Exclusive: John Vanderslice Discusses New Album

We were able to catch Vanderslice via telephone just before he boarded a train to New York at the end of his tour with the Mountain Goats. He's very, very excited about his new album.

Pitchfork: So you just finished up touring with the Mountain Goats, right?

Vanderslice: Yeah. I'm gonna be in New York for like three days, then go to D.C. to stay with my mom for three days, and then I'm gonna go back home.

Pitchfork: From what you've written about it on your site, you sounded pretty excited about the tour.

Vanderslice: It was really fun. I was playing guitar with them and there's almost no equipment and we're traveling in a mini-van, with Erik Friedlander and John [Darnielle] and Peter [Hughes], and it's totally different than my own touring. It's really much less stressful.

Pitchfork: You worked with Scott Solter again on this new record. I read in an interview that you'd done awhile back with Mesh that he'd brought up a lot more ideas and things you hadn't thought of and took more time, whereas you'd previously done things pretty quickly. Do you think that this time around you stuck to his methods going into the project, or did you do it pretty much the same way as before?

Vanderslice: I think that he is becoming more key to my records as we keep working together. We have a shorthand now where we literally don't talk much, we just record, and he knows exactly where I'm coming from and vice versa. We've been working together so long that we've gotten to be really quick with each other. And we can swap out either playing or recording each other, so it's a two-man game, which has been really great. Also we've been buying instruments over the past year or so for this record, a lot of new keyboards, and on the lookout for new players and instruments, and we're usually thinking as a team as we're going along. So he was very key to this record, absolutely.

Pitchfork: I understand you worked on the lyrics with John Darnielle [of the Mountain Goats]. Did you work on them together, or just sort of pass stuff back and forth?

Vanderslice: We did stuff on e-mail and on the phone. Basically what I would do is I would send him a first draft, five or six paragraphs, and he's a quick study. He gets to the heart of the matter very, very quickly. And sometimes there would be very fine tweaks that he would suggest-- words, or an overall sort of tone change. And other times he would give me a lot of revisions, and give me verses and lines that were sometimes just so perfect and I would just plug 'em right in. I mean, he's an outstanding writer, he's my favorite writer. So for me it was great. And I was actually kinda dreading the process. Because it's extremely difficult to have all of your lyrics workshopped by one person. It slowed down everything, it slowed down the recording, it slowed down recording my vocals, but in the end I think it really worked.

Pitchfork: The songs on the new album are supposedly all short stories. Were the original ideas all yours, or did you and John work on them together?

Vanderslice: He wouldn't suggest things-- it was much more that he would give responses. I wouldn't say exactly that it was co-written. Although, we've been talking about doing a project together forever, and I would love to co-write an EP or an album. At some point that'll happen, but we just keep getting bogged down with other stuff.

Pitchfork: What are the songs about?

Vanderslice: There's certainly an awful lot of war stuff on the record. I mean, for me, I started initially writing a lot of far-flung narrator stories, and as the record wore on and my own personal life got a little more complicated, that started to not work for me and I started writing a little bit more autobiographical stuff. I think there's certainly a mix of the two of those. I hate to say it's more personal, that's the usual thing to say.

Pitchfork: Do the songs follow each other, like a concept album? Or are they all their own entities?

Vanderslice: They're all more or less discrete songs, but I think for me it seems there's an arc of the record that's pretty clear. I've written a user's guide that has a lot of notes, so when you get the album, you'll see a one page summation from me, just to give more information on the songs. The album is a lot longer than my usual records. It's almost an hour and it's gonna come out on double vinyl. Single CD. So for me, that was very exciting. There'll be one extra song called "The Kingdom" on the vinyl.

Pitchfork: Did anybody else work on the music besides you and Scott? Any guests?

Vanderslice: The cellist, Erik Friedlander, was very important to the record. He played on almost every song. He also played on The Sunset Tree. I think he helped in fleshing out a lot of the songs. We kept a lot of tracks open. We recorded on a 24-track, so there's limited space there. We knew that when we had him, we wanted to save six or seven tracks for him. And it really changed the way that we recorded. It's a little bit more spare because of that, but when he showed up, it was pretty amazing. I just wish we had a bit more space for it.

Pitchfork: When you tour with a band in the fall, are you going to bring him along?

Vanderslice: I'm gonna see him tomorrow in New York. I'm hoping that he can open some of the tour, and play with us at night, like he was doing on the Mountain Goats shows. If we can work that out, that'd be fantastic.

Pitchfork: In the Mesh interview, you said, "It will open with a 10-minute song and it will close with a 10-minute song. I will gain fans and I will lose fans. I can tell you that right now." Do you still think that's true?

Vanderslice: Well, you know, plans are great in theory, but what did happen is that the final three songs on the album are pretty much one song. There's a narrative connection through all three songs. That part of the idea worked. But the opening song is like a vignette, it's a two minute song. It's just me and Friedlander and a Wurlitzer. So it's a much more simple opening than I'd originally thought.

Pitchfork: Do you think you'll ever go back and rework or remix this, like you've done with your other projects?

Vanderslice: The reason why I'm going to hang out with my mom, other than that I love my mom, is that I'm gonna be rehearsing for a live to 2-track version of the album. So when I get home, we're gonna go to a studio called Prairie Sun, where Tom Waits did a lot of his records. It's kind of a chicken coop room that looks like the most nightmarish recording environment, it's all concrete and plywood and it sounds so beautiful. So I'm just gonna go in there with an acoustic guitar, and Scott and I are gonna record the record straight to 2-track. It'll be a tour-only LP. And then Scott and I are gonna do a remix record for this spring. So those are the two things we're working on.

Pitchfork: I guess your plate's pretty full, but are you working with anyone else right now, producing anyone else, or do you have plans to?

Vanderslice: Last year I did Spoon and Mountain Goats. I'm trying to stick to just stuff that I know. The key thing for me is that I've been a fan of a band for a really long time, and I think that I can bring something to them. In general, I try not to do anything other than my own stuff because it's hard enough to keep focused on that.

>>The album will indeed be available in both CD and vinyl formats, and the tracklist is as follows:

01 Letter to the East Coast
02 Plymouth Rock
03 Exodus Damage
04 Peacocks In the Video Rain
05 Trance Manual
06 New Zealand Pines
07 Radiant With Terror
08 Continuation
09 Dear Sarah Shu
10 Farewell Transmission
11 Angela
12 Dead Slate Pacific
13 The Golden Gate
14 CRC7173, Affectionately

John Vanderslice: http://www.johnvanderslice.com
Barsuk Records: http://www.barsuk.com/

Posted by Rob Kleckner in on Wed: 05-11-05: 12:00 AM CDT | Digg this article | Add to del.icio.us | Permalink