Interviews | Chris Weisman

by Lucas Knapp

Chris Weisman is a musician based in Brattleboro, VT who has been quietly exploring the limits of melody, harmony, counterpoint, improvisation, and their intersection in songwriting throughout his life. After a pause of a few years in publicly released work, he came back as prolific as ever in 2019 with three separate thirty track albums softly released on Bandcamp. This streak continues into 2020 with 6 full lengths being written, recorded, and released to the world. The most recent of these albums is the entirely instrumental Sherbet And Stars, which was released shortly after wrapping up the following interview this summer. With the help of a few friends in question formulation, Lucas Knapp asked Weisman some questions over email about his recent output, collaboration, his relationship to songwriting, and four track recording.

Last year, fans were pleasantly surprised when you self-released three records on Bandcamp (Everybody’s Old, Valence with Tassels, and Romantics). So far this year, you’ve self-released five more (Closer Tuning, Squished Basket, And Seen My Brain, Full Professor, Night Commander of the Victorian Order). All of these surprise albums come after many years without any new records, and some thought that you may have been done putting out new music entirely. What was your relationship like with songwriting in the time since 2016’s Play Sharp to Me, and do you see this Bandcamp era as a distinctly new phase for your art?

I’ve always had this slippery relationship with songwriting, which is ironic because I’ve ended up doing so much of it. I started writing in middle school, and in high school I made all these tapes with my friend Ben Stamper. We were called Clov. We made a lot of albums, just us two and a 4-track, in a (retrospectively) very short period of time. (And that’s only one of the things Clov has in common with what I do today. It’s aesthetically very close, plus we didn’t play shows or have any publicity/business sense. (Nobody put out anything I did till I was 33.)) When I went to college though, to the University of New Hampshire in 1995, I turned into a jazz person. (If my parents could have afforded Hampshire College where I wanted to go but didn’t get enough aid for, maybe I would have, like, turned in 4-track tapes for my “major,” but because I ended up at the state school in my home town (where my father taught Chemistry no less), I had to choose jazz or classical. You can probably tell from my tone I’m grateful for that now, pretty much was right away freshman year when I started practicing like crazy and meeting all these incredible friends.) I threw myself fully into jazz guitar, with the very difficult and rewarding task of trying to contend with that music, and getting gigs. That’s also when I began teaching. I knew a bunch of music theory in high school and did all sorts of crazy stuff in my songs, but what I learned in college (from my peers as much as from classes) was on a whole other level, became available in real time across different instruments. I never quit jazz – it has been my musical home, my way of practicing and integrating ideas since that time (there are standards I’ve played almost every day for 25 years now, often for hours) – but when I did start writing songs again at the end of college, on top of having all this new stuff to work with, a kind of friction between the arts started to flash and grind. For years I would go through obsessive identity bouts, particularly since my song albums were bearing no worldly fruits (while people around me would periodical get sucked up into the status/$ world), where I would think I might quit songwriting and re-devote myself fully to jazz, usually with an attendant  fantasy of somehow getting an academic job somehow. But when I’d actually stop for a while, I wouldn’t feel so good. Eventually, during my better times, I realized that I lived in between the two musical worlds, and that, for me, choosing was a dumb absurdity.

I quit drinking in 2007, but I developed a “cannabis” addiction in my 30s. What at first seemed to just wildly blend, to wonderfully cream, the upper layer of all the machines I’d labored to employ, eventually got down to the root and rotted the shit out. In the last few years, I couldn’t enjoy anything without being high, and it was increasingly rare that I could get properly high (the best book I’ve read on the mechanics of this is Never Enough by Judith Grisel). By the time I quit, in December of 2016, became fully, across-the-board sober, my songwriting had already run aground the previous year. For nearly another two years I thought it might be over – I was working on a long poem, an erasure of a 1968 copy of The Beatles by Hunter Davies, I’m still not finished with – till it suddenly wasn’t. I’m still attracted to the violence of stopping, the same desire to shock (myself above all) that’s at play with the way I work with notes, but I’ll keep with the work as long as I can. 

Was there a distinct tipping point that made you realize you had to get totally sober or was it more of a slow realization? What helped you quit and get through the toughest parts of that process?

Marijuana’s decriminalization is important, particularly because of the racist ways the drug has been used by the state. And I also agree alcohol is both more habit forming and more dangerous in a variety of ways. But you can become addicted to anything – it doesn’t have to be a drug. And, yes, when I was trying to quit (over & over & over again), society’s push to whitewash grass as not only harmless but as a sort of panacea for every medical condition – that stuff came in very useful to the part of my brain convincing me to say fuck it again and pick up.

