John Vanderslice is an absurdly talented songwriter, a studio wizard and all-round master of his craft, but according to his press release he is emphatically NOT the nicest guy in indie rock. He is, however, possibly the most articulate and thoughtful interview subject this BCR hack has ever come across. He's currently touring Europe with his new album Romanian Names and we caught up with him to discuss gardening, organ harvesting... and drawing cocks on backstage walls.
BCR: The album you’re touring now is called Romanian Names, it’s been, what, a couple years since Emerald City came out?
John Vanderslice: It’s been about a year and a half, yeah.
BCR: And there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then...
John Vanderslice: Yeah it’s incredible, you know. Rehearsing for this tour, sometimes we have to go back and learn songs from that record, and it seems like 10 years ago. But that’s the way of the world, you know?
BCR: So I assume your missus has sorted out her immigration worries then?
John Vanderslice: Well actually we still have an immigration attorney, we’re still in the middle of all that stuff, believe it or not. But she lives here, and she has a temporary green card, and she’s working as a teacher. So I think that we’re pretty safe right now. But what’s funny is that right when you called I was actually writing to our lawyer about some stuff that we have to deal with. They make it really hard here, you know, I’m still dealing with this stuff today,
BCR: But in general your outlook is a bit better?
John Vanderslice: It’s way better. I have bigger fish to fry now. She’s here, we’re happy and she’s doing her thing. And I guess I’m getting prepared for continuous touring, so I’m kinda getting into a different mindset. I just hope she doesn’t get accosted, you know, taken away by the state. [laughs]
BCR: Obviously these were big events in your life, but I think from a listener’s point of view the new album is a more personal one, whereas Emerald City dealt with what you might call bigger, wider themes.
John Vanderslice: Absolutely. I came home from Emerald City touring and I decided to stay home for pretty much nine months and not tour. We did some festivals, but we really didn’t break the spell of being at home, writing, recording and focussing on making a record for nine months. It really changed the content of the record because it was a completely domestic life. You know, I live in a very suburban, very placid, almost John Cheever-esque neighbourhood in San Francisco. It’s extremely quiet, we know all our neighbours… we actually have dinner quite often at our neighbour’s houses. There are tons of families that live here, we’re friends with all the kids, there’ll often be kids riding bikes and tricycles in front of our house…
BCR: It sounds like you live in the 1950s!
John Vanderslice: I know! It is, you know, apart from being in one of the most perverse and decadent cities in history, it is like being in the 1950s. And I say that with crazy amounts of respect to San Francisco for being so weird.
BCR: Well I’m glad to hear you say that, because glancing at your touring schedule for this year, it looks absolutely punishing. I was going to ask you if you ever manage to spend some time at home, because it looks like you’re touring your arse off.
John Vanderslice: Once the record comes out everything is different. It’s so extreme… like for instance, we go to the farmers’ market every week here. We cook every night, we never go out to dinner, and we love it! We make dinners that have an investment in time, and in cognitive abilities, we bake bread… you know, we are extremely domestic at home. And then the second the record comes out, we stop going to the farmers’ market, I’ll never eat at home, I’ll be basically eating on the road for six months at a time. It’s so shocking, the change on these domestic and fundamental levels. And also that you do not have… I mean I have a tremendous amount of plants, I probably have 100 plants that I’ve planted, I have silver trees and echium and some super-rare fuschias and… I’m really into gardening
BCR: Echium?
John Vanderslice: If you’ve been following me on twitter I’ve been posting some photos of my echium in bloom, you would not believe how insane those things are right now. They’re in bloom right now and it’s like a Dr Seuss garden. I have about sixteen echium planted in my garden, so right now they’re just taking over everything. I have some really rare variegated echium. There’s one called the Death Star that’s really beautiful.
BCR: So whenabouts did you get into gardening? Have you always been green-fingered, or is it something that you picked up later in life?
John Vanderslice: I would say only in the past year and a half, or two years. It had to do with finding sanity after being on the road so much, I needed to have dirt on my fingers and to have a long-term appreciation for where I was grounded. And there was something about slowly building up a garden, pulling plants, weeding and being patient and watching things in one location develop and change and grow that was a real counterpoint to being on tour too much.
