DRIPPING SPRINGS, TX — American singer and songwriter Ben Kweller is back after a 9-year break from new album releases. Circuit Boredom is his first full record since Go Fly A Kite (2012). In this interview, originally published in PT-BR on Scream & Yell, the Texas-based musician explains what took him so long.

I’m good!

It's been so messed up, you know. It's sad that it's gone on so long that now it just… Is the new normal, you know. Yeah, I, as you can see, I've invested in some cameras, so it's my life of, you know, being able to just have my world here. And I've been kind of… You know, dude, I've been actually doing a lot of song writing. One cool thing about COVID, if there's any cool thing, it's that, um, there's been a lot of song writing sessions via Zoom, like this, but where we're just writing songs together, so that's really fun. Usually I fly to L.A., or New York, or Nashville to do song writing sessions, so now it's been really fun and I was even able to get some sessions with artists that I normally wouldn't even, you know, write with. Everyone's been kind of open to it, so that's been cool.

I'm outside of Austin, Texas. I live out in the country, I'm in a small town called Dripping Springs. It's kind of, like, ‘the Woodstock of Austin’, in the hills. And it's really beautiful, there's a good community here of musicians.

Well, it's kind of a bummer story… So, I released Go Fly a Kite in 2012, and everything was going great, and I was touring all over the world and we actually got nominated for a Grammy for the first time in my career… And things were so good around that time…

Yes, exactly, my first tour in Brazil, which was so fucking cool… So, in the winter time, my family, we rented a little cabin at the top of a mountain in New Mexico. It was really fun, except one night, my wife woke up and said, ‘Ben, get up, get up, something's horribly wrong. I feel really sick’. And so I stood up and just, like, collapsed to the ground, and we were all really sick and didn't know what it was. We got outside of the cabin and called 911. The ambulance came to pick us up and they said, ‘You guys are 15 minutes away from not waking up. You have carbon monoxide poisoning’.

Gas leak, exactly.

So we were in the hospital for days, on oxygen, and our brains were fried… We came back to Austin a few days later, and I just had to cancel everything. I was just, like, a zombie. A few weeks went by, and then months went by… I didn't want to tour, I didn't want to perform, I was just super depressed, and just didn't really know what to do with myself. Just before I knew it, years had gone on, and the one good side was that I continued to write songs, but I would just sit on my bed, you know, and write songs. But I didn't want to go anywhere or do anything. I didn't want to record. So about two years ago, one of my friends, Dwight Baker, called me up and said, ‘Man, I know that you're really depressed, but I was thinking, maybe you could just come over. Let's record a song for fun and just fuck around in the studio, because maybe making music with a friend would make you feel better. So we recorded ‘Heart Attack Kid’, and that was really the beginning. I mean, I can't believe that nine years went by, you know. It's so, so sad to me, just because I love music. I mean, music's my favourite thing. I had never really been depressed before, so it really made me look at my mental health, and I got therapy and, you know, I've gotten over the carbon monoxide, but it kind of affected a bunch of stuff as well. Just, like, physically, with my memory and all different things. It kind of affects your whole system, so that's really why… [it took so long to release a new album] And now I feel like I'm racing myself to make up for lost time, you know.

Yes, glad to be back, man!

Yeah.

Well, it's funny. We finished it right before the pandemic, and I was gonna release it in March, and then pandemic hit. So then we were like, ‘Fuck! What do we do?’, you know, and then finally… This has been going on so long, I just said, I'm putting it out on New Year's Day, just to do something fun. Because normally you would never release an album on New Year’s, because the whole music industry shuts down and I just… My fans would be on their phones, so they'll get a notification that the new album's here.

The recording process was very simple, it was me and my friend John David Kent, who is a great drummer — he was in my band, Radish, when we were teenagers. And he's played on most of my solo albums, so it was me and John and Dwight at the mixing desk, and my friend Daniel played keys and synth bass. But we just over dubbed all his stuff, so really it was just, like, me on guitar and singing with a drummer. That was the basic tracks, and then we overdubbed keys and synth, bass guitar. There was one day where I brought in just a bunch of my friends to be the choir, to sing all the backing vocals and some harmonies and ‘oh's and woos’, you know.

I write all the time, meaning not every second or every day, but I write throughout the year. What I try to do, at least once a week, I try to write a song for someone else. Just to sort of… Writing songs is my favourite thing, so I'll get together, like… Lately it's been over Zoom, with different friends, and we'll say, ‘Okay, let's write a country song today’, or ‘Let's write a pop song, that we can send to Ariana Grande’, or, you know, just like, it's fun to have that exercise.

Yeah, we try to. We get them to A&R people and managers. I'm still sort of putting together a folder, right now, of everything that I've been writing during the pandemic. So, yeah, we're going to start getting them out there so that's pretty cool. It's exciting.

Yes.

