For the third time, I teamed up with Chris and Carla for a long and interesting talk. Seems like we're establishing a tradition... Anyway, it all happened backstage at Studion in Stockholm on August 30, 1999, a couple of hours before their show there (which actually happened to be the last ever by any band at Studion). I'd like to give my most sincere and heartfelt thanks to Carla and Chris for sharing their time with me, and also for answering my questions very openly. Some of what is discussed is of a delicate nature, but both of them gave very honest answers. I very much appreciate the confidence they showed me. Thanks.

Can we talk about your relationship with Virgin Records?

CE: Well, what shall we say...

CT: That was then, this is now.

What happened?

CE: Well, this is really a technical thing, and I think it's a thing that people have had a hard time understanding, but, you know, if we say bad things about Virgin, people think it's Virgin Sweden for example who did a bad job for us, or Virgin Portugal or Virgin in a particular country, when often that wasn't really the problem. For example, I was always very happy with the people here in Virgin Sweden. I thought they really tried to do something, where some people didn't try at all.

So what was the problem really?

CE: The problem was who we were signed to, who is Virgin Germany. After we did Devil's Road, there was a certain amount of success, but that... They heard the Nighttown album and basically gave up on it before they even tried to sell it.

Because?

CE: Because it fell into a bad time for them. They knew it was gonna be hard to sell; it was not a pop record. It didn't have obvious pop singles - in their minds anyway - and that was the end of it.

CT: And I think EMI who owned Virgin also was splitting the company up. For some reason Virgin got split into different companies, that's how someone explained to me once. There's all kinds of theories. I think no one really knows what happened at upper echelon levels. But we do know a lot of bands during that time got cut off the roster.

CE: And rosters of other labels too. Everything was a precursor to what's happening right now. You're seeing tons of bands being dropped, that whole Universal/PolyGram thing...

In ten years time there will only be Universal it seems....

CT: Yeah, it's only about four companies now.

CE: And the acquisitions have not stopped. So yeah, I think now the idea of artist development has really been thrown out the window by these majors. They really feel like that if you don't deliver hits first time out, and maybe they will give you a second time, it's over. And you know, frankly, that's their business. I'm not gonna sit here and say it's a tragedy for music, because there are labels that are run by intelligent music people, like Glitterhouse and Beggar's Banquet and, you know...

CT: Rykodisc.

CE: Rykodisc, you can go down the list of people that are trying to put out good music, and frankly, they have a better chance putting it out now when the majors are leaving the field.

Maybe, in a while, they'll get kind of sucked up by Universal?

CT: That was what was happening before.

CE: I think people are very sceptical now. People are very sceptical. A lot of indie labels have stopped their major label distribution deals a couple of years ago. People are starting to detach because they can see where it's going. I think there was a lot of optimism about it in the early 90's, a lot of small labels aligning with big labels. I think people - bands included - learn their lessons. Again, if they want to sign the Backstreet Boys and Amelia and people like this, and they wanna put it out, then that's their business. That's how it's oriented. You know, there's a difference between a big chain restaurant and some nice restaurant that's on the corner. Y'know, the menus are special and it doesn't appeal to everybody, and it's all very much home-made. And then we have McDonald's down the street. There's somehow a place for both of us. And we're not really the McDonald's kind of band...

CT: Yeah, and we feel we got out just in time again.

CE: it could have been really hell for us.

Were you signed for more records?

CT: No, we fulfilled...

CE: Our option was up, but they basically had said that they... what's the word....

They never wanted to renew it?

CE: No, no - they said they wanted to renew it actually, but it was kind of a conditional renewing.

"We will do this if you...."

CE: "...if you do this", exactly. Precisely. They gave us an offer actually for renewal. Basically it was like, "You send us demos until we hear the single and then we give you this X amount of money, and this is what the new contract will be and blah-blah-blah".

CT: And our four demos ended up on this album and we like the songs and they didn't hear what they wanted to hear. And we thought, "Well, we're not gonna sit around and play this game". And so we decided, let's pull back and make it fun. And we pulled back in a lot of areas. We got rid of the management, we took a break - for the first time in fifteen years we took a break! - and decided we were just gonna make it fun again. Although I mean, it was interesting at Virgin, it was an interesting ride, but....

Now you've done that.

CT: Yeah, we did that. We watched that. We got tired talking about the Spice Girls.... Lenny Kravitz... and Janet Jackson... It's just a different music world.

