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John
Wesley Harding: How Not to be a Dick
By Mike Tony from the WQHS Blog
Double lives don’t get much better than John Wesley
Harding’s. Billed as John Wesley Harding, he is a folk-pop singer-songwriter
boasting a resume of 18 albums and collaborations with members of the
Decemberists, Peter Buck, and Rosanne Cash. Under his real name Wesley Stace,
he is an award-winning novelist. When these dual creative personas merge, he is
a variety show host, ringleading the Cabinet of Wonders, a reading, writing,
rocking vaudeville vehicle for his musician and literary friends.
Few singer-songwriters have crossed over into the
novelist sphere as successfully as Harding, a multitasker extraordinaire whose
plate is always full. When at home, he gets up early with his two toddlers, and
after his five-year-old daughter goes to school, he writes and rewrites both
music and fiction in his den. Then he cooks for the family and relaxes with
everyone until it’s time for bed.
On a refreshingly crisp Sunday morning in February,
though, Harding is recovering after a Scud Mountain Boys concert at Johnny
Brenda’s the night before. Sporting a black sports coat and matching black
shirt, Harding exceeds six feet in height. He walks briskly and with purpose.
Despite his mostly grayed hair, he otherwise has a youthful air about him,
overflowing with charm and enthusiasm for whatever fellow artist or idea is
consuming him at the moment.
It is this unwavering enthusiasm which makes Harding so
well-suited as emcee and showrunner for the Cabinet, allowing him to make
friends with his favorite authors and musicians and integrate them into the
show. Harding knows how to make friends, and he is always “on,” even while
taking care of his kids after a long night out.
“The smell of kids and bacon!” Harding observes as he
walks through the back door and into the kitchen of his Mount Airy,
Philadelphia home. Nearly every first-floor room has a multitude of Thomas the
Tank Engine train toys lying across the floor. One room has an entire Thomas
and Friends play-set which clearly is a source of frequent enjoyment for his
three-year-old son Wyn. Meanwhile, Harding settles into the small but cozy room
where he writes his novels and songs. It’s a mini-library with wooden
bookshelves covering most of three walls. Harding’s favorite writers and
subjects feature prominently on these shelves: the works of Nabokov, Hawthorne,
Fitzgerald, and Dickens all sit off to his right while a small section of books
about Bob Dylan sticks out above the doorway on his left. Harding settles
comfortably in a swivel chair at his desk.
Since Harding is a father first and foremost these days,
it’s no surprise when his daughter Tilda wanders in the room, followed by Wyn
sneaking behind in a bright blue Thomas the Tank Engine shirt.
“What’s your name?” Harding playfully asks her daughter.
Silence.
“Come on, what’s your name?”
“Tilda!”
“Tell our friend here what we did a presentation on the
other day,” Harding coaxes her daughter, who along with Wyn attends nearby
Germantown Friends, a private school in Philadelphia. “Come on, tell us!”
More silence.
“Britain! We did a presentation on Britain!” Harding
volunteers.
After much coaxing, Harding is finally able to dispatch
his two children.
“This is my life,” he observes with a mix of exasperation
and pride.
At 46, it’s a life that he’s only just beginning to
examine in his songwriting.
Harding has made a career of being a wordsmith for nearly
25 years and 12 studio albums. Three black guitar cases lying opposite Harding
and a children’s drawing of a yellow submarine taped in the corner of the room
are enough to tip anyone off to the kind of music he makes. Indeed, Harding’s
sound has always tended toward jangly folk-rock with smart arrangements and a
slice of uniquely acerbic whimsy. Yet his lyrics, which have been compared
favorably to those of Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello, have rarely addressed his
personal life. Even on “Top of the Bottom,” a song on his 2009 album, Who
Was Changed and Who Was Dead, he offers up a pointedly non-autobiographical
account of a pop star’s rise and fall in the music industry. (He was never
offered to tour in Jesus Christ Superstar or arrested for necrophilia, as his
lyrics suggest.)
But the fiction has started to fade with The Sound of
His Own Voice, Harding’s twelfth latest album released last October.
“I always give the albums a working title,” Harding says.
“And for this one it was ‘Songs About Songs.’ ‘Sing Your Own Song’ is the
crossover song on the album because it’s the most personal thing I’ve ever
written. All the songs I’m writing now that will be on the next album are like
that too. I do find it’s easier to write more personal material now that I can
just indulge my fictional ideas in novels. When Scott [McCaughey, the album’s
producer] was listening to the demoes, he said, ‘Wow, I can’t believe you wrote
about your daughter there.’”