It very much does have a theme. It's called Circuit Boredom because, well, the play on the words of, like, a circuit board, you know, and being bored… Because we live in this technology age where we have every answer at our fingertips. You can Google anything, you can find anything, do anything… So much information now.

Yeah, and so we have all of this, but we still somehow find that we're bored all the time. People are just bored, and don't know what to do, so it's kind of a funny situation, you know, where you… It seems like you have so much, yet you feel like you have nothing. So that's kind of what Circuit Boredom is to me. I recorded 15 songs for the album, but I only put eight of them on the record, because it was kind of… No one has time for anything, so I was like, ‘eight songs is probably enough’. If you do 15, that's way too fucking much for people now. And I noticed a lot of the rappers are doing that, like Kanye. A bunch of his albums are like eight songs, lately. And I've just kind of noticed this trend, and I'm kind of getting on board with it. Because it's like, less really is more, you know. And back to the single thing, I released all these singles, and I never would have done that, but it's because of the technology that I'm doing it. It's almost like the technology is playing a big role in how the art is made now, which is really weird, but Spotify has basically turned our industry into a singles industry again. I don't know if you know this, but when you upload music to Spotify, you can only send one song to editors, to try to get on playlists. So, when you submit your whole album, you only have one song that you can give to playlists, and that's why so many artists, like two years ago, just started releasing singles, because it's like, ‘well, why would I give you all my content if you're only going to listen to one song? I'll just give you one song, then one more song, then one more song, and each song has a chance to get on playlists. I think 10 years ago I would have bitched about that, and been like, ‘fuck that! I make albums!’, and I would have been so righteous about the art. But now I'm kind of, it's interesting to me, to just kind of react to what's put in place for us. It's kind of fun to work within a system and then just kind of see what you can make of it.

Yes.

Yes, totally. And a lot of those short albums, that's kind of what makes them a little more classic too, because you can listen to it in one sitting. But I'm just ready to make another one. I'm ready to keep it going.

I'll make another album and they'll probably appear somewhere. Sometimes I hold songs back because there can be a fun project, like maybe a movie comes along and they want a song of mine that is original, that's never been released, you know. The best ones, obviously, I'm going to put out on the next Ben Kweller album. You know, it's so funny, because normally I would be on the road right now. We'd be talking on the phone, I'd be at a hotel room or at a venue right now somewhere… It's just so weird to have a new album out, but I'm here at home. I guess I'll just make an album. There's nothing else to do, I'll just keep making music.

When I wrote that, I was specifically talking about social media. I was talking more about Google, Facebook, Instagram… Particularly Facebook, because before Instagram really took over Facebook, which is all part of the same company, anyway… Back in the day, if you had thousands of followers on Facebook and you sent out a message, all of your people would get it. But then Facebook came up with Facebook Ads and they started realizing that they could make so much money from selling ads. One of the things they can monetize is a creator talking to his or her audience, and so now, if I have 70,000 people on my Facebook page and I send a message out, it only goes to 10% of them. Only 7,000 people even see the message, and so if I want to reach the rest of my fans, I have to pay Facebook, like, 500 bucks to just get the message. So it's really sad, because sometimes you just want to say ‘hi, I love you, how you doing, what's going on…’. And no musician can afford to be spending hundreds of dollars every time they just want to say ‘hi’. So that just started to really get under my skin, so I kind of went old school and looked at my e-mail list from back in the day. I even found my mailing list from before e-mail, with like, people's home addresses… We used to send out a fanzine in the early 2000s, so I have some addresses. I mean, they're probably invalid, I doubt anyone's even there, but I put together all of my e-mails and I just started — on all the social media platforms —saying, ‘hey, sign up for my mailing list, so I can e-mail you directly. Come to benkweller.com!’ I have control over that website and it's not attached to some big corporate entity that is just trying to make money off of my fans and my friends. That's really the algorithm I was talking about.

About Spotify, there are tons of algorithms there, that whole playlist situation is one of the issues. I wish that you could just upload an album and that Spotify could really put your songs on certain playlists. I mean, it's weird that the playlisting thing is as big as it is, it's the new radio in a lot of ways. And radio in the States is still pretty corrupt, like you if want to be on the radio, you have to… There are some stations that'll play your music because they love it, but if you want them to keep playing it after a certain amount of time, you have to pay for it. So it's like, so fucked up, man. That's why you hear the same 10 artists and they have to be on.

That's it, it's all about the one song at a time. So every song has to be good, you know. You better just make good songs.

