Songs and Sonics

In a world overrun with lifeless Autotuned vocals and perfectly Pro Tooled grooves, Florida-based singer/songwriter Marc Sirdoreus — who performs as Marc with a C — is like a breath of fresh air. His cassette 4-track recordings are unapologetically lo-fi. They’re imperfect by any technical yardstick. But, as everyone says (and rarely follows through with), the recording quality shouldn’t matter. At the end of the day, it should all be about the songs.

And in Marc with a C’s case, what terrific songs they are! Classic mid-’60s pop melodies and jangly guitars run up against witty ruminations on nerdy girls, teenage angst, and dating someone for their record collection. Marc’s songs go beyond the typical singer-songwriter vocabulary; they’re often astonishingly direct, delightfully funny, and painfully honest. The effect is not unlike having an enthusiastic best friend telling you about something amazing that happened to him the other day.

Marc with a C’s latest release is called — and oh man, the spambots are really going to find this blog now — Linda Lovelace for President. Don’t ask. Or, actually, I’ll ask, in the interview below.

Since 2002, most Marc with a C releases prominently featured Mr. Sirdoreus’s songwriting. This time out, Chris Zabriskie (live drummer for Marc with a C and a fine songwriter in his own right) contributed three songs, though it’s still Marc playing all the instruments on the album. The recording is appropriately rough around the edges, but it’s very much alive, very human, and brimming with lyrical gems from start to finish.

“I think everyone thinks I’m their little secret,” says Marc about his fans. He’s right. And you’re about to be let in on the secret as well.

Marc: That’s difficult to sum up. My first album, Human Slushy, was pretty polished — for me, at least — and the second full-length was gearing up to be a big ol’ arena rock affair. However, that second record was more the sound and performances of the producer than my own ideas for Marc With a C. At the eleventh hour, we ditched all of those recordings and started fresh for what eventually became Bubblegum Romance. A much more stripped down, lo-fi and fun affair.

Chris Zabriskie really helped push me in the direction of making the album sound at least a little bit like the shows felt, and his offer to pick up the production duties sold me. If you play the original sessions for the first draft of that album against what was eventually released, it’s pretty clear that I had little to no input on what was being done with my songs. Chris helped me make the most important decisions of my musical life, for sure.

After those initial albums, I stayed pretty bare bones with the production, doing it on my own. I like to think each album has its own theme, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever done better than a record I put out in 2007 called Normal Bias. It was one complete thought, and sequenced in the order it was recorded in — meaning that you can hear my voice going out by the end of the album. I sang a lot over those three days.

It’s actually pretty simple: though I thought that there was certainly an undercurrent of spiritual turmoil running through the lyrics of the tracks, I mostly wanted to try and make an album that was simply a really cool collection of pop songs. This backfired, of course. At the end of five straight days of recording, I plopped down on the couch to watch the film that the record takes its title from… and was shocked to find that all of these songs could serve as lyrical counterpoints to that film. Besides “Jessica, I Heard You Like The Who,” mind you.

This album also carries the distinction of having what are possibly the two longest songs I’ve recorded to date: the title track and “Satellite.” This surprised a lot of people, as I’ve sort of built my teensy little career on three minute long pop songs.

You know, my wife said the exact same thing about the song. That one had been kicking around on various demos for years, and we could never fit it into the grand scheme of whatever album we were working on at the time. The song was literally on Bubblegum Romance when we sent it off to the duplication plant, and I believe that Chris Zabriskie had to make some frantic last-minute calls when we decided to remove it.

That’s a hard one to answer, and this response will totally seem like I’m pulling your chain. The lyrics are fairly esoteric, and that’s because I was combining elements of the film with another subject altogether: the original beta testers of Quantum Link, which eventually morphed into America Online.

I saw an early tester going onto the service and becoming very involved with seeing how far the chat room personas could be taken, eventually reinventing himself as a woman. After this heterosexual man spent hours/days/weeks/months pretending to be a flirty girl named Nikki, there were some very notable changes in his behavior that I wouldn’t feel comfortable elaborating on. I would imagine that due to our ability to become a different person in a virtual world, there may likely have been a rise in multiple personality disorders.

How this related to the film for me is hard to explain, but in it, you see Linda trying to become a real actress, pretending that she had been forced into her porn career — even though it was the only reason anyone knew of her in the first place. And in the plot itself, she makes her freewheeling sexuality very, very well known while also attempting to sell herself as a wholesome and virtuous leader. For reasons that likely make no sense to anyone but me, I saw major connections between the film and what I’d witnessed firsthand. The lyrics in the song itself probably give no clues either, but it feels really good to sing about, and I’m very proud of that one.

I don’t actually have one. If I’m going to do some recording, I gather up the needed instruments from around the house, put them somewhere that won’t bother anyone else, and go to work until I’m tired of listening to the song. This is a picture of what my setup looked like when I did some simple acoustic demos a few days ago, and yes… that is my living room.

That drop-out in “Born Vintage” was actually present on Chris’s home demo of the song. He’d gotten up to answer the door and he left the drum machine running. No one was there, so he sat back down and finished the song, leaving in the “blemish.” I thought it was a really cool counterpoint, so I kept it in my own rendition of the tune.

I never really think of anything I’m doing while recording as a trick, so to speak.

Sometimes, I’ve been drinking and I try to sound sober during vocal takes. It usually works, so I think that might count. Often I’ll use as much tape as I possibly can before I start losing clarity on the magnetic strip, and then I’ll layer the last remaining parts onto a computer after transferring the material. The bad part about this is that the basic tracks end up submixed, and you can’t really go back and change anything you dislike later. You have to sort of be married to what you’ve committed to tape to finish a song in this fashion.

It’s always different. Sometimes I’ve simply got nothing to do, so I’m plunking around with a guitar, improvising lyrics. If something sticks out, I’ll drop everything and work on the idea until it’s finished.

Lately, the work has gone like this: I don’t smoke in my house, so I’ll go to the garage or patio to indulge my habit. I almost always have a notebook within reach, and I’ll scribble things out with no real purpose. Sometimes I end up with fully formed lyrics, other times I’ll just get maybe a scattered verse out of it that I’ll later use as a middle eight. And there are days when I wake up and simply feel like completing those things, so I scour notebooks and see which ones hold up the best. But often, if I don’t immediately have a melody in my head to go with the lyrics, it’ll never be finished. I do finish quite a bit more than I release, though.

