Could you talk a bit about your evolution into this,i.e. did you envision this path in high school?
I envisioned all of this long ago in some way or another. In high school, and even earlier I fancied that I would be a performer and that there would be people who would be interested in what I was doing. But the reality of my life is so much more magical and beautiful than anything I could have ever planned for myself.
I had to let go of a lot of ambitions, completely let them go. I had a lot of very humbling experiences. These helped me to let go, and once the letting go was complete, much to my surprise, this work began.
Somewhere along the lines, for some reason, someone put an accordion on my chest. Bless them. We always get what we want. We rarely get what we expect.
Was Tom Waits an influence in any way?
Of course. Just not as much as a lot of people imagine. I grew up on bad music, on punk rock, on the Monkees, on the Sound of Music soundtrack. Later when I really was a student of music, it was classical, world folk music and avant-garde that I listened to. I actually had hardly heard much Tom Waits at the time that I released Viaje. But I think he is great. He sounds like cookie monster. It used to irk me how often the comparisons came up. Now it doesn't irk me so much, and they don't come as often. There are much worse performers I could be compared to. It only becomes annoying when people look at me as a cheap imitation, or at my work as just homage to him.
You've mentioned several influences on your work in past interviews (Dylan, Cohen, punk, folk, classical and Eastern European music). You've also mentioned Vladimir Vysotsky. I'm particularly interested in what Leonard Cohen and Vysotsky gave you. Could you elaborate a bit?
I feel some sort of kindred spirit with the two of them. It is funny, I actually only heard Vysotsky a year ago when I first went to Russia. But when I first started doing this in 1998, all of the time Russian people in Seattle would come up to me and say, 'my god! You are Vysotsky!' In the beginning, this comparison came up more
often than Tom Waits. I had never heard of him, but eventually I wrote down the name and tried to find some recordings in America. Admittedly I didn't try too hard, but nothing came up. His name gets transliterated a lot of different ways. (Much like mine does in Russia now, oddly.) Anyway, when I came to Russia last year I inquired about this fellow who was considered a Russian Bob Dylan, a movie actor, sang with a gruff voice and jumped onto tables with his accordion. They were puzzled, but finally a few days before I left, someone said 'could he mean Vysotsky?!' I was misinformed. He was a guitarist, not an accordion player. He is amazing. My Russian is horrible, but even I can tell his wordplay is genius. But mostly it is just the raw powerful sound of a single man with an instrument and a voice. He sings roughly, but every syllable is clear and articulate. The music is simple, but full of subtleties. These are all qualities that are important to me and I hope some people find them present in my work.
Cohen is a lot more recognized voice, but oddly I only met his work late in life as well. In all his work he strives for a marriage of the physical and the spiritual worlds. Or tries to make us aware that marriage has already happened. His early songs are amazingly successful. I remember the first time I heard 'Suzanne' and watching this magical frightening woman become Jesus Christ and then even more amazingly become a woman again. I felt like I had been shown a special and beautiful thing that was there always in front of me but I couldn't see. I like the idea of being an arrow pointing people toward something beautiful that is always there. Anyway, in several of my songs I have tried (and most likely failed) to capture this sort of magic. And I often use a structure similar to that in Suzanne, where an earthly relationship is painted and then some sort of spiritual one, and then I try to create an abstraction that unites the two.
I had an interesting bit of synchronicity when you mentioned Leonard Cohen. I'd just finished a wonderful book by the Scottish author Alan Warner (These Demented Lands). In it he thanks the Canadian author Michael Ondaatje. I'm a big fan of Ondaatje's work, and out of curiosity I checked to see if he had any new books out (Anil's Ghost being the last I'd read). He didn't, but I noticed he had a book on Leonard Cohen!
There are a bunch of other funny Cohen things. I once got it into my head to try to find the guy. I was in LA with a free hour and noticed Mt Baldy on the map. For some reason I had thought it was in Northern California. So I tried to drive up to the monastery, but there was fire in the mountains. The roads were closed.
Next page: Outside the Old Cemetery
