The Weather Machine - Songs to Chase the Clouds Away

Oregon's rains aren't enough to cloud Slater Smith's spirit. Under the banner of The Weather Machine, his songs always seem to find a ray of light. After the promising debut “Mr. Pelton’s Weather Machine”, the new “The Weather Machine” confirms a formidable storytelling talent.

From his college years at Willamette University in Salem to his involvement in Portland's music community, Slater Smith tells us about the transformation of Weather Machine from a solo project into a full-fledged band. And his personal secret for chasing away the clouds with a smile.

The name “The Weather Machine” comes from the legend of a device capable of influencing the weather that circulated on the Willamette University campus. To start off, could you tell us its story?

Actually, the name “The Weather Machine” was thought up by a friend of mine. It's the shortened version of the project's original name, “Mr. Pelton’s Weather Machine”. The weather in Salem is terrible, but somehow, every year, during prospective students' spring visits, the weather was always nice. So a rumor started going around campus that President Pelton had sold his soul for a machine that could control the weather. The day before the spring visits could bring the worst, rainiest weather, but every year, somehow, the following day was invariably clear.

During the campus music festival, my friend Kate thought that “President Pelton’s Weather Machine” would be a perfect name for a band. I thought so too, so I asked her if I could use it, and that's how it all started. I shortened it because it caused some confusion back when it was still a solo project. People started thinking I was Mr. Pelton, or they'd end up mangling the name. You wouldn't believe how many times people said things like: “What's the name again? Mr. Whose-its Wonder Emporium?”. After a few months I shortened it to “The Weather Machine”, but it's still a funny story.

How did the band's current lineup come together?

I'd been wanting to turn the project into a real band for a while. The recording process for the album involved four key musicians – me on guitar and vocals, Colin Robson on bass and guitars, Matthew Cartmill on cello, and my younger brother Tanner Smith on drums. Now that we've finished recording, we've added a couple more musicians, growing into a five-piece. Since Tanner went off to college in Boston, we brought in Corey Kintzi for live shows and added my college buddy Jack Martin on bass. Jack is also a great songwriter and plays in a duo called "Booty & The Bandit".

I met Colin about a year ago at an "open mic" in the small town of Pacific City on the Oregon coast. He'd organized the night to keep himself busy while renovating his old garage into a recording studio. Colin had moved to Pacific City from New York to build the studio and launch a project called "Kiwanda Sound". We became fast friends and figured it would be a good idea for "The Weather Machine" to be the first record made in the studio. The project would have been impossible without Colin. Since then he's also joined the band on guitar.

My brother Tanner plays drums on the record. We basically locked him in the studio for a week after he came home from Boston for winter break. He did a great job – he's one of the best musicians I know.

Since Tanner had to head back to college, we recruited Corey to play live with us. He recently graduated from the jazz program at Portland State University and slotted into the band in a surprising way. We met after I asked a mutual friend if he knew any good drummers. Turned out Corey was one. It was great getting to know him, and we've had a blast playing together.

Matt Cartmill, our cellist, has been a good friend of mine for years. We went to high school together in a small town called Sisters, Oregon. Back then we didn't collaborate much musically – I was just learning guitar and I don't think he'd even discovered the cello yet. Since leaving Sisters, though, we've played together a lot. Matt also played cello on "Mr. Pelton's Weather Machine". He now lives in Eugene, Oregon and is finishing a degree in Spanish. He plays with us whenever he can make it up to Portland.

Last but not least, Jack Martin. Jack plays bass with the Weather Machine and is a great guy to have in the band. He's mainly a guitarist, but he's a very skilled musician and made the switch to bass without any trouble. Jack and I both attended Willamette University, but we didn't really become friends until after we graduated and ended up living in Portland. Jack reached out to me when we both moved to the city, right around the time Colin and I were finishing the record. He's the one playing the guitar solo in the outro of "Over All The Land". And the voice you hear at the end of that track is his too, as are the vocal harmonies on "Little Surrender".

How did the recording and production of the new album go?

The recording process was incredible! But also exhausting. I was working in Portland two days a week and had to make a two-hour trip back and forth from the coast. I spent two months like that, and I've only just gotten back into my normal routine in Portland.

