12 October 2008 :: i hear china has a robust economy

:: Interview /⊙ Features Home

Over the course of last 15 years, Tim Rutili has, first with Red Red Meat and later Califone, released a number of very good records. Some might go so far as to say that he has, in fact, never released a poor record or even a mediocre one. A few might even say that he is quite possibly one of the most accomplished, important American musicians currently working, and that his records almost define beauty in pop music. We here at CMG tend to fall into that last group. The simple fact is that I highly doubt that anyone will write a prettier pop song this decade than “Vampiring Again,” and no one played blues rock better than Red Red Meat. Go back, throw on Jimmywine Majestic, Bunny Gets Paid, or Quicksand/Cradlesnakes. This is American music hitting the 21st century.

We called up Tim a few months back and talked to him about continuing the Deceleration series (!), the possibility of more Red Red Meat (!!), and Califone’s gorgeous new album, Roots & Crowns.

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CMG's Peter Hepburn (CMG): First off, where are you right now?

Tim Rutili (TR): I'm in LA.

CMG: You're living out there permanently now?

TR: Yeah. Well, I don't know about permanently, but I've been here for almost a year.

CMG: You were always such a part of the Chicago scene, it seems a pretty big change.

TR: It has been a big change, but it's been nice. I've been back in Chicago enough, just to work on the record.

CMG: Is there any sort of guiding principle for Califone, some sort of statement of intent?

TR: When we started doing this, it was a home project. The statement of intent would have been "easy listening" compared to what we were doing with Red Red Meat. This was supposed to be making little pop songs out of found pieces. It was supposed to be just a little home project, and it slowly grew from there. Now it seems like just about anything goes.

CMG: Even on the first EP, though, there was a fifteen-minute track of ambient noise ["Down Eisenhower Sun Up"].

TR: That was to balance out the sugary pop music we thought we were making.

CMG: Were you surprised by the reaction to that first EP? Was the new music perceived as much more pop than Red Red Meat?

TR: No. People sort of just took it as a continuation of what we were already doing. What we thought we were doing was drastically different, but people didn't seem to think so. It was the same people on that record, and I suppose looking back it was just a continuation of what we were doing. The intent, though, has always been to make music we wanted to hear.

CMG: Listening back, the difference between Jimmywine Majestic (1994) and Heron King Blues (2004), is drastic.

TR: It is, but it really has just been an evolutionary process. A long, slow evolutionary process. I think you can trace some of the ideas that showed up on Jimmywine and even some of the earliest Red Red Meat recordings; they've just been refined and refined and refined. Different elements have been explored, or these same elements have been getting deeper and deeper in.

CMG: Back in the '90s you guys were getting the comparisons to Chicago blues and some of the sludgier Rolling Stones material, but that doesn't seem nearly as apropos now. Was there a difference in the set of musical influences?

TR: Between 1992 and now? [laughter] Yeah.

CMG: Were there any groups in particular, though, that really helped shape the evolution?

TR: It's mostly been old music. For us it started out with The Faces and Led Zeppelin and The Stones and all that stuff: English people tryng to do American music. From there, listening to Can changed everything. We've always worn our influences on our sleeves, but we just do it wrong. We'll go in and say, "let's do something that's kind of like Led Zeppelin or Can," and it'll come out sounding completely different. The intention is to cop a feel from something we love.

CMG: Can you give me an example of that?

TR: Well, on this record we went in to "Pink & Sour" thinking about Can and Bollywood, and we came out with that.

CMG: Wouldn't have guessed that.

TR: Listen to the beat. The beat is all Bollywood.

CMG: With the new record, was there anything you especially wanted to do?

TR: A lot of what I've been doing musically over the last couple of years -- since the last Califone record, really -- has just been this stuff with picture. With this we wanted to really make everything a good song. Just really compose it, even the things that were improvised. Just work on those raw chunks and compose around them. Having been a while since I'd last written songs, a lot of easy thing were coming out. A lot of by-the-numbers folk songs. Things that are easy for me to write on autopilot. So I made a list of things that we had never really done fully completed -- things that we just kinda touched on -- and we just started chipping away at that list.

CMG: For example?

TR: Shit, I don't have the list here. But, like, "loop with banjo and organ."

CMG: So very specific sonic ideas?

