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Howe
Gelb
12/07/04
Howe Gelb is verging on becoming an institution. Having been an active part
of the American music scene now for decades, he is held in high esteem by
listeners and fellow musicians alike and is rather prolific in his song
writing. This said though it’s been along wait for new material from his
most famous outing, Giant Sand, but thankfully the wait will soon be over.
As the release date of the next instalment into the Giant Sand saga, ‘It’s
all Over…the Map’, draws gradually closer, Tasty was given the opportunity
of catching up with Howe on a recent visit to London so with great
trepidation and nervy demeanour that’s exactly what it did.
You’re obviously a busy
man. You have quite a range of musical projects on the go including Giant
Sand. I was wondering how you balance the pressures of your music with that
of your family commitments. How do the two combined leave you feeling at the
moment?
Yeah, I kind of come to terms with that on a daily basis. It definitely
depends on the day, but…do you have kids?
I don’t actually, no. My
friend has a one year old daughter though.
How old is he?
He’s 23
That’s young. Yeah there’s no sleep for a while. Father shock lasts at
least a year (laughs)
I’ll let him know. It’s
obviously been quite a while since ‘Covers Magazine’ and then before that
‘Chore of Enchantment’, so this is the first album of all new Giant Sand
material for some time. Any particular reason for such a long hiatus?
Well I, err… I don’t make a decent enough game plan ever. So I get
occupied and I guess I’ve been real occupied with the children, there’s
three of them. I’m in my late forties now, So they …the music kinda is there
and you think it handles itself and you sorta get in and out of it when you
can, but children are always needing stuff. In the old days the music needed
stuff and now that just kinda takes a backseat but you just get focused in
on what’s in front of you that needs your attention. The kids are turning
out pretty good though.
Am I right in thinking
you’re a painter as well?
Yeah but I’ve had no time for that.
It must be difficult to
balance all the aspects of your life.
Yeah and then there’s the energy equation. That’s why I asked how old
your friend was cause as you get older, and what I’m finding here in your
late forties, is your energy kinda dilapidates in the way that you don’t
have the imagination it would in your thirties, let alone twenties. So at
the end of the day when the kids are down, your kinda wasted, you don’t have
much going on, but then in the middle of the day or anytime you’ll get this
notion for a song and you’ve got to find a corner to hide away in. You just
put the phone down real quick, virtually shove it away and just get on with
it for five minutes, ten minutes and then just put it away and get on with
your other stuff.
So the new album, ‘It’s all
Over…the Map’, is out this autumn in the UK. How do feel it’s turned out
compared to your previous works?
I don’t let them go until I really love them. So I’m never sure what
it’s going to be until it’s over and then I kinda get entertained by how
it’s shaped up and try to figure out what’s going on exactly myself. It
makes sense to me; the whole thing makes a lot of sense to me. Have you
heard it yet?
I’ve only heard the track
on the Thrill Jockey website.
Oh yeah ‘NYC of Time’. Well I guess it sounds like, when I step back
form it, I think it sounds a lot like the last five years all wrapped up.
There are some rockers in there and there’s some piano songs and some guitar
songs.
So who’s in the Giant Sand
line up for this album?
It’s become the Danes that I’ve been playing with for the last couple,
of years. They’re the guys who seem to be around me the most and hang out so
they’re ready to make music when I’m ready to make it. And it’s beginning
the third decade of Giant Sand so it’s fair enough, that’s where it’s
supposed to go.
So it’s verging on an
odyssey now then?
Yeah, I, err (laughs). Odyssey?
I think it’s a fitting word
to describe it. That’s huge, three decades.
Yeah but it seems like it’s always lacked a healthy quota of ambition.
Which when I step back and think about it on occasion I wonder about the
foundation of such a lack and it comes from, you know, the given nature of
whatever you wanted it to be. I think what I wanted was something other than
whatever was, reality wise. So that’s what its stuck being, something
‘other’.
So in terms of the tour
that’s coming up soon, who is coming over with you this time?
It’ll be the guys on the record which are Anders on slide work and
Thøger on bass and Peter on drums. For the London show we’re talking John
Parish and, or even playing with, his new band he’s putting together, and
Scout Niblett maybe. She’s my favourite band at the moment. She ALONE is my
favourite rock band. I love her.
So no Joey and John then
for the moment? Are you still in close contact with those guys?
Yeah Johns coming up to Denmark in a few weeks…can you hold on a second?
There’s another line, I’ll just beep it in. I hope this works. If not you’ll
need to call me right back.
(Put on hold for a short time
before the phone goes dead. I call-back)
Hello
Its Luke again
Sorry about that Luke. So when the phone beeps it means I can go over to
another call but I lose you I guess. Where were we?
Joey and John.
Yeah. Johns coming over to Denmark where we live in ht e summer and then
we’ll travel back to Tucson together. I think it comes down to, as life has
changed through the years, there’s this common bond that comes back to
having children. John having a child still seems close because he goes
through the rigors of dealing with being a father. And all our children have
become so tight with each other like they’re brothers and sisters, between
John’s daughter and my daughter and Rainer’s daughter. Plus there’s the
younger ones as well so that whole family thin has taken over and become
more of a bonding issue between us then the music.
They were with you on the
last Blacky Ranchette record though weren’t they?