But that’s exactly what he does on “Sing Your Own Song,”
a Harding tune in which he takes some rare self-inventory:
“Now I’m married and I have two kids/And I sing songs all
the time/My 4-year old just makes them up/sometimes with explanatory mind/And
no one has told her that’s it difficult yet/That isn’t in her head/So we sing
her songs every evening long/And write until it’s time for bed.”
“[“Sing Your Own Song”] is the one that made him realize
when he wrote the line about his daughter and all that that he started
thinking, ‘You know, I should write more about what actually happens in my real
life and maybe spend less time inhabiting other characters and creating small
fictions,” McCaughey says. “That was the song that started it and now he’s gone
fully in that direction. He’s written a ton of songs for the next album and
demoed them and I think it’s a huge departure for him in that way. The songs
are a lot more personal and less fictional.”
The line between fact and fiction in songwriting isn’t a
very fine one for Harding, though.
“Whether you write about your personal life or not, it
gives you away and tells everybody about you, and it’s the story of you and how
you get through the day,” Harding says. “And my life is about how good
friendships with people, hanging out with my family, and cobbling together an
artistic career always kind of feels like a struggle since I work hard.”
Multitasking doesn’t seem to be much of a struggle for
Harding, who frequently writes in his checkbook or checks emails while talking
without skipping a beat. But he is used to taking on much more arduous and
solitary tasks at his desk.
“Writing is so lonely. That’s my new novel,” he says,
pointing out a seemingly ordinary stack of papers in a small cardboard box next
to his Flexdeck Life Fitness treadmill near the corner of the room. “I actually
printed it out in manuscript because if I look at it on the screen, it was in a
perfect state for the screen. But here, when I print it out and looked at it
like a real book, you can see every page is a friggin’ mess. I needed a new
perspective on it, but nobody else can do it for me. Music is a social activity
made with people, often performed live, celebrated with your friends. You can’t
really make music on your own unless you’re a solo musician. You need to bang
some drums around sometimes and that means working with people. And that means
you are rehearsing and collaborating and meeting at hotels and that is time
spent with people, so that’s going to be a very happy thing to do.”
The new novel should be published next year. It will be
Harding’s first book to be set completely in modern times and he hints that it
is about a rock band.
“That’s very much my world, no research necessary,” he
laughs.
This modern setting is in stark contrast to his other
three novels, none of which were nearly so grounded in Harding’s own reality.
His critically acclaimed 2005 debut novel Misfortune, for example, is a
19th-century tale of transgendered child-rearing. His second novel
from 2007, By George, is written as the collected memoirsof a
ventriloquist dummy.
With Misfortune and By George, Harding had
already established for book critics a pattern of neo-Dickensian storytelling
and a knack for creating oddball characters that are at once fanciful and
utterly convincing.
That pattern continued early last year with the
publication of his third novel, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer,
to almost universally positive reviews, including rave endorsements from the Los
Angeles Times and the Washington Post. In the book, fictional music
critic Leslie Shepherd tells the story of Charles Jessold, his collaborator and
a gifted young composer. On the eve of the premiere of his radical opera, which
Shepherd cowrote with him, Jessold murders his wife and her lover before
committing suicide.
Writing the novel entailed thorough research of English
music of the early twentieth century and required that Harding make the musical
descriptions sound idiomatic to the period, something that he worked on with
Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker.
“It’s rare to find a book about music — classical and
popular — that evinces real sympathy for, and understanding of, the creative
process,” Ross wrote in an email. “That’s exactly what Wes achieved. Satire
notwithstanding, “Charles Jessold” honors the complexity of musical history and
of the musical mind. The parallel that he draws between the late-Renaissance
experimentalist Gesualdo and the pioneering composers of early
twentieth-century modernism is one that any serious musicologist would
recognize.”
Jessold’s plot makes it the novel that best
reflects Harding’s musical persona. Shepherd and Jessold celebrate the
rediscovery of the English folk music so influential on Harding’s own work, and
they clearly share Harding’s spirit of collaboration.
They also highlight the rocky relationship Harding has
had with music critics over the course of his career.
