Shearwater - The Canticle of the Creatures

(Laughs, ed.) Like I want to keep an eye on them! I came to appreciate them slowly - I've always loved the natural world, but I never expected to develop this interest in birds specifically. In 1997 I won a travel grant after finishing high school, and thanks to it I ended up in some of the most remote parts of the world. One of them was the Falklands, where I met, quite by chance, in a guesthouse near Stanley, this man (he shows me a photo taken from the “Golden Dossier”, the booklet included with “The Golden Archipelago” and downloadable from their official site; it's the man sitting on a ridge, together with a woman and a bird, ed.), Robin Woods. He's an English ornithologist, he was carrying out surveys in that part of the Falklands of a bird called the “striated caracara”. I kept insisting until he let me tag along as his assistant, even though I knew nothing about birds - I'd graduated with a degree in English literature. Eventually he agreed and, for seven weeks, we lived on this boat off the coasts of those islands, searching for the birds' nests. There were albatrosses, penguins… (he shows me photos of the birds that appear in the Dossier, ed.)

Did you take these photos yourself? They're beautiful.

Thank you! That experience really did change the way I see things. I never would have thought the world could be like that.

I thought it was more a passion born in childhood, but it actually came about later in life…

Yes, it all happened after college. After that year, when I went to all these strange places full of all these strange birds, I came home wanting to know more about them. I studied geography at university, but I actually specialized in biogeography, with a particular focus on birds, obviously.

Do you remember a moment when, watching a bird, you found inspiration for a song?

No (laughs, ed.). I mean, not one specific moment. Actually I haven't written that many songs about birds: I put a few into “Rooks”, probably just so I'd have an answer to this question… I think there's only one that shows up on the new record… What I get out of watching birds is just the pleasure of looking, with curious engagement, at a world that's separate from whatever's going on in my head most of the time.

Not even through free association, you mean…? I read a story where you talked about a nighttime conversation with an owl…

Oh yes, I'd forgotten about that. We were in Denton recording “Rook”, there was a barred owl behind the studio, going “whoo-hoo-hoo-hooo”. They like to talk, so if you just make some kind of sound, they answer you. So every once in a while I'd go outside and chat with it a bit.

Let's talk a bit about your career. To start, I've noticed a clear shift in your sound starting with the EP “Thieves”, especially a newfound confidence in your voice (he confirms, ed.). There's obviously a gradual element to the development of a certain sound, personal and distinctive as it is, but can you recall a moment when things suddenly became much clearer to you?

I think back to when we were putting together the demos for “Palo Santo"; I remember thinking: “This is going to be different.” It felt like a door was opening onto something new. But, like with everything, it's a very gradual process, the same as with my singing style. I'm still learning to sing. I've just started taking voice lessons, which have actually been helping me on this very tour. It always comes down to the thrill of discovering new things: you get interested in something for a while, then you get bored and something new reveals itself.

On another note, it also seems to me that over these last three records you've developed a growing tendency to bring an “ambient” dimension into your music. “The Golden Archipelago” reflects this push especially, in my opinion: the rain in “Hidden Lakes”, the huge swells in “Castaways”…

Almost like kinds of visual images, so to speak?

Yeah, more than before, it seems to me…

That's something we really pushed for, on this record. We wanted it to feel almost like a film.

It makes me think you're almost heading toward a fully instrumental record, one that includes voice but without lyrics. Your voice is so evocative, I think it would suit that… Would you make a record like that?

We've actually started working on a short instrumental record, just for fun, just to do something. I don't know what will come of it, we'll probably self-release it. But, yeah, the thing I enjoy most, in the studio, is creating these kinds of soundscapes. In particular, I love layering different textures together, building something where you can't quite tell one instrument apart from another, everything merges into a single, 'whole' sound, it's evocative. Like that song, “Landscape At Speed”, I feel like what I just described really comes off well, toward the end of the track: all these textures flow into one and everything becomes something very different from what it was before. Or in “Hidden Lakes”, with all that metallic percussion…

I know you sometimes use instruments you've built yourselves, like that strange bell that shows up, for instance, in “North Col”, if I remember correctly. Did you use anything like that on “The Golden Archipelago”?

Oh yeah, that was a waterphone. Thor built it, welded it together himself… He didn't 'invent' it exactly, but he built it. On the new record we use strange combinations of instruments, but I don't think there's any one particularly new thing. Thor built a marimba out of solid Texas wood, carved the whole thing himself, it took him ages. That's on the record. You know, you have to tune it by filing down pieces of wood… We did some strange things, like taking string recordings and mixing them together and playing them back through a beat-up speaker. We made some odd choices.

I think you have a strong literary touch. Can I ask if you have any particular literary references, or just authors you enjoy reading…?

Lately, the authors I've most enjoyed reading are, first of all, Peter Matthiessen, an American writer. He wrote the book “The Snow Leopard”, our song (which appears on “Rook”, ed.) is partly drawn from it. I read “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” by Rebecca West, she wrote it in the Thirties and it's about the Balkan countries between the two world wars. It's massive, about two thousand pages: I like books like that, ones that deal with one subject but really end up talking about everything. They open a door from one narrow street onto the whole universe, I'm always drawn to books like that. What I'm reading right now is by John McPhee, an American nature writer (he pulls it out of his backpack and shows it to me; a fairly hefty volume, ed.). It's a book about geology, supposedly about the geology of the United States, but really it's about the geology of the whole world. I like books like that, these all-encompassing things… It's not that I want to make records that resemble these books, I'm not interested in length so much as in seeing the whole world through a single lens and packing it with as much information as possible.

