You released your latest album, This, just before your 50th birthday. Was this on purpose?
Yes. I worked on it in my fiftieth year so I wanted it released before my birthday. Without being obsessed by it I was quite aware that it was my fiftieth year, it was my fortieth album and that I was making music for thirty years. I would not have been as anal to release it actually on my birthday, but to release it just before seemed like a good idea.
Now, the album is 49 minutes and 49 seconds. Was this meant to be this way?
No, I hadn't realised that.
Well I thought maybe with those short fragments that were on the record.
Well it wasn't deliberate at all. I mean one can't...well one can of course mess around with these things, but I think if you do pay attention to that kind of things, then you are not paying proper attention to the music. Because music has a natural length and of course you could go around adding a second here or there, but it's best to go for the natural thing.
What was the reason behind those small fragments then? I mean they were incorporated into the album alright, but why are they there?
There were a couple of reasons for that. Obviously the album is very, is very deliberately very diverse. I think that when I started to put it together in terms of the sequencing of the songs it was proving very hard to find any kind of satisfactory order, that did not have bad juttering. And since there were songs on the album, such as Unrehearsed, that do go from A to Z and back again without any juttering it seemed rather bad to have that going on. So these little pieces serve as glue to make that work. That is one side of it. The other side is that obviously I worked for months on a recording and all sorts of buried stuff in there. I mean it's not that there's this terrific fifth rhythm guitar part that everybody really ought to hear, but that there were a few passages in the music that I thought, without reference to the rest of the music, the rest of the song, that at least have 46 seconds worth of music, worth of life in them. Maybe they do not have the three or four minutes, but they do have some sort of life in them. But basically the pieces are meant as glue. When I did that, it became clear that this was the right choice.
It does strike us as such as well. For instance between the last and the penultimate track.
Yes, there is one between Nightman and Always Is Next and then between that one and The Light Continent. And for balance I also put on in front.
Now we are on the subject: this Always Is Next song is quite untypical for you?
Well, yes and no. I could refer you to certain songs on Nadir, certain Van Der Graaf songs, What I Did, Accidents. There's a family of this kind of songs.
But if you compare it to the music you made in the nineties... it is very concise.
It is very concise and very aggressive. This is because the theory behind this album was that I wanted to put some kind of representation of the areas of music that still interest me now. That I still may, or may not, work on in the future. The examples that I gave do cover a wide range. That type of short, concise, aggressive units do still interest me. That is why it is there.
Speaking for ourselves I think we feel this to be the best song on the album. It short, concise, catchy, but it also has depth.
It's the single! [laughter]
Some would say this I guess, but mostly because the other songs are not.
In another and another time perhaps.
The lyrics to Always Is Next also differ a lot from the rest.
That is because it is an observational story. It does have something in line with film-noir for instance. It is an observed stories, and I haven't written many of those. I mean as opposed to a story where the singer is the protagonist. It has a tradition within my work, but not one which is particularly evident to date. As always, I do not know where these things come from or why they pop up.
Privately we wondered about this 'demiurge avenger'.
Oh, the demiurge avenger. Well that is a kind of a primal force. Not a godhead, but a kind of primal disinterested force. I have a psychologist for a daughter. Demiurge by the way is better than what I had first written there. For the original line I had invented something that was equivalent to demiurge, but later on I decided I should use the proper terms rather than invent them for myself.
The album we feel was not just diverse, but also very dynamic. A song like Unrehearsed for instance it can be very still and very noisy at the other end.
Of course, one of my main interests in music is still: how do we get from here to there, without having the crash the gears. Unrehearsed is probably the most extreme example of that since it goes from strange sort of wind quintet to guitar riffs and back eventually. That still does interest me enormously and is enormously good fun to do. To have those things fall in, or to work out exactly how to do that, is...what I like doing.
So like Bubble on the last album
Yes, exactly, exactly.
On this album it seems very succesful. We find this album easier to listen to, more accessible than for instance Everyone You Hold. Also because the songs are more easily remembered, more easily recognized.
That is maybe because these are more discrete songs. I think certainly Everyone You Hold, Fireships also have universal moods as well as individual songs. On Everyone You Hold there weren't any of those 46 second pieces, but it was like this that songs were deliberately made to evolve into the next song. By the nature of the songs on This, they are certainly more recognizable.
In Unrehearsed slightly before the ending there is an emotional guitar solo. At the end of Fallen there is quite some heavy keyboardplaying. To our feeling these parts could have stayed around a bit longer.
