced by the Black Crowes' Chris Robinson. "I'm willing to play it more by Mark’s rules now," Louris told the St. Paul Pioneer Press that year. "There’s definitely some kind of chemistry between us musically that just seems to pick up wherever it left off."

It worked so well, in fact, that Olson briefly rejoined the Jayhawks for 2012's Mockingbird Time, their first with their old co-leader since 1995. International touring followed. Then it all fell apart that same year after a festival gig in Spain. "In front of a bunch of people, Gary said, 'Why don’t you hit me?'" Olson told Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2014. "I don’t ever want to see Gary Louris again, nor do I want him singing my songs," he added.

Despite strong reviews, Louris has since disowned Mockingbird Time: "I don’t even count [it] as a Jayhawks record," he told Wicked Local Beverly in 2019. "I just kinda skip over it. It was a really bad experience. I was trying to force something that wasn’t there anymore with my relationship with Olson." Plus, "I was in the throes of drug addiction at that time," Louris admitted.

Ever since a heart-related surgery in 2003, Louris had been addicted to painkillers, and his drinking was spiraling out of control. "I found I just felt good on these things," he told MPR News in 2016. "I finally felt not-anxious, which is what I had growing up and all of my life, a low-level depression and anxiety." But Louris' need for pills ballooned over time; on one solo tour, he fell over backstage and repeated songs onstage.

The bottom fell out in downtown Los Angeles, when he stood on a hotel ledge at midnight and thought about jumping. Luckily, a friend from MusiCares got him into treatment: "I was so ready. You have to be ready,” he told The Current in 2016. "And I was so ready, it wasn't even funny."

Read More: Liz Brasher Opens Up About Memphis, Mental Health & Her New "Sad Girl Status" Video

Leaving The Monsters Behind

Sobriety gave Louris a new lease on life. "It’s changed the way I played," he told The Current. "I'm actually much more comfortable on stage straight. I approach the music differently." After spending years blaming music for his problems, he immersed himself in the stuff, writing prolifically in his home studio and twisting found sounds into unrecognizable shapes.

"[I] started dabbling with everything from manipulating radio broadcasts to sampling things off of my vinyl and twisting them into strange compositions," Louris told Courier Journal in 2016. This artistic roll resulted in 2016’s Paging Mr. Proust, which was co-produced by Peter Buck and juxtaposed pop jewels like "Quiet Corners and Empty Spaces" with Krautrock-influenced jams like "Ace" that reflect Louris' outré tastes.

Grotberg had a more hands-on role in Paging Mr. Proust. "I didn’t have any lead vocals that I sang, but there was definitely a lot of prominent piano," she notes. "Also, we started collaborating a little bit [on the writing of 'Lost the Summer,' 'Leaving the Monsters Behind' and 'The Dust of Long-Dead Stars']. There was a lot of freedom on that album. A lot of ‘Let’s get a little jammy and see what happens.'"

Proust’s easy-breezy follow-up, 2018’s Back Roads and Abandoned Motels, was a "cover album" with a twist. Nearly every song had been written by Louris for an outside act, whether it be The Chicks' ("Everybody Knows" and "Bitter End"), the Wild Feathers ("Backwards Women") or Ari Hest ("Need You Tonight"). Grotberg and O’Reagan sang more lead vocal parts than ever — the former on "Come Cryin’ to Me" and "El Dorado," the latter on "Gonna Be a Darkness" and "Long Time Ago."

Back Roads and Abandoned Motels led to a eureka moment for their next album of new material. "It kind of spurred me on… I just start thinking ‘I wish these guys were singing more,'" he says. "I'm singing 95% of the songs, and I have these two other people who sing so well. People love to hear their voices. Not just behind me, but singing lead."

A Full Democracy

In the interest of "opening [the band] up a bit more" and finding a unifying theme for a record, Louris asked Grotberg, Perlman and O'Reagan to write and sing their own compositions for XOXO.

Grotberg contributed two songs that dated back decades. "Ruby," which the Jayhawks occasionally performed live in the 1990s, was written about an elderly woman who cared for her during childhood. "Fast-forward a couple decades, and I hadn’t seen her in a long time. I found her with one foot in this world and another foot in the next," Grotberg says. "So it’s sort of a transition into death, but I view it more as a love song. I was trying to write about her relationship with her husband, which is a beautiful story."

