Want to follow up on Magik Markers' "theories of effective sound formulation," as Pete put it. Seems like you're chasing doubt, uncertainty, a dreamlike state—all of which I get from listening to the record, for sure. . . Is there an elaboration to be made as to the relation of improv to the songs on Boss, which sound more composed?
Pete: Yeah there was a while a few years back when Elisa would go on live about finding your locomo... Fear... fear was our locomo. Like we had our backs to the wall and we got all pokey with sharp sticks. I personally didn't want to have anything on this record that wouldn't sound right in a dream. It was pretty easy to hear a sound that wasn't right and eliminate it. In a way it was easy to know what to do. The songs are indeed composed. The pieces were made together out of many forms as well as improvised parts until they fitted just right. Fitted and re-fitted again. The only thing we really knew from the start though was the words. The feeling of the record flowed out from that. There was a while there when I thought the record would come out to dark, but I think that there are islands of relief in there. Anyway, this is just what we did naturally as a result of being put in this position. We'd been thinking about it for a long while and then we did it. We've been thinking for a while about how sounds can evoke feelings and trying to come up with new ones. That's the myopic vision Elisa was talking about. Always churning under the only earth we know.
Who you imagine this music to be for—do you have an audience in mind when you work?
Pete: Well, this time Elisa and I wanted to make a record that we would want to listen to again and again. I think we succeeded on that goal. I can't wait to have the actual thing to listen to in its finished form. We took time to make it and for me it's stood up well. I think it would be really cool if this record was heard by some kids in the middle of America. I wanted to make something that they could really dream on and get deep into. Unlock some code in their brains that will open them up to trying to find out where our stuff came from. I know it meant a lot to me to get snapshots of other worlds when I was growing up in the middle of nowhere in Michigan. I got excited real early.
I remember seeing you guys play Reena Spaulings a couple months back, and how different the reactions of, say, J. Mascis and Kim Gordon were to those of the artists gathered there, who frankly looked a bit horrified, or intimidated, or scared...
Pete Nolan: We were kind of working it out at that one. Seems like it'd be harder than that to shock a bunch of artists in New York doesn't it? I guess that's why they had us confined behind the sawhorses.
Wanted to ask about the lyrics, which you both say were the start of the record really. Seems like there's almost a mythology there—a pretty dark one too, lotta death, rot, decay. I spot what I think are references to serial killers like Ted Bundy ("Taste"), but also some stuff like Updike ("Four/The Ballad of Harry Angstrom"), right? Wonder if you guys imagine a consistent thread being pulled through the whole album? Or whether each song constitutes a kind of isolated incident. . . Certainly the *feeling* the whole album promotes as a whole has a lot of consistency to it—a kind of queasy, discomfiting consistency.
Elisa: When I was writing that verse I was thinking of Ted Hughes’ “Birthday Letters.” It is meant to be a song for the bush league batters, the song about the people too good or too weak for their own good, who didn’t or don’t watch out for themselves in the world. Gene Clark was someone like that, he gave so much of this light and this beauty out, and I feel like never got back what he gave. The world kind of wasted Gene Clark. The world kind of wasted Peter Laughner. Phil Ochs. My father is a man like that. People who don't know their value. There are voracious people in the world, who are unselfconscious in what they take and never say thank you. Vulnerable people are often surrounded by these voracious people. If you can be an artist and voracious in that way, you can often be very successful. The survivors are not wasted by this world. People like Bob Dylan or Keith Richards or Leni Riefenstahl or Norman Mailer, they don’t do a lot of apologizing or pussy footing or saying thank you. The world does not lay waste to them, they built bulletproof skins, or they were born with them. Ted Hughes as well. These are not the people “Taste” is about. It is about the ones who shoot and miss, the ones who never even had it in them to shoot. The people too good, or too weak for this world. I am neither.
Harry Angstrom for me is an ultimate American. In the finest sense that we can be Amercian as well as the worst sense. I think my idea of the American character is that we possess almost all of humanity’s best and worst traits helium pumped to Macy’s Float size: that is Harry Angstrom. I love his optimism and his complacency and his nostalgia and his constant motivations being only fear, sex and death at all times. He is joy-filled and horrifying all at once, completely empathic and callously diffident at all turns. He takes no blame and takes all the blame. I think Harry Angstrom is a more true portrait of the American man/woman of the late 1950’s early 1960’s than Sal Paradise for sure, and holds true now. Because Harry gets in his car and tries to go, but cannot. Misreads the map. Gets lost. Needs gas. Misses home. He is our optimism and our failure to act on our intentions, our fear trapped in our mouths. Finding our joy and freedom in moments instead of in the way we live our lives: when Harry grabs the Reverend's wife's ass or orders a Daiquiri. I think of him as a great hero of American fiction, like Bartleby, or a Horatio Alger character, but Harry never gets any credit. His beauty gets no acknowledgment. No one reads the Rabbit books anymore, or not to the extent they should be read. Updike, perhaps rightfully so considering his Richard Bach books and all those key party couple explorations, got marginalized and labeled ‘un-cool’ and sexist. He, like any great artist transcends his human weaknesses in his art, possibly even despite himself. I think Harry Angstrom deserves a ballad like any other tragic hero.