Yes, but we do not want them to outstay there welcome, do we? I mean they did probably last a lot longer than they eventually did, because there is certainly a lot of editing involved. The end of Fallen (The City Of Light) did last longer. I remember making the conscious decision. What is done there is actually a piece of Krebs technik which is an old modern classical composing technique, but one that we used greatly in Van Der Graaf, to not just colliding two pieces of music, but to start with motiv one or riff one and actually then have both running simultaneously and then merge with another one, so that there is actually no moment where you can say that that one is finished or the other one has started. If we were to play the song (Fallen) live, which we can't with only a piano and a violin, then we would obviously extend that part, partly because you need to be sure that everybody is locked in order to do the change into the second part. In recording terms I thought it was actually as sweet to do it as quickly as possible, as long as it works.
Making songs concise in the studio, is that an exercise to you?
Well, it's a demand effectively. Maybe it's a function of the fact that I hear the songs so often. I don't want them to outstay their welcome for me. When I finally hear the record, I don't ever to want to have the feeling "Oh, I wish I had cut three of those riffs out" cause they are not really going anywhere or doing anything. It is not game, but it is: what is this piece, what is this part doing for the piece, for the recording as a whole? So it's justify yourself please, justify yourself or you're for the chop.
That agonized scream in Stupid: where does that come from?
Actually, like much on this record, it is actually improvisation. That is what I did, when I set up the track.
But there's nothing behind it really?
Well there are a few things about it: it is wanting to make a very aggressive I AM statement, which I think it succeeded modestly in doing. But I was aware obviously that there was a kind of danger doing something, that sort of veered into the bad end of neo world music, and just kind of copying licks from another culture, without giving proper respects. It is not necessarily a get-out, but there is this violent AAAAAAAHAAA which does come down to I'M at the end and zips around the planet a few times. It is obviously Middle-Eastern based, the scale and so on.
We also feel this Middle-Eastern presence in Nightman and Fallen. I mean we do not know really about these scales, but especially the violin...
Ah, these kind of scales are kind of well the last ten years especially in singing, areas of music in which I feel comfortable playing. Stuart is also comfortable in playing this, although what he was playing was more Balkan than Arabic. There are subtle differences there. Over the last years, people have been saying that if I'm going for improvisation in singing that I go often towards Middle-Eastern or towards flamenco, rather than towards any classical style or blues style. And with singing, I mean singing happens. It is the most instinctive part of the entire process. Hence, I don't know that much about it, but that is obviously where I feel comfortable these days.
Lyrically, if we except Always Is Next, can we assume all songs are about yourself?
Myself, ourselves. As always, things addressed to you, could equally be addressed to myself. A lot of interior monologue, a lot of passage of time. The usual suspects me lad.
Personally I (Jurriaan) like Since The Kids best, also emotionally. It reminds me a lot of Curtains and His Best Girl.
Yes. Lyrically I guess this one is new. Again I'm trying to do this business to write proper songs from a proper age, in common experience. And every parent knows that is just not a simple thing. It is neither something tied up with a pink ribbon and a bow, nor is it a breakfast of bowls of barbed wire, but it is actually runs the gamut of those two things. In my view, when you have children, while you are in charge or responsible, that has to be the biggest job that you have for those years. Then you stop being in charge and somehow one hopes, not to have an exchange of personality, but to negotiate the passage of your children into adulthood, while remaining related to each other and while not being exactly friends, certainly not enemies.
From this song it seems you find it tough to raise children.
Some people say that I'm negative about having children, but actually I find it quite a positive song. The fact that Since The Kids something happened, it doesn't necessarily mean something bad. The song does end with a note of unremitting positivity, having mended the broken chord. But having children is tough, tougher on mothers than on fathers I would say. Particularly from the point of breaking ties. I have been very lucky myself, having three wonderful children. Hillary my wife, has brought them up rather more than me, since obviously I have been touring. But we have been very lucky with very very little grief. But that's not to mean it is a grief free experience.
For children it is easier. A child wants independence.
But the parent also wants independence. To be a proper parent, you want your child to be independent as well. But achieving independence is not within in the power of a parent, you cannot give independence. You have to let go when you can. You have to push without pushing away. There aren't any books about this and that is why I write songs about it. That is the basis for writing all these songs. It is complicated stuff and you can read all you like about being a parent, but nothing prepares you for being a parent.
