Dirty Impound

15 minutes, then 10, and finally 5 minutes with John Oates is what Dirty Impound scored, but one takes what they can get when it comes to an audience with one of the premiere songwriters and pop artists of the past 50 years. As the dark haired half of Hall & Oates, John Oates has had a hand in scores worldwide hits, but in recent years he’s rededicated himself to the music at the roots of his own music – blues, folk, jazz and early rock ‘n’ roll. Last year’s Mississippi Mile (DI review) was a serious charmer, and he’s just released a great live album with the John Oates Band entitled The Bluesville Sessions. At a stage when most well established (and well-heeled) musicians would be enjoying a comfortable retirement, Oates is in the midst of a renaissance that’s showing folks what a gifted, multi-layered artist and dedicated craftsman he is.

This conversation took place aboard Jam Cruise 10 this past January, where Oates was an Artist-At-Large who sat in with Umphrey’s McGee, Ivan Neville’s Sly & The Family Stone Tribute, and many others, including a JC 10 highlight guest turn to close The Omega Moo’s yacht rock reverie with a grand call-and-response on “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” [watch the set here]. Our time was short because Oates was itching to get back onstage and jam with more people, but he grinned – a vision of vigor, fitness and engagement – and promised he’d talk quickly.

People have this conception of you as this mainstream pop guy, and Mississippi Mile (and your other recent solo work) show off your interest in old jazz, blues and more. Is it a challenge to you as an artist to still be convincing folks about your actual range?

It is a challenge because people tend to pigeonhole you, but that’s just the nature of the world. I played guitar for 12 or 13 years before I ever met Daryl, but people think I was born with a moustache singing “Maneater” [laughs]. It’s untrue. I played a lot of folk music, blues music, ragtime, things like that, finger-picking. That’s really where I came from, and I added the urban/R&B thing much later when I got older and moved to Philadelphia. So, if you combine Daryl’s doo-wop/urban/R&B background and my folksy, blues background, that’s where we started.

If people haven’t listened to early albums like Abandoned Luncheonette they don’t know that, but it’s more apparent in your early work.

Well, the pop thing in the 1980s overshadowed everything. It was like a giant footprint that you just can’t get away from, but that’s okay.

Jam Cruise is such a unique experience. What’s been your experience of it?

I love it. I love the musicianship and the fans, who’ve been very welcoming and very respectful. The whole thing has just been a great experience.

All of your sit-ins have been cool. I loved seeing you strap on a guitar and stomp the wah-wah pedal during the Sly & The Family Stone tribute.

Well, I’m an old wah-wah guy!

Is it fun to just be a freelance player in these bands?

Absolutely! There’s no responsibility for me. I can just sit in and have fun. Whether it’s my solo thing or with Daryl, I’m a bandleader and I’m a principal. And when you’re a principal and a bandleader, there’s a lot of other things you have to do besides make music. But here, all I have to do is play, and it’s totally freeing and cool.

Another aspect of Mississippi Mile worth noting is what a range you show as a lead singer. Frankly, Hall & Oates doesn’t always showcase this fact.

In the early days we sang more equitably, but once we started having hits and Daryl’s voice became the signature sound of our hits that’s what happened – simple as that. I don’t think people realize what I do onstage [with Hall & Oates]. Daryl is such an outgoing personality – very aggressive and in-your-face – and he’s an amazing singer – one of the greatest singers of all-time in my book. So, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve always been a singer, but I found my niche with the blues and early R&B and rock. That’s where I really come from, and so I like this niche I’ve found.

Who are some singers that turn you on? I hear real echoes of the 1940s in your voice.

Believe or not, I do go back to the 40s – The Ink Spots, The Mills Brothers – and early rural blues – Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee – and Dave Van Ronk, Doc Watson, Curtis Mayfield, Little Richard, Gary U.S. Bonds…Put all those names together in a big mixer [laughs].

Beyond your music, you’ve made it into mainstream pop culture, including bizarre moments like J-Stache.

That was an aberration really. The J-Stache thing was an idea by our publishing company to promote our catalog and to do something unique that gets attention on the internet, something viral that people would pay attention to. And I jumped on board because I thought it was funny.

Did you know Dave Attel [the voice of Oates’ disembodied moustache in cartoon] before this project?

No! They hired him to do it. There was a lot of [mimes toking off a joint].

So, you’ve accomplished a lot already in your career. What’s really got you excited these days?

Music. I’m a very blessed and fortunate musician because I can pretty much do whatever I want. I have this incredible foundation of Hall & Oates that I’ve built my house on, and the house is pretty solid. I can go back to it and enjoy and appreciate it and do it, but at the same time, it allows me to go out in the world and do what I want. I think that’s probably the ultimate goal of a creative person, and I’m really fortunate to be able to do it.

Weavers of heart strings, smooth-handed experimenters and semiotic serenaders, Megafaun are creatures of charming inquisitiveness, sniffing at the air and chasing tantalizing trails only they pick up on. What sets this brave, talented trio apart from many sonic adventurers is a knack for melody and harmony that defuses any scientific-like bellybutton fixation. It’s clear song craft matters to multi-instrumentalists Joe Westerlund and brothers Phil and Brad Cook, who never hamstring their exploratory urges but generally make sure there’s some element that makes one tap their toe, smiling thoughtfully while humming a tune or softly reciting a line that’s taken up residence in one’s head. And Megafaun does tend to settle into a person’s breast and brain, quickly laying down roots and throwing out shoots and flowers.

As “Age of Aquarius” as that may sound, this isn’t hippy-dippy claptrap. Megafaun – particularly as evidenced on their grand, outward-inward reaching 2011 self-titled album [one of DI’s 20 Favorite Albums of 2011] – simply enjoys and excels at handling deeper stuff than the average band. They don’t hesitate for a moment to submerse in thick, darkness-tinged waters, usually emerging with a dolphin-esque leap, some fresh catch in their mouths as a full moon hovers in the sky.

But we digress…endlessly…and hopefully fruitfully as Megafaun, who have honed a special kind of rambling in their five short years together. Their innately humanistic and cosmic leanings share something with the Grateful Dead AND Ornette Coleman (and much else within those wide arms), but always flowing in a way most unmistakably Megafaun way. The combination of styles and interests in this band is simply too singular for anyone to hang a sign on them. But again, it merits noting that what they do glides like anything BUT avant-garde wonkery. Megafaun offers embrace, a hunger for understanding, and sheer, undisguised affection for catchy ditties and voices in resonant unity.

Put plainly, Megafaun is fascinating and loveable, a band worthy of one’s inspection and introspection because what they offer in return is a real gift, namely music that embiggens us and gently shifts how we look at the world.

The Impound snagged Phil and Joe for a handful of inquiries, and here’s what the lads had to say.

