Michael Stegner – The Song & the Story
Posted by Aaron Ducat
I recently sat down with Michael Stegner, the songwriter, piano player and singer of the Seattle-based band Fascination Nation, to discuss the roots of his songwriting and the release of the band's upcoming album. Below is a small impression of my time with Michael, as well as several videos of him discussing and performing his music.
Michael Stegner creates songs as a photographer captures images: lens ever at the ready in search of a contrast of light, a falling shadow, a weathered smile. His eye shifts across the human landscape and finds a jealous lover, a self-absorbed banker, a fleeing father. With dignity he gives each the light they themselves cast, and then SNAP, the whirling click captures a moment and impresses it in the silver halide of memory. Then its off to the darkroom of his imagination to churn and trundle, out of whose recesses later - a day, two months, four years (there is, as in most good art, little confident predictability) - it comes, an image sung raucous, sepia-toned with insights dark and discomforting.
Stegner himself, caught in the frozen Polaroid moment of a pen’s flash, cuts an unlikely scene. He stands narrow, bird-boned and lanky; so rice-paper thin one wonders if a strong wind wouldn’t dislodge him and, Dorothy-style, carry him elsewhere. His physicality is the sort of skinny shadow that hangs like a coat-tree in the corner of a party, at the end of which, when he thanks you for your hospitality and says goodnight (and he always will, he has the formality of an antediluvian southern gentleman), in surprise you search your brain and try to remember having earlier noticed him at the party. His face is high-cheekboned and broad-lipped and half-hidden by an ever-present hat and narrow plastic glasses, while his jaw is covered by a beard, deep amber red and thick as a pelt. Kentucky-bred his voice belies its roots more in the slowness of his speech than any obvious drawl; his speaks in a low baritone that is oddly soothing, with a gravely underside that catches and scrapes like a rasp. From habit he often repeats the first words of sentences, as if he weren’t entirely certain how to begin, and he has long-standing sinus problems that make him frequently sound congested and ever recovering from a head cold. His laugh comes often and easily, rippling and skipping from his mouth like a stone across water. When he laughs you are reminded of a slightly nerdy teenage boy giggling in satisfaction with his successes. Laughs tumble from him in dribbling hiccups that are welcome most of all for their un-self-awareness, their simple present-tense enjoyment.
From the externals he is not your typical Seattle rock musician — he doesn’t drink, doesn’t eat meat, rarely curses, displays no obvious tattoos or piercings or jagged hipster hairstyles. Instead he dresses in worn jeans and too-big t-shirts and pads about in grubby running shoes. Often, in tribute to his extended family in Kansas, he sports a rather large dark wool Stetson, which sits like a fiesta platter atop his head and only further emphasizes the fencepost thinness of his physique. Peering deeper into the image you see that, unlike many musicians he is terribly humble, on the quiet side of things without being shy. He discusses himself and his music in a tone rich with assurance and confidence; absent is the hungry neediness that so many, especially younger, artists display. He is more articulate than most, disavowing the normally vacuous musician-speak of yeahs and whatevers and desultory uhs for a more literary style full of references ranging from Mark Twain to the Buddha to Miles Davis. What strikes one with a startling clarity is his willingness to listen: where many, especially in the arts, are tone-deaf to any frequencies other than their own, he presents an engaged intentionality, an active listening.
In the shadows of this picture you see the sources of his lyrics. Barren barrooms, lonely bed spaces, dressing rooms with cracked mirrors and exposed lightbulbs. The dark unlit alleys of the soul. He writes in snapshots and his snapshots are possessions. He inhabits characters whose surface are easily distasteful — obnoxious bankers, preening narcissists, comfortably fat Americans — but his possession isn’t mockery, for such would eventually turn boring, stilted and dry. Rather his is the view from within, between the heart’s eyes in those spaces below the externals where the prickly universals - jealousy, anger, self-absorption, loss - reside in the tumultuous darks and make null the shallowness of any externals.
His music is a patois of sound that belongs elsewhere. Sounds deep from the marrow of America. Music from and for the south, the lower middle west, the empty open plains, the muddy deltas of oil spat lands. It cries of jazz, honky-tonk, church hymnals, rhythm and blues; the sounds of Leon Russell and Randy Newman and Willie Nelson. There are no oceans or mountains or skyscrapers; no fields of emerald evergreens or saltwater skies; no electronic blurbs or hip-hop beats. His is music for anywhere other than Seattle.
He is, to put it simplest, unique. When seated before his piano his face, which usually displays the passive calmness of someone reading a telephone book, becomes animated; he smiles at the other players, nodding and connecting as the songs structure themselves and the band screams along behind him. Atop his piano bench he is, you sense, most comfortable. He plays with a sneakiness that belies his genteel demeanor: what can seem like a lounge player’s easy casualness can on a moment’s notice become a jazz-virtuoso’s screaming intensity, his fingers skipping and popping across the keys like a hummingbird’s wings. He smiles. This is a music of character, of originality and singularity in a marketplace of ever dwindling difference. He is an outlier, a photographer of the insides who resides outside the usual in the downturned corners of the bell-curve of normal.