Was it an obvious choice to go back to Glitterhouse or were you considering other labels as well?

CE: It was an immediate choice.

CT: We always kinda knew that door was open.

CE: I mean, they had grown since we'd been gone. You have to understand that when we left --- I guess if you call it Glitterhouse, it really wasn't Glitterhouse, we were never signed to Glitterhouse. People have this impression we actually used to be signed to Glitterhouse, We weren't. We were signed to Sub Pop Europe which is a different company.

It is? I thought it was the same.

CE: It's the same people, but it's actually a different company. It was a subsidiary of Sub Pop America. It was run by the same people as Glitterhouse, but we were not signed to the Glitterhouse label. You know, there's different money resources. Some of the money is coming from America when it's Sub Pop Europe. So it's like tied together. When they lost Sub Pop ---

CT: To Warner.

CE: --- was exactly the same time we were down with our contract with Sub Pop Europe. So we weren't really left with much choice, 'cause Glitterhouse was a very small label at that point. They had only released like three records in the previous three years. Well maybe five, but very few. They had no money. It was a completely different story, so there was never a question of us signing to Glitterhouse at the time that we signed to Virgin, because they knew it wasn't gonna work, and we knew it wasn't gonna work.

CT: And they also kinda blessed us going, "Go see what you can do! We'll try to stay alive here, you guys go try to get something..." Thank God, three years later we can reunite!

CE: They had grown.

CE: But they have changed, it's a whole different thing. They stand on their own now, they're not being propped up by Sub Pop or anybody else. They're selling records, and they were able to offer us a deal. We didn't just come back to Glitterhouse and say, "Hey, just sign us at any cost!". We had certain criteria moneywise obviously, that we knew we needed to make albums.

CT: 'Cause we wanted to work with producers still, and, you know...

CE: Good studios and string sections...

Was it easier for you to get Phill Brown after you had done the large scale productions of Devil's Road and Nighttown?

CE: To be honest, it made no difference to Phill. Phill came around completely through a personal relationship, 'cause I had worked with him on the Midnight Choir thing [Amsterdam Stranded]. Phill doesn't care much about the industry [laugh]! He doesn't sit around and think, "This is a major record label, this is a small". Phill picks the projects he wants to work on. He's done that for the last 25 years. Nothing is new to him now. I don't know how it would have gone if I had approached Phill Brown out of the blue, but obviously he did the Midnight Choir record, and that's how we approached him on that. He had no idea of who we were. He hadn't even heard their previous stuff. I basically talked him into it on the phone. I think that Phill probably wouldn't have come on as producer if I had not already known him, prior... Because that's not a role he normally takes. He's more of an engineer.

CT: Actually he's more of a co-producer.

CE: Yeah, but I knew how he could actually work as a producer in the context of our band, 'cause I had been a producer with him, so I could see how this relationship would work. We could turn it around slightly. But you know, when it comes down to it, we could pretty much produce our own records. It's more a question of having an extra person in the room just to sort of create an atmosphere. And he's fantastic in creating an atmospheres. It's really his whole trip.

It seems to me that, with each album, the producer, or rather the production, has turned into kind of an instrument in itself. From somewhere around Devil's Road, the production has turned into a more integrated part of the music. The albums before that, like Setting the Woods on Fire, were more down to earth.

CE: Oh yeah. Setting the Woods on Fire was almost live. Strangely enough, I think that on our first album, on Rattlesnake Gardens, the studio is a tool. Not that anyone can really tell, but... I mean, that was completely created in the studio, and it had no relationship to a band playing live music or anything like that. It was really made up as we went. But, certainly since then, we were more into taking these sort of organic pictures of the band playing live. Scavenger was a bit of a production thing.

CT: Yeah, with Gary Smith.

CE: That got a little bit abstract. But yeah, you're right, for the most part I think we started to look at the studio in [that] way. And certainly, on this record I think we did that the most of any.

CT: One of the biggest reasons that we wanted to have a producer on Devil's Road was because we wanted to work with a full orchestra, and we wanted somebody in charge of that. We didn't have the talent.

Somebody to blame!