Megafaun is currently on tour in Europe and returns to the road Stateside in mid-March. Dates and details here.

Willie Nile was made for music. One can tell that songs keep him up at night, itching to be brought to fruition and plucked on his guitar and carried on his ever-yearning, gruffly potent voice to any ears willing to listen. Nile’s music – right from his stunning self-titled 1980 debut on through his latest humanizing salvo, The Innocent Ones (released on October 24, 2011 on his own River House Records) (DI review) – is packed with streetwise hymns and rocked up folk anthems, a child of Buddy Holly, Woody Guthrie, The Ramones and The Clash, and kindred spirit to chums like Bruce Springsteen and Alejandro Escovedo. Grit and everyday gravitas infuse Nile’s tunes, and he’s been on a pretty amazing tear in the 2000s after decades of topsy-turvy industry woes. What has sustained him – and infused his work with a close-to-the-bone veracity – is an indomitable spirit, which he’s able to impart in his tunes, stage personality and general demeanor. A few minutes with Willie Nile will make a person feel like the world can be made better AND that they might have a hand in making it so. He sees our beauty even though our clothes are tattered and the lines of our lives cut deep into our faces. His songs ring with freedom and understanding, catalysts for belief that just over the horizon lays something brighter, something hopeful, something worth struggling towards.

I sensed you were a musical lifer from the first time the needle hit your debut, which I bought shortly after it came out. Some folks you can just tell it’s in their blood and they have no choice but to make music.

What I love is the music. I keep writing. I keep getting ideas. I’m still on fire with the inspiration that first got me interested. I love to play. I love to write. It’s fun all the way around. It inspires me, and if my shows and music inspires someone else then that’s what it’s all about.

I walked away from it in the early 80s when it turned into business and lawsuits. I got into this because it was supposed to be fun, and this wasn’t fun. I said, “Screw this!” and moved back to Buffalo to raise a family. So, it’s really only been the last two years where I’ve picked it up [playing live again]. I was always a songwriter writing away, but I love to play, too. It’s fun to get out and celebrate and have fun with people. The response I’m getting these days is really great. I’m in Europe for about four months a year now – Italy, Spain, U.K. [Nile recently returned to the U.K. for a tour that raised funds for and awareness about Parkinson’s disease - something he’s done for the past 12 years].

Your spark is an essential part of what draws people to your music – a passion undisguised – and it’s something that’s led you into being a really independent artist over the years.

In 2000, I put out Beautiful Wreck of the World on my own label and it made money. I made the money back that I put into it and it got things rolling for me in the do-it-yourself indie world. In 2005, I made Streets of New York, and that really put me back on the map. And two years ago, I put out House Of A Thousand Guitars, and the same thing – I own it, I paid for it, and toured a lot behind it. And the same thing goes for The Innocent Ones. I have Red/Sony distribution to get it into stores but the rest – digital, etc. – I own it. It’s grace. It can be done. You don’t need to spend a fortune to make records, and if you have the songs and you can get some character on tape, well, if you believe then maybe somebody else will as well.

The lucky thing in my case is while many people’s inspiration wanes as they get older, mine’s been the exact opposite. I think the last couple records I’ve made are my best, and I have a new one written I want to record over the winter. The songs are coming fast and furious, and I feel the same way I did when I first came to the Village with a guitar years ago. Now, I have more experience in the studio and writing songs. It all comes easier to me now, just dealing with all the stuff you have to deal with can take hours, but I’m not as uptight as I was years ago about it. It seems to be working. These are good days.

Your lack of cynicism is refreshing, particularly coming from someone who’s been knee deep in this shitty industry for so long.

I have no choice. I don’t know what else I would do. If I was a plumber living up in Alaska, I’d still come home every night and write. It’s so much fun for me. I’ve put stuff out on two major labels, I’ve put stuff out on my own, and it can be done. Fortunately, I’ve got enough support out there, enough fans, to keep it going. It’s really heartening. My goodness…

Your music has folk strains that go back to 60s Greenwich Village but there’s also a line back to The Beatles and the stuff that inspired The Beatles, where rock ‘n’ roll was still dangerous instead of a commodity and a cause worth signing up for.

At its best, that’s what it is. You don’t get too much of that in the mainstream. There’s not much of it to be found on radio, which has changed so much. It’s not like the old days where you turned it on and always heard new things. For me, the response to my new record has surprised me, where they say “One Guitar” is appropriate for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Many ask, “Where are the songs with meaning?” Well, songs mean something to me, whether it’s a broken-hearted love song, a song of remorse or remembrance, or a pissed-off, fuck you, stop blowing my house up song. I’m having a real awakening getting older – whether it’s walking alone into a studio, getting out in front of 70,000 people with Bruce [Springsteen, a longtime Nile pal and admirer], or making some noise touring Europe with a full band for the first time last year. We’re making headway, and it’s because the music is speaking [to people].

Makes sense given the hopefulness of so much of your music. However, I have a fondness for your darker material. “Topless Amateur” off the new album is one of the best songs you’ve written.

I have a ton of those [laughs]. I can go light, I can go dark, but I just try to put a collection together that mixes it up.

You notice the people others tend to overlook.

I knew this was happening as early as three-years-old. I’d look around the room and see who the outcasts were, who nobody was paying any attention to. I don’t know why but I always knew and still do.

It creates an empathy with these people that your songwriting reflects. It’s one thing to notice them and another to have compassion and empathy for them – and to feel like one of them.

Again, I don’t why that is but I felt like one of them from very early on. I’d walk into a room and I could just tell who wasn’t feeling great or needed attention or was unrealized. I just had an antenna out for them. With [The Innocent Ones], I was able to put some songs out there for them – for better or worse [laughs].

It helps balance the sunlight in things when you show there’s another side to life.

It’s all real. It’s all there. From somebody being slaughtered on a battlefield or blown up by a terror bomb or having their heart smashed from lack of love, it’s all real and it’s all out there. You gotta follow your instincts and dreams. My recollection of the music of the 60s and 70s is music really meant something to us. It was part of our lives. I want my life to have meaning. I want to live and not just follow in someone else’s shoes. Follow your heart. Follow your passions. Follow your instincts. Live it to the fullest. We have one life, as far as we know, and I’m happy to say when I take my final breath that I gave it everything I had.

The way rock ‘n’ roll, particularly mainstream rock, has gone is divorced from these ideas. It’s consciously designed to be product, an ATM for the producers and distributors first and artists last. It’s often very successful because they really know how to build rigged slot machines out of rock ‘n’ roll now.

It’s one thing to make money but you and I know – and those of us that fell in love with rock ‘n’ roll or folk music or whatever – it means something. It helps make sense of the world. It inspires people. The Berlin Wall came down and rock ‘n’ roll had something to do with it. When rock ‘n’ roll got into the Soviet Union it was like water finding its own level, and if or when the Chinese let rock ‘n’ roll have full sway the same thing will happen.

