Meet Shortstack!

25Jan08

Making a cover of a song is a very delicate art, and as such, must be approached very carefully. One has to keep authentic what the artist’s main aim was with the song, including style, tone and voicing, but can’t just play the song themselves the exact same way. It has to be different to fit the sound of the band, otherwise what’s the point of playing it? It’s so easy to screw up a cover so bad that you ruin the original. (I can’t listen to The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” without thinking, “Why did Fred Durst butcher that!”) Now, an entire album of covers is even trickier. On “The Covers EP,” Shortstack manages not only to make each song their own without shitting on its predecessor, but keeps the entire work relevant.

Such a simple title describes the album so perfectly. “A History of Cut Nails in America” developed their style, persuaded listeners into their ragged, bumpkin world, and “The Covers EP” aims to pay homage to the styles of music they are themselves throwing into a whirlwind. They take traditional pieces, classic rock, and plain weird-rock pieces all the same and turn them into works you’d think they conjured themselves. Take for example “Commotion,” originally performed by Credence Clearwater Revival. CCR’s swampy sprint gets beaten against a step like a dusty rug to fit Shorstack’s country, dirt-rock mileau , morphing in the process John Fogerty’s dipthong to Adrian Carroll’s twangy yelp.

To their credit, these are not typically covered songs. They could have just as easily wallowed though a version of “Oh, Danny Boy” to round out the traditional song slot, and it would have had that much larger of an immediate target than “Pretty Saro,” but what a shallow avenue that would be. The band scoured and landed on the songs which they could do justice, songs that deserve a new vitality, songs that deserve more credit than are readily given. And to take on as ballsy a task as covering Captain Beefheart is a feat, by chutzpah alone, that requires some big props, even if “Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles” is arguably Beefheart’s most famous ditty (thank you The Big Lebowski Soundtrack).

I sat down with Adrian Carroll, the voice of Shortstack, and Burleigh Seaver, the guitarsmith of the group, to see what they had to say about writing music, covers, and generally just how they go to where they are today.

Matt: I wanted to see how Shortstack got its beginning, first of all. The bio you have on your Myspace is kinda…

Adrian Carroll: It’s more of a fictional story, yeah. Well, Scott, the drummer, and I grew up together in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and we played music together when we were in high school. Then we went to college in different places and when college was winding down, we were in touch. I was moving here and Scott wasn’t sure what he was doing, so he decided that he’d come here, too. We played with each other for about a year and a half, and in that year and a half we got into a band with Burleigh. Scott and I started playing music and formed Shortstack, and we played at a house party and our bass player was there. He joined a few months later playing the upright bass. We played as a trio for a while. . . Burleigh and Scott were actually in a rock band. Actually, its kinda convoluted. The bass player from that band joined Shortstack playing steel guitar, and Mike played with us for a few years. And then about two and a half years ago in January of 05, Burleigh replaced Mike on steel guitar. So that’s pretty much the way it started. I was working for this publishing company and I had to read music periodicals all day and I read about a guy named Merle Travis. I found him really interesting and I was getting kinda bored with what I knew about how to play the guitar at the time, so I did some research on Merle Travis and got some records. I was really taken in by that sort of style of playing. Very few people play with a thumbpick, you know, with a classic thumbpick. It’s kinda like that Chet Atkins style. Chet Atkins heard Myrle Travis play when he was a kid and kinda expanded on it.

M: Like Travis-picking.

AC: Yeah, exactly, that’s where it comes from. So, I just got really into that and studying that style. But I didn’t want to play music just like that. I was also into other kinda stuff. I was getting into The Cramps and things like that. Also, into John Lee Hooker and kinda combining the two, combining some elements of all those things. And that’s kinda how it started. Then, it just expanded. Adding the steel guitar was . . . it sounded one way as a trio, but adding the steel guitar was the really interesting texture, especially cause Mike wasn’t really academic with the way he approached playing steel guitar. He played it more like a regular guitar. He played a lot more multiple string chords instead of in like old country radio where they play kinda like two-note lines. But he played it more like . . .

Burleigh Seaver: He played more like a punk rock guitarist.

AC: Yeah, and Burleigh has a different style with it. Actually, we had songs written when Mike played with us that Burleigh learned and recorded, and after Mike left, a lot of the stuff we started writing has just two electric guitars on it, no steel guitar. I honestly at first, I was like, “Wait a minute, Shortstack has a guitar, a steel guitar, an upright bass and a drumkit.” But its been really neat. It opens up a whole new set of soundscape. Burleigh actually learned a whole album’s worth of songs in about three weeks. When we went out and bought a steel guitar. . . actually, he bought a steel guitar; I watched him buy it. And in three and a half weeks he learned our songs and we went to Tucson to record an album.

