(Credit: Ulrich Maurer)
CHRIS: The line-up has always been kind of stable!
Yeah, but maybe people have more to expect now, as you have been going on for some time.
CHRIS: The only reason that we did another studio album was because up until this point we had more live albums out than we had studio records. We're the only act in the history of rock music... We had the Mylos All-Stars and Shelter for an evening and only one studio record. So we had to do another studio record so we would at least have as many studio records as live records.
You could easily have turned into the Grateful Dead otherwise...
CHRIS: Exactly! It was veering towards the absurd. So we had this sort of change now.
But would you agree that Chris & Carla has become a name that people can relate to a lot more now since it's been going on for such a long time.
CHRIS: I guess so. Some people come to the shows, so I guess they get it as something else.
CARLA: I think that some people recognize the name from before and realize that something is developing here.
Do you think that that kind of awareness among people influenced you in some way while recording Swinger 500?
CHRIS: Yeah, I know for sure that it did in the sense that we delayed doing it. I think it dawned on Carla and I about a year ago that there are actually people that sort of expected another Chris & Carla record to be of a certain quality. We have never released a record we didn't think was good, but I think it was also thought like, "Yeah OK, we just do that - the last was fun to do". There was a certain amount of responsibility that started to descend upon our minds about it.
That's what I meant.
CHRIS: Yeah. I know a number of people that really loved that first one...
CARLA: And the first album [Life Full of Holes] was so hodgepodge; Peter Buck gave us a song, Scott McCaughey, that Moroccan guy [Tyes Abelhaq - see the original Soundmind interview for the whole story]... We wanted to do more of a finished, refined project together.
And I think it works like that.
CARLA: Yeah, I think it holds better.
CHRIS: It's something done in one sitting, like thinking of it as an album from the beginning to the end. The last time when we collaborated with people we really collaborated with them at the beginning of creating the songs. People were coming in the first day of the studio. On the songs with the Tindersticks we just had them there all the way and just played with them. And the same with Peter [Buck].
CARLA: And then they stayed on to produce too and to mix the song that night.
CHRIS: The songs had very different characters to them.
CARLA: Yeah, almost from sheer country to weird tape manipulation songs.
CHRIS: And this time we brought in people at the very end. Carla and I did all our parts [first] and then we brought people in for a few days to add stuff to it. We really had the songs more or less established what they were gonna sound like.
I really like that "homemade" feel to it. It sounds like it's 8 track or something.
CHRIS: A lot of it is really dirty sounding in places. I think that's just because we use a lot of really cheap things, purposely. We use a lot of 70's kind of keyboards and we really wanted to have a little bit of a, I guess - I hate that word lo-fi, but...
CARLA: Swinger 500 is a model of an organ that we have at home, a nice big piece of furniture. We recorded that at home in our basement and then we brought our tapes in. And we did all the drum loops at home too.
It's a very strange mix of studio sound and, uh, "lo-fi" to use a word you don't like. It has a kind of a tension between the different sounds.
CHRIS: Yeah, there's a certain tension between the sort of electronic sounds around the record like the drums and all the things on top - you know the melodic things are almost all acoustic. It's all real piano and trumpets and cello.
CARLA: And then some real drums, too.
CHRIS; Yeah, that's added to it, yeah.
Have you yet heard any comments upon this new sound with drum machines and such?
CHRIS: I'm sure there's a few people that are confused by it, but that's good. If we don't confuse people, I don't think we're doing our job somehow. I think it's a really personal record, in a way it's a kind of a record that comes out of my own record collection. It's got everything from sort of traditional folk elements with acoustic instruments to electronic music. Somehow instead of picking the one or the other we brought them together. It's a record in a way that probably only Carla and I could have made it. It's not like we're trying to live up to any blueprint or [any sort of] idea of what the record should sound like. It's more like this weird place in our own minds, really.
CARLA: Honestly, we are trying to be more electronic, but when it really comes down to it our tradition of having some kind of song there is so strong that we don't allow ourselves to go like Björk; we don't go way out there, not so far.
Maybe you will in the future.
CHRIS: Who knows. This record was planned to be more electronic. He who was gonna produce it was this guy named Steve Fisk and I think the original idea was to make a far more electronic record. But halfway through the [work], we started listening to singer/songwriter music again, which I hadn't really for a few years, so it sort of took a twist back again to that direction.
I think that a few records back with the Walkabouts, there was some kind of change of perspectives in your lyrics. There's a lot more of "you's" and "me's" on this album than before.
CHRIS: I don't really think that you can say that Carla and I are singing... I think it's a little more open looking inside and personal feelings. They're not really like story songs.
