After his set at The Triple Door last Saturday, April 5, Tom Brosseau was kind enough to grant me an interview backstage and answer my questions, both serious and silly, about his life, his opinions and his music. (Thanks Tom!)
Katy: How did growing up in Grand Forks affect your music?
Tom: It's very easy, it's because the landscape I think plays an important part in my songwriting, and being that Grand Forks, North Dakota in general is very flat and desolate, gold-colored in the summer and very white in the winter, and very cold in general in weather, I think that it all sort of had an effect on me, and because of that has had an effect on my writing style. At times I can be very dark, very cold a little bit, and then other times I can come around and be very warm.
K: Maybe that might explain why [as you said during your set] you don't have so many uplifting songs?
T: Yes I think so. You know, the other thing too, is that there wasn't a whole lot in the wintertime. If you didn't play hockey or sports or have any extra-curricular activities you were probably most often in your house watching TV or something, so I think you kind of had to develop your imagination, and that's what I did. I'd think about everything and think about different things and different scenarios. I always thought in terms of movies, like different characters, like what I could do and how i could shoot movies. So my imagination was very active and very wild, and I could never really put a cap on it, and it's all because I come from North Dakota, I think, and also because I was alone a lot. In that situation, you're kind of forced to be creative, in a way. You're kind of forced to find what your hobbies are and where your interests lie. You don't have the same things that other kids have like, say in California, or Los Angeles, you know? There's so much to do that you don't know what to do.
K: What musicians have most influenced you over the years?
T: Well the big ones are the old bands from the thirties and forties like The Ink Spots. They were what I always listened to when I was growing up. Bob Dylan was pretty big. I never listened to Neil Young, but people sometimes tell me I've got a voice like him. And, then, just people like Woody Guthrie, but the biggest one is probably Guy Lombardo, very kind of simple music from our parents' generation, Les Paul and Mary Ford, you know, songs that are like just over two minutes long. I mean, I love to listen to these songs, and they're very uplifitng, and very light, and so very bubble-gum. My stuff is so completely different, but that's stuff that I really like to pull from and that I always like to go back to. I never listened to popular music when I was young. My brother did, though.
K: Who do you enjoy listening to now?
T: A little bit more in depth in the folk circuit maybe, maybe also in the classical world. I listen to a lot of classical music. There's a great cellist named Pablo Casals that I really like listening to. Also Yo Yo Ma, and Yo La Tengo..sometimes I get the two mixed up [laughs]. I love Frank Black and the Pixies..I'm a big fan of that stuff too. The big record I have in my car at home is a really cheesy record by David Gilmore, who is the guitarist of Pink Floyd. That's what I have right now.
K: Do you come from a musical family?
T: Not trained, but they all can play music, and they all did play music. We always had that around, so that was something that was always there. It didn't make me feel unique, it didn't make me feel better or different than anyone else, but we always had music around, we always played music, and we always sang together.
K: Do you play any instruments other than your guitar and harmonica?
T: The piano just a little bit, I'm not trained. And, you know, some people might say that I don't even know how to play the guitar and I'd be the first to agree with them. I'm not a musician, that's the thing.
K: Why do you say that?
T: Well, a musician is..umm..not me. I'm more of a writer, I sit and think about words for hours and about songs for hours. And I'm not a musician. I don't practice music. I don't practice scales. I don't know the cords. I don't want to know the chords. I don't want to know the scales. I don't want to know the structure. I don't want to know the timing. I'm not concerned with any of that stuff, and I don't really want to put any time into it. My motivation lies in thinking about words, and it takes a very, very long time.
K: So you're more along the lines of Ginsberg, whose poetry happened to be set to music sometimes?
T: Yes, exactly, it's just by sheer coincidence or sheer luck or something that I also to play music. And I never consider myself a songwriter, and I'm singer-songwriter, but you can't tell that to anybody because people always have to classify you, there always has to be some kind of vehicle, otherwise it's not interesting.
K: How do you feel about how country music has evolved in modern pop culture?
T: Well, I would first like to say that you see on country music TV, or whatever that station is, that they've probably worked very hard. I'm less judgmental than I used to be. I think that if you had asked me this question a year ago, I would have said the guys look like girls nowadays in country music...and to an extent I still think that. I just think that we're still more concerned with image these days, and that they're more concerned with selling sex, and kind of selling what these people look like, and the hairdos and things like that. But if you take a look at some of those old country stars from back in the day...it's hard to say it, but some of them were just not good looking, you know? But it didn't matter. What they were doing was performing, and what they were selling were their records by how they were making people feel. So what I can say about country music today is that I just don't listen to it, but I know that people work very hard on what they do, and I try to pass less judgment.
K: What do you think is going to happen to folk music in the years to come?
