Episode 118: The Musical Life with Guests from Camper van Beethoven

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 118 is something like, what existential concerns are involved in songwriting style and techniques? That is a convoluted question. We have two guests best known for their involvement in the band Camper Van Beethoven. For more information, Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer speaking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:31 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:34 Jonathan: This is Jonathan Segel. I'm in Stockholm, Sweden.

0:36 Victor: And this is Victor Krummenacher and I'm in San Francisco, California.

0:41 Mark: Oh, so excellent to have both of you here.

0:44 Jonathan: We're technologically so advanced that we can be all over the world and have this podcast.

0:49 Mark: So this grew out of Jonathan being on our episode on Schopenhauer and. And if folks are just tuning in because they are camper van fans and are like, why are these other people talking? Well, that's the format. Sorry.

1:00 Victor: That's a good thing. You don't want us talking.

1:04 Jonathan: This is actually exactly what we would be saying on stage between songs, but we didn't have the time.

1:11 Mark: I have found I just had this experience where I played a song that I had just written. It was that Antigone song, a theme song to Antigone. And I played it for my wife and she's like, well, I don't have to like everything you do occasionally. But then I performed it for the extended family, was having a gathering and I was able to tell the story of Antigone and it went over great. It actually connected. But enough about that. If folks are just fans of Camper Van, hopefully. You know what I thought getting Jonathan on here last time, that was like a big star get. But then I tell people and unless they're our age or older, they don't have no reference.

1:46 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:47 Mark: So I'm sure you guys get quite enough of that. But even less known are the fact that both of you have a whole lot of really freakin awesome solo records.

1:55 Victor: Jonathan and I ran a label starting in about 1993.

1:59 Jonathan: Yeah, that's right.

2:00 Victor: And we did. I don't know, I've done eight or nine.

2:04 Mark: It said nine in your press.

2:05 Victor: OK.

2:06 Mark: It's always hard to count them. McCabe and Mrs. Miller count as a solo album.

2:10 Victor: It's kind of half a solo album, but it's not really. That really was a collaboration. So yeah, I guess it's nine. That's correct. And Jonathan has done with the McCabe

2:18 Jonathan: and Mrs. Miller, an EP and a solo album. So that's like three quarters of one.

2:22 Victor: Right, right. Well, EP, there's duplicate songs, but different versions. Different versions.

2:27 Mark: And then Jonathan has just a million. But you could only count the pop ones or. Only count.

2:32 Jonathan: Yeah. Or you could say only the ones that have actually been released in physical formats.

2:37 Unknown speaker: Right.

2:38 Mark: The Dr. Firebrain Vol.1 cassette that I've never heard. That doesn't count.

2:42 Jonathan: Is that.

2:42 Mark: Or that was a physical format.

2:44 Jonathan: That was a physical format, yeah. But volume two and volume three. Right.

2:48 Victor: Jonathan, for me, falls into kind of three or four categories, depending on how you look at it. There's composition for dance, improv, electronic or band instrumentation. And then there's band stuff for him, which would be Hieronymus Firebrain, more static institutions. And then just solo stuff. I think he's got four personalities, personally, but I've only known him for 30 something years.

3:09 Jonathan: Yeah. A bleeding quadrophenic, as Pete Townshend said.

3:12 Mark: So all that is by way of introduction. And Wes is on here, not as a. Well, you've written a couple songs.

3:18 Wes: Right. I'm on here as a listener that

3:21 Mark: we had in 1994 for a year when we started grad school. You recorded a little guitar thing.

3:26 Wes: Yeah, I did a few classic guitar compositions, but for the most part, songwriting classics.

3:32 Mark: Not classical. They're classical.

3:33 Wes: Classical. Classical, yes.

3:34 Unknown speaker: Sorry.

3:35 Wes: Not classics yet.

3:36 Jonathan: They're classic.

3:37 Mark: They're becoming classic. They're on their way to guitar.

3:39 Wes: Yeah. For the most part. Songwriting really is a mystery to me. I don't have it in me.

3:43 Mark: So that's partly what I wanted to get at today. We've had a few episodes on aesthetics and talked about what famous philosophers have to say about aesthetics. But most of those guys, Rousseau, I guess, wrote some songs, and he didn't write about that, that I know about. So most of these folks are concerned with what is the experience of music, what role does music or the arts more generally have in our lives? And that's great to know that. But what about the actual creative process? And moreover, living with this as your central thing that both of you, because your band was very successful in the 80s and still has a healthy life now. And obviously you're doing well enough in your solo stuff that you can continue to make it. Your records all sound good. It looked like Victor, even though you only had two sessions for the last album. It sounds damn good. You got some good players in there.

4:27 Victor: For me, that's the key. It always has been. The key is to keep really good, inspiring players around you. I'm much better if I can get it done fast. If I have to sit and think about it, it bogs down really quickly. And we just did finish, actually a Monks of Doom record. It's the first one in 20 years and it took five years to do it. If somebody proposed to me a five year album cycle right now, I think I would say no.

4:48 Jonathan: With the current market, it really doesn't matter one way or the other whether you're spending five years between albums or whether you're spending a week making an album. Yeah, you're gonna get the same sort of availability, really.

4:59 Victor: Strangely, what happened for me and as far as playing music right now is, you know, it's kind of an off time for Camper. And because we're spread out so far, it's hard to say who will do what when.

5:08 Unknown speaker: And.

5:09 Victor: And I do have this great core group of musicians who suddenly have realized in the last year that they really like playing together. And that's facilitated us being able to play a lot more than I have by myself ever. After 20 years of doing it, it's just now reliable that I cannot lose money doing it for so long.

5:26 Mark: Okay, so the pull of this activity, we don't have a text for this, but Jonathan did write a really long blog post that at least I used that I will link folks to. And that can be part of the text. So you got sucked into this. It's the thing that you think about when you wake up. You know, it's the basic. Even though you've had to have day jobs, both of you have day jobs or have had them, should have them.

5:45 Jonathan: Should have them.

5:46 Victor: Should or do. I mean, I actually like, not morally should just. Well, I mean, I have had a career as an art director now for almost 20 years. And I like what I do a lot actually. I really enjoy it. Working with really smart people makes you smarter. So I have gotten a lot out of it, but yet it's taken a lot out of me too. I think the songwriting has benefited from it, but I think it's also been hurt by it. I'll speak for Jonathan on this too, but we basically interpret our environment musically and I think we're both innately wired that way. I don't know that we can escape it because otherwise we would have stopped doing this because there's really no.

6:25 Jonathan: The positive feedback loop is small.

6:27 Victor: Yeah, the positive feedback loop is small. The intrinsic value in the society has declined markedly and it's declined markedly in the last 10 years. And so it makes it a very solitary pursuit now. But yet for me it makes sense. And I know plenty of people to whom it makes sense as well. It's how they interpret the world as well. And so there's like vision and there's a lot of clarity when you're around those people. But when you're trying to present it to the Internet society, although we, I guess we're taking advantage of the Internet right now as we speak, it's declining in value. I mean that in itself is a philosophical and moral concern of mine.

7:04 Wes: What do you mean it's declining in value?

7:07 Victor: It doesn't have the currency that it

7:08 Mark: did, the actual amount you get paid. That's what you mean?

7:11 Victor: Well, literally that, but also just the value to the overall society. I manage people who are far younger than me and they're very into their music and they're on headphones at work all the time. They're into it, but there aren't as many of them as there used to be. And the other thing is that at a certain point in time, 25, 30 years ago, music was so part of the general, you couldn't get it for free. That's basically what it was. You had to pursue it and that actually gave it more value because people were forced to actually spend money on it and actually forced, you know, when you buy something, you have to tell people about it or you want to tell people about it.

It's a very interesting aspect of just kind of consumer marketing. And when it's free. Now, content is completely vital to any Internet based business. I know this intimately because I work with one. But yet the actual content of the content is not nearly as important. They just want stuff, just that it's there. Yeah.

8:06 Jonathan: Also there's this whole aspect of societal identity with music that was very important out of World War II into the rock era and the jazz era. Your societal identification with the type of music that you listen to for the last 50 years has been extremely important to people's self identity. And I think that that started to break down as much as anything else when pop music became rock music, as Simon Frith, Fred Frith's brother, pointed out in his sociological essays.

8:34 Victor: Right. Well that's true. And if you think about the history of black music in America as a really good place to go almost immediately, that was revolutionary full on for a long time. And you could argue that it was revolutionary until about 1988 in NWA and going into the early 90s. But I would Be hard pressed to say that it's revolutionary now. You know, the aesthetics of the society have changed. You know, it's now the core value is pursuit of money, pursuit of fame, pursuit of booty. I don't know that that completely is different than it sounds. Exactly what Howlin Wolf. I guess, you know, you could argue it's not really different, but I would say that the politics have changed. It's politics of opportunity versus politics of adversity.

9:18 Mark: I guess I always thought that with the. Basically the breakdown of the central culture, that it's not that there's music that everybody knows anymore, that even the most popular pop music, most of my peers don't know what it is unless they have a daughter or a son that listens to that stuff. And even that it's word of mouth. It's not what replaces Top 40 radio. It's like, well, what is on the pop playlist on Spotify or something, which is just like one guy putting this together. It's all more idiosyncratic. So it just seems like it makes it easier to connect with the particular subculture that is most natural for you.

Not that there's a breakdown in all this. It seems like there's just as much association with small groups. In fact, it's easier to do that if you're into punk music or whatever. You can get way in touch with that without necessarily having to live in a particular area and go to certain bars, right?

10:02 Jonathan: And you can hide it. Also, you can not actually have to be authentic.

10:05 Mark: You don't have to dress like that.

10:07 Jonathan: You don't even have to dress like that. You don't even have to actually be part of a scene or anything like that. Like, I was looking up some of the ideas that people had on authenticity and how the idea behind when rock music came out was that like the blues musicians, the people that were into it viewed the singers or the performers as being authentic examples of the genre. The audience would identify with them saying, this person is really speaking for me, say Elvis Presley or then Buddy Holly or then the Beatles, or then, I don't know, the Grateful Dead or Led Zeppelin or something like that on through until the sort of breakdown where rock music becomes essentially what is pop music today.

And there's no distinction when the rock ballad is used on, say, American Idol, because it is essentially pop music. And so when people argue about authenticity today, they're arguing about somebody that is a manufactured icon. And yet the first things that are out of these people's mouths, like Iggy Azalea, are saying things like I'm real. The first lyrics in the song I'm

11:07 Wes: real, which is evidence that you're not real.

11:09 Victor: If you're, if you're saying, yeah, right, it's a great example. But everything is intensely manufactured now. And I don't think that there would be any entertainment conglomerate that would get behind anything that wasn't.

11:19 Wes: So when you say manufactured, you mean

11:21 Victor: overproduced or, you know, I mean, I live in the land of the personal brand, as do we all around here. It's fairly intense. Everything that everybody does in every aspect of their life now is towards their personal brand. That's how insidious and deep the marketing aspects of the kind of permutation of Internet culture has gotten. And I don't think it's any different if you're a small business or if you're a musician. Commerce has insinuated itself into every aspect of our life. I think if you were to contrast that with, you know, what's considered.

I think most people would consider the 60s to be a deep renaissance in culture. Film, music, literature, philosophy. Philosophy. And we've been kind of having declining returns since that point. But if you were to really look at, say, Ahmet Ertegun, you know, he was a businessman and he went and grabbed as many artists as he could and he threw it at the wall. But he did cultivate, and there's a huge difference.

12:17 Mark: So that's the guy that produced Miles Davis and all that other stuff on.

12:20 Victor: Yeah, you know, Aretha Franklin, you know, I mean, it's a different time because we are marketed to from a very young age. So your innate discovery on your own of things and your innate creation of your identity is now influenced. So here's a story. I went over to this boutique, I was in north beach, and it was like a men's clothing thing. And there were these jeans and they were on sale. And I'm like, these are nice jeans. And they're like, yeah, they're handmade in San Francisco. Like Levi's, like Levi's Once Upon a Time were. And they're Tellason jeans.

