Esquire, January 2014: Difference between revisions
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SR: Artists are supposed to be difficult.<br> | SR: Artists are supposed to be difficult.<br> | ||
EC: I think people in this line of work, if they’re good at what they do, then you’ll find that they’re a little bit odd. And socially awkward. <br> | EC: I think people in this line of work, if they’re good at what they do, then you’ll find that they’re a little bit odd. And socially awkward. <br> | ||
SR: Rock critics tend not to take such things into consideration.<br> | |||
EC: People speak with enormous pomposity and arrogance about music. Orwell wrote about the use of scientific language to distort political argument. It's done a lot in art and music criticism. They say words that make them sound like they know what they're talking about, and they clearly | |||
don't know what they're talking about. If they were ever called out, they couldn't actually explain what they were saying. Their actual vocabulary about music is very poor indeed. <br> | |||
SR: To categorize art is the opposite of making it. <br> | |||
EC: We're not butterflies, you know. <br> | |||
SR: I've seen you referred to as a third-generation performer, and I know your father was a singer, but I've never read anything about any of your grandparents. <br> | |||
EC: My dad's father was a White Star Line trumpet player in the '20s. It shaped the way that I think about music. My grandfather was classically trained, military trained. He was an orphan who ended up in the Military School of Music in Kneller Hall. And then he was in the | |||
First World War as an orderly. He wasn't a trained soldier. <br> | |||
SR: You knew him? <br> | |||
EC: I remember him just about. I was four when he died in '58. My grandfather and my father disagreed about music, not least of all because my dad wanted to improvise. It wasn't just that he wanted to play different music; it was just that he came off the dots. <br> | |||
SR: The dots? <br> | |||
EC: My grandfather didn't improvise at all. So he was playing a bandsman's book in the army. In '21 or '22, he left the army and joined the White Star Line and had ten years, predominantly at sea. He never really returned home. The theme of exile is attractive to me, because its sort | |||
of like the family business. Not just music, but travel. <br> | |||
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"WHAT CAME ACROSS AS AGGRESSION WAS | |||
OFTEN JUST UNCERTAINTY YOU GET A REACTION | |||
FROM IT AND LIKE ANYTHING, LEAN INTO IT A | |||
LITTLE BIT MORE." | |||
---- | |||
SR: The troubadour lifestyle. <br> | |||
EC: Yeah, but it's not a fanciful, romantic idea. It's just a reality. And my dad had a steady job with a really major dance band from '54 till '68, and then quit because he wanted to play different music. He wanted to sing about peace. He believed in these things. <br> | |||
SR: That's beautiful. <br> | |||
EC: And he had versatility as a singer, which is also something that I've kind of inherited. <br> | |||
SR: Can you read music? <br> | |||
EC: I can write orchestrations, but I can't sight-read music and play at the same time. I don't have enough facility. But you must hold on to the sort of finger-painting aspect of music. That's something I learned, particularly from listening to Neil | |||
Young. Tom Waits is another one, because Tom's music is incredibly sophisticated and beautifully arranged, but he's using a toolbox that's unlike anybody else's. It's not crazy to want to have certain songs be developed harmonically and still want to make noise with | |||
the guitar. And you can have both. I mean, really all the people that I like are of that kind of dichotomy. They are the natural heirs to the tradition of the so-called Great American Song-book writers: Rodgers and Hart. Jerome Kern. Irving Berlin. It's sort of an elitist idea, because it | |||
doesn't include Willie Dixon or Hank Williams. <br> | |||
SR: I saw Steve Earle teaching a songwriting class and talking about "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and telling his students there's never been a greater song written in the American vernacular. <br> | |||
EC: I agree. It's so difficult to do what Hank Williams did. And he would write two or three of the greatest songs ever written, recorded in the same session. Funnily enough. the other person that can write like that is also | |||
called Williams. And that's Lucinda. Think about "Overtime" or "Lonely Girls." They're unbelievably economical, but they're devastating. Obviously they're written in a different time and from different experience, but I don't know another American songwriter that writes as economically as Hank Williams other than Lucinda Williams. <br> | |||
SR: Have you ever thought about writing about your life? <br> | |||
EC: I've been working on a book for a few years. <br> | |||
SR: A memoir? <br> | |||
EC: With a memoir, I'd iust be arguing with the account of myself that's on the Internet already or various biographies and articles. Rather than working on one manuscript, I've written essays that would end up being little paragraphs or chapters <br> | |||
SR: Have you read Questlove's book? <br> | |||
EC: I didn't want to read it while we were working together (on ''Wise Up Ghost''), because I thought it would give me some false sense of knowing what his motivation was. I needed to know him through the choices that he would make. But I eventually read it. There were a lot of similarities, because of his dad being a singer. So the proximity of music and the experience of growing up in a household with an unusual amount of access to music is the same, but for me it goes back one more generation. <br> | |||
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ROBERT PLANT'S A GOOD GUY BUT THE MUSIC NEVER SPOKE TO ME. SAME WITH PINK | |||
FLOYD IT JUST PASSED ME BY. I NEVER WAS CURIOUS ABOUT IT." | |||
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Revision as of 18:34, 18 November 2016
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