“Jessold was the [Bob] Dylan of the book, and Shepherd
was like a critic from the Little Sandy Review [an anti-rock ‘50s and
‘60s fanzine devoted to folk music],” Harding explains. “Dylan took protest
music and stepped up from there to greater musical expression, and Jessold is
kind of doing the same thing. Shepherd wants to confine him to Anglicana but
Jessold wants to embrace music outside of that.”
Harding feels that he has always been ignored by major
music publications and appreciates the support over the years from music
outlets such as National Public Radio and prominent Philadelphia public radio
station WXPN. After Harding teamed up with members of Elvis Costello’s backing
band the Attractions for his major-label debut Here Comes the Groom in
1990, comparisons to Costello abounded. Such comparisons were superficial, of
course—Costello’s often vindictive “angry young man” lyrics never dovetailed
with the warmer and more earnest quality of Harding’s work. But the perception
of Harding being Costello’s “smart ass kid brother,” as music critic Chris
Woodstra once observed, was enough to dampen his critical reception throughout
the ‘90s.
“I just think that it’s a way for people to deal with the
fact that they’re intelligent lyric-writers, and there aren’t that many of
those out there,” McCaughey said. “I don’t think Wes’s fans ever thought he
sounded like Elvis Costello. It’s just an easy way for reviewers to lump these
intelligent songwriters together. I don’t think anything he’s done in the last
15 or 20 years reminds me anything of Elvis Costello.”
Harding is a music critic of his own now, though,
reviewing albums on occasion for the Times Literary Supplement.
“I really don’t care what anybody thinks about my albums at
all,” Harding says. “I’ve been lucky with reviews of my book. The one really
bad review of Misfortune was in the Times Literary Supplement. My
dad gave it to me saying, ‘Oh, you won’t want to read this,’ and it was really
a pretty brutal review. But I liked the magazine so much that I subscribed to
it, and now I’m the one giving bad reviews for them!”
His interest in writing for the Times Literary
Supplement is just another example of his interest in working with anything
or anyone that he is a fan of. This approach dictates not only how he assembles
talent for the Cabinet but also how he has contributed to the Words and Music
Festival (WAMFEST) at Fairleigh Dickinson University since 2009. As a curator
of WAMFEST and Artist in Residence at Fairleigh Dickinson, Harding has been
instrumental in getting many of his songwriter/novelist friends to talk and
perform for students, including Josh Ritter, Rosanne Cash, and Kristin Hersh.
WAMFEST is an annual event where poets and musicians meet to bridge the gap between
‘the people’s art’ and the ‘art of the academy.’
“I suppose I’m relaxed interviewing people and I have a
good address book for inviting people,” Harding says. “I think someone who was
nervous about moderating would do too much preparation and then kind of go in
with their own agenda and make sure everything went right. But it’s not about
that, it’s about playing it by ear and being a really good listener. In fact,
when you look at somebody like David Letterman, you see that what he’s actually
doing when people are talking to him, despite his off-the-cuff sense of humor,
is listening to them. He’s very natural with people, as he was with me when I
was on his show. That might not even be a nature that’s desirable, to be in
front of a camera. It might be the fakest nature of all, but you’ve got to
admire that.”
“He’s more than willing to share the limelight, and he
likes a good time,” Harding’s novelist friend and Cabinet frequenter Rick Moody
wrote in an email. “These things all make for a perfect emcee. In the early
television era, he would have been a household name. Perhaps he will be. We
don’t know yet.”
This spring, he taught his first ever course as a
Visiting Professor at Farleigh Dickinson, talking for fourteen weeks about his
favorite first chapters in his favorite fourteen novels. He hoped to inspire
his creative writing students to write their own fantastic first chapters.
And on a Monday morning on the last day of April, Harding
has only one remaining class to teach this semester. He is still his jovial
self, sitting in the same swivel chair and wearing a brown buttoned sweater and
black pinstripe pants which he had worn the previous Saturday night at the
latest Cabinet of Wonders show at the City Winery in New York. The show
featured musicians Carl Newman (New Pornographers) and Will Sheff (Okkervil
River), novelists Moody and Colson Whitehead, and comedian and Cabinet fixture
Eugene Mirman, all good friends of Harding’s.
The Cabinet was picked up by NPR in May as a six-episode
series of hour-long radio shows, further proof that the show has created an
audience for itself.