Ah, would a gentleman tell a secret like that? I’m not sure. I can say that in my dating days, gals without good taste in music didn’t last long on my meter of interest. I can also say that in the past I’ve been more guilty of trying to get into the tape decks of possible girlfriends than underneath their clothes. Some actually found that more offensive.

I will honestly answer “no.” I’ve also been told that I can convince myself of anything, no matter how far-fetched, melodramatic or simply untrue it may be. So… I might have done so without realizing. I often don’t write about something nowadays unless it’s in the pretty distant past, but writing pop lyrics is really nothing if you’re not making mountains out of molehills, no?

I guess it’s really a fair mixture of both. I do my very best to only sing lyrics that I can stand behind, and I’ve been known to retire songs when I no longer relate to them. But honestly… the craft of the song itself is just as important to me as what I’m saying in it. Should the lyrics ever become more important than the entire unit as a whole, I’d probably be better off writing pamphlets than pop tunes.

Oh, yes. I was actually threatened with a lawsuit once. It seems that a gal wasn’t happy that I mentioned her by name in “Blowjob Queen,” but the joke is really on her. I thought the song was a stupid throwaway, but I decided to play it live to sort of underhandedly get even with her for being so ridiculous about the whole situation. Now it’s requested at nearly every show I play.

I attempt to steer clear of things that would upset my family, but that doesn’t always end up as a hard and fast rule. It’s more that I’ll write about anything I need to express at that moment, but just how much I’ll perform it after the fact remains to be seen. There are really personal songs that I haven’t performed live for years, (”Well Fucked Sailor” from my first album is a great example), but I still really love that I got the chance to express those sentiments. But when it comes to playing in front of a live audience, that’s when any sort of fear about my writing comes into play. Seeing facial expressions while people listen, you know? Sometimes performing live is a bit like being a film director that is expected to re-enact the audiences favorite scenes from your pictures.

I didn’t receive this advice directly, but… I was watching a documentary about Mystery Science Theater once, and one of the writers said something to the effect of “we don’t worry about making sure everyone gets it, just that the right people get it.” That sentence is constantly in my mind when I’m creating anything.

I don’t know. It’d have to be for a label that I already really liked, and the producer would have to be a perfect match. I’m mostly into the lo-fi recording side of things because I don’t think that the songs I make up call for much more sheen than I give them. I’m not shooting for mainstream radio play, I don’t want People magazine rooting through my garbage, and best of all… If the recordings are “warts and all,” then the listener knows exactly what I sound like, not so much what an experienced producer can make me sound like.

For the first time in a while, I’m not totally sure. I’ve made quite a few recordings in the last decade, and I think it’s time to take it on the road again. You know, enjoy what I’ve made and watch others hear it for the first time. As far as writing goes, I’m not exactly in a hurry to finish another album. I’ve written a few new songs, but they’re quite long, melancholy and esoteric. Of course… that’s the exact same thing I said right after we finished making Normal Bias, so… anything goes at this point.

Vinyl records.

My family.

Religious confusion.

Death.

Bubblegum.

Codeine.

Showering.

Limitations.

Insomnia.

People that let me ramble until I eventually make a point.

Marc with a C’s web site | Marc with a C’s MySpace page | Buy Marc with a C’s albums

Pea Hix (a.k.a. Dan “Pea” Hicks) is the world’s foremost authority on Optigans.

What’s an Optigan? Glad you asked.

While Pea will explain it better than I ever could, the short version is this: The Optigan was kind of like a poor man’s Mellotron, intended for groovy early ’70s family room sing-alongs. Pea began collecting Optigans when nobody cared what they were, and when their eBay prices commanded virtually nothing (if anybody bothered to list them in the first place). He created not only the definitive web site on Optigans — optigan.com — but perhaps one of the most entertaining, well-written web sites dedicated to a specific musical instrument.

The story of his quest for Optigan information goes deep, culminating with his legal ownership of the Optigan master tapes and creating the definitive set of Optigan samples.

But wait, there’s more! He teamed up with singer/songwriter Rob Crow from Pinback to form the duo Optiganally Yours, featuring Pea’s Optigan stylings and Rob’s vocal and guitar work.

To date, Optiganally Yours have released only two albums: 1997’s Spotlight on Optiganally Yours and 2000’s Optiganally Yours Presents: Exclusively Talentmaker. Sure, there’s a couple tracks that are laugh-out-loud funny, like their brilliant reworking of Jimmy Webb’s Witchita Lineman, but both albums rise above being mere novelty music. It’s just plain great stuff to listen to, sometimes oddly touching but always full of solid pop songwriting hooks. And the most amazing thing is just how utterly… modern Optiganally Yours‘ music sounds. (To my ears, it sounds a bit like a lounged-up Beck.) Yet, at the core of their sound is a cheesy ’70s home organ from Mattel.

In this interview, Pea takes us on a multimedia tour of some of his gadgets, his other adventures in sound (like his Lucas & Friends project), and explains why the other half of Optiganally Yours just can’t keep his clothes on during a live show.

Pea: The Optigan (OPTIcal-orGAN) was kind of an adult toy chord organ that Mattel produced in the early ’70s. It’s brown, ugly, and not very interesting-looking. The reason why we love it so much is that it produces sound in a very unique way. Unlike most typical home organs of the time period, which produced sound electronically, the Optigan utilizes LP-sized celluloid discs, which are encoded with concentric rings of optical waveforms. These waveforms are the same thing as optical film soundtracks — except they’re bent into circles so that they can loop.

The important thing is that these soundtrack rings contain recordings of actual instruments and real musicians playing, say, a bossa nova pattern or whatever. So the Optigan was like an early analogue sampler, only you couldn’t record your own sounds on it — you could only play back the pre-recorded discs. Your left hand plays the chord buttons, which has the band, drum loops, sound effects, etc. Your right hand plays the melody on the keyboard, which also utilizes recorded sounds (Hammond B3 organs, etc.). The sound quality is very poor — think AM radio quality, at best. But that’s what makes it so cheesily haunting-sounding.

I actually have a lot less hardware now than I used to, as I tend to do most of my work on the computer these days. But I have a small collection of oddball instruments. My current fave is a Moog Sonic-VI, mostly because I just got it a couple days ago. It was a lucky Craigslist score — got it for about 1/3 of the usual price. What an amazing, weird synth!

