A Conversation with Garrison Starr (continued)

PM: It's amazing on this record what you and Neilson did by pulling [co-producer] Brad Jones into the mix and spreading the project out in many ways.

GS: Thank you. Yeah, we wanted to do that. Neilson and I really wanted to do that record on our own, but it just wasn't the right time yet. We had done some demos of the songs, and neither one of us felt like they really turned out good. And I think that kind of put us in a place where we didn't know what to do. We wanted to get a third person in who was going to be objective and be able to really sort of just come in with a completely different approach. And Brad was the perfect person to come in and do that. We'd talked about talking to Trina Shoemaker, and we discussed talking to a couple other people. But the Brad Jones thing just made so much sense because he didn't have anything going on at that moment. I don't know if he was looking for a project, but he wasn't working, and he was in Nashville. And I really wanted to make the record in Nashville. Neilson lives there, and now I'm there, too. So it all came together at the right time.

PM: And along with Brad comes a whole stable full of cool characters.

GS: Absolutely, yeah.

PM: Had you worked with Pat Sansone or Pat Buchanan before?

[Just doing a Puremusic search on either name will bring up different things each musician has done. Pat Sansone is currently with Wilco and Autumn Defense. Pat Buchanan is a Nashville session man who gigs with a band under his name--see our recent interview with Pat here.]

GS: Oh, yeah, Pat Sansone is one of the funniest most amazing dudes. Do you know that Pat was born without a sense of smell?

PM: What?

GS: Pat Sansone can't smell anything.

PM: [laughs] Oh, what a strange thing!

GS: He doesn't know what anything smells like.

PM: You could put dog shit under his nose and he wouldn't know it.

GS: He doesn't know what food tastes like. He doesn't know--

PM: And yet he's a master of texture, musically speaking. How bizarre.

GS: Well, they say when you lack a certain sense, your other senses get stronger.

PM: You get something else, yeah.

GS: Yeah. Maybe that's where he got--but also his mom is an opera singer.

PM: Wow.

GS: His mother is an opera singer, and so that's where he got his voice from, too. Have you ever heard him sing, by himself?

PM: I've never heard him sing, no.

GS: Oh, it's ridiculous. Pat had a band a long time ago in Oxford MS called Birdy. It's unbelievable. The record is called On The Moon. You might check iTunes, because now that he's in Wilco, I wonder if he has that stuff available on iTunes. [I was unsuccessful at Itunes and eBay, but if anybody gets lucky, we'd like to know about it.]

PM: A lot more people are not only going to be digging on you after this record, but they're going to be digging you emotionally after this record because you put so much into it emotionally, and there's so much Garrison Starr in there that you listen to it and you say, "Wow, I dig that person!" Not just "I like that music," but "I dig that person."

GS: Well, thank you so much. That means a lot to hear you say that. I mean, we've gotten a couple of reviews that have surprised me. Like in Paste and Harp, the record got really lukewarm reviews. And that's okay, because I can dig that not everybody is going to like everything. But it was just funny that both of the reviews were by guys. And they both said--I mean, they never said anything about my songwriting or me as an artist, that I'm not talented or can't write songs. It was more about the production, and how they thought it translated into this sort of sounding all over the place, unfocused record.

PM: What?

GS: I was really surprised. And again, I'm not upset about it. I'm able to look at that from a detached place and go, "Man, they missed it. They totally missed what we were trying to do." And it's just interesting to me--that is so opposite of anything that we were intending. And when I listen to the record, that's not what I hear at all. And the fans that I've talked to, they're so into the record, and that's not what they hear, either. So it's really funny, sometimes, how people interpret what you're doing.

PM: Yeah, because it's an awesome record, and a very emotional, musical record.

GS: Yeah.

PM: Lots of times reviewers can be too young, they can be too cerebral. They can be too cool for school and just out of school, and it's just like, well, it's easy to miss it, then.

GS: And it's also dudes. Like it's not always--the way they farm out these reviews, it's not always people's thing. Sometimes people get stuck with something that they're like, "Ahhk, another female singer/songwriter, Jesus, I hate that." And who knows? But it's interesting. It's funny, because I really thought that when we released that record that people were going to freak out about it. And I just thought that the process was going to go a lot differently. But that's the way life is. I mean, I love this record, I think it's great. And when I get to do interviews with cool people like you, it makes it all worthwhile, it really does. It just makes me want to fight harder--

PM: Yeah.

GS: --and really work harder. It just makes me want to keep going, and keep playing, and keep writing. And that's a good thing.

PM: There are a lot of great songs on the record. You must be happy with that.

GS: Yeah, I am. And I appreciate that. Me and Brad and Neilson, all three had input into what songs were going to be on the record, which I love. We all had equal say in that, and I think the record has benefited greatly from that, from the fact that everybody got their picks.

PM: So you put out eleven. How many were in the pile when you first went in and started looking at songs

GS: There were probably about seventeen songs we were picking from. And we narrowed them down to eleven.

PM: Yeah, because you get such a skinny budget that you better just pick the ones you're going to record.

GS: Exactly. Well, that was the other thing, too. We didn't want to come out with like half-done stuff.

PM: So what was the m.o. like in the studio between [co-producers] Neilson and Brad? I don't know Neilson, but they seem like different characters, energetically speaking. Including yourself, what were everybody's studio personalities like?

GS: Well, we did most of it at Alex the Great [Brad Jones' studio in Nashville]. And Brad pretty much took over.

PM: [laughs]

GS: I mean, Brad's got his way that he likes to do things. Part of that is--I mean, Neilson does, too, in his studio.

PM: Right.

GS: But their personalities are different in that Brad is just more of a control freak, I think.

PM: I hear that.

GS: I mean, Neilson is, too, but in a different way. But Brad is very OCD, and very--

PM: [laughs]

GS: --he's got his way he likes to do things. And if you step out of his way of how he likes to do things, he gets real uncomfortable and defensive about that. Like he likes to make his coffee, and he likes to do this. And "No, let's do this, let's not do it this way. Well, how about if we do it this way?" You'll make a suggestion, and Brad will be like, "Well, okay, but how about if we did it this way?" He's really funny. He's just set in his ways.

PM: Right.

GS: Especially, like I said, in his studio, he likes to do it a certain way. So that was interesting, because Neilson is funny, I think in some ways, Neilson struggled for his place as one of the producers on the record just because Brad is such a strong personality.

PM: He's a very strong person, right.

GS: And I think Neilson really struggled for his place a lot of times. But it was good for him. I think he learned a lot on that record. And he had to stand up for himself a couple times on things that he thought. It's easy to get pushed over by Brad because he's just so strong.

PM: And then he plays the hell out of the bass. But Neilson himself is a good instrumentalist.

GS: Yeah. But yeah, being with two producers who were so musical and so arrangement-oriented--but Neilson is more controlled in his arrangements, and Brad is more like a loose cannon.

PM: [laughs]

GS: You know what I mean? He's like a cricket, or something, you never know where he's going to go.

PM: [laughs]

GS: With Neilson you kind of--Neilson is very controlled. You kind of know where Neilson is going to go. And I don't mean that in a bad way, because Neilson comes up with amazing melodies. With Brad you never really know what you're going to get.

PM: Yeah, he can go right off the wall in a heartbeat.

GS: Yeah. And I think I can speak for Neilson in that both of us learned a lot from that, both of us learned a lot from being around Brad and really just being around his arrangement and melodic sensibilities. It was amazing.    continue

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