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Are they musical ones or otherwise?
Everybody ...
Because a lot of the things that probably stick in my mind when it's TV are things that you haven't seen because they're things that I grew up with that never got shown outside England. I better limit myself to ones your audience will recognize. Do I have to pick one of each, or shall we talk for a moment and you decide which are the ones to put the most emphasis on?
Actually it's about you.
Oh, sorry, I'm completely round backwards. I thought you were asking me who I thought was best.
No, that would be interesting, but...
God, I'm completely ass-backwards with this, aren't I? I thought it was like you were ringing round to ask people who they thought were the great singers or actors of the century... See, you can recommend that to the editor now.
If you have a nomination, we'll take it.
Louis Armstrong... So what question you gonna ask me?
If you were involved in compiling the best-of, and if so, any feelings that came up.
Yes, I mean, it was a good opportunity... I mean, there's boring sort of business stuff behind it, because I sold out my interest in Demon Records, which is the record label which currently has the rights to my early catalogue, up to when I signed to Warner Bros. at the end of the '80s. And when all of the directors — Jake Riviera and Lou Difford? and myself — sold our interest in the company, the new company part of the deal was the new company were obliged to consider a repromotion of the catalogue, focusing on a best-of.
And it seemed about time, because although we'd had a TV-advertised best-of in the '80s, I mean, obviously I'd made a lot of records since then, and for reasons best known only in Burbank, the Warner Bros. catalogue is mostly deleted now — including the compilation that I put together when I left that label. So it's actually quite difficult to get any of the stuff from the last 10 years.
So I thought this was a pretty good opportunity, and at least in England we were able to license a few songs from the Warner Bros. records, just the ones that I thought maybe kind of told the tale best, you know.
And we had the good fortune of having had a Top 20 single immediately before the release of the album, which meant that I was in this bizarre situation where the compilation entered the charts at No. 4, and was outselling Whitney Houston and Ricky Martin. Completely unexpected. So I'm quite glad that, those things having happened, that I did get involved to the extent I did.
I didn't annotate this one, because I had annotated most of the reissues I'd done before. I did sort of... I mean, the first disc kind of chooses itself, because they're most of the early hit singles or notable tracks from the albums.
There's probably a couple of early songs missing that I felt there could be too much emphasis on the first album if a couple other songs were in there. And then other songs that had either been the lead, the notable track in my opinion from an album — whether or not they were singles — culminating in the recent successes.
And then on the second disc I put what I thought were really the other really strong songs, very few of which have been singles. So that
one was to sort of, maybe to... for the people buying it for the first time. You've got to imagine that there are always new people hearing your name for the first time, because they're younger or they caught on because of Painted from Memory, because of the song "She," which was a hit in England. I wanted them to be able to hear the songs that I felt were among the strongest.
Again, you could go on forever when you're trying to program a 2-CD thing and you're coming down from nearly 20 albums, it's quite difficult. Particularly when licensing matters deny you the right to just choose absolutely at will. But I'm pretty satisfied that it shows a good balance of the best stuff, you know.
The song sequence makes some sense, so I figured you must have been involved.
Yeah, I tried to make it so that it did flow quite well and there weren't too many jarring things. Even though things weren't always put chronologically, there were songs that were related in outlook — like songs like "Shipbuilding" and "Tramp the Dirt Down" were put close together, and some of the romantic ballads from the middle past, from things like "Indoor Fireworks," were put next to "God Give Me Strength," as a way of saying sort of like, "This may sound different musically, but emotionally I've been here before, in a different way," rather than it necessarily seeming like, if you put "God Give Me Strength" next to "Pump It Up," it sounds eccentric, you know. So it's just to make it so people can listen to it and find their way through it.
And it's a lot of music; it's 42 tracks. There's an international edition — I mean, outside of America, that is — that's a single album, because of the licensing issue. And I hope to resolve this sort of crazy situation we have here where the Warner Bros. material is both deleted, unavailable, and prohibitively expensive every time I try to license it from them. It's almost as if they're holding the music ransom. I don't think... I'm not trying to be melodramatic about it. I don't think they're doing it deliberately, I just think it's inept — as so many things are in major corporations. It serves nobody's purposes if music is not even paying for itself. It's already all recorded, I don't understand why it's not available, you know.