T: Folk music will never die. Folk music has been around forever. Classical music is essentially folk music. Folk music is music that tells a tale, whether it's in words, or by structure or by double bows or...that's folk music. It's folk music I think that will always live and the other music that will die out, like disco did, and things like that. Folk music will always be there..I don't know if it will ever be popular on its own. I think there has to be some variant of it like freak-folk or like the anti-folk movement with Suzanne Vega or Beck when he first came on. When he first came on, Beck was kind of like a weird version of folk, and then it started to kind of come back around again, especially freak-folk, which I don't really get but that seems to be working. I think that if you ask people what folk music is, I don't know if they could give you the right answer, I don't even know if I could give you the right answer. But I think it [folk music] is very indicative of what has been happening socially, politically, nationally. A lot of people think that folk music only goes back to the depression era, where somebody's talking about getting a fair price for their crops, or on strike, but that's the whole point of folk music, it has a message to it. And I think that [folk artists] are kind of laughed at in popular music, but at one point, popular music was folk music.
K: Are there any musical movements or genres that you...let's say..."struggle to appreciate"?
T: No, I think that it's all connected. And again, I'm less judgmental now. I think that if you had asked me this a year ago, I would have said that I don't listen to rap, but that's not true. I listen to rap, I like rap. There is some rap that I don't like. There are some messages that I don't like, but when gangster rap was first very popular it was very interesting because people were saying things for the first time in a different way. Like, there was this record called "A Hundred Miles and Running" that was very imaginative and sort of painted a tale of what it was like to live in a particular place, and what it was like to deal with the cops, and what it was like to be black, but it's also very interesting because it's a very similar message to what lead belly was talking about in "Bourgeois Blues": about being black and living in Washington DC, and so I was glad to see that. There's always an aspect of folk music that is alive in other music...but no, there's not one particular music that I think is bad or anything like that. But I'm less judgmental, I don't know what changed in me, but I like anything, I'll listen to anything...even 80's music.
K: Even 80's music?
T: Yeah, probably a lot now. I've kind of come to terms with it. There's a lot of credibility there, you know? The eighties are coming back in our fashion these days, and it's crazy because the eighties are back and they haven't even been gone for that long.
K: What is your favorite book?
T: My favorite book is probably..well, I know that there are so many that I have not read, but one of my favorite books right now is probably The Catcher in the Rye...but I'm going to have give you two favorite books, The Catcher in the Rye and a journal by Hemingway called Under Kilimanjaro, so it would probably be J.D. Salinger or Hemingway.
K: Do you have a favorite children's book?
T: Yes, I do, but I don't know the name of it, but it's about these butterflies that eventually come around..they crawl up something and they find out that nothing is at the top, and it's very sad. It makes you think, and messages like that, when you're a child, you probably can't grasp, but they're always with you. That's what's interesting about children's stories. They're very distinctive and very beautiful and lovely and evil at times, and I think that they're great because we're very impressionable at that age and they're things that we can always go back to.
K: What is the best concert you've ever been to?
T: It was maybe this guy named Grant Lee Phillips, who was in this band called Grant Lee Buffalo. He was playing onstage with a string quartet. This would have been at Largo in 2004. It was really great.
K: If you were to choose a major movie director to direct your biopic, who would it be? Who would play you?
T: Well, it would have to be David Lynch, if you could consider him a major director. As for who would play me, well, maybe a very old english either..woman or man..or maybe not even a woman or man, maybe a dog or something.
K: Have you always wanted to be a musician or were you set on another career path at some point?
T: I never wanted to be a musician, I always wanted to be either a fireman or Indiana Jones.
K: Maybe Indiana Jones can play you.
T: In my biopic? Harrison Ford?
K: Yeah, maybe he could play you, or just be an extra or something?
T: [laughs] Maybe he'd play my dad.
K: If you could have any superpower, what would it be?
T: Superpower? Maybe to read minds. But I already feel like some people can already do that, can't they Mary?
Mary Jones [Tom's Manager]: Read minds? I know sometimes I can.
T: That would probably be the thing, to be able to know that you could definitely know what someone else is thinking.
K: Controllably, or all the time?
T: I don't know, just kind of get inside their heads a little bit, but I know some are already good at that, you know, by going off of people's facial expressions and how they act, like poker players or something like that and some people are just no good at it.
K: Where do you most wish to travel?
T: That I've never been to? Hawaii, I've never been to Hawaii. Did you mean to play or..?
K: Anything.
T: Well then Hawaii, I'd really like to go to Hawaii. The other place I'd really like to go to is Alaska.
K: Have you ever tried to grow a woman from the ground?
T: Recently, I guess I have. ..."And did it work?"
K: [laughs] And did it work?
T: Yes, I would say so.
K: Are you considering a change in musical direction, or are you going to stick to your roots?
T: Well, I'll never be able to leave my roots. Your roots are what they are, whether you like them or not. You can change your appearance, but you'll always be what you are. But, I'm always one for taking sabbaticals and trying something new. I think you have to do that sometimes. You have to do things that you're good at, but you also have to do things that you don't know how to do very well. I think that you have to keep on challenging yourself at least to keep things interesting and kind of retain that sort of heat in the fire, so I think that I'll have to do something different someday..it won't be rap, it won't be anything quirky, but it will be something maybe more modern.
If you want to see more of the pictures I took at Tom's shows in Seattle (the in-store at Sonic Boom Records on Capitol Hill, as well as those at the Triple door), such as the one at the top of this entry, you can view the Photobucket Album here.
2 comments:
Katy good job!! Everything looks great!!! Definitely worth all your time and effort.
Keep up the good work!
-Roomie/Cousin
Thanks Kristen! :]
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