Old interview - 2016-- Country music

You scribbled an article the other day where you said that you felt country music has basically become "next to worthlesss" due to the manner in which it has marginalized itself politically. In specific you were discussing some of the newer stars , like Musgraves and Lambert & Shelton et cetera. At points you were rather derogatory. Yet it's also obvious that you do have a real respect for the old country tradition. What gives here?

It's confusing, I know. (Laughs). Well, I think the thing that folks have to understand is that country music, you know, it's just like I said in my article: It's been incredibly marginalized and has actually almost been high jacked by people who don't care so much about music as they do politics. And this is really an enormous tragedy once you realize how integral country music is to uh...our country! I'm the last person to want to toss out all tradition and burn it; but I'm also the last person whose going to let  these conmen steal a great genre of music, you know? They're frauds.

But who exactly? Do you want to say the current stars are frauds or-

I actually don't think it's the stars so much as it is the fans. This is in fact a pretty constant theme of my work now that everyone ought to pick up on: The stars are really just puppets that the fans are controlling, and what we are seeing when we look at modern country is that the fans , well...you know, they're apart of that insane conservative political base for the most part, and so what has happened now is that the musicians also have to be apart of that same base. I find this really intriguing because if you look at the history of country singing, the only reason it ever managed to reach the mainstream was really because of that outlaw ride it went on in, i guess, the early 70s. So the only reason anyone ever liked it was because it once upon a time went ANTI CONSERVATIVE. All of a sudden guys like Willie Nelson, Gram Parsons, Johnny Cash , Waylon Jennings -- these guys managed to clip a huge deal of the mainstream and it was really beautiful because they made people like me,up here in this murderous city, they made me feel like I was apart of the country. I gues it might sound old hat now , but listening to Johnny Cash and everything when I was growing up- it really made me feel like an "American". And not in a bad way, but in a good way. Johnny is beloved by Republicans and he even seems to have a Republican message he was sending too; but when you actually look into his personal politics, you'll see he never actually sided with one party or the other. He performed at San Quentin penitentiary for Christ sakes. Johnny Cash was for the beaten man and that message is well known, it comes through in all of his work- but when I listen to these new country artists, I don't see much of him there anymore. What I'm seeing now is extremism coming from that side. I think that, like every other music culture, country music also deteriorated in a colossal way....

In what sense though?

Well for a long time I was, I'll admit, really blind to it because I was only researching those historical figures and learning how to play their songs and I was never looking into the modern guys, but then recently I started to finally look into them in a huge way, and what I came to find was I ..I really did not like it at all. They weren't relatable. If I had never heard of Johnny Cash and I had only ever heard of someone like Toby Keith or Kenny Chesney, I'm very sorry to say, but I'm not sure I would have ever become even slightly interested in country music. I think I would have insulted the hell out of it just like everyone else in the city. I would have gone the rap route like the kids in the city wanted me to. I'd probsbly be rich right now! Son of a bitch Johnny Cash....

How did you find Cash in the first place?

It's a good question that a lot of people would think isn't worth asking but very much is. The thing that everyone forgets now about Cash is that he wasn't actually doing so well in the late 80s and middle 90s and he almost vanished from pop culture entirely, it seems, until he suddenly threw out this incredible Hail Mary pass (for his own career and memory) when he did the "Hurt" song. The story of Johnny doing that song , everyone knows, it's really a story all its own. For most kids I have met here in the city, if I show up somewhere with an acoustic guitar in hand and I say I like cowboy music, that's the very first song - and often only song- that they'll reference. "Hurt". Of course as everyone knows it isn't even actually a song that Cash wrote himself, but rather one that the fellow from Nine Inch Nails wrote. I find this intriguing because it goes to show that our modern pop culture interpretation of Cash is ....how should I put it ...we've largely forgotten who he actually was in his prime, I guess. This is ironic because typically, for all the other stars, it's exactly the opposite. Nobody really gives a hell about solo  Paul McCartney or what he did with Wings, really, they love him for what he did with the Beatles in his prime and those are the songs they mainly want too- and yet when you look at Cash, if he were still alive now and touring , if there was a hologram going around of Johnny Cash right now, that holograms most requested song would undoubtedly be "Hurt".