Her impressionistic ballad "Across My Field" was written while living in the countryside. "I was probably sitting there spacing out with a kerosene lamp on the table and looking out across the gravel driveway to that field," she says. "It’s about trying to move forward out of any situation in life. You have to take a step. It’s not necessarily a large step. But you have to step forward." (Grotberg also wrote and sang "Jewel of the Trimbelle," a piano ballad named after a small Wisconsin town where she once lived, which is included as a vinyl-only bonus track.)

Grotberg's bandmates are ecstatic about the leaps she's taken. "Her lyrics are very poetic. It’s a major step for her to be able to express herself more," Louris says, aglow. Adds Perlman, "Gary and I talk about how enjoyable it is to watch her come out of her shell. He and I have been supporters of her songs for a long time. It’s just a question of finding the right time and place for her to step up."

Perlman, who had never sung a lead vocal on a Jayhawks album, wrote "Down to the Farm" half an hour before a writing/rehearsal session. “"I kind of felt like I wasn’t pulling my weight. I kind of got frustrated," he admits. "You’ve got to step up to the plate a little. So I sat down and just popped that one off." ("I love the dark beauty of that song," Louris says of the Leonard Cohen-esque track, noting its theme of "aging and feeling time pass.")

O’Reagan ramps up the energy on XOXO with "Dogtown Days" and "Society Pages," two hard-charging tracks that hint at his power-pop roots in his old band the Leatherwoods. The album’s closer "Looking Up Your Number," a tender, close-miked ballad he wrote more recently, is something else entirely.

"The lyrical content is kind of a well-trod area for me, which is regret over a screwed-up relationship and trying to figure out how to make it work again," O'Reagan says. "I seem to keep going back to that subject in my songs. A lot of selfishness and screwed-up relationships and trying to make good on it."

Louris, Grotberg, O'Reagan wrote the winding "Illuminate" in hot-potato fashion by tossing suggestions back and forth — it’s anybody’s guess whose lyrics were actually whose. "It has a variety of styles within," Perlman says, calling it a "process song." "I do remember that Gary and I had kind of rediscovered the Moody Blues at some point in the last year. I think subconsciously I was thinking of the song 'Question,' which is a beautiful song and has really distinct parts to it. It doesn’t barrel through the song from beginning to end."

As for Louris' songs, "Living in a Bubble" is a bouncy rejoinder to data-tracking and the 24-hour news cycle reminiscent of Harry Nilsson and Elliott Smith; "Homecoming" is a climate-change warning that slowly becomes subsumed in a bit-crusher storm; and "Bitter Pill" is an aching story-song that builds on "Lovers of the Sun" from Paging Mr. Proust.

"It’s a theme that hits close to home for me," Louris said in a statement about "Bitter Pill." "Always searching for the next fix of happiness, the missing piece… never being happy with what one has."

A "Shit Show" For Good Causes

While waiting for the COVID-19 pandemic to die down and for concerts to resume, most of the Jayhawks have been at home in Minnesota. "I'm kind of bored, like every musician," Perlman says. While Grotberg, Perlman and O’Reagan have zero desire to live-stream ("I think it would be a challenge for me," O’Reagan says pointedly), Louris has taken to the format like a child clambering on monkey bars.

Every week or so since late April, Louris has hosted "The Sh*t Show," a ramshackle home performance series in which he performs Jayhawks favorites and obscure solo cuts by request. His girlfriend Steph runs point from a second iPad from Canada, and his son Henry, who possesses a dusky tenor like his father, typically joins on-camera to sing backup and cover songs by Radiohead, Paul McCartney and Sean Lennon.

Louris began broadcasting "The Sh*t Show" from his home in West Saugerties, New York; now, it’s live from Minneapolis, where he moved in June just as the George Floyd protests kicked into gear. "We join in with our fellow Twin Citians in expressing our grief over the senseless death of George Floyd," the band wrote in a Facebook statement in June. "Our sympathy [is] with the family and all those affected by the events of the past couple weeks." Given current events, he splits tip jar donations from "The Sh*t Show" between the Navajo Water Project and the GoFundMe for Elijah McClain, who was killed by police in 2019.

