John Hawes: With the reissue of two of your most popular albums, a major tour of through the summer and into autumn plus a new studio album released next month is 2011 the biggest year for The Jayhawks history?
Mark Olson: Well, year as far as the time that I’ve been in the band it’s been the best attended concerts definitely and starting earlier in January in New York the shows were sold out there and then we sold out the London shows, so, yeah, this has been the best one.
Gary Louris: Yeah, I think so. ’92 was exciting because we’d just put ourselves on the map and it was the first time we really felt that leap from being a regional band to being national and international so that was an exiting time. Each had their moments but there’s something special about this. Maybe the world’s caught up with us a little bit and we’re enjoying that.
JH:Why did you re-release ‘Hollywood Town Hall’ and ‘Tomorrow The Green Grass’? what do the additional tracks add?
MO: The re-releases of those is the beginning. They’re going to re-release the majors staring with ‘Hollywood Town’ through to ‘Rainy Day Music’ so the first two are ‘Hollywood Town Hall’ and ‘Tomorrow The Green Grass’, those two seem to go together.
JH: Are they all going to get the same “treatment”, the b-sides, the rarities, the nice bits that the fans want?
GL:They should, certain ones have more extra songs than others, ‘Sound Of Lies’ – it’s difficult to find a lot of b-sides, we used a lot of what we had and ‘Tomorrow The Green Grass’ we had those mystery demos that could be used. I don’t know when those are going to happen, but there supposed to happen over the course of a year’s time and they’re supposed to culminate in a DVD collection of all our career and maybe a collection of the things put together
MO: A super Box set
GL: And a vinyl box set, just in time for some holiday I’m sure!
MO: The other issue is that the records weren’t in the stores, that’s why the re-issues were done, they were out of print.
JH: You’ve finished your European Tour – How was it?
MO: I thought it wouldn’t be as well attended. We were going out for a pre album tour and there would be seven, eight hundred people each show and it turned out that there were thousands so it was totally packed and every one was excited so it was great.
JH: You look completed shocked by that!
MO: Well, I didn’t know. The album hadn’t happened and it was August but people came out.
JH: You must have known, you are the Jayhawks, you are a seminal band, you must have expected that.
GL: well, some of it because we had pre-sales and we knew they were very, very good. We had to ad an extra night in Finland and upgrade us to a bigger room in Glasgow and we knew the London show ticket sales were really good so we had a feeling.
MO: Not when we booked it, not when the record was delayed a little bit we though that we’re going to go do this because we’re gonna work out our new album under no pressure whatsoever.
JH: The UK dates got a positive reaction, with the major comment that you didn’t really play tracks from ’95 to ’05, there was maybe one track from that era. Are you just concentrating on the early albums and Mockingbird time?
GL: We are concentrating on the period that we were together but mainly the new record but Mark has never said we can’t play anything it just that this is more comfortable and I think as time goes on maybe we’ll work some of those songs in, we’re just getting started.
JH: Are then any plans for a Live DVD?
GL: We have never discussed that.
JH: What do you think about live music DVD’s?
MO: I like the Neil Young one when he was in Nashville; that was great. I think you need to do something special sort of, not just film a regular club tour. Maybe a few extra bells and whistles from the show.
GL: It would be nice to have a good director, make it a little more cinematic
MO: Yeah, something like that; that would work – you’d need something more than just the live show.
JH: If we can move onto the new album, how did you write the songs for ‘Mockingbird Time’? Do you write separately, do you write together?
MO: A little bit of both. Some of the songs here we built up from the ground. We usually spend maybe two days on a song, two or three days to have it done. We usually get up to a very close point the first day then we each have assignments!
JH: That is a very structured way of working.
MO: We go for the goal of finishing the song. If we both feel that the initial idea is worth pursuing then we sit down to finish it. We usually get very close the first day, then closer the second day and probably on the third day record it.
