Jan

17

Al James of Dolorean: The Stereopathic Interview

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Today marks the release by Partisan Records of Dolorean’s new album, The Unfazed. Pick it up, and while you’re at it, stop and consider some of their other records while you’re at it—Unfazed is a worthy addition to a fine discography.

In between living life and gearing up for an upcoming European tour, songwriter Al James took some time to give us an interview. It visits familiar Stereopathic interview themes—what’s it like trying to make a living for a little-known band, and how does the place you live affect you?—and tries to get into the marrow of some of James’ songs.

So, Al, these questions assume a few things which I’ve gathered from talking with other musicians: it’s hard to make a decent living playing music, you have to keep other jobs to stay afloat, toiling in anonymity is wearisome but is also alleviated by being in a particular scene in a particular city. What do you think of any of that?

Yeah I agree with some of that. It’s not really toiling or wearisome. Creating music is primarily an awesome challenge that you can spend a lifetime attacking in new and different ways. For me, it’s more about trying to live with a balance where you can create freely, pay bills, be a good partner to someone, be a good uncle to my brothers kids, write a little bit, etc… As far as a scene or city, I’ve definitely worked hard to avoiding being pigeonholed by being from Portland, because frankly there’s not much here that I can reasonably claim as my own. For better or worse, Dolorean has always just sort of moved along alone.

So, the new record is called The Unfazed. The band’s website proclaims that y’all’ve been “Unfazed since 2001″. There’s a “Who wore it better?” hat contest between Garth Brooks and “Al James The Unfazed” on the band blog. And I’m guessing you probably sign your rent checks that way. What do you mean by “The Unfazed”? It seems that you’ve weathered several professional and—judging by your lyrics—personal disappointments since 2001. You called your last record You Can’t Win. How are you The Unfazed?

Originally, being The Unfazed was just a mindset that I needed to adopt to get by. More recently, I’ve just been having a lot of fun with it as a way of looking at the world. After a full decade of trying to live in that fine balance (that I mentioned in the first answer) it can get overwhelming. It you pay attention to everything going on in music and culture it can get overwhelming and distracting. Being Al James the Unfazed just allows me to focus on long term goals and try to create something every single day.

Are things better, in general, than they were around the time of You Can’t Win?

Things are definitely better now than the years around the release of You Can’t Win. Mostly this comes from a much healthier relationship with music and a much deeper understanding of myself and what I value in making records and performing.

NPR big-upped “Country Clutter” recently, astonished at all the venom and acrimony you put into what might otherwise be a sad, pretty breakup song. I recall other reviews that were stunned at the kind of bitterness you could bring up in songs like “My Grey Life (Second Chances)”. The first song of yours I ever heard—”Hannibal, MO”—features a bitter father who’s gonna shoot you down if you don’t do it yourself. It seems that you find bitterness to be fertile songwriting ground. So, a few questions: is Bitterness the right word for it? If not, what is it? What are you trying to get at? Do you ever find it corrosive to your work? Is it something reviewers have blown out of proportion—are you just working through stuff and then you’re over it? Does your songwriting help you get past this stuff?

I don’t see it as bitterness necessarily. I think it’s more closely linked to what people say when you push them to their limit. A song gives me an opportunity to say the things that I’d never get the chance to say in real life. I’m a person that errs on the side of politeness and often has a hard time really saying what I truly want to say. Writing these fictional songs give me a chance to be someone else and say something I might never say in my own life. These are just pieces of fiction and I get to write the script.

I understand you have to hold down various day jobs to make ends meet. Is that just a fact of life for the indie folk crowd in Portland?

It has nothing to do with Portland or indie folk. Musicians all over the country (and world) work jobs outside of their music for various reasons (not all of them financially motivated). I would wager that most of your favorite musicians right now do something in addition to their career in music. Like I said before, to me it’s about trying for that elusive balance. The flip side of the coin is that many of the musicians I know that live exclusively on their music often feel trapped and don’t necessarily enjoy the endless cycle of record, release, tour. If you use money as one of the primary factors in the equation of an artist’s success it becomes a very slippery slope.

It seems to me that many indie musicians struggle with a tension: while many are suspicious of “success” and its trappings, it’s also just hard to make a living cutting records and touring. Have you experienced that tension? Or am I off my rocker?

I think the tension is just being comfortable in your own skin and having the courage to say “I’m doing this the way I want to do it.” That mostly has to do with taking control of small decisions. There are promoters in Portland who I don’t like doing business with. For the longest time I felt like we still needed to do business with them, because other bands were. When I finally just said to myself and the band,”Hey, we’re not working with this promoter or club because it makes me feel like I’m compromising.” I felt great. Just small choices of control can go a long ways. If there’s one thing the music industry has shown us over the last decade is that there’s always another way to do it.