So I'm hoping to find — because obviously at the end of this year, I'm looking for a new home for the catalogue that I own, and it might be an opportunity even to unify the situation and have all of the records at one label — or at least have them all available... or in some sort of modified form. I'm not even certain they all should be available, but I would like to be able to make that choice, not some bureaucrat.
So you own the pre-Warner Bros. stuff?
I own the pre-Warner Bros., and I will in time own the Universal records. The one mistake I made was to cede the ownership of the Warner Bros. catalogue, that won't revert to me, which I think is immoral. There, I've said it. But I'm willing to negotiate with them, and I'm very willing to buy it from them, but they're not looking to sell it to me right now.
I also think that there's not such a lot of sort of sentiment for records in the middle of somebody's career as there is for the records at the beginning, and often you get that sort of sentiment returning once you've got 20 years on you.
I find that people seem to be more emotional about the recent work I've done than the work I did 10 years ago. And I don't think it's necessarily so much better. It's different, but I think that might have to do with the fact that people assume you can't be good for 20 years.
Or you do something other than they're expecting, and then after a while they realize, "Oh, well, that's actually what this guy does — he keeps doing different things. He doesn't keep doing the same thing." And there's not as much reaction to it these days. I don't know whether you've noticed that in relation to my career, but there's not as much negative reaction to me doing something different, like in Painted from Memory, which is radically different than the music I
started with, as there was when I did The Juliet Letters.
I would say they're records of equal worth and quality, but when The Juliet Letters came out, it was as if I'd gone out of my mind or something, in some quarters — critically, I'm talking about. And likewise Mighty Like a Rose and other records like that, I got this sort of alarmed reaction. And I suppose that even happened way back when I went to Nashville in 1981 or whenever it was.
So it's something that happens, and then people get used to it, and you realize that nothing is that extreme. I mean, I'm not making Metal Machine Music, am I? So I mean, it's nice when somebody comes and tells you, "You know, actually, that record which escaped many people's attention is actually my favorite." There's always somebody who's taken it right into their heart and understood everything you were trying to do.
I'm one of those who's partial to Mighty Like a Rose and Punch the Clock, which I know are a couple of people's least favorites of yours.
Yeah, I always say Punch the Clock is not a favorite of mine, but it has "Shipbuilding" and "Pills and Soap" on it, which is worth the price of admission alone. I mean, that's better than most people's albums, those two tracks — he said modestly. And there's one or two good pop songs on there; "Everyday I Write the Book"'s not a bad tune.
And Mighty Like a Rose has got "Candy" on it, which again is a really good song, a pretty good record. There's one or two other things. "Couldn't Call It Unexpected" I would say is the best melody I've ever written, so there again, if you miss that album, then you're missing the best tune I've ever written in 20 years.
That's sometimes the way it goes, though. Some of the really good songs are on B-sides, as we know, and it's not just me, it's lots of artists that you like, that I liked over the years, I've found their best stuff is one track on an otherwise not fabulous album. And maybe the freedom to go that way that took 'em away from the pop hothouse allowed them to do that one beautiful thing, you know.
The period in the '80s when you were frustrated that people had an image fixed in their minds of you circa This Year's Model.
I did a few things to sort of try and throw them off the scent. Change my name, change it back. Disband the group that I played with, for two reasons — I didn't do it out of a sense of perversity, I did it because the band wasn't sounding the way I thought it should, and I heard sounds in another way; that's why I made King of America. Then I had the opportunity to really go to town with... It was like being an independent, making King of America at the tail end of a record contract, the tail end of a recording relationship with Columbia, and then sort of coming...
It was almost like I became a big-budget filmmaker for two albums, when I did Spike and Mighty Like a Rose; they were expensive records to make. A lot of experiments in them, some of which I think stand the test of time, some of which obviously don't — but were worth making.
And then it put me in a situation where I could see what I wanted to do next, which was The Juliet Letters, and from that Brutal Youth. And each thing now has led on. So again, I think it's that thing... There was a period of time when I was frustrated that people didn't sort of seem to... Record company people, critics, and to some extent that generated in the audience a feeling of restlessness that I wasn't making records like I used to make. And yet I could always say "Well, yeah, but those records weren't that successful. What is this sort of golden age that we think we were living in?"