Well I’ve got…what I’ve been doing the last five years is I’ve been
making music whenever I fin a spare minute. I just do it like that and at
the end of the year or so, when the place gets cluttered up, I’ll determine
what’s going on here. Do I have a Blacky album that needs to be just topped
off or what? And that kinda how it goes, so I’ll have like five different
possibilities or stuff that could fit into various camps. So some of the
stuff, like the stuff that they were on (Joey and John) was a couple of
years old.
Right, cause I remember
reading an interview a while ago where you said you didn’t imagine another
Blacky Ranchette album rearing its head but we had ‘still looking Good’ last
year
And I didn’t even think that was a real record at the time. I thought
that was going to be, well, I like to make these records, these anti
records, these tour only records and that’s what I thought that was and then
Thrill Jockey heard it and said they wanted to put it to the top of the heap
of what I was working on.
I think it turned out to be
some of the strongest songs we’ve heard from you in a while though. How did
the song with Kurt Wagner and you in the car come about?
I was at Kurt’s house. I’d been invited over to Nashville to record with
St.Thomas and he was being produced by a guy named Marky Nevers who plays
for Lambchop and does the production for Will Oldham…
And Andrew Birds last
album…
Oh yeah, Andrew Bird, right. There’s like this coincidental circle,
there’s been this weather, this climate of coincidence around all things
Giant Sand that’s always permeated everything and that’s how these things
sort of lend themselves. For instance Bird and I just got off tour together
in November and I didn’t even realise the Marky Nevers connection. When I
hooked up with Mark it was by accident through St. Thomas and I loved his
studios, they’re very similar to the criteria of recording, you know the
sixteen track, kind of a home studio, and I like his method of madness, how
quickly he works. It’s similar to the way I work. But it was Kurt that put
me up at his house for those few days and the song that he sang on I
happened to be writing in his living room Kurt would get up every morning
and go into his room and write
His song a day
Right (chuckles). And he reminded me later that he has me in there, I
guess I went in there one morning with and went on at length about a dream
or something and he taped it all so he says he’s gonna do the same thing
where he uses that in something, I don’t know, like a rock opera or
something. But anyway, he was dropping me off at the airport and I hadn’t
gotten around to asking, cause at the house we never had time, if he wanted
to sing on it so I just pulled out the minidisk therein the front seat of
his truck before I had to get out for my plane. The funny part was of course
that while he’s attempting it the state trooper came to ask us to move along
which is sorta better than any solo.
So you’ve mentioned being
on tour with Andrew Bird and your love of Scout Niblett. Is there anyone
else that you’re listening to or have been on tour with that you think
deserves a mention?
There’s a women you’ve never heard of yet called Katie Maki, she’s a
young 26 year old singer songwriter from Canada, and another woman, a rocker
who’s an Inuit and an amazing singer, great, great rockin stuff, named Lucy
Idlout and she’s pretty fantastic. I was spending, ahh, I have like a
follow-up record to this giant sand record finished already and I ended up
doing it up in Canada and that’s why I was running into these people there.
So is it a Giant Sand
record or a Howe Gelb one or…
I think it’s gonna be a Howe Gelb because it’s very simple. Its mostly
just guitar and drums but with a ten piece gospel choir.
Excellent
Yeah, so that was really, really fun to do and I found myself being more
excited than I’ve been in a long time about recording.
When are we likely to be
seeing that released?
You know it’s in its holding pattern waiting for this one to do its job
so probably not till spring 2005 or so, because you tell me, but I’m told by
the record company that if I keep putting these things out too often then
the writers can’t make room to write about each record there’s so many.
There’s only so much space a magazines gonna give you. So that’s the
problem. You can put it out but nobody’s going to be able to touch it or
write about it so the record company has to be concerned with that and I’m
kinda not.
You’re just stockpiling it
somewhere?
Yeah I don’t know it seems like that more than ever. I’ve got these
Grandaddy sessions I’ve done and that means that’s the third record that’s
half done and I have no idea what to do with them. And then I’ve just
completed another tour only CD like the Blacky one turned into and I’ve just
finished it and I was listening to it on the plane over. That will be a tour
only CD but it’s a pretty good record. it almost sounds better than the real
records.
I think that’s what a lot
of the Blacky stuff ended up sounding like as well. Its kind of, I don’t
know, maybe if you sit there and just make music and don’t really consider
if its going anywhere then…
Exactly yeah, you don’t think about it in terms of presenting it and so
it has that nice cloaked, I don’t know what kind of atmosphere you call it,
but it’s sort of in your room kind of vibe a lot of it. You’re not looking
like, ‘oh I'm going to present this’ or ‘I've got to clean it up enough to
be presentable’.
I’ve just got a couple of
final questions off a friend of mine who’s a big fan. Bearing in mind he
could ask you any question in the world and this is what he wants to know.
Okay
‘Have you seen Mark Linkous
recently and is he okay?’ because he worries about him you see?
No I haven’t. I haven’t seen him in over… Paulie was keeping in touch
with him for a while and then she hadn’t heard from him for a while so that
might be, erm…(pauses) but then I heard something good about him. I heard
something, I can’t remember what it was. Maybe she told me he resurfaced or
he did something. It ended on a positive note but I can’t remember what it
was.
That’s okay then, I’ll let
my friend know. The other question was ‘Where are you living currently and
is it dusty?’. I promise he won’t stalk you. He sounds odd but he’s
harmless.
I’m still in Tucson for 8 months of the year and then I go to Denmark
for 4. So yeah, it’s pretty fucking dusty.
Luke Drozd |
