The Brendan Hines - Snapshots from an Unwritten Film

interview by Gabriele Benzing

He started writing songs in a New York apartment, but it was in the solitude of Los Angeles movie theaters that he learned the craft of songwriter. Brendan Hines considers himself first and foremost an actor, but he had already shown his musical talent even before becoming known for the TV series "Lie To Me". His debut album, "Good For You Know Who", dates back to 2008. Now Hines presents his second work, "Small Mistakes": an intimate, essential collection of songs that reveals Hines's more reflective side – and his own personal take on maturity.

Let's talk about the beginnings of your career. Which decision came first: becoming an actor or becoming a musician?

I never consciously made this decision. I started playing trombone in middle school. I started acting in high school, because it was the only way I had of hanging out with girls.

But when I got to that point where you start thinking about how you're going to spend most of your life and how you plan to earn a living, I automatically gravitated toward acting, because I felt it was what I was best at. I left Baltimore for New York, acted in dozens and dozens of shows, and did every kind of crappy temp job, because those shows certainly weren't going to pay the rent. But I never thought about doing anything else. It was the closest thing to a talent I had. More or less it still is.

So when I finally got my first real job as an actor (a terrible, terrible indie film called "Ordinary Sinner", don't rent it) I blew through the nearly $2,500 I'd earned by not working for a good three or four months, just sitting in my apartment basically trying to get better at guitar and learn fingerpicking by drinking and watching my friend Tyler, who's a great guitarist. It worked, I got a lot better, I ran out of money, and I never had another paid acting job for the rest of the time I spent in New York. By that point I'd gotten good enough to get bored just singing other people's songs. So I started writing my own. It's really a waste to be broke, depressed and alone in New York and not write something.

A few years later I moved to Los Angeles, and most of the people I met early on were first-rate songwriters; my social life was very music-centric. I still wasn't interested in music as a career, though. But I was writing quite a bit, and then I started playing shows around town. Later I put a band together, and before I knew it music had filled every moment I wasn't spending acting.

In the bio on your website you wrote that you were raised by "an ex-nun and an ex-priest who fled Brooklyn and the Church to get married and teach philosophy". What influence has your family had on your artistic personality?

Mostly it made me understand the value of humor and literature. My parents are both second-generation Irish from the working class and were teachers in Brooklyn. The art of storytelling was always important to them. My father could quote endless amounts of poetry, Irish folk music, philosophy, Shakespeare and Latin. And he basically bribed us to memorize poems or monologues he loved. The first time I ever earned money for a performance of any kind was when my father gave me ten dollars to memorize the St. Crispin's Day speech from "Henry V". So we grew up in a house where there was a lot of love for books, music and theater. Listening to records after dinner was always a pretty exciting thing for me. Whether it was the Clancy Brothers or Kenny Rogers or Kris Kristofferson or Richard Burton's 1964 "Hamlet" LP, it was a great incentive to behave.

How did your musical project take shape? Why did you choose to use your own name as the "brand" for your band?

Another decision I didn't consciously make. When I started performing solo I went by Brendan Hines. When my friends Kristen Toedtman and Al Sgro started backing me up, we called ourselves "The Fucking Gentlemen" or "Brendan Hines And The Fucking Gentlemen". But it sounded like the name of a joke band, so I kept the "The" and my name to denote that I was playing with a group. When people started referring to me in conversation as "The Brendan Hines" I knew I was screwed. And by screwed I mean branded.

In one of the standout tracks on your debut album, "Miss New York", you talk about Los Angeles from a New Yorker's point of view. Do you think the places you live have an influence on your music?

I could go on about this forever. Yes, they have an influence on me. I suspect I would never have started writing and performing seriously if I hadn't moved to Los Angeles and met the incredible musicians, songwriters and aficionados I found there. I barely knew any songwriters when I lived in New York. It just wasn't my world.

On top of that, I have an obsession with lyrics and stories. And obviously different cities tell different stories. But I think that, depending on where you live and what kind of person you are, places can also encourage or discourage creative efforts. New York, for me, was in a way on the discouraging side of that equation. Los Angeles is where I finally started playing songs in front of people.