I agree, the records that I started out with were pretty good. But not everybody had 'em. They weren't like huge, huge hits, so there isn't any fear in wanting to do something different. I would've expected more criticism for trying to pedal the same record 15 times, you know, which some artists do, do very subtle variations on a theme — or not so subtle. But I think again, I've got over that, and I think to
a larger extent, the critical world's got over it, because they've got other people to beat up on.
And the public either doesn't give a damn, because they don't know my name and their interest lies elsewhere, or those that follow what I do have come to accept it, and they also pick and choose which records of mine they take home.
You've got to remember, for everybody who thought The Juliet Letters was an eccentric move, there were people for whom it was the first record with my name on they'd ever bought, and the very things about it that shut out people who liked "Oliver's Army," liked that because of the way it sounded. And those very same people were probably horrified by Brutal Youth, which had some characteristics that I did start with.
And while there was somebody saying "Oh, he's come to his senses and made a rock 'n' roll record," there were other people going "Well, what's that about?" So it's only if you want people to love you all the time that you should worry about these things. I think it's a revolving door, isn't it? The audience comes, and it's a revolving door, and it's not meant out of any disrespect to the audience. I'm really just glad as many people can hear the records as they can. But I do accept that I have the right to go and make the one that I want to make. And I believe that I can make it well enough to capture a new audience — if necessary, all new people. But at this stage, I don't think that's really very likely, that it's going to be all new people; there's always going to be some people coming with prior knowledge.
But inevitably, after 20 years, you're going to get some people who are younger and don't have the same sentimentality about those early records. I know that was the case when I played at Woodstock the other week. They had no idea about who I was, the audience — not the consensus. There was no consensus in the crowd about who I was and what they were expecting. The only song of mine that they recognized was "I'll Never Fall in Love Again." The big massive crowd only recognized the song from Austin Powers, because the age of the audience, they have no prior knowledge of my repertoire. And they were appreciative enough, and once we did the Austin Powers song, we could do no wrong. It was strange how that was the song that connected to the biggest...
You know, when you're playing with a backbeat on a festival stage, it's not all that hard to get people to throw their hands in the air and clap. But if you're out there with just a guitar and a piano, then every song just stands and falls on its own merits, and there's no sort of momentum of energy. You do require a few consolidating gestures to try to get the audience's attention, so you're all sort of focused in one way. And there's a tremendous amount of distractions somewhere like Woodstock. You've got the huge screens and TV cameras and girls taking their shirt off and everything, and you've got these comical situations where 90% of the audience is facing away from the stage. (chuckle) It was really very, very funny. But like I say, God bless Burt. It was his tune that sort of really turned the tide there.
It's gone from days where people are stuck with image of you in 1978 to a time when a generation of people think of you as romantic balladeer or the guy in front of the orchestra, because of "She" and the Bacharach record.
Yeah. And I'm quite ready for the next surprise, when it turns out that that isn't all I am. And some of those people will be pleasantly surprised to find out I do other types of music, and others will say, "Oh, why doesn't he do good old good ones like when he did that 'God Give Me Strength'?"
And I'll be getting stick from them for not singing romantic ballads, if my next record should be different or the next thing I'm gonna do is quite in a different bag. But that's what makes life interesting — you can't be staying with the same thing all the time.
I mean, I'm doing another tour starting in a couple of weeks, and because I felt a little bit cheated of the opportunity to play a full-length show in the
towns where I played the Fleadh — although I enjoyed playing the Fleadh, obviously I only got to play for an hour, and it was outside, and you can't create the same kind of mood as you can create in a theater.
And we had a couple of really good nights at the Wiltern, so although we're coming back to do another one there, I'll probably do quite a lot of different material that I didn't do in the previous shows. But when we go up to San Francisco, the people up there didn't see the Burt Bacharach tour and they didn't see this last tour — in full; they saw a festival set. So the people that know me there, I think they'll enjoy this show, whatever repertoire we play.
And I'm using this particular time in my career where there seems to be a little bit more focus on what I'm doing than there has been in a few years, maybe because of all these film things that I've been doing, to get back to a few cities I haven't been to for 10 or 15 years, like Kansas City and St. Louis, and down in Florida, I haven't played there for a while.