And "Walk the Line", "Boy Named Sue", "Folsom Prison Blues".

That's true, absolutrly, all those songs come into play and they're all loved by people - but mostly for the modern audience the big song is "Hurt" and "Hurt" alone. Then too whne it comes to those 3 other tunes you mentioned, the interesting thing about them to me is that, while I'll agree they're incredible songs,I would also still say that I don't think they represent the Cash I love. The Cash I love, what I would consider the real Cash, he goes far beyond that sort of songeriting. To me the best stuff he did was the historical stuff, which is coincidentally all the stuff that no one even in the country music 101 community seems to remember these days. If you look at his album "Bitter Tears: Johnny Sings Ballads of the American Indian", from 1964, I think that's a literal artifact. I literally think it is a relic that needs to be preserved, that album needs to go into the Library of Congress & the Smithsonian--I honest to God think it is one of the greatest albums that anyone ever made, hands down- and I also think that new songwriters - no matter what genre they're from - I think they need to look at that album and examine it, because its not only the story of the "real" Johnny Cash, but it's also the "real" USA. That album is incredible....it's almost like a film soundtrack or something, every song is a character that Johnny is playing, it's some of his best songeriting - and yet when you look at this albums legacy, what do you see? Nothing. Nada. Nobody gives a hoot about it. It seems to have not influenced the modern songeriting community AT ALL. Nobody even knows he did those songs! You know why that album is so funny by the way?

Why's that?

Because, from an historical point of view,  Johnny was actually one step ahead of the hip crowd when he wrote that album. Look at the date again: 1964. In 1964 Jimi Hendrix had not yet released a single album and Bob Dylan had only 2 albums to his name behind him, both acoustic. The hippie revolution still had yet to really begin when Cash released that album, and a major point of the hippies was that they brought the American Indian into view, after a half century of the American Indian being total forgotten, with their long hair and their beaded jackets and their peace pipes etc. Hippies brought a lot of attention to places like Wounded Knee and stuff. They were very into Natives. And yet there was Johnny Cash doing it in 1964, singing about Indians, basically before anybody. He was concerned about the Indian issue, even writing about it - creating American ART about it-  before the hippies.

He really was and remains to be an extremely interesting figure for these kinds of reasons. Writing that album was a risk. It's nothing like regular country music if you listen to it. The songs on it are literally Indian songs, with that Indian drum beat and everything. It's extremely bizarre from a modern perspective. Look at the titles: "Vanishing Race", "Apache Tears", "White Girl". What on Earth was this you know? In 1964! Can you even imagine seeing a song from one of these new country artists about this now? A song sympathetic to minorities in the same sense as this one? Absolutely not. Because the World suffered a tragic split, you see, after the 70s hit...the War on Drugs began to rumble...and then this sort of political 2 step that Johnny was dancing, it became unfashionable. That's why he was sitting there in the 1990s almost totally forgotten in a way. Again, the only reason he came back to mind was because he threw out a Hail Mary pass with a song that an alternative rock band had written. And then too don't forget that Cash covered other "alternative" artists as well, in his old age. He played a Glen Danzig song, "Thirteen", he did a U2 song, "One", he did Tom Petty, I think he even at one point did a Bob Marley song. Yes, I just searched it out, he even played an acoustic version of Marleys "Redemption Song". That's incredible!