And the style of the jean is the John Graham Mellor. That's Joe Strummer's birth name. And so I was like, wow, these jeans are named after Joe Strummer. And the guy behind the counter who's like some 20something hipsters, like, what do you mean? What do these have to do with Joe Strummer? I was like, this is his birth name. And the guy was kind of gobsmacked. He's like, oh, that's weird. I'm like, yeah, it's kind of weird to market these jeans, you know, but yet they're nice jeans. And so like, I bought them.

13:16 Mark: But I hope his estate is earning a good chance.

13:19 Victor: Well, you know, it would be an interesting thing because I actually know some people in that camp. So, you know, maybe Lucinda is a widow. She should be collecting money on it. But, you know, that's kind of the insidiousness of it.

13:28 Jonathan: It's funny that the sales clerk didn't know that, but also that he did know who Joe Strummer was.

13:33 Unknown speaker: Right.

13:34 Victor: And if you know the history of Joe too, you know, he reinvented himself a few times. He used to call himself Woody and then he became Joe. But should I take a punk rock name now? It doesn't have the same.

13:43 Mark: It's a little late.

13:44 Unknown speaker: It's a little.

13:45 Victor: It's a little late. But it's also like, it just doesn't have the same. I don't know that that kind of reinvention works because your personal brand essentially is just established as soon as you're a teenager and you're on Facebook. And also you have easy access. Like, I want this identity. You can go buy whatever identity you want now. And identities are shop to you. And it seems like people I know who did say the Occupy movement, there's kind of like standard revolt identity as much as there is actually like artistic

14:10 Jonathan: identity, like the commodification of the identity of rock and roll. I mean, it's already in every Disney movie and leapfrog education for three year olds and things like that. So they have rock music that is no longer any sort of revolutionary identity.

14:25 Victor: Oh, rock music now is taught. You know, Alison from McCabe and Mrs. Miller works for Google, teaching kids at Google who are there for the free daycare how to rock and roll.

14:35 Mark: Oh, actual kids. Actual kids just doing an old guy. Those 18 year old.

14:39 Victor: No, no, like those kids, little kids. So there's this interesting indoctrination too. Parents love the rock and roll.

14:44 Mark: Telling them how to click on the ads now.

14:48 Jonathan: Okay, so here's my question for this then. How is it at all possible then to have an authentic identity as a musician or as a songwriter?

14:57 Mark: Okay, good. Taking it back to the process contra sort of the general rage against commercialism. I've been impressed over my lifetime at the improvement of the music even in actual commercials. It used to be they didn't want to hire real musicians or license a real song, so it would be like whatever doofus on staff like, would want to write something that was rock. Like, like we want to have this commercial, have a feel like that the young people would like it and it would be this fake attempt at 60s rock or something. But now they just actually just license the damn song or.

So there are ways, you know, just like when they show cute babies in ads, like you can just forget it's an ad and just enjoy the cute babies if that's what you're into. Like. And so in the same way it might be possible since the advertising aspect is so ubiquitous, to even just, oh, what is that song? Let me look that up. Because there are like actual real songs in ads, right?

15:51 Victor: So there are real songs in ads and they are people I know who do music direction for this kind of thing are pursuing, you know, they want the authentic song they want and does

16:00 Mark: it ruin it anymore. Whereas it used to be this ubiquitous ad. We can't put a song by the who in that ad because forever that song would be tainted with the association with Chevy or something. But now it seems like there are songs that do well on the radio, but then also they appear in multiple ads even and like just.

16:17 Jonathan: Or start in ads. Yeah, or they start in ads and then go.

16:20 Victor: Yeah. I mean the Black Keys is a really good example of just really using advertising to bolster their organization. And they've really used that to actually increase their profile. But also for like their stage show and things like that, they're paying for the logistics of what they do and

16:39 Mark: following in with that. So my daughter listened to a lot of Taylor Swift and even though she's like the most popular artist that exists right now, perhaps it's actually just somebody writing like personal confessional songs.

16:49 Unknown speaker: Yes.

16:50 Mark: She uses co songwriters and things and the arrangements are done crazily, expensively and all that stuff. So you could say, oh, this is manufactured in some way. But isn't that weird that we've created this space where the expectation, I think even among consumers is still, I want this to speak to me as a person. And so if I'm a 14 year old girl that's having problems and I want a 14 year old girl talking about her problems.

17:13 Jonathan: Yeah. The perception of authenticity is that the artist then speaks for them. They identify with what the artist is saying. So they're perceived as being authentic, similar like the Black Keys, even if they're in advertisements, does that alter the public's perception of them as being authentic musicians? Or does it make them seem as if they're manufactured or they sold out. The idea of selling out is no longer as detrimental, I guess, as it could have been in the philosophy of music in the 1960s or 70s.

17:40 Victor: Yeah, well, I think even Neil Young, who in the 80s came out hard against it, is selling songs now, from what I understand. I think in, like, the high league pantheon, you know, maybe Tom Waits is the only person who's really not gone there, you know, and they don't want his song. Well, you know, he sued Frito.

17:57 Mark: Buy your Chevy, Buy your Chevy.

17:59 Victor: He sued Frito, lay really hard for European commercial and won a lot of money. So people, I don't think, want to screw with Tom Waits on that one.

18:06 Jonathan: Yeah, they asked him to do a commercial and he wouldn't do it. So they hired somebody who sounded like him.

18:11 Victor: And he sued and won, too, a fairly large settlement, which is a little

18:15 Jonathan: weird when you consider that his vocal sound was essentially stolen from Hoagy Carmichael and people that came 50 years before him.

18:22 Wes: So what about the question of aesthetics? We talked a lot about selling out and commercialization, but I can say instinctively that I'd find something like Taylor Swift to be in poor taste, but I'd have trouble articulating what's wrong aesthetically or

18:36 Mark: the poppiness of it.

18:37 Wes: You were saying, are there aesthetic objections to something like that? What's the problem with the Taylor Swift? And how does authenticity relate to that?

18:43 Victor: And.

18:43 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

18:44 Victor: So, Jonathan, what is an authentic personality?

18:46 Jonathan: The point is, an authentic personality is whoever the audience individually identifies as somebody who speaks for them, really. So it's obviously a malleable term in the age that we live in now when plagiarism is rife in academic worlds. My wife is back in the university right now, and she's saying that whenever she turns in a paper online, they have automatic plagiarism checkers that take every paper and churn through it and produce a number the next day that says your paper was 7% plagiarized, which is usually, like, sources and stuff like that or whatever.

19:17 Victor: So they take the text and actually enter it into an algorithm that examines against the Internet database.

19:23 Jonathan: Yeah, exactly. But student papers have become more and more plagiaristic over the course of the last 10 and 15 years. And in defense of it, I was reading an article about this. One of the students in Germany said, but there's no such thing as originality. There is only authenticity. What I take from that is what this person meant was that if it appears that. That you are the authentic voice that is speaking those words, then it's good.

19:52 Wes: In my experience, teaching, a lot of times young students don't know what plagiarism is, actually. They cut and paste into their papers, and they think that if they've given a reference, then they have license to actually use the language as their own, oddly enough, to sort of adopt the identity of the author that they're using. And of course, this becomes much easier, you know, now that everything is online. So that happens more. And then there's just the ease with which you can cheat, which is also from the articles I've seen and from teachers I've talked to is so prevalent.

Just paying people to write papers for you, purchasing papers online and things like that. And so now it's routine to run them through these algorithms just to stop that. It sort of makes you despair of why continue this project, even of supposedly educating people. And I think this is related to what you guys are talking about with the free availability of things online and the fact that it seems as if everything should be available without any work or without any payment.

20:46 Jonathan: It also goes into the idea of being able to purchase your own culture or purchase your own words. Essentially. You can adopt your identity and purchase your own identity and be whoever you want to be. And so long as you're seen as being authentic, then you pass. It doesn't matter what you do or what you've done to back up that position.

21:06 Victor: Right, Exactly. And I think one of the things that actually informs me and makes me feel like I'm actually a fairly authentic songwriter is that I started touring when I was 19. All sorts of bad things happened. I was a gay man living in the Bay area in the 1980s, and people were dropping dead. We had a lot of friends self destruct. All these things that are very hard, but yet they are transformative and they are actually real, substantive things. And this is a standard line from us, but, you know, we toured around the world with a roll of quarters and had contracts mailed to us and no GPS in the car.

You know, it's a really different voyage of discovery. It's amazing to have lived on both sides of the Internet. I'm not anti technology, but the access has diminished. There's something aesthetically very important that happens to your ability to express yourself by discovering it versus finding it easily through a database or buying it. Yes.

22:03 Jonathan: Over the course of history, the divide between writers and performers and what was perceived as being authentic musically has changed an awful lot. If you look back to troubadours playing their own songs versus classical composers writing music and Then having paid performers play it versus the technology of recording, when it came into being, the whole idea was there was a big divide between who wrote music, who performed it, who recorded it, who produced it. The idea of who was a producer gave a lot of influence into what music sounded like at the time.

But by the 1990s, all of that was breaking down with technology. And so most people were, over the course of the 60s and 70s, started the writers became the performers. And then by the 90s, the writers became the performers, became the engineers, and then became the producers. So now it's sort of expected that an authentic musician will be the person that produces engineers, writes and performs all of their own music. And so when we look at someone like Taylor Swift, where it's gone back to the old like Elvis Presley, Colonel Parker sort of way of, she may have a couple of words, maybe she writes her own songs.

23:15 Unknown speaker: I don't actually know.

23:16 Victor: Yeah, actually I think she works with co writers on a lot of stuff, but I think she is actually hands

23:20 Mark: on lot of it and kind of.

23:23 Jonathan: She's probably a badass.

23:24 Mark: She's like to rewrite her lyrics, like puts them down.

23:27 Jonathan: There is sort of a machine that's behind the bigger names where people are actually, you know, like living here in Sweden. I know that Max Martin, who has been awarded music prizes for being extremely successful as a songwriter and as a producer, has written for many people, including Gaga and Britney Spears, people like that. All these sorts of people are writing and producing the big stars. So it's a breakdown of the post technology authenticity of being able to like write, perform, record, etc, etc, etc. Who is fetid not because his music is good, not because he's a good producer, not because he's a good songwriter,

24:02 Victor: but because he's success good for the Swedish economy.

24:05 Jonathan: Okay, so with that behind us now, I have to ask you then, all of your experience that makes you write what you write, how does it affect the aesthetics of what you write versus how you aesthetically understand what you hear around you?

24:21 Victor: I'm in this particular part of my journey as we talk about our lives. What horrible. We're now actually contemplating having more band input because I've been really operating on a solo basis for a long time and writing and bringing in things and getting some input. But essentially, you know, the arrangements are mine. And I was in a conversation with Greg Leisure from Camper, who's been playing with me for a long time and he's been playing with me lately about things to try ideas to try and we were both of the feeling that we have this ability to be very musically adventurous. And we have been very musically adventurous in our past, but it was commercial suicide. And so what has been working for me lately is that I'm able to go and musically provide something that is informed by my ability to be pretty obtuse, but isn't. So.

25:08 Mark: So it sounds like new wave.

25:09 Victor: Well, it sounds like new wave. Yes, exact. You know, we've been.

25:13 Jonathan: Wave.

25:14 Victor: We've been hoeing. I mean, we've been towing, essentially, you know, I mean, if you were to brand us, we're Americana now, but yet none of us really want to be Americana. And for us, Americana, you know, I mean, my drummer and my bass player have deep soul, roots, blues chops. Not born out of being a punk rock kid who discovered that music, but born out of being 60.

25:35 Mark: That original stuff, that Uncle Tupelo, Back to the roots.