I've been to Texas more recently, but I'm going back to Texas and New Orleans and places like that, as well as the more typical cities that I play like Chicago and Boston and Philadelphia and New York. And each venue on the last trip around, I found that you were getting this kind of friendly conflict in the audience between the older listeners, who were obviously dying to hear a B-side from 1978, and the girls calling out for "She." Ricky Martin, watch out.
In terms of being a musical generalist, seems like a very different thing from now where we hear pop stars talking about reinventing themselves. I interviewed Christina Aguilera who's only 18 and already talking about how she wants to reinvent herself like Madonna.
But they take that in college now, don't they? They take that reinvention course in college. Reincarnation... It comes right along with thanking your accountant on your record sleeve, doesn't it? You know what I say, never trust people who... I don't trust too many Western people that go heavy on the Eastern vibe, you know. I'm always suspicious by that, myself.
And I think all that reinventing-yourself stuff, it may be true, you can do it, but I think it's become like another... It's an alibi. And it is, it's like something you learn in college. They're steely-eyed, some of these young kids, aren't they? I mean, they're much more career-minded. I remember getting a demo from somebody years and years ago, and this little kid was singing on it, and she had spoken on the demo — she was only a real little kid — and she said "I want to be a pop star." And I thought, well, at 10, you can think like that, because you don't know the difference. You just see something on the TV and think I wish I could be like that.
Then later on you realize that in order to be like that, or it used to be that in order to be like that, you had to actually learn something, like how to sing. Because as we all know, for quite some time now, it doesn't necessarily have to be that you know how to sing, if you look right and you're in the right place at the right time and you have the right sort of single-mindedness. And I can't find any fault with it.
In fact, a lot of the music I like right now is straight-up pop music. I don't hear too much rock 'n' roll that really... It's quite difficult to come up with a new spin on it. When I say pop, I like, I guess it's R&B. Those are the records that I like the most, because they're very fresh-sounding. I don't like sugary pop, kiddie pop. But I like things like TLC. I like them, I think they're ingenious. There's a little bulletin board thing going on there, girls telling guys where to get off. And the rhythmic thing that's going on is great, and the singing is outstanding. And they've got a hook that you can remember.
I can understand somebody coming up and hearing that stuff and thinking that they can do that. But also, for some reason, they've also got this idea that they've got to subscribe to all this career-minded stuff as well, I guess because there's an awful lot of people protest about
that, even in their songs. There's an awful lot of rap songs that talk about how famous they are or how bad they are. And I think that kind of brings about in the younger kids coming up that that's the thing to emulate; it's not like sing from the heart, it's to sing from the wallet. But I hope I don't sound like a fogey — "Oh, it was great in my day" — because it was a lot of old bollocks then as well. But it was a different kind of old bollocks. It's different times, we live in different times.
To the extent you did "reinvent" yourself from album to album, seemed to be a lot of stuff you had absorbed in your younger days bubbling up at different times.
Yes, you see, it's not a reinvention thing, because it was always there. It's just a question of where you place the emphasis or what use you make of what you've absorbed. I've absorbed, I realize now, perhaps an unusual amount of music at a very early age without ever formally studying music until comparatively recently.
And when I did formally study music, it was only to learn some very, very basic essentials of notation and the power to communicate on the page of music, because that was the place where I was, in terms of those were the people that I wanted to speak to next, musically, and be able to work with — not "I want to be like Madonna."
I want to be able to talk to some musicians who can play the thing that I'm imagining. And it was different when I could show it to them, play them a record that had the sort of feel I wanted, and then we'd go in with it and get a head (?) arrangement based on a 3-chord, 4-chord, 5-chord song. We're talking about some different colors and the necessity to be a bit more precise. It's not better, it's just different skills, and you have to accumulate them.
And I've accumulated all this sort of feeling for the music that I heard right from a tiny baby, really, and you just find there's a time in your life where, as you say, it either bubbles up, or you suddenly go "Ah, now I know why that is like it is, and what that needs to be, and if I did that in relation to this musical idea that I've got, this would be the result."
And that way life's much more thrilling, when you've got these things popping out — and also, bear in mind, keeping the door open for the new stuff to come in and also have that influence, not just sort of say "Well, I know everything because I'm already older than everybody else in the whole world." Which I am, already older than almost everybody else in pop music, give or take a few. And therefore I must know everything more than everybody else, which is nonsense. You should always be able to learn, and you should be prepared to learn from a brand new record by somebody who's 17, which you might be able to. You might not want to subscribe to everything about their way of life and what they believe in and this whole career-mindedness about it, but there might be one musical thing on it that's really worth your time and worth your attention and deserves your respect.
