"They said guitar solos aren't punk rock, well, fuck you!" Chris Wollard.
I'm gonna talk about Canyons, the newish record by Chris Wollard And The Ship Thieves now.
It sounds like Chris Wollard having fuckin' fun. Hot Water Music (from which the songwriter and performer cannot possibly be divorced from now) is, well, emotive and anthemic. I wrote about "Seein' Diamonds." I could also write about "Paper Thin" or "The End." Best I don't.
Canyons? Unlike that. Joyous, packed full of guitar solos. I don't even like guitar solos, but I succumb to this disc. Do you need me to tell you what "Poison Friends" is about? I don't think so. "Sick, Sick Love?" Nah. You want anthems? Get outta town. I suspect Hot Water Music songs are a document of his life, but Ship Thieves doesn't have to be. Ship Thieves is "oh man, this is awwwwwwwwwesome."
I think Canyons is Chris Wollard's id.
What I'm trying to say is that it's a long jump from Ship Thieves to Hot Water Music.
(There will be no swimming jokes. Canyons' cover has a bird in flight on it and I am committed to theme.)
None of these songs would be amiss coming through a speaker at a hardware store. Well, they might sound a lot more polished, more soundly constructed, a lot fucking better, but they'd still fit right in. Well, okay. "Dream In My Head" is a little short for 93X the Rock crowd ("Working for the weekendtm", with a forty five minute commercial free block coming up in three and a half hours) or whomever, but it's short enough for the Hot Water followers to get a grasp of what comes next.
The trick Chris Wollard and the Ship Thieves pull here is that they make it look casual. Tossed off. Of course it isn't. Of course it takes work. Of course these songs took days to put together, but the germs of them came naturally, I'm sure.
Ever hear a friend of yours talk about something they love and you get lost and enraptured in their enthusiasm for it and skill at it? That's what Canyons is. It is a vector for Chris Wollard's considerable enthusiasm for guitar rock. There's a ZZ Top shaped hole in my guitar music listening, so I have to be careful about how I talk about Canyons, because there's genre staples I know only from parody. Pretending to type with authority here sounds problematic.
In a sentence: I am prejudiced against guitar solos and I cannot help but enjoy Canyons.
Sadly, this song is not "Dream In My Head." It is called "Poison Friends." But! For "Poison Friends" not being "Dream In My Head," it's pretty good. Play guitar solos! Drink beer! Et al!
Talking about Dessa's music is an act that stretches my comfortable vocabulary. Maybe it's the M.A. Phil. after her name. Maybe it's the lyrics nerd in me. She's one of the artists that makes my obsessive attention to what's said worth it, I think. She...well...when the songs are played right, it feels like I'm reclaiming my vulnerability, to abuse a Thomas Barnett line.
One of my favorite moments from a Dessa song was a re-worked Frida Khalo line. She's an rapper who writes rhymes where Bertrand Russell gets as many big-ups as whiskey. Of course her new song, "Warsaw" sounds like a lead pipe covered in grime, left out in the pouring rain. You're supposed to dance to it. If The Knife menaced people with knives? Yes, it sounds like that.
This was an interview for AbsolutePunk.net in advance of Castor, The Twin and then Jason Tate ignored it, so here you go. First interview of the new cycle. Suuuuuuure. Read on.
What have you been reading recently? What books
(if any) do you bring on tour? After tours, who has stuck around? What's
surprised you positively about coming back to the bed, the books and
the rotary phone after the U.S. tour?
I
buy books constantly on tour. I usually go for dense, academic
material: science or
philosophy I'd always meant to explore, but never got around
to--exactly the opposite of what's appropriate for a person living in a
noisy, moving van. Most of these books end up on my coffee table. I
resist shelving them to sustain the delusion that I will be reading them
very soon. At the moment, however, I am 50 pages into The Tin Drum and 75 pages into Sting's autobiography, Broken Music (gift from Dad).
"Dots and Dashes," that opening "vision quest at the Best
Western, the best dressed wreck at the hotel lounge, I found out the
message in the bottle is the booze" is pretty wicked. There's gotta be a
story behind it, right? Do tell.
Um...not
really. As a touring rapper, I guess I just spend a lot of time in
economy hotels. Sooner or later, life seeps into the imagination and is
re-expressed in a lyric.
If Poe in the glovebox, Plath on the dash is true, how do you get up in the morning?
Most
mornings I get up with some reluctance, hitting my stride right before
bed. I suppose I've always tended toward the melancholic, and have
always been attracted to dark narratives. To romanticize sadness is a
teenage impulse, but to acknowledge it--rather than looking for a ray of
cheeriness to blot it out--seems like the clear-eyed way to live.
Let's
say a venue wants to treat you right and leaves you some whiskey
backstage. What do they buy? Or if that's too casual with the
alcoholism, are you worried about the whiskey catching up to you or has
it already?
I drink Godfathers: one part whiskey, one part amaretto, on
ice. I'm more mindful of my
drinking than I used to be, in part because the hangovers are more vengeful than they used to be.
Will there be a Mineshaft III on the next one?
I think the Mineshaft narrative ends with the second installment, the prequel. Time to explore some new themes.
There's
a line in "Low Light, Low Life", where you say Bertrand Russell was
right, but it's irrelevant. As an M.A., you know better than most,
Russell wrote a lot. What else was he right about? Also: Does philosophy
help with being in hip-hop? Does it complicate matters in a way that's
useful?
Bertrand Russell wrote a book called Why I Am Not a Christian.
I'm an atheist, and although I certainly don't spend a lot of time
trying to talk people out of their faith, that book was a beautifully
written, intelligent expression of some very elegant arguments. For me,
the study of philosophy was
game-changing, it informed my understanding of sex, conflict, faith,
human rights, money, ethics, and art. Philosophy has affected everything
I do, rap included.
Your bartender (from before you were old enough to drink?) does
backups, that woman from "Alibi" I assume is a friend and "Dixon's Girl"
sounds like a character from a Chandler novel. How do you meet these
people?
I'm taking this question as a
compliment. I think we've all probably got some pretty compelling
stories. There's a trick though in telling them well.
Is there anything like "Dutch" or "Scuffle" on No Kings or your
2012 record? (I'm partial to the abrasive/rapping songs, but listening
to "Palace" and those Minneapolis Public Radio sessions on YouTube has
me convinced this whole singing on tracks has worked out pretty well for
you.)
There are plenty of aggressive tracks on No Kings and on my new disc. Castor, the Twin is mostly wings; the next one's definitely got some teeth too.
Judging by "The Man I Knew," it sounds like one of your friends
has discovered cocaine. Is that gonna be awkward when this dude hears
the song? Does he know about it?
I
called him, and he said it was cool. Still not totally sure he's
listened to it the whole way through. He's an awesome dude though, we'll
make it just fine.
There's tons more
questions, but let's end it with the really important one: Now that
Astro lives in Minneapolis, when are you and he going to sit down and do
a song together about whiskey and rapping? Very
proud to say that I booked Astonautalis' housewarming show: just a few
days after he moved to Minneapolis, I had him on stage at the Guthrie
Theater. He's one of the smartest lyricists out there, glad to have him
on the hometown team.
"Warsaw" sounds like a club jam from Blade Runner. I don't think I can say it sounds pretty, bleepity and distant all at the same time better than that.