25:38 Victor: Yeah, but, you know, I mean, when you're 60, that doesn't really apply because, you know, your listening experience and how you discover things totally different. So, I mean, in some ways, I guess I feel like I am a fraud. You know, I came at it backwards. It's like I'm not really part of the deep well. And I have a great appreciation for musical continuity over time and a desire to tap into it. I am fortunate in that I have people who. My pedal steel player recorded John Lee Hooker. There's a much more direct connection there. And I can have people who have that deep knowledge inform me. But I feel in many ways that I've just adopted my identity as well. And that adopted identity, for whatever reason, is now having a little renaissance. And people enjoy it and they're coming to see music, but it's culturally functional. It's culturally functional and that.

26:24 Mark: So there's. There's this increasing blues and country presence in your stuff. That's what you're referring to, generally, away from the Monks of Doom, more pro.

26:31 Unknown speaker: Right.

26:31 Victor: We kind of play with things, we adopt things. And I was exposed to that kind of music from a very young age. So it's very innate. But I avoided playing it forever because it didn't strike my teenage fancy. Punk rock is what got me into it. So I went backwards into it.

26:43 Jonathan: But does that mean that you listen to the people that were doing it back, say, in the 40s, 50s?

26:49 Victor: That is what I listen to now, yeah.

26:51 Jonathan: So if you were to listen to other people that were doing the same kind of music now, what's your aesthetic take on it?

26:57 Victor: You know, some of it I find interesting, and some of it I find. I wonder if they're as big a poser as I am. So there are some people, I find, who are bringing interesting identity elements into the kind of roots music landscape. But, you know, we were talking about the Black Keys earlier. I have listened to the Black Keys and enjoyed it and actually think they're fine band, but I don't even know what they're saying. But yet. I mean, we were talking about Joe Strummer. I know every word that Joe Strummer said. And that was one part being a teenager. But also, you know, I go back and I feel like, you know, he was actually not a bad lyricist. And he actually had something to do with it. I think sound and identity and appearance are now actually more important than actually what you're saying.

27:37 Mark: Well, I'm sure that's always lyrics. The lyrics start sinking in on, like, your eighth listen, really, depending on what the thing is. If it's a Zappa libretto, you know, if it has some humor element or something, or they might be giants like that. That's the thing that sucks you into the song. And then you enjoy the song after you've already been hooked by the lyrics. But that's by far not the norm and certainly the way either of you sing more. So I think your stuff, Victor, that you get immersed in the atmosphere. And it's only gradually sort of soak up the words as time goes on.

28:06 Victor: Well, I think, you know, the atmosphere of music is always vitally important because, you know, it conveys so much, as

28:12 Jonathan: Mark pointed out, being a feeling, living being. I think you can't help but respond to things like the beat, the volume.

28:21 Victor: Right. But, you know, I mean, then again, I was listening to a lot of Beefheart again recently, you know, and there are some really great documentaries on him that were done around the time he died. You know, one of the things that Beefheart was really into was not having a beat, subverting beat. You know, I mean, one of the references that we were talking about on email was Uncle Meat, that really heavily composed experiment in pop music, in rock and roll. That was 68, 68, 69 for Uncle Meat.

28:47 Jonathan: Yeah.

28:48 Victor: Trout Mask is 1969. It's all around the same time. Think about that music in terms of modern aesthetic.

28:55 Jonathan: And they wear their influences right on their sleeves. Because Beefheart was very influenced by the blues. And Zappa was as much influenced by.

29:03 Victor: Yeah, well, Ruben and the Jets.

29:05 Wes: Huge.

29:06 Victor: You know, just his love of Doo Wop, you know, it was supposed to Be a sci fi musical. Right. And then he just got so into the doo wop. It really became. I was like, well, it. We won't do sci fi. We'll actually do a doo wop record.

29:17 Mark: An intentionally stupid doo wop. Yeah, like that. He says, like, these are the dumbest lyrics that I could come up.

29:22 Victor: Right.

29:22 Mark: That's the genre I was beset with as a teenager, which I think there's always something that has gotten at you on an unconscious level from the music that you heard when you were younger in that way. And so I don't even know what to think about it. Like, do I actually even like the Ruben and the jets album? I'm not even really sure because it seems like it was such an ambivalent project himself. It's not like I'm going back to this music of my youth that I loved. It was like, this sticky film is on me and I need to excise it.

29:49 Victor: Yeah. But like, therein, it's like, well, that's great because it's both poking fun at yourself, but also like declaring your love for it, you know? And I think that's Camper Van.

29:58 Jonathan: That is Camper Van right there.

30:00 Victor: I think that is actually a way to find some authenticity is to kind of admit you're a fraud and then peel back.

30:08 Mark: So there's an Andy Partridge quote here that referred. I think when the last XTC album came out, was saying something like, you know, I keep putting these different influences out there, so I'll do something in the style of Thelonious Monk, sort of get that out of my system and just keep peeling it back until only Danny Kaye will be left. In other words, the thing that he was listening to when he was 5, you know, he doesn't really put out music anymore. And maybe there's an end point to that process. Like, if you really think that what I'm doing is catharsis, then it doesn't necessarily lead to doing it as a lifelong activity.

It's just like the Beatles is a very public. We get to see the progression of a band and experimentation. And then finally he said, like, there's not really anything more that this group as a functioning unit, can do anymore. And so just let it go. It seems there's a movement and a life to these sort of progressions. And then they have to end.

30:55 Jonathan: There's also the whole idea that, like, the authenticity of the teenage Taylor Swift or whomever is speaking for or singing the lyrics that the audience identifies with, who are also teenage girls, there's this progression that a lot of songwriters go through where they start out. And their first few records are a lot of self experience, confessional sorts of things. And they learn how to write during this period of time. So they start out writing songs that have their own feelings and their own experiences. Like, take the early 90s, you take Liz Phair and PJ Harvey and people like that, where it seems like where they're starting out is with their own experiences.

And then as they progress as songwriters, they go on a few records down the the line and they're expected to write songs, but they don't have the same experiences that they did, say in their 20s, once they're in their 30s. And so they start having to rely on the craftsmanship that they've learned.

31:48 Victor: That works really well for Pete Townshend.

31:50 Mark: So is that something to worry about? You're becoming less authentic because you're that certainly in a lot of the youth culture. And their first album's really great. When they were sort of didn't really know what they were doing. But then, you know, it's usually put that they sold out. But that's usually not really what's happened. It's just that, as you said, they've developed and they're not relying on such immediate visceral experiences, perhaps, or just being competent makes it harder in some way. You know, you can't.

32:17 Jonathan: Well, what would have happened to Nirvana is the Foo Fighters. What would have happened to Nirvana?

32:22 Mark: Look at Weezer as an example of what? Like, if somebody, right, if Kurt Cobain didn't die and put out another 20 years of albums, then he would be a competent, solid songwriter putting out stuff that now only a niche of people really like that much. I'm one of them, actually. I don't know. It's not getting at that primal teaser thing.

32:42 Jonathan: Well, then, you know, there are people like Richard Thompson, you know, who spent a lot of the 70s and early 80s, mid-80s, writing a lot of things that were fairly direct from his experience. And then I think this happens with a lot of writers. They reach a point of maturity where there's such good crafts that they can call upon their earlier emotional lyrical sense or their earlier emotional experiences to draw up new, say, ballads that aren't necessarily them any longer, but they're such good craftsmen that we believe.

33:12 Victor: Right. Well, you know, I speak from personal experience that the character becomes a really important thing. I was not a character writer when I started writing. I was definitely a confessional writer. And now those lines are very much blurred. There might be deeply personal confessional Real elements in a song. But for me, I feel like it's more effective to tell it as a story so it's told from the voice of a character. And, you know, I mean, the last few records are really. That I've done. I've been much more infused with that kind of writing.

33:38 Mark: That's good to hear, Victor, because otherwise, it's like you have three albums of breakup songs. Basically, like, there's a lot of downer stuff on. Yeah, well, you know, that's not all happening to you personally.

33:47 Victor: I mean, I like it. I like a dance song. You know, what can I say? A lot of people have the same. It was playing in north beach, and this one woman, she's standing there. I don't know who you are. I don't know you are from. And I tried to explain as well, the camper thing. And she's like, I have no idea who that band is. This is great music. It's beautiful. It's atmospheric, and it's just kind of sad. I was like, okay, well, you want to buy CDs? She's like, yeah, they're not happy, are they? No. She's like, good. So that in itself is. I guess we could say that becomes part of your identity and part of your marketing strategy.

Also, I think there is this weird thing where if you're a long artist, you become kind of. I mean, look at what Bob Dylan just did. You know, with the record of standards, you know, you kind of start to revert back. Maybe that quote about your inner Danny Kaye is where we're all headed anyways, which means that I have to make a Frank Sinatra record or something, because that's the first stuff that was around me.

34:41 Jonathan: God, I think I'm gonna go back to either Judy Collins or the Beatles or.

34:44 Victor: Well, you know, I guess better for me is my mom had the Judy Garland Live at Carnegie hall record, and she used to play that all the time, especially around the time my parents got divorced. There's your deep story right there. So, see, that explains it. See, I grew up, like, not only, like, my dad was listening to folk music, my mom had Judy Garland, you know, so that explains everything about the melodrama.

35:04 Jonathan: The cathartic nature of sad music is like the need for tragedy and drama. I don't know. Is there really a catharsis? But people seem to like to live through the emotion of it come out on the other side.

35:16 Victor: If we're talking about the aesthetics of music there, music, it's a language, and I think it connotes Emotion in people. And I think that's where they actually find it vital. And I think that's where we're in this weird schism where things are both being undermined by the popular culture, which is like, why do you even really want to feel. We just want you to buy. We don't really care what you feel.

35:38 Jonathan: Yeah, wouldn't they want people to buy the things that make them happy?

35:41 Victor: I think often just buying things is supposed to make you happy. Right.

35:44 Wes: So is that the criticism of. I'm back to this question of what's in poor taste and what kind of critique we want to render for some of these artists, like Taylor Swift. What's wrong with Taylor Swift? And I don't think it's that every song is happy.

35:57 Victor: Well, you know, I actually did that Taylor Swift record. Got a huge buzz on it. And so I went and checked it out, like a lot of people did, and it's definitely not happy. There's a lot of kind of sad teenagers, early adult stuff on it.

36:10 Wes: So is it the musical equivalent of young adult literature?

36:14 Victor: Yeah, maybe. You know, I didn't have a lot of huge, horrible problems with it, other than it's just musically uninteresting, like, so much. And I think the problem in the way they talk about peak oil, they've talked about peak songwriting, and the peak, well, of harmonic inventiveness.

36:29 Jonathan: So there is no more originality. There is only authenticity, I guess, you

36:33 Victor: know, is that where we're left? Have we churned through musical originality and we're left with this kind of great divide between trying to be an authentic person or only trying to be this kind of marketing brand that propagates itself massively through culture and therefore makes you very rich. And then you can have your island

36:48 Jonathan: in the Hundred Monkeys worked out. Every different combination of the 12 notes in the.

36:55 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

36:56 Mark: Well, it is hard to think that if I tweak this chord progression to be less obvious, then I'll be blazing new ground like. No, you're not blazing new ground. They were doing that kind of stuff in the 1940s in the tin Pan Alley days. You know, the progressive rock thing happened. That's old news. That already happened. So there's nothing wrong with feeling like you want to explore more of that part of yourself, and that will be more natural or more interesting to you. But to feel like you're doing something that is progress in some important way that you're not, when you do music that is maybe simpler, but more coming from your gut, that just seems like A false choice.

I had an early kind of important experience in my college band. Like, we had some aspirations to be more progressive. You know, I listened a lot of King Crimson and stuff like that and never had a band that was really good enough as a group to do that kind of thing. So I recorded this thing. I programmed the synths, you know, layers and layers and layers of stuff. Of sort of thinking through every sound and making it warble in interesting ways. Did a punch in solo where I used a different effect kind of on every note. And it became this very complicated Pink Floydian thing.

