So what the hell are you doing in Iowa?
Oh man, it's called love. My fiancee is a scientist getting his phd there, so we were flying back and forth, doing the long distance relationship thing. After a while, it just started wearing on me emotionally, and I said to myself; you've sacrificed too much to the music gods, it's worth taking the risk. So I moved there with the feeling that if the band is gonna work, if it is truly still meant to be after all these years, it will have to adapt. And so far, so good.
Didn't it make songwriting a lot more complicated, not being in your usual surroundings, back in Seattle?
A lot of the songs on this record were actually written in Iowa. In Seattle, you don't really have defined seasons. There's summer and then there's grey. In Iowa, on the other hand, you have extremely hot summers, with lightning storms and tornadoes, and really hard-core winters. I like that, I need those extremes, and I've missed them for the past twenty years living in Seattle.
Also, the quiet and the lack of distraction was very inspiring. You really resonate with yourself. Seattle is a small city, and it's really the hub of the hipster-elite aficionado. I lived in an apartment on a relatively remote street, but still, from my front window, I could see all of the Fleet Foxes under a tree, smoking cigarettes on their breaks from recording. They recorded their new record right across from my house. That part of Seattle feels like such a small town, as the music culture is just in your face. You can't walk out your door to get your mail without running into a Fleet Fox! I don't like to define Seattle completely through the music, but there's something to be said for walking down the street in a small town in Iowa and being met by church ladies instead of indie bands. I’m not emerged in a youth culture in Iowa, and I find that refreshing for the time being. Please don't think that I'm putting the Fleet Foxes down, or putting down living in an artistic environment-those things are golden to me...I'm just trying to paint a picture of how different it is. It’s all about where I’m at in my internal world at any given moment -when I can't distract myself by going to bars or submerging myself in some sort of arty culture, the songs for me seem to emerge clearer and remain pure to where I am really at in my life.... hmm. Does that make sense?.
It does. But tell me, before you went out there and realized that being in the middle of Nowhere, Iowa actually did good things to both you and your songwriting, did you fear moving there? Did it put you out of your comfort zone?
I wouldn't say it put me out of my comfort zone, but there was a bit of fear in the beginning in that the actual move could create tension in the band and not being able to function anymore. It forced me to think about who I actually was and how much the music defined me. If I was to leave this, could I still be me? So I had to do a lot of soul searching. Was I just running away? But the opposite happened. I became way more aware of what I need. We're evolving so much these days, musically as well as personally, and the songs on this album mirror this. I couldn't have written these songs in Seattle, cause I was getting really depressed. I felt that I had sacrificed so much for this band over the last ten years, and it was preventing me from evolving as a person.
What do you think had happened to the band if you had stayed in Seattle?
Good question. I felt like I was starting to almost have these muzzled memories. I would have these rituals in the morning where I would wake up early, make a pot of coffee and, you know, let myself be available to the music. These early mornings would be my most inspired time, but now I was just feeling longing to be somewhere else. My little home which was once the most inspiring place I could be, started feeling like a casket to me. I couldn't evolve in it any longer, and if I hadn’t done something to take care of myself, the band would probably still be in this state of… well, I don't know, but I do think it's interesting that I was only able to write one or two songs for the album while in Seattle.
So, you've been hanging out with the Southern Lord crowd, you've been doing work with the band Boris, and I know you're good friends with the guys from (hood-wearing, bowel-shacking drone-rockers) SunnO))). The opener on Marble Son, the song Hushed By Devotion sounds like something even Jimmy Page would have been proud of in his heyday. What the hell happened?
Oh, well first of all, you always worry that those press releases over-simplify things! Obviously, we didn't go "hey, now we're going to make a heavier record because we have seen some sort of light!", but I've always liked heavy music, bands like Led Zeppelin are some of the more obvious bands that come to mind that were my top shelf favorites growing up. I know I've always been paired a singer/songwriter, and I do love beautiful, melancholic music, I love folk and I love the stripped down kind of stuff too, but again my top shelf records have always been 60's/70's rock bands, and avant-garde rock bands from the 60's/70's, stuff like that. I don't really listen to much indie rock. It just doesn't move me in the way those bands back in the day did. There seems to be a common thread in a lot of music these days -it feels too safe, too restrained somehow. Real quick though. Also, Phil has always been into heavier music, Black Sabbath and so on…and, lets be honest here, it would be lame of me to take the credit alone for the obvious changes on this album. Luckily he and I tend to grow at the same rate when it comes to our collective vision. But it is clearly his guitar work that creates the spirit of that song and much of this album.