I know, I know! That used to happen with radio, with the one-hit wonders. I remember Beck, early on, when ‘Loser’ came out, I saw him, and he was opening for That Dog or something. He was not even famous yet, but ‘Loser’ was kind of becoming popular, and he walked out on stage with his guitar and said, ‘okay, I'm gonna play this song Loser, and then you guys can all go home’. So he played his one song and then people left and then his real fans stayed and he played the rest of his songs. (laughs)

Man, uh…

Yeah, that’s big, man. That's a lot. Yeah, you know, I think that people that get into music as a profession, by nature they're creative people, and they know how to sort of go with the flow and get creative. So I think that, first of all, so many people are out of work, which is horrible. So many great venues are going out of business. There will be casualties, there will be companies and businesses that won't survive and that's horrible. And artists that maybe can't continue, but I think most people in this industry are resilient and they're going to come up with new ideas and new ways to promote music and bring it to people in new ways. I think touring will return. Hopefully this vaccine works out, and things can go back to somewhat, you know, the way they were before. I don't know, man, it's so… The political scene is really scary and there's so much to it right now, and I've really just, I don't know. I think everyone's just holding their breath wondering what's gonna happen. I'm ready for a peaceful changeover, I hope that Biden can do a great job. We just need unity in this country, we need unity so bad, and I worry that both sides are… They yell at each other and I don't know how we're gonna come together, but we have to, because my country is super divided right now, and it's really hard for me, because I'm a real communicator, and who I am as a person, is all about bringing people together. That's why music is such a great art form, too. It is one of the art forms that can bring you to a time and a place in your life, and a memory, and a smell, and a feeling, you know. Songs just can do that, no matter what color your skin is, or what religion you are, or what beliefs you have. Music is really special for that, and so I guess my little job in this world is just to try to keep making the music that comes to me, and if it brings people hope, like, that really is all I can do.

Well, I think one cool thing, and I was proud of Spotify for that, is they did turn on this feature where you can send direct donations to artists. I don't know if it's live around the world. I always say ‘if you love an artist, just try to find that direct line of communication’. For most people, it's social media pages, which again, there's this corporation in between you and the artist. So I try to go directly to the websites. Buying physical music is always great, if you can buy vinyl or merchandise directly from the artist. And if you have to buy from one of the big platforms, iTunes is still the best, as far as what they pay to the artist. I have my own sort of fan club on my website, and I have, I think, 160 fans that are on there right now. It's one of my favourite things, because we have a direct line of communication and i'll do Zooms like this with the different members.

[Excited] Yes, Sha Sha!

You got it, bro! 2022, yes! My label, The Noise Company, we got the rights to all of my first albums. So, in 2022 we're going to do Sha Sha 20-year anniversary. I have demos, I have voice memos, all from that time, from 2002. That's really cool, it's gonna be fun.

Yeah. I would like to. The Radish stuff is, um… What's kind of weird is we can't find some of the tapes. It's so old, and there were so many different… Like, the record company we were assigned to got bought by another company, and so some of the stuff, we have the rights to do it if we want, but it might only be able to be remastered. I don't even know. It might be a DAT type, this little digital audio tape, and we definitely have some CDs, but to have the actual two-inch tape would be amazing. So that's a little trickier. But all of my Ben Kweller stuff has been archived, luckily. ATO Records, who I signed with years ago, they did a good job at keeping everything organized. But in the Radish days, everything was a little crazier.

Ah, you know, not really. Occasionally we get an e-mail from someone like you, who's, like, ‘oh, can Radish do a reunion?’, or ‘what's going on?’. I'm still friends with John, the drummer. Sometimes we think about it, ‘oh, it would be cool to do a reunion for fun’, but honestly, we don't even know where the bass player is. Brian, who was our main bass player, he's not on social media, we don't have his e-mail or phone number. So I don't even know how we… He's kind of, like, off the grid, you know.

So, we need to track him down. Maybe one day we'll find him and then we'll do a show. I don't know.

My friend Conor Oberst, from Bright Eyes, is someone who I've always loved hanging out with. We've done a lot of touring together and he would be really fun. I would love to collaborate with some hip-hop artists. There's this guy, Trippie Redd, who I really like. I'd love to collab with him. There's some producers… There's sort of a dream collaboration for me, personally, would be Max Martin, who is a very famous songwriter, producer… He did so many huge songs, like Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys, Taylor Swift and stuff. But I just think that he's an incredible scientist, you know. The way that he approaches it, just to be in the studio with him would be so fun for me, just to kind of see his process. Let me look at my phone here, let's see… There's a country artist who I love, Alan Jackson, he's probably only famous in the U.S., maybe, but that would be a dream collaboration for me. My friend Jason Schwartzman, do you know his band, Coconut Records? Check that out, so good. It's like two albums and we've been talking about making something, like putting together a band. Who else? I'd love to do something with Sonic Youth, that'd be amazing. Little Uzi Vert… I've been listening to a lot of rap, so, I want to bring some grungy, indie rock guitar into it, and really… I mean. Dude, I would love to work with Kanye West, even though he's crazy. Clearly, he's insane, but I think he's such a genius musically. Maybe he'll come to Brazil and read this article or see the blog post or something.