I know I brought it up – I like to tell the truth about those years I stopped working – but I’d also like to move on. It’s personal, obviously.  But I want to reiterate one more time: I couldn’t get high anymore. I am not learning to do without some awesome thing. The word sobriety has always given me the image of, like, a dry bone bleaching in the desert sun. It doesn’t capture my life now. All the magic feelings, all the juice, that I eventually learned to associate with pot, and that pot was making it harder and harder to get to, is now (it took a while!) freely flowing in my life again, and without pushing some button to make it happen. I literally feel like a kid. Like, all this stuff I thought was “the magic of childhood” was apparently just really the state of not being clogged up and blocked with substances. I can only speak for myself, but getting free has been literally the opposite of the drug thing: Drugs give you the best part right upfront and then begin the taketh away; sobriety just steadily continues to get more and more amazing. Like, what the fuck is reality and why is it so beautiful? A better name for sobriety might be “The Rainbow.”

Do you have any highlights from the last year or so of writing and recording? Does your work/practice lend itself to this kind of momentary recollection?

It’s really, really fun making albums. It’s a literal rush. One thing I’m always trying to snap awake to is the space between the stories we tell about ourselves and a deeper light, so I’m apprehensive about the things I find myself repeating, but: I make albums closer to how a jazz musician plays a solo. I realize genre talk is reductive – I’m an example of that, obviously – but I would be disrespecting the jazz tradition if I couldn’t see how specific its philosophy, its wisdom, is, and how free those technologies have made me in this adjacent 20th-century form (“Beatles” albums?). And in some cases the distance between those forms has collapsed, but in many cases they’ve gotten farther apart. Even Sergeant Pepper, the quintessential labored-over record of its day, seems nearly tossed off relative to a lot of song albums today. Like Bill Evans talks about in the liner notes to Kind of Blue, with Japanese sumi-e painting as his model, jazz is about radical preparation combined with radically spontaneous high-wire work. 

So I have a bunch of stuff that helps me to just catch the flash and not get bogged down. 

1. Still practicing. For me, it’s important to be practicing music all the time, to not assume I already did enough and now I can just keep hitting the well and have it stay all nice. The metaphor I’ve often repeated is tending to a garden. You care for the space, sing your prayers. Nutrients. You put a weird tricycle down there and let it dissolve. And then flowers grow. You don’t control them, contrive them, you just try to help them happen. (I know a lot of this is boilerplate, but I still feel so happy writing about it. :) It seems totally possible to me that one of the main reasons jazz masters keep getting better and more beautiful as they get old is that they keep practicing. Sometimes songwriters maybe dry up and get sad because they don’t. Another thing I really like about practicing (I read Keith Jarrett talking about this in an interview the other day): There’s tons of beautiful music you’re just giving away. You’re not trying to tape it, turn it into something, benefit from it with other people. You’re just like holy shit and letting this magic blow away with the wind. Who knows where that goes, who it’s for? And just the act of not clutching tight to all “your” goods is a good act of faith. So let it out and let it in. I’m learning this new instrument, a Yamaha Venova, a soprano saxophone/recorder hybrid. I’ve been practicing that 3 hours a day most days (making an album, which, in 2020, these shorter ones, usually takes me 1 to 2 weeks, can pull me away somewhat). That’s been very deep, rewarding.
2. When I write a song, I don’t get up till I’m finished. The only exception might be singing a bit of melody into a voice memo late at night. But when I sit down to hit it the next day, I do it fully. All the sections, all the precise voicings, the exact form, and all the lyrics. If everything all together expressed the time and energy of when it was made, it will all, however “flawed,” seem right. This is how John & Paul did it. I’ve known a lot of people who try to wait on the lyrics, but the thing dries up and then nothing will stick to it. And the words are important! Waiting on the lyrics is like drawing a person with no face or something. Making Star Wars but not knowing what Darth Vader’s helmet is gonna be till everything else is done. (Famous last words: We’ll fix it in post.) (My favorite Star Wars genius: Ralph McQuarrie.) For me, you want everything to affect everything else, to be awake to every other element. So I do everything all together at the same time.
3. When I go to record the finished song, which is often* very close in time, if not the same day, to writing it, I record the whole thing in one sitting. (*Sometimes I’ll write the whole album and then record it, particularly when I’m writing the songs for a show I have scheduled.) I make up the arrangement, the parts, and the mix as I go. I don’t want to compare myself to Prince (!), but I also don’t want to disrespect him by not acknowledging that I basically do everything, process and speed-wise, just like Prince, minus having an engineer (and, needless to say, minus being Prince (favorite Prince album> Parade)). Again, like the writing, like sumi-e painting, like a jazz improvisation, I am trying to let every element all come together, as one intelligence, simultaneously in the light of that “moment,” that wave of time & energies.
4. All of my albums from 2018> (and including some earlier ones too, like Beatleboro) are written and recorded in order. So once I catch the beginning of something (which actually happened yesterday when I recorded track 1 from _________ ), the whole thing unfolds as one painting, and the sequence is also an improvisation; I just feel what wants to come next.