CARLA: There's only one; "Fear" is the only one story song.
CHRIS: And the Willie Nelson song.
Is that something that just happened to be?
CHRIS: Well, the words just come right through somehow. The record's really "small" [as far as the instrumental setting goes] so I think the words needed to be intimate. I think that with albums like Devil's Road and even Nighttown, you have these big soundscape kind of records, they work kind of cinematically. I think this record works better with very simple, emotion kind of words.
Aren't you afraid that people are going to analyze you through the lyrics?
CHRIS: Yeah, sure. That's why we wrote story songs for so long, I really didn't want people to do that. You know, maybe it's something different. You can't keep writing the same song. You have to try different approaches not just in the musical backgrounds but in the lyrics as well.
CARLA: I don't worry too much about that because even though I'm singing the songs and have been living with the songs a couple of months now, I still can't make sense of exactly what they mean.
CHRIS: Well, I don't think that I can do that [either]. Lyrics are best left open-ended.
I think it's easier now for the listener to kind of pinpoint their meaning than it was before.
CHRIS: Right, but you can't really say that "this is where this comes from and this is where that comes from". The sources of them are not like "well, this happened last week". They still somehow are these kinds of impressions.
CARLA: Like "Swinger 500" sounds like somebody's in trouble, some kind of pain...
Most people are in your songs, aren't they!
CARLA: [laugh] Well, yeah...!
Do you think that you will go back to the storytelling thing with the Walkabouts?
CHRIS: I don't know. We started working on some songs in January but we didn't really get very far down the lyrical side of it, it was more like thrashing out musical ideas. It's hard to say. We're definitely gonna take a few weeks off and spend most of the summer... I don't think we're gonna play much [for a while], so I can't say really what direction it's going to take.
Would you agree that this last album is more experimental than the ones before that?
CARLA: For us, working with an orchestra was pretty much an experiment. I don't think I would agree with that.
Would you, Chris?
CHRIS: [pause] It [the album] seems logical to me. We never really felt that we're out on a weird edge of things when we're making the records, so I guess I never really felt it being experimental somehow. It seems to be a record that reflects musically where Carla and I were at the time of when we made the record, so it doesn't really seem strange to me. I know that some people have reacted to it that way. I know that some people don't get it somehow. But I get it and if it was really experimental, I would not understand it.
CARLA: In one sense it was experimental in that we're both on keyboards. For me to get back to keyboards was really fun.
CHRIS: She played the keyboards the first three-four years of the band until Glenn came in.
CARLA: Yeah. Chris started playing the piano on Nighttown.
CHRIS: To program the drums...
CARLA: That was experimental.
CHRIS: That was experimental, that I'll give you! 'Cause we didn't know at all what we were doing as far as I go! That was about the only place on this record where we were out learning something that we hadn't really done before.
CARLA: And then there was one song where every musician came in to play... We had them to record a song where they only heard what Chris and I had done. We didn't let them hear what the other people had done. At the end of the two weeks then we took that song and mixed it with Michael Wells on bass and harmonica.
CHRIS: Bingo Catastrophe.
CARLA: So that was a big experiment.
CHRIS: There are probably about 17 versions of that song that are possible, 'cause it's full of trumpets and saxophone solos - all kinds of stuff. We just didn't use very much of it, we just used Michael's bass and harmonica and David Immergluck's pedal steel. It seemed to make more sense with that. We had a lot of banjo on it, dobro and all kinds of tracks recorded for that song.
So you could release a remix album only using that song and nobody would recognize it.
CHRIS: You would recognize the loop but other than that would be very very different.
I can't really point out why, but I think "Swinger 500" has a more European feel.
CHRIS: I don't know. I look at it still very much a record that's folk and country music. All of the songs you can somehow still sit down and play them. I think that some of the choices we made of instruments we added maybe moves it into more a kind of an electronic road. We're doing some jazz there which is not something that we have really done a lot of before.
CARLA: The trumpet player we had to come in is in his fifties and had done Ray Charles and James Brown tours.
Oscar Williams, right?
CHRIS: Yeah. He has done a lot of sessions; he's got a huge discography of albums that he has played on and things like that. - Well, he's a weirdo, this Oscar guy's totally weird! How did you meet him?
CHRIS: We heard about him and called him.
[At this moment, there's a pause for dinner.]
CARLA: Noo...
CHRIS: It's funny, he hadn't actually been in a studio since Scavenger and that was recorded in '90. He hadn't changed his drumheads since 1990 either, and he said ,"Hey man, did you change my heads?" "Weell, now that I think about it..." He did bring extra heads, though... It was great, that [Famous Last Words] was just one take. We just ran through the song once. It was great, a very easy relaxed session.
