A Conversation with Colin Gilmore – HuffPost 9.25.13

Mike Ragogna: Colin. Dude. The Wild And Hollow. My first official question is who the hell do you think you are recording an album this good?

Colin Gilmore: [laughs] Oh man, that is a good question.

MR: I think this is the strongest singer-songwriter/Americana album of the year. What do you think of that, Gilmore?

CG: Oh, man, look at that. I’ll agree with you, but I might be a little biased.

MR: How’d you get to this album? I’ve been following your career and your albums and I’m wondering what voodoo you inserted into the mix to get to this level of songwriting, production and performances.

CG: Well, it was the voodoo of Austin and Chicago. The band that I started playing with in Chicago, the drummer of that band became the co-producer of the album, and then alongside Rob Seidenberg here in Austin, I spent a huge sum of money just going back and forth between the two cities recording and drumming up inspiration and co-writing with the guys. You’ll notice that the first track was written by me and the guys up in the Midwest, the twin brothers up in Evanston, Illinois, and then Billy in Ohio, and then there’s one song that Rob Seidenberg and I co-wrote in Austin. There was one song I covered by an old friend of mine named John Walker, a very good friend of mine, and then one that he and I wrote together when we were in our early twenties, when we were riding trains in Europe. That was the first song that I ever wrote that I would be willing to play again and wasn’t just a throwaway horrible punk song from high school days. I dug deep on this one. We really focused on getting it to have the kind of sound that gives you the feeling of when you put on a really old Buddy Holly album or a Ray Charles album or something that had that aesthetic to it. That’s what we went for and we were really happy with how it came out. We’re still in the midst of getting the word out about it.

MR: My favorite recordings on this album is “Warm Days Love,” do you want to take us through a little tour of that recording?

CG: Oh yeah, definitely. So “Warm Days Love,” that’s the one that my friend John Walker wrote. He and I were in punk bands in high school together. We’ve always shared a love of music. He did a lot of traveling. He went to New York and then he went to Mexico for a while and he lived as a wandering minstrel and wrote a bunch of good songs during that period. So he came back to Austin and he and formed a band called Chalk Outline and we did that song. We did it in kind of a slow waltz, bang-’em-up rock ‘n’ roll style. I decided, “Hey, this would be nice as a more sensitive ballad,” so I got Will Taylor of Strings Attached to put some orchestra on it. All that orchestra you hear on it is basically one guy putting down twenty tracks of every different thing. Then, of course, Amanda Shires put a little lead part on it and sang backup on it, which made it that much sweeter.

MR: Amanda Shires and there are other vocalists on the project.

CG: There are several of them, actually. Amanda Shires is on that one and then Sally Allen, based in Butte, Texas, she’s a really talented singer-songwriter and she sang with me on “Wake Me In The Night” and on “Only Real To Me,” and then a very under-looked songwriter in Chicago, Julia Klee. I met her through the band and she sang with me on “All My Worlds Are Fleeting” and “Feel Like Falling,” the second song. She’s just got a beautiful voice. Any time we’d sit down and record, it’d take me fifty tries to hit the note I was trying for and she’d just hit it immediately. That was really cool, recording with her, and she’s got a unique voice.

MR: You straddled two cities for their inspirations.

CG: I still can’t put my finger on it, but there’s a lot of the same kind of style of Americana going on in Chicago and in Austin that’s somewhere between Indie Rock, Country and Folk. It can sit in the same category, but they’re very different, and I can never figure out why. The minute I go to Chicago and my friends there say, “Hey, check out this guy who’s based here,” and put the music on, I’m like, “Man, this is just different from back home.” But there’s a lot of really good stuff going on in both cities. What I tried to do is each time I came back to one or the other, I tried to just sort of plug in to what was going on there and try to keep that feeling going on when we recorded.

MR: When you were approaching the album, there were no rules, right? It was basically, “get the best recording on these songs as soon as possible?”

CG: Yeah, absolutely. When I sat down with twin brothers Tim and Jason Bennett in Chicago–the guitar player and drummer–Tim, the drummer and I did the most brainstorming. We just thought, “We don’t have time to just mess around with every kind of sound.” We’d play around with sounds and everything, but we also got to thinking, “What is it about a really good album that you put it in and it immediately sounds good?” I think with my previous albums, that’s not an approach that I took. Those were more like, “Okay, I’ve got these songs, here are the arrangements, let’s get a guitar tone that we’re okay with and everything will take care of itself.” On this one, we were trying to be really conscious of how tones could so immediately affect you. By no means do I think I achieved perfection on it. Afterwards, I was just so, “Oh, man I could’ve done this part better,” but for the most part, I could feel it when we put it in that it’d really taken a step up and made it more of an immediate pleasure to listen to, even just when the opening notes of a song come in.

MR: When you played this thing back, you knew what a powerhouse you had, didn’t you?