CT: [laugh]

CE: We didn't know anyone in Seattle that had even worked in that context. Our own old familiar reference points just wouldn't have worked. So we knew we had to go outside. But this album, we rehearsed it as a live band for a few months and then we purposely left a lot of time to basically make things up. There are songs that really became the songs that they are in the studio, like Crime Story which was just sort of a Bob Dylany kind of folk song. We really fucked around with it and added weird sounds to it. None of those ideas really existed prior to the studio. Songs like Gold really came together in the studio. Pretty much of it did. Till I Reach You, all the textures on that... On the Day became a very very different song in the studio. We just had really basic ideas. The thing about Phill; he encouraged us a lot to "let's just record it". He's not really an editor. Like Victor [Van Vugt] was very much an editor. We did a lot of work before we went into the studio, cutting things out, like, "OK, we're not gonna record that", which was great.

CT: And we designed sound loops before.

CE: Yeah, we all had it done before. With the Victor stuff, there wasn't a lot - well. really nothing - not in the mix at the end. But this album, there's many things that are on these songs that aren't in the mix. We tried a lot of things that didn't really work, or even if it's cool there's too much stuff happening, let's go less is more. We are always sort of thinking in the end, the mix is where we did a lot of editing.

A funny thing about Trail of Stars is that the sound is kinda narrow, but at the same time it's very large.

CE: Right. It's a very strange album.

Do you understand what I mean?

CE: I know exactly what you mean. I think it's a perfect way to put it really. I think that comes from the fact that the size of it is determined by the room that we recorded it in. This is gonna sound like a very technical thing, but we weren't using artificial reverbs to give us this sense of space. All of the drum tracks are pretty much governed by room mikes as opposed to close mikes and then adding reverb later. Everything is recorded with a bit of distance. Everything is done like that. The piano is recorded that way. The guitars are all recorded with distant mikes. So the size of the album's is fairly--- if you listen to it start to finish it sounds the same. It's not like "this track sounds really big and this one sounds smaller". They all sort of sound the same sizewise. And then the dimension of it, then we added little things behind it to give it this kind of bigger thing. But the actual governing room size is rather small. It's actually a pretty big room, but it doesn't sound like a giant hall or something, like all kinds of orchestral reverbs... So it is very intimate in a way, and then it starts to... It sounds like a deceptively simple record to me. But as you start to listen to it, then you start to, "Oh, then there's this and then there's that". You start to hear some of the things that are kinda underneath it.

CT: I thought it was also interesting that Phill didn't mind us recording our sounds with effects already effecting the sound. When we recorded, we didn't add things later. We got to play with our own delays and our own distortions pedals and reverbs, and [looking at Chris] you used your Echoplex. Or we did some strange things like, Chris had done a scratch track in a smaller room that was surrounded mostly with glass and was playing the scratch guitar at the same time in there. We liked the sound of the electric guitar ricocheting off at the glass. So, later on when he laid down the electric guitar, we set up the same scenario and recorded it ricocheting off the glass.

So it's still a lot of discovering the possibilities as they appear.

CE: Yeah. We recorded the basic tracks almost like a jazz album. Very close to that, with roomy distant mikes. The drums were certainly recorded that way, and the piano, and the basic guitars. And then we fooled around with the sounds of everything else. Everything else was very far out, like, "Let's try this and let's do this and let's distort that", just fuck things up. But the general basis, the underlying feeling of it is this kind of organic album, with all these electronic things flying through it.

CT: And we placed things in the speakers and left them there from song to song, so there'd be some cohesiveness for the whole album. Like the drums are in the centre, the piano's off to the right, strings off to the left.

CE: Yeah, this sort of spread in the stereo never changes. We set it up to give you the sense of the same band playing every song, and then we added these little things to change it as the story goes.

You can use that also to describe a movie by Robert Altman. They almost always take place on a very limited area with things happening inside it. The way you describe it, it seems that this album works the very same way. CE/

CT: Right, uh-huh.

CE: The themes kinda resonate beyond those walls.

Yes.

CE: There's something happening there that's universal enough to ricochet out of it. Yeah, that's a good example.

In many ways I think it's your emotionally most complex album to date. I was listening to it late last night and it struck me that it's like coming into a room or a house and it's all empty, but you know that something has happened there. There has been a severe change for some reason. You're the only person there, but you can still feel the vibe from what has happened. It's still evident in the walls, in the atmosphere of the house.

CE: Oh, it's interesting.... Like something that remains... Hm, never thought of it that way. It's very interesting.

CT: Well... Maybe that's the reason for "trail of stars"; "trail" is what's left behind, the markings....

CE: It's what's left over, it's not the actual star itself...

So what has happened in this "room"?

CE: Well, I think...