Overall, Louris, who has been open about his struggles with depression, looks relaxed hosting his home show — cracking jokes, bantering with the peanut gallery in the comment section, lightheartedly penalizing Henry for sour notes. "He can pull that off. He has the ability to get on a stage," Perlman says of his boss' livestreaming abilities. "I don’t think I’ll ever work with anybody else who is as proficient a songwriter and as talented a singer and as talented a guitar player as he is. People don’t realize what an amazing guitar player he is. You don’t find people with that kind of all-around talent. So he can do that."

"On the other hand," the bassist says, "I would never be caught dead doing something like that."

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Photo Credit: TimGeaney

 

Looking Forward

When the pandemic allows for touring and recording again, will the band continue in this democratic format?

"I’ve been thinking about this and I’ve kind of painted myself in a corner," Louris says with a laugh. "There is no rulebook. I’m always going to feel a little bit like a benevolent dictator and the buck’s got to stop with somebody because it’s really hard to have everyone agree on everything. I’ll always kind of sort of steer the ship a little bit more, but hopefully this continues. I have total faith that this will continue."

"We kind of have similar sensibilities between us about what’s good and what ain’t," O’Reagan says, noting that the process of trimming songs was surprisingly painless. "There were no knock-down drag-out discussions about what would make it and what wouldn’t."

"Who knows?" Perlman asks in response to the question. "The songs decide how the record is going to be produced. The next record we make could be completely acoustic, stripped-down. The next record could be all Karen songs for all I know."

To Grotberg, who has had the longest journey of any Jayhawk to the spotlight, there’s no question that XOXO is the beginning of an era. "I’d have to say yes, I do anticipate that," she responds. "It could be that Gary has such a large volume of songs for the next album, but I can’t imagine him saying ‘Nobody else can have a song.’ I imagine that this is a new day."

To that end, nearly four decades since Louris found American traditional music, the Jayhawks are arguably just getting started.

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S.G. Goodman

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S.G. Goodman Talks Debut Album 'Old Time Feeling' rising-singersongwriter-sg-goodman-talks-debut-old-time-feeling-growing-rural-south

Rising Singer/Songwriter S.G. Goodman Talks Debut 'Old Time Feeling' & Growing Up In The Rural South

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Get to know the Kentucky-born singer/songwriter, whose raw, country-tinged anthems both celebrate and hold her community accountable on 'Old Time Feeling'
Noah Berlatsky
GRAMMYs
Jun 22, 2020 - 11:04 am

"I never want to leave this world/without saying that I love you," S.G. Goodman sings on "Space and Time," a country weeper that serves as the first song on her solo debut Old Time Feeling. "I owe my life to even my enemies/the ones who have loved me/the one who have tried." Her vibrato give the song a keening, unforgettable edge—a tribute to love and community that comes with a stab of pain.

"I have obsessive-compulsive disorder," Goodman told me matter-of-factly over Facetime from her home in Murray, Kentucky, wearing striped denim overalls and her trademark large glasses. "Space and Time," she says, "was about how easy it is to "go down a rabbit hole of feeling isolated and struggling with the thought of not really wanting to be alive at that moment." It also touches on the feelings of being a lesbian in the rural South, and thinking about acceptance, representation and isolation.

But the song is written in such an open way that it could apply to anyone. Goodman's sung it at weddings, she says. She figures she could sing it at graduations and funerals. It's especially relevant now, as the country grapples with a mounting death toll and the loneliness that comes with lockdown and social distancing. "I don't want to be an opportunist there, but it has morphed into a corona anthem, for sure," she adds. "The need to tell people you love them applies to all the moments of life."

Goodman has a knack for writing about her specific experience and communities in a way that connects across differences and state lines. Her video for her song "The Way I Talk" is set on the family farm, featuring her father, her brother and her three-year-old niece. It's a celebration of the beauty of the land, and also a bitter reflection on the exploitation of Southern labor and prejudice against rural people. "Sharecropper daughter/she sings the blues/of a coal miner's son," she spits, before the song ends in a squall of angry guitar feedback—rock speaking for and to country.

Goodman's a wonderfully easy interview. She explains with good cheer that she wanted to speak by Facetime since it was about all the human contact she would have for the day, and swinging the phone around to show me her dog sacked out on the couch. Like her music, when she talks she's funny, passionate and welcoming. The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you become a musician?

I mean, I was raised in the church. So as soon as you let anybody know you could sing, you were kind of guided into performing in the choir. And I really wasn't into it! But I learned a lot.