What is the broken chord?
The broken chord is actually a kind of joke. It is actually an arpeggio. The broken chord is maybe the normality of the life before, that gets kind of fractured by this absolutely normal event that has been going on forever. It is not meant to be aggressive.
We also got the idea that maybe children can mend the broken chord between two parents.
Yes, absolutely. That is because you are a family. The dynamic is between everybody. The siblings fight, the parents fight, everyone fights. One hopes to end up glued together in the end, you know. Without too much crockery damage.
This song, the Light Continent, also sounds rather untypical for you.
I said this the other day. Normally somebody who knows my stuff gets a new Hammill CD of forty minutes thinking to hear something like seven or eight things happening, and thinking they know about that. But this not like that at all yeah.
Our idea is that it is not really a song. More a blending of the ambient stuff you've done and a normal song.
Basically, it is a tone poem in the classical term. Not song, not symphony, not concerto, it is a tone poem that is impressionistic. It is a very impressionistic piece. I think it has to be that long. I tried to narrow it down with edits, but it turned out it just had to have its time. And it absolutely didn't need any other ingredients. There were other ingredients that could have gone in there, but everytime I stuck anything else on to it, the whole thing sort of disappeared.
It also illustrates the vastness of the continent.
The vastness of the continent, but also the slow moving nature. It's a bit imprecise, the feeling that I'm getting at, but to get that feeling, one has to have some appreciation of the slowness of things. We tend to have to have this impression that everything has to go fast, fast, fast, but there are things on a different timescale as well.
I (Jurriaan) was kind of struck by the fact that the song uses light tones (the Light) and ponderous low ones (the Continent).
Em. Ah. For ME, I had a very strong feeling about Antarctica. First of all: Africa is the dark continent, so Antarctica is the Light Continent. There is also a reading on the title that one can make as being "The Continuous Light". One of the features of Antarctica is that it is white and there's daylight for long periods and this enduring lightness. If there are dark tones -- the top level is this bright brightness -- underneath there is ice that is thousands years old, there is ice that is black, green, gray, there are minerals. Those are the elements which are involved I would say.
Asking on the Internet somebody came up with a question, one I also wanted to ask, which this was about the Artist Shop thing.
The Artists Shop imports records into the States. Gary Davis there asked me if I was interested to do an IRC chat. And I said yes eventually. Eventually managed to download the software and did it. I will probably do it again in the future. I don't know when.
I heard that the people at the Artists Shop actually decided which questions put to you.
Before we even started they already had 85 questions lined up. So there was some kind of mediator who passed on the questions. If there was no mediator it would really have been a free for all. Partly, it is true that I do not get the chance to choose the questions I find most interesting, but that would be...well I was really typing things in real-time, which was really the thing about it. Of course, maybe a next one we could do it differently. On the other hand, it not being my nature to answer a straight question, -- as you know -- directly with a straight answer, I surely kind of angled around hither and beyond enough.
Somebody on the net said that she heard many references to various periods in your work. Is this album a sort of recapitulation.
Well, its a statement of continued intent, rather than recapitulation. I'm not interested in recapitulation, going back in anyway. Of course, if I'm busy with a piece of work involving getting from here to there, loud guitar songs, something entirely new like Light Continent, then I will be working within my normal musical language. Because I have put many of these songs together on one album it seems different from Everyone You Hold -- which also contains songs pointing to other songs -- but which itself is a more continuous album.
One small unrelated thing: somebody mentioned the live side to Pawn Hearts, which was supposed to be a double album.
[Stuart Gordon comes in, admonished not to feel excluded]
At one point there was the idea that Pawn Hearts was to be a double album. Frankly, I'm very happy it didn't happen, since it would have diminished the entire album. We were going to record Killer, Darkness and one other one as well not actually live, but live in the studio. That was because of the element of frustration that comes with the growth of the songs live compared to the studio versions. That was one side. And then the chaps were to do some kind of piece each for the fourth side. All of these were, we DID record Killer and Darkness at least. They were okay, but they weren't like live versions. And ehm, certainly the others did do quite a lot of recording of their pieces, which were not necessarily "only them". It was not like: if you won't do a solo album, you CAN have a solo track.
Like the Long Hello's?
No, it wasn't, it was quite different. The Long Hello albums are a bit more of jamming, instrumental things. For some reason or another, not finished in time, the budget ran out, or what have you or indeed the things we had done were not really what we wanted to do, and then, when we finished to work on the album proper, to tag something on to that would be distracting at the very least.