A lot of things obviously... Baker... change of label...

CE: Yeah yeah... I think, well yeah, we were apart from each other for a long time... I'm not sure that we really thought that we were necessarily going to be a band again. I think there was a lot of speculation on all of our parts whether that was going to happen.

CT: We all had to make decisions. We had to go make money in another way again. At least on Virgin we had had three years of being professional musicians [laugh]. We all took this break and then [we'd come] back together and decide, is this worth it? Do we still wanna choose this little... still kind of a harder road to choose to keep a band going.

CE: I think we all also had to rewrite our relationships to each other to an extent too. I think we had all, on different levels, spent a lot of time with each other. I think things got really hard after... I mean, 'cause we really... you know, I still.... I don't feel like I've deluded myself --- I really believe in Nighttown, I think it is a beautiful record, and I don't think it was a failure somehow. I think it was a movement towards something we've been moving towards for a long time. When we had that done, I mean I really wondered if we... Somewhat in the character of Devil's Road, I wondered if we could really, you know, move from Devil's Road. I felt like it was successful in that respect. It took a lot of the same themes, sort of re-cast them a bit. But I was very satisfied with that record. And just have to be told constantly what a failure it was really really difficult to handle somehow.

Why was it supposed to be a failure?

CE: Because it was a commercial failure as far as the record company was concerned. The management told us it was a failure, and the record company told you it was a failure, and...

CT: And they told us that it was too dark, that it wasn't what people wanted to hear...

That's a very funny standpoint I think - that it was too dark..

CT: I mean - we are the Walkabouts! [laugh] and we've always been dark! Hello, you signed us! So they put the album out and didn't even buy a single ad for it! So, it sold half as many as Devil's Road.

And two attempted singles were never released.

CT: Yeah and they were even made. You see, even at a retail level we were seen as a failure.

CE: Absolutely, on every level. Booking agents look at it and they say, "Well look, you're not nearly getting the support you got last time". I mean it just hurts you on every level. It's really such a bitter pill to swallow. And I would say to some extent even the reviews of that were fairly inconsistent. In some places they were just glowing, but in some places where we had been very well reviewed with Devil's Road, we came back to them and, "The new one is not nearly as good"... Once again, I think it's one of those records that you have to listen to, and it's not really meant to be digested probably in the way that a lot of pop music is meant to be digested. I don't know if that's a failure on our respect. or if it's some kind of a belligerence in our regard. I think there's a certain amount of egoism operating. I was pretty pumped up from Devil's Road, I though it sort of pulled it off. We had this kind of minor hit single [The Light Will Stay On] in Germany and a couple of other countries and it sold fairly well, and I took that as a license that we could do whatever the fuck we want. I didn't look at it as, "The next logical step is..."

CT: The Light Will Stay On #2!

CE: For me it was like now we should just do... Not that we ever [thought] about that before, but we even took it more as a mandate to do just whatever the fuck we want. I might have been a bit arrogant, but I don't regret that somehow. I feel better about it than been sitting in the laboratory trying to come up with The Light Will Stay On 2 or whatever....

The Lights Will Go Out.

CE/CT: [laugh]

CE: The Lights Will Go Out, yeah! Or I Want to Go Out...

How did all this affect the way you did Trail of Stars?

CT: Well, for one thing, Chris wanted to change his surroundings where he usually wrote songs, which was usually America and usually on vacations, usually listening to --- well we told you in the past, he catches things in conversations, all of that. So he wanted to go off and write in isolation, and I think part of that crept into the songs.

CE: It should be said I think that part of that was necessary too. I wasn't able to write basically. We got together in January '98 and basically, we played like four or five songs that I had. I realized that this was all basically cast-outs from other things I just had lying around. The only song that was new out of that batch was Drown. That was the only song I liked out of them. The rest was like three-four years old. I've never done this. I've never just like dropped recycled material on them and offered it. And I said, something is really wrong here, the ideas are just not coming. I think, again, that a lot of this is business pressure or something like that. It seemed really hard. Virgin at that time was still talking to us, and they were still like, "Well, yeah, we'll do another record and look for a producer and blah-blah-blah", and then sending CD's of bands, like, "Check these guys out - if you sounded more like them, we'd get more excited". That was really really weird! [laugh]

CT: That was the problem; we had never had Virgin trying to influence our music before on Devil's Road or Nighttown. They had no say. But the indications were all there that they were gonna be little bit harder-nosed about the whole thing and try to steer us more, giving us Sneaker Pimps and all these CD's that they thought were gonna go somewhere.