And it is still—I mean, I'm not really involved in church at all these days, but those songs and the melodies are, I would say the most influential thing that's ever happened to me as far as music goes. When somebody tells you that you need to sing as if God's hearing you that's pretty powerful. No matter what I believe about it now, that's never left me.

This is your first solo album. But you've been performing for a while, right?

Yeah, I'm 31. I went under a different moniker for a minute and released an album as The Savage Radley. That's where I really started writing songs that were more focused on where I'm from in my home story.

And before that, when I was around 18, I did pop music. I had a radio single that supposedly was played in 40 states.

I'm not ashamed of it or anything. I mean, you know, those were songs I wrote at like 16 to 18 years old and they weren't bad. I'm not embarrassed of it, but I definitely don't want to highlight it.

Did your niece have a good time shooting that video for "The Way I Talk"? She looked like she was having fun.

Oh, my goodness, she had a blast. She was three years old in that video. And she did wonderfully, though she's a little shy. I told the boys who were filming I said just don't talk to her, she'll warm up, and she did.

I fed her candy all day, which was half good, half bad. She would have a sugar high and you couldn't get her to focus. But most of it, if you just watch the video, we really just let her do her own thing. There were very few moments in the video that we had to actually tell her what to do.

But it was pretty simple, aside from the fact that she had to skip her nap time. So things got a little rough towards the end of the day. But she did great. I mean, she was a natural. She got in the back of my car one moment she said, "I'm the star!" I was like, "You sure are!"

It was special to have two generations of farmer's daughters in that video. I wanted to portray that.

"Red Bird Morning" is a lovely sad song. What inspired that?

I came up with most of the imagery in that song while reflecting on a breakup.

So yeah, I was recently dumped. And, when you're dumped, you kind of become a detective, as you try to go back to instances where you think things went wrong. And I thought about how I got on someone's bad side for leaving the day before my birthday to go to the Standing Rock protest. So the person in the song is traveling, and it's actually about me on my way to Cannon Ball on the Standing Rock reservation.

And also, you know, there's an old saying in the South that red birds like cardinals have a special spiritual meaning. The red birds are loved ones who have left you and are visiting you. And I was on my back porch while I was writing that and—obviously I was dumped, so I needed comfort.

I think if you're going to get spiritual and think about spiritually impactful moments, you have a really good chance of that happening after getting your heart broken.

So was "Red Bird Morning" something you just wrote recently? How long have you been working on the songs on the album?

Oh, they're all over the place honestly. "Red Bird Morning" would have been written in 2018. There's a song on the record "Supertramp" that would have been written in 2011. And my song "Tender Kind" I wrote in the studio.

I'm not a factory when it comes to writing. I might have a verse for a few years, and it's just not the right time for the rest to present itself. I'm not one of those people who writes five song a day.

Are there people who write five songs a day?!

There are! There are people who write at least a song a day or more. And I just don't, that's just not how my process is. And I used to beat myself up about it, but I really don't anymore. Because I always say, if a song is meant to stay around, you won't forget it. And if you do, then it wasn't meant to be.

"Old Time Feeling" is a pointed song about what people in cities think of people who live in rural areas. What do you think northerners or people in cities need to know about the South?

People often use stereotypes when talking about the South. And a lot of people are very shocked when certain legislation passes in the South.

And people don't really want to understand the way our state governments work and who's involved in them, how they came to power, and the out-of-state money that goes into making sure there's a large population of people who are forced into cheap labor. So many states in the South have become right-to-work states. A lot of the times when people look at certain things going on in the South it comes from a place of judgment, rather than from trying to understand the complexity there.

I'm not trying to be an ambassador or something like that. But people are often not in tune with the progressive initiatives that are happening in the South right now with different politicians and different organizations who are of real positive change for the people.

You know, I live in Kentucky. I want Mitch McConnell out. I want people from other states to understand that we need to work together across state lines to help these political initiatives. I worked on the Andy Beshear campaign [which won the Kentucky governorship for Democrats in 2019]. But I am really outraged politically right now, and I can't canvas.

Is it a hard time to be releasing a debut album?

There's a lot of conflicting arguments around that. But right now people have a lot more time to listen. And they might take the time to listen a little harder. It's not like they're just playing a playlist while they're driving to work and drinking their coffee and trying to get away. People might actually be listening while sitting still right now. So that's encouraging.

