By John Michael Cassetta • May 17th, 2008 • Category: Interviews, Music
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It’s dangerous when you get two music nerds into a room at once. And mind you, I mean nerds, not snobs. The difference? Well, it’s slim, but a music snob probably wouldn’t admit the influence Tom Petty’s had on his latest album Love & Harm. Leatherbag (aka Randy Reynolds) is by every definition a music nerd. Between all the nerding-out over Wilco demos and Sonic Youth interviews, he and I managed to chat for a bit about his new album, his production credits on Graham Weber’s latest album, Door to the Morning, and, true to our nerdom, books.
Big Diction: There are a lot of obvious influences on the album that you’ve talked openly about, how do you see them fitting with you own songwriting on the album?
Leatherbag: Well its hard, its really hard. I mean this past week I’m obsessed with two things: Dwight Twilley… and Tom Petty. And people laugh every time I fuckin’ say it, there’s something about Tom Petty. I can’t explain it, but he knew when he had really good songs, ’cause the songs are really well taken care of. Every part works exactly the way it’s supposed to. And I’m only listening to stuff from ‘76 to ‘81 where they’re still trying to figure out what they’re doing, nothing that went platinum yet except Damn the Torpedoes which is awesome, awesome. But dude, when you listen to “Refugee,” you can walk down the street and play that, and people know exactly what it is. It doesn’t matter if they know who’s singing it, but they know the song. Part of me at least, wants to get to the place where you can do that one time at least, and say that’s my thing. His song “Listen to Her Heart,” it’s awesome. It sounds like them and nothing else.
So the main thing is that every week I’ve got something new that I’m into. It keeps me from getting involved with a band for a month or so, because then the writing really stats to take on a very… I wouldn’t say it’s like a chameleon effect or anything like that, it’s that this stuff, when I hear it, I just love it, and there’s nothing I can do about it except fall for it. When I listen to Tom Petty, I know it’s making me dumber in some way, it’s making me stupider. But from a songwriting standpoint, if you can get to one of those, you know you’re doing something correct. And it’s like I said, if you listen to the parts – all the lead guitar versus all the rhythm guitar – nothing gets in the way of the song, and that’s what I really value about it; it has nothing to do with how dumb kitschy it is, nothing gets in the way of this perfect thing that they made. It’s a strive for perfection.
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I’m looking for stuff that’s real and sincere, mainly that’s what I want to come through the songwriting, more than anything else. I’m looking for sincerity, and when I hear that sincerity there it’s so exciting to find a song you’ve never heard. It’s a drug, man, it’s musical porn. You can say whatever you want, it’s a drug. You’re constantly looking for that thing, like it’s the first time you’ve heard “Eleanor Rigby” or “Misunderstood” and you’re going, “I want to feel this way every time I hear a new song.” So you’re digging and digging and digging, and it renews your faith that not only did this person do something, but all these other people that aren’t really talked about did something really great. So it’s mainly striving for that sincerity of that influence, instead of the influence itself.
BD: From listening to some of your older stuff, I can hear a lot of influence from your old “self.” Like on “Caroline” or even “Love & Harm,” the title track, I get more things I’m used to when I put on a Leatherbag record. Was that intentional, at least so far as showing some of your other influences was intentional?
LB: Well, “It’s Over” was written first for the new record, and it was written effortlessly, and exactly how I felt at the time. I had three jobs and I was tired, and I didn’t feel like I could really say anything. So that’s what I said.
“Caroline” was part of a record I was trying to write that was all female names. And that was when I was in my groove with folk. I was in the groove, man, like I still have a ton of songs that I didn’t record, like 5 or 6 more, that were all written about people I don’t know, women I don’t know, situations that I don’t know. But I was in the groove where I felt like I had a hold of something, like I got to a point where I knew I had a hold of something and instead of doing what people normally do, I decided: fuck it, I’m going to try to spread my wings here. If I feel like I got a handle on this, I don’t need to do this anymore.
Ray Davies was talking about the Kinks, and he said, “The Kinks was never a problem writing, I had a muse for that. I knew how to do that, it was a simple “1+2=3″ math problem. How do I get to the hook? What do I do here? Talk about these weird characters, a few puns and it works.” But when he was talking about himself, it was very hard.
That makes sense to me, you can get to a place where your own idea of who you are, the music that you make, can become its own thing. And that’s scary to me; I don’t want that. My whole idea is, whatever we do next, it has to further itself. We could’ve made another Love Me Like The Devil record and it would’ve been no problem at all. But the big thing that happened to me was, Indie rock, I completely abandoned it, and it’s the most freeing experience of my life.
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BD: Does your past, your singer-songwriter or folk past weigh on you then?
LB: No not at all. I love it. The whole great part about this is that I’ve created something where I can do one or I can do the other, which cannot be said for a lot of people. I can go and do a whole set by myself, or with two or three people, and we can do something gorgeous and lush. Or we can go turn it up, and go as far as we can go with it, with the same songs! I like that ability to move around. I have to have a vehicle where if the band cant play, I can move along.
The folk thing is something that I love and was the first thing. I went through a huge Woody Guthrie phase when I was 20 years old.
BD: Who hasn’t, right?
LB: Well, right. But that happened to me and I read Bound for Glory, and it freaked me out! And going through all that, those songs are completely comfortable for me. They’re not easy to write, they’re very hard to write, but they feel right. Playing with a band is a very awkward thing for me. It shows sometimes, but I think that’s okay.