CE: A favorite one was this one called Transis... uhm, Transister?

???

CE: See, you've never heard of them. Well maybe you have heard of it?

No.

CE: They're on Virgin anyway, but now there - they were convinced that it was gonna be the next big thing.

Obviously not.

CE: Obviously not, exactly! Which is really even funnier! The president of Virgin Germany send it to us, and goes, "Y'know, my wife heard this the other day and she said, 'This sounds like the Walkabouts! Or what the Walkabouts should sound like." I mean, how could you say a band "should" sound like something? A band sounds like what they sound either you like it or not, that doesn't really matter, but you can't say they should sound like this! That's just so weird! It's like saying, you should walk like this or you should eat like this. That's... weird!

CT: Yeah, and instead the band they let go ended up having a huge hit...

CE: Yeah, that's my favorite story, yeah - Chumbawumba. That huge hit they had worldwide whatever that song was... They were signed to Virgin Germany essentially, and Virgin Germany passed on the album they had that huge hit with, and that sold like 5 million worldwide... So these people aren't the best A&R people, we all have to say that [laugh]! Well, I guess that if they were geniuses and that they got it wrong with us, I might feel stranger about it, but they were not the brightest bulbs...

CT: No, but then again, it's a committee working on that level too and there are some smart, good people working there, but they're still up against their comrades, co-workers. They all have to come to an agreement who they're gonna go with and who they're gonna drop.

But you don't regret having been with them.

CE: No no, I think Carla put it best, it was a good ride. We learned a lot. We certainly got things out of it. We still got guitar strings left from those days....We were like packing our bags for this tour and we didn't have to buy any guitar strings.

CT/me: [laugh]

CE: We're well financed for a while. We got some software and some samplers, well we got a few things out of it.

CT: We've got a lot of Realworld CD's [laugh].

CE: So I can't feel horrible.

CT: And a Spice Girls colouring book.

CE: That's a cool thing

That's the best out of it!

CT: And a coffee thermos!

CE: And a calendar! There are some advantages...

So after all, it wasn't that bad!

CE: [laugh] But back to one thing you asked, about what made the album different. I was in Portugal and I was calling back to the States and Glenn at one point said that he really wanted to keep this album as a five-piece. This was before we really knew that Baker was going to leave. As soon as we thought about Nighttown we always knew that there would be strings in the songs, and we really started the arrangements as the songs were developing. It was this integrated thing from the beginning. But he thought we would just get into the room the five of us and play and fill in the parts ourselves as long as we could, and if we needed something in the end, then we'd bring it in. And that was a little different way to operate from Nighttown. And we held to that. We really developed this as a five-piece album. You see some weird results from that, like Carla's playing the electric guitar a lot, and I'm playing acoustic guitar for some reason; there's not two guitars on every song, I'm on keyboards, she's on guitar... We sort of just tossed it around.

Previously the focus was on you two, but on the new album I think it's a lot more Terri and Glenn.

CT: I think that particularly Glenn has got his stamp on every song very prominently, and I think that Terri's got to shine more, because of our new bass player Fred Chalenor. Those two work together better than anyone we've ever had in the percussion department. She's stepping out a little bit more.

CE: Also I think we build a lot of the songs up starting with the drums I bring the song and I play it once, I wouldn't for like an hour, and left it for the bass player and the drummer to work it out, because I didn't wanna imprint it with my rhythmic ideas. I play guitar like this and piano like this, and I just didn't wanna have that setting the rhythmic thing. I thought it could be much freer somehow if the rhythm section really started to model the song from the beginning. Also I wrote all the songs to loops and to drum machines and I have never done that before. There's something more rhythmic about them anyway; even though they're slow and things like that. They still have a more kind of a groove thing to them.

I quite often think of funk and reggae.

CE: Yeah, there's reggae things happening, in Gold and the end of that. And I always though that the opening track Desert Skies --- to me that was some kind of weird Isaac Hayes song.

I think that's the soul track of the album.

CE: Yeah, exactly. That's how I conceived it, like Isaac Hayes doing The Look of Love or something, you know that kind of big intro, set it up, bring it down to something really simple and groovy and then bring the strings in.

CT: And then Hightimes would be more of the funky side. I think that's where Fred had a lot to say on that song. And to bring the wah-wah pedal in, that always kinda adds the funk.

