adrian is rad

On August 25th, John Vanderslice played on my show on KZSU, I Once was Canadian, and I interviewed him between songs. He’s the nicest guy in indie rock and he’s really interesting to talk to as well. Oh and his acoustic set was fantastic.

Here’s an mp3 from the show:
John Vanderslice Dear Sarah Shu [Live at KZSU]

I really like the version he did acoustic, moreso than the album version by a lot. I apologize for the sound going to only the right channel for about 2 seconds in there. It only happened on this one song but the song happens to be one of my favorite cuts from the show. Smurph was the engineer for the session.

The set and interview were from about 8:05am to 9:05am, so we were both a little bit loopy. What follows is the full text of the interview:

canuck: John, you are among other things, singer, songwriter, musician,
producer, studio owner, I guess…

John Vanderslice: Yeah, I think. [laughing] It sounds like I’m really like on the ball
when you put it like that. Also, I own a Pentax K1000 camera, which I think
that you just had in there.

canuck: Yeah, I do. I have it right here.

JV: I’m a huge fan.

canuck: Yeah, they’re great things. Actually one of my plans is—I don’t
know if I should reveal this to everybody over the air—I’m going to take
a K1000 and a digital camera and make my own digital SLR.

JV: That’s great. Perfect. I think for the money the K1000 is an absolute
steal. Total bargain. Beautiful camera.

canuck: I’ve been on—what’s it called—shopgoodwill.com recently and they
have good prices on those there.

JV: Yeah.

canuck: I mean we’re not endorsing them, of course, because we can’t
endorse anybody, but… But of all those roles, what do you think of
yourself as first or do you think of yourself as all of them?

JV: Well, probably, the one that takes the most time is writing and being
a musician and touring and stuff. I mean, the studio five years ago was my
life 60, 70 hours a week, but once the studio was set up it became a lot
more stable. I mean, maybe for the first five years of the studio,
actually. But now the studio kind of runs—there are people running it and
I am in and out and I try to give them as much freedom as possible. So I
would say the touring and making records takes the most time.

canuck: Right, and that is Tiny Telephone studio in the Mission?

JV: Yeah, in San Francisco.

canuck: Fantastic. What was I going to ask about that? Man, I need to
write some stuff down sometimes.

JV: The question you want to ask is do I have a lease and the answer is
no. [laughs] The studio is in an industrial compound and it’s owned by a
very very cool woman who lives in Sonoma and it’s pretty much her
retirement income. And her sons—I probably shouldn’t be saying this on
the air, but anyways [laughs]—there are people in her contingent that
want to sell the land and for many reasons it’s a really dicey
proposition—there are schools down there, there’s a lot of people living
down there and also there are industrial spaces. The land may or may not
really be zoned correctly. Anyways we’re hanging in the balance there, so just, you know, pray that we’ll be around in a couple years.

canuck: And how long has Tiny Telephone been around?

JV: It’ll be eight years in September. I can’t believe that, but, yeah, eight years.

canuck: So that goes back to ’97 I guess.

JV: Yeah, ‘97. Actually we opened on September 11th, 1997, so I had to retroactively change the date we that opened because we have these anniversary parties and I thought that, from a PR perspective, it might be better to be September 12th.

canuck: I have a couple friends whose birthdays are September 11th and they always feel like it’s sort of ruined by… that.

JV: Osama is coming…

canuck: You label yourself as producer on a lot of records and you have your engineers, so what’s the sort of role of a producer versus the role of an engineer.

JV: Well, a producer is kind of an inflated term for someone who doesn’t know how to set levels and place microphones. The role that I take on with band—I produce very few projects; mostly, my involvement is with the Mountain Goats and the reason with me being involve with the Mountain Goats is me being a hardcore fan, from a long time ago. And I met John [Darnielle of the Mountain Goats]—the first solo show I ever played was opening up for the Mountain Goats, so I was very lucky. And I got to be friends with him. And I was into the Mountain Goats but it wasn’t until later, it wasn’t until Coroner’s Gambit came out that everything changed for me. I kind of pursued him and I just said, you know—after Tallahassee was made I was really disappointed with how Tallahassee sounded. It just seemed to me like the most bizarre representation of what he does, in other words, adding space to a guy who is almost devoid of dimensionality. Because of so much boom box recording and the beauty of those recordings is the two-dimensional wallpaper quality. It is right there. That suits his narratives. So I basically just pitched to him that me and Scott [Solter]—the best thing a producer can do is defend an artist against studios, engineers and musicians. At the time John—now he’s sort of a pro—but at the time he wasn’t used to being in big studios. For me, I know a lot of studio owners and I own a studio so I can really negotiate with studio owners hard. I can bring a lot of gear. I can also negotiate with musicians and keep everyone on the same page and kind of control everything. I mean, in a weird way, it’s like a producer of a film, you know what I mean? Actually a line producer of a film would be the most accurate term because it’s mostly you’re controlling the overall aesthetic choice that you’re doing. Where do you record a record? Incredibly important. And also where you mix a record is important and who you hire as an engineer and as a second engineer. So that for me was mostly—also John doesn’t exactly need help with his lyrics but he sometimes needs a little bit of perspective with arrangements and overdub ideas. Scott Solter is really my partner in that. It could have easily just have been “engineered and produced by Scott and John.” But I’ve only other worked with Spoon very briefly. I’ve only done one session with Spoon. I go way back with those guys and again that’s another band I’m obsessed with. Producing’s very diffucult and it takes a lot of brain power out of your body forever.

canuck: I agree with you that I was a little disappointed when Tallahassee came out but the last two [Mountain Goats] records that you produced sound awesome.

JV: I mean, I think We Shall all be Healed is like a masterpiece. I think that’s kind of slipped through the cracks, unfortunately. A lot of people do like it but it’s not getting the props that it should have gotten.

canuck: I was just playing that while you were warming up. I don’t know if you missed that.

JV: That’s cool. That’s great. I didn’t hear that through the headphones.

canuck: Earlier you mentioned the K1000 and on your website you have a ton of photographs that you’ve taken. Have you ever thought what you’d be doing if you weren’t a musician and the things I listed [earlier]? Would you be a photographer?

JV: If I weren’t a musician, I’d be living in a half-way house in the Lower East Side. Who knows? I’d be in mental hospital. I have no idea. [laughing] Well, I have a degree in Econ so I don’t know what I would have done, but I know that I like to own a business. I really love owning a business and having employees. I just think there’s something incredible about it, especially if you’re kind of an absentee business owner and you provide—I’ve just worked in a lot of studios and I just think that me owning a studio and then not really being around or controlling engineers is important. It’s like a community service. But I think that not matter what I would have done I would have—I don’t know if I would have gone into photography. I think photography is too competitive. I think everything except music is impossible. Like when I look at people making movies, I cannot believe they put it together. It’s the most complicated production.

canuck: But a lot of people probably think that being a musician is impossible.

JV: The thing is, it’s always been really easy to four track or record yourself at home and to make a record. Now getting it out—yeah, maybe—but distribution problems are inherent in any sector. Getting a film distributed is a hundred times harder. In photography basically anyone can put stuff online just like you can put music online, but to actually get a folio printed of your photographs is incredibly difficult. I watched my friend get a book deal and it took forever. I know a ton of people who are on small labels.

canuck: So anyone can start a label but starting a photography book gallery sort of thing is—

JV: Or a dance troupe! Imagine! The infrastructure is there to be a musician in this country. I think it’s a lot easier and you can do it alone.

canuck: So you mentioned recording at home and a lot people are recording at home these days with Protools and digital things like that and I know you’re a huge fan of analog-centric recording. So what are your thoughts on the current recording at home? Are people worse off than with four-tracks?

JV: No, I’d say people are better [off]. I mean, this is a really long conversation and I’ll try to be really—kind of—pointed. I mean no matter what, it’s better than when I bought my Portastudio 2. Those thing may have a lot of style but the benefits end right there, you know what I mean? It’s easy to romanticize the past and it’s also—things are changing so fast. The problems I have with digital recording are not on the bottom end; it’s on the top end. It’s going into a studio that’s $800 a day and they don’t have 2” machines any more. That to me is like—that’s insanity. For home recording I’m all for it and I’ve always helped people try to find the right systems to get at home. Usually musicians are incredibly cynical. They’ll buy a distortion pedal and talk about it for weeks or a guitar and they’ll talk about it for years, but they won’t even think about the quality of the digital stuff that they’re buying at Guitar Center which in general is so bad. I mean, there’s way better stuff out there if you, kind of, poke around. Mostly what I try to advise people is don’t forget that you are a cynical, highly intelligent person who should really be research this stuff as much as you research other stuff. I mean, people who kill themselves about which small, dingy rock club to play in Denver and then they’ll just buy some junky thing with bad converters. For me it really matters what you buy. It’s only at the top end that analog still beats digital. Digital’s gotten a lot better. At the tippy top end when people do have budgets—it’s kind of hard—unless you’re super savvy like Radiohead and you can spend $20,000 on digital converters and do tape and digital, I think it’s still better if you do analog recording. A lot of geniuses spent seventy, eighty years perfecting analog; To bail on it’s kind of silly.

canuck: So you just released an album on Tuesday [August 23, 2005]?