BCR: So it’s a very locative thing, it gives you a relationship with where you are?
John Vanderslice: Yeah.
BCR: Awesome. Can we talk about music some more?
John Vanderslice: Do we have to?
BCR: Yes we do! Is there a story behind the title, Romanian Names?
John Vanderslice: I was writing a song about a Romanian gymnast in the mid 60s, and I imagined this state apparatus stealing away an infant, as they used to do behind the Iron Curtain, and enrolling them into brutal servitude for the state. Creating these gymnast-monsters that are super-drugged and steroided. And I thought about how difficult that would be, and also how difficult it would be when those gymnasts are growing up and they realise how vast the world is, and how much there is to experience and yet they’re still trapped. So I was writing a song about this and that internal rhyme, Romanian names, that just kind of came to me and I wrote it down. And after I wrote the song I thought, “Wow, that’d be a really good title for a record”. I don’t know why!
BCR: It’s a more personal, relationship-based record than you’ve made in the past. Is this what you’re looking at for the foreseeable future? Is it going to take another horrible thing to happen before you do anything political again?
John Vanderslice: Well, I think for the time being I feel like I’ve got the horrific war stuff and the political stuff out of my system. I don’t feel drawn to that right now. In general I’m pretty restless about what I write about, so I’m not sure what’s going to be next. Recently I did a concept record with the Mountain Goats where we wrote songs about cannibalism on a moon colony outpost…
BCR: Yes! I was going to ask you about that, because I’ve read about it but all my efforts to track it down have failed. Did you only give it away on tour?
John Vanderslice: We had it for sale on tour, it’s vinyl only and limited to a thousand copies, but I think that after we sell out of the vinyl we’ll probably just put it up on the internet. So you’ll get to hear it.
BCR: Moon Colony Bloodbath, that’s an absolutely brilliant title.
John Vanderslice: I know! That’s [John] Darnielle, man.
BCR: It’s about organ harvesting?
John Vanderslice: It’s about organ harvesting on the moon. And the keeper of the pods starts eating his charges. So we wrote a whole concept record based on this idea, which was partially a joke and partially was dead serious, actually. You know, John has really been very influential to me, he’s extremely curious and kind of far-reaching lyrically. So we just did that concept record, and I’ve actually just started to write again this week. So I’m going to see where it takes me.
BCR: I read somewhere that you and John Darnielle had started a band called the Comedians. Was that just a one-off thing? Was it a joke?
John Vanderslice: Actually it was serious, and we were going to release Moon Colony Bloodbath under the name The Comedians, but a couple things prevented it. There were other bands out there called The Comedians, it just seemed a little diluted and it didn’t seem to catch the vibe of our blood-filled extravaganza. So we released it as the Mountain Goats and John Vanderslice. But The Comedians, in the future, who knows? It may be revisited. I actually just got off tour with John maybe a week ago, we did a theatre tour in the States and it was probably one of the best tours I’ve done in the past five years. It was a really incredible experience. It was just me solo and John solo, so it was just two acoustic guitars, John and I and our tour manager Brandon. It was a very elegant, stripped-down and focussed tour, very different to touring with a band. It was extremely interesting because of that.
BCR: Do you sometimes find it draining being on tour, or is it always something that you can draw inspiration from? I mean, when you go on tour you seem to play every night, almost.
John Vanderslice: There are, without a doubt, many moments of punching the clock. I don’t mean that in performance, I mean in showing up for soundcheck and being in another graffiti-filled club, that you’d just… if you had a gun handy you’d blow your brains out! To pretend otherwise is so disingenuous, you know? Touring is like anything else, there’s a grind, and an unnatural and anti-art, anti-creative vibe that is absolutely tremendous. At its best it is very profound and very inspiring, but touring is only as good as the club you’re in and the theatre you’re in and the audience that’s in front of you. Sometimes it is utterly inspiring and other times it is so enervating and depleting that you literally cannot imagine doing it again the next night. But often those shows the next night are the best shows on the tour! Because you’ve gone from the lowest point to the highest point. It’s very, very extreme. One thing I can say about being on tour is that the highs on tour are the best moments of my life. And the lows are the same.