That helps, I think. The music business is pretty small, and you can usually get to someone you know. There might be one or two people between you and that person. Sometimes it's just finding an e-mail and reaching out. The best way is, obviously, meeting the person and having a good time, hanging out, then you're, like, ‘hey, let's get together and write some music’. That's the best part, you know. Being on tour together is fun. I remember, years ago, when I used to tour with The Strokes. Julian would come and sleep on my bus for a few days, and then I'd go and hang out on their bus and, you know, just kind of being gypsies. That's really fun. That obviously hasn't happened for years, especially now. But again, you can do it with Zoom. But see, that's kind of tricky, because if I set up a hangout with me and Kanye West on Zoom, he might get pissed off in two seconds and then just hang up and leave.

Exactly!

I wouldn't say I'm in the old guard yet. Nada Surf is still five or ten years older than me. I remember being a teenager when they came out with ‘Popular’, you know, a big hit. I was that still listening to Weezer and Nirvana back then. I remember when I moved to New York, I did a lot of shows with Nada Surf. I think Matthew is such a legend, you know? But I still feel that I'm a little younger.

Exactly, we were in high school when Radish started out. I meet artists now who are much younger than me, and who say ‘oh, my god, you inspired me to make music’, that kind of thing. There's a band in Nashville that do really well, called Cadillac Three, I don't know if you've heard of them, but they have always said that I was an inspiration for them. There’s also Alvvays, who I like. Kevin Morby is a friend of mine now… He has reached out to me because, you know, he said, ‘god, dude, I used to listen to you all the time’, you know. So, it is sweet. Now I'm like, ‘all right, cool, when touring starts let me come open for you’. (laughs)

Well, I remember I loved Fortaleza. I loved the big cities, obviously [he also played in Rio and São Paulo]. I think it was in the São Paulo show where I crowd surfed. I was just playing solo acoustic, and I had my distortion pedal, so I was able to make it really fucking loud. But I just couldn't believe it, some of the shows had mosh pits, you know. For an acoustic show! And I loved Belém, up north, you know, by the rainforest.

Nice! I love it up there, dude! I went to this restaurant, and you're sitting in the restaurant and, like, you're looking out the window and what you see out there, that's all jungle. Like, that's the rain forest, you could go in there and you'll never come back. And I'll never forget the breakfast buffets, with all the fruit.

[Very excited] Amazing fruit, man! Yeah.

Yeah, I did a live stream in August, over the summer, but I had to go to Austin. I did it from a venue that's been closed, The Continental Club, which is one of my favourite clubs in Austin. So I wanted to do it there, so they would get money from the tickets and it was really fun. We had a great time. It was, like, four cameras, so it was really professional, it wasn't just me on the couch, you know, playing my songs. My problem here, where I am now, is my internet is so bad. Right now we're doing pretty good on the Zoom, but some days it's in and out, and so I'm working on getting fiber internet delivered here, which is going to be really expensive, but I'm hoping that I can start doing more live streams. It’s one of those funny things, as a musician you have to have fast internet now, to have a business. So I'm now investing in my internet. I have plans to set up a Twitch account. I was thinking of just turning it on and going live, writing songs and just fucking around here in the studio, whatever. It'll just be part of the journey, maybe, for the next album, where people can kind of be a part of it as I make it.

Yeah, totally. You know, I think about Brazil all the time, it was such a fun tour.
 

AUSTIN, TX - This interview with Black Pistol Fire's guitar player and singer Kevin McKeown was originally published on Scream & Yell in PT-BR. You can read it below in English. 

Yeah, we were supposed to be on the road for the better part of this year. I think we were supposed to be in Europe right now doing festivals. And we were supposed to release our album this year as well, but we’ve had to postpone that. The last few months and the better part of this year have been spent at home, which has been good, being able to spend time with family. But other than that, we’ve been working from home, writing and recording and trying to take advantage of the creative time to work on things from home. I love being on the road, touring and playing for people, but I find it difficult to write music on the road. So, when I’m home, I try to take advantage of that.

Yeah, it was written almost two years ago now. And it was written mostly out of personal experience, having to deal with a tough time and personal decisions that needed to be made, and the risks and consequences of those decisions that were made, but yeah, it had stayed on the shelf for a while. We didn’t know if we were gonna release it in an album or such. But when we started making the new album that song definitely fit in thematically and vibe-wise with the rest of the material. We didn’t exactly know what to do with it, but when the pandemic came about, we decided, wow, this song really resonates quite a bit with what’s going on in the world right now.

We have plans to release it early next year. We’re excited, and we’ve been wanting to release the album for quite some time. This is definitely the album that’s taken the longest for us to make and record, so I hope it shows a lot of different sides of the band, where we’re at musically.