For a person who loves to perform, and loves to meet people…but I feel like my work will stand on its own. And I will get back out there and get to organically meet people through shows again. It is a scary time. But I really don't think it would serve me at all to focus on it, so I'm not.

Phoebe Bridgers Talks 'Punisher,' Japanese Snacks & Introducing Conor Oberst To Memes

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PJ Harvey and John Parish perform at Primavera Sound Festival in 2016

Photo by Jordi Vidal/Redferns

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John Parish On PJ Harvey's Lost Album pj-harveys-lost-album-john-parish-discusses-1996-gem-dance-hall-louse-point

PJ Harvey's Lost Album: John Parish Discusses 1996 Gem 'Dance Hall At Louse Point'

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On the occasion of its recent reissue, we tracked down John Parish to talk about 'Dance Hall At Louse Point' and his earliest memories of meeting PJ Harvey as an ambitious teenager
Zach Schonfeld
GRAMMYs
Nov 10, 2020 - 10:19 am

PJ Harvey rarely looks back. The songwriter’s career has been defined by a restless sense of reinvention, each album cycle accompanied by a fresh persona—the blues roar of To Bring You My Love, or the glossy alt-rock romance of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea—ready to be discarded at the next creative whim.

But 2020 has been an exception. Harvey has spent much of the year rolling out a vinyl reissue series of her back catalog, along with some accompanying demo albums. The latest vinyl reissue is something of an outlier: Dance Hall At Louse Point, Harvey’s abrasive 1996 collaboration with ex-bandmate John Parish. Harvey and Parish had first met in the late 1980s, when she joined his band Automatic Dlamini. In 1996, they combined Parish’s musical demos and Harvey’s lyrics on an album that would plunge the singer-songwriter into an avant-garde realm of disturbing monologues and banshee-wail vocals.

Credited to John Parish & Polly Jean Harvey, Dance Hall was largely overshadowed at the time by the immense success of To Bring You My Love. In retrospect, it’s an underrated gem and something of a lost album in Harvey’s catalog; as Harvey herself later acknowledged, "People don't even count that, yet that's the record I'm really proud of."

On the occasion of the album’s recent reissue, I tracked down John Parish to talk about the album’s unusual backstory and his earliest memories of meeting Harvey as an ambitious teenager. Since then, Parish has co-produced most of the singer’s solo albums, and in 2009, the pair reunited for a second collaborative record. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

At the time you made Dance Hall At Louse Point, you had already known Polly for a number of years. What was your first impression when you first met her in the '80s?

She was like 17 when I first met her. She was coming to see my band, Automatic Dlamini, whenever we played in her local area. We all got to chatting after a gig. A mutual friend introduced us, and then she gave me a couple of cassettes of some of her early songs she’d been writing. They were kind of like folk songs at that time, really. But her voice—it was already there. It was fully formed at that age.

I just thought, "That girl’s got a really good voice, I’m gonna see if she wants to join the band." So I just asked her. When she finished school, she came and joined the band and she played with us for the next three years, before she formed the first PJ Harvey trio.

Was there a moment when you first realized, "This person is extraordinarily talented, oh my God."

I mean, I obviously saw something that was really good there; otherwise I wouldn’t have asked her to join the band. You can’t possibly predict how somebody’s going to develop as an artist. I could see that she had the potential to be great. If I said, "Oh, I knew she was going to be a star"—obviously nobody can know those kinds of things.

Do you have any favorite memories of working with Polly in Automatic Dlamini?

She came in at a point when the original lineup was kind of falling apart. I was rebuilding a lineup, and she was an absolutely fundamental part of that. She’s always had an old head on young shoulders. She was somebody that you could talk to and discuss pretty serious issues. As a teenager, she was very serious. And was quite capable of being able to offer good advice. We started relying on each other.

Was she nervous performing onstage with the band when she first joined?

The first couple of shows, yeah, really nervous. As you would be. But no, she got used to it pretty fast.

Tell me about the origin story for Dance Hall At Louse Point. My understanding is that you wrote those songs while on tour with Polly for To Bring You My Love?

That’s semi-right. It was Polly’s idea. It was after Rid Of Me, before she had started To Bring You My Love. I was teaching a performing arts course at a local college. I’d written some music for a theater production, and Polly came along to see it. She absolutely loved the music, and said afterwards, "Would you write me some music in that kind of vein? That I could try writing words to?" I said, "OK, that would be great."