TR: Yeah, but another thing just said "James Brown." All we ended up doing was on that song "Black Metal Valentine," the first beat just started out as the words "James Brown."

CMG: How much of the list did you end up achieving?

TR: Well, I think we got about half way through it. It was a way for us to keep inspired.

CMG: Would you like to make an album of just simple, stripped-down folk songs at some point?

TR: Yeah, that's on the agenda. I'd like to do something like that by myself someday. Thing is, I'm in love with noise. Sometimes I can just listen to static. And really enjoy it. We have enough obstructions with lack of funds to make these records and shitty equipment, and we kinda make all those things work for us. And it's kinda become an aesthetic: duct tape has become an aesthetic. I'd really like to make a simple, empty record.

CMG: Why had you not been writing songs?

TR: All of us were pretty burnt out after the last Califone record. We had done a lot of work in a pretty short period of time. We did Roomsound, the Deceleration records, Quicksand, Heron King, and toured -- pretty much non-stop -- for years. Three years, four years maybe. At the end of that Heron King tour we were just burnt out, and we didn't know if we wanted to continue. We played a few shows here and there, and then just didn't do anything for a year.

CMG: How similar was that to the end period of Red Red Meat?

TR: Well, for me, the end of Red Red Meat went directly into Califone. Right after the last Red Red Meat we did the Loftus record and then two weeks later I started writing and recording stuff for the Califone. No break. I thought I was writing more Red Red Meat songs really.

CMG: So after Heron King why not put Califone to rest and come back with a new band?

TR: Well, we thought about that, but it just seemed like we loved playing together. When I started writing again I just was thinking, "man, I miss playing with these guys." Jim and Joe and Ben are amazing to play with. I'm out in LA and there's no one that plays like we do out here.

CMG: You've been doing a lot of soundtrack work, too. Do you have a different approach for that stuff than for the Califone music?

TR: Oh yeah. You've got to do a lot less with the soundtrack stuff. You have to work with a picture.

CMG: Have you enjoyed that?

TR: Yeah, I really love it. I feel like I'm learning how to do that, and it's a whole different touch.

CMG: How many films have you worked on?

TR: A feature and two long documentaries. A bunch of TV stuff too.

CMG: What TV shows?

TR: I was doing stuff for The History Channel. I was doing that when I was back in Chicago; you'd never even know it was me.

CMG: What do you have coming up?

TR: There's a film called Rank. There's some other stuff in the works that I can't really chat about yet.

CMG: The production on Roots & Crowns is phenomenal. I was wondering how you and Brian Deck go about producing the tracks.

TR: Well, this record was a long journey. I flew back to Chicago and we did some recording there with different engineers, and Brian was the last one to come on. I did stuff here at home, I did some stuff at a friend’s studio in LA, we went back to Chicago, and Brian didn’t come on till the end. When he came on, it was a matter of taking these hours of stuff that we have and just refine it and completely manipulate it. On some of it, we just leaned over the computer and chopped and sliced and hacked at things like crazy.

CMG: How much is that a collaborative effort and how much is just you or Brian going at it?

TR: Some of it was just Brian, some of it was all of us, some of it was Ben [Massarella] and Brian together.

CMG: Were there any songs where you got ‘em back and were really surprised by how they turned out?

TR: Not surprised, but we did really try to take out the manipulation farther than we had before. And also bring out the melodies more than we had before. We tried to make this a really song-based collage record.

CMG: How do you record your drums?

TR: Well, it depends on the song, but for the most part we just recorded it with everyone playing at the same time and then we just let everything bleed into each other. We didn’t do anything to separate the instruments. You’ve got a drum kit, a percussion set-up, sometimes a piano that’s mic-ed, sometimes a guitar, and everything’s just bleeding into everything else. Some of it was recorded in this warehouse space here in Long Beach and that has a really special, weird, non-studio sound to it. We still have hours of stuff to sift through from those sessions.

CMG: What do you expect to come of that?

TR: I don’t know, we just have to get at it.

CMG: Well, let me throw a specific example at you. How’d you do “3 Legged Animals”?