So, to answer the question (lol), within this form – it seems like I’ve mostly been making these last ones around the end of each month – a highlight that comes to mind, on top of just fundamentally being lucky enough to work at all, is one of the filtering games I’ve played. I’ve done some restrictions on arrangements, recording stuff, mixes. Most notably, and this is my highlight, Full Professor was recorded entirely dry, no reverbs, and everything is entirely hard panned to the left or right. No sound you hear in the left ear (I record, mix, and master (with my friend Nick) entirely on headphones, which is supposed to be wrong) is at all in the right ear, and vice versa. (The only way I gamed myself out of this some, was by double-tracking some vocals, so the part appears in both ears.) This effect can be very harsh! The raw digital sounds, the near-vertigo sensation of radically imbalanced ears. To refer back to the stories-we-tell thing (to the idea that it’s often just a story, made up, flexible), it’s really fun to just sort of decide something unusual can work, and then feel it working. Art making as building/finding a tool for self-expansion, and then other people may also choose to experiment with it. :) I always think of picturing a bicycle before they were invented. It doesn’t seem believable! That’s what I want to do.

I find the intersection of mixing and songwriting riveting, how much of a song is tied to the spatial placement, and are these things now more than ever apparent with so much listening done on headphones. I wonder your thoughts on this as well, and I think about the Beatles who just were goofing off in the sandbox with these concepts, and now many seen to obsess over the “perfect mix.” I don’t know if you’ve heard any of the complete stereo re-mixes done by Giles Martin of Abbey Road, The White Album, and Sgt. Peppers, where they tried to sonically improve on the originals but also stay faithful to the general idea. Odd task, but they do sound “better” I suppose. 

I am particularly curious how this approach is applied to lyricism. “Stream of conscious” writing comes to mind when I think about improvisatory writing, but your songs don’t sound to me like someone rattling off anything that pops into his head. Often, what impresses me most about the lyrics of Weisman songs is how fully formed and structurally sound they are. You clearly approach both the lyrical content and construction with detail and care, resulting in songs that feel like complete mini-treatises on the inanities and complexities of modern life. Is there room for improvised play (exemplified by the humor in a song like “Top Down”) within disciplined lyricism and how does that manifest in your songwriting practice?

Thinking about the degree to which mixing is or is not the song is interesting. On the one hand everything matters, and like I’ve said, I want everything talking to everything else, all expressing one _________ together. On the other hand, I’m quite conservative, and there is a definite hierarchy of importance for me. (It’s politically uncomfortable, but just at the fundamental level of tonal relations, music is extremely hierarchical. Subservience, dualistic thinking, power struggles – all right there. And it’s tempting and easy to make an argument that this stuff is just Western bias projected into the vibratory field, but I actually don’t think so. It’s more like the vase/face figure/ground of visual experience. It’s a lovely, tidy story to be against the vibe of those forces, but it‘s another thing to, like, literally not see that way, to be somehow transcending that stuff. And though, say, North Indian Classical music famously doesn’t have chords, I believe all the same energies are at play there too. Like magnets work the same over there. I don’t know – I’m not all resolved and confident on all this stuff – but, for me, my experience of music has tended to tangle with my surface-level political comfort zone, rather than line up all nice with it. A trickster personality, a spirit very plainly working to humiliate me and my neat desk with everything all lined up on it. To keep me laughing, confused.)

It’s possible I’m just bitter about being outclassed (still mad I couldn’t go to Hampshire!), but when I hear “texture” or “granular” over and over again, I’m just like, Whatever. Those words signal to me an elitist, academic vibe of people pretending to basically enjoy watching paint dry. Or, because that’s the coin of the realm for that in-group, they probably do enjoy it. (This rant is ironic: I’ve listened very deeply (and liked it!) to a lot of the most boring music on earth, and will again, probably tomorrow.) I’m finding out right now I’m a spice factory today – I paid bills before this – but my point is: I am not going to pretend that my tastes are so refined and subtle, that I’m such an advanced super-taster, that I don’t care for something so garish and obvious as melody, harmony, an exciting form. Melody, harmony, and form (and lyrics when they’re there (I’m making an instrumental album right now)) are more important to me than arrangement, recording, mixing. So I do the more important part first. But then, to be fair, once I’m working on the next strata of detail, I care (almost) just as much about it as I did the writing. The mix is and is not the song.

I started listening to the Beatles in 1987 at age 11 with my younger brother Kurt (who showed me them). For many years, we just had the stereo mixes and yes, the Beatles did not attend those sessions; they were the equivalent of a surround sound mix today, a novelty most people wouldn’t hear. We had cassettes and would (you’ll hear other people say this too) turn off one speaker on the boombox. Because of all the hard panning, this was like being able to turn a soup back into its ingredients. Also, because the stereo mixes were done quickly, there are cool errors. I’m thinking of a weird chop of “ah” after Lennon is finished with a line on Lucy. There’s an easy narrative available here that we learned how music was put together but it feels specious. The Beatles are always pretty transparent; you can hear the bits locking together like a cartoon regardless of mix or format. We listened to one speaker in part because it exposed things, but I think there was more going on.