“Real collaboration, sharing creativity with somebody, is
an intimate thing,” Harding says. “And probably a lot of people don’t want to
do that very much. To me, the Cabinet is much more like, bring your own thing,
and then I will find ways to put that with the other things happening to make
it seem like we’re all going towards one goal at the end of the show. The art
is in putting everything in order. I have to put things in the right order. I
make it so that Carl Newman does a song with Rick Moody, and then me, and then
he does one with the band and then everybody gets up to do a song at the end
with Carl and Rick. It works because we’ve built up to that. We earned that moment
because I planned it right.”
“I don’t suppose these people are going just for the
collaborative energy of the thing,” Moody observed.
“But Wes likes to play with
other people. He makes it easy to play with other people, and he’s incredibly
inclusive—in fact, he’s nothing if not inclusive—and so I think one has a
better time if one is prepared to get down with the team effort of it all.”
Today, Harding’s mind is on the race for the English
Premier League soccer title. Rival teams Manchester City and Manchester United
will be squaring off later this afternoon. But his lifelong favorite soccer
team, Arsenal Football Club, is out of the race. Since the Premier League has
no rules in place to govern players’ salaries, teams are only as good as their
owners’ purses are large. Harding observes resignedly that Arsenal isn’t a free
spender.
“At least Arsenal wins morally every year,” he concludes
before pointing out a hand-sized red and white Arsenal shield on the mantel.
“My father gave me that when I was four,” he grins. “You
were born into your football team.”
Harding was born into a middle-class, showbiz veteran
family in Hastings, Sussex, England in 1965. From his desk drawer he pulls out
an old flyer featuring his grandfather and grandmother in respective
traditional magician and magician’s assistant garb. They had a successful ‘40s
and ‘50s magic act together. “The King Townsons, Magicians and Entertainers
Extraordinaire,” it reads, and Harding attributes many of his ideas for By
George to his late performing grandparents. Indeed, the novel’s featured
ventriloquist, Joe King Fisher, is largely based on Harding’s grandfather,
Clifford King Townson. It’s no wonder that Harding’s tastes and performances
often owe much to vaudeville and music-hall.
“When I was writing By George, I asked my mom to
send some of his old magic things with his writing in them because I thought it
would be very inspirational,” he says tenderly.
Show business runs in Harding’s family. His mother is an
opera singer and singing teacher, one of his sisters is also an opera singer,
and his other sister Melanie Stace is well-known in the U.K. as a singer in
West End musicals and game show personality. Even his father, a Greek and Latin
classics scholar, is a jazz pianist.
“Everybody sang around the house all the time,” Harding
remembers. “My mom’s house is still loony. She does her singing downstairs, so
all the time there’s ‘La-la-la-la-la,’ somebody taking a music lesson. And my
stepfather sits right above that and hums along to whatever their song is. My
sisters don’t live there now, but if they were they’d be singing something. So
music was a natural thing to do. That’s what “Sing Your Own Song” is about,
because I’ve passed that on to my daughter Tilda. She has that same lack of self-consciousness
about her.”
That lack of self-consciousness is what got Harding
through boarding school. After going to the prestigious King’s School
Canterbury from ages 13-17, Harding’s father got him a job as a Latin and
English tutor for younger children at his old boarding school.
“What I do think that boarding school gives you, if I’m
anything to go by, is confidence,” he reflects.
“Teaching there, I saw how it
was good for the confident kids like me and how it could potentially destroy a
kid who wasn’t socialized or at ease in his own skin. I was lucky. I was one of
the people who because of my grandma, grandpa, probably because my dad is a
very confident man, I had the right character for that school. I wasn’t afraid
to shake things up or show off or talk too much. I got in trouble, but I didn’t
care. I joined sports teams, all those dumb things it takes to get by. When I
went back there, I became sympathetic to the kids that weren’t as socially
active. One of the core ideas of By George is what it would have been
like if someone going to that school hadn’t had the confidence I had.”
Through the Cabinet, Harding has encouraged others to be
more comfortable live performers as well.
“I had a hard time singing in public at first (this
predates the Cabinet—as I have been singing with my band occasionally for six
or seven years),” Moody wrote. “Mainly because I was worried about my precious
reputation as a literary figure. But because Wes is not uptight about these
things, and was reasonably willing to let me be my uncomfortable self at first,
I have improved a great deal. And he has a lot to do with that. I owe him a
major debt on that front.”
Suddenly, Harding is back to rummaging through his desk
drawer. This time he picks out a black and white picture of him in what is
known as “full Canterbury dress” while he attended the King’s School
Canterbury.