TR: I was doing a film score here, and we had maybe three days to finish and the director was like, “I need something for the end credits.” He played me some things he was thinking of licensing and I was like, “nah, let me try something.” So I just stayed up all night and wrote that song, recorded it the next day, quickly, and we had this song lying around. It worked at the end of the film, but there was something about it that wasn’t quite right. I still liked the melody and a lot of those lyrics, so when we did the Long Beach sessions we did a bunch of improvised stuff and then we did a couple of songs. That was one of them, and it was in the warehouse, which is why the drums sound so weird on that. I let those guys hear the song just right before it was recorded. I didn’t want them to learn it, so I think that was part of it. They were kinda panicking and just thinking on their feet. That made it stretch in different directions.

CMG: Do you do that regularly?

TR: Yeah, all the time. Things just seem to work better when people aren’t thinking about their parts. It helps me too when they do something that surprises me.

CMG: Your lyrics tend to be evocative, but I was curious how much narrative meaning you see them having?

TR: For me there’s a lot. I don’t expect there to be any for a listener unless they’re inserting their own. A lot of them seem not necessarily narrative, but like an inner dialogue. A lot is stream of consciousness -- I don’t want to think about it much. I think the sounds that we’re making are visual, and I think these words are visual too. I like it when someone says, “I always paint to that record.”

CMG: Do you write fast? Do you edit yourself?

TR: I write fast, and I edit when I’m trying to make things fit. I tried to write less this time.

CMG: None of your records are especially wordy, so you’re not starting off with a whole lot.

TR: Yeah, but this time around it started off with songs where I would write a page, leave it, and then build a song around these words. In the past it was almost always, “here’s some music, here’s a melody, let’s see what fits.”

CMG: Was that for all the songs?

TR: No, not all of them. “Rose Petal Ear” started out with just that small poem. There was a whole block of songs where I tried to write really short songs based on really short poems. That was the only one that made it on the record.

CMG: What sort of a band is heading out on this fall tour?

TR: Jim Becker, Joe Adamik, and me for sure. We’re trying to work out what’s gonna happen with Ben, and we’re thinking about adding some people.

CMG: How do you translate these songs to a live environment?

TR: Well, you just treat them as the songs and don’t try to imitate the recording. In general, you just have to forget about the recording. Usually it becomes a completely different thing.

CMG: Are there any trcks on Roots & Crowns that you are thinking might be especially challenging to prepare for the live setting?

TR: Well, I was just sitting at the piano today trying to figure out how to do “Spider’s House.” There are just all those vocal parts, and the horns. I don’t know how we’re going to do that one.

CMG: Do you plan on continuing the Deceleration series?

TR: Yeah, I’m working on mixing stuff now.

CMG: Stuff that came out of the Roots & Crowns sessions?

TR: No, stuff that we did in November, 2004, I think. Maybe 2005. After the Heron King tour, so probably 2004. We played four shows at a club called Rodan in Chicago and we did all those shows to films. The recordings are really good, we’re just sort of shifting through that stuff now. We should be able to get two more Deceleration albums out of those four shows.

CMG: What were the films?

TR: One was this 1908 version of Alice in Wonderland. Another is a Russian post-revolution documentary. Then we did part of Brent Green’s animated film called Hadacol. We did He Who Gets Slapped, which is an old Lon Chaney film.

CMG: Would you like to be able to release these as a CD/DVD sort of combo?

TR: I would like to, but there’s a lot of legal stuff and we don’t have the army behind us to get into it. We’ve been wanting to do that for a while, but there’s really not a lot we can do.

CMG: Have you considered having Califone working with original filmmakers?

TR: Yeah, and we’re doing that this fall with Brent Green’s film. He’s gonna be opening up a bunch of shows and we’ll be his backing band. On Quicksand there’s a film called “Francis” -- it’s on the CD if you put it in your computer. He’s an animator and he’s really, really good. We’re premiering his new film out here at the Getty in October.

CMG: You’ve mentioned in interviews a few times the possibility of another Red Red Meat album. Do you see that happening at this point?

TR: Yes. I don’t know when, but I’d love to do it. We played a show in Chicago last December with Calexico and Iron & Wine. It was too late to get Tim Hurley out, but we’ve all talked about doing more Red Red Meat stuff. We had so much fun playing those old songs. Tim said that if we’re gonna do it, he’ll do it. It’d be pretty fun. It feels like everybody’s still really creative.

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