There are strong similarities between the atmosphere of your records, “Rook” in particular, and Cormac McCarthy's “The Road” (he agrees, ed.). In that book, though, the human figure is still central, it's what provides hope, whereas that doesn't seem to be the case in your records. Aren't you afraid of the Apocalypse?

(Laughs, ed.) Who isn't? The thing is, in our nature as human beings, there's always a part of us that loves life and a part that loves death. That latter part is always the one most fascinated by the Apocalypse, it would almost want to bring it about, just to see it, you know… I think that's the part we really have to fight against. I think it's important not to fall too much in love with the Apocalypse. From whatever angle you look at it, not just the religious one… Sometimes you think, if you love the natural world and hate what humans are doing to it, wouldn't it be wonderful if there weren't so many people around anymore? But you don't get very far with that kind of thinking. I think it's important to resist the temptation to think there are too many of us.

At the same time, do you think the world, History, will carry on without humanity?

Oh yes. Especially if you put it in geological terms, if you took the entire history of the world and compressed it into the span of a week, the dinosaurs would have shown up just a few hours ago. The industrial revolution would have appeared just a fortieth of a second ago. We're a chapter in the history of the world, but that's all we are. Life will, in all likelihood, carry on without us, just as it did after the disappearance of other species.

What do you make of the rise of a sort of "apocalyptic movement", which is spilling over into cinema, for instance? Do you find it therapeutic, in a way, in these uncertain times?

Yes, it's very much in vogue these days... Maybe we're trying to answer that fear by facing it head on. Or maybe it's just an easy way to make good television, good entertainment. It's always been there, after all. Think of the Decameron, for instance, people fleeing the plague thinking it was the end of civilization, and in the end it wasn't...

Your latest record deals with specific places, the Falkland Islands, life on an archipelago, the hardships of living in those places... Could you give us a quick walkthrough of the Golden Dossier?

Well, part of it, the first part, is largely drawn from an aboriginal settlement I lived in back in 1998, in Australia. Some missionaries had lived there, so the Dossier includes some of the rules the local population had to follow while the missionaries were around. But the missionaries left after a hurricane, and the aboriginal people stayed, and they still live there today. The second part probably has to do with this boat, built by a mad German aviator, who sailed it all the way to the Falklands in 1927 and made a book and a film out of it. He later crashed his plane in Patagonia. He sold his boat, which stayed in the Falklands for eighty years. I worked on that very boat in 1997.

And the man with the violin?

He's from the Falklands, his name is Andrew Peck and he built that violin out of matchsticks. If you look closely, you can tell (this refers to the man on the last page of the Dossier; on closer inspection, you notice the violin is made of little sticks, ed.). I love his expression, as if he's saying: "I made this myself!". There's something about that, in such a wild place where the human presence is so sparse... It's about the durability of culture, building a violin out of whatever's at hand. I think that's our greatest strength, and I also think it's the most insidious and dangerous thing about us — we have a whole fantasy world in our minds that we want to project onto the landscape, bending the entire world to fit what we want.

I have a couple of classic questions, which oddly enough come up at this point in the interview. How would you define your genre?

(He smiles, sighing, ed.) They always ask me that, I wish I had an answer. I don't think of us as an "indie rock" band, and definitely not a folk group... The records I had in mind while writing "The Golden Archipelago" were the ones I loved in high school, that kind of grand, dark art-rock epic from the early Eighties, before synthesizers took over everything... I'm thinking of "III" by Peter Gabriel, "Hounds Of Love" by Kate Bush, "The Final Cut" by the Pink Floyd, which is a record I love dearly: that kind of vast, imposing record, very ambitious and dramatic. I don't know what "genre" that would be, but we'd like to think we belong to it. On a much smaller budget than they had back then...

Another very simple question, which in your case I find particularly hard to answer on my own. Which contemporary bands do you follow or admire?

Um... Sometimes I feel guilty because I ignore contemporary bands, you start feeling like you're in competition with them, when you're not, music certainly isn't a competition. But it gets hard to feel that way sometimes... Let's see... David Thomas Broughton, he's touring with us, I love his music and I think he's an excellent artist. Um... I'm trying to think of something completely different from what's popular right now... There's a series called "The Secret Museum Of Mankind", it's all live recordings from 1920 to 1940 from all over the world. It's put out by a label called "Yazoo Records" in the United States, and it's simply incredible. It's made up of eight volumes, recordings from a time when recording itself hadn't yet changed the way people listen to and play music, it's like a snapshot of the old musical world before recording took hold...

Last question: you're free not to answer. Suppose, hypothetically, that you and Will Sheff (frontman of Okkervil River, ed.) ended up on stage together — do you think it's more likely he'd join you with Shearwater, or the other way round?

(He laughs, ed.) Oh well, I don't know... Actually, last year we played together in Berlin, I went up on stage and sang a couple of songs with Okkervil, but... I think I'm done with that kind of thing.

(14/03/2010)

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Lorenzo Righetto, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition