13 days and counting
In the Studio with John Wesley Harding
Jeff
Bogle, February 12, 2013
John Wesley Harding has wrapped up
production on his latest, as-yet-untitled long-player for Yep Roc Records. While the album won’t hit shelves
until fall, Harding sat down with us inside Philadelphia’s Milkboy recording
studio last month, and then again after the all tracks had been laid down, to
discuss the process of making his most personal record to date.
The
album, which could boast as many as 20 tracks, will feature his longtime
musical cohorts The English U.K., a baroque four-piece string section, and the
Silver Ages. The latter is a Philadelphia-based all-male vocal choir featuring
members of Dr. Dog, the War on Drugs, and the Spinto Band, among other
mainstays of Philly’s indie rock inner circle. Harding has taken a shining to
these debonair young fellas in recent months, performing with the choir in and
around town, and even having them up to the City Winery in NYC for the December
installment of The
Cabinet of Wonders,
Harding’s acclaimed and now-on-NPR variety show, where they backed Ron Sexsmith
on a stunning version of Harry Nilsson’s “Good Old Desk.”
John
Wesley Harding on recording: I’m totally delighted with the
luxurious studio experience. I can’t imagine being in a better place to
[record] it. Those finished tracks sound like a bunch of guys playing together,
which is what it’s supposed to sound like. Chris [von Sneidern] is a very good
friend of mine, a fantastic songwriter, and has toured with me. We’ve done a
lot of stuff together.
Because
of the slightly different nature of the material on this album I really didn’t
think that I could get away, which I might in other instances, without having
someone on the other side of the glass, beyond the engineer who’s making purely
aesthetic but mostly technical decisions — having stuff sound as good as
possible. I needed somebody on the other side of the glass who I trusted and
who knows exactly the kind of things that I like, so I could concentrate on
making the music and the engineer could engineer, yet there was someone else
there saying “that isn’t a take yet, that isn’t it.” We are quite good foils to
each other, each with a good work ethic, but he is the perfectionist, while I
am more apt to steam through stuff and move on.
John
Wesley Harding on songwriting: I write a song with a melody and some
chords, generally on guitar. I will then decide whether I want that song to
have any instruments or just solo. If instruments, on this album, it might be
guitar, voice, and string quartet, or bass, drums and electric guitar. Then I
look for others to give me what they like about their playing. Songs in my
head, when I take them to the band, I have a rough idea of what they sound like
— but on the other hand, I am neither a drummer or a great bass player.
Occasionally,
as on [new song] “Ride Your Camel,” I thought “David needs to come up with a
keyboard hook for this” but it didn’t appear at any time, and I said “I had one
in my head that I’ve had all along, try this, it’s a bit dumb,” but it ended up
being totally perfect after he finessed it a little. And that is the finished
lick on the track, the riff I thought of playing it on my acoustic guitar. But
with drums I am much less confident with having things in my head. One motif of
this album is that there isn’t a lot of high hat on it, because I wanted the
drums to feel pretty sparse.
John
Wesley Harding on making a singer-songwriter record: Funny because
I’ve been nothing if not a singer-songwriter my whole life, but I would say
yes, in terms of ’70s singer-songwritering, yes, this is the album I’ve most
made that way. It rocks hard very rarely, one or two songs, and a lot of them
are just acoustic guitar, me singing, and strings. So we are referring to
various bits of music I’ve liked over the years, some of it on the softer side:
Duncan Browne, Jim Croce, Cat Stevens, a bit of Alan
Hull. All the singer-songwriters that I’ve liked.
I’ve
always had a blueprint for doing stuff where I write the songs that I write,
then I take a band into the studio. Often times it’s someone else’s band, a
band I like; last time it was the Decemberists, because I like how they sound
and I thought they’d sound great playing my songs, and that’s a very nice way
for a singer-songwriter to do things. On this album I did it the other way
around, because once I’d written the songs, and there were 50-some contenders
because I’d written a lot of songs over the last couple of years, they had a
very different feel to me and I thought I don’t want to do what I normally do
and have the band lay in all over this. I wanted to really put these songs in
the world and make what I consider a pretty serious singer-songwriter record.