And then like a week after that, I recorded something else that I just, like, wrote that night and popped it out. And I liked the second one so much better as a result, and everybody liked the second one so much better. And so choosing something that would sell among my own creations became more just a matter of choosing among the many things that I like, not a matter of choosing am I going to be authentic and experimental, or am I going to do something simple and sell out. It's just a matter of even if I try to do something simple and sell out, people still think it's weird.

38:34 Victor: Well, that's a long standing argument. Going with your gut is the thing to do, so long as you have

38:41 Jonathan: the fingers to back it up. Back 2000 years ago, when they were critiquing the Latin poets, especially the Latin love poets, they made a big divide between Ars and Ingenium, essentially. Ars being the craftsmanship of being able to write the poem versus Ingenium, the innate talent that the poet was trying to express. And I think that same sort of balance is something that we strive for. What we really enjoy seems to be something that expresses a lot of the inner talent of the artist or the composer while still having a modicum of the craftsmanship available. Things that go too far in one direction, like all craftsmanship, end up being sort of boring. You could say the sort of guitar Shredder instrumental solo album. You know, the guy's really good, but.

39:30 Wes: Right. Soloist.

39:31 Jonathan: What's his inner talent?

39:32 Victor: Whereas on the other end, Steve Vai, Joe Bonamassa.

39:36 Jonathan: Yeah, but then you'd say someone like Syd Barrett or something like that, who actually didn't really have a whole lot of ability to control his instrument, but was a stream of just constant, unending, inspirational word and music and melody.

39:52 Wes: This is interesting to me because it seems like we're on the track of talking about expressiveness as one of the criteria. I mean, you were talking about two criteria, really. One of them Is just this musical competence. And then in talking about Taylor Swift, I was thinking, well, is the problem that it's not really. And this gets at authenticity as well. Is its expression kind of shallow in some sense? Is it really expressing something? Is there that kind of vitality to it?

40:19 Jonathan: I think that the problem with modern production like that is that it's exactly half and half. It's like whatever she's trying to express is being come at by the production team and come at by the people that are manufacturing the music, the craftsmanship of it, so that it meets it exactly in the middle. And it's like this perfect balance. It's saleable. It has just enough expression, has all the technical ability to back up that expression. It's not like teetering on a fulcrum where it's like pushed to one edge. That made it interesting.

40:48 Wes: Yeah. And I can say about these songs, I feel. Listening to these songs, I feel the way I feel after eating Cheetos or something, or doing something that makes me feel dirty, which is that they push all the right buttons. You know, it's that manipulative effect of hitting all of the Pavlovian. Oh, yes, this is catchy.

41:05 Mark: That drum sound is freaking great.

41:06 Wes: It's somehow. It doesn't take you on a journey away from that sort of immediate gratification, and so it doesn't provide those more profound gratifications of something that's less immediate.

41:17 Mark: So there's something wrong when every song is a single. Is that what kind of like that? A really good 80s album, like, would have two songs like that that are awesome singles. But then the rest of the stuff, like, you should not really get until you listen to it four or five times.

41:30 Victor: The deep tracks. There are two really interesting things here in referring to Syd Barrett as well, as we continue to tear apart Taylor Swift. I do like her. But one of the things that makes me bristle in all that kind of modern production is the lack of human drums. There was an interesting article recently. I mean, it's one of those kind of stupid Huffington Post clickbait kind of things. But the great revolutions in music are not what you think. And I think this was actually a database analysis of people did a bunch of sampling of music. And so, like, the thing that's most important is the quantized drumbeat of hip hop in the last 20 years.

That's the revolution. But yet, I would argue, although the things that really make me bristle about Taylor Swift are that, you know, yes, as Jonathan says, I think it's divided into just enough authenticity and just enough real emotion to be appealing, but yet it's manipulated, produced, and marketed in such a way as to be just right. It's like the perfect pitch. It's just down the center. It's right in the box. But that lack of human rhythm. I think human rhythm actually imparts a lot of information. There's a ton of information that actually goes into it.

It's more dense. There's more actually to hear there. And when you subvert that, as I think culture has subverted it in general because of taste, I think we've lost a lot of feeling out of music. And a lot of authenticity, as we talk about it, is born out of just the feeling that it imparts, because music is very mysterious that way. And so that's part of why this kind of modern wave of pop music has struck me so cold. Part of it's that I'm an old fuck, and that's part of what happens. And you're becoming irrelevant and don't worry about it. And part of it's like, I think I actually have some real esthetic reasons behind this.

But then again, getting to authenticity and looping this back around how we got to Taylor Swift and Syd Barrett. What part does mental illness play in authenticity? And as far as a musical experience, in the Camper Crew, we've lost a lot of people to suicide. A lot of songwriters we know have killed themselves. And, you know, there's a component of mental illness in that. You know, there's this deep.

43:37 Mark: I would hope that it's not existential despair over how bad music.

43:42 Victor: Well, I. I think there is some existential despair in it, too, actually.

43:46 Jonathan: There is that. Yes.

43:46 Victor: Yeah. I think that's not actually a joke, but I think back on who those songwriters were and how astounding a lot of their work was, and I just wonder what the component is. And one of the things on the reading list was watching that Robyn Hitchcock interview about Barrett, and I think what he was saying was that it wasn't filtered. And he was talking about how he, as a songwriter, learned a lot from that and how that's why you don't omit the line that pops in your head about the sandwich, which I understand. I think that's really true. I think that's the brilliance of David Lowery. Sometimes it's like it's totally obtuse, but it totally emotionally makes sense in the context of the song. Just not having that filter is a very interesting thing. And, like, how important is that to Both the argument about authenticity as a songwriter and originality.

44:26 Wes: Yeah. There's actually a neuroscientist named Nancy Andreasen who's doing work on this relationship right now between creativity and mental illness. And it's actually a topic that's been around for a long time. So she's someone who actually holds a PhD in English and in neuroscience. I think the basic idea that she's been testing is that it has something to do with the ability to free associate, and that those things are implicated in both creativity and in mental illness. So she's used brain scans to show that people are highly creative, have more associative brains, and similarly, take a schizophrenic who's essentially hallucinating and their language.

They talk as if they're free associating. You see this sort of breakdown in the ability to cut that off, let's say. So I think we're back to this criterion of inventiveness and originality. And I think there's some relationship between that and expressiveness as well. The more inventive you are, the more you can express and the more subtle emotions you can express. It's not just, oh, I'm sad someone broke up with me. It's subtler, shades of that. And that's where I see inventedness playing a role in establishing an aesthetic criterion here.

45:35 Mark: I was thinking of the connection, Wes, with one of the last conversations we had with Freud on dreaming, and just his model of, you know, you've got the two portions. We think about this in songwriting, too, or any kind of art. You've got the idea generating portion, and then you've got the sensor portion that comes in and screws with things. And that's exactly the model that he was putting forward. And so, of course, you'd think if one is not working, and there's even

45:59 Wes: that interplay with virtuosity at an instrument, right. There's all this energy that's produced in a performance. Right. And if it weren't constrained, it might just come out as anything. It could come out as a tantrum, say, by a toddler. But you've developed all these abilities to sort of hamper yourself with some sort of musical structure. So classical performance is a great example of that of someone who's adhering to a score, but can pour all kinds of expressive energy into the interpretation of that score. I was thinking also about this question of expressiveness versus being great at an instrument. And my musical tastes, by the way, are very simple. So my influences are things Like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Jesus Christ Superstar and just things my older siblings were listening to when I was a kid.

46:39 Jonathan: But I think, incredibly expressive.

46:41 Wes: Yeah. When you.

46:41 Mark: When you listen to War of the Worlds album.

46:44 Wes: Right. That's. That's one of them.

46:47 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

46:48 Wes: But, you know, so I'm someone, for instance, who listened to Dazed and Confused over and over again. And this goes also towards the element of imagining that there's a live performer there, which I think is really, really important. So you listen to. It's not just a drum beat, but it's John Bonham going crazy and doing great things, and all of them were great musicians. And then it's also fucking inventive as hell, and it's really expressing something. And I think all those three things come together. You're sort of identifying with the artists in some sense and with their genuine expression of something through this. The structure of music and being great at playing their instruments and all that stuff. I don't know how it's to put it.

47:26 Mark: And yet that doesn't relate very directly to the lyrics. In the case of Led Zeppelin, suck it. That's why I didn't like them for a long time.

47:34 Jonathan: I have a lot to respond to here. But the thing that I loved about that, the live version of that Dazed and Confused that's on song remains the same, is that after that huge instrumental section, it's like 18 minutes of instrumental. And when Robert. It comes back in, the first thing he says is suck it.

47:51 Mark: It's like, oh, that's what that was about.

47:54 Wes: Yeah. Jimmy Page with the violin bow and I know, Parodied so well.

47:59 Victor: Musical metaphor at its highest.

48:01 Jonathan: One of the things about when you're talking about, you know, your imagination of the individuals that are involved there, is the perception of agency. The perception of agency is difficult when you're having a computer playing clocked beats, for instance. And even with laptop performers or with DJs, the perception of agency is very, very difficult. Even though modern culture idolizes DJs and idolizes the idea of like, you know, having Swedish House Mafia or Avicii or whoever standing there pressing Go and then waving his hands like I'm making this music, he's creating some sort of false agency there.

To contrast that, I will say that going back to Max Martin versus the Taylor Swift clocked beats and everything like that. One of the things that he has said is that one of the things that's making them the new era of professional songwriters for these major stars, great is that they're actually playing Their synthesizers. They're no longer sequencing them, they're actually playing them in. Of course, then they quantize them afterwards. I'm going to go backwards now and refer to the mental illness like Syd Barrett's filters and lack of filters and perception of agency.

There's. And Freud, James Joyce. His daughter was schizophrenic, and probably he was as well. He was more able to contain it. The ocean of world languages that he swam in. Freud, who was trying to diagnose his daughter and trying to help his daughter, told him, that ocean of language that you are swimming in, she is drowning in.

49:29 Wes: That's fantastic.

49:30 Jonathan: So that same ocean of mental illness or of potential association and in the brain, that makes all of those potentialities of neurons associate to whatever. Like, you know, Joyce hears a word and thinks, ah, proto, Indo, European, changes that to this, to that, and it becomes this huge string of multiple languages in one sentence, never ending sentence, potentially. Whereas, you know, his daughter then grows up in this environment as a person with potential mental illness herself. Because probably their brain chemistry is odd in that family anyway, but she can't.

50:04 Wes: Yeah. Psychiatrists will use this phrase, word salad, to refer to what's a very typical way of speaking for schizophrenics. And it's similar, you could say to some of the things you're going to read in Finnegan's Wake, for instance.

50:16 Jonathan: But going back to Syd Barrett then, it's like, here's a person who was mentally ill and was making these lyrics that are run ons of whatever was occurring to him in his mind at the time. And we as listeners pick up on these juxtapositions of words. And we see it as poetry, we hear it as poetry. When it comes out, it's phenomenal, because there's no way that you could try to make that up, really. It's just something that came out. And going back now to what Victor started off by saying, which is that as writers, we are filters. We're filters for everything that we've heard and everything that we experience in the world.

All artists are essentially a filter. Everything that comes in, everything that you experience, however you choose to put it out, the aesthetic that you choose, the notes that you make with your guitar are the filter of everything that you've learned, like you said, your knowledge of the instrument that you play, your experience of the world around you, whether you stepped in dog shit that day on your way home to play the guitar or whatever. All of those things color the filter that allows whatever comes out to come out. So it's associative or a product of mental illness or a product of whatever.

The artist is the filter for everything that they've heard. All of the musical influences that you've had over your life affect how you play and how you write now.

51:32 Victor: Right. I find that neuroscientists work very interesting because that associative thing, you know, as we're talking about Syd Barrett, I hadn't listened to Syd Barrett in quite some time. And in that YouTube interview that we're referring to, Robyn is playing these Syd Barrett songs. And the poetry, I can feel my synapses light up when I listen to it. And I think that is a quotient of how my brain works. And the self critique I was going into earlier where, you know, I was saying, I feel like I'm a fraud. I'm a poser. I think I am a bit of a poser.