Closely related: what would professional or vocational or musical fulfillment look like for you? Would that simply be making records you’re proud of? Would that mean making a living off of records you’re proud of?

I’ve talked about this with a number of artists that I’m close to (writers, photographers, musicians). I like to think of success as this—Is what I’m making something that someone will pack and unpack every time they move or will it end up in the discard pile. My hope is that whatever I make or write will be brought along in some way.

Do you read? If so, who? What do you pick up from it? What have you read in the past that did something for you?

I try to read as much as I can, but I don’t make as much time for it as I’d like. For me, books are the blueprint for storytelling and creating genuine characters. Lately, I’ve been enjoying Willy Vlautin, Raymond Chandler, Scott Nadelson, James Salter, Richard Ford, and Jaimy Gordon.

You used to write more from the perspective of various characters; your songs are now written from the 1st-person-singular perspective. Why the change?

Yeah, I’ve moved away from third person. I realized that in most cases I don’t want the perspective of omnipotent on-looker or storyteller. It was just another layer that didn’t need to be there. Why not communicate directly from the speaker’s heart? I think it’s more believable.

Tell me about “The Search”, from Violence in the Snowy Fields, where you sing a good portion of Job 28. Is this your “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season)”, minus the Billboard-charting? Did you feel like Job at the time? Did you just dig those words? How does that song hit you nowadays?

That song was a simple exercise that turned out cool. One of the most amazing, creative people I’ve ever met is Glen Galloway from the San Diego band Soul-Junk. (He was an original member of the legendary noise band Truman’s Water). What Glen does is take verses directly from the Bible and just sing and play them spontaneously as he feels moved. The results are amazing and beautiful works of spirituality no matter what your beliefs. I tried this with some various passages in the Bible and this is the one that stuck for me and worked as a song. It’s a fun song to play live and I enjoy springing it on the band when they’re least expecting it. It’s funny because that guitar solo that I played in the middle of the song is very Byrdsian. It was a first take that we tried a bunch of different ways before we realized my first instinct was my best.

You live in Portland, you’ve been in that scene a long while—being a musician, what does it mean to have a home? Does being from somewhere affect what you do and what you write? Does it ground you in ways that you’re at all aware of?

For me it’s actually the opposite. I get further and further away from what’s going on in the music scene in this city, because it doesn’t interest me. I have my close friends and family, my band mates and business contacts, outside of that I enjoy what Portland has to offer—fly fishing and camping nearby, fresh produce, trail-running in Forest Park, healthy and diverse food options, proximity to the ocean for crabbing and clam-digging, etc… I actually don’t think my song-writing would be too different if I lived somewhere else. It’s more rooted in relationships than ‘place’ or ‘home.’ My hunch is that I’d write the same type of songs anywhere.

Fools Gold Ring from The Unfazed

Jan

17

The Dolorean Discography

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On Tuesday, Portland, Oregon’s Dolorean releases The Unfazed, their first record in four years. After some release-related Portland-area shows, the band will cross the Atlantic for about a month of shows around Europe.

Emerging from the small Willamette Valley town of Silverton in 2001 with the low-key Sudden Oak, Dolorean first drew attention in 2003 when the New York Times reviewed their second album, Not Exotic, mentioning songwriter Al James in the same breath as Elliott Smith. Not Exotic featured short stories and character studies accompanied by pensive acoustic guitars, piano, and shuffling waltz-time drums. The record is a quiet, insistent grower built on a solid foundation of beautiful tunes.

2004′s Violence in the Snowy Fields was centered on the band’s confident, outgoing adoption of some classic country-rock sounds. Electric guitars pushed themselves into the front of the mix; comparisons with Neil Young and The Band abounded, not unjustly. With looseness and ease Dolorean fully inhabited themselves as a band, and James’ songwriting ranged from rollicking, Byrdsy rave-ups (“The Search”) to quiet empathetic character songs (“Put You to Sleep”) to bitter, acrid kiss-offs (“My Grey Life”). The record was an inspired, assured turn from James and his band.