CG: Yeah. The whole time, I was like, “Man, how am I going to get this done?” I did a Kickstarter campaign to fund it and I was like, “How are we going to get this done to our projected goal?” Well the answer is we took longer than we said we would, but not too much. We took some time on the thing.

MR: Did you play the album for your dad?

CG: Yeah, definitely, and he really loved it. It’s funny, I think as unbiased as he could be as a father, he genuinely seemed to think it was a good several steps up from the last recording. He said, “This is your best one yet, for sure.” He was really happy about it and he really was saying, “You’re doing things I wouldn’t have thought to have done.” That made me feel like, “Oh good, I’m not just rehashing anything or trying to keep one phenomenon alive.”

MR: And fathers truly do want their sons to outshine them, but when they finally do, it I think they’re sort of surprised.

CG: [laughs] Yeah, definitely. I think he finds what I’m doing interesting. In fact, the band that I’ve got in Chicago have become one of my dad’s preferred backing bands. My band played a couple of shows in Chicago backing both me and my dad up and then we tried it down in Texas, in Marfa, and then in New Mexico, and it just kept working out better and better each time. So now, it’s kind of a matter of, “All right, my dad’s not touring a lot, how do we keep this going and keep all the songs fresh and either get us up to Chicago some or them down to Texas or out wherever we go?” That’s always something we’re looking to do.

MR: Are you performing with your dad these days?

CG: We are a little bit. For a while, people kept asking us to do shows together and we always liked doing them, but we kind of made a conscious effort not for it to just be like, “Oh, we’re just going to do this all the time and get sick of it.” I’ve had to watch out because when a lot of people first hear me the first time, they think I’m just his backing musician or something. So every time he and I play a show, I try to intersperse it with some shows that let people know that I’m doing my own thing and writing my own style and everything.

MR: Did your dad’s music influence you?

CG: Oh yeah, definitely, and that happened a good while back, but it took me a long time. When I was younger, I took his music for granted. I always liked it, but I took it for granted. I didn’t realize what kind of effect it had on me and for how long. That goes for my dad and a lot of the people I was listening to that my dad was a contemporary of. Butch Hancock, his music has had such a powerful influence on my life and so has Terry Allen and Jo Carol Pierce and Joe Ely. I guess when I was young, I thought, “Oh, well, this is just music. This is what music sounds like,” and then later on, it came to me that, “Wait, this music is so powerful,” and it still is powerful, and not all music is. I feel like some music has an appeal to you at a certain point in life and then later on, you listen back and you’re like, “Aw, I don’t know what I was thinking, listening to that.” So many people I grew up listening to, I had the good fortune of sticking with it and rediscovering and loving them just as much later on.

MR: Nice. By the way, “Wake Me In The Night” is a great chiller, like when you request to your brother and your sister, “Would you wake me up if the house is on fire?” There’s a lot of depth going on in that song.

CG: Yeah, you know it’s funny because it all started out as just words in my head, but there is meaning to it because my siblings have been some of my greatest saviors at times and been good friends to me. There’s definite literal symbolism there, but it’s also kind of like there was something spooky going on inside me for a while and I feel like when I finally got that song done and written and recorded and everything, I was like, “Okay, good, I let that out.”

MR: Could this album have been a bit cathartic about that period that you just mentioned? Do you think the album helped you turn a corner on some things?

CG: Yeah, working with these people, Rob Seidenberg and all these musicians and Tim and Jay, they were kind of valuing what I was writing and they took it seriously, but they also encouraged me not to take it too seriously or beat myself up about it. They said to just let it be a song. So that was really big. That’s what helped me get the songs done and kept them from being twenty minutes long and really boring, too

MR: It’s hard to self-edit sometimes because you just want to get everything you feel out there.

CG: Oh yeah, and you’re like, “Wait a minute, that’s not what I meant, let me rephrase it.”

MR: Whose idea was it to cover Nick Lowe’s “Raging Eyes?” That was genius.

CG: You know what almost kicked the whole thing off was that Rob Seidenberg approached me in Austin. We had a mutual friend and he said, “Hey, I’m putting together a compilation of alt country,” or whatever you call it, “artists doing Nick Lowe songs and I’d like you to be on it.” He said, “So we’ll have to decide what song to do,” and I said, “Hey, can I do ‘Raging Eyes?'” because I love it, it’s perfect, it’s like punk rockabilly pop. It’s a style that no one else can pull off and Nick Lowe pulls it off perfectly. So he said, “Okay, but I was thinking ‘You Make Me,'” So I tried that, I did “You Make Me,” and we decided that’s going to go on the tribute album Lowe Country. Then we recorded “Raging Eyes” and we were like, “It’d be a shame to do nothing with it, so can we just put it on my album,” and he said, “Yeah.” It’s funny, it’s got Gary Burnette on it, who’s a really good producer and guitar player in Nashville, and it’s also got almost all of the members of Fastball except for Miles Zuniga. It’s got Tony Scalzo singing backup on it and Joey Shuffield and Cory Glaeser. You can hear it, you’re like, “Whoa, this sounds different, the production’s different.” But Tim mixed it, still, so he kind of helped it have some of the similar feel and not be too much of a whiplash when it comes to the last song.