“Winged collar, check it out!” he says excitedly. “I was
a scholar at that school, so I had to wear a black pinstripe suit and jacket,
white winged collar, collared stud, black tie, and gown. From the age of 13 to
17, that’s what I would wear!”
Just as ubiquitous as collared studs at the King’s School
Canterbury were the reminders that Canterbury is a historic English cathedral
city. Every night at 7:30, gates around the cloister of the Canterbury
Cathedral would close and lock those in the King’s School Canterbury houses
inside the cloister of the cathedral.
“The religious paraphernalia is around you all the time,
and that definitely left a mark on me in terms of viewing religion as a
touchstone, a symbol that everybody understands—God is good, the devil is bad,”
Harding recalls about the King’s School Canterbury. “One had to be in bed at a
certain time, get up at a certain time, go to assembly and cathedral, be in the
corps, be in the army, all things I didn’t want to do. It fostered in me a very
polite rebellion where I wanted to do the things I wanted to do, read the books
I wanted to read. It just made me want to read different books from the ones
they were telling me to read and listen to different music from what everyone
else was listening to. I became a bit of an individualist there.”
After his time at King’s School Canterbury expired,
Harding studied English Literature at Cambridge. More importantly, Cambridge
was where he laid the foundation for his musical career.
“Cambridge was a very nice place to be,” Harding
remembers. “It was a hotbed for doing whatever you felt like and fancied. I
learned to play guitar there more or less. I was in a bunch of plays, and I did
very little work but I knew when to do the work, and I had a really, really good
time there.”
Although he enjoyed studying English at Cambridge and
even earned a First in the subject, he only initially stayed on to obtain a
Ph.D. in Social and Political Science because he didn’t know what else to do.
Fortunately, Harding’s natural charm and quick wit allowed him to take
advantage of the toxic political atmosphere of England in the ‘80s by becoming
a stand-in protest singer for his Cambridge cohorts. After all, this is the guy
who sang, “Bob Dylan is my father, Joan Baez is my mother” on the song “Bastard
Son” on his major-label debut album Here Comes the Groom.
“I noticed that when everybody went on these political
protests, there was never quite a focal point for them,” Harding says. “I
tended to know all these American labor and protest songs, and I used to update
them. So when there were a couple of speeches, I’d sing a Phil Ochs song but
I’d change the lyrics. He changed the song ‘Here’s to the State of Mississippi’
to ‘Here’s to the State of Richard Nixon,’ which I then changed to ‘Here’s to
the State of Margaret Thatcher.’ A real dumb move, but a real populist move. Now
I’d be ashamed to do such a thing, but having said that, it turned me into the
bloke that played the guitar. I could be depended on to help people have a good
time and make noise.”
By the end of his time at Cambridge, Harding had been in
a handful of groups and realized that being in a band was not for him. Wanting
to do things his own way, he found the occasional supporting gig, starting out
opening for Irish rock band Hothouse Flowers. When the group had surprising
success in the U.K. Singles Chart just two weeks after adding Harding as its
opening act, Harding suddenly found himself playing to hundreds of people. He
soon landed a record deal with Sire Records in America.
“I did have an interview for the BBC, because that’s what
people did,” Harding says. “I didn’t get accepted or offered a job there, and
if I had, my life would probably have been very different, and that would be a
shame. I’m glad that didn’t happen. I’m also glad that I didn’t do a Ph.D. at
Berkeley that I was going to do for a bit, because then I would have been
writing about writing novels instead of just writing them. After I didn’t do
the Ph.D., I realized that what I wanted to do was not write about writing
novels but actually get down to writing one. So there’s a lots of things in
life that could have gone a different way. Who would regret giving up a Ph.D.
to go out and do gigs? The gigs are going well and you’re getting paid, playing
with a big band, so it’s fantastic. It’s a dream.”
After inking his record deal, Harding paid most of his
Cambridge student grant back to the university and recorded Here Comes the
Groom, from which the video for the single “The Devil in Me” got him
significant airplay on MTV. The Los Angeles Times described the record
as “the first great rock album of the ‘90s,” and Harding was established as a
versatile singer/songwriter with a biting sense of humor.
“I wasn’t daunted, I enjoyed it, and I took it in
stride,” Harding says of his early moderate success. “I didn’t think it was my
due but I didn’t run away from it. I have no issues with having or not having
success.”
