SHEARWATER: FREE AS A BIRD
Jun 13, 2008
Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg ponders life after his group’s Great Leap forward.
By JOHN SCHACHT
In 2006 Shearwater, once a low-key side project for Okkervil River members Jonathan Meiburg and Will Sheff, finally made its Great Leap Forward with the release of the critically acclaimed Palo Santo. The band then re-recorded the album, with Matador reissuing it last year as an expanded double-disc edition, ultimately moving the moonlighting gig into the limelight and forever altering Shearwater’s profile. Sheff subsequently bowed out to concentrate on Okkervil, and while Meiburg remains a member of that band, Shearwater is his full-time focus – and lucky for us.
Further refining Palo Santo’s haunting drama, Meiburg has added strings, reeds and brass to the brand new Rook to create a more organic Shearwater sound. The fresh arrangements result in another wistful and slightly sinister set, rich in naturalistic imagery (Meiburg is an ornithologist) that portends the coming showdown between man and nature. Rook’s songs can be as explosive as volcanic eruptions or as ephemeral as vanishing species, but whichever direction they take Meiburg’s soaring soprano is up to their challenges.
BLURT chatted with Meiburg via phone at his Austin home, covering a host of topics ranging from Rook’s cover art and the books of Peter Matthiessen to the record’s arrangements, Austin’s flocks of Great-tailed Grackles, and Meiburg’s “un-rock” voice.
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Let’s start with Rook’s affecting cover art; this is one of those album covers that stop you in your tracks. How did you hook up with the design team of Kahn & Selesnick?
JONATHAN MEIBURG: I saw an illustration that they’d done for their Eisbergfreistadt exhibition in the back of a Harpers about six or seven months ago, it was a little tiny sliver of a thing; they had a polar bear sitting on a kayak on an iceberg. There was something both so fanciful and imaginative, and so sad, but definitely funny, about it that I thought: “Who did this? Maybe these guys would be fun to work with.” So I got in touch with them and it turns out they’d never done a record cover before. It turned out later we had friends in common, which I didn’t know. But they loved our music, and I loved their artwork the more of it I saw. I would say it’s been the easiest and most enjoyable artistic relationship I’ve ever had with anyone. You’ll suggest something and they’ll do it and it’ll be way better than you ever thought.
They create these sort of themed exhibitions. The idea behind Eisbergfreistadt is this little state that’s created somewhere in Eastern Europe on the Baltic Sea in the ‘20s when this iceberg crashes into the mainland and people create a little state on it and it has a currency and everything, and of course it melts away. They made a deck of playing cards, and the suits are brambles, icebergs, some sort of industrial chimneys, and birds. And the king of each one of these suits is really strange looking, and they wanted to do a large scale version of all of the kings at some point, they’d been tossing around the idea, and when we were discussing the album -- I’d sent them the demos -- they said, “Why don’t we do a king of birds image?” So they did and that’s what the cover is. I trusted them so completely, and when they came up with that I was 100 percent delighted.
How did they do it?
All I’ll say is that it’s a photograph, and that it took a lot of time. It’s one of those things that if I told you exactly how they did it it’d take some of the fun out of it.
Yeah, I guess it’s like a magic trick; you’re better off not knowing. But it certainly fits with the record’s visceral feel – how much does having a naturalist background help with the imagery in the lyrics?
It helps me in my life in general. But I don’t go out looking at birds and start immediately thinking of birds in my songs or anything. Certainly, when I’m trying to write songs you have to get your head into a certain place, and often thinking about the natural world is a really good place to start. I tried to throw a few more birds and animals and landscapes into this record than I’d done before, because I really care about it. So as I sort of carved chunks away from the thing and started to see what the record actually was about and what the songs were going to be, I could see these themes emerging.
I’ve been lucky enough in the course of the research I’ve done to have visited some places that really are as close to the ancient world, or the world before there were human beings, as you can get. And the contrast between that world and the one that we live in most of the time now is extremely striking and very haunting – because it’s still here, but only just barely. There are little fragments of it that are easy to miss in your everyday life. You don’t want to over-romanticize it or get too nostalgic about it because the world has done nothing but change since it cooled, but at the same time there’s this thing of absolutely immeasurable value and meaning that’s just disappearing from the world.
Is that why you choose the rook, a bird that’s often considered in folklore a harbinger of bad times?
In that song in particular, you have some species of birds dropping out of the sky and dying while others are feasting on their bodies, and that’s a thing that you see all the time in the natural world: whenever there’s a vacuum, something else will arrive to fill it, often in ways that you couldn’t anticipate or that are really alarming. Like here in Austin we have Great-tailed Grackles which are self-introduced from Central America, thousands upon thousands of them, and they’re really fascinating birds: They’re very intelligent, they’re very funny, and they have figured out how to deal with us. They know that we’re the best food source there is. If you go out and mow your lawn, there’ll be a group of them following you around eating the bugs out of your lawn as you mow it. And they’ll eat the food out of your dog’s bowl if you leave it outside. They’re very attractive and interesting animals, but there’s something kind of monolithic about them – because when there’s a lot Grackles about, there’s almost no other species of birds around, anywhere. If I go out to a more undeveloped area I’ll see 60 or 70 different species of birds; but if I go downtown I’ll see about three. People feel a little uneasy about them. There’s a little Hitchcock-ian feeling about big clouds of Grackles downtown. People always get very uneasy when animals behave in some other fashion from the way we think they’re supposed to, especially when they start interacting with us in a way that benefits them, and not us. And most of all, even on a subconscious level, they remind us ourselves, because that’s what humans do, too; we take over everything. Never has there been such a successful primate – ever.
I don’t know if you saw that story, but from genetic evidence they think that human population might’ve gone down to 2,000 people at one point. I have a running argument with friends about this — isn’t there some part of you that wants to tip the balance all the way over and have us just wink out at that point? Things would be so different – there’s a part of me that certainly feels like it would be better without us here.
It does seem like the herd’s going to get culled in some fashion, given the over-population and global warming, etcetera…
Yeah, that’s the frustrating thing about that – we could do this the easy way or the hard way; which would you prefer? Because it’s really not a choice. But then you start feeling terrified all the time, and that doesn’t do anyone any particular good either.
Were these some of the themes you were exploring here?
Yeah, absolutely. In a way, it’s just the oldest story there is; the old world is gone, and it’s not coming back, and the new world is one that you might not recognize or be able to cope with. A lot of the reason why we have religions is to cope with that. To try and sort of hang onto the old world and make sense of the new one – even though that may be an impossible thing to do. I don’t mean for the album to be one long lament, exactly, even though parts of it are that way. It was also just my attempt to make peace with that a little bit.
I take it that’s why a song like “Snow Leopard” sort of speaks for itself?
There was some spectacular footage of them in that “Planet Earth” series, it took them like three years to get it – people almost never see this animal. It lives in the Himalayas and in places like Northern Pakistan. But also I was thinking of the book (The Snow Leopard) by Peter Matthiessen, about the trip that he took into Northern Nepal in the early ‘70s. I read almost everything he’s ever written last year; just after I read The Snow Leopard I got completely fixated on his writing. I even tried to get him to do the bio or the liner notes for the record. I did get in touch in with him, but I think he was perplexed – “Who is this? What do you want? Leave me alone.”
But that song in particular is partly about the feeling that on the one hand the only way to escape feeling trapped in your own situation, in your own species, in your own moment, in your own consciousness, is to do it with your mind somehow, but on the other hand the impossibility of doing that, too. You can’t become inhuman, you just are what you are. In that song I wanted this climbing feel to it, this sort of unresolved feeling, it keeps going back to the same thing over and over again – that figure, they’re sixth figures (plays piano) – I like that because it feels like it never quite resolves, it never comes to the end, it just keeps going up and up and up, like those Escher drawings with the Monks going round.