Had you decided on beforehand that he would do the drums for that one?
CHRIS: For that song I had a vision for something like very dry drums, a totally straight ahead beat and just a piano and it should be very simple. He was like the perfect drummer for that.
Did you enjoy it?
CHRIS: Oh, we had a great time. We sat around drinking in the studio for about four hours.
CARLA: And he plays with John von Feldt [bass player on two songs on Swinger 500]. That was good to have a drummer and a bass player that could "read" each other.
CHRIS: Have a bit of chemistry.
So you didn't have to do a lot of remakes.
CHRIS: No, we did it totally one take, absolute one take.
Will he continue working?
CHRIS: Ah, I don't know. I don't think he's having any grand ambitions to be a musician at this point. I mean, he enjoyed it but I don't think it like re-sparked any fire in him to get out and play.
Just a one-off thing then.
CHRIS: Yeah yeah. We might do something else in the future, who knows.
CARLA: He has a much better job now. It's consistent and... He's trying to be a family man.
What is he doing, what is he working with?
CHRIS: He's a carpenter, a builder.
CARLA: Now he's one of the head carpenters at the Dale Chihuly factory. Dale Chihuly is a world renowned glass blower. Elton John just went there and spent half a million dollars in 40 minutes. He just went through the factory and pointed at things!
Sounds very much like Elton... So, what will happen with Chris & Carla and the Walkabouts after this?
CHRIS: Well, we definitely won't do another Chris & Carla for a while, there's no hurry to do one. Definitely our focus at this point is to do another Walkabouts album, but the general opinion amongst all of us is that there's no reason to rush into it until we've got songs. We've jammed around a few things, but it's truly nothing to talk about. We didn't really have a record... I think we had a good nine months between Setting the Woods On Fire and then we sort of got back together to work on Devil's Road. I think we need another good half-year before we go back in the studio because we've just been so busy. Baker's doing Mad Season again - they're doing an album right now actually - and Glenn's playing with Matt Cameron from Soundgarden...
CARLA: And Kim [Thayill] and Ben [Shepherd].
CHRIS: It's sort of a Soundgarden off-shoot. Terri did drums on the Midnight Choir album that I just produced. She's playing with Christine [Gunn] actually. Christine has a [new] band now.
As anyone should know by now, Christine joined the Walkabouts for the Devil's Road/Nighttown tours and she also plays cello on Nighttown. She has never been a permanent member of the band as she had her own three-piece band, Trillian Green. Trillian Green made two really wonderful albums, Psycho-tantric Juju Jazz and Metamorphoses, which I think are still available from Omnivine Records. The band's now sadly defunct - I sure will miss their creative and innovative blend of Eastern music, jazz and Jethro Tull-ian outbursts. Apart from some truly remarkable cello, the line-up included flute and various percussion.
Too bad that Trillian Green broke up.
CHRIS: Yeah. This new project, I think she's really excited about it. So we're all kind of doing different things, and I think that's a good thing. I think it always makes the band stronger when you bring it back, 'cause you learn stuff. It's so obvious but you do bring fresh ideas back to it.
I know that this is silly but each time there's a new Chris & Carla album coming I get afraid that the Walkabouts are about to break up...
CARLA: It's still really, really, really fun!
After all these years!
CARLA: Yeah!
CHRIS: I always look at what Carla and I do as very much a side project.
But every Chris & Carla thing sounds so very convincing.
CHRIS: But it doesn't mean that... I'm not gonna make an album that's not convincing, it doesn't matter if it's a side project or hopefully even when I produce records I'm convincing. I wanna bring that kind of energy to other projects that I do or we do.
Now that's quality thinking.
CHRIS: Yeah, but at the same time... As long as the fire's there to make music, I think we should make it, because it's really rare that you have five people that like each other and know how to make music together after being together for a mighty long period of time. So I look at it as a real lucky thing that we can still get excited about standing in our rehearsal space with the five of us trying out new songs and things. But also with that said that we've been together for so long, we have to step back or else you would become suffocating and somehow, nobody would really grow. It's good to grow and the best way to do it is to go get experiences.
- I think we'll always make records, no matter what we're doing. I look at it as a privilege to do it. It's nothing someone makes you do. I guess that - and I'm at it again - we wanna make sure that we don't get into this thing where we're doing it because our record company or our manager or somebody that's not us wants us to make a record. I think that's a really bad place to be.
CARLA: We don't wanna make an album because you know how to make an album.
CHRIS: It's too precious for that.
