The Boggs standard: A word with Jason Friedman

This interview took place in April 2008, right about the time The Boggs' excellent Forts had recently been subject to a glowing review courtesy of myself...

Jason Friedman is, to all intents and purposes, The Boggs. He writes the songs, he designs the artwork and he oversees the recruitment of whomever the hell he wants to work with on any given day. With the stonking post-punk of Friedman's latest release Forts still ringing joyously in his ears, Finbarr Bermingham expected an impious Stalinist control freak on the other end of the ether when he caught up with the multi-talented Brooklyn based musician recently. Friedman's gracious, informed response suggested such misgivings were slightly off the mark, but we were by no means disappointed...

Your new album, Forts, is extremely difficult to classify. Where do you place it and how did you progress to a point so far away from your debut (2002's We Are The Boggs We Are, which was a reworking of Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music 1927-1932)?

Jason Friedman: "I think the thing that excites me the most about making art is looking for the connections in seemingly disparate things. When I started The Boggs, I wanted to discover for myself the ways in which all the music I listened to overlapped and I wanted to do so in a way that skipped past the automatic associations one might have for the specifics of genre.

"I have always thought the idea of there actually being something fundamentally 'rock and roll' or 'punk' or 'blues' or whatever was really kind of false. Fundamentally, it really just didn't ring true that the differences were real. To me, the only differences seemed to be surface ones; ones more about fashion, technology or the way records are marketed.

"It's all fundamentally the same thing to me; whether it was the disenfranchised in America thrashing away on brittle guitars in some late-night shebeen, skinny working class teenagers in postwar England finding their own fierce way through those same songs in a sweaty Cavern or a bunch of kids cutting up the records themselves in a local rec-center in the Bronx - wasn't it all just DIY party music?

"It's like a telephone-game of culture in which these party anthems have been passed around from generation to generation, mutating for over a hundred years."

Is there any reason why you are the only constant member of The Boggs? Do you find it easier to collaborate rather than operate in a fixed unit?

"Well, I'd say it comes from necessity more than anything. I've always had a very specific sense of how I wanted things to develop and a lot of that development has occurred late at night when my OCD tendencies can sort of switch on and take over the process. In that way, it's been a kind of insular route so it has at times been really rewarding to open it up and have the fresh ideas of someone new to play off of.

"In essence, The Boggs is really a recording project and most of the work is done over extended periods of time and the songs built up in an almost painterly manner.

"Where not having a fixed unit has been an issue, it's in performing live. It's hard to grow as a performer when, in reality, things are starting over again every several months.

"Sometimes I get very jealous when I look at friends of mine like The Rapture and I see the ways in which they continue to improve on stage. That comes from their ability to build on each performance and that is something I have never been able to really do in The Boggs."

Is it important for you to be the controlling force when writing/recording, or are there any democratic aspects to the process?

"Yes, I'd say it's important for me to think of myself as in control of the band. I don't want that to sound arrogant. It's not the only way I could ever work and in no way are my ideas in anyway superior to all the incredibly talented people who have at different times called themselves a part of the group. It's just that the thoughts behind what has motivated me with The Boggs have been so specific that it's been easier to assume the role of captain. It's also a role that has intensified over the years. I think there is something very specific about what the Boggs are and even I would be a different sort of writer and performer if I were in another band.

"In the Boggs, I mostly work as musical director. I set up the parameters and the direction and then whomever I'm working with act in response to my initiative and we move the track along together.

"I think one of the ways in which I have improved over the years is knowing when to trust the people I'm working with. Trying to recognize when it's appropriate to step back is important. Most of the time, the engineer or musician is more likely to go where you want them to if you leave them alone."

The list of musicians who have contributed to The Boggs over the years makes for impressive reading (Friedman has counted Enon, Au Revoir Simone and Liars alumni as part of the band at one point or another). How do you get involved with these people and what artists would you like to collaborate with, in an ideal world?

"Oh I don't know. I'm not sure I could really answer that. Maybe a filmmaker? I'd like to try scoring a film; that would be fun. And I could certainly learn a lot by watching a great director in action. I've definitely been extremely privileged to work with so many amazing people. In some cases they've sought me out, in some cases I've asked people to fill very specific rolls and sometimes it just kind of happened."

Like some other notable New Yorkers (Lou Reed, Liars), you've spent a lot of time in Berlin. What is so attractive about the city; how does it differ from New York and influence your work?

"I went to Berlin at a time when I really needed to step a way from things. I went there and basically disappeared into the creative process for a year and a half. If you know what you want to work on, Berlin is great for that. There is a feeling of being very far away from the world there. It's slow and it's quiet: I think that was what I needed at the time.