That’s how we had the idea for the album. I was writing the music for Dance Hall At Louse Point at the same time she was writing the music for To Bring You My Love. I then became involved with [To Bring You My Love], which was obviously a big record. And it involved a big tour as well. Took 18 months of our time. While we were on tour for To Bring You My Love, that’s when Polly wrote all the words. She already had a cassette of the music for the Dance Hall record, which she carried around with her on the tour and then wrote lyrics in different cities. Which is why those cities are referenced on the album sleeve.

Were you hearing her lyrics while she was writing them? Or were you both working in your own separate worlds?

She would sort of drop a cassette into my hotel room and say, "I've got some lyrics for this song." I'd hear them as they were coming in. It was always kind of, "Here you go, here's the lyrics." And it would always be completely done. It was very exciting.

I was reading some old interviews with Polly. There’s one where she describes that record as being a huge turning point for her. What do you think she meant by that?

It’s always difficult to talk about how that is for somebody else. My take on that is—and I know this from myself when I’m writing in collaboration with somebody else—it’s a certain freedom you have that you don’t give yourself if you're writing entirely individually, because you have the weight of the whole thing. When you can share the weight, it eases you up to do things you might be nervous about doing yourself, because you’re not sure whether you’ve gone off a stupid tangent and you’re not seeing it.

You can try those things that might seem kind of wayward. And you have another person that you rely on say, "Oh yeah, that’s great. Push it a bit further." Like I said before, she approaches most things very seriously. Writing particularly so. So I think it probably enabled her to be a bit more wayward than she might have been. When I first heard her vocal idea for "Taut," I mean—the entire delivery of the song was kind of extreme.

Which song are you referring to?

I’m referring to "Taut." Which is quite an extreme performance. A lot of the songs, I would give her a title. So I gave her the title "Taut." She didn’t have to use it if she didn’t want to. Some of the titles she used; some she didn’t. But I think it was also quite freeing to suddenly have a word or a line and say, "What are you gonna come up with for that?"

I’m assuming Polly thinks the same. She might have a totally different reason for saying that was a turning point. It could also be that, up until that point, the lyrics she had been writing—you know, Rid Of Me and Dry—were very personal lyrics. Or they could be read in a personal way, couldn’t they? Louse Point was very much stories and scenarios. You weren’t imagining that Polly was talking about herself in the bulk of those songs.

The vocal performance on "City Of No Sun" is also quite extreme and very jarring. Were you taken aback by her approach to singing this material?

I was a bit surprised. In a good way. I thought it was really exciting. I remember the performance of "City Of No Sun" when we were in the studio. She said, "OK, I’ll record the quiet bits first, then I’ll do the loud bits." So she had the engineer set the levels, doing the quiet bits. It’s quite strange timing in that song, to get everything to line up. She hit the chorus; she had two or three go’s and she kept getting it wrong.

At one point, she got it wrong again and she was so annoyed that she just went straight into the loud bit anyway. We had the mic set to be recording this really quiet vocal, so all the needles shot way into the red. It was on tape, which can really compress those kinds of things.

Is that the performance that is actually on the record? You can hear how it sounds a bit distorted.

Yeah. Because it’s absolutely pushing everything. She didn't mean to record it like that, but it just sounded so great. Of course we kept it.

Whose idea was it to cover "Is That All There Is?" by Peggy Lee?

It was initially done because they needed it for this film [Basquiat]. We really liked the way it came out, so we thought, "Oh, it kind of fits on the record." The recording that’s on the album is actually the first time we’d ever played that song. There were no rehearsals. We didn’t really know what we were going to do. Mick Harvey played the organ, I played drums, and Polly sang.

Obviously, most of her albums are credited to PJ Harvey. On this album, she's Polly Jean Harvey. What do you think is the significance of her changing her billing?

That was absolutely her call. I think she was quite protective of me. She very much said, "I want it to be called John Parish and Polly Jean Harvey, not the other way around." It’s difficult, isn’t it, if you’re an established artist and you suddenly work with someone who’s unknown, or de facto unknown. It’s like, "Oh, PJ Harvey and some bloke" kind of thing. I think she was trying to find the best way of making people realize that it wasn’t another PJ Harvey album. I know that later on, when we did the second collaboration, it was PJ Harvey and John Parish. It in some ways made more sense, but you’re never quite sure how you should go about those things when you’re doing them.