I don’t know the bible or Christianity very well, but I know the spooky Jesus line Split the stick and I’ll be there. That’s what we were doing: splitting open a Beatles album and listening to how a slice of the Beatles somehow wasn’t any less Beatles. I do not believe that this is usually true. You will not get this effect listening to half the stereo image of Full Professor or probably any non-Beatles album. Something happened with the Beatles, something that happened not at all with their contemporaries or anyone since, and when they were together there was an X factor that is outright occult and frightening in its plain – yet unsolvable, irreducible – legibility. And (and I love Ram too), once they’re over, not a jot of it remains in their solo careers. The closest they come again is Free As A Bird (which I adore), and that doesn’t have it. 

I’m really into this podcast called Something About The Beatles. The guy Robert Rodriguez is just the best. His vibe is so steady and positive and great. He has a Chicago accent. I listen to a lot of more intense podcasts about the world falling apart and stuff, but Something About The Beatles is my safe space. I randomly wrote this on a piece of paper listening to it the other night while doing dishes: GENTLE, LOVELY PEOPLE OF EARTH SMILING and drew a big sun under it. The episode was with this amazing woman Candy Leonard who wrote a book called Beatleness (I ordered it but haven’t read it yet) on basically the subject I was trying to get at above. Along with being a scholar with fresh flashes of insight into the Beatles (a difficult art form!), she is also self-consciously a female voice of Beatles scholarship. And not just a corrective to a male-dominated field because that’s right, but a corrective because she believes the female perspective accesses things a male would/can not. (Here’s one of those places, for me, not shutting down a gender binary allows for something cool.) 

I bought the mono box that came out in 2009 the following year and only listened to mono Beatles for a long time. I love mono and a lot of my albums are in mono actually. I liked listening to the mixes that the Beatles were in the room for. It wasn’t on vinyl – I’ve never been a record person, don’t have a player – but I was closer. But then again, with the Beatles it never matters. I love the Giles mixes too. I was just listening to his Abbey Road last night. (Abbey Road: The Augmented Album.)

The lyrics question: It does all basically just pop in my head. I seem to have different channels of language all on tap and I can sort of switch between them to shape things how I feel like doing. Sometimes I start with a title or a chorus hook, but usually I just sing out the first line and follow it. I will begin not knowing what the song is about, and then it’ll find its way into focus pretty fast. But I always leave the opening lines as they were – I wouldn’t want to disrespect the door that got me in the house – even though I don’t know where I’m going when I put them down. O.C.D. is a straightforward song on Full Professor about having O.C.D., but when I sang out the first line(s), I didn’t know that. Another choice is to keep the lines wild and keep the song from coming in too plain. There are streams of improvisation I’m accessing, and one of those streams is a meta-stream intuitively deciding how locked or loose it all comes in. One thing I like to do in a song with a verse and then a chorus – once the song knows what it is – is throw wild again for the 2nd verse, do a leap of faith then find a way to bring it back in. Often there’s a setting, a place and time, from my past that just kind of shows up – and often I can’t see why – but I’ll also work that frequency in, refer to it seeing as it’s there anyway. I am always singing little joke songs all day, and am really practiced at basically free-styling a song with rhymes and everything. It’s different in the details, but the same state, really, as playing bebop over changes, extemporizing a real-time thing that both solves itself like a puzzle and has an overall pleasing form. The last song on Full Professor, Special Extras is actually just straight-up improvised. I did the guitar and vocal first – just zipped over and did it in one take in the middle of working on another song, staring at a picture on the wall of George Harrison in India in 1966 – and then also improvised all the overdubs, including the backup vocals. I mean, like, you can tell :) – I’m not trying to act like it’s particularly impressive  – but that’s a good example of the sound of me just going for it in a certain style.

What is your weekly routine like, and is it a rhythm you’ve been in for a long time? Have you had different routines of “Working on Music” throughout your life and how has your current one come to be? How do you keep a balance between your work in music and responsibilities to your family/community/loved ones?

Sorry this answer is coming an entire week after I acted like I was going to do it. I guess that in part answers your question! I finished the album I started earlier in this interview a few days ago. It’s 12 songs, and this one is all instrumental which was actually really emotionally amazing to do. It was like all these rays of joy could just blast straight into the sky without first having to go through the thorn bush of my lyrics. (That’s not fair to my lyrics, or how much I love writing them, but that’s where my heart is right now: untethered balloons.)

During Covid I’ve fallen into the unplanned pattern of starting an album around the 24th~26th of each month, and then writing and recording it in a week or two. I don’t know what’s up, but I suspect it’s related to the moon.? The night I finished Night Commander Of The Victorian Order was the full moon, and I didn’t realize it until I saw the moon reflected in a big bank window across the street from my studio. In general the isolation has sharpened my tuning into higher levels of connection – I actually feel more connected to the people in my life, weirdly. Like Luke Skywalker can fight the little floating ball shooting at him better with his face shield covering his eyes. It’s actually freaky how many precognitive dreams and psychic moments I’ve been having. I feel like a blade of grass quivering more precisely to microevents in the air currents.