Production was also a new and interesting challenge. Unlike a lot of projects where everything is mapped out in advance, we wrote all the parts on the spot. I already had the skeleton of the songs in terms of acoustic guitar and lyrics, but I'd never played the songs with a full band. It was like putting together a puzzle and trying out a bunch of pieces to see how they could fit. We started with Tanner, who wrote his drum parts after we laid down a rough sketch of the songs, and we brought Matt in almost right away. Tanner and Matt made a crucial contribution in shaping the direction of the record, and I'm really glad I involved them the way I did.

How do you think this album differs from the previous one?

My first project, "Mr. Pelton's Weather Machine", was very bare-bones. I recorded it in a week with a few friends in a barn. We had very little time and no money. The goal was to have something to offer people, but I wasn't worried about making it sound perfect. There are spots where the songs drift out of time, where there's too much reverb, and so on. Still, when I chose the songs to include on that record, I went with the ones that could sound good even in a stripped-down, rough form – I think that's what gives the project its charm.

"The Weather Machine", on the other hand, sounds a bit more like what I've dreamed of making for years. I've got a strange contradiction in my musical taste: I love folk songs deeply, but I also have solid roots in indie rock and alternative rock. I grew up listening to bands like White Stripes, Strokes, Modest Mouse and Killers. When my family moved to Sisters I was exposed to a wide range of folk and folk-revival artists through the Sisters Folk Festival. I started listening to musicians like Ryan Adams, Anaïs Mitchell, The Tallest Man On Earth and Josh Ritter. With "The Weather Machine" I like to think I managed to bring these two worlds together. I think the new record is a step in that direction.

Why did you decide to include new versions of "Leviathans Get Lonely" and "Back O'er Oregon" on the album?

I decided to re-record these songs to breathe some new life into them. I think the bare-bones acoustic versions on "Mr. Pelton's Weather Machine" still hold up, but I wanted to see what else we could do with these songs. I always thought of "Leviathans Get Lonely" as a song meant to be played with a full band. The idea was to offer a light-hearted commentary on the Occupy Wall Street movement, and I wanted to re-record the track while it was still relevant. I'd always felt it needed a fuller, more playful sound. We had a blast recording the new version. The vocal effect mimics the sound of a megaphone, and the shuffle of the drums places the song somewhere between punk rock and country.

For “Back O’er Oregon” I was excited to see what we could do to subtly add some texture to the song. We drew a lot from Josh Ritter’s “So Runs The World Away”. Lots of guitar reverb and cello parts give the song a wonderful new flavor. It’s an important song to me and I wanted to do it justice.

One day I hope to revisit all the songs from “Mr. Pelton’s Weather Machine” with the new band. I love every song on that record, and it would be fun to set them aside and update them for future albums.

Could you tell us more about the three-act story of Skeleton Jack?

“Skeleton Jack” is a song I wrote back in high school. I wanted to record it even then, but it wasn't until this record that I developed the skills and gathered the resources to pull it off.

The first song, “Act I”, came out of me playing around with some ideas about divinity and fairy tales. My take on Jack is that he's a kind of king of fairy tales, since it's a name that shows up in so many stories and sayings – “Jack And Jill”, “Jack Be Nimble Jack Be Quick”, “Jack and the Beanstalk”, and so on. Eventually I landed on the idea that it would be interesting to make the character of Jack immortal. Since Jack robbed the devil, he can't go to either heaven or hell, because he earned heaven by wronging the devil (so he can't be punished for that), yet he still committed a sin by stealing (so he can't be let into heaven). That's the framework within which the three acts play out.

“Act III – Alexei Mikhail” is actually the next song I wrote in the series, though that only happened several years later. In this song, Jack kills a man in a bar fight (before Jack is turned into a skeleton), and the victim miraculously wakes up in the body of a wounded soldier. The idea is that, to get back at Jack, the devil saves the soul of a man thirsty for revenge against him. So in “Alexei Mikhail” the narrator spends his days hunting Jack down.

I wrote “Act II” to explain the connection between the two storylines. “Act II” is titled “Chorus” because it serves the same function as the chorus in a Greek tragedy: a voice outside the group of characters that offers hints and explanations about what's happening behind the scenes, or a perspective on the themes running through the story.

