Interview: Shakey Graves – Living The Dream

Alejandro Rose-Garcia, aka Shakey Graves, is about to make another trip to New Zealand with a show slated at Auckland’s Powerstation on Wednesday, April 24th.

Shakey Graves’ latest album, Can’t Wake Up, threw a few fans for a loop thanks to its musical experimental-ism.

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda had a chat with Shakey Graves as he was working on his new home studio and talked about why he felt the need to broaden his sound.

Click here to listen to the interview:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

SG: I’m just on the outskirts of Austin Texas right now.

MD: Ah very good. Is that where you live?

SG: Yeah Austin ‘s where I live. But I’m off at my recording studio right now.

MD: Oh, what are you working on, anything exciting?

SG: I hope so yeah. Right now I’m doing some menial tasks, I’m drilling some door handles onto a door, working at the shop right now.

MD: That sounds like fun. So you have to pretty much maintain your own studio and all that stuff? Sounds very hands on.

SG: Yeah it’s part of the dream come true. I like having something to dote on.

MD: Right. So is this the studio where you recorded your most recent album?

SG: No we didn’t have the luxury of having a studio at that point. We sort of set out on a quest all over the place to record. We did some of it at Levon Helm’s house in upstate New York, we did some at Colorado, we did it kind of all over the place. But the studio is a pretty new thing. I just kind of resolved to…Ii needed a place that was set up all the time, just so it’s nice to work at your house, but everyone needs an office at some point to take it to a more official level!

MD: That’s right, I’m on the clock and off the clock, there needs to be a difference.

SG: Absolutely.

MD: What was Levon’s place like up at Woodstock?

SG: Oh my God, insane. It’s like a museum kind of in its own right. His dogs are running around. And of course he wasn’t there but it sure felt like he was. Yes it’s an extraordinary place. Somewhere I couldn’t believe we were there the whole time we were.

MD: Sounds pretty cool. So you’re going to be in Auckland on the April 24th to play at the Powerstation, and I’m gathering that it’s going to be a different kind of show than what we’re used to because you’ve been here a few times before. So tell us what we can expect when you get here.

SG: You’re definitely going to get some new tricks on an older boy. But you know overall I try not to be going somewhere I don’t go all the time. I’m not going to fly all the way there just to force you guys to listen to the new record that I did. As much as that would somewhat please me, I basically take the whole body of music on the road. So there definitely will be plenty of stuff off the new record, there’ll be stuff from the old records, some solo stuff, acoustic thing, it’s a variety show.

MD: Gotcha. And are you travelling on your own, or the band? What’s happening?

SG: I’ll be travelling with a band. So it will be partially me and then partially a 4 piece band.

MD: Sounds like fun, and I know it’s been several, quite a few months since Can’t Wake Up has been released back in May, was the reaction kind of what you expected for that, or was there any surprise involved in how people reacted?

SG: Yeah I think it was mixed confusion with total enjoyment and people definitely jumped ship because that’s how the cookie crumbles but I think personally I couldn’t be happier. It was such an exploratory process and one that I would do it all over again if I could. Really enjoyed it.

MD: Right. So what was your process for coming up with this idea of exploring more sonic territory than you have in the past? Did you give it a lot of thought? Is this something that kind of happened naturally?

SG: It was both. It was kind of the choice I had to make. If you’re a close friend of mine or someone I play music with a lot you would already know that the potential range of musical tastes and the weird recordings I’ve made but for the general public it maybe came definitely more as a surprise and before I did that it was like, there’s always the question of, do you try to recreate something that worked? I sort of knew I couldn’t do inherently otherwise it would feel false in some way because all I’ve ever really done was explore what my gut tells me and what kind of music I’m feeling I’m needing to hear . And again, and if you look at the history of recorded music, fortune favours the brave even if something is whatever. You’ve gotta take chances man!

MD: Right exactly.

SG: And I also knew potentially that this wasn’t really a record made to… I didn’t really design it to play on the radio, it didn’t really have a direct agenda. It was mainly a record to express stuff I haven’t shown to people before. I knew that if i didn’t do it now it’d be potentially harder to do in the future. If I didn’t stretch out I feel like I would have just suffocated.

MD: Now this may seem like a weird question but because everybody knows record sales exactly aren’t what they used to be, does that kind of take the pressure off of you, not having to worry about selling a million copies because no one’s selling a million copies, does that allow you to do what you want more when you ‘re recording?

