John Craigie - A Storyteller and His Guitar

A long journey made of people, folk music and America, in the company of a faithful guitar and a suitcase full of stories to tell.

American John Craigie is one of the most interesting finds among that crowd of artists drawing inspiration from traditional American singer-songwriter folk. Perennially on tour, John embodies the true spirit of the storyteller, following in the footsteps of great names from the past like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, with a personality and mastery that are surprising for someone his age. During a break between shows, John gave us this interview.

Over the course of our lives, each of us goes through a kind of “musical journey”, which begins with our very first listening experiences as children and then continues indefinitely, thanks to the many ways music makes “incursions” into everyday life. In the specific case of an artist, the bond with music is even more intense and deep. Can you tell us something about your musical journey?

When I was young I was very taken with music, but its concrete realization didn't seem possible to me, since, as far as I know, there had never been a musician in the Craigie family history. Not that my family was against such a possibility, but the chance of making music was never really considered or encouraged. I also think that for my generation (kids born in the '80s) there was strong selective pressure toward having good vocal ability. By this I don't mean that kids were encouraged to sing well, but simply that some were born with talent and others weren't, and if you belonged to the latter category you certainly weren't pushed to sing.

For as long as I can remember I've had the desire to sing, to make music and to write songs. I was pretty sure, though, that this desire would never come true, because I felt I didn't have the necessary talent. Around the age of thirteen I secretly began “writing” songs in my head, which I would then hum to myself when I was alone. I never wrote them down or recorded them, nor did I ever tell anyone about these songs, since the whole thing embarrassed me a lot. At one point I even thought about buying an instrument, but I quickly dropped the idea because I was afraid I'd eventually have to show it to someone, and I was too scared of actually realizing that I wasn't able to play it. In the summer of 1996, when I was sixteen, my best friend Shadi Muklashy bought a guitar, and whenever I went over to his house he'd play and show me things he'd learned: a few Green Day songs, some Pearl Jam or Nirvana tunes. I'd always just sit there watching him, acting as his audience, never asking to play, until one night he put the guitar in my hands, showed me a really easy riff from a song and had me play it. Once I got home that same night, I decided I'd start saving up money to get a guitar of my own, and about three months later I bought one. After that, I picked up the guitar and started writing, and at that point all that was left was to find the courage to show the world the result. But that's another story.

Among the various definitions of “folk music” you can find online, one common thread refers to the way songs and stories are passed down orally from generation to generation. Live, you give plenty of room to storytelling, fully embodying the spirit of the folksinger in every sense. What's your relationship with tradition, and which folk artists of the past have most deeply shaped your musical path?

Nowadays folk turns out to be a particularly broad genre. Eighty years ago the term “folk music” referred strictly to the oldest traditional songs and to those songs passed down from generation to generation whose original authors had long been forgotten – things like “I Know You Rider”, “House Of The Rising Sun” and other classics of the tradition. In the '60s, though, folk underwent a major shift, through the so-called “folk explosion”, after which artists started writing their own songs again. Since then folk has come to mean a genre with songs written specifically to entertain audiences, songs with easily accessible lyrics that listeners could identify with in some way – through something personal, through something of shared interest, for any reason at all, as long as they were able to understand it and identify with it. Folk usually had a fairly simple musical structure and sharp, brilliant lyrics.

To me, making folk music means trying to add something of my own to folk as a genre. When I started making music professionally, I immediately thought of it as a job, as if I were an employee of a company and my job was to write songs, songs that both I and the audience could benefit from.

People like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Arlo Guthrie helped set the initial tone for the modern folk genre; I still listen to them and still draw inspiration from them. Among the lesser-known artists who contributed to the development of folk music, John Prine and Townes Van Zandt deserve a mention, while among more contemporary folk songwriters there's Greg Brown, Todd Snider and Dan Bern.

You could say you're perennially on tour, since for the past four years your shows have followed one another almost non-stop, taking you all over the United States. What's been the most touching moment so far? And the strangest story?

Picking out one specific moment, whether touching or strange, would be pretty much impossible. It's not like in a movie, there isn't just one moment of pathos: everything can turn out to be touching, just as everything can turn out to be strange.

The most touching moments are probably the ones I experience when fans come up to me after a show to tell me how my music has helped them: for some it was a comfort during a breakup or divorce, for others it helped them through a period of depression or a particularly difficult time.