Gus Van Sant took the cover photo for Dolorean’s 2007 record, You Can’t Win. Al James stares at the camera, most of his face wiped out by a fuzzy band, the dejected words “You Can’t Win” eclipsing the man. The record came after a strange, demoralizing three years in the band’s life, and it lacks the conciseness and sideways uplift found in Violence. The band tried out a looser, more improvisational sound; assured jam sessions  (“Beachcomber Blues”) and yearning instrumentals (“33-53.9 N/118-38.8 W”) shared the platter with some really bummed-out lyrics. The title track sums up the record: several brooding minutes of distorted drums, organ, and piano build to James’ repeated insistence that “You caaaan’t win, you caaaan’t win!”

Things have picked up for the band since then; The Unfazed is confident like Violence, and much more comfortable with the roughscrabble of life than You Can’t Win. Breakups, debt, aimlessness—and the broad backdrop of lean times and an uncertain future for today’s thirty-somethings—such topics can make for resigned, weary songwriting. But James defies that temptation; and it’s a lot more interesting to listen to someone fight against the things that got him down than just get tread upon. In the title track, James encapsulates the joie de vivre of today’s downwardly mobile, singing:

Take you out again tonight,
when you get off I’ll be outside…
We’ll take a handful of quarters from the dresser drawer,
there’s a bar ’round the corner and there’s no cover charge,
they can’t kick us out until half past two,
we can dance all night if we fill up the juke…
…fill up the juke…

Meanwhile, the band backs him up with music fully at ease with the country-rock sound they first adopted on Violence, finding room for lovely details like the violin at the end of “If I Find Love” and the wide-open pedal steel adorning “Black Hills Gold”. Fundamentally, this music is meant to be played and heard live; The Unfazed sounds, more than any other Dolorean record, as the effort of a band, of five guys buoying each other up and simply in the same pocket. It’s a fine album, one we hope will bring this deserving band a wider and more faithful audience.

Buy it all right here, and sample some tunes below…

Hannibal, MO from 2003′s Not Exotic

The Search from 2004′s Violence in the Snowy Fields

You Can’t Win from 2007′s You Can’t Win

The Unfazed from 2011′s The Unfazed

Jan

14

The Maldives’ Blood Relations: Jason Dodson tells us what it’s about

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I recently wrote about “Blood Relations”, a sprawling, fighting, epic song about fathers and sons from the Maldives’ magnificent LP Listen to the Thunder. Writing about music is perilous; music works on all sorts of non-rational, emotional, and cultural levels, and to put into propositions what a song is “about” inevitably just misses it and sounds stupid. I’m tempted to end most of my reviews with “aw, crap, just listen to the record”—which is a cop-out, but a sensible one.

I nearly did that with the song review linked above, but instead I had a sudden flash: What if I asked the songwriter how my interpretation squared with what he put into the song? A bit of digging around on teh interwebs got me emailing with Jason Dodson, the terrific lead singer and lyricist for the band, and so I asked him about the song.

Interviewing musicians can be perilous, too. Some are exhausted from answering questions and don’t give you anything. No big deal. But others just whiff questions with content-free answers. Wanna tell me about this song that means a lot to me and my friends? “Well, we were just messing around one day and I threw in some lyrics and never thought about it again and then our producer stuck it on the record and I was all, ‘oh, whatevs…’” That kind of thing can just ruin a song—or even a band—for me. Why put the effort into something that doesn’t mean anything to the person who made it?

I’m happy to report that Jason Dodson’s response to the interview more than rewarded the dozens of times I’ve spun “Blood Relations”. Listen to the song, dig the song, and dig how the man poured himself into this song.

Image credit: Suzi Pratt via http://www.flickr.com/photos/spratt504/4016180056/

Blood Relations from Listen to the Thunder

Is this song autobiographical? Did your father say to you, “What good is a man without a family? my son…” Do you have children still carrying his name?

The song is somewhat autobiography, indirectly in pieces, and some more historically latent to my own past. The song begins with the name “Ellis.” Ellis was my grandfather, my father’s father, Read more

Jan

10

Dawes Makes BellTower Debut

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From touring with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros in the last year, to recording with big-name musicians like Conor Oberst, Jenny Lewis, and Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson, Dawes have steadily been making a name for themselves in the music industry.

The California natives have often heard their folk-rock tunes compared to the likes of Neil Young, A.A. Bondy, and Delta Spirit, and will be making their Pullman debut at the BellTower on Thursday, January 27th at 8 p.m.

Take a look below as they perform a version of “If You Let Me Be Your Anchor” while accompanied by The Morning Benders:

Dawes & The Morning Benders “If You Let Me Be Your Anchor”

Dawes – When My Time Comes

Dawes will be accompanied by Nashville alt-country artist Jonny Corndawg.

You can purchase tickets online in advance for $7, or at the door for $10.