Somebody on the net remarked why you couldn't tour with some other cult artist like John Cale or Richard Thompson.
I actually had, not an offer, but it was mentioned that I might tour with John Cale. I thought it be a kind of interesting, yet distressing, event. No coward is going to that show I'm sure. Faint-hearts duck out. But he was somewhat of the same opinion and decided it would not be a good idea. but you never know. Touring is always a complicated thing, since I do not want to tour that much. It more and more has to be sorted out in advance. But it is potentially possible. The basic deal is for better or worse, I have not and will not start in the future asking anybody for favours. My independence is not because I'm the cranky bastard, that I am in fact, I just do not want to be riding on anybody's back.
But the idea was of course that you would play with people of your own say caliber.
I would like to see the battle of the ego's though, who gets the last breadroll in the dressingroom. John Cale, Nick Cave and me, fighting over the last patch of margarine. This is what rock music was formed for. It is an interesting idea. Okay, I'm being a bit stupid about this, but it is an intelligent thought. That possibly it might run aground on the reefs of artists management, agencies and commisions. It is not a nasty world, even the world of nominal cult artists. It is not that nasty, but business does get taken care of. One wants to end up with everything making sense for everybody else. But, we shall see.
Somebody commented that you have played 30 or 40 songs over the last years out of a total of four hundred. He mentions My Room.
Thirty is really of the mark since we have thirty rehearsed for every tour, as a minimum. Probably there are eighty or ninety that are played with a strong regularity. It seems that they are always the same songs in a certain period. I play My Room a lot, because it's a song that I can revisit and revisit and it's always different. But it's not on the list for this tour. But last night we had four world premieres.
Are they all from this last album? This album seems rather a band album.
Weeeeelll...
It does have quite a lot of saxophone.
Yes it does. Quite a lot of drumming and such. But actually they are quite adaptable songs. That is probably something too: the songs that I play a lot adapt easily to anything from solo, duo, trio to full band. They are the ones that get played a lot. We are just starting with them, but they are adaptable.
One small last point: in a discussion about lyrics it was said that you wrote very verbose songs, like La Rossa. How do you feel about that now?
I try to say things in few. Like in music, I try to gabble a lot. I do gabble a lot in earlier songs, trying to get it all out. These days I like to do things in implication, rather than saying things out loud. That is what I used to do, trying to write it all out. Sometimes I still have a fast run of words, but generally I like to work with resonances. I think that this has to do with being an older writer. If you look at Beckett, never the most verbose of people, gradually shrunk and shrunk and shrunk until they became stage direction and just a couple of words, because these are the important words. And if they are delivered in the right way, then they will carry much more meaning than a standing up and giving a lecture. Some years I started to reign in my ranting tendencies, at least in terms of writing songs, not entirely succesful personally [laughter].
Would you say you learn by writing what you can omit and what you cannot.
Yes. I think so. One never knows. One of the problems, particularly with song lyrics, I always think that every kind of reference that I make is as plain as day, idiotically simple. A lot of the word plays...like the title of the Light Continent. I had this experience that somebody is translating some of the lyrics into Greek. He started by asking me the meaning of specific lines. This guy is obviously very good in English, very literate, and he thought he knew the lyrics inside out, or so he thought. Then he kind of goes, there's this and this in this song. Sometimes the general meaning, but often just some word that cannot be translated into Greek. And then I say: this word is here, because it has this kind of resonance on that and so on and that is what it means for me. Then he says he had absolutely no idea that that was there at all. And there is no reason anybody should. This is my professional stuff. I want to be satisfied that I have put enough stuff in there for enough people to draw out different conclusions from it. Nor is it saying that I know what the songs are about. It is a fact that there is more in there probably than what anybody knows. But you can't release a CD with a million footnotes.
Like "running through an anagrammatical swordplay" in Unrehearsed?
Right. That is rather a typical line. They are all over the place. It is a sword play, because obviously 'sword' is anagram of 'words'. So, then, like you said, you are running through the dashing blade of conversational wordplay, but also 'run through' is 'rehearsal'. There isn't any reason why anybody should know this. I mean the tadaradadataradadadada, the rhythm of the words, might carry meaning enough. But I make the effort to put things like this in there, because it pleases me and I think I should be doing it.
Somebody asked whether you still wrote stories.
No I haven't been doing that in years. Basically songs. They are much more satisfying.