Rock really was dangerous when it began. There were legitimate reasons parents were scared because this music challenged power structures and social norms. Rock isn’t about following rules. It’s about individuality and passion and things that can’t be easily put into words or controlled by rules.

Life is like that. Life is not a set of rules. It’s a wild and wooly planet we live on. Something I talk about at shows is how divided the country is, with Fox [News] pinheads on the one side and the MSNBC lackeys on the other side. There’s such a distance between them and it’s not right. It blurs what the information is. I think most people are good hearted and will make the right choices in most circumstances, but understanding the circumstances is hard under these conditions.

For example, take a cul de sac, a bunch of homes in a circle, and say Bill O’Reilly lived in one house and Keith Olberman lived in another and other houses
had right and left wingers. Then, say a 7–year-old boy gets hit by a car. They’ll all come out and see what they can do to help. My thing is the human aspect of things. We’re all brothers and sisters on this planet, and we should try to do our best to help each other. It’s simple things. It’s not complex. It gets complex when we talk about how to split the budget and there are people in companies cheating. It’s hard to sort out but most people are good.

I think that’s generally true, but it is disheartening to watch the recent Republican debates where people are cheering letting someone without health insurance die or celebrating the record breaking number of deaths by the state in Texas. One wonders if that’s just the moment – the mob mentality at work – and if someone sick actually showed up on their doorstep that they might act differently.

My brother died because he didn’t have health care. He was a great guy but no one knew his heart wasn’t in great shape. I asked the woman who did the autopsy if this could have been prevented and she said absolutely. If he’d gone to the doctor and checked his cholesterol it was totally treatable. Because there’s no health care that readily accessible to all in this country he couldn’t afford it and just didn’t go. I have friends in the U.K. and Spain and if they need heart surgery they can go and get it done. He’d be alive today if he could have gone to a medical center and gotten checked out. It’s heartbreaking, and it’s all the more reason for me to be a heart in my songs. What was it Bobby Kennedy used to say? We’re good people, we’re a compassionate people, but we can do better – really inspiring words to me. Both John and Bobby Kennedy carried a torch for compassion and our better nature.

It’s weird to watch people try to dismantle the good in both men posthumously, focusing on the negatives and shortcomings of their lives, as if every human being doesn’t have plenty of faults and failings.

You put any of us under the microscope and…well, you know. They were really inspiring. They made us proud to be from this country and feel like we could help set the world on a better course. It’s a great feeling to have. Life would be a lot different if they hadn’t been killed.

I wanted to talk about the One Guitar Campaign.

I wrote “One Guitar” with Frankie and started playing around Europe last winter. It’s a song about how one guitar and one voice can maybe make things better in bigger and smaller ways around the planet – something in the vein of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen and more to come down the road. Music can enlighten. It can lighten the load and lift spirits. So, I was on the road with Alejandro Escovedo on a tour of 12-13 countries in 14 days – a pretty hard tour – where we were raising money for Parkinson’s. And in the middle of the show I’d play “One Guitar” and we’d get standing ovations, sometimes for 2-3 minutes. We’d just look at each other and wonder, “What the hell?” We’d never encountered anything like it before. So, my manager suggested we get people from all sorts of different countries and walks of life to record it and eventually put all the versions out on iTunes when we’re ready, where all the profits from that – publishing included – will go to charities. All of it is going to good places. Graham Parker has done a version. The Alarm has done a version. A bunch of people in different countries have done cool versions.

It’s amazing the power a single song can have.

It’s true. It can be “my baby broke my heart” or it can be a cause like “One Guitar.” When I play “One Guitar,” “The Innocent Ones,” or “Singin’ Bell” I feel something stirring. An older song from the early 90s, “Hard Times In America,” is perfect for the Occupy Wall Street movement – “People eating garbage/ People drinking rain/ Sleeping on the sidewalks in a cardboard hurricane/ Some are drinking whiskey/ Some are taking drugs/ Victims of society still working out the bugs/ Hard times in America.” I’m making music that means something and having a blast doing it. People are getting it and coming out and want more and more. I think I’m just getting started.

“Because narrow is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leads unto life, and few there be that find it.” –Matthew 7:14

“God is good and it’s understood, but he moves in mysterious ways.” – Hiss Golden Messenger

Like it or not, human beings must wrestle with their place in the scheme of things. While the questions can be kept at bay for a time – drowned out with distraction, drugs and drudgery – they linger, catching us in our beds when the din dies down and the spheres whisper to us in our solitude. Who am I? Who made all this if it was ‘made’ at all? How does it all fit together? How do I fit together with it all? Even the shallowest person comes up against these seemingly rhetorical conundrums and some answer is required, even if only to quiet these lonely late night murmurings.

While some turn to houses of worship and dogmatic religious practice to engage with these inescapable internal inquiries, others find the path into this fertile, frightening gray area through music. While a great deal of what’s on offer today is as deep as a paper cut, there are beautiful, thorny exceptions, music that pricks us and reminds us of our humanity and potential transcendence. North Carolina-based-former-S.F.-area ontologically charged roots rockers Hiss Golden Messenger till green, fragrant ground, the smell of overturned earth redolent of decay and life in all its tendril throwing glory rising from their work. HGM is M.C. Taylor and longtime collaborator Scott Hirsch – both former members of now-defunct but cultishly loved Bay Area band The Court & Spark – who’ve struck out into rock’s wilds in search of something more rewarding than party anthems and pretty ditties.

Over the course of three very different yet psychologically and spiritually overlapping albums – starting with 2009’s Country Hai East Cotton and weaving through 2010’s stark, largely solo Taylor recording Bad Debt and arriving at the more electric and readily welcoming Poor Moon (released November 1) – HGM has handily disproven the notion that rock is a dumb artistic medium. This band shuffles with archetypes and grasps at the sky in the hopes some higher power high-fives them somewhere along their weary road. It is workingman’s music that melds elements of Merle Haggard with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Rev. Gary Davis, where songs pulled from usually hidden places serve as the listener’s companions into their own craggy, shadowy reaches.

By turns worshipful and wary, Hiss Golden Messenger is bread for incarnation and transubstantiation, feeding the body in the here and now while simultaneously nourishing less obvious appetites in one’s soul. It also happens to be great music sung in Taylor’s lovely, almost-too-honest voice, a dirt field relative to Sam Cooke and the Jerry Garcia who sang ballads that make one feel split open. The music is an evolving blur of folk, country, blues and the outside-the-mainstream work of pioneers like Roy Harper, Bert Jansch and John Martyn, a fascinating conversation between Taylor and Hirsch that’s been chattering away for nearly 20 years. While Taylor may be the lead singer, guitarist and primary songwriter in HGM, Hirsch’s empathetic grace shines through in the many fine touches he brings to this subtle music, playing on and co-producing, engineering and mixing all of HGM’s records. Each new chapter allows us to eavesdrop on the coded shorthand this pair shares, which has never been more together or sweetly rewarding than on Poor Moon, which also features contributions from Terry Lonergan, Nathan Bowles (Black Twig Pickers; Pelt), Hans Chew (D. Charles Speer & the Helix), Matt Cunitz (Brightblack Morning Light), Tom Heyman (The Court & Spark), and others.