One other thing to touch on... some people see you as a synthesis of traditions the Beatles and Dylan represented. Some overlap there. You've worked with a Beatle and Dylan. Did you originally feel heir more to one of those traditions than the other?
No, I don't think I thought anything that presumptuous. That again... I think that we just live in more self-conscious times now. Because... I mean, I think the dominance of visual image upon the music scene, the popular music scene anyway, has the effect of either being like a sort of fun-fair crazy mirror, you know, house of mirrors, or like a giant mirror in a dressing room where you try on fancy clothes.
In other words, How would I look if I say this? You get that feeling of self-consciousness about so much music now, that people have their eye on their career and their place in... They're looking for respect before they've made two records and they're looking for posterity before they've had any history. I just don't think that people thought that way 20 years ago. I'm not,
again, saying that it was better then. I just don't think that I thought like that, and I still don't think I think like that. I mean, I actually don't give a damn about posterity. You know why? Because I'm gonna be dead, and I don't actually care what happens after that. In terms of like, you can burn all the records then, it doesn't make any difference to me, because I'll be dead, why do I care?
You know, I'm gonna enjoy the time I have, doing what I do, and for as long as I can get away — it makes it sound like it's a con trick I'm doing — but get away with not sort of playing the game the way some people seem to think it should be played, and just enjoying the ups and downs of the way I go about it... Of course you get frustrated and exasperated sometimes when it doesn't work out right, because you put a lot of work into it.
But ultimately I'm very fortunate, and some of the names you mentioned, to have worked at all with these people. People keep asking me "Who would you like to work with?" I'll say "For crying out loud..." Give or take a couple of obvious exceptions, I've written most of my songs alone, and one or two small collaborations, and an ongoing obvious potential to write songs around the house with my wife involved.
But the two major sit-down and work-at-it collaborations of my career are with Paul McCartney and Burt Bacharach. I mean, who else is there? What I'm waiting for is the knock on the door from somebody younger than me who wants to try to bridge that gap in another direction. There isn't anybody else. There's no other songwriter I can write with who is a natural collaborative-type songwriter, anyway. I mean, there's great people that are older than me that I admire still, but they don't need any... they don't work as collaborative songwriters, so it would be a shotgun wedding to try and work with them. I don't have this wish list, I never did. I never dreamed of working with Paul McCartney or Burt Bacharach, for the reason that I just said. I never saw it as like a continuum. I just thought, I do this.
I make no bones about "Pump It Up," this is related to "Subterranean Homesick Blues," as "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is related to "Too Much Monkey Business." But all three of them are original songs. None of them are so much in the debt of the other as to not have their reason to exist.
And "I'm a Loser" by John Lennon is clearly in the debt of Dylan, but it's still an original song. And "New Amsterdam" is in debt to "Hide Your Love Away" and Bob Dylan, but not so much as it makes it invalid as a song.
I think when it just becomes... when it's witlessly done, or done like "Yeah, we're like... (unit.), we've got cellos," then that's just lazy, that isn't very imaginative. But when people rail against sampling, I think, well, what's the matter with you? That's just like photo collage, isn't it? But with music it's a creative thing. Sometimes the effect is more thrilling and more startling and therefore more original than other times.
Other times, it just seems like, oh well, yeah, if you just take a hit record that somebody's already had like a Sting song or something and then just put some other words over the top of it and make it a hit again, it's good for Sting's bank balance but it isn't really much of a record, it's pretty dull. It's a dull idea, it was a dull song to begin with, and it's now a duller record for this bad tune that you've put on top of the backing.
But then you hear something really great that's done that way that takes you out of yourself, you go "Yeah, do what you like, play the guitar upside down, put the tape on backwards, whatever gets there. Be really straight, take lots of drugs, what does it matter?" There's no right or wrong, is there? There's no wrong notes, there's no right way to do it, there's no perfect way to do it, there's no best music, there's no worst music.