For his next album, The Name Above the Title
(1991), Harding made what he now dismisses as “Here Comes the Groom again—only
with horns.” Yet it still garnered a positive critical reception despite
reinforcing misguided Elvis Costello comparisons.
“I was writing songs that I liked writing, though I wish
I’d written better ones now, but I wasn’t to know that then,” Harding reflects.
“If I had some of the songs back then that I have now, I’d be in a very secure
place musically. But it was a terrific joyride.”
By Harding’s own account, though, his next album Why
We Fight (1992) was where he truly found his footing as a songwriter, more
overtly displaying his folk roots and pivotally ditching the “band” conceit of
his first two albums. In addition to being the first album Harding recorded
while living in America, Why We Fight also got the attention of Bruce
Springsteen, who handpicked him to be his first opening act since 1978 on the
Boss’s 1995 Ghost of Tom Joad solo tour.
But Why We Fight also stalled commercially and he
parted way with Sire before releasing the self-financed John Wesley
Harding’s New Deal in 1996. The complexity of Harding’s wordplay is perhaps
to blame for Harding’s failure to connect with mainstream audiences throughout
his career. But he doesn’t care.
“People actually don’t want literary music, it’s a very
tiny ghetto,” Harding admits. “But people do like literature made more musical.
And so it’s a little neat equation, but I feel like there’s one way to make
music literary, and I tried to do it. You have to create things for yourself.
Second guessing what other people want will get you nowhere. Occasionally I’ve
picked a word and gone, huh, maybe if I picked a slightly simpler one there,
but it’s not because people wouldn’t understand it. I mean, I’ve just written a
song in which the chorus is in Latin. Don’t ask me why. Stupid thing to do, but
it’s about Ovid, and it’s a beautiful love song about a man in exile wishing he
was in Rome rather than the exile he’s in. But I really wanted to use one
particular phrase that happened to be in Latin and I thought, ‘Nobody will
understand that, it’s a ludicrous thing to do,’ but it’s the best way that I
can do the song. So I think you owe it to yourself to create for yourself.”
Harding’s parents have always been supportive of his
musical efforts throughout his career, even after he cut short his path toward
a Ph.D. at Cambridge. But Harding’s father has never known how to approach his
son’s tunes.
“I sent my dad a copy of John Wesley Harding’s New
Deal and he sent me back a little note saying, ‘Demonstrates a heterodox
theology,’” Harding chuckles. “And I just went, ‘Maybe that’s what it is, but
to me it’s a bunch of tunes.’ He wasn’t able to engage with the music very
much. It wasn’t stuff he knew about.” Not surprisingly, Harding’s dad has
always understood his novels a little better.
The transition to writing novels came naturally for
Harding.
“I just think it’s something I wanted to do and I felt I
had the time to do it,” he says. “I was not perhaps using the entirety of my
brain making music. Songwriting’s all about compactness and leaving things out.
It’s a spare craft and not really useful for novels at all. Writing novels and
writing songs are as different as two writing disciplines can possibly be. The
practice that I had songwriting was very good for my writing career though,
because it let me trust in words and I think as a writer one of my good
tendencies is to just let it roll out of me.”
The idea of having dual creative personas did not appeal
to Harding’s publisher Little, Brown and Company. Little, Brown suggested that
using his stage name rather than his real name would boost book sales. “John
Wesley Harding,” though, simply doesn’t work as the name of a novelist. Sans
the letter ‘g’ at the end of Harding, it’s the name of a late 19th-century
outlaw immortalized as a hero figure in the title track from Bob Dylan’s album John
Wesley Harding (1967).
Harding’s stage name was “too rock and roll” to go on the
front of a gender-studying novel set in the 19th-century.
“I put my foot down for once in my life and told my
agent, I’m not going to put it out as John Wesley Harding. That would be the
short-minded view. I don’t think I’m famous enough in music for the name to
ensure me 20,000 sales, and I think we can get the word out to anybody that we
need to. I think journalists will enjoy discovering my dual creative personas
themselves and it will work to our advantage rather than be something held
against us, so all those decisions culminated in me saying…”
Harding leans forward and his voice turns to a whisper.
“I just spent seven years writing a novel. I’m going
to put it out under my own fucking name.”
Thus Harding has little time for publishers or writers
who pigeonhole his fellow songwriter/novelists.
“Stephen King wrote an astonishingly mean review of Josh
Ritter’s first novel [Bright’s Passage], which was a terrific novel,
Harding says, gradually speaking louder and agitatedly crossing his legs
Indian-style in his chair. “He actually bothered to go to the length of saying
this book wouldn’t have been published if it wasn’t Josh Ritter!”