In plain terms, Hiss Golden Messenger are deep, solid stuff in a whipped cream time, offering up thoroughly wood-shedded tunes that take a spell to unravel (if they ever unknot at all), asking big questions with appropriate fear and trembling yet braving step after step into the Great Unknown that resides in our own breasts.

What follows is a rambling stroll with M.C. Taylor that finds its way to the Bible, the music biz, the Grateful Dead, and ultimately reasons for making art that have nothing to do with financial profit but perhaps everything to do with being a true pilgrim slouching towards understanding, compassion, and maybe – just maybe – a slice or two of truth.

The name Hiss Golden Messenger is so evocative without being remotely specific. There’s mystery entwined in those seven syllables.

There’s a lot in the name. It’s a name that I arrived at in some way. I needed a name that I could use for anything I was involved in, whether it was just me at the kitchen table or a full ensemble record. I needed something that wasn’t my own name. The name works for me on a variety of levels. Obviously, there’s a kind of Biblical referential, but the ‘Hiss’ can be interpreted in a lot of ways. And I like Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, so there you go [laughs].

It starts with a word that tintinnabulous, which always rocks.

The other thing is many people think the ‘Hiss’ is a misspelling, and somewhere along the way there’s been a mistransliteration of project and it’s actually His Golden Messenger, which I really appreciate. I like that and honestly get a kick out of that.

That’s great, that somehow we’ve all screwed it up and you’re stuck with ‘Hiss’ [laughs]. There is value in enjoying misinterpretation.

Yeah, yeah, I’m realizing that interpretation is THE beautiful thing about music – the subjective quality of music. The stuff that’s intensely personal for me in these songs I sing is also intensely personal for other people but in entirely different ways. The questions that I’m so often asked are about interpretation and I appreciate that you’re hesitant to pull the veil back, partially because I couldn’t really tell you what’s at the bottom of things. My own interpretation is so subjective from day-to-day, so what I’ll tell you will be vastly different each time.

The thing about the kind of music we – meaning you and I and the other heads really into music – are drawn to is the mythography and mythology of it. This is part of what electronic culture has made a little harder and a little easier. We construct and deconstruct ways to reckon with music mythology in different ways now.

A big sea change in this area occurred with the rise of videos in the 1980s, where scripted visuals begins to replace the personal, subjective imagery that naturally occurs in an individual’s brain. You and I are talking about the lure of music pre-MTV and their ilk, where music had more personal ritual – the unwrapping of a vinyl record, the first listen, turning the album over to hear side two of the story. The only pictures you got were the cover art and what came into your head prompted by the music.

I’m always hesitant to have black and white discussions about this or to suggest the musical myth we have now is a total transparency that’s done away with personal myth. It just comes to us in different ways than we might be used to. That said, what we have now is an overabundance of information as opposed to what you’re talking about, which is one photograph, one artifact that’s easily accessible and can work as our Rosetta Stone to decipher the music. There’s something very powerful about that.

It requires a higher level of engagement by the listener. I do worry about being a cranky old man going [voice shifting into Abe Simpson mode], “Music was so much better when we had our own imaginations!” You’re right about mythology being used in very different ways now, but often in a kind of sick way by people who’ve studied this stuff and use it for advertising, where we get clear soda because of ancient tales of purity and innocence tied up in clear liquids. Now the dude at Pepsi understands these cultural underpinnings and uses them to hawk soda.

Here’s the problem: this holy mystery of music has been co-opted by Pepsi [laughs]. It’s not to say it’s not at our disposal still, but it’s still important to music [to have mythology].

That’s abundantly clear to anyone who’s spent time with Hiss Golden Messenger. HGM is interested in engaging with big ideas, actively open to them even.

Yes, I am. The way I engage with music and incorporate music into my life is all about engaging with larger ideas – What is myth? What is the myth of music? What is the myth of the musician or artist? But, my point of entry into this is an intensely personal one. I came out of this other band, The Court & Spark, where people around us – and it was in their best interest for them to tell us this and maybe have it work out – led us to understand that The Court & Spark was going to be successful. Well, I just ended up paying off our Court & Spark bills last November. We were in debt until almost the end of 2010. I can count on one hand the number of accounting statements I got from our record label over 10 years. We were the epitome of a failure as a band, and that’s a hard thing. I’ll qualify that: we were a commercial failure but critically was another thing.

The issue of not putting bread on your table with your talents and drive is tough to stomach.

I’m still dealing with it. Anyone who’s an artist can’t do this shit for free. You can and will do it for free, but you have to possess some kind of personal boundaries, where you say, “Okay, I’ll do this for free because I love it,” or, “I’ll do this for free because the payment I’m getting – be it aesthetic or financial – makes it worthwhile, but I will not engage in the standard arena of commercial commerce because it’s bullshit.” So, what this means for me is I’ll continue to play – I’m sure of it – to empty rooms or five people because I want it to be in this place and that time what I chose aesthetically and I prefer to do it that way. I might bitch or moan about it in the moment, but ultimately it’s my choice. It’s important to me for some reason to be there artistically in the moment. I’m not gonna chase this brass ring anymore. No one even knows where the brass ring is hidden anymore – the thing isn’t even around anymore, at least for the likes of me because I’m not willing to do what it would take to find that tarnished thing. The people who work in corporate labels, the ones that are left, know nothing about music. They have their heads up their asses.

It’s not about music anymore. It’s about the synergy with the other industries owned by a record label – how a song fits into a TV ad for a cleaning product from one division, a video game for another, and so on. You’re not just dealing with the record industry anymore. In most instances you’re dealing with a faction within a mega-conglomerate that’s only interested in what the music can do to help sell cars or laptops. When you think of music first as a widget and not as one of the deepest forms of human expression it changes things dramatically. To play to that mentality diminishes music, and it speaks to the general acceptance of compromise and diminished ethics prevalent now. People accept that to get anything done you have to play the game as offered. Thankfully, there’s a growing faction that’s sick to death of it and starting to make changes.