What's this album fundamentally about?
Well, a ten-year relationship coming to an end, death, birth and the tension that arrises when you're not really sure if you'll be able to ever find love again. The album really mirrors that. It mirrors what the direness of our lives looked like at the time. And of course, we became pretty good friends with the band Boris, and their music just opened up this door for me. It's so exciting to me how they just do whatever the hell they want. They can make beautiful music or really heavy, extreme stuff, and I think it just definitely inspired us. It just made us less sheepish subconsciously about getting out of our comfort zones. I remember with (the sophomore album) Oh My Girl, we really thought the song The Dreaming Dead was gonna freak people out, which looking back on it is so funny, as it's not an extreme song at all! It's epic in context to what we had been doing, that's all....So,anyway, we just stretch it a bit with every record. It feels natural and organic to us. And with that song, Hushed By Devotion, I wanted it to come out of the gates with tension, and a darkness of almost mythic proportions. The BP oil spill was happening here when I wrote it, and it almost felt like the song was oil spilling out of the ocean to me, it just felt dyonisian without sounding pretentious. I can't make a record that doesn't somehow feel to me like the era of what is happening in the world.
Have you ever found your self in the position of having to struggle with the perception that you were in fact an alt.country/americana band? I mean, I do think a lot of people, the old fans, are going to think that you've wandered a bit too far off the path, making a bit too many loud noises on this record.
First off, the whole mythology of "that" mythology is pretty interesting. Reckless Burning was just me and Phil. We didn't even have a band. It became a band through the recording, but I didn't have a band when I wrote those songs. So they were quiet songs. But with that said, I definitely think that there are seeds on Reckless Burning that surely show where we would be going. Back in the day when that record came out, when there really was an alt.country scene and No Depression was at its pinnacle, they never really got us. They were not fans, they never championed us. We were always a little too out in leftfield for that magazine, which in essence, let's face it, was the scene at that time. We got billed as alt.country, cause Phil and I were touring as a duo, and yeah, we did have those dark country songs, so I get why that whole tag got put on us, but as soon as Like, Love, Lust & The Open Halls of the Soul came out, it should have been clear to everyone that we were so much more than just an alt.country band. If anyone still wanted to lump us into that, I think it was because of laziness and lack of vision. There's been a lot of really spectacular reviews of Marble Son, in many different languages, that all seem to get the record on an emotional and sonic level. But then you get the ones who like the record, but are still talking about tumbleweeds and desert imagery, and I'm like "man, did you even fuckin listen to the record?!" It's embarrassing. You don't have to like my music, you can even hate it, but please, take the time to actually find out what the hell you're writing about. There's no outer reference to Americana or dirt roads on this record. You know, it just blows my mind how a lot of writers just pretty much fill in the blanks when they write these reviews.
Do you think Phil's ever felt limited or restrained by his past in Whiskeytown? Is he the kind of guy who doesn't want you to remind him of his old band?
Man, I think it's great that you actually give him kudos for having been in that band. Most people just ignore it. He gets very little praise for being the guy who actually started Whiskeytown with Ryan. Phil was a HUGE part of the sound of the band, and I honestly cannot figure out why he doesn't get more credit for it? Behind the scenes, people do respect him for what he accomplished, but considering all the people who have instant orgasms each time Ryan Adams writes one of his songs, Phil never got the amount of respect he deserved for the ones they did together. Phil is also an amazing editor, and I can say this from working with him, and I think that's what Ryan lacks these days, someone to say "dude, you're just going way off here". And that's what Phil did in Whiskeytown. But he's very humble despite what people might think, he's very supportive of great music, and he's very unthreatened. And you know, he really respects Ryan deep deep down. The Ryan he knew, he's really proud of him, he's really proud of what they did together. I admire that about Phil. He doesn't bitch and moan. I'm just surprised he never received more kudos for his guitar genius. I can say this, because he's my guitar player out of choice. We're a two-headed monster--his guitar mirrors my voice.
Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter's Marble Son is out now on Fargo. The UK dates are:
17/04 : The Railway – Winchester
18/04 : The Sage – Gateshead
19/04 : Captains Rest – Glasgow
20/04 : The Cooler – Bristol
21/04 : Monto Water Rats – London