Harding remarked in the studio to his bandmate and
string composer David Nagler that “Stare at the Sun” is going to be the best
song he’s ever recorded. The stirring piece is more singer-songwritery than
most of Harding’s previous work, although it is aligned sonically and
somewhat-thematically to the Gavin Bryars-orchestrated “Sussex Ghost Story”
from Harding’s 2004 album Adam’s Apple. “Stare at the Sun” too will have only voice, acoustic guitar, and
strings. Having heard this track performed live, and again during my time in
the studio, I can attest to the stark nakedness of the emotion in Harding’s
voice.
John
Wesley Harding on the use of strings: Originally I had the idea of half the
album being baroque strings (Nagler and Daniel Felsenfeld shared writing the
string arrangements, of which there are six or seven apiece), and the other
half being light singer-songwriter pop music that I like. But when I got into
it I realized it was less good to think about it as two separate aspects of the
same album and much better to think about them all being related so I won’t
separate the album. It will be
quite a hard album to sequence.
On
this record, it felt like the absolute main thing should be intimate vocals and
really nicely played acoustic guitars with everything else being subsidiary to
that and I didn’t want to muddle that up with a band thrashing through stuff.
The band parts were arranged very carefully. The band is the English U.K. but
with Patrick Berkery, a Philadelphia guy with War on Drugs, Danielson, and
Bigger Lovers on his resume, on drums in place of Adam who is in Australia
getting married.
John
Wesley Harding on touring the new songs: It’ll be tricky to take a string
quartet around the country, but I’m sure at selected gigs we could make it
work. The band is totally available. The interesting thing with this material
is that so many of the songs are… not whispered,
but sung quietly, I mean quite quietly and that will be an interesting
experience for me because I know already from having played some of these songs
live that it’s difficult to sing that quietly on stage.
I
generally sing out quite a lot. I started playing guitar on the streets
just for fun and that has given me a loud voice over the years. I’m
looking to present these songs in a very different way, but if there’s a band
playing on them that band will be playing out so we’ll have to restrain them
and make sure there’s a crapload of my voice in the monitors so I can actually
hear what I’m doing! The nature of [the songs] are pretty low in my
register; I mean, I’ve never presented songs before of which the first line was
“You saw me, I saw you.” [Sung for me
very low, in a mix of early Neil
Diamond and Leonard Cohen]
It’s
all linked with me buying a new guitar, I’ve never owned a nice guitar before,
and I liked making up all these guitar parts and I liked singing them so low, I
thought my voice sounded really pleasant in that register. And so that’s how I
wanted to record them and that’s how the idea all came about, because I was
just sitting in my room going “You saw me, I saw you.” In the old days I
would’ve shoved a capo on the guitar and chucked it five frets up and sung
louder, but I haven’t done that this time and it makes the album and the songs
a much more intimate experience. It’ll be about a 60/40 split [between full
band and orchestral], but even some of the band songs are less aggressive than
the orchestrations, which are, in a couple cases, quite lively and
aggressive. One of the band songs is called “Lydia,” and it’s the slowest
song I’ve ever recorded. It is so slow, like 55 beats per minute or
something — you hear a snare drum once every eight seconds or so!
Should
Harding’s studio band become his live band once again, that will continue a bit
of a trend for the frontman who, until taking the Colin Meloy-less Decemberists
+ R.E.M’s Peter Buck out on the road in support of The Sound
of His Own Voice
, has never attempted to rekindle the
same studio magic on the road.
John Wesley Harding’s new album is due out in the fall of 2013 on Yep Rec Records.
An Evening with John Wesley Harding/Wesley Stace
Thursday, 28 February
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