I agree. Hiss Golden Messenger is something that’s allowed me to reorient myself vis-à-vis music. At the end of The Court & Spark, I was brain dead, depressed, and tired. For whatever reason, I wasn’t getting from the music what I needed. I don’t need music to make me happy all the time -that’s not what the job of music is – but I need to be happy engaging with music. It makes me think and feel things, and I needed to find my way back to that. Finding my way back to that was my way back to this personal work on myself, which everybody does and I do mainly with music. Hiss Golden Messenger, in that sense, has been a very, very personal journey. The audience that I’m making it for is first and foremost me.

Your work operates in the same realm as clear influences like Terry Reid and John Martyn – guys who never gave two shits about what anybody thought about their work.

I don’t think my work can hold a candle to what those guys are doing, but certainly they were uncompromising in their work, especially John Martyn, who was apparently thuggish in this regard. Those guys allowed the art to lead. The music never became incidental to what they were doing, and this is a danger with contemporary musical culture, where somehow we still arrange our lives around music but it becomes incidental in a way. It’s an insane sort of paradox.

The culture of the music business has been taken over by the second part of that two-word phrase.

I understand what the music business does, and I don’t think it’s an oxymoron. I don’t think music and business are mutually exclusive BUT let’s remember what we need in order for the business to keep rolling along with integrity [laughs]. We need the music…

…and music that speaks to something deeper than having a good time. When one reaches no further than the next party, there’s a frivolousness that gets spread throughout music culture. Not everything needs to be “Long Black Veil” but it’s not as if we’re not still wrestling with huge ontological issues as a species.

My party line for a long time has been it is possible to make thoughtful music in a major key. Music is a complicated thing, and there’s a lot of complex emotion in a song. There are a lot of sad songs in a minor key that suck, and there are a lot of thoughtful, wonderful, powerful songs in major keys that work in the way I think music should. Music is very, very, very complicated. There are so many shades to it.

There’s a sense that one can’t create music with deeper psychological or cultural issues without it being leaden. What about a song like “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys?

I’ve been listening to a lot of the [Grateful] Dead stuff from the ’72 tour that was released this year, and, to me, it’s the Holy Grail of music. What they did, particularly in that era, was write music that was thoughtful. Robert Hunter’s writing is about as good as you can get in the idiom of music or any other [art] happening in the late 60s and early 70s. But they weren’t writing sad songs in minor keys. They wrote these songs that had SO much harmonic content that it was talking about LIFE, how happy and tragic it was, and all in the same song. They were in major keys and they tipped their hats to jazz and country, and they did it all so well.

I always say the Dead were practitioners of the Great American Songbook. Hunter’s lyrics feel like music that’s been carried around for hundreds of years, handed around and changed slowly like a river stone, until arriving to us now. Hunter was a relatively young man at that time and yet he penned “Wharf Rat,” “Black Peter” and other bardic killers. And fun stuff, too! How big a blast is “Casey Jones”?

For my money, he’s easily one of the best writers of that era. It’s hard to reckon what he did with how he was ‘in’ the band without fronting it. It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around what he was doing in comparison with someone like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Van Morrison. He had a different model he was using but goddamn! The key to his songs is how honest they are. There’s a certain transparency in how it touches you, and you’re right about how they feel like they’ve existed for a really long time and everything that absolutely doesn’t have to be in the song isn’t in there. It’s sort of like the Bible, where the stuff that needs to be there is there and the extraneous stuff has been worn away.

Are you ever astonished at people who haven’t read the Bible? Regardless of where one stands in terms of religious practice or belief, the Bible is a central stream in which we all swim culturally.

Frankly, I think there are a lot of hardcore Christians who haven’t read the Bible. This is where so much strife and bloodshed has come from for hundreds of years. People think they understand what’s in the Bible, that they have a clear interpretation of what the Bible is saying. The Bible is a fallible book, a fallible document, and to really understand what the Bible is saying takes some work. You do have to crack that book open [laughs]. If you haven’t read the Bible then you can’t understand the Bible. You can’t talk about the Bible if you haven’t read the Bible.

If one’s understanding of it comes from a few lines drawn out of context then they’re really removed from the actual content and spirit of the Bible.

There should be some sort of ticket you can give if you hear someone talking about the Bible but you know for certain they haven’t actually read it.

I like that idea more than is Christian [laughs]. Circling back to your music, I love that you don’t shy away from big ideas like the ones in the Bible. You have a way of making this stuff resonate in a modern sense. “Jesus Shot Me In The Head” is one of the best song titles of the last 20 years. Whether you hear the song or not, once you see that title it’s in your head and gets you wondering, “What the fuck is that all about?”

[Laughs] Like I was saying earlier, my relationship with Hiss Golden Messenger is deeply personal. So, my grappling with spirituality is…I’m not a church going person. Any first year divinity student could debate circles around me with religion. But I’m not talking about religion, I’m talking about spirituality. It’s important to me to try and understand what my perspective is on a higher power, and to understand what role that sort of belief might play in my life. It’s critical to me to think about this stuff – a lot. I don’t know where I stand on it and I need to get a better handle on what I’m thinking about spirituality. I’m generally a pretty private person and yet my forum for this is very public. So, it’s a little funny that I do it this way but I have to.

There’s an illusion that we choose how we practice our spiritual life, but it’s generally propelled more by happenstance and such intensely personal drives that we can’t name them. While many people think they’re getting the job done going to services once a week, the true work of spiritual engagement occurs during the week.

I think that’s right, and part of “Jesus Shot Me In The Head” – which is obviously an allegorical work – is how deeply cynical it is. For all of its mention of Jesus Christ in the title it’s sort of a black-hearted, cynical look at people who are using their spirituality for some other purpose. There’s an awful lot of bet-hedging that goes on in belief. One of the last lines of that song goes, “He loves us all but the ones who fall hold a special place in his ranks/ At least I hope this is how it goes ‘cause I’m just ‘bought outta bread.” This is sort of a disciple character but he’s clearly not totally sold on Jesus as the Son of God. He just hopes he is so he’ll have a spot in Heaven.

There’s a huge faction of professed Christians that are ALL about what one gets from God. One of the arguments I have with virulently Pentecostal born again folks is how my God isn’t the God of parking spaces or other mundane handouts. Prayer isn’t a gumball machine one tosses a coin into because they want something in return. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

I don’t believe it works that way, though sometimes I wish it would [laughs].

There’s always a temptation to get up on one’s high horse about this topic, and it’s an impulse worth resisting [laughs].

My music is deeply spiritual, and it’s critical to me to work this stuff out in my music, but I’m not a believer, not in the usual Christian sense of the word and certainly not in terms of proselytizing.

I think there’s a built-in hunger to engage with these ideas that we’re born with, but it’s hard to say where one can land with any certainty about God and the huge ideas connected to the notion of God.