JV: Yeah, on Tuesday. Yeah.

canuck: And you’re doing a tour of independent record stores and college radio stations?

JV: Yeah, we played Amoeba—Dave, my drummer, and I played Amoeba on Tuesday and we’re playing the LA Amoeba next week and we’re doing tons of stuff up and down the coast. And then flying to the east coast and doing that for a couple weeks.

canuck: Why don’t you tell everybody else what else you’re doing on Tuesday?

JV: Oh. Oh yeah! Well I play on KXLU earlier. Then we go play Amoeba and then we have this idea to go bowling at All Star Bowling Lanes in Eagle Rock and we just had it be open—the thing is—it was never a joke, but the thing is I thought well I’ll put this note on my website and we’ll see what happens and now I’m getting so many emails about it and now I’m like kind of worried about holding enough lanes. I think that just the kitsch value of having a bowling night with Vanderslice is just going to draw some people. The thing that I really don’t like is—I’m a huge fan, I’m like a super fan of tons of bands and I’m really frustrated that I can never talk to these people. I went and saw Destroyer a year ago just so I could go and hang out try to talk to Dan Bejar because he’s a genius. I mean I’m in love with the guy and for me to talk to him for ten minutes meant everything to me, you know? I just think why are people so inaccessible. Because I know what musicians do when they’re not on stage; they do nothing. They play video games. They really do nothing. Even musicians that are a hundred times bigger than me, they really do nothing so I just thought—this barrier is so silly—so I thought why not just be out there? The thing is, this whole tour that I’m doing, it’s really about being exposed with acoustic guitar and that’s it. There’s no bandmates. There’s no tour manager. There’s no nothing. It’s just me and a car and I love that it’s so—it’s like a reset. It’s so simple and pure. So I’m just trying to sustain that because once the tour starts, then there’s five other people in the van, then there’s a trailer and then the question is not ‘When do you hang out with your friends?’ it’s “Where are you going to park your van to not get it broken into? And how are you going to get back to the hotel?” That’s not as fun.

canuck: But the bowling is one of the best ideas I’ve heard in a long time.

JV: Cool. That’s my friend Graham’s idea. He’s a genius. He’s been working with me for like five years.

canuck: I’m pretty sure if I was anywhere near LA, I’d be there.

JV: That’s cool.

canuck: You don’t often do acoustic on your recordings, just acoustic and voice, right?

JV: The, um—the—yes, absolutely. [laughing] I’m pretty smart, right? It’s—well—kind of a cliché to say it’s early ‘cause I’m a musician and it’s 8:30 [am], but this is definitely really early.

canuck: Well for the people who didn’t get our emails, which is pretty much everybody, John apparently normally goes to bed at about 4, so…

JV: Yeah, that’s true.

canuck: So this is certainly pretty early for you. It’s hard for me, too, but I do it every week.

JV: But, you know, there is something life affirming about being up this early. I mean, it’s positive. You know what I mean? I like it in the middle of the night because it’s quiet. That’s my thing. It’s really easy to do a lot of work, but the light’s really beautiful.

canuck: I always watch the sunrise on our studio cam here which shows us what’s going on outside.

JV: That’s cool.

canuck: I wanted to ask you if you could take us through your songwriting process. What comes first and, you know…?

