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WILL: Are you in Boston?
RICHARD DAVIES: Yeah, I live in Boston at the moment. I’m working on my frickin’ masterpiece.
W: You’re working on your frickin’ masterpiece?
RD: Yeah. I am, actually.
AG: You’re doing something you like more than anything you’ve done before?
RD: Yeah, I am. I don’t know why. Although I’ve liked certain things in the past about stuff I’ve done, like every record has had songs on it I’ve liked, I feel like this is the first record - if anyone lets me record it, no one might ever let me record it - where it feels like really me making the record, as opposed to the record making me. I don’t know what it’s like for other songwriters, but [in the past] it was almost like when I’d write songs and then hear them on the record, I’d be getting some sense of myself from the songs. Like "Ah, gee, that’s where I was at at that point! Oh, I see."
I suppose one product of getting older that has been really useful has been being able to be more at ease with myself. I think I’ve done enough stuff, you know, written enough songs, that I’m not so curious about "what is it I’ve done?" I really don’t feel like that this time around. It’s a good feeling, it’s kind of a productive feeling, for me.
W: Do you mean that this time you’re more conscious of what you’re doing as it happens?
RD: You know, this is what I think it is: I’ve been here seven years now, and I think I, when I first got here, was quite happy to just let the music I made be some kind of a record of my experience of this country, as a new American. So the records I’ve done and the songs that I’ve liked from each record in particular, the reason I like them is because they seem to me to have been an accurate diary...of my journey. And I just feel now like I’m not so much trying to do that as going "enough of an an American attitude is in me... [so that] rather than going ‘c’est la vie, I wrote a good song and I liked it’ and then get beaten and tossed around, it’s more like ‘fuck this! I’m either not going to make a record or I’ll make it exactly how it should be. If it takes six months of if it takes six years’" And I think I would never have really thought about music that way if I hadn’t spent these last few years in America, because I think this is the only place where you can really think like that and end up getting somewhere behaving like that. [Laughs] You know? It rewards that way of approaching creating stuff: being really pig-headed about it.
In the past I’ve been really stubborn about writing a song that I liked. Still, half the time it doesn’t work out how I want it. But as soon as I knew I had a song that I liked, whether it was "Transcontinental" or it was "Chips Rafferty" or "Christmas Trees" or "You’ve Lost Me There," or "Big Mink," or "Cars for Kings Cross," any of the songs I’ve really thought worked, as soon as that song was done I felt my job was done.
I’m trying to describe [it], because you caught me at a time when I’m sitting by lyrics and music and the whole thing, right in the middle of dozens and dozens of songs…trying to get a really specific idea about where I want to take them. I just feel very different about it this time. I know that if this was two or three years ago I’d be thinking "Well, I’ve got a song here called ‘Oscar Traffic,’ I’ve got a song here called ‘Inner Series Reaching Out.’ All right, I’ve got maybe two chords to go and my job is over." I just don’t feel like that about it now. I think that my job will be over on those songs when they feel like much more than just the lyrics and the music I’ve written for them. When they’re coming out of the speakers. I think that that’s been my thing that I’ve learned by trial and error. And I don’t know what that will take, other than probably a lot of patience.
W: When you say "no one might let me record it," what do you mean? Do you mean that it’s just going to be difficult to execute, or do you mean you might have a hard time finding a record label?
RD: Well, I really have no interest in having to not make exactly the record I want to make. So that’s me drawing a pretty hard line. I’m not going to do anything in a piecemeal fashion. So that might mean I never get to make another record, because whoever agrees to work with me is going to have to give me the money that I want, they’re going to have to let me do what I want. Because that’s the only way I could foresee doing it.
There have been two or three records where I was thinking..."I want to just get into a studio at any cost." That is very much a product of the time that I grew up in. In the late 80s and early 90s I was a punk. I still probably am a punk, in the way I think about music. And so a big part of the thing was that, even though the Moles really didn’t know what the hell we were doing, we just wanted to get into a studio and experiment with it. And there have been two or three times where I’ve repeated that process. For example, the Kindercore record; I’d come off a bunch of touring, about four months of touring, and I had two or three songs that I liked that I just really just wanted to experience getting into a studio really quickly, straight after touring, which is something I’ve never really done before. So, to me, there was maybe "Palo Alto" and a song called "Stars" on that record that worked exactly as I thought they might if I’d just come off touring, where I could get the feeling and the complete picture that made me feel happy about the songs just by playing an acoustic guitar on a couple of tracks. That was part of my learning process. But I just feel like there’s a whole lot more that I’d want to do if I was going to be bothered making any more records. So I’ve gathered up that experience of making the Barbarians record and even [the Moles’] Instinct, which is a really loopy record but was kind of an important part of me learning how things worked in studios, I’ve done all that and now it’s like "All right, now I’m gonna either do something that’s for me, the real deal, with no compromise, or not bother to do it at all. Because I really don’t see the point in...having to unnecessarily compromise."