Of course, I’ve got lots of Optigans — I don’t know how many, but at least eight. Then there’s the Optigan’s cousins: the Vako Orchestron and Chilton Talentmaker. I’ve only got one of each of those. I also have a Chamberlin Rhythmate, which is an early tape-loop drum machine:

Another early drum machine I have is a Wurlitzer Sideman, which was a totally tube-based monster made in the 1950s:

In the synthesizer dept, I’ve got a Sequential Pro-One…

…an Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer…

…a Yamaha CS01-II…

…a Casio CZ-101, an Ensoniq ESQ-1, a Kurzweil K2000, and a MicroKorg. Then there’s the Wurlitzer 200 Electric Piano I scored at AmVets for $20! Other than that, I’ve got loads of Casios and other toy keyboards.

How did the idea of Optiganally Yours come about?

When I got my first Optigan, I immediately had the idea that it’d be fun to do some sort of lounge act with a singer, just singing cover songs with the Optigan. Rob immediately volunteered to sing, but before we ever got around to working up any cover songs, we ended up writing four originals, all in one afternoon. We just made quickie four-track recordings of these, and realized that we had something good. So we kept writing more songs.

Rob came up with the band name, which I hated and I still hate, but it is what it is. I wanted to call the band “Mattellica.”

It was sort of a fluke. Rob’s in a successful indie-rock band called Pinback, and they were supposed to do a short tour of Japan a few years ago, but had to cancel at the last minute. Since they had already sold tons of tickets, a compromise was worked out, and it became sort of the “Rob Crow Variety Show” tour, which included a set by Optiganally Yours. It worked out well, because we had already released our second album on a Japanese label, and the Japanese are into stuff like what we do anyway, so we got a very enthusiastic reception there.

Well, I’m not really sure — somebody has probably written their doctoral thesis in anthropology on it, though! I guess probably the question is whether this is a post-war phenomenon, or if it comes from deeper within Japanese culture. All I can say is that, in our case, whatever popularity we have in Japan comes from a mix of the pop music and the gadget factor, the gadget being the Optigan, of course.

Yes, unfortunately. You kind of have to see the whole show — he has several costume changes (Ed. note: Here’s a concert photo, possibly not work-safe), more or less amounting to a gradual striptease over the course of the set. Believe me, it’s nowhere near as great as it sounds! Spanish Flea is the last song in our set, so he’s pretty close to naked at that point.

It’s pretty simple. I’ve never been much for writing melodic material — mostly I’m interested in chord progressions. So I usually come up with a chord progression and song structure, using Optigan sounds, and send it to Rob. If he likes it, he’ll write a melody and lyrics and record his parts over the top of it, sometimes adding guitar parts as well. Then he’ll send it back to me, and I’ll do keyboard overdubs and final production/mixing. We almost never work together apart from rehearsals and live shows.

Well, as far as the lyrics go, only Rob could answer you on that. Sometimes I don’t even know what lyrics he’s singing, or what they’re about. We wrote that song the same way we write most of our songs, as I already described.

Hmmm… I thought there might have been some sort of connection between the lyrics of that song and Optigan collecting! (”How come he’s not like any of them / I don’t know”)

Nah… Rob writes all the lyrics, usually off the top of his head, and he’d never probably never have any reason to write anything explicitly about the Optigan. I’m very conscious about not doing the whole Optigan “theme” to death — mostly we just stick to using those sounds. Apart from that, the songs can go anywhere. So, on the one hand, we’re in a closed loop sonically, but on the other hand, things are wide open thematically.

Well, funny you should mention that, because actually I tend to take a very purist sort of approach most of the time, and tend to shy away from “tricks.” I prefer to present the basic sound of the Optigan as it is, and work within its limitations.

The most simple/obvious “trick” you can do with an Optigan is to insert a disc upside-down, which results in the music playing backwards. We’ve never done this on any Optiganally Yours song because it’s kind of like saying, “Well, I like the Optigan, but it just doesn’t do enough, so we’re going to use every last little trick to get as many weird sounds out of it as possible.”

If I went down that road, the next thing I’d be saying is, “Well, I like the Optigan, but it just doesn’t do enough, so I’m going to send it through this phaser pedal and then add some delay and distortion…” But then you’d end up with something that sounds nothing like an Optigan, so why even use an Optigan in the first place?

Obviously, there’s something to be said for using whatever gear you have to arrive at whatever sound it is you’re ultimately looking for. But I guess my mind is just sort of wired in such a way as to think, “I want an Optigan on this recording, therefore the Optigan I record should sound like an Optigan.”

All that being said, something I have no qualms about at all is using other technology to bolster the sound of the Optigan and make it easier to present. To that end, I use the computer a lot, like recording the Optigan and making .wav files of loops and arranging songs in software like Sony’s Acid.

That’s hard to say. I do remember always being fascinated with tape recorders from a very early age, and my dad was a ham radio operator, so we always had electronic equipment and strange disembodied sounds in the house. But other than that, often I think my preoccupation with sound as a medium is more or less arbitrary. I could just as easily see myself having gotten involved with, say, assemblage sculpture or photography instead.

Although, I will say that I do tend to have a fascination with found objects in general. When it comes to writing music, I like to use found sounds because it’s just another way of collaborating with forces outside of my own mind. People collaborate artistically with all sorts of things: other people, folk traditions, drugs, chance processes, etc. I like to collborate with seredipity and found objects. In a way, the Optigan is sort of a meta-found-object, in that it’s really a cultural discard that contains all these faint messages-in-bottles in the form of fragments of long-forgotten musical recordings.

Well, there’s always more to explore, if only because we can always bring new musical ideas to the table, and interpret them using Optigan sounds. Within any closed system or palette, there’s an infinite amount of exploration you can do — it’s just a matter of getting the most out of your limitations. I personally find that much more liberating than being constantly faced with a much broader, general palette.

In other words, I don’t think I’d ever get any Optiganally Yours stuff done if I was constantly saying things like “Well, I like the Optigan sound on this, but could I make it even better if I added some Kurzweil K2000 to it?” I have a very hard time working that way, with too many options. I’d spend all my time considering the options, and never get around to doing any actual writing or recording.

I’m a casual fan — I only have a couple of his records. But every time I read an interview with him, I tend to find myself agreeing with a lot of points he brings up. I had an original Oblique Strategies deck several years ago, but I never actually used it for anything. I ended up selling it on eBay for like $400 or something.

What’s the status of the next Optiganally Yours album?

The third Optiganally Yours album, Optiganally Yours in Hi-Fi, has been a frustrating project. It’s been in the works literally for years. Rob and I just can’t seem to get our schedules together to finish it up. In terms of the songs, it’s about halfway finished, though we have plenty of song sketches from which the remaining songs will emerge.

