FRI., SEPTEMBER 19, 2008
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eMusic Q&A: Jonathan Lethem
by Sam Adams
Jonathan Lethem's obsession with music is no secret. References to bands, songs and the secret messages the devoted find therein permeate his novels and stories. Two years ago he scored the rock nerd's wet dream: a face-to-face interview with Bob Dylan for Rolling Stone. But apart from a handful of one-off projects, Lethem had never crossed the divide between music fan and music maker until he struck up a conversation with one of his musical idols: the Silos' Walter Salas-Humera. Conversation turned to friendship, and friendship grew into an unusual collaboration called I'm Not Jim. The collective's first album (Lethem shies away from calling it a band), You Are All My People, ranges from the muscled power pop of "Amanda Later" to the unnerving spoken-word collage "Walks Into," a varied but cohesive off-kilter tunes that blend Salas-Humera's ear for melodies with Lethem's mundane surrealism. Joined by producing/playing duo the Elegant Too (Chris Maxwell and Phil Hernandez) who have worked with Yoko Ono, Diddy and John Cale, Lethem and Salas-Humera create a funhouse world of luckless baseball pitchers and crackpot schemers.
How did your collaboration with Walter start?
I began as just a Silos fan. I got aboard with the first EP, and I had seen Walter live a bunch of times, shouted out requests or whatever, but never troubled to introduce myself. There came a time when I saw a show of his by chance in New Orleans. It was a very small club, and something about being out of my own home turf made me giddy, and I walked up and talked to him. This was maybe four years ago. That was it. It could have just been a nice friendly contact. But he was generous with me and gregarious, and I ended up sending him some books, and this turned into a mutual-appreciation society. We swapped swag, as they say in the music business.
At some point, Walter emailed me. I think he'd just read Fortress of Solitude and was particularly turned on by that book, which makes sense for someone so deep into the music world. He threw out the idea that we should collaborate on some songs. Of course, I was tickled by that. I've done this a few times with some friends who are musicians, kind of throw some lyrics at them, and I was thinking if anything it would be one of those moments where I got to play with some lyrics and have a musician friend turn those lyrics into a song and maybe it would be on an album or maybe it wouldn't.
But it turned out as Walter talked, I think, that there was something in him that was little restless with the Silos' stance, the place he'd been writing from. He was a little exasperated with it, or anyway curious about other things. So he proposed that we make a project out of it, a cycle of songs or an album. Last summer, he came up to Maine, and we just sort of woodshedded for three days, and threw a lot of ideas around and ended up writing a lot of songs in a very, very short burst that all seemed to come from the same curious place, which was not like anything I had done before as a sporadic, dilettante lyricist. They were different from the Silos' work, and they were fun and they seemed to have a weird cohesiveness, so we decided it was going to be a record.
What was the process like?
It was a matter of accepting any method that was fruitful. There are songs that originate with some scrap that Walter had in his notebooks, and a few that come from ideas I already had lying fallow and unfinished. And we originated stuff together, just by willing it into existence, and playing and talking about music we liked. We did a lot of listening during those three days, so there are certainly a number of things that are slight facsimiles, like, "What if we did one of these?" There's stuff from the ground up as well, and very impulsive things. "The Pitchers Gave Up" came about because Walter and I were watching games for respite during this time. And during one of the games that was played during those three days the Texas Rangers really, truly scored 30 runs — just an unprecedented onslaught. So we woke up the next morning and there was this newspaper headline, and Walter said, "Well, jeez, what did the pitchers do?" and I said, "I think they quit."
To read more of Sam Adams' interview with Jonathan Lethem, click here.
How did your collaboration with Walter start?
I began as just a Silos fan. I got aboard with the first EP, and I had seen Walter live a bunch of times, shouted out requests or whatever, but never troubled to introduce myself. There came a time when I saw a show of his by chance in New Orleans. It was a very small club, and something about being out of my own home turf made me giddy, and I walked up and talked to him. This was maybe four years ago. That was it. It could have just been a nice friendly contact. But he was generous with me and gregarious, and I ended up sending him some books, and this turned into a mutual-appreciation society. We swapped swag, as they say in the music business.
At some point, Walter emailed me. I think he'd just read Fortress of Solitude and was particularly turned on by that book, which makes sense for someone so deep into the music world. He threw out the idea that we should collaborate on some songs. Of course, I was tickled by that. I've done this a few times with some friends who are musicians, kind of throw some lyrics at them, and I was thinking if anything it would be one of those moments where I got to play with some lyrics and have a musician friend turn those lyrics into a song and maybe it would be on an album or maybe it wouldn't.
But it turned out as Walter talked, I think, that there was something in him that was little restless with the Silos' stance, the place he'd been writing from. He was a little exasperated with it, or anyway curious about other things. So he proposed that we make a project out of it, a cycle of songs or an album. Last summer, he came up to Maine, and we just sort of woodshedded for three days, and threw a lot of ideas around and ended up writing a lot of songs in a very, very short burst that all seemed to come from the same curious place, which was not like anything I had done before as a sporadic, dilettante lyricist. They were different from the Silos' work, and they were fun and they seemed to have a weird cohesiveness, so we decided it was going to be a record.
What was the process like?
It was a matter of accepting any method that was fruitful. There are songs that originate with some scrap that Walter had in his notebooks, and a few that come from ideas I already had lying fallow and unfinished. And we originated stuff together, just by willing it into existence, and playing and talking about music we liked. We did a lot of listening during those three days, so there are certainly a number of things that are slight facsimiles, like, "What if we did one of these?" There's stuff from the ground up as well, and very impulsive things. "The Pitchers Gave Up" came about because Walter and I were watching games for respite during this time. And during one of the games that was played during those three days the Texas Rangers really, truly scored 30 runs — just an unprecedented onslaught. So we woke up the next morning and there was this newspaper headline, and Walter said, "Well, jeez, what did the pitchers do?" and I said, "I think they quit."
To read more of Sam Adams' interview with Jonathan Lethem, click here.
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