W: You’re talking about earlier songs just being a kind of snapshot of where you were, a picture of Richard Davies right then. Does that mean that you tend to write in a narrative style? That your songwriting is more personal as opposed to character- or story-based?
RD: It starts out as narrative and personal, and I think the songs that don’t work quite as well stay that way. The songs that I like more are songs that start out personal but then I don’t quite understand what they’re about. The thing is, if you write a song you’ve got to sing it over and over, so often if I’m writing something I think "Oh man, I couldn’t be bothered singing that again, ever!" And I think that’s time to change that song.
W: On the subject of America and being an American: the cover of Barbarians features a red, white and blue top hat, and the songs have titles like "Palo Alto" and "Great Republic." Is the album a tongue-in-cheek concept piece about Americans as barbaric, or are you casting yourself as the conquering barbarian?
RD: That’s why I like the title – ‘cause I don’t really know what it means myself. It could be exactly what you said, both sides of the coin. I really don’t know exactly what it means. Sometimes I feel it’s one thing, sometimes I feel it’s the other. I felt, after I did all of the touring on the Telegraph record, like a barbarian, because I felt like I was just traveling constantly. Songs like "Palo Alto" are just about what it’s like to drift through San Francisco really quickly and really not know much about the place, but pass through it. And that’s pretty much how I felt for a period of four months. So I suppose the word’s referring to me and the band that I was playing with more than anything else.
AG: Are you touring for Barbarians?
RD: No. That was the whole reason I did it with Kindercore, because they said "you can make an album and you don’t have to play any shows." I knew that once I’d done that record I was going to want to hunker down and go back to thinking about music in my own little room for quite awhile and not have to worry about the logistic of bands and personalities and all the rest of it, the inevitable consequence of being on tour. You know, I would love to tour, but I really feel like it’s going to be something that comes after the next record I do. I would love to do a lot of touring after the next record, because I figure that it would be something that, at that point, would make a lot of sense. But I really felt like I just needed time to live a little bit of a life, because after the Cardinal record and then through the first two solo records and all the touring I did there wasn’t much left of my own life. It was just all musical stuff all the time. And I think I like music too much to have wanted to continue on that track. I really love music, and so I figured "the best way to serve it at this point is to get a life as well." That’s my plan, so I’m sticking with it.
W: If you were to go on tour for Barbarians there would also be the whole insanity factor of singing songs about being on tour while you’re on tour.
RD: Well, I would like to play some of those songs like a lot. I like the song "Stars," I think it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever written. It feels really natural for me to play that song. It’s really easy for me to make it sound like I want to. There are songs that I’ve written which are really too tough to even attempt to play live, let alone feel comfortable playing them night after night, because sometimes they sound all right and sometimes they sound like real crap. But when I play that song I don’t have to even concentrate to make it sound like it is on the record, and to me, as a musician, that kind of tells me something. It was done in one take – most of the songs on that record were done in a take – and it was finished in three days. Even though it’s got a lot of rough edges and it’s not really produced at all, it’s still quite musical.
So it’s almost like I’ve hoarded up these secrets that I didn’t have when I first got to America. And that’s kind of part of my plan. And now what I’m doing, by going into my little hut and hiding, is another part of my plan: being around for as long as I can, because I like music and I’m still learning.
AG: You’ve said that you’re much more a songwriter than a musician, and that your interest in Brian Wilson’s music is more about songcraft than sounds. What kind of songwriting elements make up the kind of pop songs that you love to hear again and again?
RD: The thing is, it’s really tough to write the melody. The best music these days is rarely about melody - I like that Moby record a hell of a lot, I really have a lot of admiration for him and that record – but, even so, I was listening to these records as a kid, that I liked, the same as everybody else: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and all that stuff [for the melodies].
I bought this "Classic Country" compilation that you see on TV - you know, the 800 number and you ring up Nashville or wherever it is and they send you out Classic Country – and of course a lot of it is rubbish, but a lot of it is incredible music with great melodies…The theme for me in music, that I probably got from my parents, because they were Welsh and they love to sing Welsh hymns and stuff, is the emotion in the melody. It’s very, very hard to do that. Getting a melody that works is not really confined to a genre. It’s almost the most rebellious thing you can do, for me, even though included in what I’ve just said are a lot of songs that most people wouldn’t associate with being rebellious at all. By its nature, writing the melody is seen as sentimental and sweet and all the rest of it. [But] melody is the thing that appeals to me. It’s a really enjoyable experience to listen to melody. People like good songs, and good songs used to be based around melody. I don’t really think that many songs get written these days anyway. Usually, stuff that works is stuff that is a composite of different things. It could be samples, you know...