On the other hand, when fans approach me after a show, that's also when the strangest moments can happen. Since a lot of the shows I do don't have a backstage, and in some cases the crowd is pretty small, people feel very comfortable coming up to me, which I love, because my work would be nothing without their strange stories. (smiles)  Since I book my own shows and I'm always traveling to new places, I never know what to expect when I'm on tour. One of the strangest moments happened when I played a show at a coffee shop that turned out to actually be a church. When I booked the show at that venue, I'd gotten the impression it was just a coffee shop. Once I got there I found out it really was a coffee shop, but one that was located “inside” a church.

I should say upfront that I have no problem playing in a church—I'd play anywhere, for anyone—but my music isn't necessarily labeled as "Christian music." For that night's lineup they'd booked me between two Christian metal bands, and I admit I was a bit worried when I got on stage with my harmonica and my colorful guitar. But all it took was telling a few stories and singing a few songs to find the whole crowd was already won over by my performance, and that reminded me once again just how universal folk music can be.

In an interview a while back, talking about the albums that influenced you most, you named "New American Language" by Dan Bern as number one—a singer-songwriter still fairly unknown to most people in the US. You also said of Bern: "Dan and his guitar alone could take over the world," pointing out how undeservedly overlooked he is, an artist you seem to regard almost as a mentor. What aspects of Bern's songwriting struck you the most?

Of all the musicians on today's folk scene, I think of Dan as something of a "guide" for me, as well as my main source of inspiration. Even though our styles are pretty different, both on stage and in terms of songwriting, I admire his artistic approach enormously. Dan can write about absolutely anything: if there's a line he wants to say, he'll say it, and I'm not just talking about things that might be controversial or open to censorship—I mean any phrase that sounds stylistically awkward or unusual. Often, in the middle of writing, a songwriter will have a line pop into their head that sounds great but doesn't quite fit the structure of the song. Usually that line ends up getting thrown out, or it gets reworked somehow and loses its original impact. With Dan's lyrics, though, you get the sense that most of his lines are exactly as they first came to him, and to me that's what makes him such a great songwriter. "New American Language" is the perfect combination of Dan's songwriting with Chuck Plotkin's excellent production.

On your MySpace page, in the "Influences" section, among others you mention the two brilliant directors Joel and Ethan Coen. How does their cinematic imagination influence you and your music?

I think of them not so much when I'm writing songs or composing music, but more when I sit down to record an album. For me, recording an album is like making a film: there's a story to tell, and once the recording starts, it's as if that story is set in stone, immortalized to stay that way forever.

In that sense, playing a show is easier than recording an album, because every time you can change the songs to fit the audience in front of you, letting the songs keep evolving. What makes recording an album such an intense experience is that, no matter how much it evolves along the way, by the end you're left with one single finished product.

When I have to record an album, I try to picture the experience as if I were making a film, taking cues from great directors: the Coen brothers, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and so on. As for the Coen brothers in particular, their attention to detail is astonishing; the way they layer their plots with detail and develop their characters is a huge source of inspiration for me.

Imagine you'd been sentenced to spend a whole year on a desert island. If you could only bring two albums and one book, which would you choose?

As for albums, I'd bring "Rain Dogs" by Tom Waits and "Decade" by Neil Young. "Rain Dogs" is an album that never ages for me, while "Decade" is a great practical example of Neil Young's musical range, a remarkable mix of folk and rock'n'roll.

As for the book, I'd pick pretty much anything by Mark Twain or John Steinbeck: they're both such great storytellers that, out of all the books I read, whenever I finish one of theirs I almost feel like picking it right back up and reading it again.

Many of the pictures of you floating around online show you with your inseparable acoustic guitar, its body a riot of colors you simply can't miss. Can you tell us the story behind that artwork?

I'm glad you asked me that. One of the things people ask me most often is whether I painted my guitar myself. In the fall of 2001 I was living with a group of artists in Santa Cruz, California, and one night I painted a simple image on the front of my guitar. Some of my roommates asked if they could add to it, and within a few hours the entire front of the guitar had been painted. For the whole following year, at parties and get-togethers with friends, anyone with a good idea and the urge to try their hand could paint something on my guitar. Some were people I knew, others were people I'd never met before and never saw again after that. Even now, people sometimes come up to me and point out something they painted on my guitar that I had no idea about.

At shows where several artists share the bill, the chemistry between them matters a lot, since it lets everyone feel comfortable enough to deliver their best. If you had the chance to put together a tour with another artist or band you admire but haven't yet met in person, who would you choose?

My live shows are usually purely acoustic, and most of the time I play solo, but I really admire bands that come across as truly tight-knit units. Two groups I'd love to work with are Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Wilco.

Right now you're busy with the "Portland Basement Tour," and your schedule is packed with shows. During your live performances you also play a few unreleased songs that will probably end up on your next record. How are you feeling about this new album?