Well, yeah, all of the above almost. A lot of different genres and styles of music. For this album I didn’t want to restrain ourselves to recording music that could only be played live with two people. I wanted to do what was best for the songs. So, if it needed extra instrumentation and bigger arrangements, that was something I didn’t want to shy away from. I wanted to just best serve the songs for the album. As far as guest musicians go, we’ve had some back-up vocal singers to help us on a few tracks, some lead guitar guest appearances on a track or two, and on keyboards, on Hammond organ, we’ve had somebody as well. So, yeah, we’ve definitely moved more out of our comfort zone with this album. It was recorded in many different studios in Nashville and here in Austin. And during the pandemic, we’ve been able to round out the album with a few extra last-minute songs that were recorded from home, and kind of, work some of that stuff out. It was the first time I had to do that, work and record from home, with no people at a studio to help out.

Some of the guests are friends that we know in town, not people from a level of notoriety that the public might know about. I really wanted to collaborate because, sometimes, when you work with just two people for so many years, it’s great because you develop such a strong chemistry and bond musically, but at times you need other people to come into your circle to shake things up in terms of, you know, make sure you don’t fall into a very predictable outcome with the creative and recording processes. I really wanted to seek that out, having someone to play guitar on a track, or keyboards, and create a different dynamic with the sound. That’s really in only a few songs, but I think it definitely brings new life to the tracks.

Yes, we do. It’s called Look Alive. It’s funny, again, we’ve had the title for this album for quite some time now, because it related a lot to me on a personal level. But then the pandemic came, and the title seemed even more appropriate. All these things related to the album were decided before the pandemic, and it’s strange, because it all resonates with what’s going on in the world right now. It’s a big coincidence really.

Yes, a few of them will be on the album. The intent with these singles last year was to have them compiled in a bigger album. So, another four unreleased songs will be included to complete the album as well.

We started working with Jacob on our fourth LP and also with another good friend and engineer, our co-producer, Nick Joswick, who works at 5th Street studios here in Austin. We worked with him on most of the album, but with other people as well, and we also went to Nashville to record with Vance Powell, who has previously recorded The Dead Weather, The Raconteurs, Chris Stapleton, among others. He’s a great engineer, I loved to work with him. So, it was kind of all over the place. And when you continue to work with the same people, it’s because of who you develop a musical relationship with. ‘Oh, I know what you are going for with this vocal sound or with this guitar sound’. Or because they’re there to stay, ‘oh, you’ve done this before, let’s try going in a different direction’. For me, I like to lean on people that I have a history with, so I know how to get to results a little bit quicker, or someone who pulls your back to let you know that you’re repeating yourself or going on the same path you’ve gone before. So yeah, it’s a very interesting album considering how many different people were involved in it. And it’s a very special record for us, we’re excited to get it out.

Uh, it’s a very tricky thing for us to come into, because we are Canadian, and we cannot vote in the United States. We live in Austin, but we can’t vote, so that’s very frustrating considering this is where we live and that we would like to have a say in how our country is going to be shaped and run. So, it becomes difficult for us to want to speak up about any kind of political issues about this country when we don’t have much of a say. But we do encourage everybody to vote, because if you don’t, you don’t have a voice. You can’t make a difference without speaking up. Just because we can’t vote, we would love to have the opportunity to do that. It’s a very important time right now in the history of America and the world, with everything that’s going on in the world. I just encourage people to get out there and vote, that would be my comment on political issues.

Well, this is something that I personally feel very passionate about and I’ve been trying to figure out how to help and contribute to this movement. We’ve been trying to raise awareness as much as we can, using social media as a tool to repost and other things. I want to take actions about issues, and on a much smaller scale than Jeff Tweedy, Gibson guitars (which is my sponsor) donated a Les Paul guitar to me, which I have been hand-painting, and we’re working towards doing a live stream, where all the proceeds and donations will go to the Black Live Matters movement, and also to the frontline healthcare workers. These are all very important issues to us, these are all things that we’ve been trying to find the best avenue… It’s just very hard to navigate through anything during the pandemic: trying to get together to rehearse, or put together a live stream, or do things to raise money. I’m also a father to a two-year-old. At home, sometimes the days can go by like a blink of an eye. 

(Laughs) So, I constantly wrestle with the idea of like, ‘oh, man, I’ve been working on this for two months and I still need to get around to this, and I need to get around to that’, so I’ve been trying to give myself a little bit of grace, like, ‘ok, so I’m slowly chipping away when I get some time to work on music, or finish projects…’ But back to what you were saying, yes, those types of issues and movements are extremely important to us, because what’s happening right now is what is going to spark change. I think what Jeff Tweedy is doing is amazing work and we are hopefully going to be able to contribute more soon.

It’s hard to know what is gonna happen. We have shows on the books for the next year and we hope to go on tour. But I don’t know if that’s really going to happen. We are going to hopefully release this album early next year, and we would love to get on the road and perform in front of fans and play in places that we’ve never been before. But right now we’re at the mercy of what lies ahead of how venues are going to continue, and even if people will want to go to shows again, due to the fact of how severe things progress or start to subside. Right now, the only thing we can do is stay safe and stay sane, working on music as much as we can from home, so when the gates open up again we’ll have plenty of new material to give fans.