He was trying to break the chains of genre as an old man....in a way that the new country stars just don't really do, because they aren't at all sympathetic to anyone outside of the country world, in my opinion. They don't realize how odd they look, I don't think, to city eyes. It's sad because losing country music as a viable pop culture art form....I personally think it means losing a lot of other things as well. But it's honestly like the modern stars aren't even trying. It's like they don't even care to have a wider audience. They're content with Wal Mart shoppers. As though they don't mind being marginalized. It's very strange because the country stars are actually just as marginalized as the rap stars, maybe even more so. I don't know how to explain it. I think it's sad I guess. As an acoustic guitar player but even just as someone who loves  listening to stories and writing them myself, it's very depressing for me. Again: I first became interested in Cash not because I wanted to be a cowboy in Louisville, but because he had good stories he told. He told me about history. He sang "The Battle of New Orleans", "Ghost Riders in the Sky", "Long Black Veil", "Banks of the Ohio." Where are these stories now? They're no where. The only stories country gives me now - they're all about a bunch of people in cut off shorts, drinking Budweiser, shopping at Wal-Mart and shooting Glocks and Desert Eagles at bottles of Coca Cola in their backyard. That's fine occasionally, modern stories are very important to tell, absolutrly- but - Jesus Christ- can these people ever come up with a character? I feel like that's what the whole new generation is not comprehending about the old stars. Johnny Cash was not at the Battle of New Orleans, he was not in the Civil War, he did not fight with Robert E. Lee, he wasn't there when Sitting Bull was killed at Wounded Knee and he did not help George Washington fight the American Revolution - but in his songs he played characters that were doing these things. Everyone these days you'll find, it's like they have no idea how to get out of their own personalities. Every song is about their own life. The black rappers have the exact same problem, I'm telling you . These songs all suck! They only write about how god awful life is in the modern day inner city of Baltimore or Oakland or something. All of their songs , if you look at them, it's as though nothing ever happened before the artist himself was born in 1990 or whatever. Johnny Cash had a whole other spin. He was actually an impersonator, in the same sense that Stephen King or Johnny Depp is an impersonator. But if you look at these people now, they've lost this, I swear to God they've lost it. All they play is themselves. They never sing about history. They never create a fictional plot. They never do jack diddly. The only modern day country song I ever find myself listening to on repeat is that one Braid Paisley sang called "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive". That was a great song. Turns out he didn't even write it. Patty Loveless did. I'm not surprised, since Brad Paisley never writes about history, almost as though he isn't allowed to or just doesn't know how to. And that's why Brad Paisley is not beloved by city folks or international folks or anyone outside of Nashville for that matter - because he's very belligerent , and he makes no secret of the fact that he's writing for one sort of person and one sort of person alone. I'm sorry but, in my opinion, that's just not what an artist is supposed to be. An artist is supposed to take on characters - even if they're characters he doesn't agree with. Take for instance Merle Haggard with the song "Okie from Muskogee", where he sings the famous Republican line "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee, we don't take our trips on LSD / we don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street, cause we like living right, and living free..."

Well the very interesting thing about this song is that, when I went and looked into it and tried to summon up some answers as to why exactly Merle went ahead and wrote it ...what I came to find is that he, in his later days, started saying ...what else...that he wrote it as a character. He said he wrote it "with his fathers voice". You see what I mean don't you? Everyone grabbed that song and ran with it - I think Richard Nixon used it for a political campaign?- but in the end that song was not even totally Merle Haggard! He literally even sang it with Willie Nelson years later, Willie Nelson who is the king of the potheads. The song was just a character, it wasn't totally his voice; but it's like people can't grasp that. They always want their musicians now to be the character on stage and off. It's stupid and it's limiting the creativity. It's limiting it in the  most horrific of ways. I always say it...but just imagine how boring it would be if Stephen King only wrote about his actual day to day life? Or if a major actor like Bruce Willis suddenly decided he would only actually play ...Bruce Willis? It would be good for about 10 minutes and then you'd be bored to tears! Bruce Willlis needs to transform into someone else to be interesting. George Clooney does. Johnny Depp does. They all do! Nobody wants that day to day stuff in movies or books - so why do they want it literaly around the clock in music now? I don't get it.

It's almost as though the movies and books became so over the top and inauthentic with the special effects that, as a result, music - and country music in particular - had to fill the void and become the 'authentic place'.