But I think I know now through a lot of experience that I was born with a lot of empathy and a lot of ability to both communicate that empathy and write about it in a way that people respond to. And that's where I think my best work has come out of. And that I think that's the kind of the core of the authenticity argument sometimes. And it's weird because it's almost proto religious. And as a not religious person, you know, especially in a philosophical context, I don't like to get into the spiritual very much, but that is essentially the role I think we fill in society as songwriters.

And I think that is the actual value of being a songwriter, is to communicate on a level, for lack of a better word, that works spiritually for people. That's a primitive way of saying it, because I think there are even biomedical reasons why it works. But yet it's a mysterious voyage. And when you're firing on a number of cylinders in your, you know, for me, it's borne out by experience. I learned how to do it a lot better. But I'm able to create something that people emotionally respond to, and therefore it gets its value. It gets its value because it feels authentic, whether or not it actually is.

At a certain point, you dispose of the argument as to whether it's actually authentic because it works authentically.

53:09 Wes: And this goes back to the difference between swimming in the sea of language and drowning in it. If there's too much association and too little structure, then it fails to be a medium for communication. If you're that far gone as a schizophrenic, you're actually not communicating anything to anyone. People are confused by you and they think you're odd and they respond in that way. And you're also not actually getting the satisfaction of expressing something yourself. It's too unstructured and confused to actually serve. And so it's frustrating.

53:38 Jonathan: Which is ultimately what happened to Syd Barrett.

53:40 Victor: Well, totally worse and worse.

53:41 Jonathan: And he couldn't communicate anything to anybody

53:43 Victor: any longer because there were no constraints. Is the argument about constraint in context, for good or for ill, to impart information from one being to another? I mean, language is a construct. That's a constraint. We require these constraints in order to do it. Yet there's this innate tendency in the problem solving kind of culture that we live in. You know, it's like we want to solve everything, we want to fix everything. I think one of the things I find frustrating about the Internet culture is there's a dominant influence of engineering culture and scientific culture in it where we want to fix these problems.

But I think what imparts meaning to us as people is not necessarily fixing the problem, but just simply talking about the problem. I mean, that's the talking cure. And I can take this as a greater metaphor back to like the mechanical beats versus the human beats. It's like the mechanical beats is like we're trying to make it perfect. Right. But I don't want perfection. I want humanity.

54:34 Mark: No pitch correction for you?

54:36 Victor: No, definitely not. Maybe it's just a little bit, you know, I mean, if it's really want, then I might fix it a little bit. But that's an aesthetic thing.

54:44 Jonathan: I think that that's what makes the perception of agency really important. Because regardless of what genre somebody is working in, like, regardless of what genre Victor is working in, Victor is the person that's doing the singing and touching the instrument. And therefore it's his person, his filter, that is the agent that does that. And there's an imperfection to it because he is a human being. And that imperfection, that wabi sabi sort of aesthetic. You know that term from Japanese art?

55:10 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

55:11 Jonathan: It's a term that has to do with the beauty of imperfection. And that is what makes it ultimately more human and maybe potentially more identifiable with as an audience member.

55:21 Mark: So I think with super pop music, the focus there is on the humanity of the singer. That even if the singer is dosed in pitch correction and very well produced, there's still supposed to be something, you know, in your American Idol singers or whatever that popped radio equivalent of that is, is that it's Supposed to be warbly inhuman and that you can grab onto even though everything happened around them. It's like I'm connecting with a person in a dance hall. I don't expect the background to be itself a human thing. I'm not picturing a drummer doing that. But just having that one point of connection is enough. I think would go this response from

56:00 Jonathan: the techno world and would have the response from an audience or from any audience to identify with the music that's happening. Like for instance, when we're talking about the aesthetic position of an audience enjoying Uncle Meat.

56:12 Mark: Has there been an audience that has enjoyed Uncle Meat? An audience?

56:15 Victor: Well, Wikipedia says it was critically acclaimed.

56:18 Mark: Okay, maybe an audient, to use your favorite word, picturing a whole crowd of people enjoy. But I wasn't alive at that time, so I don't know what crowds were like back then.

56:28 Jonathan: You children? No.

56:30 Unknown speaker: But

56:32 Jonathan: somebody recently lent me a DVD of the Frank Zappa ensemble performing Uncle Meat in the Netherlands or in France for live television. And Burnt Weenie Sandwich. Do you know the record? The Frank Zappa and Mothers of Invention record? Burnt Weenie Sandwich.

56:46 Unknown speaker: Yes.

56:47 Mark: And I could see why European audiences would. I don't understand their sensibilities.

56:51 Jonathan: They brought the deli tray out that they had backstage and on it was a burnt, burnt weenie sandwich. And they played this music. Well, I think one of the things that I find very, very interesting about listening to this kind of music, beyond the ability to follow it or not follow it, is the fact that you're watching human beings attempt to play music which is almost impossible for them to play really, because a lot of these people were untrained musicians.

57:14 Victor: And Frank Zappa, Jimmy Carl Black, for

57:16 Jonathan: instance, and Frank Zappa is writing very complicated charts. Essentially he's writing 20th century avant garde music, classical music, and they're trying to play it and it's performed as best it can be. I find it very, very interesting. But also that the literal human element is perhaps why I'm aesthetically drawn towards improvised music. Because at any moment the player is choosing to make that sound. And that to me, literally only the agency involved is what I find fascinating.

57:45 Unknown speaker: Right.

57:45 Mark: And I know you are also focusing on the experience of it as something irreplaceable in time.

57:50 Unknown speaker: That it's.

57:50 Mark: You're grasping a moment which is actually very different from the way I think both I listen and that I create. Even with classical music, I'll let it wash over me or something, but I don't. I always feel like I need to listen to that nine More times to really get it. And so with classical music, I simply won't, unless I played it in an orchestra when I was in high school. Those songs I know pretty goddamn well and I really can enjoy in the depths of my soul. But anything else. And I feel like if you listen to something many, many times, in fact, you are replicating the experience of the composer or the performers who had to practice that damn thing over and over and over again.

Whereas the audience who just hears it once in a concert is never getting that. And I just prefer. This is why I'm more comfortable on bass than on lead guitar or something. I like to do something and then kind of think about it and then do something else. I like to think in discrete phrases. Whereas if you're playing even a walking bass line, even if you're a jazz bass player, there's that just constant thing that's at least some of it has to be automated so that there's not the relax and then go and then relax and then go. And so consequently, like I love the fact that, that I can fix stuff in post.

I'm never more creative than when I can take even a pile of crap for tracks and then go through it second by second in the multi track editor and squiggle things around and copy them and do, you know, then I feel like I'm doing something. And I felt like the same thing. I sort of came of age, you know, when sequencers were just getting on the market. And so this is 1986, we have Casio with a sequencer built into it that you had to program step by step. And just the fact that I had that complete control and I could like create a different sound for each little thing, that was awesome.

But it's, you know, obviously completely antithetical to this idea that you're putting forward of it happens once and it's gone. And you know, if your fingers are not fast enough, then you don't even deserve to express yourself in that way or improvisational spirit.

59:45 Jonathan: Well, people talk about the danger of that, how improvisational playing is dangerous because you're always on in the now. You're always in the specious present, as James put it.

59:55 Mark: I guess I mostly felt like when I was starting to play with people getting bands together in high school that the people that like I just want to jam sucked. And so if they just want to jam, they're going to do the same freaking Chuck Berry riff on every song or whatever their quirk is. And so actually slowing down and composing something seemed much Preferable.

1:00:14 Jonathan: That's the problem with primitivism in art, is that, you know, oh, my kid could do that sort of thing. Whereas the actual artists, like, you know, you take Picasso, who's trained all his life to blend colors and draw a perfect line to represent something, and then when he goes back to do something that's primitive, it has a huge amount of expression behind it. It's like the guys that wanted to jam before they learned how to play for 30 years, you know?

1:00:39 Victor: Right. And I think part of being a musician, one part of it's just being an athlete. Jonathan can attest to this as well as anybody, is if you haven't slept well or you're too hungover or whatever, your plank can blow. And if you're in good form and you're well rested and well rehearsed, you can have a completely different experience. Adrenaline on stage has always been a huge issue for me. My fluidity offstage versus onstage are remarkably different. I can sit in the studio if I'm relaxed, and I can play the guitar, I can get on stage and, like, those hands just clench up.

So there's that element to it. If we're talking about just, like the performance aspect, the other thing, too, I think, in the long run is just that we do want to manifest agency. And I think agency, as Jonathan's been pointing out, is very important. And I think that is actually why I like recording as live as I can and being as in the moment as I can. You know, most of my recordings for the last several years have essentially been live. A lot of the vocal takes are live right there. And I feel people respond to that. I mean, there's the Joe Boyd argument.

He's the guy who fostered the idea that the reason that the Buena Vista Social Club was such a massive hit at the time it came out was simply because it was recorded live. The room had a certain sound. It's in his book, the White Bicycles. White Bicycles? Yeah. He produced the first Pink Floyd stuff. And, you know, I mean, the guy, he's a legend, been around, but his thesis was that basically Buena Vista Social Club became popular simply because of how it felt. It was a very old, you know, and I guess you could say in a certain way it was not authentic because it was really artificially assembled group of Cuban musicians that Ry Cooder had a large hand in doing.

But they recorded as they knew how. And the audience, the NPR 40 some things who bought the record in droves

1:02:25 Mark: were not your audience, is that what you're saying?

1:02:27 Victor: Yeah, my audience, exactly. Or actually, that audience is now 60. We're merely in our 50s. Let's not take it too far. But, you know, they responded to it because they hadn't heard things like that in a long time. And again, you know, that's also working with constraint live with a few microphones in a room, and they had a massive hit with it. Those are some.

1:02:45 Jonathan: Well, they're good musicians. Those guys knew what they were doing. They worked within that idiom for such a long time that they could be thrown in any sort of arrangement of players and do a good job.

1:02:54 Mark: Don't you think that being a movie helped a lot? If you can present something and this is what you're talking about as actually seeing live people on stage doing a thing, that itself is a presentation. And one of the greatest ways to get your kid into classical music is to show them Amadeus or show them the movie Bird, to get them into Charlie Parker and that kind of jazz. Like any of these sort of presentations that have a dramatic element and that set up a mood in a way that we're almost more used to. And maybe. I know, Jonathan, you are also complaining about just the fact that people, they don't actively listen. They listen while they're on the go. It's the background. But in a movie, you sit there, you stare at the.

1:03:29 Unknown speaker: Stuck.

1:03:30 Mark: Yeah.

1:03:30 Victor: This is a huge argument, though. And I think it has effects on both agency and authenticity. And also, like denigration of the value of music and culture, passive listening versus active listening is crucial. I did, as I imagine every one of us here did a lot of active listening. And I still do active listening. I actually don't have a TV right now. And if I'm gonna sit and watch a movie, it's an active pursuit if I sit and listen because there's nothing else going on when I. I listen now. And I mean, if we're talking about what the brain will do, how the brain associates, how the brain takes its input, that really is what, you know. I mean, if we go off on the Internet tangent again, that's the problem. We got too much input going on, and we are really actually not biomechanically able to take it in.

1:04:12 Jonathan: We can't actually multitask as we think we can. That's one of the things about active listening. I'm hoping that the vinyl resurgence actually makes people put the record on, watch it spin, listen to it. Maybe that'll be some form of active listening. But I think that without multitasking, the idea of active listening to something means that your mind can wander. And I think that that's probably a really important thing in terms of the aesthetics of ingesting something that you can identify with in music. Like Wes, you're talking about Led Zeppelin and the idea of, like, imagining the agency, the people involved, what they're doing, all of the elements of the music coming together, all that sort of stuff.

Your mind was wandering when you were listening to it. You were just able to free associate, think about all these sorts of things, which rarely are people able to do when they're actually listening to music, unless you're stuck in a classical concert hall.