If ya dig, check out more from Aaron's interview with Michael: HERE
Ramble On – Rjd2 Interview @ Neumos 4/11/10
Rjd2 soundcheck at Neumos
Posted by Todd Hamm
{Check out also our review of RJ's new album The Colossus here}
At about 6:30 the band is soundchecking. The four members are wandering around stage twisting knobs, tapping keys, testing mics. With a guitar slung over his shoulder, Rjd2 has his back turned to the empty Capitol Hill venue, working some effects from "A Spaceship For Now" out of his MPC. The guy behind the keyboard is breathing the backup vocals for "Exotic Talk" through a modulated microphone, and the drummer is pounding out some tricky fills from RJ's vast catalogue of tricky drum breaks. The experience is like walking into an exploded diagram of the artist's body of work; bits and pieces of his catalogue strewn everywhere on stage, ready to be pulled together at the right moment.
After a minute or two, RJ notices me in front of the stage. "You here for the interview?" he asks. "We're gonna make some noise for a minute first." They jump into the middle of "Since We Last Spoke", the title track from his second album. The instrumentation is beautifully arranged live, and when the musicians lean closer to their mics to hum the refrain, it sounds like wind howling through Neumos as it bounces from speaker to wall and back again.
The sound is broken by a member of the venue's sound team giving instructions over the PA fed through their stage monitors, and once again they're changing levels, replacing speaker wire and moving about. Satisfied with his equipment on stage for the time being, RJ runs upstairs to the sound booth and changes out a chord or two, then backstage, then behind the bar to grab something--this guy is everywhere. After a few technical difficulties, he finally hops behind the turntables and cues some stage-rattling bass tracks, then mixes in some loops and taps out samples. He's making beats on the spot.
As the opening act, Bus Driver arrives to soundcheck, RJ cuts the sound and gives the thumbs up to the sound team. He approaches. "You want to go backstage?" he asks me, and I follow him to the green room. On our way downstairs beneath the stage proper, we pass several musicians hard at work on the venue's pinball machines, killing time. We hang a right into a room lined with couches and folding chairs. He yawns. "This is day number 55," he says of the tour as we sit down. After the show, he's scheduled to fly home to Philadelphia for the rest of the month, then it's off to Europe to play more gigs for a couple of weeks. This show is his ninth sell out in a row.
He's on the road to promote his fourth album The Colossus, a release that's melded styles from across the vast spectrum of his career, and received favorable press. "I had the idea of doing a record that would be as far reaching as possible, stylistically speaking," he says. "And so I would kind of be filling these roles, you know? I would go into sample-based, MPC mode and do a song like that; finish that. Then probably move on and do something of some other sort, like eletro-y or soul oriented or whatever, and I would end up going back to these things. For me, making a record--specifically this record--is a lot like putting a jigsaw puzzle together in the sense that once you get things down, you start having to look for songs that will play a different roll."
He talks as fast as you would imagine someone as busy as he is would, and his points are frequently accented by lively hand gesture. I tell him one thing that stuck out on this record was his sense of humor. "It's not a conscious thing as much as I just don't take what I do that seriously," he explains. "A record and a show are time to have fun. I guess to put it clearly, I don't have a lot of ego or pride as far as what I do as an artist." He adds that he tries not to think about his relevance in the music world. "In a way, it's assessing your own popularity...it's a dangerous thing. I make records first and foremost to please myself, because it's something I enjoy doing."
RJ with the band
The bass from Bus Driver's soundcheck pulses through the ceiling as I ask about The Third Hand, the soft rock/funk precursor to his current release that, while accomplished in musicianship and technicality of songwriting, left fans and critics alike puzzled as to the direction of his career. Despite what many journalists stated at the time, the album may have been more of a return to his roots than a departure, as he began playing the guitar long before he hopped on the decks, and actually still does most of his songwriting on the keyboard before it's transcribed elsewhere. "I stopped reading reviews," he laughs. "I read three: one was really good, like four and a half stars in the [Associated Press]; then Spin and Rolling Stone both wrote pretty unfavorable ones. I knew there was going to be a bit of a challenge in rolling out that record, I just didn't realize how big that challenge was going to be." He explains that he stopped reading positive critiques as well as negative ones. "It's an emotional roller coaster...If you care about one, you gotta care about the other. It's not a fair place to put yourself to only pay attention to the good reviews."
He begins to stretch, hinting that show time is near. Leaning one direction with his opposite arm extended over his head, it looks like a lat stretch. It almost looks like he's going for the high-five. I hesitate for a moment, but refrain. "Every record that I've made has really in so many ways been referential to the previous record," he says as he stretches. "The fact that a portion of Since We Last Spoke was not sample-based--it was live--was directly referential to Deadringer being a sample-based record, and I knew I had to branch out. The Third Hand was kind of a culmination of that pursuit, and the point of it was to do as much as I could on my own. The Colussus was referential to that in the sense that I wanted to do the exact opposite and collaborate as much as I could. I'm not working on a big picture, but the small picture has everything to do with what's relative to my immediate future and immediate past."
