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WEB EXCLUSIVE:
Q: There are a lot of short songs on A Boot and a Shoe.
A: That has become more apparent playing them live because when we do end a song — and maybe it’s because we don’t go back to the chord we started on — there are a few moments of pause as the audience isn’t quite sure if it’s over or not. The title, A Boot and a Shoe, is about being a little off-balance with life’s circumstances as life seems to knock us all off balance every once in a while. I don’t mind that the shows are a little like that or that the audience feels like that. I think it’s time to skew things a bit to bring some different elements into an almost-dead art form (the live show).
Q: Why did you stop playing live?
A: I had a little girl. She’s now 6. I also was in town doing The Gimore Girls TV show on the WB (Phillips writes the incidental music for the show) about a mother and a daughter, so that’s kept me home. Also, I’ve been shuffling the deck, and my writing took a different turn. I don’t ever remember that I loved playing live as much as I do now, and feel compelled with these records to go out and sing them. I am doing torch music — ‘torch’ as in ‘tortured’ — there’s some kind of passing of the torch with that kind of music, too. I’ve listened to a lot of Rosetta Tharpe and, of course, Billie Holiday, and even some of the great old country singers. I think a lot people were singing torch music over the years, and it’s important to somehow carry that on. I don’t mean to sound self-important, but I do think it’s something worth doing that not a lot of people are doing right now.
Q: What’s the appeal of doing torch music?
A: Just opening the subject up. The fact that you’re in pain and don’t know what to do, but that somehow it’s going to work out. If you’re carrying a torch for someone, there’s some expectation, some hope — good or bad — to somehow say what you feel, even if it’s not really good show business. I think people appreciate that and can relate. As a songwriter, I want to lead people into this world, then gently exit out the back door and leave them in there to have the thoughts and the reverie on them that they’re going to have. I feel assaulted by a lot of singer-songwriters. It seems like there’s no room for me as a listener, that it’s all about them. There’s no room for my pain, my reverie, for me to extract meaning out of their songs that I might want to extract.
Q: It seems like torch music is music that is made to be heard live.
A: The studio was great, but that was more about playing the songs for the musicians and getting their reactions, which in a funny way is scary but so rewarding because they come up with things, different parts. It’s great.
Live, it becomes about the audience — the challenge to break through the art form that’s set on automatic, and also try to let them make some meaning out of it or have some sort of experience themselves. I feel like for the first time I’m in my element doing what I need to do, and that’s strange after 25 years of doing this. I’m a late bloomer in the extreme.
If it wobbles a little bit and is different live, I don’t mind that. I took a chance on taking a violin player out this time because I thought a violin player would be really sad and desperate-sounding (laughs) and work for the torch music. It’s not my first choice for an instrument, but it has worked out really well. Eric Gorphain has found a stroh violin which has an old gramophone horn and resonator on it — it was before they had pick-ups — but it sounds like an old, old recording. We stripped down some of the songs and found ways to make take them even further live and make them even more wobbly and broken and human live. So it’s been fun.
Q: Do your vocals change when you play these songs live?
A: Certainly from night to night, which is the addictive thing about playing live. All the variables: different sound, different audience, the air is different, the temperature is different, the city’s different. One person in the band may be tired or unusually on it.
Q: What does playing your own rhythm guitar do for you musically?
A: Personally, that’s been such a fantastic experience, playing with these musicians — Carla Azar (drums), Jim Keltner (drums), or T-Bone (bass) — it’s been such a blast to be able to collaborate in that way.
I think it’s really the core of the record. It’s rhythmic, and the drummers take their cues from it. It seems to have played a central part in the record, which is funny because I didn’t mean to do that. To make a bad metaphor, it’s the heartbeat of the record, and it’s far from perfect. I’m not at all a perfect guitar player, but I think it gives it the mood and feel and direction it needs to have so far. If I feel otherwise, I’ll find somebody else to play — again. T-Bone played for a long, long time, but I felt it was really important, especially with the subject matter being more vulnerable. I thought it was important that I play it myself and not have somebody interpreting.
Q: Does it affect your singing?
A: Yes it does. Sometimes in a bad way. Sometimes it’s hard to do my best singing while playing, and other times it helps. It just depends from song to song. Good or bad — that’s what I’ve got to do.
Q: Which songs pose challenges?
A: The ones that are a little bit harder for me to play the feel, like “Draw Man,” which is a shuffle that’s always elusive. It’s easy to slick out on the blues, but it’s more of a challenge to let a shuffle open up and ramble along. That’s a hard one sometimes because I’m so involved trying to get the feel right. And as a vocalist, I lay back (behind the beat) further than the guitar player, so it’s sometimes hard to keep time and be the vocalist who’s singing way back.
Q: Why so little bass guitar on this record?
A: When it’s there, it’s big. It’s really, really big. I don’t know — the guitar, the vocal and the drums were what I started with on most of the songs, and I had a hard time figuring out what to put on after that. Live, that’s easy. If we had a bass as big as what is on the record when it does appear, it would swallow everything else. It complicates things sonically and you can do without it. We have a lot of big bass drum that takes up that space and makes it sound more odd. Maybe it’s just wanting to deconstruct the two guitars-bass-drums, wanting to hear something different.
Q: How has working on Gilmore Girls affected your own work?
A: It’s taught me economy. It’s made everything more intense. I only have a few seconds to make strike. Granted, it’s much more about the picture, but I have so little time to make something musical happen that that’s been a great discipline for me. It doesn’t always work, but they’ve left me alone to experiment and do what I need to do. Once I learned the emotional range on the show, I’ve been able to do some odd things.
Q: How long was this record in the making?
A: About a year. There’s less of T-Bone’s involvement than ever before because he was very busy, but I was attempting to make this record with T-Bone at the time. We had to do it in bits and pieces as he was available.
Q: How was it working with T-Bone on this record?
A: It was complicated. We’ve been married a long time and that marriage has dissolved, and that was probably part of the most intense time in the personal department. It was pretty amazing that — I have such respect for T-Bone as an artist and he must have the same for me as well because we made it through. He’s very happy with the record and I am, too. He played beautiful bass on it and he and Mike Piersante mixed it. It’s an extraordinary experience to put differences aside, as you’d say, and to work on something creative. Maybe that’s not a good idea for every sort of record, but for this particular record, it worked really well, for the sparseness of it and the mood of it, the torch music, the sadness.
Q: Was it synchronicity that a record about dealing with pain came at this time, or was the breakup feeding this?
A: I think it’s both. It is a work of fiction. I don’t feel like it’s the “breakup” record or anything like that. I was on the torch music path anyway. What I was going through, I want to be candid onstage. Whatever was going on at the moment I feel has to be part of the show, at least the subtleties, the undertones of it are there. There are more than a few undertones and overtones of that on the record. Again, I tried to make it as open and universal as I can, not specific — for everybody’s sake.
Q: I read that you read before writing.
A: Sometimes, yeah. The funniest things can set me thinking, can set me writing. There’s a little intersection I’m thinking of where there’s a train track and a cafe out east in Pasadena, and that intersection always does something to me because it looks like it probably looked that way 50 years ago. Different things can set me to writing.
Q: What were you reading when you were writing this record?
A: For months, I had read a lot of Jean Giono who I had never read before. The Horseman on the Roof was one book I went through, and Song of the World. Horseman on the Roof, really a guy up there on the roof and there’s a plague down in the streets and panic in the streets and he’s trying to figure out how to survive. That’s how I felt during a lot of the emotional turmoil, so it was a beautiful metaphor and I related so strongly to it, I think it really influenced this record.
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