ACL Artist Interview: Talking Sound, Song, + Sport With John Vanderslice

Published Sept. 23, 2009 at 4:55 p.m.

That’s a good unintentional segue to our next question, which is that you kind of moved away from your studio for the beginning of this record and were doing a lot of things out of your home. Is that about sort of changing up your routine or getting out of your comfort zone to see what kind of creativity comes out of that?

John: Yeah, I think that that’s part of it. It’s also just incredibly expensive for me to be in my own studio. I have to book it, and it’s like if I book it for ten days to do basic tracks - that’s a lot of money, you know! I have a very simple set up at home and so it kind of affords me like the home recorded...kind of the trial and error ability to be patient. I'm not really worried about what happens, and there is no pressure whatsoever. I can write songs in a sort of way; I can demo them over and over. And the studio is so booked up all the time, that when I'm in there I'm definitely taking away from another band and I am definitely paying too. I book it anyway to mix and to do some tracking, but no matter what, I am like spending a lot of money. Which is great - I don’t have any problems with that, but it’s like at some point I have to be really mindful of that. I'm now starting to record off and on all year 'round, so I really have to be careful about being out of the studio.

Well, it's interesting to be talking about the economics of everything. When you started your studio back… I think it’s eleven or twelve years ago, the major labels were really running the show. Now the tables have really turned, in the sense that labels like the ones that you have been on like Barsuk and Dead Oceans, along with Merge and a lot of other guys seem to be doing just doing fine while a lot of the majors are falling by the wayside. I just wondered how both as a studio owner and as a musician you think that this has impacted people’s abilities as musicians to make a living at their craft.

John: Oh, it’s maybe that the musicians are a lot smarter, and I think that… it’s a kind of delusional change that bands were working toward labels like multinational corporations. And when we started, pretty much half of our bookings were bands making demos for labels. That is just stupid, you know, and now I haven’t heard the phrase "demo deal" in like five to eight years. Now, bands come in and they make art. What they are doing is art. That’s the only reason they are doing it. There is not this financial corporate incentive to do anything other than express your own ideas on tape or on a hard drive, and I think it’s made it so much healthier for bands. And, I have seen this with a lot of bands starting out - that financially it’s a lot more competitive, especially for touring. So, it’s harder for bands to lift off I think.

Right.

John: But overall the entire state of music is incredibly, it’s so varied and it’s healthy, and it’s just a tremendous amount of self-financing and self-made works of art. And that’s what we want. I think it’s been really the best for music studios watching our transition. You know, I tell people all the time that I think this is the golden age of music and art in general because of the Internet. Some musicians - younger musicians - always agree with me, and then the kind of more grown up people, they really think I am off base.

Well, it’s a confusing thing as a music listener because there is such an overwhelming amount of choice. I find myself as I get older and have kids and all that - fighting to maintain the attention level that I could have being younger where there were fewer things to focus on because now you are just inundated, and it’s incredible and it’s terrifying sort of all at once if you're somebody who likes to consume art and listen to music and trying to bond with it, you know.

John: Yeah, I agree. In fact, it’s been a lot easier for me to stay current with films because there’s still so much less of it, you know. Somebody told me the number of how many records came out last year but it was like 500,000 or something. It was completely ten times more ridiculous than I ever thought it would be.

And half of those were American indie rock albums! [Laughs]

John: Probably, they were. And the thing is, that this is amazing and I think it’s a great thing but there is a portion that engenders a little bit of commercialism. You just can’t process it. It’s so overwhelming. I find myself following bands that I’ve been interested in for five to ten years all the time just because it’s some kind of [touchstone]. It’s almost like friends, you know. You stay in touch with people that had an impact on you at a certain point in your life, and you can kind of tune out the rest of humanity. I mean, there’s six billion plus people on the planet. And, I think that it’s a survival thing on one level, but I have the same feelings you do which is a little bit of guilt for, maybe, not being as aggressive as I used to be about finding new music.

Oh, definitely. Going back to talking about you owning the studio, it made me wonder - is live performance an inherently frustrating format for you as someone who really understands sound and who works on the technical side of that when you’re not doing your touring musician thing? Is it really hard to adjust to the impurity or the imperfections that being playing live entails?

