self-titled - no. 1 - (Page 14)

“You can’t help but wonder whether it was the devil’s handiwork.” 8. Scads of people both you and I know got into drugs due to Ladies and Gentlemen. You had your problems. Obviously, there were epiphanies—joyful and sorrowful—around it. What say you? I don’t know if it’s specific to that record. It’s a circumstantial thing, isn’t it? It can be the single most important piece of music in your life if it fits into where you were and what age you're living and what you’re doing. I dispute that Duke Ellington thing where he says there’s good and bad I think there’s only that which you like and that which you don’t like. 9. Ladies and Gentlemen—does it feel like an albatross to you now? Not really. A lot of it was a press construct. With time, it’s become less important. I’m guessing Ray Charles’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You” doesn’t still conjure notions still as to who he stopped loving. Though that may be oversimplifying [laughs]. 10. You’ve called this album the work of the devil. Isn’t that odd considering that these new tunes feel so grandly angelic? That quote’s been put into an odd context. But I will say one thing about this guitar I got before I started recording. I’ll say the story, and all disclaimers will follow. It was a black 1929 Gibson acoustic. It weighed nothing—like that of a postage stamp—with this weird little triangular neck. It sounds like no other acoustic I ever heard. It’s got this flat tone, not the flutter you get with most acoustic guitars. And it’s almost as if it came with these songs attached. Now, I’ve never sat around strumming an old acoustic, let alone written songs on them, with the exception of maybe a few Spacemen 3 songs. Usually I just play or hum the tune into a machine and work out the chords later. But these songs just came from that guitar. 11. That’s a nice romantic notion, isn’t it? I know, right? I’m not romantic enough to really think the songs wrote themselves. Yet you can’t help but wonder whether it was the devil’s handiwork. 12. So that explains stuff like “The Waves Crash In,” the swish of it? A&E was nearly a concept album, as I didn’t want to write something with me as the main character. It was nearly about a family—not mine. I didn’t want to talk about that which was close to me. In fact, the record had a subtitle in brackets: “The old man says goodbye to his daughter at the gate.” That said, I don’t even remember what so many of the songs are about. 13. Are you done with this record and onto another then? I am, actually. It’s weird. I can’t even listen to it—all the emotion is out of it a bit. But I’ve plugged into the wall. There’s electricity in our instruments again. It’s all so hard to re-imagine it. The older stuff, too. I was convinced older moments like “Amazing Grace” were like garage things. There was this immediacy. Improvisation. I thought since it was constructed in the studio, it wound feel immediate. Yet none of them sounded anything like I remembered so I’ve no idea what you’re talking about sometimes. But I believe you.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of self-titled - no. 1

self-titled - no. 1 Contents Spiritualized No Age Les Savy Fav The Teenagers Booka Shade Michael Gira Ellen Allien Magik Markers Jens Lekman Yeasayer Daptone Records Tipping Point Boris Fiery Furnaces Black Dice Black Mountain The Black Lips

self-titled - no. 1

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