The hardest thing to do is write good melodies, and I’m very aware that I don’t succeed every time I do it. I might succeed a third of the time or less, but that’s what I’m shooting for. That’s my territory, I suppose.
W: I think that one of the things that makes old folk songs so perennially singable is that they have melodies that you never get tired of, because a lot of the emotion and lyricism is actually in the melody.
RD: Yeah. I think you’re exactly right about that. [Melody] is like a color that painters would use and a certain painter might strike upon a combination of colors at some point in the history of painting, in the 19th century or 1922, whatever the hell it would be, and that might get a lot of peoples’ attention for a short time…For me, melody is like a color that artists and listeners and the public has kind of grown accustomed to not really hearing that much or not really seeking out. I think in the 60s and the 70s and even the 80s, people would be sitting, tapping their foot with their arms folded, going "where’s a good song, where’s a good song? Oh, that’s a good song. I’ll go buy that." You know? And I’m still there. I’m still listening for that color, and I think always will. If I still manage to still be writing songs when I’m eighty years old, that’s what I’ll be assuming when I pick up a guitar or sit at a piano.
W: You've said that you like books and paintings as much as music. What are you reading right now?
RD: There’s a book by Bill Bryson I’m reading…a book about about Australia called Down Under. I actually had to rush back to Australia recently for a short period of time. Just before I started reading this one, I was reading the book that he wrote about coming back to America after living in England for a long time. So I could kind of relate to that one, too. I’ve been interested in finding out what his perspectives on Australia and America were.
I’m trying to write a song right now which has got me really confused. I’m writing out words, and some of them, I know, are about Australia. There’s a line that goes "Red dust in green air." That’s the first line of the song, and I know I’m singing about Australia because that’s what I was looking at when I was there about two weeks ago. But then there’s other stuff in the song where I know it’s really writing about America. I really think that might be a complete dead end, that song, but I would love to try to make that kind of a thing work. But, God almighty, I don’t know. That might be a little bit too tough.
W: When you say "that kind of a thing" you mean writing a song that blends two places?
RD: A song [in which] you could talk about more than one place at once, and it still really rings, it still makes sense. I think, with "Palo Alto," some of those words worked to describe a place, a single place, and my view on it as I was passing through it...[With Australia], basically, you know, I was on trains and planes for two days: going all the way across Australia on a train and then getting a plane back from L.A. to Boston having not been in America for a couple of weeks and being very busy while I was away. So I was looking out the window of the plane and I could see the desert in Nevada, and it was red, baked clay, and then it was the Rockies, and the Grand Canyon just before the Rockies, and then this forest, you know, that they’ve cut all the cities out of in the Northeast. It’s a forest and people cut into the forest and then started getting really stressed out in big cities in the Northeast, you know? And I saw all of that in a very short space of time; you know, like literally twenty-four hours after being in the middle of the Outback looking at red dust in the green air of the trees, [I was] sitting in this plane looking at the Grand Canyon, and so I got this really strong sense of how I really loved both of those places. And I don’t know, right now I’m trying to write a damn song about that feeling. It’s not easy to do. I don’t know, it could work. I figure in order to make that work I’ve probably got to include some stuff in there about something that has nothing to do with looking at the places. So I don’t know what that’s going to be yet. [laughs]
W: You mean, like some kind of action that brings them together?
RD: Maybe. You know what I think will help is [pauses] time. Time will help.
W: So you kind of work on a song bit by bit and not in one big burst?
RD: I tend to write bit by bit and write on dozens of songs at once, but usually if I get something I end up liking and keeping it comes very quickly. Like, this song I’m talking to you about, it’s had four or five names already, but when I get whatever it is that works it will come quickly. There might be three or four movements in a song, probably each one of those would have come really quickly, but each one of those would have occurred at long distances of time separate to each other, and it’s been a case of sitting back and being patient, and just waiting and waiting until I can see a pattern emerge between good ideas that had happened a long time apart. You know, having to talk about what I do with writing songs is not an easy thing. It’s harder than writing them, really….