For how long has Fred been with you now?

CE: For about a year exactly now. We started to rehearse with him around the 1st of September last year.

He fits in perfectly.

CE: He is - and I don't think anyone would argue with this - the best musician in the band. He's certainly the most schooled, the one who knows all the implied chords that nobody's playing, I mean - he's got it down. Plus he can be an economist also. He's got both things covered.

He never dominates the sound.

CE: No no, he plays it very... right! He certainly plays a lot more notes than any other bass player we had too, but they're just the right notes.

CT: They don't get in the way.

CE: No. In fact he has transformed a lot of the older material too. I think the whole set has a real coherence to it. We really encouraged him not to go back and listen to the Nighttown and Devil's Road and various other albums, and try to just do it the way it was there. I think it's better to make it all sound like one sound. I think we've been fairly successful in doing that. We're only into our fourth show tonight, and it feels good already.

May I ask about Baker, or is it a forbidden place to go?

CE: No, it's not forbidden.

What happened really?

CT: Well, he... After getting into our band and working for a year and a half and making one album and doing two tours, he didn't really appreciate us wanting to take a break. He got restless and joined some other bands - as he always did. He had already been in Mad Season, and they were getting ready to do their second album. He'd been working with Mark Lanegan in Seattle. I don't know, he just... He wanted to keep working, and we said, "Well, we're not gonna work until the Fall".

CE: And we cancelled a tour in the Fall, or in the summer of '98 I guess. We had planned to go out, and he just felt like if you're in a band you should be working. He didn't realize that we'd been working, really, certainly in the 90's, very hard without interruption. We just kept saying, "Wait a second, we need raw material for the next record, if we don't stop at some point ---- we have to write too!". And well, there was some business disagreements. And it just came to down to he just felt that there was no way it was gonna work out. For the band to continue on with some kinda sense of unity, there would have to be some changes, so.... That was August and then he died in January. I think it was just... shocking.

CT: He had a lot of projects going. He seemed to be on the up-and-up. He had always been kind of a troubled soul, and... You know, he had a fair bit of drugs most his life. But he had been clean for five years, and... for whatever reason he returned to hard drugs.

CE: The theory is that he just used them once, and that was the first time he had used them in these five years, and he died. Which is often the case, 'cause people misjudge the dose. They know what they were used to five years ago, but then your body chemistry has completely changed at that point, so... It's like getting a shock from a live wire.

Could it be that he got depressed after you decided to take a break, and that kind of triggered off something, and he looked for "safety" in the drug habit...?

CE: Yes and no. It should be said that he didn't have a drug habit. If the theory's correct, and it seems to be confirmed by everyone including his girlfriend and everyone around him --- he didn't leave the band in August and then started doing drugs. The months went by and he just did it once; shot up once and he's dead. It's not like he went back to a life in drugs. I do think his state of mind changed, but he was already there. This is one reason that we had a hard time working with him. Carla said it, he was a troubled soul and everyone around him knew that. It wasn't just that he had problems with the Walkabouts, it was just a very difficult thing... That many years of drug abuse ---

CT: From his teenage years.

CE: Yeah. It really stunts your ability to deal with the world. I looked at him as a hero in a weird, odd way, 'cause to me he was totally inspiring. I mean, here's this guy who had lived on the --- he had lived on the street for three years! I mean, literally lived on the streets ---

CT: In Chicago, I think it was five or six years.

CE: Well, off and on, but three straight years in his life. I'm taking him home from rehearsal one night, and he says, "Oh my God, this is such a different world to where I come from..." But I just found him really inspiring. This is the guy who had gone sober, and stayed to it, and he was really really.... he was someone who helped other people with those problems, like Mark Lanegan from the Screaming Trees, Layne Staley from Alice in Chains, these are people who looked at Baker as a confidant, because Baker had been there and done that. He was not a loser in my mind. I never thought of this guy as that. He was a brilliant bass player and he was a hysterically funny person. He really was one of the - honest to God - one of the funniest persons I've EVER known. He could just cut up one line at a rehearsal and you never recovered for half an hour! Really, he was brilliant!

CT: He was sweet, he was a very sweet person.

CE: And generous. He was always bringing CD's and when you talked to him, he had always music on his mind. He was really inspiring. Like I said, he was just a kinda hero to me. And when things started to derail. I found it extremely depressing well before [Chris snaps his fingers] it went. But it just became clear from his side too, it just wasn't a relationship that was gonna work with us. We certainly thought about it when we discussed with him about breaking it up. I wasn't sure about what psychological toll it was gonna take.