For this album, we’re actually not using any Optigans at all. Rather, we’re building songs from loops taken directly from the Optigan master tapes, which were the original studio recordings of the musical material on the Optigan discs. Sonically, this album will be different than our others, in that it will be all studio-quality hi-fi, but the songwriting process is the same, so it will sound like Optiganally Yours in that respect.

I always have a million things on the back burner. It just tends to take me forever to get around to finishing anything. As an example, I like to write chamber operas, and have had a few of them produced, but it’s expensive and requires lots of resources.

Yeah, I have a degree in music from UCLA. It’s not worth much, though. I mostly just hung around the Ethnomusicology department, messing around with all the exotic instruments they had there. I wasn’t really in tune with most of my teachers.

Here’s an excerpt from a workshop production of my opera The World Is Round, which is a setting of a Gertrude Stein children’s book. You can find some more info about this piece at operazero.org.

I’ve also been working on a sort of Lucas & Friends opera, which basically means an opera made out of found sounds. I put together a sort of short “demo” version of that last summer, it’s just a matter of getting the resources together for a full-length production.

You know, I’ve had many people suggest such a thing over the years, and I guess I’m just not the guy to do it. I tend to be good at gathering raw materials and information, but not so good at editing and organizing it. That’s why the web is a nice medium for me — I don’t feel any pressure to “finish” something before I present it to the world. Things can always be works-in-progress. If I were to make an Optigan book, it would take me forever, because I’d get bogged down in the minutiae of making decisions about what to set in stone, etc.

Well, these days most of the good stuff I find goes on eBay. I have to make a living somehow. I have this loose policy that basically says that if I find something I like, and I paid, say, a buck for it, and it’s going for, say, $100.00 on eBay, I just ask myself: “If I saw that on a store shelf with a $100.00 tag on it, would I buy it?” And if the answer is “No,” I sell it on eBay. In other words, NOT selling it on eBay for $100.00 is financially indistinguishable from buying it for $100.00. I’m choosing the thing over the money.

So… that being said, I’ve found lots of valuable old hi-fi gear, vintage microphones, records (I had a Bob Dylan promo recently sell for over $4k — I paid a buck for it at a garage sale), and countless other things. I’ve been doing eBay for ten years, so there have been lots of great scores.

In terms of great garage sale scores that I’ve kept, I suppose I’d have to include my Chamberlin Rhythmate, alot of my Optigan stuff, some art, lots of weird records, things like that.

Serendipity

Purity

Sincerity

Flaws

Repetition

Organic structures

Landscapes

Velocity

Myth

Lydian mode

Optigan web site | Order Optiganally Yours CDs and Optigan sample CDs from Optigan.com | Optiganally Yours MySpace page | Lucas & Friends web site | Lucas & Friends MySpace page | Opera Zero | Pea Hix’s YouTube videos

Count me in among those who really like The High Llamas‘ particular brand of licorice.

Over the course of eighteen years and twelve albums, the Llamas have cast a dreamy sonic spell. ’60s California pop, Steely Dan-like studio perfectionism, Moog synthesizer albums, Steve Reich-style minimalism, thrift store vinyl soundtracks, and a bossa nova beat mingle in surprising ways and are wrapped in a distinctly British sensibility.

Some are resistant to the Llamas’ spell, and the various controversies in the music press sometimes threaten to overshadow the band’s accomplishments. Certainly, what The High Llamas do is good enough for Bruce Johnston, who hired Llamas mastermind Sean O’Hagan to produce an eventually aborted Beach Boys comeback album in the late ’90s. A number of other artists have employed Sean’s arranging and session skills to more fruitful ends: Stereolab, Will Oldham, Cornelius, and Louis Philippe, to name a few.

While The High Llamas’ music might not be played in shopping malls around the world, Sean’s influence has certainly spread far and wide: the majority of artists already interviewed for Songs and Sonics have acknowledged his musical influence on their own work. Heck, he’s one of my influences! So it’s definitely a thrill to have him here.

Sean was nice enough to take time out of his busy schedule to chat about 2007’s Can Cladders, the Llamas’ well-received and most accessible outing yet. In fact, if you’ve never heard The High Llamas, Can Cladders is the ideal place to start. (Sean O’Hagan photo by Kev Hopper.)

Sean: I start on nylon string guitar usually, then go to the piano. The arrangements are already taking shape as I write. They kind of arrange themselves in a way. I write chords that lend themselves to arrangements.

I write in fragments sometimes and record these to MiniDisc. I then review the writing, and put these fragments together in a way that I hope defies convention.

A lot later, I start to arrange, even though I know what the arrangement might be.

Very short answer: Listening to records. No training, just listening and trying to work out what is going on. I taught myself to read music only recently and am still a very slow reader. Marcus Holdaway (piano) is trained and helped with the strings. He also helped with my sightreading.

I used old 4-track machines to demo parts. I crudely noted parts and worked with either Marcus or Andy Robinson as I dictated the harmony from piano or guitar. Yes, I suppose I used pencil back then. But the 4-track was essential.

Just getting older and wanted to be absolutely instinctive. I thought I went through a period denying that I loved pop (Carole King, Laura Nyro, Neil Sedaka, The Flamingos), and with age you just stop the fooling around and get on with what you are good at. I know Becker and Fagen are hated by some, but the early LP’s are full of crack pop tunes, as were The Specials, The Beach Boys, The Zombies, ELO, 10cc, Dion and the Belmonts. You can go to any era or style and find great pop — even today. I just wanted the pop I wrote to be a bit different.

Yes, it was happy. I worked at home a lot. But as a process draws on it, it becomes somewhat frustrating as well. I was determined to capture my pop positivity that I had rediscovered. Formerly, I think I was denying the instant melodic ideas I would churn out, mistaking the ease of writing with poor quality. I am glad for any idea now.

I really cannot say what the next record will be like. It’s not in my head, and will not be for a while. I have to do some other stuff before that time comes around again.

I often wonder whether the world can cope with another High Llamas record. We don’t exactly set the world alight when we release a record, and it is hard putting in a real commitment to writing and know that a great number of listeners will stare blankly at the product and wonder why we make this music. I always have to get over that image in my head.

OK.

That’s a chap we know who was a tour manager and gave up touring, preferring the land locked middle England to constant driving for ferry departures.

