further complications! jarvis speaks

Yesterday, Yancey shouted out the new Jarvis record, Further Complications, which I hadn’t really spent much time with. I’m spinning through it now and am loving it — it’s a radical shift for Jarvis. Not just because it’s a “rock” record, but because it’s so arid and pointy and gruff — you can certainly hear the Albini-isms.

We were fortunate enough to score an interview with Jarvis, and the results are predictably hilarious. The match-up between eMusic’s Matt Fritch and Cocker couldn’t have worked more perfectly. Both of them are at the top of their game, and the back and forth reads more like a friendly conversation than the kind of “LETS TALK ABOUT YOUR ALBUM” yawn that occupies way too much space in the fading magazine industry.

The full interview is both here as well as below the jump, but here’s a choice quote to whet your appetite:

I can’t possibly fuck all the women in the world, but I can at least penetrate them if they listen to this song. That song going into your ears is like me penetrating your orifice.

The first line on this record, “In the beginning there was nothing,” is the same opening line on the first song on Lee Hazlewood’s Requiem For An Almost Lady.

[Shocked] It is, isn’t it?

I take it that wasn’t intentional.

No. Please don’t point that out. “In the beginning there was nothing/But it was kind of fun watching nothing grow.” I didn’t realize that. That’s good. When you started saying that phrase, my blood started running cold. I thought you were going to say it’s exactly the same line as the first line on Bon Jovi’s album. At least it’s Lee. I don’t mind that. Thanks for pointing that out. If I had some sort of prize to give, I’d give it to you.

You were on a really excellent tribute album to Hazlewood in 2002, covering a song (”The Cheat”) with Richard Hawley.

Yeah, myself and Richard even got to support Lee in London. He heard us play that song and laughed a lot. A couple of years ago I got to guest-edit The Observer — a Sunday newspaper in England that has a music magazine once a month — and I asked Richard to do an interview with Lee. It was one of the last interviews he did before he died. I didn’t get to see him before he died (in 2007), but I was lucky enough to get to know Lee a little bit.

This is a little bit of a stretch, but there is some similarity in the way that you and Hazlewood write lyrics: an eye for detail, a little bit of silliness and a genuine love of women.

Yeah. I mean, Lee didn’t help himself in some ways in that some of his songs were silly, like “Dolly Parton’s Guitar.” You’re asking for trouble there. People think of him as a jokey figure, but he wrote some quite profound songs, like that “Dirtnap Stories” song from For Every Solution There’s A Problem. Maybe because he wasn’t prepared to take himself that seriously, he didn’t get the respect he deserved. But I think he’s a major talent, and not just because of his songwriting. There was all the production work he did that goes back to the roots of rock ‘n’ roll, with Duane Eddy.

He also operated a little bit outside of the music business, doing things on his own terms.

Some of that he probably learned from working with Nancy Sinatra. Then he disappeared to Sweden, I think so that his son wouldn’t get drafted. I think “No Train To Stockholm” is about the fact you couldn’t get drafted in Sweden.

You’re living in Paris now. Some musicians, like Hazlewood in Sweden or Bowie in Berlin, take inspiration from living in a foreign place. Does that matter much to you in your writing?

The thing with me is that I’m such a slow person. It takes about five years to register in my brain that I have moved, and for it to filter through to what I do. The last record I made still talked about a lot of stuff in England. I just did this thing in a Parisian art gallery where we had six days and we set up and played music. I don’t think I could have done that project anywhere else. Finally, after six years of living here, I’ve done something that does engage with Paris.

You spent some time in the Arctic recently.

I’ve just about thawed out now. I went to the west coast of Greenland with this (climate-change awareness) organization called Cape Farewell that takes creative types up there. The author Nicole Krauss and Laurie Anderson were there, too. I came up with the musical part of “Slush” there. People who listen and expect I’m going to tell them how to deal with climate change will be sorely disappointed. But it does address it in, well, slush. That’s what the North Pole will be quite soon. It’ll be like that dirty snow you get in the city two days after it fell. It’s also a love song, so it kind of played on the idea of a slushy romantic ballad. Sentimental slush.

My editorial imperative here is to talk with you about the inspiration behind the songs on the album. But it seems obvious that so many of the songs are about, well, fucking. Or not fucking.

