SM: How much of the new album do you have done?
DW: We just finished it. It is all done and it will be out in April, (the label) likes a lot of lead time, so we are all set.
SM: Your last album was a double-disc effort. One disc was a greatest hits and the other was you and your friends revisiting some of those older songs and reinterpreting them. One of your songs that I have always found fascinating is “Are You Out There.”
You wrote it about indie radio fading in the 90s and corporate radio taking over and it seems to grow more relevant as the years carrying on.
DW: There was that fear in the 90s. There was still a power that radio stations had. So there is more confusion about who has the power and who has the voice that controls everything.
In a lot of ways, and weird ways, the consumer now has a lot more power now and that is creepy too. There is that hand that kind of guides them along.
The major labels at this point, there are really only two things they will put a lot of money into, and I really can’t blame them.
I think that there is plenty of good music still out there, but they are always going to go with something now that has something more theatrical going on, than if you are going to stand there with a guitar, unless you are from Green Day and sit there with an acoustic guitar.
I get it. I chose, a long time ago, to have the pretty much exactly the career that I have. I was walking along in this little fishing town and I just read a story about how these trawlers had scraped up the bottom of the ocean and destroyed all these fish populations. I was passing by these little medium-sized family business with their smaller boats, and they weren’t the big boats that were tearing up the landscape. I remember thinking I don’t want to be small, but I don’t want to be big. I want to be like (those family businesses). I want to be a medium-sized boat that doesn’t chew up the landscape too much. It’s great, it is exactly what I wanted.
But, anyways, you are right about the absence of the charismatic, iconoclastic media personality.
But you in Pittsburgh have nothing to complain about: You have WYEP. There are about, maybe, stations that are everybody’s favorites in this industry and ‘YEP is one of them.
I pledged to ‘YEP once as I was driving through Pittsburgh to Ohio.
Stations can’t help it, and it is a really weird thing as they will play like a lot of men and one woman. It’s interesting, it may be more than that if you do a direct count. WYEP, it’s almost like they go Rosemary (Welsch) who is counting, as it is much more even. There are only a few stations that pull that off.
They, also, do a lot of shows, like a lot of rock and blues shows on the radio to make sure that they are giving everybody something. They will play an Irish band, a Canadian rock band... they try and educate. There aren’t a lot of stations that stand out like that, but WYEP does.
You do have internet radio, but in order to seed the information-machine of kids in dorm halls and kids talking to each other and people sharing stuff, you do need something that allows them to keep the wheel of music going. At some point it is word of mouth, but you need a starter to click. You need a catalyst, and at some point people will take over. That is what happened with my career. My career can not go faster than it does, I wish it would a little (laughing).
Radio stations and internet radio and there are some cool magazines, like Swerve, that you see in cities now that are filling in the gap too.
SM: Word of mouth seems to be big in getting new artists started right now. It has launched Fitz and the Tantrums to the next level and your label mate, Nicole Atkins, is getting the buzz behind her now, too, via word or mouth and stations like WYEP getting behind her music and pushing it.
DW: I would freak out if I were just starting out. I’m glad that Nicole (Atkins) is getting a lot of push, she is on my label. I know my label, and her and I are not where they can put all their attention right now. I think they are giving her a bit more of attention, which is really cool with me as she is on a very exciting ramp right now with a lot going on.
It is so hard to start, they gave me a lot of help in the beginning. There was no tour support, but just a lot of encouragement and posters. They would send posters off to tiny coffee houses as posters were really important. Actually, posters are really important again.
SM: So what made you want to revisit your older songs and rework them on the “Many Great Companions” LP?
DW: Once you get out on the road with these songs, you know two things. One, some of our songs were very produced and we stripped them down, like a song “What Do You Hear In These Sounds.” So we just brought it back to a song instead of a production. There are some things that were produced in an originally spare way, but I was so young 15 or 16 years ago, that I just wanted to redo them. I could barely recognize my voice on the early songs.
SM: Your voice is that much rougher, I hadn’t noticed it much...
DW: I think it is a little rougher. Somewhere along the way I took voice lessons and somewhere along the way the voice lessons took.
I was teaching songwriting, which was really kind and lovely for (class), I did for about 20 minutes of this up-and-down voice lesson. It was really amazing how much it reminds yourself that you are a heavy object that can hold a lot of air. You have to do things to sort of breathe so that your body is using all of that to help you with your sounds. I think along the way, I was able to use a lot more air to create a more constant and deeper sound. And also, as you get older, especially women’s voices really come into their full stride between the ages of 40 and 60.
SM: You have these vivid characters in your songs that have a truth to them. A universal truth, I guess. How do you get into those characters’ heads and not falsify anything about their story or their ideals? And I realize that is a really metaphysical question.