That's a good way to put it really and maybe it is indeed what happened because honestly when I look at it ...I can't really understand how it came to be like this. What you say though, that's probsbly the straight truth. Everything else in our culture went so over the top so we started protecting our music. Preserving it in this one "authentic" place. It's almost actually reminding me of that film with Kevin Costner about baseball now, Field of Dreams...when the James Earl Jones character goes on that beautiful  rant about baseball and he says ...what does he say... "The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again...." This line from Field of Dreams is fantastic & all but you know the problem is that uh..baseball is a game, it is not an ART! A game isn't supposed to change rapidly, a game needs rules and regulations and limits - otherwise it will lose its essence - but a musical art form, it will die if it follows these structures. An art form needs to be able to paint outside the lines if it wants to survive. But what we have done now is collapsed everything ...we don't allow anyone to play a "character", whether that character is historical, modern, or futuristic. We only want them to play themselves.

Do you think a female star like Miranda Lambert almost gets it the worst, this whole locked into 1 character thing you're pressing?

Absolutely. There's no doubt about this at all. Look at her songs, look at the songs her friends like Ashley Monroe or Carrie Underwood have written, look at them and you'll see it's far worse. Unbelievably worse. They're as locked into one character as could be. Men cannot listen to these songs. It's always one mask and nothing else. The girls might as well be wearing the Afghan face mask - yep! - I said it! I said It! Every song Miranda Lambert sings is about being ...Miranda Lambert. She never plays a character. It isn't her fault as a songwriter. I bet she could play 1000 characters. Don't ever think it's her fault as a songwriter, no way. I don't believe that for a second. It's the fault of the fans. Of the culture surrounding her, the culture she is trapped in. Her fans and her culture - it will not let her be anyone but that one character. I bet Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, Angaleena Presley, Kacey Musgraves...maybe even Carrie Underwood- whoever the big chick performers are - I bet any of them could, if they tried, write a character driven album such as the "Bitter Tears" one that i referenced from Johnny Cash, they might even be able to make a better one, a masterpiece  - but guess what? It'll never happen in our own time period because their fans have them on lock. They're in a cage. They would lose everything if they took on something outside themselves. Miranda Lambert, according to this culture, she must never play anyone when she steps up to the microphone except herself. As I say, look at the titles, look at the lyrics, and you'll see it instantly. Always the same person. Always. And this is why no one "serious" wants to examine them as creators. I often feel like these artists are happy with the audience they have, I'm sure they are - but I also can't help but think that they'd like to have some more reach. Well the reason they don't have any reach, this is why. It's like I said before: They aren't even trying.

So what would your advice be?

(Laughs) my advice is very simple: They have to gradually start leaving the "personal" character behind and start dipping into other boxes , just like Cash did. In the article I wrote, I at one point referenced the famous "Highwayman" song that Cash, Kristofferson, and Nelson put together. If you look at the song it follows what I think is the best character driven scheme imaginable. In the first verse the singer is speaking as the highwayman with his pistol, in the next verse he's a dam builder, then he's a sailor ...and finally Johnny Cash himself
Comes in and sings the ultimate verse as a "starship pilot who shall fly across the universe divide..." This song is quintessential character songwriting, and new young songwriters ought to look at it ...obsess over it...examine it....again and again. This song proves just how many characters can exist in one song.

Would you like to see Miranda Lambert sing it?

Very much, yes, I would. I'd like  to see her sing this and many other sorts of tunes. I think a big part of me actually has always dreamed of being the behind the scenes songwriter for these people in a way, but I never..I never found a way to do it I guess. I'm only 27 as I write this so I guess there's still time, but I'm very far from all of the places where this is happening you know..I've never seen Memphis or Nashville or Dallas or New Orleans or any of it... To me those cities are almost all as foreign as Cairo and Shanghai and Bangkok (laughs) but you know recently for some reason Miranda Lambert in particular has inspired me, because I am doing a lot of research recently on female icons in general and once you put her politics aside, I do find a lot to like about her. I could easily scribble a book about a character like her. But my Miranda would have a uh..she would eventually take a much different direction, I think.

She'd sell out and leave country behind and become like Taylor Swift.

No! I hate Taylor Swift- I'll say it! I don't like her at all. She's worse than all of the strict and rigid Nashville stars to me because she's ...she's like Cyrus, they're one in the same, they broke out of the Nashville mold, yes, but then they just went flying into another mold that's even worse. Forget them. Neither of those stars are examples of good songwriting either in my opinion. Miranda beats them easy. ...

(Interview ends)