SG: I guess. I’d love to sell a million copies, but yeah on one side the bit that gets confusing is it does make it a lot harder to gauge the success of a record that isn’t a giant radio hit. Because the radio is still totally valid. It’s not like, ‘oh, what’s a radio?’ It’s definitely a barometer of popular opinion but album sales don’t really reflect what they used to. And so in a lot of ways it’s kind of harder to get a general sense of what a record like that does. I guess if you’re asleep at night thinking ‘I’m just happy its out. And a lot of people whose opinions really matter to me got it. And even people I don’t know are like, ‘oh, this is what I’m talking about!’ so I feel like as long as it’s heard by somebody, I’ve done my job.

MD: Fair enough. As far as the songs on the record  on Can’t Wake Up when you were writing these songs, did that dictate how because they’re all fairly diverse in how they sound. Were you just kind of following what the songs did? How did that work?

SG: Yeah, it was definitely that. It was like, I kind of always seek songs and then try to build a narrative from there. With this the narrative became sort of a collage that was, I didn’t know that was going to be… I was just as surprised as anybody, I guess, finding out that’s what the whole record was going to be about. I believe very heavily on the subconscious and trying to stay out of your own way when you’re building something like that and do what needs to be done by you. And so in that sense it’s a wild success for me because I feel like I got to the bottom of something that I didn’t even know I was going to express.

MD: One of the more ambitious songs on the record is Aibohphobia which is a palindrome, I don’t know how to say that, what possessed you to even try that?

SG: Yeah that’s a great example. That was a song that once we wrote it we couldn’t stop singing it. And it came up as a joke, it begs the question of what makes a serious song more important than a song that has a sense of humour or is a bit more confusing? I listen to all sorts of wild shit, some of my favourite stuff, my favourite show I’ve been to this year was Jonathan Richman which is as strange as it gets, extremely non-linear music in a lot of ways and there’s something he’s getting to the bottom of in the same turn of a coin that I love listening to top 40 pop music. Somewhere in between those two things is what I think is important and Aibohphobia just had to be on there. That one side had to be represented in some way and that was the song that did it. I don’t know if it would make sense to make a whole album that sounded like that or know if I want to but when listening, I purposefully built it to the way I like listening to music too, sometimes in a really cohesive project I love something in a very consistent narrative voice where everything sounds the same. I think there’s a place and time for that at the same time I love a little variety and to spice it up in the musical bedroom.

MD: Speaking of the musical bedroom, Foot of Your Bed, how’s that for a segue?

SG: Nice! You’ve done this before.

MD: You’ve got harps and it sounds very baroque and you’ve got an organ going on there, what was it about the song that made you take that musical approach to it?

SG: That was one where the music totally informed all of it really. It’s like I had written a version of that song back before And The War Came came out. We used to play some variation of that song a long time ago. And then it was in the 13th hour right when we were finishing the record off I went and sat on a 70’s organ that has the autoplay feature and just started playing, and fell in love with the tone of that thing and then out of the clear blue that song popped up in my head, I hadn’t thought of it in years, and ‘oh my God, it works!’ so that was recorded in a night, I sat outside wrote the lyrics in a very quick, it just kind of came out where some of the songs I worked on for months,  that one just appeared and seemed like a beautiful closer. I love that song, very transportative, it takes you somewhere.

MD: And you kind of segue from one song or join some of the songs together, was that a planned thing? Did it feel like these songs belonged together? What’s going on there?

SG: Yeah I always think about that stuff. I love connective tissue in music. I think about that a lot, it’s mainly I do the car test. Eventually I try to find what songs want to be paired together because my goal is for you to be sucked into the record no matter what. Some songs I feel like they need to be there more so than they want to be there, so well, that song has to be there. That’s where it goes.

MD: Now that you’ve got this record out of your system so to speak, does that enable you to do anything you want from here on out? You’ve kind of shattered people’s expectations of what they think you should sound like, I guess.

SG: Yeah. A million times yes. I feel different. Maybe that’s what it’s all about. I hope the record makes people feel different too. It’s about what I learned in the process. In doing this, records end up becoming big chapters of your life as a musician and I feel like Can’t Wake Up is a perfect representation of my emotional state or the tumultuousness that comes out of whole identity shifts, how different is that really at the end of the day if it’s all you? And all those things are kind of what the record’s about subliminally. So what’s next in the future is just an open door. You can be whatever you want. And sometimes it’s going to be a lot easier for me to just play an acoustic ballad now. Oh, I’ll play an acoustic guitar all day long, I don’t care!

Click here for tickets and more information to see Shakey Graves at The Powerstation.