"It also seems to be a somewhat lawless or apocalyptic place. Just about every major event in the 20th century happened in one way or another in Berlin. Those stains are still all over the city and in a lot of ways it still feels like a post-war environment. Creatively, all that darkness and space really had an impact on me. It helped guide a number of the themes. Not in a literally historical manner, but in its mood and temperament it had a tremendous effect."

Thematically, what is Forts about?

"It's about the kinds of figurative and literal things people make for themselves to both deal with and avoid ordinary life. It's about routines and habits and the rooms, cities and imaginary spaces where these habits and routines take place. It's about compulsion, restlessness, isolation and people who should know themselves and each other much better than they do."

What are the main influences on your music, both musical and others?

"While I was making Forts I was listening to a lot of early hip-hop, Afro-Beat, funk, ska and soul.

"I watch a lot of movies. I end up spending all day watching things if I'm not careful. And I'll watch all kinds of films really, from snooty seven-hours-plus Hungarian films to teen comedies. You can't miss with a good rom-com. Nor can you with the Marx Brothers or something like It Happened One Night.

"I look at art. Paintings and drawings mostly but I also I borrow from a good many of the 70's conceptual artists and people like Joseph Beuys.

I hope this doesn't look ridiculous but, a lot of my notions about this kind of non-linear history of rock and the kind of de-compartmentalised anti-genreism I go on about were shaped by reading Gilles Deleuze."

The cover of We Are The Boggs We Are features a music magazine with The Strokes on the cover. What was the thinking behind that? Do you think The Boggs fitted in with the early 2000's New York band scene?

"I think we fit in more than The Strokes did to be honest. By that I mean that those guys were never really a part of the scene. You'd see them bobbing up here and there, but really they weren't really a part of things. To me the New York scene was something that really grew in the late 90's. There were a few really great rock and soul dance parties around town and there was a gang of kids who all hung out together and ended up in all these bands in the 00's.

"The Strokes sounded the part, but they didn't have much to do with anything else. They might as well have been from L.A.

"I always like to fill album covers with details and inside-jokes. So much of the first album to me was about re-thinking assumptions and I new most people would automatically associate our sound with cliché images of sharecroppers and miners. None of that had any relevance to me since I discovered that music in record stores. That was my context for it and I wanted to display it that way as if to say, 'This music is not what you think, it is not something from long ago, it is now.'

"The cover was based on the Faces' First Step LP as kind of an answer to any criticism that we might just be a novelty 1920's revivalist act. The Faces reworked folk and blues in their way, The Velvet Underground did it their way, Wire did it their way etc. I wanted to say we are no different and that this is what the process is: everyone stealing from each other and in the process, rediscovering it. The England scarf was another clue. This music doesn't just come from America and Africa it comes from everywhere and its mutations are infinite. And all of this was done in the summer before the Strokes debut when every magazine had them on the cover when everyone was wondering if they were the next great leap forward. I was pointing the finger and saying they are nothing new."

How do you like to spend your time away from music? Do you have any interesting pastimes?

"I draw a lot. That's my stuff all over the new album. I also make films and videos; although I don't do that so much anymore. And I write. I watch a lot of football which, because of the time difference between England and America, means getting up at the crack of dawn and getting my weary bones to a pub in the city. Ridiculous."

What is your favourite music of the past year?

"The new Hot Chip LP."

Interview written for The Skinny

Video: The Boggs - Remember The Orphans

Cabaret on a Sinking Ship @ The Nightingale Theatre, 29 September

Theatre Review for Latest 7

With standout characters like an amphibious reality TV champion, jilted by her manageress, a politician haunted by the demons of the past and Lily, the gypsy immigrant from Eastern Europe, begging for your vote; Cabaret On A Sinking Ship takes a well-aimed, if sometimes slapstick swipe at British society, opportunely timed to coincide with a certain visiting conference.

The results are unflinchingly intense and occasionally hilarious. There’s acerbity in the cast’s delivery that hammers home their disgruntlement, but there’s an unfortunate overriding sentiment that 30 minutes could easily have been sacrificed from the production, much to the comfort of the patrons.

3/5

The Mountain Goats: Songs and Scripture

Finbarr Bermingham waxes with head Mountain Goat John Darnielle to talk ambition, God and Santa Claus

There are few bands that combine durability with innovation like John Darnielle's Mountain Goats. Almost twenty years into their celebrated career, with a prolific turnaround rate of nigh on an album per year, the concepts seem to be growing more and more interesting. Darnielle's recent EP with John Vanderslice was based around an organ harvesting farm on the moon (think Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, gone lunar). But nothing could have prepared us for the challenges presented by their new album, The Life of the World to Come.