When I’m not making an album I still go to my studio every day and just practice the whole time. (I maintain quite a bit of practice time still while I’m making an album, but it’s less.) There’s no internet there, and my only phone is a landline at my apartment, and for whatever reason I never rest or read there. Yesterday I got there at 2PM (I go to bed really late and usually get up around noon). I worked on a solo guitar piece (writing it on paper) for an hour, did Venova longtones for an hour, sightread melodies out of O’Neill’s Music Of Ireland on Venova for an hour, meditated for half an hour, did another hour of Venova improvising with a tetrachord I rolled with dice (moved chromatically against a fixed drone), and then finished off just blowing over Solar at a fast-ish tempo for half an hour on my Stratocaster. Then I went home in time for a phone call with my friend Carl at 9:30. 

I basically feel like I have plenty of time to do tons of music and relax with my people. (It was my partner’s birthday this weekend and we hung out a bunch.) I don’t perceive any trade or tension between those things, but my life is very finely adjusted to allow me to give my life to music. I knew in late college that having children was not going to be a possibility (and given how my career has economically gone so far into my mid-40s, that now seems 1000x more true.) I always knew I didn’t want a “comfortable” American life, property, etc. I wanted a scrappy, bohemian artist life, to focus on the magic stuff and not, like, mow the lawn. I live like a student and it suits me. 

(Keep in mind, too, I chose this path during the salad days of Clinton. E.g. I moved to Austin after college (with a girlfriend at the time who was going to graduate school) when the dot-com bubble was still unburst. This is to say, it seemed like there were good viable cop-outs and compromises around every corner, because there probably were, back then. I’m patting my heroic self on the back for sticking to my values (Gen X to the core) during the temptation years before America was fully hell, but I’m also still probably defensive. I fell from the middle class into technical poverty in a society primarily about money, and though I write this with pride, I can still feel the shame of sticking to my adolescent picture, the shame I felt plenty during many of these shoe-string years. Now though, I just feel vindicated. Any path besides the true heart’s path seems like an obvious Faustian bargain, as everything besides faith and love crumbles pathetically around us.)

I did waver in those years after college. I was with someone who wanted a family, and I allowed myself to imagine that I could leave this life behind, or at least find some middle path. It didn’t work out. When we broke up in 2005, I swore I wouldn’t put someone through the tease of that waffling again. When my partner and I got together in 2006, I was clear as a bell about who I was, that I wasn’t going to have kids or etc., etc., etc. That I just wanted to keep exploring the me I already was, however threadbare, silly. And it’s probably just a better match, but I also attribute it to me knowing who I am and being willing to say it.

And for 14 years I have had infinite space, and the infinite support of my girlfriend, to just keep drilling deeper into the mysterious caves, come what may up on the sketchy surface.

What inspired your album Romantics? What’s your relationship to the bass guitar (I feel like you have your own style)? Is more collaboration (like with Omeed on unison singing) something we could expect in the future?

I’ve always had a less-is-more thing going that I periodically get closer to the failing edge of. At its best it’s not a purist idea, but an experience of juice and wealth pouring from something that’s supposedly unfinished, the parts having the proper room to really smash their full flavors against each other, and you can really watch the reverberations of the pebble drops as they radiate outside the frame and into “your” territory. I.e. a lot of the things that get added to a recording are going to be experienced whether you literally put them there or not, and when you leave room for them to sing instead only inside the listener – the most obvious example being, say, leaving off a drum beat that can be felt through the music anyway – the listener is reminded that the music always exists in this spooky mutual zone in between supposedly separate beings.

My subtraction impulse also stems from a desire to challenge myself. A big thing for me since high school has been making sure that my love of chords doesn’t make me write weak melodies (harmony and melody: another duality that’s really one continuum, both curving to the same laws of energy and balance always playing out through notes). A full bed of pastels can potentially puff up a wan tune, but I’ve done various workouts over the years to make sure that doesn’t happen. (Or if I do it, I do it ironically, for fun: let a guide-tone “melody” slip down step-wise against nice chords because another trap, of course, is deciding what’s good and then trying to do only that.) I often write the melody before everything else so that it’s “self-supporting,” can stand on its own two feet, like those Bach Violin Partitas where the melody implies its own harmony, strides through the forest on its own phantom stilts.

Another thing I’ve been always impressed by is unison, the psychological effect of the doubling of a part. It might be the case that over half of my vocal melodies are double-tracked. It seems to be the case that even if you consciously know that it’s one person singing something twice, you subconsciously perceive two animals doing something together.  And, like something that has a lot of views online, we might be drawn to things that are good enough to do together. And we don’t just think maybe this is something good!, we also think maybe this is where my friends are! A vocal is only doubled, but your body starts singing, your heart perceives a cozy nexus, a warm room alight on a cold night. (I would go so far as to say that this is actually getting activated by digital delay and just reverb even. The melody bouncing off the walls of the cave sounds like friends singing together. (In my experience, too, it is impossible to sing with someone if you are actively fighting with them. I can’t think of a more unifying agent than singing together.))

