INTERVIEW: Grandaddy
- Chris Hill
Grandaddy recently played a well-appreciated Seattle show that, for their relatively small catalog, felt like a greatest hits extravaganza. The band mixed favorites like "A.M. 180", "Everything Beautiful is Far Away", "Levitz", and "Taster" with tracks from the upcoming album (_Sophtware Slump)for a memorable show that ended all too soon. Prior to the show, Aaron Burtch (drummer), Jim Fairchild (guitarist), and Jason Lytle (singer, guitarist, and keyboards) sat down with Consumable for a relaxed chat.
CO: Do you guys like talking about themes for the album?
JL: I was thinking the other day that, me being the most qualified to talk about it, I still feel totally unqualified to talk about it.
JF: Even when he's told me what he specifically had in mind when he wrote the song, people will come up all excited, and go, "Yeah, I heard this, and you're talking about this...". It's totally off-base from what he had in mind, but it's almost neater in that they come up with their own interpretation.
JL: Especially when you end up liking other people's versions more than what could have been the original version.
CO: Do you ever discover something you didn't realize you'd put into a song? Something that worked its way in subconsciously?
JL: Yeah, I think that every now and then. A lot of that comes out from talking to other people about it. Other people's interpretations end up being pretty therapeutic, because I end up finding things out. "Whoa, shit, maybe that's what was going on there." A lot of times, it is pretty neat.
CO: "Everything Beautiful..." seemed like it was right out of a Ray Bradbury story: man on a Martian landscape, looking out.
JL: That song, I'd actually just got done with this long drive through the desert. Finally, you just go "I can't stand it anymore. I need to be a part of this." Pull over the car and you get out and start heading towards what it is you're looking at, and next thing you know you're traipsing through sticker bushes and it's hot outside and you're worried about losing your car and the next thing you know, you might as well just get back in your car, and look at it from a distance. And then my mind started racing, and I started all these comparisons with that basic idea. But the actual story is pretty similar to a movie I saw when I was a little kid. I took like a little snippet, a remembrance of that movie, and then just kind of ran with it, my own version of it. This movie called "Robinson Crusoe on Mars". (laughs) I only saw it when I was a little kid and I vaguely remember it, but I just remember being totally mystified by it.
CO: Don't watch it again.
JL: I know. I think I've decided if the opportunity comes, I'm not going to watch it. I've already built it up too much in my head.
CO: The Sophtware Slump, you guys have been working on for how long? Six months? A year?
JF: It took about four months to record.
JL: Yeah, it happened in spurts: chunks of productivity, then total disinterest. Let it rest, take off, then chunks of productivity, then disinterest.
CO: I have an image of you [Jason] having taped hours of noodling just to find these sounds that make it onto the record.
JL: Yeah, there's a lot. I wish I had better knowledge of wave synthesis and the manipulation of synthesizers and all that, but I do do a lot of sound design, I guess. It's really hearing the original sounds and maybe hearing like a shred, maybe 10% of it, which is something nice, so let's retape this and work with it for a while, and maybe see if we can't get it to have 65% more human being to it, and maybe 35% machinery. Or vice versa. So there is a lot of time spent noodling and messing around. Not being in a hurry and just listening to sounds.
JF: Jason doing that has inspired all of our creativity, too, just in everything. Just constantly writing stupid, little ideas, or whatever. Some little visual or something, because you have to embrace that shit. Because not only do you not know when it's going to pop up again, but also you don't know when you're going to be able to actually execute it.
CO: Do you find hard to motivate yourself out in Modesto?
JL: Yeah, totally. There's something to be said for surrounding yourself with like-minded people and that's very much not the case out there. That whole "going against the grain" thing only works so much.
JF: I think it has worked against us. It seriously took us a long time to do anything. The Signal to Snow Ratio...
CO: I love that cover.
JF: Thanks. We had to fight to get that cover.
CO: Seriously? Couldn't you just say, "'Fargo'! 'A Simple Plan'! It works."
JF: See, you got it! It's a fuckin' stupid cartoon. You can make your own story up out of the sequence of pictures.
JL: I had to try to modernize it and put it in comprehensible, digestible terms: "Blair Witch Project". You start attaching some sort of huge chunk of money and how much money that movie made, and all of a sudden it becomes okay.
JF: Everyone at the label is really nice and we get along really well with them and they're understanding of our ideas. But I think sometimes they're just so used to people bending pretty easily. They called me - "The cover has us really worried", 'cause it was after the Columbine shooting, and they said, "We need to change it." I'm looking at it, going "I gotta talk to everybody else, but my first response is there's no fuckin' way we're changing it. This is not reprehensible in any way."