Aluminum cladding salesmen (tin men… no prize for guessing) and beat poets, sort of meeting up in my little invention. I think it works very nicely. Who needs love.

I was DJing one night and playing Dorothy. The reaction of the folk in the club prompted the second verse:

They were rich kids. Then I brought Dorothy into it as a living person. I imagined the harp as a means of travel for her and the listener.

If there has to be one, lets say Clarion Union Hall. I love the girls’ voices on this tune and the ooh refrain at the end is as close as I got to a classic 60’s girl sound, which chuffs me up. Its my favourite moment on the record.

Once when I was robbed, and once when the good old US border guards really did not want to let me back to the US in El Paso. I had to give them a big load of cash to get over the border.

The line was born to be sung. It was always going to be that. I think the rest of the song wrote itself around that line.

I know what you mean, but do not agree with the premise. I will answer in spirit. How about Queen, You’re My Best Friend.

But that’s a good song! OK… I’ll let you off the hook for that one. What’s next for you and The High Llamas?

Right now, I’m in Rio making an LP with Kassin Kammal (Kassin + 2) . We are co-writing an LP. I hope it works and people like it. It is an experiment, really.

We spent time wondering whether there should be a name. I think it will be Kassin + Sean.

The Llamas have a big show in Ireland where we are doing the music for a narrative written by the wonderful UK novelist Jonathan Coe. The soundtrack is Llamas music from the last eight LPs played live with strings, July 20 in Dublin.

I started out as a construction worker at the age 15 before working in UK car plants.

I suppose they did. As you know, I write about everyday stuff in a narrative way, and an assembly line can produce a storyboard every bit as poetic as a love tragedy.

That’s pretty much where I am, standing on street corners looking up at architecture that most people miss and wondering who drew this stuff up. From there, a story begins.

Pembrokeshire

Birdsong (I’m a recent convert… it happens when you get to 45)

Architecture

Marcos Valle

Anything I hear that makes me rush to the piano

Paul Auster

French movies (1967-1978)

BBC Radio 4 (Embodies England)

School singing. When you hear your own children sing it’s quite wonderful.

Great pubs. Because they usually host great conversations, which in turn inspire.

Thinking about LA and New York as they were in 1968-1971…

The High Llamas’ official web site | The High Llamas’ MySpace page | Order Can Cladders from highllamas.com (UK) | Order Can Cladders from Amazon.com

While MySpace is often a fantastic place for checking out new music, the Swedish band Testbild! can’t be properly represented within that site’s conventional ADD-friendly structure. Then again, there’s very little about Testbild! that’s conventional. (Yes, there’s an exclamation point at the end of their name, and no, they don’t show their faces in their band photos.)

Testbild!’s latest release, Une Teinte Intense, is an atmospheric concept album about adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt. Sometimes the album sounds like a Middle Eastern Free Design playing lite jazz. (!) At other times it sounds like what might’ve happened if Pink Floyd recorded an alternate soundtrack to Lawrence of Arabia.

But even those far-out comparisons don’t quite describe what Testbild! sounds like or what the band is about. The only thing that can probably be said is that Testbild! doesn’t make background music; this is most definitely art which demands and rewards attention, preferably with a good set of headphones. And there’s some pop thrown in for good measure. If you’re willing to go along for the ride on Une Teinte Intense, the experience is one you won’t soon forget.

Petter Herbertsson is Testbild!’s mastermind, a polite yet slightly mysterious gentleman who prefers the shadows instead of the limelight. And as you’ll see in the following interview, he’s got ideas about art, sound, and making music that differ from the norm. And if you’re as taken with Testbild!’s sound as I am, you might be able to record your own Testbild! album one of these days. What does that mean? Read on. (Studio photos by Moa Andersdotter.)

Petter: Well, the short answer would be that we get inspired by artistic people, or visionaries, who do exactly the opposite of what society expects of them. Further examples would be Chris Marker, William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Bas Jan Ader, Mike Alway, Ferdinand Cheval (the French postman that singlehandedly built a fantasy castle called Palais Idéal in his garden), Delia Derbyshire, etc., etc.

Isabelle Eberhardt was the daughter of Russian nobles, had an anarchistic upbringing in Genève, converted to Islam, and travelled around in North Africa in the early 1900s dressed as a man. She was elected to a mystic Islamic brotherhood called Qadriya, wrote articles for French and Swiss newspapers (but weren’t allowed to return to her home, since she was considered a dangerous and subversive character by the government). And as if that wasn’t enough, she drowned at Aïn Sefra, in the middle of the desert, at the age of 27. Her life was fascinating, as was her personality. She seemed torn between her Islamic religious ideal, and her at some times wild way of life with the cross dressing, lots of alcohol and kif, etc.

And at the same time, she was an artist by definition; her descriptions of the myriads of colours in the North African sunset is totally unique. To make a themetic album about her is simply our way of paying our dues to one of our greatest heroes.

The manifesto said that Testbild! is a band wich doesn’t profess itself to a single musical genre, that one of the main assignments should be to investigate and dwell on the relationship between pop music and sounds that could be described as noise. Total honesty was also a key conception, i.e. the music could never have a commercial purpose, and had to come from our personal musical tastes only. These things are still followed, I guess, but if we were to write a manifesto today, it would be more developed in a way. But also more or less non-existing, depending on points of view.

We strongly believe that it’s an artist’s (artist in a broadened sense) duty to avoid clichés at all cost, to at least try to kill your darlings every now and then, to never underestimate the audience and to create something that is far beyond the music business and the establishment. On the other hand, Testbild! should be a band based on ideas of any kind; in that case you could say that the only rule is that there are no rules.

I started the band ten years ago, because I was fed up with playing with “normal” bands where you were supposed to stick to a genre, wear a certain type of clothes, write prefab songs that people could dance to, etc. Testbild! was supposed to be the antithesis to all that.

Back then, it was just me. Today we are at least eight members, and we’re still growing. I want Testbild! to be around when I’m dead too. I want the project to be immortal. I have suggested to other bands that they could perform as us, and do more or less exactly what they want, but so far no one has dared.

Absolutely. The thing is, confusion is something good in our opinion. You have to keep moving forward all the time to develop as an artist, and as a human being. I may have started the project ten years ago, but at that very moment I had to resign as a leader, since the whole thing was supposed to be idea-based. You can’t have a leader if you want to be a part of something that opposes authorities and the establishment, can you? If some people decide to “kidnap” the idea, and release an album under the same name, playing indie rock in leather jackets and sunglasses, that’s a good thing too, because there is always a small chance that reviewers or journalists eventually will find out that there actually is (or was) another band with exactly the same name, with a totally different approach. And then you have a discussion, a debate on the subjects that we’re interested in.