Because in other parts of the world they hear tonality different, and we hear rhythm one way and they hear it differently in South America, and we're all right, aren't we? We're all right and we're all wrong. So I mean, it's just live what you can of the life and enjoy what there is, and if you don't get it, then play something else, or
write your own song. I don't think it's such a much of a competition as some people seem to think it is.
There's so much to be enjoyed, there's so much good music that exists, and it's being made all the time — and it's one of the less damaging things that we can do, isn't it, as humans, is make records and sing to each other about each other and about the things we've done that are right and wrong. The music itself I don't think can be good or bad, it's just whether you think it's good or bad or useful that is my concern. Does that make any sense? I was starting to get philosophical there, wasn't I? It must be the weather.
This has been great. Double-check: Best-of not going to come out in America?
Well, it can't come out right now, because we are about three months away from the end of a contract with the current distributors of my catalogue in America, and they don't seem to have had much to say for themselves in the last couple of years. It's sort of a relationship that's sort of fizzled, you know? Ryko. They get a lot of credit, I think, in America for the handling of the catalogue.
I've read a lot of times of these brilliant packages that they put out on the pre-Warner catalogue, but you have to bear in mind that they didn't have a single creative piece of input into that, but all of that was done by Demon Records, and they just simply issued it. Their idea was to put all of my records in a brown cardboard box. That was their one creative suggestion at the beginning of our relationship. (chuckle) So it was obvious to me that I had to write the notes myself and oversee the designs and make sure that the right tracks were found. They issued what were in fact UK editions in the States. So with that, that relationship is so close to its end, I think you can probably guess that it isn't gonna go on.
So I'm really looking for a new home for all of the catalogue that I own, come the next millennium. And hopefully it might be possible to negotiate, as I said, to get some sort of common-sense idea about the fate of the records that I made between that time in '86 and the recent signing to Universal, or what turned out to be Universal anyway. It's always constantly in flux, though, isn't it?
As soon as you say hello to a bunch of people, you're saying goodbye to them. (laughs) "Hello, I'm the president of the company" and the next week they're fired. It's very difficult. There's no consistency or continuity anymore, because everybody's just scared all the time that something is going to upset the apple cart and make it all invalid.
I mean, the business of selling records is obviously in a very, very vulnerable state now, or so people are telling themselves, probably the whole reason to believe that so that they don't have to do any work. "Oh, it's all gonna be upset by the Internet or something." Well, maybe it is, but we won't know for a while, will we, whether that's true.
So I would hope that we can get it out, maybe next year, in some sort of form, because I would like to have an updated compilation that people that have just caught on to what I do fairly recently, maybe from Painted from Memory onwards or the last couple years, could go and buy. If they should find that the racks are empty of my records, that's not a bad thing, because they need a lot of space for, I don't know — what records come close to mine? Um, Ry Cooder records or something. He does a lot of records, and they need all that space in the C-O part of the shop.
So if my records are kind of absent for a while, then they'll have to get some more shelves made when they become available again, if they become available again. But the other thing is, if you didn't buy them before and they disappear forever, what does it matter? Maybe you should have bought them when they were out, and if they disappear forever, then that's just the way it is. Like authors have to live with the fact that most of the books they write don't stay in print forever. We kind of get spoiled with all the records that are available.
But if I can do it in some way that makes
sense and I can do it with a bit of style, then I will. But if it's just putting them out in cheap packages in a convenience store, then I'd probably rather burn 'em, you know? Because they're available somewhere and people can always get them some way. I think it makes life more interesting when there's a bit of mystery to where they are and what they do and what they mean, and maybe it makes people curious about what you might make next.
I mean, I'm more interested in the next record I'm gonna make than the last one I made, or any of the other ones. So let's hope that if it reemerges, it's because it's gonna get handled in some sort of bold way, because just sticking 'em out like any old way is just sad. Because it's hard to imagine — I never dreamed that any of my records would be, that they'd be listening to them 20 years later, after they were made. I made 'em to be listened to when I made 'em.
And I think it's different from playing songs, because you can write a song and then you can play it forever. You can just play it forever if it's a good song and you still feel good about singing it. I'm never singing it from a nostalgic point of view, I'm singing it because I want to sing it that day. So, who knows what may happen? But I'm gonna try and make another record some time next year, maybe early on, maybe not. (chuckle) I don't know.
