NAME: John Vanderslice
PROGRESS REPORT: Releasing his 7th studio album, Romanian Names (Dead Oceans), on May 19.
It takes a while to get John Vanderslice to talk about himself. He'd much rather talk about blogs, ceramic tile, the iPhone, or the silver trees and New Zealand wind grass he planted in his yard. It makes sense. As past Progress Report bands have shown, it's much easier to write music once you've had time settle into a steady but boring routine at home. The San Fransisco native needed all that to write his new album, Romanian Names."Knowing I was going to be home from May to December, it allowed me to sit at home and get quiet and bored, which is very important. There has to be an element of stir crazy. That's just part of it," he explains. "When you tour all the time, there's so much time it takes to prepare for a tour, and getting in and out of rehearsal and in and out of the van. You're just not creative. You're like a fax machine, sending out pre-prepared material, which can be inspiring, but it's not making new shit."
Making new shit also involved listening to old shit. Vanderslice kept of Montreal, Grandaddy and the Beatles albums in the basement to listen to between writing. Of Montreal's The Gay Parade, particularly Kevin Barnes' chord progressions, were an inspiration, as well as the least cool of all Beatles records, Magical Mystery Tour."There's a world of stuff to pay attention to in every one of those songs on that album," he says. He wanted to keep that kind of complexity and swift movement on Romanian Names, but also keep all the songs under three minutes. "On a superficial level, my goal was to write a bunch of shorter, faster songs that were all about melody lines. It was just about vocal melody and developing harmonies and making a pop record." His new album packs in many sounds too: flutes, clarinets, saxophones, marimba, viola, even the Swedish nyckelharpa. So there's the real challenge: making shorter pop songs that don't suffer under the weight of too many instruments, too many chords, and too much time in the studio. Vanderslice says he and longtime producer Scott Solter worked that out by booking the same amount of studio time as they needed for past albums but recording more songs -- 24 in all. "We definitely ran out of time, which I think is great. The sheer volume of stuff we were working on that made it overwhelming.You push out all of the stuff that's not important."
Vanderslice has decided that being at home, and liking your home, is important as well. On his blog he links to writing "distractions" that actually seem to be inspirations and ideas: links to plants, to tile makers, and to the IMDB page for HBO's Oz. He says things like Ed Droste's lovingly blogged-out home garden totally make sense to him. "I think that comes as a reaction to being in so many hotel rooms and being unhinged in a space for so long. It's that nesting thing that happens," he says. "For me the most horrible situation in the world is to be backstage at a rock club where there's 50 spray-painted phalluses and some retarded thread going on, like 'Fuck you, band' -- 'Fuck you too.' And then 80 other people chiming in with Sharpies." It's probably why so many bands retreat to isolated, prettier places when they write their albums. But Romanian Names, according to Vanderslice, is about the other part of that -- when you're finally home a lot, you've got to deal with all the stuff you have there. "A lot of songs are about the difficulty of being in love, and the difficulty of being in a relationship. That's what I see -- I don't know if other people will get that thread in the lyrics. When you're in a very, very close relationship, there's a mirror in front of you all the time. So a lot of the songs, for me, are about that mirrored self and that almost suffocating thing that happens." That's on the record, though. Vanderslice says he's happy right now. "For me, I'm drawn to a certain amount of negativity and bleakness in art. That's just what I need. But outside of art, I don't need that shit."
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