Having lived in modest-sized towns in Florida, George and Maryland as a youth, singer/songwriter/producer John Vanderslice has always held a soft spot for the Underdog and his often beautiful and typically overlooked details. When asked for reason behind why he’s playing so many unusual tour stops (including three different small Indiana venues) on his current trek with fellow singer/songwriter Damien Jurado, Vanderslice had much to say: “Man, I pay attention to all that tour planning stuff. I like playing places I’ve never been and I love smaller cities and towns. Playing in Philly is great, but you’ve been there a hundred times. There’s something exciting about pulling up to a place you’ve never been, ya know.
“And I just love small towns. I grew up in small towns. I love open, under-populated places with history. I feel very much at home in those places. My booking agent, also, is in Indiana, and my drummer is from Bloomington. So I have that. And my label is in Indiana. Also, I never say no to interesting shows.”
When Vanderslice arrives he’ll do so in support of his eighth solo studio record, the grand White Wilderness . For the record Vanderslice, who is as known for his recording studio, Tiny Telephone, as he is his solo career, changed things up more than ever, recording with The Magick Magick Orchestra.
“Well, Minna Choi, the director and arranger of the orchestra, had e-mailed me when she moved to San Francisco with this incredibly bold idea where her orchestra would be the house orchestra of Tiny Telephone,” Vanderslice explained. “I thought it was incredible. So I was totally intrigued to meet her and see the shows she was doing. She was doing straight classical, very well-curated shows that were just incredible shows. Just great shows. So from that point she started working regularly with bands at my studio – Death Cab, Dodos, tons of bands. So it was just a really natural decision for me at that point to have her arrange an entire record for me.”
Being a seasoned producer and studio rat, Vanderslice has always recorded, produced and mixed his own work, in the past spending days, weeks, months tweaking his songs until they’re just right. All that time in the studio spent not just with his own work, but with the work of others, has led to an inspired artistic arc, beginning with 2000′s Mass Suicide Occult Figurines , a record that couldn’t be more different than White Wilderness . For Vanderslice, making records is about expression and, most of all, growth; so taking a new direction was something he welcomed with open arms. For starters, these recent sessions marked the first time he recorded his own music at a studio besides his own – this because there were 25+ musicians tracking at once, far too many for Tiny Telephone.
“We couldn’t fit everyone in, so we went to a studio in Berkeley called Fantasy Studios, this really historic and fantastic place with this huge room to play in. So we recorded there for two days. We did it all in two days, so nothing was really overdubbed, music-wise. Then we went to Tiny Telephone to finish up the vocals and mix it. [The whole experience] was very different for me on every level. It was eye-opening and challenging and, for the most part, better. I mean, it’s better not to spend six months recording a record, for sure. This was a lot more pre-production than recording. There was a lot of rehearsal, so most of the heavy lifting was done ahead of time.”
Featuring beautiful arrangements and Vanderslice’s always excellent writing, the thing that first stood out to me about the record was surprisingly not Choi’s excellent arrangements, but Vanderslice’s vocals, which here sound better than ever. So good, in fact, that I had to ask him if something happened to change his vocals. Was it the new studio? The new company? The new approach? Something else?
“Man, that’s such a great question,” he laughed. “I haven’t shared this with anyone yet, really, but my wife got two kittens right before we started recording and I realized that I was insanely allergic to these cats – and it really changed my voice. In some ways, it made my voice rougher and more fucked up sounding. I mean, I loved the cats, but I was really kind of mad at first that they were there. Then I started listening back to the tracks and was like ‘man, this is really cool; this sounds nasty and dirty.’”
The result is not only the cherry on top of his new sound, but, in this writer’s opinion, his best work yet and one of the best records so far of 2011. But, with arrangements so grand and his indie profile so modest, how can these big-studio songs be played on small-venue stages? Backing tracks? Pick-up musicians? Voice-and-guitar? Surely none of those things. I next asked the man if, while recording, he ever worried about playing his huge new songs on foreign stages.
“I always really worry about that for every record. Pixel Revolt , for example, has a lot of orchestration and Celeste and Orchestron and Mellotron and songs with two drum kits,” he explained. “And Time Travel is Lonely is heavily overdubbed as well. So from the get-go I made the decision that I wasn’t going to worry about how things translated at all; I was just going to do different versions of songs live and completely commit to whatever band permutation I was in at the time. That’s actually, in some ways, more fun that doing straight versions of the songs.”
So, again, growth.
Speaking of just that, growth, Vanderslice also informed me that just two weeks ago he opened another studio. With eight studio records in 11 years, various side projects and EPs, some notable collaborations and countless shows, I couldn’t help but wonder how one man could also own and operate one studio, let alone two.
“Studio work and my solo career are usually split 50/50, time wise, but it’s been a wee bit worse because I opened a new studio a couple weeks ago,” he said. “So, yes, it’s considerably worse because it’s way more studio stuff than before, and I’d say that the next four or five months will be rough. I’ll just have to shut down [my solo career] between this tour and my European tour and focus on the studio. It functions well enough without me, but there are things that happen that ruin everything. For instance, yesterday was fine until 3 p.m., when I get a call about this console we have from 1976, saying that it’s down. We had an out-of-country client there waiting for the console to be fixed, so I end up on the phone for six or seven hours before the show. So those things happen.”
Business be damned, Vanderslice next told me that he already has his next project planned out: a second record with The Magick Magick Orechestra, which he plans to work on after returning from his tour with Jurado, next recording after his European tour. “It should be out next year,” he said without a breath and wimpier.
Last but not least we have Jurado, an indie legend whose star is equal to that of Vanderslice’s. An artist with a big, solid catalog of beautiful, fully formed music that is made to stand the test of time. Knowing that Vanderslice is from San Francisco and Jurado from Seattle, I wondered what the connection was. Sure, they’re both on Bloomington labels, but so are 50+ other artists. I couldn’t find anything anywhere, so before I let Vanderslice get back to his songwriting and studio phone calls and performances I asked about his connection to what is surely one of the great songwriters of our time, Mr. Jurado.
“Well, I’ve known Damien for five or six years. We played together in Europe a few times,” Vanderslice said, next explaining that he just saw none other than Damien himself drive up to the venue. “I really love Damien and am good friends with both him and his wife. So when this idea came up it was just brilliant. A brilliant idea.”
And that was it. Vanderslice, busy man of indie rock, hung up the phone, jumped out of the van and, along with Jurado, started loading in for his show at the Record Bar in Kansas City, a rare big city stop on his current tour.