Growth doesn’t happen overnight, and I learned that. I find these shows from bands, like really early shows, and you hear, “Man they hit it there” or, “They’re still really working out some things.” And I like that, because no matter what, you still hear the total promise of what they’re doing. They’ve still got a swagger about them. The Replacements are a perfect band to say that they’re a band that hit before they were ready to hit, and before they know what they were doing they were over with. It’s like that, I don’t want to be someone that just does this for a while and burns out, I want to do this for a long time. In order to do that, I have to make dramatic changes.
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BD: With having a band, what’s the writing process like?
LB: I write everything myself.
BD: All the other parts too?
LB: I try to write as many parts as possible. But Seth Gibbs (of Brother Machine) has much to do. He and I work very close together with composition of the songs. Holes or gaps where I’m kind of at a loss, he comes in with the addition of Brent Pennington (of Golden Bear). Brent’s done a wonderful job on the guitar, and the banjo, and the keys. And he’s not any of those. He just can play things, and he’s come in and done wonderful backing vocals.
Brent and I actually worked out the beginning riff of “Caroline” together. We took it to Joey and he worked out another opposite ended mandolin riff, to where the song is no longer just some sad folk song, but something that actually has a root to come back to. That’s why we took that song to he record, because that’s an interesting composition to something that’s very simple.
BD: How did you come on to the Graham Weber project [Leatherbag produced Weber's latest album, Door To The Morning]?
LB: Graham has more songs than anyone I know. He came to me and said “I want you to do this.” Anyone who knows me knows next week we were recording. I got with Seth [Gibbs, at Superpop!] and said, “This is going to happen, He’ll pay you full price and we’ll get this done. I don’t want any money, I just want to help Graham do this.” We went to the studio, recorded sixteen, seventeen songs, and I cut it down to ten. We never argued about it, he never once ever, ever, made any kind of inkling about my judgment. I’ve never know a songwriter to do that, it was an amazing feat.
With my own record, this thing was almost 5 songs, I almost cut it down to where it was nothing but jams. But with Graham’s stuff, we know where the songs were going to be placed; I knew everything that was going to happen. I was there for every rehearsal, and everything that was recorded. They were very different things.
The main thing was that Seth…Seth is the best I know of. Right now he’s working on the Lonesome Heroes‘ new record, He’s working on Chuck Fleming’s new record, he’s working on the Archibalds’ new record, he finished up our new record, the new Hope Irish record, he’s working on his own new album. He works seven days a week and he knows exactly what he’s doing. It makes it easier to get what you want out of the songs when you have someone with you that is so professional and so understanding of their environment.
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BD: Going back to some of the songs on Love & Harm, there are a lot of age-related themes. Like “It’s Over,” for example, I feel like it’s less of an “I give up, it’s over,” and more of an “Ultimatum-to-myself it’s over.” What do you think of that?
LB: I promised myself by the time I’m thirty I need to be moving with this, and I’m 28 now. Also, a lot of this stuff, when I was writing it, I had 3 jobs, man. I was dating this girl, it was a weird relationship. I was tired and I just felt like there’s got to be something more to this. If you work so hard, there has to be some other payoff. “Jesus Come Back” talks about age as well. “Love & Harm” to me is a really great thing; that whole theme is just talking about how if you love someone, you hurt them at the same time. It’s simple but it’s true. Whether it be your family or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or whatever, familiarity breathes contempt after a while and you have to fight. It’s just, “With love and harm I give it all to you.” You just get all of that…crap.
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BD: You’ve talked about how writers have influenced you. What are some of the big ones and how have they…
LB: John Fante. The Road to Los Angeles is a fantastic book. The guy doesn’t want to get a job, he wants to be a writer and write dirty books. Basically, he’s like a Don Jaun and he does all these chicks and he fights crime. He wants to write these novels, and he writes them and – the whole book is about this – he shows them to his mom and his sisters (his dads not around) and they laugh at him and they make jokes about them. He’s like sixteen, seventeen years old!
What I remember about the book most is that he doesn’t want to work, and his mom gives him some money for something, I guess for the week, and he goes and buys an air rifle. He goes down to the coast (they’re in California) and he goes and kills crabs every day. That’s what he does. But there’s this whole long thing about how he’s like the king of the crabs, and he’s taking them all out and they’re going to worship him like he’s a god. It was terrifically humorous but it’s also poignant in some weird way – I’d rather kill crabs than work.
John Fante. Every book I’ve ever read by him is completely poignant. What’s interesting about him is that he wrote his first 3 books in 1920’s-1930’s, and then he picked up where he left off in 1987 and they are like, 50 years later, and you cannot tell.
BD: I’ve always been drawn to short stories, just because it seems to force the author to get something out in such a few amount of words.
LB: Well they’re like songs. That’s all it is. It’s not an instant gratification, but what it causes the author to do, just like a songwriter has to do, is that you have to develop characters very quickly, and you have to tell a story. You have to get from point A to point B in a rather decent amount of time.
For the song, you’ve got 6 minutes. Anything over that and you’re asking for a helluva lot – 6 minute songs are where you go get a beer at a show. There are some songs that have that payoff. And [Raymond] Carver, that’s the great thing about Carver, that’s the great thing about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Payoff, man… if you wait.