So last summer when I was thinking about my next album, I put together the idea of writing pure counterpoint, just melody and bass, and singing everything in unison with my good friend the crazy genius Omeed Goodarzi. Around then, I was at Ten Forward in Greenfield, Mass. (20 minutes from Brattleboro where a bunch of our friends live) and I saw Mal Devisa play an unbelievable set with just bass and voice, and that cemented it. Omeed was there and I asked him to do it and I started writing.

Omeed and I did a trade: He made Romantics with me, and I started working on what became Pickled Dawn with him: me playing bass on his songs, an album recorded with a live band almost exactly a year ago today. For many weeks we were rehearsing a lot together, sessions of my music and sessions of his. We sang and recorded and did shows together.

It was a lot more collaboration than I usually do. I usually describe myself as having more the temperament of a writer or painter than a musician. I prefer to shoot off into my own* worlds rather than drive and fly all over the literal planet of animals. *I don’t feel alone when I’m working alone; I feel almost more connected to the psychic lattice of my peers, listeners. (And that does sound more like a writer than a musician who feels most connected on stage, yes?) I almost want to say that I gave myself a good strong dose of something before it became impossible in the Covid times, that it was a precognitive instinct, a gift from God. At time of writing it’s late August 2020 and wow: this Covid stuff (to say nothing of the unbelievable horror of the Republican Party, police (still) shooting unarmed African Americans, climate change kicking in hard) isn’t even half over. In a sense, it will never be over, never be the same again. And so I’m grateful I sweated in those 2019 summer rooms, arm to arm, with my people, that me and Omeed sang into one mic together last fall making Romantics together, crossing our breath, our biomes, still able, in good conscience, to mush our soft bodies as one. It was really nice and it was really fun.

Another sense in which Romantics was collaborative: I was having really annoying problems with microphone interference that I couldn’t get rid of (the song Technical Problems is about that). It was particularly pronounced because the album was so spacious and transparent. If I was a more pure John-Cage-type radical, I would’ve let that indeterminate interruption, that shitty micro-frost, be our serendipitous guest. But I hated it so I had to mask it. So I recorded nature – crickets, gusts, rain, and, most comically, occasional acorns dropping onto the tin roof across the way – from my porch on Cherry Street. And in the end, maybe the microphone problem was my friend too, because I really like the effect of what I was forced into. A mutual friend of ours said it was the weirdest album he had ever heard, and I think the nature sounds, only half-scanning (at best) as New Age relaxation, are part of that. It feels, to me, like autumnal death, a skeleton dance, the ominous snap of the final twig.

When a friend buys Romantics on my Bandcamp, I have more than once written Only my most advanced listeners go full Romantics. I adore that album and I really appreciate the question about it. :)

I’m thinking about how musical/recording concepts play an important part in your album length works, with hard panning on Full Professor and pure counterpoint on Romantics. Has any of your newer work had no main guiding principle informing the album’s direction?

Closer Tuning was all written in a tuning called Closer Tuning that I made up a few years ago. A, D, F#, A, B, C low to high – you have to restring for it. The strings are getting intervallically closer and closer together, allowing for all these crushed, tight, wonderful voicings. I can’t think on my feet in that tuning really so I was more pleasantly lost than normal, though when I’m following a song I’m probably always kind of lost, in the midst of a trust fall basically. That’s the closest limitation to the other ones I told you about. Squished Basket might’ve had the vaguest concept – really just a vibe. And Seen My Brain had Venova even though I could hardly play it, more instrumentals… 

Sometimes I think of a game that seems fun – even just switching over to stereo from a string of mostly mono albums for Fresh Sip felt like some wild indulgence – but more important are the little internal rhymes, as it were, that start happening as I’m working. In one sense I’m just making a bunch of music in a certain time period, and in another I’m helping it fall together into a larger thing. Little things will show up or echo across songs. 

Your trusty 4-track is something that you’ve talked about being your main recording device in most of your earlier albums. Is it still your primary means of recording for your recent albums? I don’t mean for this to be like a gearhead question or anything, but the four track has a special intimate nostalgia to it and takes on a magical bent in your music making narrative. It makes me wonder if you’re still using one and what your relationship to it currently might be. I also don’t mean to imply that the way of recording takes away from the magical quality of your music; I believe the music first bestows that special feeling.

When I started making albums my freshman year in high school in 1991, with my sophomore friend Ben, we would borrow our music teacher’s Tascam cassette 4-track. It was the Garageband of its day: the cheapest way to multitrack, and some people sometimes even released “real” albums made on just that. We did not aestheticize the tape hiss; we worked hard to minimize it.