I’m not saying that there ever will be a debate, but anyway… I know all this sounds terribly pretentious, but that’s something we just have to accept. There used to be at least one band from Sweden calling themselves Testbild, but I’m not sure if they’re around anymore. And I know for a fact that there is a German band with the same name; I think they’re into metal stuff. There’s also a Danish collective, but they’re concentrating on video art. I contacted them about six years ago, and asked them if they thought it was a problem that we had the same name, but they were just amused.

At my place we have Fender Rhodes, piano, electric bass, acoustic guitar, a couple of analogue synths, lute, kantele, vihuela, glockenspiel, banjo, chromatic harmonicas, melodica, violin, oud, hand drums and other percussive instruments. At Douglas’s place there’s lots of guitars (both acoustic and electric) and analogue synths, a vibraphonette and other stuff, and at the rehearsal place there’s a Wurlitzer piano and drums.

We go out on excursions in the city or in the nature where we happen to be, and just record everything we can come up with on our mini disc. We keep these recordings in what you might call sound libraries at home, and whenever we need a special kind of sound, we just look through our files.

We’ve done some odd stuff when it comes to our field recordings. For example, I borrowed a professional microphone from my stepbrother — he’s into filmmaking, so he has incredibly expensive stuff — that was rather long, like a forearm maybe. It had a pink angora cover to protect the recordings from wind sounds, and the handle was shaped like that of a gun. I walked around at the docks in Malmö last year, recording water sounds and sea birds, and people just stared at me like I was some kind of maniac. It was summer and very hot, so imagine a sweaty guy in sunglasses, pointing a pink angora gun at everything!

We’ve also done stuff like breaking into abandoned buildings and attics to capture the inherent sounds. There are recordings of Pontus playing accordion to cows, of Mattias playing a satellite dish with a bow, of me sitting at an old chair and moving backwards and forwards all the time to get a creaking sound, of Siri picking mushrooms in the woods, of fighting cats, etc.

Once I had the idea that every song of mine should contain an element of chance, to get a mystery feel to it. You can hear traces of that on our second album, The Inexplicable Feeling of September, but we abandoned the idea rather quickly, since it tended to limit the possibilities rather than broaden them. It turned out to be just another type of musical straitjacket or uniform that we’ve always tried to run away from. So it’s not a rule anymore. But I think it’s sometimes just a way of reasoning when you compose, like, “Now let’s see, what does this song need after the chorus — an anarchistic noise part maybe?”

I’m also somewhat fascinated with the idea of sound that suddenly stops and changes perspective, like a meta listening. We did that a couple of times on our unreleased “real” second album The Lolita Wagner Case (to be released some time in the near future on Radio Khartoum, it’s the second part of a thematic trillogy starting with The Double Life of Testbild!). First you have a proper song. Then in the second verse, you hear someone putting on a cassette recorder, and the song continues on the tape while you hear the person breathing in the background. There are many more layers than you think. You are listening to a record, but at the same time someone is listening to you, listening to a record, and a person listening to the person who’s listening to you, listening to a record and so forth. Very John Cage indeed!

Oh, thank you! But getting back to song structure: it’s a very delicate matter and should not be taken lightly. The key word is listening, of course. You have to listen carefully to where a melody line or a chord progression wants to go, and then the music actually writes itself. It takes a lot of time and effort, and sometimes you don’t have the patience for it, but when it happens it’s the most wonderful thing. I think you can tell when you’ve been careless about a song, but usually not until after a while.

I’m not ruling anything out, but for my own part I’m through with writing conventional songs. I’ve done that so much in the past. I guess you can see that as part of a learning process. And I should stress that it does of course happen that we write conventional stuff every now and then, but these songs are always thrown away. I don’t see the point in keeping something anybody could do; you should listen to your own inner voice instead.

Oh you know, just fooling around with EQ to get that old, fractured sound. There was also a great deal of voice direction; the way that Katja was supposed to read the text was in a kind of slow and half whispery tone to strengthen the dream-like atmosphere.

It depends on the circumstances. I personally have an indestructible passion for great songwriters, i.e. musicians that really treat the song like the work of art it is, people like Louis Philippe, Brian Wilson, Laura Nyro, Paddy McAloon, George Gershwin or Dorothy Ashby, people who are in love with the songs they write. I want to become one of them myself, and I hope that maybe I will some day.

On the other hand, I get obsessed with artistic ideas all the time, and perhaps it’s easier to find those in movies than in music, I don’t know. I love directors like Andrei Tarkovsky and Victor Erice; they have the aesthetics and a poetic attitude that’s very close to my own, describing the beauty, the mystery and eternal sadness of the world and its inhabitants.

When I get obsessed with something, I have to find out everything there is about it. My latest infatuation is French film maker Chris Marker, who is mostly known for a short low budget science fiction movie from the early sixties called La Jetée, entirelly composed of black and white stills. Apparently Terry Gilliam was very influenced by this when he wrote Twelve Monkeys, with all its time travel business. But La Jetée is something completely different, of course.

Sans Soleil, a full length movie from 1983 that is a unique and puzzling mix of documentary footage, apocalyptic science fiction, meditations on what memory is, and a highly intellectual and essay-like voiceover, is even better. Chris Marker (it is said that he took his name from a Marker pen) is an enigmatic character who’s been around the business since the fifties. He rarely gives interviews and almost never shows his face. The images of him that exist has him most of the time standing behind a camera, and nowadays he’s been known to send pictures of his cat Guillaume to journalists who contact him.

You’ve obviously taken a Residents-like approach to band photos, yet — correct me if I’m wrong — that’s your face singing in Testbild’s “ENIAC vs. UNIVAC” video. So the cat’s out of the bag, at least as far what you look like. Why bother hiding now?

First of all: that’s not me in the video, it’s a friend of director Angelique Clark. I don’t remember his name, but I think Alexander Bailey (of our American record company Radio Khartoum) mentioned that he actually is Scandinavian, and I guess he was chosen to play the part because he looked like our friend Magnus Löfgren (the guy impersonating ENIAC and UNIVAC on the cover of the first album).