I think you’re right about how people attend church but the real work happens the rest of the time. I don’t discount church. I think there’s a lot of positivity that comes from gathering as a spiritual community, but at the end of the day only we know what the truth is in our heart. We can talk about it with everybody all we want but the hard part, the heavy lifting is the personal stuff that we do alone in the dark of night.

This spiritual journey is reflected over the course of the three Hiss Golden Messenger albums thus far.

I think I’ve been on a life journey where I’ve gotten older and become a father and a person that has to set aside, in some ways, selfish desire. It’s a kind of working class mysticism I’m involved in. I’m not putting on tie-dye and spangles and going off to meditate and eventually find my Lord. [laughs]. I’m getting up every day and going to work like everyone else in this small town. And I’m trying to understand my place in the universe like every other person in this town. I just do it in a different way. It’s important to me that these Hiss Golden Messenger records at least be honest documents of that journey, and hopefully entertaining, too. This is also entertainment – I’m totally aware of that – but it’s important to me that what I put out feels honest.

Honest is as good a word as any at getting at the vibe of your music. There’s no other agenda besides the desire to write a good song that’s representative of what’s going on in your heart and head. Music writers too often make glib comparisons to Bob Dylan, but your work, especially as Hiss Golden Messenger has gone on, reminds me a lot of the mixture of the personal and almost fevered broadmindedness one gets in early Dylan. Bad Debt especially shares a rawness with Dylan’s early records.

Well, thank you…

One can’t invoke Dylan unless they’re serious about it. It’s like evoking Einstein when talking about a scientist.

The thing about Hiss Golden Messenger is it’s a long game I’m playing. My incentive is not the incentive a 20-year-old musician might have setting out on this path. My incentive and my pay are different. As far as I’m concerned, these are the early days of Golden Messenger as I try to figure out who I am as a person and an artist. This is a good time for me to be trying to understand myself.

There’s a few things in life one can justifiably judge their fellow humans on – how they treat animals, how they treat their kids, whether they cheat or steal or kill – and in music I have a few similar litmus tests for whether someone has any real depth as a listener. One of them is whether someone gets what a national treasure Grayson Capps is. I’ll actually sit people down and make them listen to him – say the carnivorously carnal “Give It To Me” or the slow brewed ache “Ike” – and then ask what they think. If they get it – and it ain’t hard to get with a singer-songwriter of this caliber, this generation’s answer to the bruised perfection of vintage John Prine or Lowell George – then I know we’re gonna be fine. If they don’t get it, well, there’s a door and they shouldn’t let it hit them in the ass on the way out.

Capps is equal parts rock ‘n’ roll beast and pick-up truck troubadour. There’s rust and wrinkles on his tales, which hum with wisdom both streetwise and non-denominationally celestial. His characters ring true, kin to Sam Stone and Bobby McGee, and they move through a landscape drippin’ with verisimilitude – real stuff about real folks for real folks, weaving mythology and workaday madness together with the silver thread of love and quivering, shaky-at-best hope. He’s seen better days but he’s putting up with these, and he shows us how to do the same if we listen hard enough.

Capps’ latest release is titled The Lost Cause Minstrels (released June 7 on Royal Potato Family), which is also the name of his new band. Once again, critics with ears and more taste than what’s in their mouth should be short-listing this set for their Best of 2011 list, but the world is cruel and talent and truth like Capps’ is too often overlooked. Like many of Capps’ rabid fans, I feel the guy is a worthy cause, a musician that makes music in the meta-sense better and deeper and sweeter, too. His fifth studio record only reinvigorates this feeling, stirring up strange feelings and grins with a mixture of New Orleans sway, barroom ready rock and reverberant, folksy rumination. It is a spell that builds slow and sure, luring one back inside his grooves for reasons one can’t quite pin down in words, drawn to return to his world by forces one feels more than understands. Even if he’s reached a point where he murmurs, “Who the hell am I foolin’, I ain’t gonna be no star,” the music is only richer for that honesty. Most of us aren’t going to be celebrities and millionaires and we need music that pulls us together in the reality of our lives and gives us melody and phrase for this pain we’re carrying around. Lost Cause Minstrels is this sort of album, and there’s four more just like it – though each different in their own charming ways – that lie before it.

We got Grayson on the phone as he drove home to Alabama from New Orleans, and here’s the fruits of our lively chat.

There’s an element of testifying to your music. It’s a far cry from boy meets girl and goes to the dance type fare.

I can’t stand that stuff! Growing up and playing around the Southeast, which is such a conservative mindset, I grew up thinking outside the box. Like my cousin said, “Grayson, Jesus is the only way,” and that just irritates me. I can identify with these people but come on, there’s a whole world out there! I like to appeal to people but also draw them in and sucker punch them a bit, too. I get turned off if the word ‘politics’ or ‘economics’ or ‘religion’ is in a song. Ewww, turn it off!

Too often it’s stated too forthrightly in a Toby Keith kind of way. He’s not a bad guy but he’s become my shorthand for that kind of bubba thinking.

It’s a cheap laugh. You can always play the patriotism card. I won a high school election because I was an actor at the time and said, “I’m an American and I’m for everybody here!” I was being facetious but I won because people couldn’t see that. It’s like how Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA” became a national anthem but if you really listen to the song it’s really not.

It’s a critique of what Reagan had wrought at that point…

…don’t even get me started on Reagan.

This helps situate your mindset in your songs. You always write about people on the edges – the sandwich makers, the janitors, the overlooked and the lonely. Those are your people.

Well, those ARE the people. I just looked at an issue of Rolling Stone and it seemed like a high school yearbook with who’s dating who and such. I guess somebody likes it. It’s strange, but I’ve always been this way.

The Lost Cause Minstrels is an awesome name, but at the same time, I don’t want you putting ‘lost cause’ on an album cover just five records in.

I witnessed Jack White come up with The White Stripes when he was nobody then became a huge superstar, and now he’s an old retiree. Wow. I witnessed it all, and I’m still here doing this thing [laughs]. I’ve witnessed whole careers be born and die, and I’m still doing it.

That’s a kind of perseverance that people who need to do a thing exhibit.

I have a fan base that’s not huge but it’s real intense. For example, this woman’s husband died and he was a fan and she wants me to play this one song when he’s being buried. I have this widow that comes out to almost every show, no matter where it is. Her husband died almost two years ago and she’s found some sort of salvation [coming to these shows]. I have a bunch of crazy, intense fans. I don’t know what it is, but it’s really valuable to me whether I’m making money or not.

It goes beyond a job when it means that much.

To me it’s not a job. I did landscaping for almost 20 years while playing music and I came to the proverbial crossroads where I had to decide to do music or landscaping. Obviously, getting older, music was always what I wanted to do, but all I’m saying is I came at it with music as my outlet, my whole reason [for being], and I didn’t try to please anybody. Even to this day, if I find myself in a situation with music where I’m not happy I’ll go work with plants because there’s joy in that. If I’m not finding joy or rewards in music why do it? I need to pay a mortgage and buy gas to the next gig and food to eat but after that’s taken care of it’s a dream world playing music right now and making a living at it.