Reviews such as King’s reinforce Harding’s notion that
songwriters’ novels are not taken as seriously as they should be.
“I do think people kind of look askance at artists who do
two or three things,” Harding sighs. “They want musicians to make music and
shut up. They want writers to be writers and shut up. People like Steve Earle,
Rosanne Cash, Josh Ritter have written novels under their own name and why
should they do it under any other? But I do think those people did not benefit
from doing a different thing in the eyes of the world.”
The working title for Harding’s 2009 album Who Was
Changed and Who Was Dead was Dilettante’s Inferno, signaling his
awareness of the potential to get spread too thin with his many creative
projects. McCaughey knows from his past participation in the Cabinet that
helming the show is not an easy task.
“As I’m sure is typical of those shows, everybody’s
learning songs at the last minute, and you soundcheck for three or four hours
rehearsing,” McCaughey explains. “And since we were on tour and learning a lot
of songs as we went along on tour as well, it was pretty hectic that day
leading up to the Cabinet. Wes is amazing at having incredibly high energy and
dealing with whatever gets thrown his way, but he was even frazzled! I could see
he was ready to fall over at the end of it.”
“It’s quite a drive out to Fairleigh Dickinson,” Harding
says. “Two and a half hours teaching, two hours driving, two hours office
hours, two hours driving back. My wife said she’s never seen me so empty as
when I walk back in the door after driving back from FDU. I just go straight to
the fridge.”
Harding likely won’t teach at Fairleigh Dickinson again,
both because of the distance and the fear of feeling obligated to teach every
year at the expense of his other careers. Otherwise, he has no plans to scale
back any of his various creative commitments.
“If I were to have a fear or insecurity about my life, it
would be that I do a lot of things but do none of them particularly well,”
Harding says slowly, his brow furrowed deep in thought. “Is that how I feel
about the things I do? Not really, but on the other hand, that would be my
darkest fear. Should I rein it in and do less things but do them well? I think
not because in the end, my character does not have that urge for perfection.
Dilettante means the same thing as Renaissance man. If they’re in a good mood,
they’ll call you a Renaissance man. If they’re in a bad mood, they’ll call you
a dilettante. I prefer to call it productive and unselfconscious. That’s an easier
way to make art for someone of my character.”
And that’s what Harding is—an entertainer by blood and a
creative workhorse by will.
“It’s funny because he has enough leisure time to read a
book and listen to music and watch Arsenal games on TV, but somehow he
structures his life so that he can massive amounts of work done,” McCaughey
says.
“So when I talk to him and he goes, ‘Oh yeah, I’m halfway through my next
novel or whatever, it never surprises me. Or when he tells me, ‘Yeah, I’ve
written 40 new songs since we talked last month.’ He’s about the only guy I
know who can be that prolific and that structured.”
Far from deserving the “jack of all trades and master of
none” label, Harding in fact has only one trade: likability. A voracious reader
and music connoisseur, he is always admiring at least a handful of writers at
any given moment and wants to see how many of them he can get to know. He’s
looking for other creative minds that enjoy nights of acoustic guitar and a
bottle of bourbon just as much as he does. They’re easy to find, and for the
outgoing Harding, they’re easy to call on.
So believe in either name above the title, because Wesley
Stace and John Wesley Harding are both well-versed enough in the art of
conversation to always hold your attention in their respective media.
“My father was good in front of people, my mother was
naturally able to do those kinds of entertaining things, my grandfather too, my
sisters are,” Harding points out. “People say, ‘How do you get the Decemberists
to play for you, how do you get people for the Cabinet?’ Not being a dick!
Don’t be a dick!
“I’m sure there are many annoying things about me. I can
talk a mile a minute, sometimes I don’t shut up for hours, but I like the hang.
I like the buzz. I like those things. It’s worth staying up till all hours
sometimes, like I did at the Cabinet on Saturday night. I met some terrific
people doing that, and they said afterward, ‘I think I’d like to do the
Cabinet.’ That’s what it’s all about! You meet new people, they’re great!”
- Mike Tony; Popscene with Mike Tony (Sundays from
10am - noon @ WQHS.org)
An Evening with John Wesley Harding / Wesley Stace
Thursday, 28 February
7:30 PM
Alumni Hall, Student Center
Central Connecticut State University
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