The best thing that anybody said to me about writing songs was when I was living in upstate New York three years ago. I was walking the dog along the river up there in the mountains, and it was very peaceful, and there was an old couple, they must have been 75 years old, a husband and wife, and I was sitting next to them on this bench and the wife said to me "what do you do?" At that time I was recording Telegraph, and I said "I’m making music and recording and stuff." And she said "Oh, my husband is a sculptor." He was kind of a grumpy old guy and he didn’t really say anything to me, but he said one thing to me before I left, and that was "If you want to be an artist, you have to have patience. You don’t really need anything else." That’s something that made a lot of sense to me. Because even before I came to America and was writing "What’s the New Mary Jane," which is probably my favorite Moles song, that song took two years to write if I really think about it. So I think that’s a really important thing to learn.
If you think about why people write songs, even people who like music and do it for the music’s sake, people do it to get famous. Even someone like me, I think "Shit, I’ve written some music I like. Goddamn it, I want as many people as possible to like it." That’s a natural human state to be in: to want to be famous. Certainly being in America, too, where it’s such an industry. Sometimes I get the impression from people that I’ve come across that they can’t understand what the hell I’m motivated by. [Laughs] They assume, naturally, that I’d be in an enormous hurry to try any way I could to get famous. And, you know, I’d like to be famous, I suppose - I don’t even know if I’d want to be, actually - but I really do this because I love music. And I really don’t know what to say beyond that. That’s why I think I feel a bit uncomfortable doing interviews, because I like to talk about music and stuff but I’m kind of self-indulgent about music: I can only do it for my own pleasure, my own sake.
W: You stopped studying law in Australia, but have just recently started again. Is that true?
RD: That’s right.
W: So you’re going to keep playing music and become the Wallace Stevens of indie rock?
RD: I was at law school in Australia and when I left Australia I was 27 or 28 years old, and it was a case of "am I going to bother making any records in my life or am I not?" A big thing to do in Australia is to get a backpack on and go to Europe for six months. Everybody does it - it’s like some kind of finishing school for people; they get up with a backpack and go off to Italy or wherever it is. And I really never was interested in that, but I was really getting down to the point where I just had to decide if I wanted to just be a lawyer in Australia right then or make some music. And I thought "I think I want to make some music for a few years." So that’s exactly what I did.
So now I’m going to just carry on from this point with the rest of my life. I like law. Between Cardinal and Telegraph, that period of time where I really wasn’t doing anything except music, I would sit at home and I would stew and I would wonder what the hell I should be doing, and it just doesn’t suit my personality. To sit at home and loll around all day, every day, it’s great fun for a period of time, but I’m kind of a Type A personality, so I suppose that’s why I ended up deciding "okay, I’ve made some music and I like some of it, and now I‘ll go do school and I’ll be a lawyer and I’ll have a job." I don’t know what the hell I’ll do in the future. I might go off and do a record and enough people might like it that I don’t have to work except for music, but I’m not going to sit around relying on that. And I like what I’ve done, so my sense of self-respect doesn’t really come from whether other people like me, but if I like me. It was part of the thing of having a life outside music.
I saw a lot of things when I was on the road. It’s very glamorous to look at it from the outside, but I met people who were "famous" and I met people from all angles of the entertainment industry, not just the music industry, in France and London and L.A. and New York and whatever, and you can see a pattern there, you can see people kind of hanging around, and they get into drugs, they get into hard drugs, because they’re anaesthetizing themselves to the extreme pain of realizing how desperate they are. That wasn’t exactly something I was in love with, being around that kind of a scene permanently. And I’m re-iterating; I love music, so the best thing for me to do, if I love music that much, is to get away from this kind of a scene.
W: Well, when I say "the Wallace Stevens of indie rock" I mean it respectfully: Wallace Stevens is great, and one of the things that’s so great about him is that he doesn’t have the attitude of the "poet;" he just seems like a lawyer who every now and then writes a great poem. I’ve always been intrigued by people who take a workmanlike attitude towards making art.
RD: Yeah, why not? I relate and I know that a lot of the musicians and writers and characters that I’ve loved have been totally self-destructive. There’s a lot of romance in reading about strangers whose lives are like that. I have a self-destructive part of my personality, like most people do, but it’s not overwhelming, so I’m not going to be like that. I had the opportunity to be like that, and I though "Nah, that’s not for me."
I figure my only responsibility, ultimately, is to live my life and hopefully now and again come up with a decent song, cause I can’t come up with a decent book or a decent painting cause I can’t bloody do it. I think I’d prefer to be able to do that if I could do it. But now and again I might come up with a half-decent song, so I think my responsibility ends with that.
Listen to mp3s by Richard Davies (from Audiogalaxy.com):
from Barbarians
Stars
interview used by permission of Audiogalaxy.com
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