You won’t find any pictures of me anywhere, not of the band with uncovered faces either, and there are no pictures of the whole band together. On the other hand, there are images of several of the other members out there (most of them have other musical projects on the side), so I guess you could cut them out and make little Testbild! collages of your own…

We chose to have it this way for many reasons; one is to emphasize the fact that it’s all idea-based, and that no member is more important than the other. In our modern society, you tend to put focus on the artist rather than his or her work, which is a rather twisted way of looking at things. So that’s of course something we want to protest against. The fact that we sometimes use anagrams instead of our real names is another manifestation of these thoughts.

We have an album coming up in September, it’s called Aquatint, and will hopefully be our most conceptual piece yet. Apart from the music and lyrics, there’ll be a movie and a short story. And if everything goes as planned, the nice digipak will smell of tar.

Well, apparently we have to do it ourselves by hand, so it all depends on if we get the CD’s before they’re sent out to the shops or not, I’m not sure about these things.

Anyway, we’re still working with Bed Stilt, our orchestral and apocalyptic third part of the trillogy I mentioned earlier, an album about Belka and Strelka (the two Russian space dogs from the sixties that actually came back alive) and other things. Oh, and we’re supposed to go on a small tour in Sweden and Denmark in August. We like to keep busy!

The seaside. Everything about it really, water, boats, lighthouses, sand, shaped rocks, fishes, the horizon, the smells and sounds.

Rain. The sound the raindrops make, and just the plain fact that there’s actually water coming down from the sky.

Coloured lamps hung in the trees on summer evenings (is it called Chinese lanterns in English?).

Shortwave radio. I can sit and turn the knob backwards and forwards for hours, the sound has a completely absorbing effect on me.

Used copies of The National Geographic Magazine, preferably from the sixties and seventies. Older copies is OK as well, but never newer.

Foxes. Red foxes, that is. It’s been my favourite animal since I was a child, and I used to dream of them all the time when I was in my early twenties, I even dreamt that I had this fox alter ego, called Kani. I guess you could call the fox my totem if you’re into new age mumbo jumbo stuff (god knows I’m not).

The night sky and the stars.

Dreams. I find it eternally fascinating that ones subconscious is crammed with poetic images and abstract art. I used to have this dream diary where I wrote down everything; many passages in the lyrics and stories are taken from there. I’ve been neglectful to it lately though, maybe I should start again.

Old libraries and dusty archives. I’m a librarian by profession, and have always loved the somewhat archetypal idea of a forgotten, hidden room somewhere in the basement of a public building, stuffed with old books and files with subversive information.

Tea. Preferably Lapsang Souchong or Russian Earl Grey.

Testbild’s web site | Testbild’s MySpace page | Buy “Une Teinte Intense” from Friendly Noise (Sweden) | Buy “Une Teinte Intense” from Amazon

If you’re a late ’60s sunshine pop fan, you’re in for a treat.

Margo Guryan was a well-educated jazz pianist in the mid-’60s when a friend played her the song God Only Knows, from The Beach Boys‘ (then) brand-new album, Pet Sounds. That one song altered her musical direction permanently:

She became a full-fledged pop songwriter, and her songs were covered by the likes of Jackie DeShannon, Mama Cass, Glen Campbell, Astrud Gilberto, Claudine Longet, Julie London, Spanky And Our Gang, Dion, Harry Nilsson, and others.

In 1968, Margo was given the opportunity to record an album of her own songs. The result, Take A Picture, is a collection of solid Brian Wilson-influenced pop, jazzy psychedelic grooves, and sweetly sung vocals. “I never thought of myself as a singer,” Margo says. But her breathy, multitracked babydoll vocals are made of the stuff that make men swoon, even 40 years after it was recorded.

Unfortunately, because of Margo’s refusal to perform live, Take A Picture went nowhere. No followup albums were released. Margo eventually became a piano teacher.

But about 30 years after Take A Picture’s original release, something unusual happened: Japanese record collectors discovered it. And subsequently went wild over the album.

One thing led to another, and Take A Picture was reissued on CD multiple times in several countries. Bonus tracks were unearthed. A companion album of unreleased recordings, 25 Demos, surfaced in 2001. Accolades from modern pop stars, like Beck and Garbage’s Shirley Manson followed.

And Take A Picture, the little album that hardly anybody paid attention to in 1968, is now widely regarded as a sunshine pop classic.

A chance MySpace encounter led me to asking Margo if she’d like to do an interview for Songs and Sonics. However, just as I was about to send a list of questions, I stumbled across this excellent recorded interview which covered nearly everything I was about to ask! So, armed with this new information, I went back to the drawing board and promised I would ask her “different” questions which were not covered before. In the following interview, we cover both her ’60s work and her return to releasing pop music with her political 2007 single, 16 Words.

Margo: I really don’t know. Take A Picture has been released three times in Japan, the latest being on Sony/BMG. The first release in the late ’90s came as a complete surprise.

I’d really love to know how this started. One day (1998, 1999) David [Rosner, Margo's publisher and husband] received a call from a guy at a small label called Distortions Records. He wanted to re-release Take A Picture because he catered to record collectors and said my album was a frequent request. He said, “Margo’s a star in Japan.” We thought it was pretty weird and David told him to get in touch with Arista (the former Bell Records).

Sometime later, David received a publishing royalty statement from Japan and noticed that all the songs listed were from “TAP.” That’s when we found out a “pirate” version of the album had been issued. I was happy about that, because up until that time, I had only an old-fashioned LP of my record. Now I had a CD…. Wow! I wrote to the company to ask if I could purchase some copies at a publisher’s discount. They responded that they were all sold out, but would send me their last copy for free.

That, to our knowledge, is how it started. Then Cornelius, a Japanese recording artist who had a label, wanted to release it. That was the Trattoria release.

But, Jeff, that’s just how we found out. Though David has sub-publishers and other contacts in Japan, we have never been able to learn why it happened.

I don’t feel I’m living a “parallel life”… it’s the same one. I’ve always written words and music (and words & music) as ideas occur. There was a long period of time when I felt no connection with pop music. I began studying piano again, then teaching. I wrote just words then, or just music (The Chopsticks Variations is a piano piece I wrote for my “kids”.)

I guess The Chopsticks Variations might have been the next thing I wrote (in the ’90s). In teaching Mozart’s variations on Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (Ah, vous dirai je, maman), I found that children loved to play something that was familiar to them.

Anyway, I wondered what I could write that children would know and relate to. The easier variations, as written, have Chopsticks in one hand while the other makes it become a simple piece… Easy to learn!