You’ve been on a constant evolution since your first record. The music just keeps growing in a real natural way.

Good! I hope so because my only insurance as a musician is to get better. So I better get better! When I’m old I want to be really good. I’m definitely not going to be like the Eagles and doing my greatest hits when I’m 60…mainly because I don’t have even one hit [laughs]. Hopefully I’ll be making hits then.

There’s a level of togetherness on the new album that I think could serve as a good handshake to folks who haven’t heard your music before.

I’ll put it up against anything that’s out there right now. Trina [Shoemaker], my partner who engineered and produced this record, is beyond professional. We’ve been making records together for a long time, and I think we’ve found a comfort zone, or maybe we’ve figured out how to achieve what we want. I also changed my whole band except my drummer, and hopefully that means growth, too. I’m just amazed at some stuff that gets away with being called music.

One picks up on musicians really serving songs on Lost Cause Minstrels, which I think is key – obvious humanity and blood and muscle right in the notes.

Definitely. A lot of artists use that Auto-Tuning and I’ve never used it because Trina always talks about loving when a singer starts a little off then scoops into it. You don’t get that with a lot of more polished artists because they want it to be big and seamless…

…and readymade to slot in with all the homogenous stuff that’s already on the charts. I can’t even imagine what your voice would sound like with Auto-Tune. Your voice has so much character and your phrasing is really unique.

I don’t think it would work [laughs].

We would never have gotten any of the classic 60s soul sides with Auto-Tune. Aretha and Otis were all about pushing things into the red, particularly with the mics they had in those days. I’ve said it in the past about you, but it bears repeating: You have a LOT more in common with classic artists like these than you do with most contemporaries. It makes much more sense to compare you to Kristofferson, Prine and Lowell George.

Those are my heroes. It may be part of my downfall, but I’ve never been a pop fan. It’s always been into Tom T. Hall and John Prine. People are trying to tell me about Arcade Fire and I say, “Have you heard Levon Helm’s last two records?” And they go, “Who?” What? Who the hell are you to tell me about ‘the best band in the world’ when you don’t even know who Levon is?

Amen!

People just don’t have the history with music. One of my favorite records ever is Leon Russell’s Carney. It’s short – probably 38 minutes long – and growing up with that…man. That’s where Trina and I connect ‘cause she’s a seventies rock chick. She loves Bad Company and says, “It’s magic. How did they do that?”

There’s a lot of mythology about classic rock but it is music that doesn’t seem dated. It’s so well produced, played and written, especially compared to what’s coming out today. You can still put it on the radio and it holds its own. It’s a kind of skill and craftsmanship that’s really going out of the business.

It had some depth, too. When they hit those floor toms – wow! Some of those recordings by The Band are some of the greatest of all-time.

It must be frustrating on some level to shoot for that sort of benchmark and realize most of the world isn’t shooting for it anymore.

I’ve given up generalizing, though I agree with you on the mainstream, although I finally got somebody to expose me to My Morning Jacket, and that’s pretty intense. I saw them live somewhere and didn’t get it, and then I heard a recording and liked it. It’s kinda like Pink Floyd meets something else [laughs]. It’s enticing and the sound’s good. There’s all kinds of good music out there like The Black Keys. Trina knows Tchad Blake, who did the Brothers record, and it pisses me off that in interviews they say, “It was just the two of us in Muscle Shoals laying down guitar and drum tracks.” She talked to Tchad, who got these naked tracks and they told him, “Just do your thing to them.” There’s bass and keyboards, and it’s intense. It just makes me jealous really because they have lots of money and Tchad Blake [laughs]. They are great songwriters though, and I think Dan is a great singer, too. And there’s Junior Kimbrough all over him [in his guitar playing]. It’s just so obvious [laughs].

You’re one of the only people besides myself that’s ever brought up Junior in relation the Dan Auerbach’s playing, which just speaks to the general ignorance of music journalism about them. So, I wanted to touch on your move away from New Orleans, where you spent a huge part of your career. That city has been in the fabric of your songs for a long, long time.

It’s so strange. I think my next set of songs is going to be called Jaded [laughs]. I just moved back to Fairhope, Alabama, which is about two and a half hours away from New Orleans. I’ve started a regular gig on Tuesdays at Chickie Wah Wah in New Orleans, which is great but I’m still the black sheep of that community. Like Anders Osborne comes in and just embraces it and even talks like he’s from New Orleans. It’s wild! He became what he loves, and I’m not putting him down at all – he’s wonderful – but I never got embraced by New Orleans even though I’ve had my own little niche there. I’m half Alabama and half New Orleans. It’s a confusing mixture. There’s this guy who’s doing something sorta funky but he’s country, and he’s definitely white and hairy. Something’s not right with this [laughs].

I’m not a dance band, and I don’t aspire to be. I don’t know what I’m trying to do. My parents were both school teachers, and my dad was a preacher for a while. I’ve read so much philosophy, and I studied theatre for awhile. I know if people are dancing that’s a soul thing, and I’m more into epiphany, revelation, the magic that happens when people transcend. People can do that by dancing into a frenzy, and that’s great but I only know how to do that verbally. I feel like I’m learning more about music every year and the music is getting stronger and better.

Play my music way too loud
My hair’s too long, I don’t fit in the crowd
Leather jacket and denim jeans
Metal studs run down the seams
Times are hard but I don’t care
‘Cause if I want it I’ll take my share
Talkin’ life on a bit too steep
Outta my way or I’ll bury you deep

Metal wouldn’t have evolved the way it has without Anvil. While never the commercial powerhouse of their many high-profile acolytes, this Canadian institution helped steer the course of modern metal and hard rock with an opening trio of releases – Hard ‘n’ Heavy (1981), Metal On Metal (1982) and Forged In Fire (1983) – that exerted as much gravity on young bands as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and the California pioneers like Metallica and Exodus (notably both admirers of Anvil). After a series of rough industry travails, lineup changes and other turmoil, Anvil resurfaced in the popular consciousness in 2008 with the stellar documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil, a fascinating, ultra-warts-and-all history of the band’s endurance in the face of shit that crushes most musicians. It’s a portrait full of intense, understandable emotion and pummeling rock that reeks of ball sweat and real steel, a survivor’s story that’s sad and funny and crazily true.

Since the film’s release Anvil has been more active than ever, and just this year released a bang-up new album, Juggernaut of Justice and a boffo career-spanning anthology, Monument of Metal. Dirty Impound had the great pleasure of a short audience with Anvil’s colorful, ever-rockin’ singer-guitarist-songwriter Steve “Lips” Kudlow, who filled us in on some of the band’s operating ideals as the trio – Kudlow, drummer Robb Reiner and bassist Glenn Five – forges ahead after more than 30 years of heaviness.