Beyond that, there are plenty of hidden gems tucked into the three acts. For instance, the broken crown comes from “Jack And Jill”, while the golden fiddle is a reference to the song “Devil Went Down To Georgia”, and even the name “Alexei Mikhail” carries its own symbolic weight. On top of that, there's a bit of mystery surrounding the characters – the listener never learns Alexei's real name, and has no way of knowing for certain whether the narrator in “Act I” and “Act III” is the same person. Then Matt came up with the idea of using the cello as a kind of storytelling device to tie the three songs together, which I think adds a lot of character to the Skeleton Jack series.

Your lyrics are always full of irony. What do you think is the secret to telling a story with a smile on your face?

I don't know if there's a secret to songwriting, but I do know I can always tell whether I'm writing a good song if I catch myself smiling. It's not that a song has to be funny to be good – I've just noticed that when I'm writing my best songs, I feel an immediate sense of lightness and start chuckling.

As for the irony, I think it comes from the fact that I tend to take boring things or cliches and turn them into something completely different. “Skeleton Jack” is a great example of trying to reimagine a narrative cliche (a fairy tale), and I think “Puppet” does a good job of subverting a cliche image in its own way. It took me a long time to learn how to write a good love song, and it was only once I learned to laugh at myself and at the wonderful absurdities of romance that I was able to write songs like “Puppet”, “Leviathans Get Lonely”, or even “SuperFolk”. It's not like I sit down to write and think, “Today I want to be ironic”: it's something that happens naturally while I'm playing around with ideas. I think if I tried to force it, the songs would come out a lot worse.

Do you have a favorite place or moment for writing a song?

It depends on where I am in life. There have been spaces I used to love writing songs in that became stale over the years, so new settings are always useful and creatively liberating. As for the times, unfortunately I end up writing some of my best stuff at two or three in the morning. I think there's something about sleep deprivation that manages to strip away the filters we carry around in our heads. At night you're also forced to be alone with your thoughts, so there are fewer distractions.

Recently I wrote a song during a night walk. It was the first time I'd ever done that. No distractions, just turning the lines over in my head to the rhythm of my steps. I should try it more often.

What do you think of the local music scene in Oregon? Do you feel part of it?

I love the music communities in Oregon. I grew up in Sisters, around the Sisters Folk Festival, and now, since moving to Portland, I've started meeting a circle of great musicians. What I'd say about music “scenes” is that it can be easy to think you've “found” one that already exists, but in a city like Portland there are so many great musicians and such a strong sense of community that I've realized it's almost better to build your own circle of musician friends. For me that was definitely a key part of putting the band together, and I keep meeting more and more brilliant people every day.

Portland really is a wonderful city – there isn't as much money as in Seattle or Los Angeles, but it gives musicians the chance to build something their own way, right from the ground up.

What do you think are the best and worst things about playing live?

I love being on stage. It's the reason I decided to make music for a living. I honestly can't think of anything negative. I can say it's a lot more fun to be on stage once you accept that you might make mistakes. I almost expect to mess something up on stage, because it gives me the chance to connect with the audience in a different way. If you give people a good smile, and they know what's going on, any mistake can turn into an opportunity for the performance.

To make “The Weather Machine” you ran a Kickstarter fundraising campaign. From social media to crowdfunding, what do you think of the opportunities the digital era offers artists to promote their own music?

I think music is a really fun place to be right now. At no other point in history has it cost so little to make high-quality records and get them out there through the internet. It's a double-edged sword. On one hand, it's easier for artists to record and promote their own work, and they can do better as entrepreneurs. On the other hand, it means musicians are expected to do a ton of work before labels even notice them, so there's a lot more competition and background noise to cut through.

That said, I think crowdfunding is a great tool when used responsibly. At a time when there's so much music out there and musicians literally have to give their songs away for free just to get noticed, crowdfunding makes it possible to pay not just for the music, but to become part of a creative experience. By taking part on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, fans and friends can help create a project instead of just helping musicians cover their costs afterwards. It gives people a new reason to pay for music.

If you could collaborate with another artist, past or present, who would you choose (and why)?

Jack White, without a doubt. I have a lot of musical heroes, but he was the first. Even when his lyrics don't always hit the mark (though often they do), the attitude always does.

Ride the wave of great music

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