“I Was A Cloud” seems to have a similar construction, especially on the piano outro; did you come up with that?
Howard [Draper] played that figure, and it’s really one of my favorite things on the record. I like it a lot. It’s a beautiful little line. I have the songs, mostly the structures and chords and things, pretty well mapped out when we start working on them as a group.
Let’s talk about that with regard to Rook. You opted for woods and strings on this record, but the ensemble feel doesn’t overwhelm the listener; you don’t feel like you’re listening to chamber pop...
Yeah, I feel like there are so many records now where it’s lots of people playing lots of instruments all the time, it just gives me a headache. So even though there are lots of people on Rook, it doesn’t feel real thick or crowded – I really wanted to avoid that, and I felt like we did succeed at that. So the strings are just little gusts that come in and then wander away; they just reinforce things but don’t make grand statements for the most part.
We once talked about Brian Beattie’s production for Okkervil River — how it was like “going to arrangement school,” as you put it. Has that factored into Rook?
You make enough records, hopefully you start to learn at least what the really bad ideas are. Brian and I have some sayings: “sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing”; “it doesn’t have to be good to be good”; “sometimes being good is bad”; “sometimes it’s bad to be good.” We’ve all sort of learned that stuff over time. The thing that’s wonderful about writing for the strings and woodwinds is that there are a lot of rules in place of orchestration and stuff, just because people have been doing that for a while, and they’ve noticed that, “hey, if you pair an oboe with this instrument, that instrument disappears.” Or, “don’t put this with this, however, this with this is a wonderful combination.” You’d like to just throw all the rules out the window and go, “no, I’m going to do it all new,” but really, there’s something very nice about adhering to some rules of counterpoint -- or arrangements or pairing of instruments -- that are really very satisfying. The song “Home Life,” we worked and worked and worked on that arrangement and I was really happy with how it came out in the end – it has sort of an old-fashioned feel to it.
There’s a wonderful image of someone tracing their finger over a spinning globe; how’d that come about?
I used to do that when I was a kid, because we had this globe at my parent’s house that had raised surfaces for the mountains, so you could run your fingers over the Himalayas and go, “Wow, that’s really big. Something’s really going on over there.” But then I could spin the globe back and see Baltimore, Maryland, where we were, just crammed up into Chesapeake Bay, this tiny little thing. But I just couldn’t get enough of that, the idea that all this stuff actually existed. And there I was in relation to the rest of it.
You mentioned earlier about the remote places you’d been, and I read about your research trip to the Galapagos – I take it that that’s part of the idea of “Home Life,” the contrast of where we are now and where we used to be in our natural state?
Yeah, you can think of it in a lot of those ways. I think of home life as the most precious thing there is. That’s what people want more than any other thing, and it’s so elusive, and often slippery in its definition, but yet you know it when you find it. The great terror is that you might go on living after your home is gone – like after there’s no way to get back to it or make a new one. It’s more frightening than the idea that the world will end.
You could equate it to a death versus the death of a relationship, where the loved one just goes on without you…
Yeah, that’s the worst! I’m sorry to be so heavy on a Thursday morning, but a lot of that’s in there in that song – but that’s really as far as I want to go with that.
Okay, let’s switch topics – do you suffer stage fright, as I read somewhere?
Yeah, every time. But luckily there’s no stopping it, so you have no choice. I always think of that scene in Apocalypse Now, in the beach landing section, there’s a helicopter landing on the beach and there’s a soldier in the doorway yelling “I’m not going! I’m not going” and then somebody yanks him out of the helicopter. It’s kind of like that; you’re going, it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. It’s part of why I prefer doing music as opposed to writing; with writing it’s a little too easy to escape sometimes.
How so?
Well, it’s just you. With music you’ve got your band and your label and your publicist and all these people to answer to, and you can’t let them down even if you don’t feel up to it.