I've got some new songs; I did some demos yesterday of them, and a couple of them sound pretty good. I'm just still learning them, so I don't know how I feel about them yet or what they are. They're nothing like the last record; they're not much like anything else. Which always makes me happy. I'm not saying they're a brand new type of music, but just, they're not typically like any other thing. You couldn't say "Oh, that belongs on that album you made before." It's like the way I am now. So let's see what it is, you know.
So no strong sense of genre you're working in
Well, the only sort of clue I suppose that I feel is probably... The first two songs that I wrote recently were for this movie I'm gonna be in, this Prison Song, have you heard about this movie?
The DeNiro thing?
Well, it's his company I think that's overseeing it. It's Darnell Martin cowrote this movie with Q-Tip. Have you heard about this Prison Song? Well, I don't want to say too much about it, because we haven't done it yet. I'm not playing a lead role in it, I'm playing a supporting role in it. But there's music in it. I should probably wait for somebody else to tell you, one of the creators of it to try and define it. But the use of music in quite a serious story — a very serious story — is very, very ingenious.
I've written two songs for my characters to perform, to perform them in character as it were, in this movie. So it's kind of like a musical, but not like any musical you've ever heard of. Sorry, it sounds tremendously mysterious now, doesn't it. I just feel like it's not really my place to say what this movie is or what it's supposed to do, because other people wrote it. But they commissioned songs to be in this film, and I'm gonna do that, and Q-Tip's in it and Mary J.'s in it. So that's a world away, you know.
Suddenly a spate of new musicals that aren't traditional... von Trier made one with Bjork.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing, because I love her. I think she's just the greatest. I think if it's any relationship to... Because she has a good relationship with video makers. The little visual stories that accompany her records are so much better than most just promo clips that we see. I would think that if she's working with creative filmmakers, that could be really great. So I don't know where this is leading, but I'm gonna do these tracks, and that got me thinking a different way.
And also, I've just been
writing a lot of songs on the guitar, which I haven't done for a while, because all the music I wrote for Painted from Memory with Burt was all written on the piano, because we needed to really be composing on the same instrument. It didn't make a lot of sense for me to come in with a lot of guitar chords and then we'd have to put them all on the piano. So the songs I've written recently are not even sort of written on the guitar so much as some of them are guitar songs and some of them are just rhythm songs, that the guitar is just the most functional instrument that I can play the rhythm I intend them to be in, so by the time I finish with them they'll have a more rhythmic foundation, and then of course they could be arranged for a number of different ways beyond that. But as I say, it's early days.
I may perform them in a sort of guitar form, some of them — I may perform some of them on the tour I'm just about to do, just for the experience of actually singing the words and the melodies that I've written without necessarily saying, well, that's how the next record's gonna sound. They might come out sounding very different from that once I record them. But I like that, when a song can have two lives, two types of performance, you know. We'll see.
It's good to go on the road when you've written a few new songs, because it's a great opportunity, if you've got the audience's confidence in you, to take a moment to perform a couple of new songs to see how you feel about them before you start trying to sell them a record of them! (chuckle) Okay, well, listen, I better go.
And when do you expect to make the movie?
Um, my contribution... I don't know when it's going to be finished, but my contribution to it... I wouldn't have mentioned it at all, because as I say, it's not my project to talk about in full. I'm very proud, though, that I've been approached to do it, because it is such an ingenious idea. But I would rather somebody like Darnell tell you or Q-Tip tell you what it is and how they see it, because I'm only going on our creative conversations about it.
I've got two days on the set during the tour, so it's just like two days' work for me. I've got to go in the studio next week to cut a backing track and then perform the song on the set, live on the set to the track. It's a very, very bold, original use of music, the most interesting use of music in film that I've heard of in many years. To say it's a musical immediately makes you think of Oklahoma or something, but as you say, obviously a few people are thinking the same way, that maybe music could be used to help tell a story, but not always doing the way that we think of traditionally, just the same as not all records are the same.
So I'll be very interested to see what everybody thinks, because I was really impressed when I read the script. It just seemed to be that I seem to have made some sort of weird connection with the movies at the moment, and sometimes they're very light-hearted things like being in Austin Powers and "She" and everything, and then you get an opportunity to do something a bit more serious like this. Which is not better, but of course it's more involved emotionally, you know. It'll be very interesting to see how it turns out.
But listen, I better go. See you down the road. Bye.
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