I moved there in 2003 and knew only a handful of people. I didn't know the city at all and hadn't driven much in the previous five years. I complained the whole time about wanting to go back to New York. New York was familiar, easy and sociable, and I'd never had much success there, so I wasn't afraid of failing because that was already the case. L.A. was big, bright, depressing and lonely, and the thing that got me through the first couple of years there more than anything was the amount of time I spent alone in movie theaters. Especially the "New Beverly" and the "Egyptian Theater" (home of the "American Cinematheque"). They had, and still have, incredible programming. You can just bounce back and forth between these theaters every night and never get bored. If you're a film nerd, that is. So the sheer amount of old, obscure films and the quality of storytelling and performance completely absorbed me. I've always been obsessed with movies, but being a newcomer in a city with such reverence for its cinematic history, combined with my loneliness and the amount of time I spent in the dark, stoked me creatively. My lyrics have been inspired and influenced by great film dialogue as much as, if not more than, by any songwriter. I've always wanted to make films, but writing songs is a kind of cheap, noble, not entirely dissimilar alternative.

Anyway, there are plenty of advantages to the anonymity of being a newcomer.

Your new album is called "Small Mistakes". Can you tell us something about this title? Do you think it's possible to learn from your mistakes?

I spent a good chunk of my twenties making mistakes just for the sake of making them. Mistakes and crappy choices usually make for better stories. But at a certain point I had to scale them down from big and horrible to just small and stupid. That's my version of maturity.

There's a 1974 film called Il mediatore. I saw it years ago at the "Egyptian". It was written by Eric Roth. It's a kind of perfect genre film. Bo Hopkins has a fantastic line that kept coming to mind while I was working on this record: "Old enough to have learned the lesson, young enough to do it again."

What do you think is the difference between your debut album and the new record?

Good For You Know Who is a "breakup record". I wrote most of the songs over the course of a few months after a particularly nasty and unexpected split, and after the stupid way I dealt with it. It's a cheeky, bitter, sarcastic, angry post-love record. It's mostly aimed outward. They're basically "look what you did to me" songs.

Small Mistakes doesn't have that anger in it. It doesn't even have that dialogue. For the most part it's made up of "look what you did to yourself" songs.

The Butcher's Son is an elegy for my father, who passed away a few years ago. That was his nickname back in seminary. He wasn't actually a butcher's son, he was a phenomenal pool player; they called him "the butcher's son" because he could "cut" the ball damn well.

Could've Sworn is probably the first real love song I've ever written.

Cahuenga is a track in the vein of Top Shelf (from my first album) about drinking too much, but with less partying involved.

Musically, it's a quieter record than the previous one. It's intimate, both in sound and in the stories. There's some guitar, a couple of vocals, some keyboards, and the bare minimum of percussion. If Good For You Know Who is an album to listen to before going out to get drunk or have sex or do something stupid, Small Mistakes might be the album to listen to the morning after, or the week after, to remind yourself of the consequences.

What was it like recording Small Mistakes?

It was easy.

Lie To Me had just been cancelled, so all of a sudden I had a lot of free time on my hands. We recorded it at (producer) Al Sgro's studio in Los Angeles, which looks like the set of an old western saloon. It's dark, all wood, full of old organs, synths, guitars and shakers.

I started by recording all the songs on my own with just my guitar. Then we set them aside for a few weeks, because I was shooting Scandal. Having a bit of distance from those recordings actually turned out to be useful; being able to think about them without being too fixated on them. The challenge was not to overwhelm the intimacy of those recordings or of the lyrics.

Then Kristen Toedtman came in and sang her gorgeous melodies. That's when the sound started to expand a little, and from that point on it was just a matter of finding a few finishing touches. Phil Krohnengold, our not-so-secret weapon/multi-instrumentalist, added electric guitar, piano and vocals. After that it was just a matter of knowing when to stop working on it.

Your songs are often love stories full of irony. What do you think a love song needs so it doesn't come off as saccharine?