Yes, me too. We would love to get to Brazil, that’s definitely on our bucket list. We hope to see you guys soon.

Cercada de polêmicas, a autobiografia do diretor americano Woody Allen foi lançada nos Estados Unidos em maio de 2020 e tem previsão de chegar ao mercado brasileiro nos próximos meses. Escrevi sobre o livro para o Scream & Yell. Leia um trecho da resenha abaixo.

Para conferir a versão integral da resenha, acesse o texto no Scream & Yell.

SAN PEDRO, CA — Mike Watt is one of the world's greatest all-time bassists. In this interview, originally published on Scream & Yell, he discusses his first solo record, "Ball-Hog or Tugboat?", released in 1995. He also talks about Eddie Vedder, Nels Cline, Jeff Tweedy and Bob Pollard, among others.

So, I wanted to discuss with you the 25th anniversary of your debut solo album “Ball-Hog or Tugboat?”, which was released on February 28, 1995. Does it feel like it’s been that long?

Well, I’ 62 years old. I was in my late thirties. So, I wasn’t that young… But yeah, I do remember it. When I think back about this record, it definitely feels like it was kind of a sea change in my life. Before that album I mainly had done Minutemen and fIREHOSE. So, when I go do this record, which is really funny that it’s called a solo record, cause there’s 48 people on it, but… I’m not working on the trio anymore. There’s 17 different bands on the record. With D Boon I would bring all my music to him, and with Edward I did that too. I remember bringing Edward “Piss-Bottle Man” and he thought, “well, maybe this isn’t a song for this band”. So that’s when I started thinking about “Ball-Hog or Tugboat”. Just the idea of the bass player knowing the song and having other people come in. Traditionally the bass player is the last to be brought on except maybe in R&B and funk music. So, that’s where the title comes from. Am I gonna be the guy that brings this together, or is it gonna be just, you know what I mean, like a “fake lead guitar bass”, which I don’t really think is what bass is. Bass is not really guitar, it’s got strings like a guitar, but it’s more like a drum set, in my opinion. Specially the notes, they are down there with the kickdrum and the toms. So I used the metaphor of wrestling, like the studio was kind of a wrestling ring, and I called my friends up, see if they wanted to come play with me and do this record. It was three different towns, pretty spontaneous, it was done really quick. I wanted it to be a record that stand on its own. I didn’t want it to be so much hype, or people making a big deal about names of some of these people. I didn’t use managers or anything, I just called people up and did this for a little bit. And it got me to what I am doing nowadays. So, looking back, it was a really important record for me.

When you wrote songs like “Against the 70s”, for example, did you write it with Eddie Vedder in mind to be the singer on the record? Or “Chinese Firedrill”, for that matter, did you write it thinking of adding Frank Black’s vocals to it?

No, of course not. I didn’t know who was gonna be available for this. There wasn’t hardly any practice, all this stuff was done very spontaneously in the studio. I did have a few songs, but I felt if the bass player knew how to play them, anyone could come and play drums or guitar or sing. So I showed it to them right there in the studio. Nels Cline, I did a little practice with him. There’s a song on the record, “Coincidence is Either Hit or Miss”, that’s kind of what it was, you know?

How did the idea of reuniting so many different musicians come together? Did you invite them or they were the ones who approached you to record together? I imagine many, if not all of them, were big fans of your previous work on the Minutemen and fIREHOSE.

No, it was my idea, my record. I asked them. The only one who approached me was Kathleen Hannah, when it was almost done. She heard about it and asked to be on it. Like I said, I wrote “Piss-Bottle Man” and brought it to Edward, in fIREHOSE. There’s no way I wrote that for Evan Dando. But I thought Evan would be kind of good to do that tune. You know, that was a strange year, 1994. fIREHOSE broke up, the first week or two of the year, and I did not tour, the first year I did not tour since the Minutemen days, so, it was kind of unusual. So I thought of doing the record, but I never thought about touring. Cause there was too many people on it. That was David’s (Grohl) idea, he called me up, he said he and Ed (Vedder) would be my band, they had their own bands who could open the show, it was all very spontaneous, there was no strategy behind it, or plans… I thought of it as the old bebop days, when people just jammed together, no big stuff, setting it all up, and no expectations, no preconceptions of the way it should be, just let the freak flag fly.

So, you guys were travelling on a van and playing every night, which was the punk thing to do. However, many of your fans didn’t really appreciate you playing with rock stars. People were throwing coins and all kinds of things at you, specially Eddie, right? How did you guys deal with that situation back then?

I’ve gotten stuff thrown at me a lot of times before, when the Minutemen open up for Black Flag and then when I opened up for Primus. But I think what you are talking about is… Eddie got money thrown at him. Those weren’t my fans, those were Pearl Jam fans! You know about this shit. Who’s the guy who shot John Lennon?

Mark David Chapman.