Much is written about your voice; did you have any classical voice training?
I sang in the church choir. We went to these Episcopal churches, and so I was trained early on in that in terms of vocal technique. Although I learned a lot from other things, or had to unlearn, I should say. Because I learned to sing very straight-toned and that choir boy sound that you think of – which is very nice if you’re trying to blend your voice with lots of other people, but not so good at conveying those subtle shades of emotion -- you sort of sing like this lonely robot, so I’ve had to really work on that. But it’s funny, even in the last two weeks I feel like I’ve learned things about singing in practicing with the band. They always tell me, “Lift your palate,” and I always thought, “What does that mean?” And the other day it clicked — “that’s what that means” — and suddenly I got two or three more notes in the higher part of my voice.
It’s interesting you say you’re still learning about singing, because one of my favorite lines is that Silver Jews’ one…
“All my favorite singers couldn’t sing.” He’s right, of course. You don’t have to be able to sing in this classical way to be able to be expressive. And there’s more to it than that. I thought it would be fun to try with my own voice – because I can’t go back and unlearn all this stuff completely – to deal with what I’ve got, because I have a very “un-rock” voice. To try and figure out how to make music that makes that work, rather than being a liability.
So it’s helped determine the sounds of the songs themselves?
Absolutely. No question. I’ve been getting better about writing songs I can actually sing, too. It’s easy to write songs that are too much for your voice. Like Palo Santo, it’s really hard to sing that whole album, it completely wears me out doing it. Rook is actually much easier.
Why was Palo Santo harder?
There’s a lot more of the shouting and screaming kind of stuff right at the top edge of that particular part of my range. I’ve only got so many of those notes in me. Not the real high ones, but the ones that are sort of in the middle when you’re singing full-voice – those are the ones that are killers.
Speaking of Palo Santo, what led to the re-release of that record so quickly?
We re-recorded Palo Santo partly because we felt our own performances weren’t what they could have been – it had been bugging us, like having a rock in your shoe. We’d played those songs a bunch of times after the record came out and felt there’s really something in here that we failed to capture in our performances. It was weird, like going back in time and trying to fix something you’d done in the past, which made for a little bit of an uncomfortable feeling. But everybody was pleased with the result. You don’t usually get to go back. I think of the re-release as definitely the definitive version of it. We re-recorded about half the record from scratch, then the other half we took from the other version and re-mastered that.
Your first tour for Rook is upcoming, and you’re doing a couple dates with a string quartet and winds and reeds, but that’s not going to be case most of the time is it?
No, but it’ll be five or six people. It sounds really good; we’ve just been practicing with that lineup the last couple weeks. Actually, I wouldn’t want to have all those players all the time because then you’re stuck doing things a very certain way. It’s like driving a train as opposed to a bicycle; there’s no way to make corrections or do things differently, it’s all got to happen exactly the same way. The fewer people you have the more nimble you can be.
Are you using keys to recreate some of the chamber sounds?
No, I don’t like to use anything that sounds phony. So, we’re just doing different arrangements. I’ve seen people try to address that in different ways, I’ve seen bands even have the sound guys trigger samples while they’re playing. It’s always so distracting and dumb-seeming, it just turns it into karaoke. I think that recorded music and live music are very different in the way that you experience them, and the immediacy of the live show can make up for a lot of things that are present on the recording, and vice versa. Sometimes you get to do special things on the recording that you wouldn’t have to do if you were just playing it live for people to keep it interesting. Because with recording, the sounds are just going to be coming out of these two little boxes, but live you’re right there. And just the fact of being there, which I think counts for a whole lot.
If you’ve ever been to a show and think “God, that was great,” and then you hear a recording of it later and you’re like, “Oh, that wasn’t that good” – it’s not that your first reaction was wrong. It was just that there was a lot more going on than just the sounds coming from the stage.
Shearwater’s Rook was released by Matador on June 3.
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