M: That’s the “History of Cut Nails in America?”

AC: Yeah.

M: How would you describe your music to someone who’s never heard it before.

BS: I usually tell people it’s like early rock and roll but more echo-y, and a little weirder. It’s got some elements of rockabilly and stuff like that, but I think our newer stuff is getting away from that a little bit. Older stuff is definitely a little more country. I think the newer stuff is more, hopefully more unique in a way. It’s less firmly rooted in where, Adrian was saying, it came from, “Hey, I really like Merle Travis. Let’s play some songs like that.” It’s still got all of that in it, but now I think it’s less doing something like The Cramps or Merle Travis and more hopefully varied. It’s only taken, what, like seven years to kinda come around to that point *laughs*. But it’s sorta where we’re at.

M: So, you’re getting into Merle Travis and The Cramps wasn’t really rooted in where you first started getting into music?

AC: Like, back in high school? No, I never would have thought I’d like anything country at all. But like a lot of people who play guitar, I was interested in the blues when I was younger, but I always kinda knew that it all kinda sounded a little cheesy to me. Like B.B. King. . . Like Stevie Ray Vaughan is a great guitar player, but a lot of that stuff is just . . . it’s just so boring, and when you go back and listen to it, it’s like a five minute guitar solo . . .

BS: It’s like Eric Clapton couldn’t be more boring. *Laughs*

AC: *Laughs* I mean, a lot of country music, what’s so cool in my mind is that, even top 40 country from the 50’s and 60’s, they’re really set structures, they’re tightly organized and arranged songs, but the sort of instrumentation, I’d say it’s more harmonically interesting to me than blues. A lot of blues is just like, you got three chords, and it always has those three chords, and the guy’s always playing like the same scale.

BS: Same lyrics. You know? It’s like, “That song again.”

M: Why do an album of covers? Was this more of an ode to the range of influences, because it is all over the board in terms of genre, or is it more of just songs that you liked specifically and that you thought you could do justice?

BS: It’s kinda both. We definitely are influenced by many different things besides early country music and rock and roll.

AC: I barely listen to country music these days.

BS: Yeah. I think for many years, people thought of us as “that country band.” You know, “that band that would play at Black Cat, but was like country or rockabilly,” and we kinda wanted to do something that would show the broader range of our influences and show more of the direction that the sounds we’re making now came from. Incorporate a broader range of things. So, it’s not really a break from what we did before. We wanted to do something that showed where we’re at now, while at the same time sounding like our older stuff a little bit. I dunno, have you heard the EP at all?

M: Definitely, I’ve been listening to it all week, actually. But I wondered why you made it an EP instead of an album?

AC: Really, just time. *Laughs*

BS: We kinda cooked up the idea while we were on tour, and we all got really into it. It’s an enormous amount of work to get even one song together. At least the way we work, you know, get it structured and thought out and recorded and produced and all that, particularly because our drummer lives in New York, so we have a small window of time every now and again that actually works as a whole band. The three of us that are down here play a couple times a week usually. We’ll write stuff and think, “Does that sound lame? I can’t tell,” you know? And then Scott will show up and play something rockin and we’ll be like, “Ah, that sounds great!” So that’s definitely a factor. We kinda wanted to do this thing but also continue working on the music that we were writing. We didn’t want it to be like a blip, but we wanted to do it kinda in passing, and kinda move on to the stuff we’re writing.

AC: We’d had this idea of doing this since our records label was like, “Hey, is there anything that we could kinda put out kinda soon.” We planned on doing The History of Cut Nails and another album, which we will do. . .

M: So there is another full length album in the works?

AC: Yeah, it’s about 60% composed.

BS: I’m hoping it comes out in the fall. I don’t know if we’ve talked about this, but I think I was in the shower the other day and I thought, “I’d like to have a new record released in the fall.” *Laughs* That would be great.

M: Were there any songs that didn’t make the EP that you wanted to do covers of?

AC: We had a long list of songs. I don’t know how we decided on songs and there was no blood spilled. We had some cool ones: “Just One More Day” by Otis Redding. We were trying to put a broad scope and narrow it down.

BS: We like the idea of taking songs that were very different from what we normally do and then somehow learning them through the filter of our band and having it come out sort of the same but a little different. We’ve always played a lot of covers just cause it’s an interesting way that we found to take a song that you know already is good. Like there’s two elements of getting a song together: there’s actually writing a song and then arranging a song, figuring out who’s gonna play what and how many times they’re gonna play a part. And it’s always been an interesting exercise for us to take a song that we know is great, so you don’t have to worry about that part of it, and then you can spend your time practicing how to arrange it. So it’s been a good exercise for us over the years, and they’re fun to do. Yeah, there was a Stevie Wonder song, “I Wish,” that I thought we might do which is completely unlike anything we do. I always wanted to do “These Arms of Mine” by Otis Redding. Some of them we just had a really hard time imagining how that would happen, so we nixed some for that reason. Scott wanted to do a Depeche Mode song. And while I wasn’t opposed to doing a Depeche Mode song like out of hand, we sort of started thinking about why we were doing this. I was like, “You know what? I can confidently say that I’ve never been influenced at all by Depeche Mode, so I don’t think it really fits with what I’m going for here.” *Laughs*

AC: What turned out was a pretty fair balance of what people wanted. Burleigh always liked the song “Commotion.” He’d always play it when we were goofing around.