1:05:04 Victor: Right. And that's the interesting thing about kind of DJ culture. And, you know, I have work functions where I have to kind of go to these DJ events and it's. They're just going out. And I've levied this critique before, and people were like, you know, people are just going out and getting loaded and listening to music, and it's like, well, I went out and got loaded and listened to music. But it's a very different exchange.

1:05:20 Jonathan: I like doing that.

1:05:21 Victor: It was a very different exchange because, you know, I went to go watch human beings do something, and it was usually in a small place without a ton of production value to it. And although I can really enjoy production values with music. We were just talking about Sufjan Stevens show, and he's got a lot of people talking a lot about the stage values. The production is pretty high. He's got these digital LED screens with disco balls backlit between them. And I saw. I actually went and pursued a clip on YouTube to look at it because it sounded pretty interesting as a visual designer.

And it was. It was beautiful. I think it was really well done, you know. And again, you know, I was the age, you know, when Stop Making Sense came out in 1983. It was in high school, my senior year, we went to go see it, and I saw that show and I thought it was pretty interesting, pretty exciting. Very different than things I'd been seeing before. But in the long run, I actually don't like a lot of production values on stage. I really just prefer, like, neutral white light and the musician doing what the musician does, because that's the language I want to hear.

And I guess that's just.

1:06:20 Mark: Well, you're a musician. That's part. That's part of it.

1:06:22 Victor: Well, yeah, I mean, part of it. I'm a musician. But also, as you grow and as you understand what you do better and better, you begin to understand how much information is actually there. And so that naked aesthetic really was never that naked to me. And I think that is, you know, when we're talking about, like, deep listening and dedicated listening versus, like, passive listening and passive consumption, that's what you lose. I mean, that's the argument about MP3s right there. It's like down sampling and loss of information. And I think that's important, and I think that information is mysterious, but yet it does have a lot of value and a lot of effect.

1:06:55 Mark: You guys looked at the David Byrne book, the How Music Works that came out a couple years ago.

1:06:59 Victor: No, I haven't.

1:07:00 Mark: It's a combination of talking about the financial aspect and the acoustic aspects and the sociological aspects, and for instance, what kind of music evolves to fill what kind of room, what kind of social situation? And it convinced me that I have been foolish to think that going out with my band and playing in a bar and just standing up and playing the songs in a stark kind of way, even being as emotive as I can be on stage, that that would actually be interesting enough for people who don't know the songs in advance, you know, so he, on his later solo tours, would, like, employee dancers.

Had a very conscious thing that, like, that there has to be something for people. Just looking at the way people take these things in, that it's not going to be enough. Maybe again, if it's a band that they really love and, you know, all these songs in your sleep and then like, I can't believe I'm hearing this live. That is so awesome. And I'm hanging everywhere. But most of the people in the audience are not going to be in that situation. And so having something to amuse them while their subconscious is blasted with the real stuff seems like it actually works.

And this goes along with, you know, why I do, like active listening, but almost more effective even before I do the active listening. So rather than just sit down and on a first listen, try to listen to your album, every song, and focus in, like, I'm gonna. I'm not gonna make it through more than three songs if I really am doing that. Like, it's better if I spin it several times while I'm walking the dog and doing other stuff. And then it's like a familiar thing. And then do that active listening, and

1:08:24 Victor: then you can crunch it. I understand that. But still, walking the dog is better than, like, you know, trying to, like, respond to 14 work emails while you've got your earbuds in, which is how a lot of people I know Listen to music and also, you know, or performing surgery or. Well, you know, the ubiquity of communication. I mean, a lot of people I know are like me. I'll be on the train to work in the morning and I'll be answering work emails and I might have earbuds in. I don't know what that does for your brain. Somebody should study the neuroscience of multitasking. I'm sure somebody is. Yeah.

1:08:53 Mark: That it doesn't work that well. You think you're so clever and are performing well. Now you're performing.

1:08:59 Victor: You are a mere monkey. You know, Easy there. We're definitely in this interesting phase. I mean, I'm looking at this as a conversation, really about authenticity. And I think we are still able to create a lot of authentic art, but I think we're really at this dangerous point where we're hamstrung by over availability. And I mean, it's just too much. We have too much going on.

1:09:19 Jonathan: And the culture of time equals money, really.

1:09:21 Victor: Yeah, exactly.

1:09:22 Jonathan: There's no time for wool gathering.

1:09:24 Victor: Right. Historically, you know, you get into, like, pre agrarian society, you know, and basically people's lives, you know, like dogs, you know, you sleep 14 hours a day, you lay around.

1:09:32 Mark: So maybe as a way of moving toward wrapping this up, I'll just go through the questions which I had sent everybody an email. I sort of meant to read these at the beginning as being our agenda, but I think the way it went was more organic. It was better. But let me just go through them and give our. Any additional thoughts that we've got on that. So the first one was writing in genres that Jonathan in his blog piece actually referred to it, like Americana, say, as historical reenactment or LARPing. I love bringing in that association. And I think Victor's talked quite a bit about how that plays into his work and his ambivalence about his own authenticity. But what else, Jonathan?

1:10:05 Jonathan: I think one of the things that really brought me to that point of view was the fact that I'm living in Sweden and there are numerous acts like, say, First Aid Kit, who are a huge, huge phenomenon here. And there's these two girls. They sound beautiful. They're singing Americana. There are a lot of acts here that are doing essentially what is American music. And of course, the way that rock music has become pop music, Nashville's country music has become something entirely different. So people going back to the roots of country music and the roots of blues and things like that is very interesting and can be a very, very deep source Or a deep well of originality.

But then when I hear, for instance, two Swedish sisters. Singing their version of American country music. I'm thrown into the uncanny valley. It's like, it's so close, but it's not real. And it sort of gives me the creeps, in a way.

1:10:57 Victor: Yeah, the uncanny Valley is very apropos. I think when I started working with, quote, better musicians. And then was faced with the prospect of charting songs for people with lots of chord changes and drop measures. I made a very deliberate, intentional choice to go more idiomatic, as they say. And work more in blues structure and more in kind of folk structures. While I'm paranoid about my own authenticity. What I do bring to it is that I can subvert it. Because there was that period in my life which was the Monk's writing, which is the open free. That's my unfiltered mind going, like, it's just basically anything. There were no rules. There's still no rules. I mean, we just finished that record. There are no rules to it. I think that's something to be pursued also.

1:11:36 Jonathan: Victor, you are you right, so you are the filter that even if you tried to do a Muddy Waters song. Or, like you, for instance, covered a Woody Guthrie song. It's not Woody Guthrie, it's you that does it.

1:11:47 Victor: And that's good. But that's one thing, you know, when we're talking about just like, the ability to go to the mall and buy your punk rock identity. If you're going to really pursue authenticity versus just kind of genre hopping. You have to open up yourself at a certain point. And really try and find what's inside you. And that's an investigative process that requires both time and active listening.

1:12:06 Mark: So, Victor, for you, does it start with melody and lyrics? That's kind of what it sounds like to me, which is mostly the way I write that you're just. There's a song in your heart. Because it sort of. It doesn't matter what the background style is. What it's gonna make it you. Is you singing those melodies that are the kind you write.

1:12:21 Victor: Usually what it is is there's a lyrical idea or there's a phrase. And it's like that phrase is gonna become a song. And then it's kind of like the repository of lyrics. And then there's a repository of musical ideas. And this last album, Hard to See Trouble Coming, had a lot of. The title song itself. Had maybe four or five different musical permutations. Before I decided it worked best as a talking blues. Just like, really radical rewriting. And there's a song called an angel who sings like Jacqui McShee, which is. There are very real elements in it, but as I was saying, it's just a story song.

And it came out in one tuning. And then I got drunk with a luthier at my house and we were listening to a bunch of Martin Carthy for some reason, and then we wound up ripping a tuning from Martin Carthy and the arrangement came from there. And then I met Martin Carthy recently and he's like, oh, I've modified that tuning. You should try it this way. And I was like, no, that's too, too frightening. I can't. Don't make me tune that string up a whole step. It'll fuck the whole thing up. So. Different ways.

1:13:11 Mark: So now you're talking about these English folk musicians who took playing in a genre to ridiculous extremes. I've put a lot of time into listening to Steeleye Span and as have we all. Yeah. And can't imagine sort of doing that for. That's my only band is playing stuff from the Renaissance.

1:13:29 Victor: Well, that's what's really interesting. Like somebody like Martin Carthy. There are some records, you know, Bright Phoebus, if you know, that record is one record where he kind of like went out of the folk realm. And then there's a Norma Waterson record there where they were playing, like, Grateful Dead songs. And that's actually a great record. And they were kind of breaking form. But if you go see Martin Carthy now, you're going to get songs at Cecil Sharp House or whatever is where. The Folk Song Archive in London. Yeah, you know, they go there and they, like, go into the archives.

And also, you know, Martin was going around with a Nagra in the Scottish highlands in his 20s, and that's how he got his OBE is basically. He was one of the people who went and preserved the music. So I think he feels that that's his mission. But I love that music dearly. But I feel like I'm a kid from Southern California, from the desert, you

1:14:12 Jonathan: know, and as kids from California, we played some of those songs, you know, 20 years ago or whatever, just because we loved them so much that we learned how to play them. And I think we even probably performed

1:14:23 Victor: some Fairport and some Steeleye Span, as I recall. Yeah, definitely.

1:14:26 Jonathan: Yeah. Just because we could learn it and

1:14:28 Mark: do it and would real Irish people or English. Would you get the uncanny Valley effect? Would you be spit on by the purists?

1:14:36 Victor: Absolutely.

1:14:36 Mark: It seems like it that this Entire thing that you've pointed out is of course, relative to what audience that you're talking about, that getting something third hand or secondhand, in fact, is maybe even a better way to take it.

1:14:48 Victor: No, no, I totally agree. Camper Van Beethoven was the uncanny Valley in 1983. In a certain way, we really were.

1:14:53 Jonathan: Exactly.

1:14:54 Mark: And it's great that there's always more text to go into that. If you say, oh, you like Wilco and the Byrds and this sort of Americana, but that's basically college kids from California doing things. Then go back and get into the originals from 30 years before and there's just more to approach. But that doesn't moot the effectiveness and enjoyability of the secondhand stuff.

1:15:17 Jonathan: No, I mean, it's like Dan Auerbach from the Black keys producing a Dr. John recording. Maybe they'll get all those 20 year olds listening to the Black Keys to listen to Dr. John. Maybe.

1:15:27 Victor: Maybe it'd be good. I'll believe it when I see it. Other than some hipster with a turntable in a bar doing a DJ set.

1:15:33 Mark: So the second topic was experiment versus expression, which we've talked about this a little bit. In terms of authenticity, it sounds like, Victor, you seem to, in some of your screens here being leaning toward the expression side, that if you're doing something that maybe that's part of what authenticity, you know, this is hard to reconcile with the avant garde stuff that I know you guys have performed. I saw you guys in Camper Van Chadbourne. This was my first experience of you when I thought I was going to a Campervan Beethoven show in 1989 or 1990.

1:16:01 Victor: I'm both sorry and really happy about that at the same time.

1:16:04 Mark: And it was Victor plugging the cord that would go to his bass into a rake and smacking the rake on things. And I mean, I was glad to see that, Jonathan, you were back in the band, even though it wasn't the band a mere year after it had broken up. That was nice to see. But it was a. Yeah, it was an unexpected thing. And so it's hard to. What do we make of this experiment versus expression thing?

1:16:25 Victor: Well, I am with Jonathan. I really like improvised music. I still play improvised music.

1:16:30 Mark: So that is expressive, even though it's.

1:16:31 Victor: And I think that. I think that is expressive and I think that experimentation is really vital to me. I like the emotive. It's comforting for me and I think it's comforting for my audience. And it's something I pursue. It's not always easy There's a lot of psychological work that goes with it. That's not necessarily the funnest thing in the world. And sometimes you just want to be a musician. Like. Jonathan and I are a pretty diverse lot in as far as what we listen to and what we like. And I think we've watched each other go through really pretty radical phases.