Yeah, he’s wearing a fucking name tag! These guys are like this. It’s this love/hate thing. That was so fucking weird. When I saw this teenager throwing money at Ed, and his t-shirt said “Fuck you, Eddie”, I just thought, “what’s wrong with you?”. You’ve never been to a Mike Watt gig, you’re not a Mike Watt supporter. You just want to tell your friend the next day in school that you did this stupid shit. That was something I never had to deal with in tours before, cause I come from the underground and a small scene. But what can I do about that? They just come to the gig, they’re assholes.

It’s interesting to hear this, because I always thought it was your fans reacting to you playing with these famous guys from mainstream bands.

Well, not really. I guess, yeah, they were more mainstream than me at the time, but they were not New Kids on the Block. And Dave was just starting his new band at the time, and Eddie was playing with this weird, experimental band, where he was playing drums. He wasn’t doing what he was known for. And even when playing with me, he was mostly playing guitar. So these guys weren’t doing what they regularly do. It was kind of different, it wasn’t so mainstream, but what happened is that mainstream attitude came in, all this hype and phony shit, yeah that was terrible. But, you know, Dave was in a band called Scream. And Eddie had played in a band before called Bad Radio. So they knew about all these stuff, but you’re right, there was some popularity right? But that shit’s terrible, come on, it’s fucking Hitler shit. But it was something I didn’t really foresee, cause I never had to deal with that kind of fame before. That was no Mike Watt fan! I hope no Mike Watt fan ever does stupid shit like that. But that shit happens, there’s this mentality, when you get kind of popular, the scene becomes different, people like things because other people like things, they don’t trust their own judgement. So you’re not dealing with open minded people, you’re dealing with a herd, or a bunch of cows. People are not in their best moment. So that was not a good part of the tour. But playing with those guys, we only had a couple days of practice. And I thought that was pretty amazing to pull that off. And Pat Smear, I mean, Jesus Christ. Pat Smear was a hero of Minutemen, he was in The Germs. That’s what I found interesting, these guys could fucking play their asses off. In just a couple days we put together a whole fucking tour, did this thing, even though there were some problems with this phoniness and hype shit, as far as playing together, you know, getting together songs and making a gig, I thought it was pretty successful. And I was pretty amazed, specially coming from where I did, where I never… This was kind of a different thing for me. It was scary, exciting scary. I don’t look back on the other stuff, I can only imagine what Ed felt. I hope those guys grew out of that stuff. And also there was this sickness that came around, a flu. We were travelling on a van, but that’s what we always do. I had my van, the other bands had their vans, maybe that’s why I didn’t get sick. But anyway, they were champions, they were soldiers, they played so fucking good. Actually, a few years ago we released one of the shows from this tour as a live record. The Chicago one. Man, that tape had been around, cause the Chicago Metro always record their gigs. So, when the record company asked me about it I said, well, I’ll ask Dave and Ed and Pat. When I listened to it, I thought there were going to be a lot more mistakes. I’m really grateful to them guys.

You have a few covers on the record as well, such as Sonic Youth’s “Tuff Gnarl”, where you actually had most of the band to play it with you on your record. Why did you choose that specific Sonic Youth song to cover?

Cause I like it! You need a better reason? I think the words for that song are some of Thurston’s (Moore) best words. I got J. (Mascis) to play drums on that song, but J. jumped off in the middle. That’s why you don’t hear any drums in the middle. So Steve (Shelley) was there and he jumped on. I picked that song, also to me the music is kind of symphonic, and Nels Cline… I actually did it for Nels Cline and Carla Bozulich, who always wanted to sing it. I thought we could do a great version and make it justice, give it a new meaning. But I think J. did really good too, kind of Keith Moon drums. Until the jumped off of it. (laughs)

What’s the story behind “Hearbeat”, specially the lyrics?

This song was going to be an instrumental. But it was like 45 guys on the record and I thought, “man, I gotta have more women on this”. So I got Carla. Petra and her sisters did some singing, played some violin… I asked Tifanny, a friend of J. Mascis, if she would sing. Actually, this song is made up of a Dos song, and a song I’ve written for the Minutemen, I put them up together. Anyway, the one person who asked to be part of this project was Kathleen Hannah. So, on this song, Tifanny sings the words that I wrote, and the words that Kathleen Hannah, I guess, recited, those are her words. I was in New York City, and I was already down with the studio. Thurston was with us. And he said: “You know what, we can use my answering machine, from the studio”. So, he had Kathleen call him up and leave the message you can hear in the song. So, that’s the recording. It’s not a real message, she makes up this… Some of that stuff is very real, but some of that is made up, for sure. That’s the way Kathleen is, she mixes up things together, but the impression you get by listening to that, is like she doesn’t want to be on the record. But that’s the complete opposite of the reality, she wanted to be on the record, she asked me to. But that’s what you can do with records, you can mess up with reality. I have been asked a lot about that. That’s the story. Kathleen wanted to be on the record, she was. You know, her husband’s on there. Mike D. They’ve been married 26 years, she told me that I had something to do with it. But come on, I was just trying to make a record. The same thing happened to Nels Cline and Yuka Honda. I made a record, you know, usually when I make projects, people don’t marry each other, but sometimes it happens. (laughs)

One of the musician’s that has the most presence on the record is Nels Cline. He probably wasn’t one of the more well-known guys back then, but after he joined Wilco, certainly a more mainstream audience was able to get to know him better. He also played with you on the second leg of that tour. Do you still play with him often?