CO: Do you read the press before you get to a town? In "The Stranger" [a Seattle weekly], one of their comments is that you won't be in a small place like this next time.
JL: You can only be told all these nice things and be sincere with your thank-yous so much, and then you just finally shift into this whole other mode. You never quit appreciating people's compliments, but almost for your own peace of mind, your own self-defense, you just gotta kinda only give away so much anymore. You gotta save some for yourself.
JF: I think all the attendant stuff is the freaky stuff for me. The other night, a girl was asking me about it. She said that two or three years ago she had written to us. She was pretty touched by the fact that I wrote out this letter back to her and said, "Thanks." Once again, I'll never take that stuff for granted, but it increases step by step by step and then eventually, now we get enough letters, to where I remember it would seriously drain me to sit down and write back to a bunch of people by hand. Exactly what Jason said, I felt like I didn't really have much left to myself.
JL: It would actually be nice if the stuff showed up and they made their point, and they expressed their appreciation, but it's usually the last ten lines go, "So, anyway, I was wondering if I could get this and get that..."
JF/AB: (laugh)
JL: I mean, not always. But it would just be nice if it was just "This is my appreciation." Put it out there, and that's it, because that is nice. Because it does get read, and it does get appreciated, and it does make a difference to hear that.
CO: So you're still including the post office address in the album?
JF: Yeah, they wouldn't let us put our own fuckin' URL on there. [http://www.grandaddylandscape.com] It just became this fight. We just went "You know, we're not going to deal with it. We're just going to promote it on our own as much as we possibly can." It's a really provincial attitude they have. They almost consider us an opponent.
CO: Who designs the website? Is that anybody's baby?
JF: Primarily, him [Aaron] and Kevin, our bass player, and myself.
AB: I'm actually a little scared. Kevin's reading up on how to do a website, because we started from scratch, with absolutely no knowledge of how to do it. So we were doing stuff you're not really supposed to do, as far as layout and design. I'm afraid we're going to lose some of that. So I'm actually telling Kevin to back off from learning too much about it, so it can stay kind of a little bit undesigned.
CO: Why "grandaddylandscape"? "grandaddy" was taken?
JF: It was. Our old manager had it. He actually offered it back, but "grandaddylandscape" is a nice, evocative... That's another thing that's weird about technology. People have gotten impatient. I tell people it's "grandaddylandscape" and they'll go "It's so fuckin' long." It's eighteen letters! It takes seriously, four seconds to type "grandaddylandscape.com". People don't want to do that. Barnes & Noble, their URL is "bn", because it's got to be simple.
JL: I remember thinking about that when I was trying to think of what the title of the album made me think of. It's like there's almost this slow extinction of this individual - like the Tom Joad character of "Grapes of Wrath" - the honest, polite, hard-working, "it's going to take a while for us to get through this, but we'll get through it". It's the fading away of that sort of individual. What it's being replaced with is that which doesn't encourage problem solving and patience and figuring things out. That to me is really a shame.
CO: Are you finding that more money coming in equals more tools to play with? Or are you trying to keep it lo-fi and closer to your roots?
JF: No, there's ever been a deliberate "keep it lo-fi". Like keep it grounded and maybe organic, but certainly not lo-fi.
JL: My biggest problem with that is that when I think static, static to me means... I think of plotting the music in visual terms. It's like an organ could easily be water, and scratchy, dotted guitar notes can be looking at a freeway from the top and seeing all the dots being cars. And static is one of my favorites, because static can be anything. Rain, dust flying up, whipping leaves. But automatically, if there's static on the album, it's considered lo-fi. But it's just a texture. It's a great texture and tool. I've always thought that Hammond organs, that bubbly sound, sounded like an organ underwater. As if somebody were to actually tape the keys down and throw it in the water, and it kept playing. Always thought that was a real neat description. "You just sunk that organ!"
CO: It almost sounds cinematic.
JL: There was a big emphasis put on just disappearing, I think. Music being a key to getting the hell out of here. I just remember if there was ever one thing that kept popping up, maybe being stumped production-wise, going "Okay, where does this song need to go? What can we do with this?", and saying, "Well, above all else, it needs to have that transportable quality, to take us the hell out of here."
Amen. The Sophtware Slump is due out May 15 in the U.K. and May 16 in the U.S. Web surfers can check out the label at http://www.v2music.com/ and for the band, http:/www.grandaddylandscape.com .