Over the (many) years, most of my Gen X peers naturally upgraded, in some cases became full-blown legit sound engineers. Recording-wise, I clung to the familiar. I expanded and developed, but not in that realm. It was mostly an embarrassment, really, another example of self-sabotage. And then, around the time Pitchfork decided Ariel Pink was very good instead of very bad, my Millennial friends started  getting into cheap analog. I was just still using it. There was a magic window – I’d say 2006-2012ish – where cassettes and VHS (and in my case (and many) marijuana) sung a very beautiful, brown and wide swan song. A garage sale alternative – though many of the retro aesthetics were the same – to the late-VH1-Classic/early-YouTube era. It was two things: Stuff that seemed like garbage – the quintessential item being 80s New Age cassettes – alchemically became cultural gold, but also, crucially, a lot of the equipment was still around and still worked. This was not like certain books ironically coming back into vogue or something. This was a media fetish in the final era of that media still being basically all over the place and a lot of times still working. But then the machines broke, the tapes broke, the tapes degraded…

During my years of not writing, getting sober, Twin Peaks: The Return came out and blew me (us!) away. I was in 8th grade when season one came out. I saw the trailer on TV and knew, no idea who Lynch was, This is for me! I learned the theme on piano and would play it while I waited for showtime. So, all these years later, to watch Lynch pivot to digital, literally and aesthetically, for the grand reprise (I didn’t bite for Inland Empire so this was the first digital Lynch I loved) just radiated through me like a glorious wave. If I go back to making albums I’m going to go digital. Arguably, I waited until it was ironic, trash transfigured. It was the Red Room early digital art looking stuff that really tipped me over. Also Lynch’s insane stretching out into the space, the room a streaming medium allows. He did not covet the precious “warm” boxes of the past; he unapologetically dropped us instead into this enormous, terrifying expanse, a void that seemed to extend to everywhere the wifi could reach. Anachronistically, we would watch them right when they posted, along with millions of others, but rather than harken back to the cozy 90s or whatever, it seemed to amplify the spider web of the internet, to help us see the glisten of its strands, a medium we had really only just begun to inhabit, to really see or play with.

When I started writing again I did one more on my 4-track and it was a freaking nightmare. The tape hiss was depressing – it itself is like a song I never want to hear again. Also, even though I (barely) obtained high bias, still-wrapped tapes, they were so badly degraded they were unusable over half the time. Many takes were ruined by dropouts, various unwanted cassette problems, plus my 4-track itself was half broken. The crowning moment came when I was digitizing with my friend Nick and a tape unspooled in the machine and I had to fix it doing this awful surgery with pencils. The tape had multiple songs on it, backed up precisely nowhere. Part of a song was destroyed and we had to fly in that section digitally from another place (mercifully that was possible). I was already done but now I was DONE.

As late as late 2004, I was still able to order a newly manufactured Tascam from Musicians Friend. Tapes were still being manufactured, were easy to get at actual stores, and didn’t cost weird high amounts yet. By 2012, when my machine wore out, none of this was true. A younger friend had to hunt around online to find me all my supplies: a used 4-track, some weird place that would make us tapes. It was literally easier to score weed, an illegal drug.

It’s often painful to watch an older artist devalue the context of the time they come from. They think it’s just them that’s important! It’s particularly awful when it has that keeping-up-with-the-times/“staying relevant” feel. E.g. the boomer in the 80s with new hair and a new jacket with, suddenly, drum machines and synth pads and no flowers in the chords anymore. Alternatively, it’s awful to watch an older artist figure out their folly and try to do a “classic” version of their brand, to do full-on fan service and get all the proper yesteryear stuff correct, down to the fonts. You can’t win. But, if you’re not trying to win, you can’t lose! I’m banking on basically nothing mattering except tone. If you detect fear of decline, desperation – if the dog smells you’re scared it’s gonna go after you.  If you’re David Lynch’s Return, you are the dog.

I got an iZotope Spire for free last year, through my partner’s sister who did some work for the company, and I’ve been using that since Valence With Tassels. It’s 8 tracks. A lot of stuff is easier than the 4-track, but there’s stuff I did on 4-track – e.g. pitch control and E.Q. stuff – that it doesn’t have. (I dreamed of being able to record a pitched-up voice again just last night.) It also doesn’t allow for looping; I still have to play stuff I want to repeat over and over, which I actually enjoy. My friend teased me in an email yesterday about how scary it would be when I advanced the next step up to Garageband, how radically wide my palette would get. I don’t know if it’s a contrarian thing or reverse snobbery, but I do like recording albums on machines that are really just meant for demos. Maybe a mix of a low pressure environment and wanting to do more with less? Anyway, besides some bugs and annoyances, I’m still on my honeymoon with the Spire and do not miss tapes.

Besides what may be very real financial barriers, do you have any aesthetic/artistic reasons for not recording in studios? As a student of jazz (generally a tradition where musicians show up and then the engineer captures the magic) does the concept of just focusing on performing and not the job of recording as well appeal to you?

There are two simple reasons I haven’t gone to a real studio.

1. Money.
2. I like layering it up alone, alone like a painter, alone like a writer.

There’s a feeling to the whirl and buzz of blowing my own mind in the “studio,” and it’s a solo thing. If I ever write something for live musicians it’ll be a different story, but my main jam is already this.

Lastly, do you have any personal goals for the coming years, and what has brought you hope for the future? 