I'm very excited about my next two projects. My new album will be released in autumn 2008: it's my first live album, a recording of one of my shows in Northern California. This live record is highly anticipated by my fans and I'm quite eager to put it out. The next studio album, on the other hand, will come out in 2009, and its sound will follow in the footsteps of what characterized "A Picnic On The 405", drawing a bit more on bluegrass and blues.

“Soft Hail” settles into a gentler sound, one that harks back to the sprawling singer-songwriter feel of your early work, moving somewhat away from the more markedly roots atmospheres of the previous "A Picnic On The 405". The titles of these two albums seem to hint a little at their respective content. How do you go about choosing a title for an album?

You're absolutely right. When I have to name an album, I want to pick a title that embodies not just the album's sound, but also its poetic content. I don't know if every artist chooses titles with that kind of criterion in mind, but I've noticed my fans really appreciate it.

The title track of "Soft Hail" was originally meant to close "A Picnic On The 405", but it ended up becoming the starting point for building the following album, which it also lent its title to. What led to this “change of plan”?

Both “Second Grade Awakening” and “Daddy Longlegs” include “secret tracks” — ghost songs tucked away at the end of the album that don't show up in the tracklist. When I finished "A Picnic On The 405" I wanted to stay true to that habit and add a “secret track” there too. I like my ghost songs to be light and quiet, I like the idea that they can create a relaxing mood to close out an album, as if each one were a kind of lullaby. But I realized that the album I was about to work on after "A Picnic On The 405" was going to turn out to be an entire collection of songs built around that kind of atmosphere, so I decided to leave "A Picnic On The 405" upbeat and rocking, with no ghost song, and to let the following album "Soft Hail" become one whole big “secret track”. Neither of the two albums has a “secret track”, and I almost feel like the songs on the two records are paired off with one another, as if each one were the “secret track” for a corresponding song on the other album.

At one point in the beautiful lyrics of “Soft Hail” we read: “Life is short I say to you. You just smile and say: life's the longest thing you'll ever do.” This wonderful line offers a refined, almost definitive take on the old “glass half full – glass half empty” dilemma, hinting at a positive resolution in favor of the glass half full. Generally speaking, in everyday life, do you tend to be more of an optimist or a pessimist? And how does that outlook shape your music?

I think anyone who listens to my music picks up on a certain optimistic outlook within the lyrics, even as an awareness of all the reasons to be pessimistic comes through at the same time. I think every great writer has walked that thin line between optimism and pessimism. Generally speaking, I think none of us wants to be too optimistic, because that would feel obvious and unrealistic, but at the same time we also try not to be overly pessimistic, because otherwise we'd risk complaining all the time, and people are tired of hearing other people's complaints. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing I can do for my listeners is to let a little sliver of light fall into the darkness, and then it's up to each of them whether to pick it up or not.

The delicate beauty of “Tacoma” makes it one of the most evocative songs on the album, able to reach the heart on tiptoe and settle in there for a long while, gently rocking it on the light pulse of its picking. What kind of interaction happens between you and your guitar when you write?

While writing a song I always want the sound coming from my guitar to complement the imagery created by the lyrics. Just like in a film, I try to pick the perfect soundtrack for each specific scene. With a song like “Tacoma” I wanted to create a calm, sweet melody, one you could play right before going to bed, hoping not to wake anyone else up in the house.

“Folk singers are like wine, they get better with age”, you say in one of your songs. You're quite young and you've already released five albums. How do you picture yourself, musically speaking, twenty years from now?

That line comes from my impressions of the folk music business. For a young singer-songwriter like me it's pretty hard to try to write lyrics that carry some kind of message. People seem to respect and listen more to folk singers who have many years behind them, so maybe in twenty years I'll still be doing what I've always done up to now, but with one difference: more songs, more stories, and more credibility. (smiles)

Our view of things always depends on the particular perspective we look at them from: in that sense, the very moment a person reads the word “now”, it has already become “a moment ago”. In light of that thought, we'd like to ask you, finally, something about the flow of your feelings. How do you picture your future two minutes from now? Or rather, how do you feel right at this moment? Or even better… how did you feel a moment ago?

The best thing about being an independent folk musician is that your future is never set in stone. High-profile figures like Fergie or Justin Timberlake have an entire team of people revolving around their image and their music; there are huge expectations and a lot of outside pressure pushing them in one direction or another. For a musician like me, though, there's no pressure at all. The fans who come see me live just want to be part of the show, they just want to hear whatever songs I'm singing at that moment, whether they're old or new, serious or fun, it doesn't even matter if they're good or not so good. I sing for them, and I'm deeply grateful just to have the chance to do it.

(19/08/2008)

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