Mostly not fucking, really. “Fuckingsong” is my surrogate. It’s like I can’t possibly fuck all the women in the world, but I can at least penetrate them if they listen to this song. [Laughs] It’s going to put people off buying it, isn’t it? That song going into your ears is like me penetrating your orifice.

Maybe husbands won’t be buying it for their wives.

Well, maybe. It’s looking at the contradictions of being a performer. It would be better for people to have a relationship with the song rather than with me. Like every other human being, I’m a bit of a fuck-up. I get drunk. I turn up late for things. Sometimes I can’t perform when I’m supposed to do. That song, once it’s recorded, every time you listen to it will be as good as the first time. It will always perform. So what I’m saying, ladies, is have a relationship with that song, not with the person.

Big Black, one of Steve Albini’s former bands, had an album called Songs About Fucking.

I believe you. I’ve never heard it. That’s a funny thing, I’m looking forward to playing with Steve’s band, Shellac, at a festival this month in Barcelona. That will be the first time I hear the kind of music he plays, to be honest.

When you met Albini to begin recording Further Complications, did you have preconceptions about him?

I don’t think so. I knew that he wasn’t just a producer. I’d seen things he’d written about the music business, so I could tell he was pretty opinionated. It was an almost an accident that we ended up recording with him, because we were playing at the Pitchfork music festival in Chicago, where his studio is. A couple of the guys in the band suggested we work there. Technical things and all that crap I can’t get involved in. I thought recording with Steve would be an interesting experience. I like his attitude of not wanting to get in the way of what the band sounds like. It’s an admirable thing to aspire to, certainly the polar opposite of most producers, who like to see themselves as a god figure.

Going into this recording, were you trying to get the more immediate feel of the band you’d been touring with?

I made a resolution to write the songs with the band more and make sure we played them in front of an audience before we recorded them. The logical extension was to record the songs live. Nowadays, if you’ve got a band, I can’t see any point in not recording live. Otherwise, get a MIDI sequencer and have something completely in tune and on time. The only point in having a band is if you want something different than that. Which is that slightly indefinable thing of what happens when five people try to play in time and in tune, and you’ve got those little human things that turn it into something else. It’s so fucking boring going into the studio doing it the other way, where people play one bar and use ProTools to repeat it 60 times.

It hardly seems like creativity.

Usually, the first day in the studio you sit in the control room drinking too many cups of coffee while someone hits a snare drum all day. Because I’m not a technical person, I thought there must be a reason for this torture. But I don’t think there is.

I wasn’t familiar with the word pilchard, which is a song title on this record.

It’s like a large sardine.

Does it have some slang meaning?

There was a girl at our school who wasn’t very attractive but became known because she allowed boys to have sex with her, sometimes during break. She had a kind of fishy face, so she was known as Pilchard. The song was going to have lyrics about her later seeing one of the boys who’d shagged her behind the sports hall, and he was respectable now and it reminded him of what he used to do. But I never got around to writing that bit.

“Pilchard” and “Homewrecker” are songs that give you a bit of space not to sing.

I do tend to fill every spare moment up with me jabbering, and it is nice to get some breathing space. Hopefully when I do so, they’ll say, “What’s he on about now?” Otherwise you turn off, don’t you?

You gave a lecture at SXSW this year about lyrics in music. What were some of the talking points?

The basic premise was that words in songs don’t matter that much. The example was “Louie, Louie,” and the point was you can’t tell what the lyrics are and so some people thought they were obscene. Really, you have to think of lyrics as a sunroof on a car or a patio on a house. Having said that, lyrics are important to me and they really can make a difference. I looked at some specific examples of work I admired. There was a Lee Hazlewood song in there, Lou Reed, Dory Previn, Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen was an interesting example because people ask whether lyrics are poetry or not, and he’s a published poet who also writes songs.

Some songwriters are reluctant to discuss lyrics, thinking it takes away the mystique. I know you’ve always discouraged people from reading the lyrics while listening to the music.

The lyrics only exist to be part of the song. If you’re reading them, you’re taking them out of their natural habitat. You wouldn’t just listen to the high-hat part of a song, unless you were some kind of anal person. It’s how it all blends together that’s important. The best thing is when it just comes out of the speakers and you can’t tell what’s playing what. You just like the general noise that comes out. That’s what I like about music. Why does it excite you? One of Steve Albini’s greatest aphorisms was like, “It’s like trying to explain why you get a hard-on.” There’s no analyzing it. Either you like a song or you don’t. Either you get a hard-on or you don’t.