CT: But I really don't think that he... he wasn't like trying to check out of the world or anything, because that night that he died, well he died in the daytime.... That night he had a meeting with Barrett [Martin] from the Screaming Trees and Mad Season, so.... you know...

I just want to point out that I do not mean to blame you for what happened.

CE: Nononono, no no, I know that you're not blaming us. We were worried about it, don't get me wrong, I'm being completely candid with you; I'm not going to say that we didn't think that once out of the band, it was going to further escalate his troubles. But it wasn't like a drop off the cliff. Things were already a little bit shaky. It's just difficult, it's hard...

CT: He would occasionally drink. Things like that, you know...

CE: Yeah, he started to really worry us.... Some people shouldn't really drink, let's just face it. Well, I've got a beer now, I'm not a moralist about it, but it's more a chemical thing. Some people just shouldn't do it.

If you're depressed or something, you'll never know what will push you over the edge.

CE: Yeah, exactly. But I feel like people are where they are too. We so often look for the causes of things. The thing is that we are ultimately responsible for ourselves. I don't mean that in any harsh way. You know, we all tried to maintain a relationship with him, even after he was out of the band, and fairly successful. He came to parties and...

CT: We all went to Nick Cave together....

CE: Yeah, we all went to see Nick Cave together when he came, so it wasn't like he was locked out or he locked us out. It's just really frustrating... Yeah, it's still horrible to think about it... You know when we do this tour, it's kinda funny... When I walked in here today I was actually thinking about him, 'cause I remembered when he was here and...

[Chris says something in a very low voice and there follows a very long pause. I feel it necessary to change the subject.]

I saw that you're about to produce the Raindogs.

CE: I did a band called the Raindogs already, I did their album. I did it very quick. Quick.

What kind of band is it?

CE: They're a Portuguese band, they have an independent deal in Portugal. They're cool. They kinda sound... They often get compared to the Tindersticks, but I think their sound's alike the Go-Betweens, independent... strummy strummy pop. The have a very good violin player who's from England. It's cool. It's just something I did when I was down there in May, they just came to me. I did enjoy it. It's hard to make records like that, though, that quick. It's hard to do it justice somehow. They're the kind of band who could use a budget, they would know what to do with it. Some bands, or types of records, you can make very very fast. Probably a lot of members of our band and I'll be something of a producer, we're gonna work on a Terry Lee Hale record in January. With Terry you can do that. It's a certain kind of approach to things. With this band it was difficult to do.

CT: With Terry we know his weaknesses and strong points, we know when he's done well and when he's written a good song and...

CE: And it's also like, if you labour over Terry Lee Hales music, you'll really lose something. You know it's not this big orchestrated type of sound. With the Raindogs it was somehow a very ambitious kind of project.

CT: You probably taught them more than you even realize, 'cause I know what we learned from Gary Smith early in our career, just having a referee there to make everyone talk to each other.

Just enough being in the room.

CE: Yeah, that's very true, yeah. It's all it takes sometimes. Doesn't have to be really proactive.

CT: Or profound or anything, just calling it for what it is.

I saw somewhere on the web somebody who said that he really wished that the guy who did the Midnight Choir album would go on to produce the Savage Rose, you know, the Danish band?

CE: Never heard of.

They started out in the late 60's like some kind of a psychedelic Jefferson Airplane-like band, and then turned into a kind of experimental folk music.

CE: They're still around?

Yes, they are. They did an album last year.

CE: Thirty years old as a band? Wow!

Yeah, and they will probably go on forever. And somebody said that you should produce it.

CE: It's interesting. I don't really wanna be a producer! It's not really a thing I want to do. There's very few things that I really would like to work on to be honest, 'cause it's too much time. I mean, this is what I want to do, this is much more important to me. To sit with people you don't really know and don't have a relationship with, I'm not really into that. I'd rather work with my own music. It takes so much out of you to produce other people's albums if you care about them. I can't wind up that thing so many times.

CT: You can only answer a hundred questions a day for so long. And that's what the producer [do]. It's the same as a director of a film or any in those positions, the pinnacle. It's like everything goes to you. It's a lot of decision taking. It's very wearing. It's a great job, producing's a great job, but if you've been on the other side, been making music, it's hard to give that up.