GL: We definitely write fairly quickly and we try to do the words and the music at the same time, especially on this record. They are all different songs but we tried to keep things fairly under developed so that we could both contribute instead of disagreeing on a song that is three quarters done. But that happens too, sometimes there’s a song Mark writes that I really don’t have much to do with and that’s cool.
JH: What songs are you proudest of both off individually and as the Jayhawks?
MO: Well, as far as a Jayhawks song I would say ‘Blue’ that one is always crazy to sing every night. It just takes off from the get go. ‘Over My Shoulder’ and outside the Jayhawks I like the song ‘Pacific Coast Rambler’ which is a good story, that character you see walking down the highway.. It’s kinda why I got into music it’s because I like that sense of freedom.
GL: I would agree with Mark as far as ‘Blue’ goes just because It’s one of these songs we played before the record came out and people would try to describe it.
MO: And then they got pissed with us because we recorded it with two acoustic guitars.
GL: On the new record I get a kick out of playing ‘Tiny Arrows’ just because it’s like scene changing. It has so many different parts to it that flow; it seems to be part of what we do now that’s a little bit more than we used to as we seem to write songs that are not necessarily verse, chorus, bridge. I’m proud of that because it is a little bit out of the box. As far as things outside of the Jayhawks I guess I like I did a song called ‘Listen Joe’ with Tweedy for Golden Smog. That song is very emotional it’s got that funny line “surprise surprise everyone dies” so that song and I like that song “everybody knows” that I did with the Dixie Chicks. But you could ask us again and it would be different records!
JH: You mentioned about recording acoustically; do you have a preference?
MO: Well, I like both, right know I like … (GL – No guitar!) [Laughs} right know I’m exploring playing no musical instrument other than just singing! I don’t know if you’ve checked out our version of ‘high water blues’ live but, wow, when you just sing you can get more power going and I’ve just discovered this, after all these years! But anyway, I like both but I probably lean a little more towards acoustic as I’ve always played an acoustic guitar and there are times in the clubs when the sound is a little rough but electric is great when the sound’s good.
GL: I like both, I lean toward electric because I can express myself [Laughs, and does a Nigel Tufnell impression]. It’s a power trip in a way; it makes you feel bigger than is humanly possible! I also have to be careful because really we are a vocal band and you don’t want to find out later that nobody can hear the vocals. But, I like both, it was really fun when we started working on our solo/duo record and we both got into finger picking acoustically and was never really something that I had done a lot of but there is something about finger picking with another person that you can lock on this thing – a kind of trance – it’s great.
MO: Yeah the thing about the acoustic thing, we can’t sing as good as Simon & Garfunkel but we can reach up there I mean we can try to keep climbing that ladder and there are some nights when it really, really feels incredible with the harmonies and that is the thing that I’m concerned about with the electric volume level is that we could loose the magic of the vocals as there is other stuff coming through the vocal mic.
GL: We hope to continue doing both, after doing band shows doing acoustic shows also.
JH: The deluxe edition of MT has a documentary on it, could you tell me a little about it, who has made it?
GL: It’s really just our friend Steve Cohen, who is great photographer from Minneapolis. He became the documenter of the Jayhawks at this point, he’s taken a lot of photos and he has filmed us. We wanted something that we never really did and sometimes I regret not doing it. For instance, when I was doing my solo record there was a woman in LA who was a documentary film maker and she wanted to record some of the recording but the producer didn’t want to do it. Maybe that was good, to just focus, but know I wish that I had more film. So this is the recording of the recording!
MO: There were times when we would sing a bunch of times before we would sing the actual track. That’s what he filmed; he never filmed the actual track.
JH: Re-releases, tour, new album – are The Jayhawks back for good, or at least the foreseeable future?
MO: My basic idea is that I have go to Minnesota in September and do those shows and then a whole US tour and then a European tour and hopefully the album will be a big success and then there will be more touring from that and then we can talk about another record but man, we gotta get through this touring by show, by show, by show, by show.