Each track is named after a biblical passage, each of which has resonated with Darnielle in some shape or form through his life. He has applied each one to an issue close to his heart, some personal, some global. Matthew 25:21, for instance, recalls the death of his mother-in-law, and is truly heartbreaking. "When you're in a room with someone dying of cancer, it's hard," says Darnielle when told how touching the song is. "I had some trouble getting through that one."

Another track was inspired by his diagnosis with a chronic illness last year, which led to the cancellation of an Australian tour and comes with the defiant chorus: "I won't get better, but someday I'll be free. I am not this body that imprisons me." John, a former nurse, explains that he tried to write the song from both patient and carer's perspective. "I've spent a lot of time in hospitals as a worker and clinics as a patient. It's a place and role that's been under examined by songwriters. I wanted to broaden it and give it a third dimension." And it works.

Listening to The Life of the World to Come is like cracking a code and its depth and quality combine to make it one of the Mountain Goats' finest releases to date. But when I put it to Darnielle that his religious zeal may alienate some of his fanbase, he laughs. "Believe it or not, I don't have any faith. I think that this, the guy talking to you today, is it. After I die, that's it. But I'm sort of the opposite of most people who don't have faith in that I think it would be awesome to have it. You have people like Christopher Hitchens who are happy to share his atheism, and that's cool for him. But I remember the morning that kids came into my Catholic school telling me that they'd figured out that there was no Santa Claus. I knew, but didn't wanna know. I was like: "Guys, it's way more fun if there is a Santa!"

Despite not possessing faith, Darnielle is a spiritual person. He attends church and prays, because for him, "there's a great deal of pleasure to be had in it". I suggest to him that in pursuing such activities he is merely hedging his bets. "No!" is the quick response. "If the great God the Christians talk about is real then there won't be any bet hedging. You can't say: 'Well, I showed up at church'. You really have to either take the leap or not. Americans really like to think, well, hey I did this and I did that, so he'll let me in, I'm cool. Of all the possible escapologies, that one's not right."

But Darnielle's seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of the scriptures is enough to put the most devout Christian to shame. For a confessed atheist, it's a peculiar specialist subject to have. John, however, refutes that claim. "I have a selective knowledge of the parts that resonated with me. If you were to quote to me a verse that I hadn't been using, I wouldn't know where it came from, unless it was pretty clear. I have a working knowledge of the scriptures."

As we approach the end of the decade, Darnielle is thankful for the fortune that has come his way. "Man, ten years ago, I never would have thought the Mountain Goats could have been full time thing. Well, certainly not at this level. I still don't expect much, though. I grew up with not so much money so my general hope each year is that by the end of that year I will have a roof over my head and a stove to cook food on. That really is as high as I set my goals." But when it is put to him that his ideas and songwriting ability should be enough to ensure continued trajectory, he is equally modest. "I feel as though all of my ideas have to be coming from somewhere outside of me. I don't really believe in invention, everything is probably a perversion of something I've heard somewhere."

Something suggests that the man described by the New Yorker as "America's best non hip-hop lyricist” is selling himself short.

Interview for The Skinny

Video: The Mountain Goats (John Darnielle) - Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace

A Weekend In The Country with Bloc Party

This interview took place in June 2007, when I spoke to Matt Tong before Bloc Party's show at the Carling Academy in Glasgow. After being initially annoyed at being fobbed off with the drummer, I was pleasantly surprised by Tong's opinionated, honest and forthright conversation, all delivered with a prominent stammer...

Who the fuck wants to know what I think? I'm only the bloody drummer in Bloc Party for God's sake!

Probably not the most solid foundation to base an interview on, but as it turns out, Matt Tong has an awful lot to say. An unlikely spokesman for the band, Tong has assumed much of their media activity for their latest album, an interesting tactic considering the outspoken nature of frontman Kele Okereke. But after half an hour spent with The Skinny, Tong's strangely endearing stammer and refreshingly honest persona suggests it's a prudent decision.

With an industry driven bandwagon of political and socially "aware" artists in full motion, it's sometimes difficult to ascertain whether there is any substance behind it. Bloc Party are one such group, and few take themselves more seriously.

"The undercurrent of violence and racism in the UK," and in particular the troubled climes in the capital are unsurprisingly "worrying" for Londoner Tong. His views on the root of the problem, however, are slightly more forthright. "It's symptomatic of the English embrace of American culture. The media have taken a lot of US values and made them normal. So now it seems commonplace that gang culture is rife in London."

Ask him about the stereotypical English view of the Scottish, and he lets fly with another tirade. "Red headed, angry and alcoholic. I don't subscribe to it though, the English have used that for years to cover up their own frailties. You just have to look at the hooligans flying English flags all over the world. And then the Americans slag off the English in turn, to disguise their problems."