DW: No, no. There are some specific answers, like one of them is you have to like the character. You have to empathize with them, like the song “Cooler Than I Am,” the narrator is not singing to a person she dislikes, it is more like she really feels sorry for him and can’t understand why they would take the cheap way out. The person she wanted to be with her is making her feel insecure and it is not going to be a relationship that is really going to be enjoyed.
That helped me early on to learn that contempt is not a great leg to stand on.
I think, me, being raised as the youngest child and your sisters are really smart and they are good at all the social subjects. You, being the the youngest, can kind of live by your wits; either you imitate people, or you notice things that they don’t notice, that you are identifying more with the underdog than the kingpin or the big fish. That is what you are interested in and that is what you kind of end up picking up on.
There are kids out there, I see it all the time, who are very good at functioning at the world. They don’t believe in ghosts. They don’t believe in luck. They don’t believe in karma. They are not superstitious. They are so good at pulling out a credit card and getting what they need and don’t question much and I can understand why they don’t, but it was always more complicated than that for me. I’m so interested in people who find it complicated as well, and it turned out to be my skill was I could then tap my way into the world the way normal people do.
SM: You are quoted as saying that even though the country is in troubled times, “we will get through it, but we will be the last to know it.” What is the secret you have seen in criss-crossing America that most of us don’t see?
DW: Gil-Scott Heron was right; the reason the revolution couldn’t be televised isn’t because we storm the offices of “The Man” and take him down and steal his equipment and go into this weird Mad Max, anarchic kind of thing.
It is just that it is so dull. The great giant nose of capitalism, that is what I call capitalism, it is a giant nose and it sniffs out money. It just goes, it is blind and it can’t hear anything. It just goes where the money is.
Even though the television will show you the pictures of the people having these meaningful moments on porch swings, it is just not interesting to them what is happening out there. Like the farmer-markets are a multi-million dollar business, it just past the billion-dollar mark a few years ago.
We are growing a garden. We tried to get brussels sprouts and egg plants, we tried to get seedlings and everywhere was out of them.
You know, like, “What the hell?” What kind of world is that? But it is happening and when you go outside and you are planting stuff and you are sharing tomatoes and you are talking about what you do to protect your broccoli, there is a lot of stuff to talk about besides politics. And suddenly you are discovering these networks, where hand-me-downs go around the neighborhood.
The community networks are strengthening.
My joke is that with every e-coli breakout is that you have a thousand new gardens, and there have been a couple e-coli breakouts.
And now we have the more political incarnation march on Wall Street thing, take your money out of the big banks and put it in a credit union. We were always thinking that we were going to do that, but now we are going to do that and 750,000 people also did that.
I think the Occupy Wall Street movement is a response to all the stuff that has been brewing under the surface. There has been a real concerted effort to green the insides of cities instead of sucking everybody to the outside.
I just played in Blacksburg, Va. They are going to make the town more pedestrian friendly and they are putting in an arts complex and they just renovated this whole opera house and it was a gem. I see that everywhere and that is why I feel I’m seeing things (getting better that other people might not).
I see more solar panels, and not in Arizona. Solar panels, the mainstream think on it right now is, “I would, if I could.” If you have any pull with anybody, just get one solar panel...and then get another and get another. It will pay for itself. Don’t even talk about it. Don’t support the think tanks that think about, just get them.
It is changing. It has not been static. It is changing. This is like the stuff I wrote about in my environmental courses in college 25 years ago. The belief that the whole community supporting artisans and local businesses and your neighbors and growing stuff. The small stuff, then the big stuff and the larger conversations like the questioning of a global economy, it is all happening out there now and it was not in the 90s. It is not people sitting in their SUVs thinking about what Bill Clinton is going to do for me.
I wonder if I should thank George W. Bush for that, because there was this mentality of “If you are wondering if we are here for you, we are not. We are clearly not here for anybody.”
I think, unfortunately, my mentality was, “Well, what is the serf supposed to do?”
They can grew their own vegetables, keep their head down and not rack up too much debt fast.
There is a sort of serf mentality to working on such a basic level: It is called the mosaic level. It is called that because you are just sort of putting things together tile-by-tile, but it all adds up. And then it kind of trickled up.
Look at WYEP, it has grown. It has a new building. They have concerts in their building. There are a lot more concert venues now in general, but they have a really good state-of-the-art one and it’s a green building and they really pride themselves on having a green building.
And then you have neighborhoods that are all over Pittsburgh that are very pedestrian friendly and then you have these giant museums and concert halls. They are being reinhabited with all sorts of music and it is a very cool scene. People want to move to Pittsburgh. It is one of my favorite cities. Pittsburgh and Milwaukee are my two favorite American cities.
I think the smaller cities are the ones that are actually going to lead the larger ones.