JV: The hardest thing for me and why it takes me so long sometimes to make records, is that it’s hard for me to just sit down with my guitar and fool around with melody lines and chords. Usually I have to have an idea for a song or I can’t even start writing it. With this song, “Angela,” I was—I don’t know what I was doing—I was probably driving or walking or running or something and I thought, okay, I got it. I’ll write a song that’s to my girlfriend or a sister or someone else that’s basically apologizing for losing their pet, but the metaphor is if our pet can’t survive leaving the apartment, then we’re in the wrong place, right? [laughing] Like this is unhealthy. And also maybe the idea that this caged animal had one day or two days of freedom in San Fernando Valley, right on Magnolia Boulevard, and that was the best, most adventurous time of it’s life and that’s a sign that we need to get out of here. Part of the reason I wrote this song is that my brother had just moved from the city to Chatham County which is south of Chapel Hill, North Carolina onto a farm. So I went to visit him and I thought, this is sanity. He has fifteen acres, trees, a pond. It just really just kind of effected me. When I go back and live in my tiny studio apartment, it just seemed to be really unnatural and not maybe so good for me. And so I sat down—and I think originally it was in B flat—[strums B flat chord]—so I just—[singing] Angela. That’s the first thing I came up with, so then from there it’s a month of on-again and off-again. I always send my lyrics to [John] Darnielle [of the Mountain Goats] to workshop and to help me. He would not touch this song, though, because it’s about a dead animal and he’s a huge animal rights guy. [laughing]. John’s a very idiosyncratic guy and he’s like, “man, unless the rabbit lives…” The original title of the song was “Dead Rabbit” and so he said “Unless the rabbit lives, I really”—he worked on every other song on the record except this one, he said “I just can’t, I can’t do it. Man, and by the way, why do you got so many dead animals in your songs?”

From there it’s just a matter of sitting down and pounding out chords and ideas. And like every song, the first drafts, you look back at them and you’re like, what was I thinking? It takes so many layers of tightening up the lyrics and the writing to get to some kind of logical structure. But, I guess the answer is, it has to start with some sort of narrative idea or I’m just lost. I’m just not the kind of guy who can just come up with melody lines.

canuck: And then do your, sort of, production ideas come when the whole song is sort of finished and you’re in the studio?

JV: Yeah, what I’ll do is I’ll bring the bare bones acoustic song into Scott [Solter] or if he’s not around—actually, this song [“Angela”] he wasn’t around for the beginning of the tracking, so what I did was I just took an old Baldwin Rhythm Ace—it’s like an old drum machine—and I just tracked four minutes of the tempo I wanted and then I started adding synthesizers where the chords dropped. I don’t think I ever added just an acoustic guitar. I just added bare bones sounds to sort of build up the choral structure of the song. Then Scott came in. We tracked drums. And then we tracked vibraphone and it just goes on from there. Often we’ll be tracking on ten or eleven songs at once. It’s just so random, the order, and how the ideas come. Sometimes we’ll be tracking an instrument on a song—like we were tracking a celeste, like an orchestral celeste on a song with my friend Matt Cunitz and Scott and we thought, you know, it doesn’t work on this song. And then Matt Cunitz said, “Hey, let’s do it on the rabbit song.” And so we did it and so the solo is Cunitz playing this celeste solo, which should have been on another song.

canuck: So do you own all these instruments or do you borrow a lot of these?

JV: What I do—the thing I realized a long time ago is that if hire a musician who’s great, like Matt Cunitz—basically Matt owns a warehouse full of keyboards, so I pay Matt $300, which is the bargain of the century, for him to come down and track for a day and he comes down and brings his VW van filled with a real Mellotron, unknowable keyboards that I’ve never seen before, Claviolas, and completely bizarro—like the first Rhodes mock up for an electric piano. He just has stuff that’s really exciting and interesting. We’ll just plug them all in and play them and just see what works.

canuck: Who owns the church bells that you use on a number of songs?

JV: Oh that’s uh—wow, these are good questions, man. Thanks, Adrian. Scott Solter owns a studio—another studio—in the Mission, which we also track a lot at, called 15th Street and uh—it’s on 16th Street. No I’m kidding. And there’s church right across the street from him and so we just go over there. Sometimes, I guess, maybe we ask and sometimes we don’t and we go and get the church bells. You have to wear these white gloves, you know, and it’s real proper. They’re so incredible. So we borrow—whenever we can borrow them. They would be on a lot more songs if we could borrow them more. They’re totally amazing.

The thing that Scott and I learned the hard way is that it has to be real. If it’s fake, it’d better be so weird and interesting that it’s great that it’s fake, but if you’re going to have a Mellotron, go get a Mellotron. Borrow it. Just steal it. Beg someone to bring one over. Don’t use the canned—you know, I have Michael Pender sampled CD set—it’s just, once you hear a real Mellotron—it’s just always worth it to source out the original stuff. It’s like organic produce versus going to Safeway.

canuck: What I was going to say was the church that I went to growing up had the hand bells. I was never in the hand bell ensemble but my friend was. After I heard—what was it—“Promising Actress” I guess—I was like, man, maybe I should get some church bells. They’re really expensive.