CE: Right. Also I think the reason that none of us will ever call ourselves producers of Walkabouts records, is because nobody really wants that role. We know how to produce ourselves collectively, we know how to communicate with each other. There doesn't have to be a heavy hand by one person to the other.

You mean that you can produce yourselves while playing?

CE: That's exactly it, yeah. I don't wanna produce, nor would anyone else necessarily want to take all that responsibility. You need to detach yourself from it. I rely on the other members of the band to produce me when I'm playing, when I'm playing my guitar, when I'm singing...

CT: People have different strengths. I can tell when things would be better in tune or something like that, but as far as drums and things that Terri hears, or Fred hears...

CE: Yeah, they know, they've got it covered.

Chris, tell me about your solo album!

CE: It's a mailorder only from Glitterhouse. It comes out in January. It's called A Janela. It means "the window" in Portuguese. That's it. Not much else to say.

What does it sound like? You and your guitar only?

CE: No. No, it's small band on a couple of songs. Some of it is electronic, or sort of samples/electronic instrumentals. There's no kind of me-and-my-guitar songs. Mostly band. I used a guy who plays drums with Elliott Smith on a couple of tracks and there's another guy from Seattle who plays drums on a couple. And the guy who recorded it play bass. Very small. I mean, there's maybe violin on one song or two songs, and there's a trombone on a couple. Otherwise, like all the keyboards and guitars, I play. It is basically left over songs I had from Lisbon. There are more about Lisbon itself, they are kind of place songs. You know, I've always written place songs.

CT: Chris wrote thirty songs.

CE: Yeah, so I just had a lot of songs. And we were going to try to do Trail of Stars in November to December of '98, and because of this whole label thing it all got pushed ahead. So I just got really bored. I was in Seattle and we could rehearse three-four times a week, but that was it. We didn't wanna rehearse too much either, 'cause we didn't wanna kill the album before we really got into it. So I just got bored; I mean I did the album in like ten days. I actually finished it in July, but I recorded it very very fast. It's an interesting little album. But again, it's mostly sort of place songs about Lisbon. Kind of fantasies about Lisbon I guess.

But why a solo album?

CE: No-one else was in Lisbon with me! It didn't really seem like material that made any sense for anybody else. That's why we [it's kept] to this very low-key release, as this album doesn't really make very much sense to anyone else except for me. In fact, when I started recording it, I had no plans to release it at all. I was more or less doing it for myself. But Reinhard [at Glitterhouse] said, "Let's do this mailorder thing", and I said, "That sounds perfect". I really don't want to talk about it, I mean I don't mind talk to you about it, I just don't care about doing interviews per se for it. It's just a mailorder thing anyway. That's the only time I ever really thought of it, it never made sense before. They're weird kinds of songs that didn't really make sense like Walkabouts songs, really. And the Chris & Carla stuff; contrary to what most people think, those were not like leftover Walkabouts songs. Carla and I always think up songs together. She's really involved in those when we're working on them. This wasn't bad either somehow, but it should be seen like something completely separated. - You didn't ask us what our next thing we're gonna do is. That's kinda interesting too.

Tell me.

CE: The next thing we're doing, we're doing another covers album - did you see about that? It's going to be only European songwriters, only from continental Europe. Let's see who it's gonna be... Uhm, sort of like the first album Satisfied Mind in the sense that it'll be very current people and also people that go back like 30-40 years.

Any names of songwriters?

CE: That's a little difficult. Just like the Satisfied Mind, I've got two C90 cassettes on the bus right now with probably 40 songs on them, you know that's a lot of stuff to go through. It's something we wanted to do for a long time. It's an idea that came along quite a while ago but it seemed like now that we're on Glitterhouse we could actually do stuff like that.

Any recording sessions yet for it?

CE: We're doing it in March. We haven't recorded yet, we're gonna work on it in February and record it in March. I think it's gonna be a lot like Satisfied Mind, very stripped down, real acoustic, little bit different instrumentation. This will be very rootsy again. This is not gonna be like an electronic record, that's for sure. I imagine acoustic guitars. I think we're going to tour on it, but probably only... I doubt we'll come to Scandinavia. We'll see. Maybe. Maybe. I think we're gonna do like three weeks next summer. We'll see if there's anything appropriate here. I just don't wanna play the rock club kind of thing. More like the Chris & Carla sort of venues, very very stripped down.

Loppen in Copenhagen?

CE: Loppen could work actually, that could work. It's a cool place.

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