Even before I heard the first album, as soon as I saw the name Anvil, I thought, “That is the most goddamn metal name of all time!”

We had to come up with that [name] right from the beginning of the metal genre because somebody was gonna get it!

What drew you into making this incredibly fast and heavy music, which was different from other metal, particularly in North America, in the early 80s?

We were an anomaly, especially for Canada. We had such an attitude right from the beginning which was young and stupid and naïve and call it what you will, but we felt the only reason there were no heavy bands in Canada was no one was doing it.

Starting in Canada is way different than starting in New York or Detroit.

It was. There were heavy bands but every time they petered out and didn’t stay heavy. I’m talking a band like Thundermug. You probably don’t know what that is but I give that as a prime example. They started out very heavy and the infiltration of record companies and everything caused them to dissipate and eventually broke them up. But there are endless stories of that. The initiative and the thing we wanted to do was to create the heaviest band Canada has ever known. That was what Robb and I set out to do. We had to make history for this country, one way or another, man.

We grew up on that shit, and I’m not saying I’m the first one that was ever heavy – no, no, no. I’m a big fan of the Midwest sound of the sixties, where distortion was pretty much discovered, that and Hendrix. And distortion is a big, big deal. Sonically, it’s what really defines hard rock and heavy metal. It pigeonholed the whole thing, but it’s a particular sound of distorted guitar that we’re talking about.

If you vibe with that sort of aggression and volume there’s no other music that will get you off in the same way. That’s how metal becomes the one true love for a lot of people.

It’s really, really a great kind of music because it has so many influences from everywhere.

People who aren’t metalheads don’t realize the variety in the genre. This leads nicely into the new compilation, which really shows off Anvil’s range. It showcases a lot of different sides of this band.

Well, there are [a lot of different sides], which is part of the problem as well as what makes us what we are. People misunderstand the diversity. It’s just music [laughs]. Certain types of songs sort of argue with others, and it’s really subjective. There’s more to us than meets the eye. Let’s just put it that way.

This anthology really spells that out in a clear, neat way, but it also shows the continuity in your work. Anvil didn’t have one great era; there’s a through-line that speaks to generally consistent quality.

You know what the saddest part is? The production in the dark years – that’s what I call them – when we were completely on our own and didn’t have a producer, well, a lot of those songs could have been so much better had there been another hand in there. You can’t really produce yourself, not properly. You end up thinking in a box. You don’t see the whole picture, and that’s because you’re in the middle of the forest [laughs]. The only way to get that objectivity [on your own] is to record your album, go away, and come back a year later and listen to what you did with fresh ears. How can you get objective about your performances and writing otherwise? You can’t, not without time. When a producer fixes stuff, in their mind, they’re thinking, “This is forever.” In your mind it’s just a performance and it’s over. What they want to do is make sure that the performance presented lasts forever.

Are there any hard rock/metal producers on your wish list to work with? I wonder if a collaboration with some of the iconic producers out there might not be the next step for Anvil’s recent reemergence.

I don’t know if that’s necessarily the next step. A lot of the guys I would have wanted to work with are no longer doing it, or if they are it isn’t going to be relevant enough. It’s a completely different school now. All the guys from the old days – Ted Templeman, Tom Werman, Jack Douglas – those guys worked in the old school, two-inch tape, and today the guys in the studios with Pro-Tools and all the electronic stuff they have nowadays, you just can’t compare. The old guys aren’t part of that world; they came before. I’ve worked with Chris Tsangarides (Killing Joke, Helloween, Yngwie Malmsteen) and Bob Marlette (Atreyu, Saliva, Alice Cooper), who’s a digital genius. He knows how to work in that format, and there’s an art to that which takes years to learn. Bob is a very special producer because he was on the cutting edge of the digital/Pro-Tools thing. He was a consultant in the working group that developed that software. So, not only does he know how to use the software, his ideas helped create it in the first place.

Juggernaut of Justice is a very modern sounding metal record.

It is but at the same time it’s very old school.

One of the things that’s always made Anvil stand out is how you understand that playing fast isn’t the only way to be heavy. You understand the power and impact of slowing down, and how that can be just as heavy, something you show again on Juggernaut.

Absolutely! To me, metal is a lot of different things…because it really is! Most bands are narrow. Either they’re fast or they’re slow, and either they sing with melody or they don’t. That’s like North, South, East, West. No! There are lots of different directions! There’s a lot of different ways to express yourself and feel. Look at this drummer we have. It would be a real shame not to utilize all the things that guy can do. Thank goodness somebody’s here for him [laughs].

The band had been a four-piece for good while but has settled into a really tight trio in recent years. What’s the difference for you approaching the material with three guys instead of four? Personally, I really love the three-piece and how it puts your guitar right in our faces. It’s like this sword in the middle of everything.

I agree. I think that it was unfocused sounding as a four-piece. There are certain things that compensate for other things. It’s hard to explain but you can get away with having a not-great bass player if you have a ripping rhythm guitar. But if you have a really great bass player then you don’t need a rhythm guitar. That’s about as simple as it gets.

Glenn is just wicked.

We hired Glenn after Ivan [Hurd, ex-guitarist]. Ivan was in the band first, and then the bass player we had at the time quit and we got Glenn. When we got Glenn we wondered, “Why do we still have Ivan?” But I wasn’t quick at the draw at it and there were a lot of years of heartache. You try to do it for the greater cause until it proves itself that it’s not. You have to be certain of things before you take steps like that. It wasn’t that [Ivan being in the band] was harmful but it wasn’t going anywhere or growing with us.

Anvil is still clearly growing, and that’s pretty rare for a band that’s been around this long.

I think it’s the will to survive. I think it really comes down to that. It’s wanting to [grow]. Most bands don’t want to, and that’s the problem. I don’t get it. You get these old iconic bands that would be great if they just kicked some ass instead of lightening it up and becoming not heavy anymore.

Playing the same eight songs every night doesn’t seem like a very satisfying career.

I know, and I want to be different. Man, I really want to be different.

You use the phrase ‘the greater cause’ and that’s maybe the heart of it. Anvil has always given the impression that metal/hard rock is a cause for them.

That’s pretty much it. It’s right there in the lyric for “Metal On Metal,” where we say, “Join the heavy metal fight.” That’s been going on my entire career. It’s a fight for survival. It never ends. So long as you create music it’s a fight for survival because music becomes so disposable, in a certain sense, by the public. No sooner do I put out a new album than people are asking when the next one comes out.

It’s like feeding snacks to a dog.

You could have pocketfuls and then when your pockets are empty the dog is still sitting in front of you wagging its tail.