BS: Mike was really into the Captain Beefheart song “Her Eyes are a Blue Million Miles”.

M: The only reason I know Captain Beefheart was from The Big Lebowski Soundtrack, which they had that song.

BS: *Laughs* Yeah, I watched that movie a bunch of times and didn’t even know it was on there.

AC: That’s my favorite Beefheart album, with that song on there. It’s an album called Clear Spot. If you’ve never heard it, you should check it out. That and Safe as Milk are like more listenable Beefheart albums.

BS: He’s got some really out there shit. It’s interesting, but it’s not as fun to listen to.

M: It’s interesting that you did “Commotion” by CCR which is kinda unknown, and then some songs that might not be as well known, like The Kinks song, and The Pupils song.

AC: The Kinks song is in Rushmore, actually. When Bill Murray is climbing up the ladder of the high dive.

BS: *Laughs* Yeah, we realized some of these songs are in movies after the fact, and thought, “Yeah, I wonder if anyone’s gonna ask me about that.” *Laughs* But “Pretty Saro,” the traditional song that Adrian picked up sorta played for us, and we thought was cool. It’s not a song that I knew but it’s definitely something that I’d be into. So I thought we’d take a pretty diverse list. And we didn’t kill each other over it.

M: What are your thoughts on how the internet has transformed music as a art and a business?

AC: I think overwhelmingly negatively. That’s my personal opinion. It might be kinda crotchety. Have you read the Bob Dylan Chronicals? He talks about when he was starting out, he was really interested in folk music, and finding folk music at the time was incredibly difficult. Like finding a LeadBelly 45 or an Odetta 45 or like a Woody Guthrie 45 was like finding gold, so whenever somebody had one, everyone would go over and listen to it. And I imagine that people just turned this 45 over and over and sat around listening to the same few songs for hours, so you really absorbed it and you actually knew the names of the songs. Everything is just so hypersaturated now, everyone’s got an Ipod with 50,000 songs and another 50 million songs at the touch of a button on the computer. And there’s 50 million bands on Myspace who would write you and ask you to play shows or tell you how good their latest song is. I think it’s taken away a kind of social element. Music, like the Bob Dylan example, would bring people together. You could argue that the internet brings people together, but I don’t think it’s genuine in a way, like personal contact. You know, that contact, too, is part of how music is transmitted and passed. Again, the same thing could be said about the internet, I guess. You know, “I heard 10,000 bands today on the internet and they all inspired me.” There’s something with the hypersaturation.

BS: There’s sort of no filter anymore. Not saying that a filter is necessarily good before, because it’s not necessarily good that you couldn’t find a LeadBelly record; I think it’s bad in many ways. It’s not to say it hasn’t opened up new things. When I consume things, when I buy records I still like to go to the record store and buy records, or CD’s as it were. There’s just something about that that I enjoy. Does that mean I’m old? *Laughs* I mean, I bought the new Radiohead record online.

AC: It’s definitely democratized the music world. And also advancements in recording technology. People can do a lot of stuff at home and you don’t have to pay some studio thousands of dollars. So there’s a democratizing element to it, and also the day of record labels is kinda becoming irrelevant. The roles they played before are becoming obsolete.

BS: We’ve certainly benefitted from it. The tour we did on the West coast, like a lot of the shows, though finding bands on Myspace, through connecting with bands in other cities that seemed similar to us that we could check out ahead of time and write to them. You can just find them in the first place. I remember we were playing with bands like 10 years ago, trying to book a tour. I can’t believe anybody did that, thinking back on it. You’d send tapes to clubs that you wanted to play at and cold call and just hope that they would give you a show, and hope that they would book you with a band that made sense, instead of like a Kiss tribute band. It’s kinda amazing, the crazy ass shows over the years just because bookers were like, “Okay, I have these three bands from different parts of the country that all happen to be here on the same day and they don’t make sense at all, but I need a show so we’ll put them all together.” And then hope somebody shows up. Now you can sorta pre-plan your own tour and then have a network to tap into in these cities that you may have never been to before and make something work.