I gotta tell you, Jeff Tweedy is the boss of Wilco. He played bass in a band from St. Louis, it was called…

Uncle Tupelo.

Yes, Uncle Tupelo. They even had a song called D. Boon

He’s a big fan of yours.

After D. Boon got killed they wrote a song for him, so I knew him a little bit. But I’m really grateful to him hiring Nels Cline to be in his band, cause Nels has always done experimental wild music, and this way he can still do that, and still make a living working for Mr. Tweedy. So that subsidizes his experimental side, you know? Specially since Nels Cline moved to New York City, after he married Yuka Honda (from the band Cibo Matto). There’s a much more free jazz open experimental scene there. He and his brother Alex tried to get it going here in So Cal for a long time but people wouldn’t support it. There it’s really huge. I do still play with him, but you’re right. He started getting some attention, but the first time he got attention was when he played on my first opera, “Contemplating the Engine Room” (1997), maybe not so much with critics or the press, but other musicians. A lot of people were asking me about this guy playing guitar. And so I ended up making albums with these guys. I said: “You wanna know Nels Cline? Just play with him!” We just set up the project. For years, he just came to the studio and improvised. He’s a great listener. Also, with the internet now we can collaborate more easily than in the old days. Nels has always made himself very available to me. A great guy like that. A very generous, open guy. He’s one of the positive things I like about the music scene. There’s so much phoniness and bullshit, and then you got a guy like Nels Cline, who’s just the opposite of all of that.

Floored by Four: Nels Cline, Dougie Bowne, Mike Watt and Yuka Honda / Howlin' Wuelf Media

There is also a Brazilian connection on the record, since Mario Caldato is on the closing track “Coincidence is Either Hit or Miss”. How did you get to know him?

Well, Mario Caldato, he was sound man for the Beasties. Yeah, that connection was through the Beastie Boys. I opened up for them, Check Your Head Tour, I think in 92. It’s when they started playing their instruments again, really good tour. Horowitz came on stage and played with us, this was fIREHOSE, one of our last tours. We had a problem with people throwing stuff at us. Actually, they had problems too, people wanted them just to rap and not play their instruments. This is the way it gets, things get a little knucklehead, when things get a little “less underground”. It’s pretty fucking stupid.

Are there any leftovers from that recording session? And do you have plans to release a reissue of that album in celebration of its anniversary?

Just the seven inches, the b-sides. We released three seven inches, with b-sides. There are no plans to rerelease the album. I don’t think that would be right. It’s still on sale. I thought the best way to redo it was with the live record we released a few years ago. We ended up doing the vinyl, cause back then we just did the CD. So we did a blue vinyl, it was deluxe enough, I don’t think there’s anything else to do without being exploitive about it.

So, you played with 48 different musicians on this record and a lot more during your career. Is there anyone you still haven’t worked with that you’d like to get together and play?

Yeah, Bob Mould.

Wow.

I’ve always wanted to do something with Bob.

Yeah, that would sound amazing.

There’s another Bob. Bob Pollard.

Wow!

Guided By Voices, right?

That would also be great.

Both of those guys, they got such a vision of their own. I would also like to, instead of repackaging the wrestling record, I would like to do another one, Leonardo.

Yeah, please do.

Only, I would do it in Cleveland. Just with Cleveland musicians. You know, the town where Pere Ubu came from. I really would like to do that. With guys from Pere Ubu, like Tom Herman, Scott Krauss, John Petkovic, from Cobra Verde, there’s quite a few musicians in Cleveland with whom I’d love to do a miniature version of “Ball-Hog or Tugboat?”.

You can make an exception for Bob Pollard, since he’s from the same state…

Yeah, he’d have to come visit. Yeah, I love his genius, he’s so prolific, oh my God.  You know, he just played here in downtown LA in the New Year’s. One hundred songs, a five-hour gig.

He probably played all the songs he wrote that week.

That day! (laughter) He’s amazing.

You came to Brazil in 2005 with Iggy Pop and the Stooges, right? Any memories from that experience that you’d like to share?

Three times in Brazil, two times with The Stooges. One was the James Williamson Stooges and the other was Ron Asheton Stooges. And another time I came to Brazil was with The Missingmen. So, all three times were São Paulo, and two of them also Rio. I liked it a lot. But I still have to know more of the country. Rio and São Paulo are very different towns, but they’re kind of close to each other. (laughs)