Tong's reluctance to embrace patriotism extends to a disdain for facets of the British music industry. "People think you have to be pretty shameless when it comes to getting attention and success." He assures us that as a band, Bloc Party are "cynical of what the industry has to offer."

However, with the levels of attention given to all the next brightest hopes by the likes of NME, who championed Bloc Party, it must be hard to ignore. Tong brands such overexposure "harmful" but explains that sometimes, it's just better to smile and nod. "We knew it was going to happen. But you can't assume you're above it, even if it can be a hindrance. I think we give our fans some credit though, quality prevails."

Those guilty of wrapping their arms around celebrity culture are dismissed by Tong as "puppets," and he has no qualms in giving his views on some of the more notorious pawns.

"Johnny Borrell is an arse. Write that down. And Pete Doherty too. I have my opinions and sometimes I'm wary of them being misconstrued. But they're just fucking arses."

Seemingly under no illusions as to what this industry offers, Bloc Party could be in for a long and illustrious career. So, in this age of frequent reformation, what does the long term future hold? "We're gonna split up after the third record," he asserts with his tongue boring a hole in his cheek. "We'll develop a Pixies-esque cult following that explodes into something far and above what we experienced in our original lifetimes and come back for a multi-million pound tour. That's the plan." Not a huge Police fan then? "Sting can fuck right off!"

As known associates of Franz Ferdinand and confessed lovers of contemporary Scottish music, Matt also proves somewhat of a historian, suggesting the successful Scottish underground scene can be traced back to the Act of Union. "The richer scene stems from a perpetration of trust by the English. Scotland had to maintain a sense of identity which results in the whole thing being more interesting than the English. I'm not a massive fan of bagpipes though!"

One would be forgiven then, for thinking there was little about Tong's native green fields that gives him pleasure. Au contraire...

"Well there's something bloody marvellous about Morris Dancing, if you're talking about traditionally English things then that's it. There's something so intrinsically silly about it that makes it fantastic. Nigel Mansell as well." Is it for his charisma? "No it's his moustache, I think for the same reasons I like Morris Dancing."

Video: Bloc Party - Banquet

E's Midnight Children?

A few months back, I interviewed Mark Everett (read it here), or E, from Eels for The Skinny. Anyone who is familiar with his history will testify, it's as rich as they come. His story is heartbreaking and he tells it candidly and matter-of-factly, as if it was all completely normal. I would be fascinating, then, to hear his account of this story, which was posted on the NME's website today. "Eels' E the father of Salman Rushdie's ex-wife's baby?" screams the headline. If there's one thing to be learned from Everett's life, it's to expect the unexpected.

But... holy fuck!

Video: Eels - Mr E's Beautiful Blues

AA Bondy - When The Devil's Loose Album Review

Alabaman mirrors Ryan Adams' earlier solo endeavours with fine second album

Since leaving Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams’ solo career has followed an interesting trajectory, taking in colossal peaks and disappointing troughs. Sound-alike AA Bondy has also traded a full band sound, in the form of Alabaman grunge merchants Verbana, for a more introspective style. Thankfully, he mirrors Adams in more than just voice and recalls the Carolinian troubadour at the height of his powers: woozy, melodic and slightly rough around the edges. But it would be wrong to dismiss Bondy as a tribute act, for When the Devil’s Loose is a fine album in its own right. From the drunken balladry of Oh The Vampyre (“I could drink the world and never get my fill”), to the tender navel-gazing of Mightiest of Guns, and the album’s crowning moment, the buoyant I Can See The Pines Are Dancing, this is mightily impressive fare. Now, is it sadistic to hope Bondy doesn’t follow Adams onto the wagon?

4/5

Written for The Skinny

Video: AA Bondy - I Can See The Pines are Dancing

The Mountain Goats - The Life of the World to Come Album Review

Few albums will send you rifling through a 2,400 page tome. But such is the gravity, beauty and heartbreaking sentiment within The Life Of The World To Come – a trip to the Bible seems obligatory. Each song is named after a biblical passage, the relevance more obvious in some than others. Occasionally, John Darnielle adopts a persona (a prisoner on 1 John 4:16), but it mostly seems unflinchingly autobiographical with consistently breathtaking results. Matthew 25:21 is a harrowing account of rushing to someone’s bedside to watch them die: “the last of something bright burning, still burning; beyond the cancer and the chemotherapy.” Darnielle's voice comes as close as it ever will to wobbling on a track that will well up the eyes of the most secular listener. Whether you agree with the author's piousness – affected or genuine – shouldn’t stop you from hearing this. Christian rock this is not, but it's one of the best records of 2009.

5/5

Video: The Mountain Goats - Genesis 3:23

Written for The Skinny