AC: A lot of the networking stuff, there is a positive side of that, but in terms of the actual listening part . . . We live in a culture that’s just so fast-paced. People are not able to focus the same way they could in the past.

M: Do you think music on whole is suffering on whole because of it?

AC: I guess, it’s hard to say. No, not necessarily. I still hear music that I like. Seems like there’s more of it in a way. More people are playing music and playing in bands.

BS: People always make fun of the music that’s in the top 40 now, how ridiculous it is, Brittney Spears or whatever. Honestly, I don’t think it’s any worse than top 40 music 20 years ago. I mean, it’s the same types of hit-maker song-writers writing the same kind of songs which is what people want. I think what the difference is that songs from 20 years ago, you’ve been hearing for 20 years and so they seem classic in some sense where as new songs don’t. But I agree with Adrian, it does seem like there’s a lot more going on, or at least you’re aware of more that’s going on.

M: So what are you guys listening to these days?

AC: I don’t listen to much new music at all. I like Spoon a lot, they’re a great band. We played some shows with Ted Leo, and he’s one of the most amazing performers you’ll ever see. Who else? Oh, I like the Feist album that came out. I like Cat Power a lot. Speaking of an artist who covers other people. I thought her “Greatest” album was really good. I’m trying to think of who else contemporary . . . We played with a band in L.A., they’re called Jail Wedding.

BS: I like the new Radiohead record.

AC: What else? The Dan Higgs album. He’s done a lot of interesting stuff. He’s the singer of Lungfish.

BS: Yeah, his stuff is really crazy but awesome. Like awesomely-focused craziness. It’s like he’s got this singular vision for what he’s doing and somehow makes this insane music that has a point, it’s not just drifting everywhere. That I really dig.

M: What does the band hope to accomplish? What is the end game?

AC: I don’t know if we’re gonna turn this into a job. Like, it’s easy to live and have this attitude, and I think it’s a negative attitude of, “Well, just around the corner this thing was gonna happen and that will be really cool.” You can live your life that way, and it’s not the way you wanna live your life. We’re trying to stay focused on making music that we like. Over the years, I’ve come to learn more to appreciate how special performing for other people is. I love listening to records and zoning out at home, but at the end of the day, the really special thing is playing for other people. It’s a unique moment. It’s a unique group of people that will be together, and it’s a real interaction between human beings that can’t all be described in words. When you go to a show that really affects you and moves you, to me, those are the things that really make life worth living, that brings real meaning. That could be putting a big grandois spin on it, but there are times that you get to play that it does feel that way. It’s more than a financial or commercial aspect. I mean, the commercial aspect will enable you to continue doing that type of thing. Otherwise, you’re playing to an empty room.

M: Has the music that you loved growing up effected the way you write songs now?

AC: I think there’s a certain aesthetic. There’s a certain underground ethos that things aren’t as overproduced or commercial sounding. A certain appreciation for things sounding a little, an element of avant garde in it; I don’t know if that’s the right word. Recently, I was listening to some old mix tapes I had in high school, older indie music from the 1990’s. I don’t even know who was on there . . . Sebadoh or whatever. You listen back to that, or like old Dinosaur, Jr., and a lot of the stuff by today’s recording standards is terrible but that was kinda the aesthetic that they had, sorta rough around the edges. I think it’s a nice thing to keep in mind. That’s what distinguishes us a lot of times, or people who are making music, like Sheryl Crow, is that it doesn’t always sound totally perfect, and that’s kinda what makes it unique.

M: I was curious about the artwork. What is the with the aggressiveness of the Covers EP pictures?

BS: Scott is a freelance graphic designer, lives in New York and works at home and listens to NPR all day *laughs*. He does all kinds of crazy stuff, like Lego did this whole series of transforming robots and he helped design the tag for that. He does a bunch of web stuff, a lot of crazy different things. He does a lot of backgrounds for like animation. So he won’t draw the main characters but he’ll draw the background going by. The Covers EP specifically was inspired by an artist named Walton Ford. Who is a current painter, who draws these giant paintings in a sort of naturalist way, like autobon style. It’s sort of Scotts take on that guy’s work, cause he draws in these giant, naturalist themes of animals but there’s always something kinda wrong in it. There’s always something wrong in his work and my take on looking at Walton Ford stuff is that it has something to do with the intrusion of man on nature. Scott saw a show of his work in a museum in Brooklyn and really liked it. I think the artwork came out a little more aggressive than I thought it would. Particularly having the dogs on the cover.

AC: My mother was scared. *Laughs*

BS: *Laughs* Yeah, it’s definitely weird. But what I like about it is that, if you sort of ignore the aggressiveness of it for a second, I think it sort of reflects the idea oftaking something and changing it a little bit, transmuting something from what it was to something new. It sort of fits the idea of the music and The Covers EP in a very abstract way.

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