The impetus for 16 Words began, I think, while reading Joe Wilson’s Politics of Truth. Those words were also prominently featured in Frank Rich’s The Greatest Story Ever Sold. It occurred to me that that lie was representative of all the lies the Bush administration spouted to get us into the Iraq war, wire-tap Americans, torture, etc., etc. And I thought I’d write music to it.

Well, look at the comments on YouTube. There are obviously some people who didn’t like it.

When I was a child, I “made up” poems. As I learned music (I began piano study at age 6), I “made up” songs. My models were the songs I heard, and the songwriters were usually good ones (Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, etc.). You absorb form and style (the words always rhymed) when you’re a kid. I was encouraged by my parents (there were only hand-made greeting cards in my home) in every creative field (took art lessons, dance lessons, etc.). But my father once told me, “Songs like yours are a dime a dozen.” He changed his tune after Chris Connor recorded a song of mine (Moon Ride) on Atlantic Records!

I think all writing begins with an idea… a thought, word fragments, a snippet of melody. I’d go to the piano and (more or less) let it happen.

My father once asked me if I could make myself get an idea. I said, “No.” He said, “That’s God.” I thought that was interesting, but I don’t really buy it. You’d have to be some kind of brain surgeon to even begin to understand where ideas come from.

The “idea” for Thoughts was to write a song containing only two-word phrases. The answer section and vocal backgrounds in the bridge occurred while recording.

I thought at the time that Sunday Morning was much more risqué: do what other people do on Sunday morning. But no one else seemed to think so.

I didn’t recognize that line as risqué until you mentioned it… Now I’m trying to think of other dirty lines in your songs that I might’ve missed!

Keep looking.

Just for fun, actually. If you listen to that song in demo form (25 Demos) you won’t find the burlesque atmosphere. I wanted to write an old-timey song a la Harry Nilsson. I think the crowd was (producer) John Hill’s idea. Gave me a chance to invite some friends and relatives into the studio. The whistle belongs to GayeAnn, my cousin Peter’s wife. None of the guys could match her construction worker gusto!

Nothing mysterious or arcane about this one! It’s exactly what it claims to be: telling someone who was a good friend that a change had occurred. (I married him.)

Still is!

Ooh…cornered. I don’t have an iPod. I listen to Thom Hartmann and Randi Rhodes and watch Keith Olbermann. I do check out some of the music posted on MySpace and have found occasional gems.

There’s a song I love on the 20 Minute Loop page. I think it’s called Ambassadors.

This is “iffy.” I had recorded 5 tracks when the idea for 16 Words hit me. I wanted very much to finish that song first. While working on it, one co-producer left and John Hill helped finish it up. Then John left for the East coast. John had written some gorgeous string parts for a few of the other tracks and I didn’t want to proceed without him. I may decide to finish them up… and may not. Don’t know.

I don’t like rites! I never wanted to get married, I just wanted to be married. I don’t like funerals… gone is gone. A diploma is great, but graduations are a bore. Awards are nice, but earning the award is where the satisfaction is. I’ll do without the ceremonies, thanks.

Thanks, Jeff… You too! Good (and different) questions!

A child doing anything well.

Discovering a new Bach or Scarlatti piece.

Discovering an old Randy Newman song.

Barack Obama.

Learning a mystery’s solution.

Dreams. (But only good ones.)

Surprises. (But only good ones.)

Watching kittens play.

Seeing a great performance.

Silence. (Especially at the dinner table when I’ve prepared the dinner.)

Margo Guryan’s official web site | Margo Guryan’s MySpace page | Order “Take A Picture” or “25 Demos” | Order “16 Words”

His career as a professional recording artist spans over 20 years, his Wikipedia entry calls him one of the “elder statesmen of indiepop,” and he’s worked with laundry list of distinguished artists, including The Clientele, The High Llamas, and former XTC guitarist Dave Gregory.

Louis Philippe (real name Philippe Auclair) is a unique figure on the pop music landscape. He has the ear of a seasoned orchestral arranger, yet is musically self-taught. (Anyone with an interest in arranging should check out his excellent blog post on writing for strings.) He crafts sophisticated tunes which pay their respects to the shrine of Pet Sounds, but his music is gentler than anything on that album. And, as you’ll discover in the following interview, he doesn’t employ the methods that a typical pop songwriter might use when capturing ideas.

Elegant is the word that most often comes to mind when listening to Louis Philippe’s latest album, An Unknown Spring. The songs are highly literate, delicately arranged, and supplemented with real orchestral instruments. Make no mistake — this is indeed pop music. It’s just smarter and a little quieter than what typically falls under the pop umbrella. There’s no screaming guitars, no trace of the modern loudness wars. Instead, An Unknown Spring boasts an intriguing mix of confessional songwriting, Brill Building-like pop craftsmanship, and cinematic but intimate orchestral arrangements. And then there’s Louis’s angelic vocals soaring over top of it all.

Not only does Louis make great music, but he gives great interviews too.

Louis: I’d become quite disillusioned, to put it mildly, with what I was hearing around me; most of it seemed very reactionary to my ears, beat-and groove-driven, with hardly any attention paid to melody and harmony in any sense of these words. I wanted to see if I could get closer to my ambition of writing pop lieder, in which repetition would be a device used with far greater economy that is the norm (including in my own work). By the way, this was not a choice as such; it’s the music I was hearing in my mind and that coming out when I walked in the street or sat at the piano. It’s something I’ve been atrracted to ever since Danny Manners and I worked on our album of Poulenc mélodies. When the songs started to take shape, I noticed that my writing had evolved towards more evolutive lines, more fluid harmonies. It was more a matter of going with a natural, ‘organic’ flow than a decision as such.

The analytical process took place afterwards, if you see what I mean, when I had to build the record in Ken Brake’s studio. Another thing: the form of the songs, and the curve of the album were also influenced by a personal necessity: sing a body of songs which would have a common emotional colour, and a very tender one at that. There is hardly any place for tenderness in pop these days, whereas it is ever-present in the music I love. Nostalgia too.

I guess this is more of a constant in what I’ve done over the years than a “new” inclination. I couldn’t say if it is a theme as such… Maybe it’s an echo of Ray Davies’s obsession with weather in albums like Face to Face and Something Else (and Village Green, of course!). Do you think it has to do with living in a country where we experience four seasons in a day? And a clue — every time “spring” is used (and it is quite a few times), it is in all its meanings. What you said about the weather could also be said about water.

Do you mind if I bat this one out of the park? It would be a bit like answering a question like, “How