Heres a transcript of my interview with Mark Linkous. It looks better
in print than its gonna sound on radio. It was late afternoon but he
sounded sort of sleepy and fragile, and spoke very
.very
..slowly
.
Im sorta glad it was pre-recorded so I can edit out the long
silences
!! Cant wait for the gig on Monday.
Cheers - Sophie
- Mark, welcome to Australia, how are you enjoying our weather?
Um
well
I havent really been outside
- Can we start off by talking about the process of recording Good
Morning Spider in your home studio. What sort of setup do you have?
Its a fairly basic 16-track digital studio, and I just start by the
old-school method, sitting around with an acoustic guitar and writing
a good song and then recording it. I guess the difference is, when I
go to record it, I try to make it interesting but the construction
of it, the writing of it, is really traditional as far as structure
goes.
- Youve sometimes spent many months working on one song, does your
perspective on a song change over time?
Not really. I mixed Painbirds off and on for two years, but my
perspective doesnt really change that much. Maybe perceiving things
as needing to be more minimal, rather than more elaborate.
- Do you feel that you stay truer to the aesthetic that you want to
achieve producing yourself, rather than taking them to an external
producer?
Yeah, the majority of it
for instance, the song Happy Man, I was
really bored with it, and I made it sound like it was coming through
an AM radio on the album, but so many people at the record company
thought it should be a single, so I compromised but compromised in a
way that was still able to retain a lot of the integrity of the song.
Then I collaborated with Eric Drew Feldman who produced the first two
Frank Black records -- he was also in Captain Beefheart. I went down
to Memphis, to a studio that Id been wanting to record in, that the
last two Pavement records were recorded in, some Cat Power records,
Guided By Voices records. Ill compromise in a way where I can trust
someone, someone I respect, rather than working with someone whos
been recommended to me by some industry person, yknow.
- Do you have to affect a critical distance at some point, to shape
the original song into the finished product?
The deepest that I ever perceive the song as a finished product is if
my friends are gonna think its cool. A good way of judging myself is
if I think its gonna sound good in five years.
- When you listen back to the albums, do you have an awareness of how
far the songs have come from their conceptual beginnings?
Not really
I mean, it starts and ends with me. On the majority of
stuff, I play everything, unless its cello or violin or something. It
begins and ends with my brain
I think its because Im so isolated,
Im not affected by other peoples ideas.
- Ive read that your dreams are a great source of inspiration for
you
does music tap into the subconscious for you?
Yeah I think so
I think that dreams and feelings and wants and wishes
are a little more simple and more prevalent in your subconscious than
they are in your conscious state. In the conscious state, theres so
many details of the world, youre bombarded by so much miscellaneous
junk.
- Does your rural lifestyle help you to be in that inner space being
away from the city?
I guess so, I mean Ive lived in the city
Ive often wondered that if
I moved
I was gonna move to Spain
and I wondered if stylistically my
music would change
I think its just something that you carry with
you
Im not sure if it has a whole lot to do with your environment. I
mean, a lot of it does have to do with environment, but more of it has
to do with how much of your environment that you absorb.
- You spoke earlier of a sense of isolation would you experience the
same sort of isolation if you were living in, say, Los Angeles?
Yeah but when I lived in LA I was pretty isolated
I lived in a van
and didnt really go out much
I was pretty isolated there, too.
- You did time over there on the alternative-rock circuit with your
previous band the Dancing Hoods. Is Sparklehorse a kind of attempt to
break out of that whole american-pop-group paradigm?
I gave up on all that when the band I was in moved to Los Angeles. We
were trying so hard to get signed, and I just quit and came back home
and just gave up on all those aspirations of being a rock star, pop
star, whatever. The business
I was so fed up with the business
I
just let go of all that bullshit, and thats when I started making
good music.
- How do you accommodate the business side of it now dealing with
record companies, music journalists, people like that?
Well, thats absolutely the hardest part of it, trying to deal with
all that. I always thought that when I started making Vivadixie, I
wanted it to come out on Matador or Drag City. Being on a major label
and being stylistically, vaguely in the same category of a band