John: You know the funny thing is that it’s actually the exact opposite. I can easily have the chaos of a live performance without any regret. Like, we played four shows over the weekend. We played in Seattle and Vancouver. And they were just uniformly fantastic shows from my perspective. I had an enormous amount of creative fun, you know, like exuberance and appreciation for the situation that I’m in with my band and touring. And we would get off the stage and invariably, one of my band mates would say, “Man, I had a really bad show because the monitor wasn’t on or working.” And I thought, “Oh, man, just you know, you have to embrace” … the impurity of the live experience and ride it out. Otherwise, it will grind you down. And the thing is, it’s easy for me to tour and have a blast at live shows and accept a lot of imperfections and also the situational absurdity of playing. We played in Seattle on Thursday, and the whole lighting rig in the club that we were playing at and the entire lights in the club just shut down during the song. It was impossible for anyone to see their instrument. So, the song kind of just fell apart. You know, man, I live for that. And I can easily see someone getting very upset. Like a fuse blowing in a performance, I can see it making someone insane, but I found it to be one of the highlights of the trip. It really depends on your state of mind, you know. And then, conversely, with the studio, where it really has to be exactly what you hear and what you want, that can be very difficult. That can be very frustrating. And, so, I guess what I’m saying is that you’d expect it to be the opposite, where the studio experience is controlled and satisfying and live is just like a clusterfuck. But, it’s kind of the opposite.

Yeah, that was a surprising response. It wasn’t what I was expecting. Speaking of the studio, a few years ago, you participated pretty heavily in making one of my favorite, what I think of as an Austin record, which is Spoon’s Gimme Fiction. And I just wondered if working with Britt and Jim and those guys, if there was anything you took away because they’ve definitely forged a great path. And I just wondered how you found that experience.

John: Well, there’s probably been two really important bands for me in my creative upbringing. My old band was covering songs from Telephono. We were massive Spoon fans. So Spoon was just tremendously important to me. And the other one was Mountain Goats. I’m really lucky that both of those bands have been part of my life. And I’ll see Jim when I’m in Austin. Over the trip we just saw Britt. Not this time, but over the summer when we were there. It’s been like one of the more important relationships that I’ve had musically. You know, I saw them...they played the Fillmore here in San Francisco last year. And they played three nights in a row - and I went to all three shows, and I can’t think of a better live experience than seeing those shows. They’ve really changed as a live band. It's really exciting in a dangerous way. Some of the stuff they’re doing with reverb and with delay live, and with Jeff Berg their sound guy - he is doing a tremendous amount of interaction with the band. It was a live dynamic kind of thing. I was really blown away and it made me...you know, it’s easy to get burned out with rock and roll. There’s so many days when I’d rather be watching Joanna Newsom or The Bowerbirds or some singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar because it’s so much easier to deal with sonically. And PA’s usually don’t do any favors to rock bands, in general. And bands [also] don’t do any favors to the audience because they’re usually in some kind of volume war. But those shows - they made me want to play rock and roll.

That’s never a bad thing.

John: Never a bad thing. And to be inspired like that is really powerful.

Absolutely. My final question for you is that I saw a note on your website saying that the NBA playoffs were of paramount importance to you. And I wondered who your team was, and what you think about what’s going to happen this year?

John: Well, I’m an unusual kind of sports fanatic because I actually...I really like the strategic part of sports. But I never really have a team. I actually watch all sports. I also think that sports are very similar. Like they’re all the same. Like I like soccer and I like tennis and I like football and I like baseball. I see it as kind of a Zen battle between opposing forces. You know what I mean? And I really love torturing indie rock people who can’t culturally accept sports. Like especially some of my band. I really make them crazy. They have this like...It’s just ridiculous. It’s a completely silly knee jerk reaction to, I guess, jocks. But I don’t have a team in the same way that I don’t fly an American flag out my window. I think it’s completely meaningless division. I think it’s random where you’re born and of course, when I grew up I had all my local sports teams that I completely and irrationally defended against everything they did. And especially when a call went against them. Somehow it’s like partisan politics. I’ve kind of transcended the whole mess. But I will say this: that I always root for the underdog. So if I’m watching a game, I’m always for the team that’s not supposed to win or the team that doesn’t have the money or the marquee player. So I would say that in general. But I really do [like it]...It’s one of the only times I can turn off the chatter in my brain because it’s a totally different thing that’s happening. It’s more about physical genius than about pronouncements and pretension.

I see what you’re saying. It’s only the second time I can ever remember it coming up in a rock interview. Explosions in the Sky are really big sports nerds and they love, love, love to talk about basketball. But they’re the only other people I’ve ever seen mention sports in any context.

John: Well, the thing is from owning the studio from 11 years, I can tell you that actually the percentage of bands that like sports is 100 times higher than they will ever admit. They're culturally scared to say that they watch football or basketball...it's so funny, and kind of silly. I've seen bands watch football on Sunday in the studio, and then later in conversation not own up to it. So Explosions In The Sky are just honest people!

Thanks very much for talking with Austinist.

John Vanderslice performs at the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Saturday, October 3 at 6:40pm on the BMI Stage.

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