Maybe that is our authenticity, is that we've experimented a lot and gone in some really pretty far flung directions. If I had to choose, I would maintain myself as an emotive songwriter. It's a lot more work. I don't think it's an easy victory. You know, you have to put a lot of time into it. But there's something really liberating about just being able to go and plug in a guitar into a lot of effects and not play it like a guitar. That's super fun.

1:17:30 Mark: So, Jonathan, it seems like you've done a lot of both as well.

1:17:33 Jonathan: Well, Derek Bailey, who is famous in the world of non idiomatic improvisers, guitarist, wrote a book actually called Improvisation where he talks about all the different ways in which improvisation is done in idiom and without idiom. And the idea of where are the constraints? Where will the experimentation happen? Allows the improviser, allows the musician to grow within any set of constraints, whether they are playing within an idiom or not. So the idea is to be an expressive musician in all cases. The idea is to be an expressive musician even when experimenting.

1:18:08 Victor: And also, I think it's important to note that I have spent some time with some pretty deep improvisers just hanging out and heard them complain about other deep improvisers just not knowing the language very well. There are constraints in any field if you crawl into it deep enough.

1:18:21 Mark: So yes, you can do deep improvisation even within a very narrow genre. Certainly blues. I would be bored silly playing only blues. But there are lots of people that define that completely. I guess to bring it back to the music as a language thing. I mean, there's the language that could say I love you, you know, this is how I thought about when I was doing composition classes in college of if music is a language, why would you want to say something has been said a lot of times anyway. Don't you have to create a new tonal vocabulary for yourself? Is the way you think as an avant garde composer, you want to. Balancing those two models of music as language seems to be the trick, you

1:18:54 Victor: know, for me, that is the trick, you know, that's the pursuit to try and make something that's familiar and different at the same time. And you're going to fail a lot when you do that.

1:19:02 Jonathan: A lot of, you know, like you said again, about being a feeling, living being, responding to the physical elements of music, human beings being homo sapiens, the animal, There's a lot that we're gonna physically respond to. Your neurons are gonna respond to a lot of sorts of things. And so that's what you want. You're drawn towards playing that anyway as a musician. Like, you want to come back to that big chord, or you want to come back to that deep ending, or you want to come back to that

1:19:27 Mark: cadence while we're at it. So the third point was writing lyrics. We talked a little about narrative strategies, personal expression versus story songs. It seems like a good working theory. I think this actually was a Stephen King quote or something. Like, the quality of any work of art is sort of how much truth per square inch is in it. Even it's a fictional story. I mean, Stephen King is not writing things that you would think that would be associated with him, that would be more John Irving or somebody that, like, researches a whole. The lumberjack industry or something before writing his fictional book within a world like this.

But so even when writing these story songs, you know, obviously they're supposed to resonate. They're supposed to. What I like to do is take something that is related, you know, maybe just a fleeting annoyance that I have and turn that into something that dwells for three minutes with you. Or a fleeting. Just some weird feeling. There's a thing of truth in it, but it's so exaggerated and sort of spread out for your viewing pleasure that it is a work of fiction.

1:20:22 Jonathan: It becomes a focus.

1:20:24 Mark: The authenticity in lyrics, I guess, if it's a story.

1:20:27 Jonathan: Well, I think that, like I said earlier about the idea of writing from personal experience versus crafting character or crafting a song to be about something like that. Like, that's all about the aesthetics of songwriting really, as much as anything else. Like, what you're talking about taking a small annoyance and drawing it out to be able to describe it fully over the course of three minutes. It's sort of like the craftsmanship of songwriting being writing an essay about the way the ink spilled or something like that. If it becomes universalized or if it becomes something that an audience identifies with or sees beauty in the way that you put the words together to describe the potentially universal experience or potentially understandable universal experience, then that's where it succeeds aesthetically.

1:21:09 Mark: And so to bring in political lyrics, I guess. It would. You've sort of both been putting out these pictures of what's wrong with society and the Internet as a very personal thing that pinches you. And so I'm thinking the most recent Cracker release that's actually has songs about the digital distribution destroying people. That only works, I think, because he's got the ironic thing going. Because it's not a straight up. You know, a guy I used to play with was like, well, I would rather write a song about a pimple on my ass than about a social commentary. Because he just felt like that is not authentic. That he could not himself get riled up enough about some social issue to make it. You know, that's the kind of thing that I could write an essay about. I have an opinion about it. I want to vote for certain ways, but it's not going to be the expression of my underlying soul.

1:21:53 Victor: Right? Well, yeah. I mean, I think that's a specific example of. I mean, I think that record actually works really well. But it's. Because there's a lot of satire going on in it. The satire is. It's hyperbolic at points.

1:22:04 Jonathan: The hyperbolicism of his characters is where the poetry comes from. And the characterization becomes essentially poetic.

1:22:11 Victor: Right. There's so much contention about Internet culture right now. We are prone to hyperbolic statements about it. And it's really an intensely mixed bag. There are positives in it, for sure, but I think there are some profound negatives. As a songwriter, I embody the role of an artist. I am an artist, and part of my job is commentary. That said, I would argue that I don't think Washington Bullets is the best Clash song. Although I don't think it's necessarily the worst one either. That's a delicate line. There's a lot of lefty. You know, I do like Woody Guthrie. I like stuff that works on a story level. If you can tell a story effectively. Dave Alvin says this.

1:22:48 Unknown speaker: It's.

1:22:48 Victor: I have my politics. I don't talk about my politics. If you want to know my politics, listen to my songs. You can do that skillfully without it being a screed. So I'm more than happy to indulge in a screed in this kind of forum. As a songwriter, I am not so inclined.

1:23:03 Jonathan: It's not something that you feel aesthetically drawn to as a.

1:23:06 Victor: Not usually. But then again, you know, during the first Gulf War, when we were on tour with Eugene Chadbourne, to bring up Eugene again, we played those sets that were nothing but Phil Ochs songs. And those are Screeds, for sure. And I felt pretty good about that at the time.

1:23:21 Jonathan: That was a real education for me to slightly go off topic because one of the things that happened to us was we left for Europe the day that the 1991 February, as the bombing started.

1:23:31 Victor: We literally were flying.

1:23:32 Jonathan: Yeah, as the bombing started. So most of the other bands that were on tour from America did not fly. They cancelled their tours. So we had large audiences. But with our band, Eugene wanted to play only American songs and songs that were political, but that included rock music, Phil Ochs, a lot of folk music, jazz and country music.

1:23:53 Victor: And the dominant factor was peace and anti war. Even the jazz things we were playing were meditations on peace. We were playing Pharoah Sanders.

1:24:02 Jonathan: But also, it was the first time that I understood that the whole idea of free jazz was that it was a civil rights issue. Free jazz was like free speech.

1:24:12 Victor: That was profound in understanding, you know, your choices as a musician and your choices and how you use the musical language can belie your politics and your stance on where humanity is at, at whatever particular juncture. One of the reasons I try and subvert the Americana influence on my records, you know, the kind of idiomatic purity. Is to do that. Exactly. And that's why you might find a Malian tuning in the middle of classically British folk songs, is because I'm trying to subvert it and bring in elements as a deliberate statement that are associative. That are associative. Exactly. Well, you may not know how it's working on you, but I can predict that if I can hit something in a harmonic way, it's going to take you in a different place and it might impart the idea of the song better.

1:24:53 Mark: Speaking of freedom, the last topic on here, which we don't have to treat with any detail, but was just group dynamics. We've been talking a lot about how you as a singular artist. So Victor likes to just compose songs and go in the studio with awesome people. Jonathan, it seems like more often you sit and layer most of it yourself. Right.

1:25:10 Jonathan: Well, that's only because I'm all alone.

1:25:11 Mark: But isn't it always been a no, even in the Hieronymous? Something about how the group dynamics in these things work. Of course, there can be many different situations that work out fine, and it's just a matter of the individual personalities involved. But there seems some inherent tension which with, you know, I want to be a free artist with. I'm working in a group with people. Unless you're in a purely improvisational setting. And are just reacting to people. If you're doing something that is compositional, that is stepping back and constructing a vision, that almost seems to rule out working collaboratively with others, at least if, you know, the extreme would be in a writer's room, like on a sitcom or something.

So, like, we just want to make something damn funny. You won't get any credit individually, and we're just going to hammer this thing out. It seems very difficult, and maybe the result for music would be negative to have that sort of group think committee made music.

1:26:00 Jonathan: No, I actually really, really, like, bring ideas to other musicians and seeing what they come up with. Because in every instance, people that I like to play with will come up with something that I would not have thought of. And even if you go back to my first record outside of Camper van Beethoven was 1988.

1:26:17 Mark: So many songs and such a wide. Just so thoroughly orchestrated. I hadn't heard that storytelling album until just, you know, this year because it was on Spotify. It just wasn't available to me earlier.

1:26:27 Victor: Spotify, amazing.

1:26:29 Wes: Was very.

1:26:30 Mark: Was very surprised.

1:26:32 Jonathan: Spin called it a double album art romp.

1:26:35 Wes: You couldn't have pirated it before that, Mark.

1:26:39 Mark: Yeah, it was not right, I'm sure.

1:26:44 Jonathan: Yeah, the thing about that, one of the things that was great about making that record is, yes, I had worked out everything that I would be doing, but then I took it to Victor and Chris Pedersen, and what they came up with for the rhythm section, for the bass and the drum parts was nothing that I knew.

1:26:59 Mark: So certainly, yeah. When people have defined roles like that, it's much easier. You're like, you're a way better guitar player than I am. So you go, you'll come up with a solo. I'm not gonna write your solo for you. But especially, like, it doesn't seem like even in the present Camper thing, you don't write lyrics together. Say there's not a Lennon McCartney or is there that kind of collaboration.

1:27:18 Jonathan: No, but what's funny about that, actually, is that the way that Camper ends up working in that way is that we all talk about things always. Like, on tour, we have these subjects that we throw around and talk about, like, I don't know, chemtrails or Morgellon's disease or some ridiculous things that are happening in culture, on the fringes of culture usually, you know, alien conspiracy theories, things like that. And somehow those things end up in the lyrics.

1:27:42 Victor: Yeah, they wind up percolating. There's definitely group osmosis, that whole process. You know, Camper I mean, you know, frequently is David's voice, but David's voice is often an interesting filter of what everybody's kind of saying as we're around each other.

1:27:56 Jonathan: I think that Camper's a great idea of group dynamic. Also, because we're all such strong. This podcast is ending up like a great justification of ourselves.

1:28:06 Victor: That's okay.

1:28:06 Mark: People should. You know, the model that people latch onto of a Magic pop thing that came together, like, is so contrary to how a working band where every individual is talented and develops over time. And so you all have these solo live, like, this is the. I think it's worth presenting this as an alternative picture to the accepted one.

1:28:29 Jonathan: It's pretty funny because then, you know, we all end up doing a lot of compromising, obviously, when we're working. But the thing is, it's like, what's funny about it now is that 30 years down the road, we all know each other so well that, A, we're very comfortable playing together, and we sort of have ideas about how each other will react when we're playing or when we're in the process of writing something. But, B, we also can mimic each other in terms of writing so that, like, for instance, Greg might say, well, this is the sort of melody that Jonathan might have written, or this is the sort of chord progression that David might have written. And he'll come in with that, and then, you know, and then Victor will say, well, this is the sort of melody that Greg would have played on that.

1:29:12 Victor: Yeah, there's been a lot of default anticipation of what the other member of the band is going to do. You know, I've gone both routes in as far as groups and not groups. And, you know, I can't really say if I. I mean, I have a preference for going off of my own because it's just easier, you know, I used to be fraught with anxiety about it, but I've done a lot of stuff just by myself in the last few years that I seem finally comfortable with it. So I'm fine. You can just take me off on my own, and I can just do my thing, and I feel like I can deliver.