Some articles I’ve read state that the record label, Island, was uncomfortable with the album and believed it to be "commercial suicide." Is there any truth to that?

I’m sure there were people at Island who were a little bit unnerved by it. And by the fact that it was coming out not as a PJ Harvey record, but under a different name, when To Bring You My Love had just been such a relatively commercial success for PJ Harvey. Probably somebody said it was commercial suicide. If they really thought that, I doubt they would have put it out. I think they didn’t really know what it was.

I have to give quite a lot of credit to Polly’s manager, Paul McGuinness. I think if he hadn’t been behind it, perhaps Island Records wouldn’t have gone for it. But Paul heard it and he was like, "This is a really good record." Obviously he had a lot of clout and a lot of credibility with Island.

During this period, Polly was also becoming successful very quickly. Perhaps she was overwhelmed by the expectations from the record label or the degree of media scrutiny. Do you think those factors contributed to her desire to separate herself from the PJ Harvey that people knew?

You’d probably have to ask her. My take would be that it’s not quite as thought-through as that. She doesn’t like to repeat herself. The last thing she would have wanted to do at that time would have been To Bring You My Love 2. Her gut reaction is to try and do something different each time. Which is why I think she’s had such a long, successful career. I think there was a lot of pressure after the first album, Dry—the record company didn’t like Rid Of Me. They didn’t want to have this Steve Albini-recorded, very hard-hitting album. They were hoping for something more commercial, like I would have said Dry was.

If you are able to reinvent yourself each time—which, obviously a lot of artists just don’t have that facility—if you can, it sets you up for a much longer, more interesting career.

The album title refers to a painting. How did the title present itself to you or to Polly?

I was, and I still am, a very big fan of the painting Rosy-Fingered Dawn At Louse Point by [William] de Kooning. I told you I was giving Polly some of the songs I gave her with titles. One of them, which she ended up not writing any lyrics to—the title track from the album—is an instrumental. That was just a title I gave it. There was something about a place called "Louse Point" that sounded sort of desolate and rather unappealing, and I just thought a dance hall—I just liked the atmosphere that the title [suggested].

How would you describe this album’s long-term legacy in Polly’s career? Do you think it’s overdue for more attention?

I mean, I know it’s seemed like there’s a hardcore group of fans that like it very much. In the U.K. and Europe, there were a lot of people [who] liked it pretty much straight away. Perhaps in America it took a little bit longer to find its home. Obviously we never came over, played any shows, did anything in the U.S. at the time of its release. A lot of people talk to me about it 23, 24 years after its release and say they love it very much. I guess it has its fans for sure.

Once this reissue campaign is over, do you think we can expect a new album from Polly next year?

Umm… I don’t know. I can’t really answer that.

Are there any more previously unreleased demos, like the Dry demos, that fans can look forward to as part of this reissue campaign?

Nearly all the albums will come with accompanying demos. Probably the only ones that won’t are our two collaborative albums—the demos would all be instrumental versions of the album, because that’s how we went about it.

What can you tell me about the demos for Is This Desire?

Well, there’s a demo version of "The Garden," which I really, really love. Had it been down to me, I would have said "Put the demo version on the album" when the record came out. Because I just think it’s one of Polly’s greatest demos. Generally, I like the demos for Is This Desire? a lot.

And the b-sides from that record as well—"Sweeter Than Anything," "Nina in Ecstasy." I think there are some really extraordinary songs that didn’t make it onto the proper album.

You and me both. I think "Nina In Ecstasy" should have been on the record. That was my favorite track of the whole set of demos. So I was very disappointed that that didn't make it onto the album.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought that track should have been on there. Will those b-sides be included with the reissue package?

Not the initial reissue package, because it’s literally the album plus demos of the album. I might be wrong, but I think there might be some kind of b-sides and rarities thing to come out as another package at some point down the line.

Will you also be reissuing the more recent albums, like Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project?

I think Hope Six is still available anyway. So I don’t think there’s any point in reissuing that. But I think everything that was unavailable is being made available.

Has Polly herself been very involved in preparing these reissues and overseeing everything?

No, I think she’s delegated to people like me or Head. And she’s delegated the artwork; it’s all the people that did it originally who are working on it again. She’s very good at [delegating].

I’ve always gotten the sense she doesn’t like to dwell on her past work. She’s more interested in doing something new.

As all creative artists should be, I think.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, The Honorable Music Lover

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