A lot of people write about a romanticized version of love. That's just not something that appeals to me. I think it's pretty saccharine when people write and sing these songs, because they take themselves so seriously. I find singers who take themselves very, very seriously, with no self-awareness or spirit or humor, pretty saccharine.

I know what I like to listen to, so as a songwriter and music lover, all I can do is write the kind of songs I'd want to hear when I'm in love, when I've just been devastated, when I'm looking for sex, or when I'm looking for a fight. I like songs that deal with huge, devastating events but describe them through the smallest details. I like beautiful songs with really dark, funny content. Without a doubt, the songs that grab me, or that I fall in love with, or that make me laugh in desperate moments, are songs that manage to find an unexpected angle on mundane subjects. Great lines and great prose can make you smile when you feel like someone is speaking directly to you. When it seems like the writer has read your mail. Avoiding being too cutesy can be a challenge when you're drawn to verse and rhyme the way I am. I don't think I've ever used the word "kiss" or "baby" — I've used "love" once or twice, but in one of those cases it was because I needed a rhyme for "Vaseline-filled-glove." And it's a pretty weak rhyme anyway. Don't worry, I never finished that song.

Does your work as an actor influence your songwriting in any way?

Mostly in the sense that I've been lucky enough in recent years to make a living as an actor. So I no longer write as much about the terrible, soul-crushing jobs I used to write about.

You were one of the leads on the TV series "Lie To Me", playing Eli Loker, a character who had decided to practice so-called "radical honesty", always saying whatever came into his head. Do you think a songwriter should always tell the truth, or do you sometimes need to lie in order to tell a story in a song?

No, I don't think songs should be documentaries.

As long as there's honesty in the way I sing, as long as I'm being myself and I can recognize myself in the words I'm singing, I'm not much of a stickler for the truth.

The dishonesty that bothers me is when someone writes and sings as a character that doesn't reflect in any way who they really are — guys who sing kind, sweet, tender, romantic, whispered songs and are actually cold, self-absorbed, thoughtless, misogynistic assholes. Basically they're just businessmen.

If one of your songs could be included in the soundtrack of a film from the past, which film would you choose?

If the ghost of Sergio Leone showed up at my door with a time machine and a song commission, I'd love to work with Ennio Morricone on "Once Upon a Time in the West". At first I'd probably be terrified, but then it would be thrilling.

Do you find it harder to be in front of a camera or in front of an audience with your guitar? How do you experience your relationship with live performance?

I get far more nervous singing songs than I do standing in front of a camera. Partly because I haven't been doing it for very long. But a live performance always scares me more. When you're in front of a camera, you're usually surrounded by people you've already worked with before or have been working with for a while. Generally, most things in that environment are there to help you give your best. There's silence, scenes are shot piece by piece, everyone is a professional working essentially toward the same goal. Plus, you're reciting words someone else wrote.

That's rarely the case in a bar or some other venue where music is being played. First of all, the words you're singing are your own. Probably things that actually happened to you, or that you have some emotional connection to. In a bar, especially, you have to win the audience over. And some people have absolutely no intention of being won over. Those are the ones who talk through the songs.

So, yes, my answer is that it's harder for me live. But in the end, performing live is more rewarding, because if you're lucky, you draw an immediate energy from the audience, and that's the drug that keeps pulling you back.

In 2010, your song "The Butcher's Son" was included in the first volume of our OndaDrops project, alongside other promising songwriters. Is there a songwriter on the current scene that you particularly admire?

Eef Barzelay is truly great. He's not part of the current scene, but I'll never stop loving Elvis Costello. I'm actually a terrible person to ask about new music. I try to avoid the trendiest stuff. I also avoid most new songwriters, for the same reason I don't like watching people who resemble me on TV or in movies. I'm a competitive, critical asshole.

I tried to avoid M. Ward for as long as I could. But it's impossible. He's incredible.

What are your plans for the future, both musically and in film?

Always the same, just with more people who give a damn. Same goes for both.

The Brendan Hines – The Butcher’s Son (live)

(da “OndaDrops Vol. 1: Do you know the way to blue?”)

[download]

(16/09/2012)