For personal goals, I do have one, but first I should say: wow, it’s really secondary to all this stuff happening in the U.S. and world right now. Firstly, I hope I don’t die of Covid before there’s a vaccine, and I hope we get Trump out of office with the minimum violence to our norms, and the minimum straight-up violence. Pet issues of mine are

1. I really want everyone to get a Universal Basic Income – that you wouldn’t have to pay with your freaking life for failing to properly compete in the random lottery of this dumb capitalist game
2. I want musicians to stop touring all the time because it’s destroying the climate. I don’t want it to go back to normal after Covid. If we pay musicians for their recordings, they might have the option to stay home for environmental/moral reasons. (What Spotify is doing should be illegal.) Etc., etc., etc.

Personally though, God willing, I’d like to live in a modest house with a little building in the yard that I can practice and record in. In Brattleboro so I can still walk everywhere. With my partner Ruth Garbus. Neither renting or buying anything like that are options right now, but in 5 years when I turn 50, that’d be really nice and cool. Our apartment now (we both rent separate studios) is too small for a cat. There is a constant battle with traffic sound when I’m recording in my studio downtown. I would like a modest piano. I’d like to make – this is a genuinely tall order – a middle-class income just from writing and recording music. All this said, yes, I know I am already very privileged. And it might well be true that these were the salad days! But I’ll risk answering you honestly. I do have a fantasy. I would trade it in a heartbeat for my fellow Americans to stop being tortured and murdered by the police, for the world to dissolve its borders, for women and LGBTQ people to live without fear and harassment and worse, for musicians to wake up and stop pretending climate change is only a “systemic” problem, and so on and so on. But I want a cottage behind the main house, a little dream world for my later years. If that is not my fate, it’s really alright. It’s in God’s hands. It’s very awkward here pivoting between these inequivalent dimensions, but it feels better than avoiding the dissonance through a trick of the writing. The truthful answer is an active mess.

Finally, we have five recommendations from Chris

1. For readers with addiction issues, I’d like to recommend Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel. Her extremely clear depiction (and personal story) of the checkmate of addiction, the mechanics of the impossibility of gaming yourself out of it and coming out on top, has helped me immeasurably. Many little whiffs of drug fantasy fizzle in the face of what I learned there.
2. John Ashbery, John Ashbery, John Ashbery. Celebrated “enough” already, but whatever switched in me with his work 7 years ago, or whenever it was, has switched for good. Every poem, every line = PARADISE. I love him so much. I just finished Flow Chart, a book-length poem from 1991, recently. I read it very slowly, always at night, over the course of a year or something. It feels like he is able to say many unsayable things in there, at the edge of sense, things I feel like I know about but only Ashbery can almost reach. (Ashbery died the same day as Walter Becker (I am an enormous Steely Dan fan), the night the final episodes of the aforementioned Return were posted.)
3. Wayne Shorter Atlantis. 1985. On the cover he is rendered in colored pencil wearing a tank top and a mustache. He was 52, making something so strange and beautiful and complex and requiring radically more work than the famous perfect sheets he wrote for Miles’s magical 60s quintet. The first song is performed in part by a programmed Synclavier, and though much of the album is live musicians, the threshold experience with the automation seems to seep across the whole like the fingers of a new funk, a new light. The writing and soprano saxophone are incredible. There are songs with singing that are so amazing I almost have to block them out to protect myself. This is a classic elitist, ironic choice, but I also choose all the universally beloved Wayne. I love Wayne Shorter and I hope he lives forever.
4. Roswell Rudd Flexible Flyer. 1974. In the 90s, my younger brother Kurt was given an enormous vinyl collection of trombone LPs by his trombone teacher, Dave Ervin. Flexible Flyer is indescribable, very weird, and we were obsessed with it. I always picture it being recorded in Maine and that may be true; Rudd used to teach there. The album features, alongside Rudd’s trombone and sometimes singing, an unbelievable vocal performance by Sheila Jordan throughout. She takes solos and sings in a way that is very hard to describe, but is very, very beautiful and psychedelic and heart expanding. There’s a song called Waltzing in the Sagebrush that I believe is by the piano player. You can play it when I die please. On one hand, this is jazz deeply steeped in African American tradition, and on the other, this white band feels like they’re making rural New England music of the future – mixing jazz, song, and downstream of the 60s – in some barn. That last part might just be projection, but in any case, please listen to this album. Microtonal music, and dynamic to the max. The opening track alone will help you answer the question that the title begs: What Are You Doing With the Rest of Your Life?
5. I’ll leave you with two scales:

New Major: D E Gb G A B played in the context of F, over an F and C open-fifth: 6 7 b2 2 3 #4

New Minor: F Ab Bb C Db Eb played in the same context as above: 1 b3 4 5 b6 b7

Another way to think about it is D Major (no 7) over F & Ab Major (no 7) over F. These are

1. The same scale a tritone apart
2. “Compliments”: together they cover all 12 pitches and do not share any pitches. This “Major” and “Minor” are more radically dualistic in this way. The “New Major” is a stretch, but a beautiful one!