CARLA: But at the same time you wanna make an album because you do know how to make 'em. You know, after so many years and after working with so many musicians, you still can learn a new trick or technique. The reason you wanna do the next project is that you wanna try out what you've learned; a new technique, new gadgets and effects, new instruments...
For how long can you expand the sound?
CHRIS: I think it's infinite really. I think there's a lot of things that we still can try.
CARLA: And when you go to a new country, they have different instruments, different scales, different traditions... You know, we know so little about music, really.
CHRIS: Yeah, that's true.
I'm thinking of your collaboration with these Greek musicians which turned out really fine.
CHRIS: That was a real learning experience for us. They're beautiful! That was a great example of music at its most... doing music for all the right reasons. It was all about people wanting to play together. The idea of making an album out of it was completely a sort of an afterthought. Somebody just happened to think of it in time so that we actually could get a mobile truck there to do it. That was never the focus of it; the focus of it was always like just to go and play with these guys.
CARLA: Even the director of the entire complex - it's a cultural center - he's a pretty famous Greek keyboard player and producer and he wanted to come out and play keyboards.
There's a Norwegian band called Midnight Choir that has put out two records to this date. The last of the two, Olsen's Lot, was released in 1996 with Chris Eckman as a producer. Their style is slightly similar to the Walkabouts', but they certainly have a very personal touch to it. And most of all, they have great songs. Chris was working in Portugal on their new album earlier this year and it will - hopefully - come out in September. Meanwhile, I recommend you to listen to Olsen's Lot, it's out on 24:00 through Mega Scandinavia.
How did you team up with Midnight Choir? Will you continue working together in the future?
CHRIS: We've decided that we'll do one more record after this one, you know, a trilogy, we'll keep it a trilogy. This one's close to being done. We'll mix it at the end of April and we're very very happy with this record. I'm just really happy for the band 'cause it's a band that after their last record [Olsen's Lot] more or less went separate ways. They didn't play live and... The record got phenomenal reviews in Norway but there was no band all of a sudden.
Will you (Carla) sing on it?
CARLA: Yeah, when we're going to London I will add vocals to it.
And then you will take a break?
CHRIS: Yes. A few months.
I guess that you deserve it.
CHRIS: Nah, I don't think we deserve it, but we need it! It's a hard kind of work to just... I'm not afraid of hard work obviously, but at some point I think... I mean, we haven't even had a vacation. I just had eight days in Portugal and that was the first time I had that much time in like two and a half years. It's a long time. We've had things like four or five days, but that's like it. Otherwise you're back in the office doing some kind of business thing or producing a record or writing songs for a record or whatever - constant, constant work. It's already that this fall potentially could be filled up. Tours have been offered, I was offered another producing thing - I mean there's just all kinds of way that it could be filled up but at this time I just have to say just no. Which was hard to do because I love doing things.
But you're still human.
CHRIS: Yeah, you're human. You've got to take a rest.
Well, he's human all right, but sometimes it seems that his creativity and talent for pulling out new - and genuinely great songs - is a gift from above.
Don't you ever run out of songs?
CHRIS: I'm out of it at the moment! But I think it's a point of, just again, staying interested in music. As long as you [are ready to receive] fresh ideas and fresh sounds and as long as you have new experiences in your own life, I think you'll find songs. I trust that to come.
It's just so fascinating that you go on do album after album and almost every song is just so wonderful!
CHRIS: Thank you! I appreciate that! I really don't know what to say, but thank you - I appreciate that!
And so I can't keep it back any longer, I just got to say this...
Well, actually - and this will maybe embarrass you...
CHRIS: Here we go!
...actually, I think you're the greatest songwriter alive.
At this point, something rather unusual occurs. I've rarely seen Chris fall short verbally; you know, he's a man of words and he always has a quick reply, both in interviews and when you're just having a talk with him. But now, there's a long, stunned pause. Carla says nothing, as if she's just waiting for what will happen. For a while I almost wondered if I had said something wrong. Had I broken some rule for what to say and what not to say? Had I made a complete fool out of myself? But then there's a relief to the tension, and -: CHRIS: WOW!
CARLA: [relieved laughter] Phew!
CHRIS: [genuinely delighted]: So behold the day I die - then I will really get famous! [calms down a little] Well... I really appreciate that, but I don't have anything to say... except thank you, but... I've certainly been on a good run of songs, but that's why I'm very protective about this next Walkabouts album - I just don't want to rush into something. Every once in a while you've got to pull back and take a deep breath and we've been producing stuff at a fairly rapid rate and I think that that could catch up with us if we don't be a little bit careful. So far we've been very lucky. I'm very happy with what we've done.
You should be, Chris. You should be.
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