At this point we get up and wander back toward the stairs. He tells me the show will be his best yet, and to expect costume changes among other things. I shake his hand and wish him luck before wandering back upstairs and onto the main floor where the first few members of a sell out crowd are beginning to leak through the door.
I failed to bring my own video camera, so this clip comes courtesy of macberns on youtube. Photo credits however, go to your boy.
Nick Oliveri Interview @ The Funhouse 2/16/10
Posted by Todd Hamm
Backstage at the Funhouse
There's Olympic hockey playing on the TV behind the bar. The one mounted just to the left of a set of kitchen knives that are painted red to look like murder weapons. While a handful of sharp uppers would have been a perfectly fitting prelude to a backstage meeting with a guy who named his first solo record Cocaine Rodeo, I opt instead for a cold High Life to conserve the quality of interview.
Looking around, it's hard to imagine why someone with pull like Nick Oliveri would want to play a show in a dark, carnival themed bar like the Funhouse, but in a way that is just as strange as an acoustic metal show, it's as fitting as any of the massive Ozzfest stages he's rocked.
Just after 7:30, a scraggly goateed Oliveri enters with a tall, dark haired woman who appears to be his girlfriend. The two look tired, but used to it. We shake hands and wander backstage where he sets up for the night. He's upbeat, outgoing, and seems pretty happy to be here. Oliveri's on the road in support of his latest release Death Acoustic, an unplugged record that features a mix of songs from various bands he's played with, outlaw folk covers, and new tracks.
This is a tour he began in October in Australia, then powered through Europe and the eastern U.S. before heading out west. As he settles in, he mentions that last night's show in Portland was a bit of an off night. "Every tour has a dog," he says, "and I'm glad I got it out of the way."
As we talk about music and his career, he focuses his pre-show anxiety on a piece of gum and the beer the dark haired woman has just brought us. She disappears to find a hotel to stay in for the night. "I kind of feel like I don't fit in," he says. "Right now there's really no place for somebody to go as far as a scene is concerned. One of the greatest things in my lifetime that's happened in music is the Subpop grunge thing; bands coming together on this label who cared about something enough to start something cool. Now there hasn't been anything for fifteen years. I don't think there really is anything as far as a world scene that's recognized by everybody, right now--and if I'm wrong, I hope somebody tells me so I can find out about it, because it'd be nice to have..." he pauses, "it'd be nice to have something to be a part of."
For now, he says his focus is in keeping the tradition of performance alive. "I think it's about trying to keep playing live, whether it be out here by myself, or with the three other bands I play in, as much as I can. There's a lot of things kids are missing out on," he says. "Going to see live bands is really important, and maybe they'll get influenced to go try something like that." He recalls going to see Cro-Mags and Motörhead when he was younger and "knowing what [he] had to do."
"I just go to the bands that'll have me, you know, and if there's music inside, it has to come out," he laughs. "And I love to get up on stage and be a jackass."
This would be the part of the conversation where I ask about Queens of the Stone Age: why he left; if there's any chance for reconciliation with his former band mates and a subsequent reunion tour. However, most interviews that venture into this territory seem to take on an air of bitterness, resentment, and overall tension that kind of jumps from the page. I had actually asked him about the matter several years ago before a Mondo Generator show at the Showbox. I remember him saying something like "It's Josh [Homme]'s band now," and leaving it at that.
It's been almost five years since Oliveri parted ways with Queens; a split that yielded very different results for both parties. While Oliveri has continued down the punk-metal wormhole, Queens have gone the greaser-rock route as of late, and been able to hang around the mainstream scene a bit more. Homme has also moved on to form a massive supergroup in Them Crooked Vultures. Oliveri however, seems to prefer the dark underbelly of death-everything rock.
"I've done death metal, death punk, and this was like death acoustic," he says of his most recent venture. "As a singer/songwriter or a folk singer, I strum hard, and sing as loud as I would in a band." His songwriting has also recently been contracted by on-the-rise hardcore group The Knives, as well as an untitled project with members of Norway's Turbonegro, and on going projects The Dwarves and Moistboyz.
The dark haired woman returns from her search and reminds Oliveri they are going to have to drive all night in order to make tomorrow's show in Boise, and will have to sleep in the car. We quickly discuss the finer points of touring with Ween, and seeing Tad Doyle vomit on stage before I leave to join the growing crowd outside. He is all smiles as I thank him for the interview and beer, and he thanks me for coming to the show.
The next few hours consist of suffering through the dreadful opening bands and general milling around until Oliveri climbs on stage to soundcheck. After stepping out to smoke a cigarette, he takes time to mingle with the openers, before he gets back on stage. Finally, he strums his acoustic guitar like it was plugged into a monstrous generator-powered amplifier in the southern California desert. Veins bulge from his forehead and around his temple, his eyes are closed. He breathes deeply and screams "I want you to die!"
Thanks to rutlandl off youtube for the acoustic footage, and salutetokareem for the QOTSA clip. The picture at the top of the write up was taken by yours truly.