But as Jonathan says, I think the influence of being with other people. I mean, one thing just kind of as we've been wrapping up these mixes, is that what I was most proud of is, you know, it was interesting because it had evolved in a way that kind of belied everybody's experience. You know, David Immerglück being in the Counting Crows, Greg and I continuing to Work together. Chris just kind of being off on his own in Australia, even that kind of showed in an interesting way. The playing is not as precise and kind of anal retentive as it used to be, but the inspiration is still very much in effect.

And I couldn't describe what kind of music it is. I mean, it's definitely rock music, but it's. It's just kind of off on its own planet. And it was nice to kind of look at this as I'm completing it and go, well, I can still do that. You know, I can still be in a cooperative. And that very much is a cooperative. You know, there's no real dominant member. There's plenty of fights for dominance, but nobody ever seems to win in that band. And that's cool and very interesting and very unique. But also, you know, democracy in a band can be just God awfully frustrating.

And so, you know, it's been a real joy to work with some people who really came up as musicians outside of punk rock and band experience and just grew up playing with people. You know, my bass player, this guy, Paul Olguin, you know, he grew up as a player and he was playing for people. And so he understands that role very well. But yet, you know, he's this really intuitive, beautiful musician. And if you want his input, he'll give it. But, you know, his role and he defines his role is like, I'm in this container over here. If you want me to go outside of that container, you need to ask me, you know, And I really appreciate musicians like that because there's a real art to that.

1:31:30 Mark: Is it an aesthetic or a professional role?

1:31:33 Victor: It's both, but it's the aesthetics are basically kind of permitted or not, you know, you have to be given the green light to bring them in. And I'm pretty open to what people will bring in frequently, you know, I mean, we've been playing a Grateful Dead song recently, and I like the song quite a bit, but I told them when we started playing it, it's like, if it sounds like a Grateful Dead song, we're not doing our job. And that works. Unfortunately, a couple of them despise the Grateful Dead, so it wasn't that hard. But it does sound like All Things Must Pass. Strangely, it sounds like George Harrison, weirdly. But that's all right. I can deal with that. That's a good compromise.

1:32:07 Mark: It's, of course, very hard to get generalizations out of any of this. And all these are post hoc observations, you know, anything on what works in music or not it's not a matter of, like, this is a recipe for doing something right. It's just a matter of this is the kind of situation that did, in fact, work out. So it's hard to apply, for instance, in a professional context. Seems quite different than me getting people that I'm not going to pay in my area who want to be sidemen. Like, it's a very different, you know, to find that it almost seems hard for me to imagine.

Or if your reason for doing music is because you see yourself as an artist, a creator. This is what I get up in the morning to do. I have to. Then that's quite different. Especially with drummers who don't play any other instruments. I feel like a lot of them that in my experience have been more like people who play soccer. Like, they might really like drumming, they might be really good at it, but it's something that they could just stop doing and do something else athletic or something. You know, it's not. So it's probably the best relationship to a drummer would be if you're paying him then.

And then it can be.

1:33:07 Victor: I mean, I know those kinds of drummers. Indeed. I. I've actually. I've worked with a few of them where it's like, you know, I'm going to the gym, like, okay, so a

1:33:16 Mark: drummer who is also a songwriter, you know, who has some other role, who's an actual musician on top of the drum, seems always easier to work with, to engage them creatively in some way that even if you are the only songwriter in the band, if you're not paying these people, then they have to feel creatively invested in some way. And so, yeah, just ranting about my lack of empathy with the people that I play with.

1:33:36 Jonathan: That's.

1:33:36 Mark: That's really. Why do you even want to continue to play my songs? Wes, what did you get out of this? Did this devolve into Inside Baseball for the last hour or what?

1:33:48 Wes: I think what emerged from this conversation was the importance of expression to aesthetic experience and the agency of the artist. And I was thinking about that in relation to our previous Kant and Schopenhauer episodes. So Kant, for instance, has this theory of aesthetic experience which involves disinterest. So when you appreciate an apple aesthetically, you're not interested in consuming it or in devouring it or satisfying those types of desires. You're simply interested in it formally. You're interested in the form of the representation. And that seems to leave out the sense in which an audience might be identifying with the creative act itself.

Or the artist. Although in the case of an apple, of course, or nature, there's not an obvious creator. Although Kant does say part of aesthetic experience is this sense that there is a creator, whether or not there actually is one. The sense that not only is there a creator, but they have created this thing so that it perfectly matches up to the way your mind is designed in a way that satisfies it. And then when Schopenhauer elaborates on this view, he, on the one hand, takes that disinterest and runs with it. So that aesthetic experience involves a retreat from one's own desires, a way of being rid of desires and all the suffering that that brings.

So there's a sort of Buddhist influence there. So that's on the one hand. On the other hand, it brings a way of being will, less of retreating from one's own specific will. On the other hand, it brings you closer to this unified metaphysical will that's supposed to underlie everything. Aesthetic experience brings you closer to these objectifications of the will, which Schopenhauer calls Platonic ideals. And. And music especially, sort of connects you directly to the will. And I think that actually recaptures to some extent the sense in which an audience's aesthetic experience depends upon identification with the will of the artist, with their expression.

And that goes some distance towards getting at the sense in which this authentic expression is a criterion of aesthetic experience.

1:35:56 Victor: That's a good takeaway as far as I'm concerned.

1:35:58 Jonathan: I'd say also with Schopenhauer's idea of aesthetics and transcendence moving towards sublime. I think that that audience identification with the artist, when they're actually watching an artist play, being on the edge, like, for instance, if you're listening to Led Zeppelin playing or whatever, and you're listening to them playing in real time as the notes happen, that the danger of the species present essentially the danger of every moment they're playing. They are potentially improvising a guitar solo or drum solo or whatever. They're moving in this dangerous direction of the potentiality of falling apart. And I'm hoping that that could be similar to the tension that one feels in an aesthetic experience that allows you to contemplate and potentially transcend to the sublime experience.

1:36:45 Victor: And I think the sublime experience, whether we're. Because we've talked a lot about functioning both as writers and as listeners, that really is kind of like the dominant overarching influence here. I think for all of us, that's really what we're pursuing, and it's not easily achieved. Interestingly. The sublime going towards a transcendent. As analytical as we try to get, and as much as we try to quantify our experiences and explain them, we are still confronted with this odd mystery that we were very much enraptured with and have a really hard time achieving.

1:37:16 Mark: That's why it's so hard to slice apart the creator end of it from the spectator end of it. Because, of course, as creators, you are the immediate spectator of your own work. And the reason that you enjoy this song that you are singing or whatever is because you have created this mood that you yourself are enveloped in. It's not just coming out of you. You could be playing entirely an idiom. In other words, taking something that is historical, external, and being its speaker.

1:37:40 Wes: Likewise, the point I was trying to get at is the audience is sort of a secondhand creator. And that's part of what it means to have an aesthetic experience, is to identify with the creative act.

1:37:50 Mark: Identify with your own act. If you're playing your own song, then.

1:37:53 Victor: Yeah, well. Yeah, okay.

1:37:55 Unknown speaker: Okay.

1:37:55 Mark: Yeah, well, you know, my last takeaway, sort of with this authenticity thing, is that it seems like it's a notion, like something being fashionable, that it's something that is a phenomena among the audience. But as a creator, you should not worry about it at all. Like, think of things more in terms of, am I achieving this state of spiritual ecstasy when I play in the way you just described, Victor? But putting that in terms of is this being authentic or not, I think it just doesn't help.

1:38:23 Jonathan: It doesn't help the artist.

1:38:24 Victor: No, it doesn't. It really undermines the artist. Artists, I think to be effective, you have to be confident in your statement. And that's a hard thing, you know?

1:38:31 Mark: So it's the equivalent of, do I look fat?

1:38:33 Victor: It's the equivalent of authenticity. Yeah. Or is it Stanislavski School? Or you're a method actor? Or are you more just kind of old school London Shakespearean? You gotta determine your school and bring it.

1:38:43 Mark: All right, next time, the next episode is gonna be on Friedrich Nietzsche's first book, the Birth of tragedy from 1872.

1:38:50 Unknown speaker: All right, people should come to the after show for this episode, which is going to take place on Sunday, July 12th at 3pm Eastern Time. To sign up, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com I would love to pack the discussion with musicians or rabid music fans so we can continue the discussion that we just had here, which I really could have all day. Now, musicians, whether or not you're free for that discussion, I invite you to reach out to me. Send me an email@markartiallyexaminedlife.com Send me a link to your music online. I always love to learn more about our musician listeners and moreover, I am very eager to draft any of you that would have the desire and the ability and the equipment to contribute parts for the songs that I create for the ends of these episodes.

Now, the song you're about to hear is not by me, it's by the Monks of Doom. It features Victor here, as well as Greg Lisher from Camper Van Beethoven and some guys who used to be in Camper van Beethoven, drummer Chris Pedersen and guitarist David Immerglück. This is a song called the Bastards Never Show Themselves. It's from their upcoming unreleased album and

1:39:46 Mark: we are very, very pleased to present

1:39:47 Unknown speaker: it to you here first, we are supported by your donations. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution. Big donors since last time include Dennis McDonald, Mark Griffin, David McQuiston, James Tranter, Herb Harris, Milo Trenier, Keith Grennon, Eric Arabia, Mark Burrock, Luis Vega, Stephen Aris, Andrew Miles, Angela McLaughlin, Timothy Perigo, Gareth Jordan, Kenneth Daly, Alexander Conrad, Mason Part, and Jeannie Carey. Thanks also to our smaller donors, including those who are newly or on a continued basis. Sign up for our $5 a month citizen site. Folks might also want to look on our store page, partiallyexaminedlife.com store where we have a bunch of new T shirt designs. And these don't necessarily even involve you

1:40:25 Mark: walking around hawking the Partially Examined Life.

1:40:28 Unknown speaker: They're cool ones. Using the pictures by Genevieve Arnold of Heraclitus Popper or Schopenhauer. And we'll be adding more to that page in the coming weeks.

1:40:36 Mark: And while you're at it, why don't you say thanks to Jonathan and Victor here by going and just, just filling up your house with their solo albums

1:40:44 Wes: that you've actually purchased.

1:40:45 Mark: I could point my camera over there.

1:40:47 Wes: Yes, not your computers at your house.

1:40:51 Victor: I mean, if you want to audit it on Spotify, I won't complain. But purchasing, because you'll get at least

1:40:56 Mark: a quarter of a penny for each play. At least at most a quarter of a penny.

1:41:02 Victor: It's far less than that. I think it's like a thousandth of a penny.

1:41:05 Mark: Ah.

1:41:06 Unknown speaker: All right.

1:41:06 Mark: Well, thanks again. Good night, everybody.

1:41:08 Unknown speaker: Good night.

1:41:09 Victor: Thanks, you guys.

1:41:09 Jonathan: Thanks very much.

1:41:10 Victor: Yeah, much appreciated.

1:41:56 Unknown speaker: The silver flashes of unknown lands Vessels that don't pass us by Filled with gods and demons that don't deny but the bastards never show themselves. And in the morning I hear the fear of the church house where I sit and dwell and think we are alone. In fact we are alone. Fact we are alone. Sat quest for the absolute and did what I set out to do. Sit down and hound about the moon and plan the moon like in a

1:43:36 Wes: dark

1:43:39 Unknown speaker: and plan the moon about my loss. For my bone I sift about. For my bone I sift about for my bone. Sifted, bound for my bone. I left with sickness on my breath My lepers pose my nose to death to scare my friend is not yet disclosed. To know I'd rather be alone

1:44:55 Victor: and

1:44:55 Unknown speaker: know the rush I always feel

what

I can make the strongest me up and look inside their faint souls

I

know they're on their own. Know they're on their own. Know they're on their own. In fact he's on his own.

Sa.