JV: They’re really expensive. I mean, most of this stuff is prohibitively expensive and that’s the cool thing about recording is that there are so many great musicians out there that just want to play and everyone has their own collection of stuff. When it’s a co-op, then it can happen.

canuck: You just have to know the right collection of people.

JV: Yeah, but man, we spend a lot of time building that collection. I mean, it’s unbelievable how many people I’ve reached out to try to get them in the camp and to get them available to record with other bands at Tiny Telephone. A lot of people are just in their own zone and their potential is not being tapped so I’m trying to bring people together.

canuck: That’s a great message.

canuck: What do you feel about remixing and sample and especially about people doing remixing and sampling of your stuff?

JV: Oh I always—I’m an open source guy, man. I let people do whatever they want. I mean, with my photography, I just let anyone do anything they’d like and with—we did a remix record called MGM Endings of Cellar Door and I just put the entire thing up on the web. Every time someone emails me, I’m just like, sure, do whatever you want. Mash it up, it just doesn’t matter to me. I think people are just too proprietary about what they do. I mean if you look at the internet and the way things are going, to try to fight that, it’s just—you look like a jerk. If anyone emails me for permission to use my stuff that’s not commercial, then I just don’t care. Like is some wants to use—people will say, “I’m making a student or like this documentary that has no budget.” I’ll just say, of course. They’ll just email me back and they’ll say, “wow, I’ve asked other people and they have their lawyers email me.” Okay, that’s really silly. I just think anything goes. I mean, I think that the more that things are open—I mean, trademark, copyright law—we have big problems in this country. I think anytime you can fight against that—you know, the Disney law, the better. I always err on the side of open source.

canuck: That’s cool. Do you read reviews and music blogs, especially to see what people write about you?

JV: Never. As an iron-clad rule, I will never google my name. I’ve very unlike a lot of people I know because they will go into heated, you know, soliloquies about what some blogger in Omaha said about their first record. I—this is not like the Soviet Union. People can think whatever they want. And also: that’s great. A lot of musicians I know get really upset that there is an open dialog about their music and the whole point is that there are people having discussions about art. That is the point of making art. It’s part of the culture. Yeah, people are going to moan about you do and people are going to praise what you do and the thing is that either way, when you start paying attention to that stuff, you’re gone, you’re dead. And I don’t want to be effected by anything. I want to exist in a vacuum. For me, my idols are people like Brian Eno and David Bowie and Tom Waits and Neil Young, careerists, who have made sometimes opaque and bizarre decisions about what their next album is going to be about or sound like, but they are totally pure artists. They are absolutely following their own ideas the whole time. I don’t want to—that stuff makes you conservative, I think, either way. I’ve seen it with a lot of my friends. They get a little bit gun-shy because they’re worried. Either they get a lot of praise and then they start worrying, “I’d better stay on this track” or they criticized for being too autobiographical. I have a friend who put out a record that sold a lot of copies but it was criticized for being too autobiographical so his next album that he made was—you know, the lyrics were completely non-sequitor things because he was, you know, gun shy. So I saw that and immediately thought, that’s not the way to do it. Also, I don’t really care on a certain level. It’s like, when you leave a party do you call up all your friends and say, “do you think people liked me?” You just don’t—

canuck: Well, I do, but I think everybody else, I don’t think does.

JV: I think that if you’re not secure enough to put out—I mean, this is a tough game. All my heroes are rappers. I mean if those guys are going to have a beef, they’re going to like shoot guns. That’s cool. [laughs] Anything short of that, just moaning to your friends, forget it.

canuck: So you’re doing this solo tour until—what?—mid-September?

JV: I think it like ends on September 18th. There’s a bunch of stuff that we haven’t put up yet, because it’s not confirmed. I think I’m going to be playing a roof-top show in New York on the 17th. And then I think I’m going to visit my mom in DC, so I’ll be there the next couple days and then I come back and then we rehearse for the tour.

canuck: And the tour starts, September 30th?

JV: Yeah, and goes until November 5th.

canuck: You are back in this area—the Bay Area—?

JV: Actually we’re back on the 5th, but the problem is, on the 7th we go to Europe.

canuck: And it’s the 5th at the Independent.

JV: The Independent. Yeah, the Independent.

canuck: And all your tour dates and whatnot are available at johnvanderslice.com.

JV: Yeah, and there’s a lot of mp3s of full albums up on the site. Whenever I put out my own album I always post it up in high-res mp3s, but Barsuk, my label, will not allow me to do that [for all of them].

canuck: Thanks.

JV: Thank you so much, Adrian, for having me.