MR: I love Nick’s The Abominable Showman, I thought it had like four or five potential hit singles including the Paul Carrack duet, “Wish You Were Here.” If only the record company understood what they had with him.

CG: Yeah, totally. It’s funny because Nick Lowe has never been afraid to just throw stuff out and see if it sticks or not. Years later, it still does, somehow. I think that’s one of the great things about him.

MR: I think his material holds up, in some respects, better than some of Elvis Costello’s, although I know that’s controversial to say.

CG: Yeah, totally. All of Nick’s pub rock is my favorite, and it might just be it’s his particular sense of melody and sense of humor that I dig.

MR: Me too. In fact, it’s really funny to me that whenever they put together these compilations on him they always leave out things like “Tanque-Rae,” which I think is hysterical, and “We Want Action” that’s one of the best non-rap wordplay lyrics I can think of. I think it’s great that you guys did that Nick Lowe nod, it’s perfect for your personality, your voice, your sound. It totally worked.

CG: Thank you.

MR: What would you say is the most revealing song about you on this album?

CG: I’ll try not to think about that too hard. The song “All My Worlds Are Fleeting” is maybe my funny, pessimistic side.

MR: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that one. I’m glad you brought that up.

CG: What I try to do if I have a negative sentiment…I’ll use an example. Alan Watts is a British writer who brought a lot of Buddhist thought to western culture. There are things of his that I read that seem dismal, they seem so miserable, but then when I hear him say it on audiotape, he almost sounds like he could be a member of Monty Python and it sounds funny. It made me realize that maybe I was taking it the wrong way. To me, “All My Worlds Are Fleeting” is kind of the same way. When I read it, it looks like I’m real depressed and everything, but if you hear the song it’s like, “Oh, no, that’s not really what I meant. That’s not the way I meant it. I didn’t mean it so bad. [laughs]

MR: Another one I wanted to bring up was “Only Real To Me.”

CG: Oh yeah, yeah. That one was a dream I had when I was fourteen years old, that I was walking through a department store in a mall that was closed. I had snuck in and I saw this girl in a dress just twirling. It just really knocked me out. I don’t know what it was, but I woke up immediately and I was like, “I’ve got to go find out who this girl is!” She was just this perfect angel, and years later now, that’s kind of where that came from.

MR: And what a hoot “Free Money” is. Free money certainly isn’t, I share that sentiment exactly.

CG: Oh yeah? That’s the one that John [Matthew Walker] and I wrote. What happened was he and I had been in a punk band and we’d written stuff where the pure intent was to irritate our parents and to irritate anybody listening. So when I got out of college, I had some free travel miles and I said, “Hey John, let’s me and you go to Europe.” We’d never gone over there before together and he had never been, and I said, “Hey, I’ve got this melody in my head.” I played it for him, I think over the phone or something, and then a couple days later, he was like, “Hey, I’ve got most of the song done,” and we finished the song together. We went to Europe and we busked on the streets playing that song and a Woody Guthrie song and “La Bamba.” We tried it out in Ireland and we got tipped a stick of gum, I think. We went to Cologne, Germany, and got tipped enough money to where we could have kept on living there. So years later, I was like, “Hey John, we should record this.”

MR: And so it goes full circle. This is really an important album for you on a lot of levels, a personal level, an achievement level, and on a pleasing musical level.

CG: Yeah, definitely, definitely.

MR: Colin, what advice do you have for new artists?

CG: Any advice I could give is going to sound really cliché but just remember that your job first is to make really good music and to make music that speaks to people and that really shines from the heart. What you’re worth is your direct connection with your fans, how you really touch them on stage or when you record or when you write a song, because it’s very easy to get caught up in thinking someone else is going to come in and make things work for you and really make things happen. It’s so different now than it was five years ago and it keeps changing. People always say, “Does your dad give you advice on the music industry,” and I’m just like, “My dad would be the last person to ask right now,” because he’s just focused on what he’s playing and what he’s writing and he’s not keeping up with how everything’s changing. Right now, everything’s just chaotic from my perspective. There’s nobody that you can go to and go, “Okay, what’s the next thing to do? What should I do for my career?” Anyone who claims to really know, five minutes later, goes, “Hmm, maybe I was wrong about that.” That’s a long-winded answer, but it’s almost like your job as a musician is to be a shaman or somebody that takes something purely from the spirit world and brings it into reality, and it’s probably going to sound weird at certain points. But a lot of what you think is weird at first is later on going to be the best thing out there.

MR: I never thought of it that way, that’s pretty great. So, Colin Gilmore, five years from now, what have you done?

CG: Five years from now, I will have written the songs that I’ve always dreamed I would have written. I’ve written a handful of them and I will have figured out the right way to get the songs that I’ve got into people’s hands and get it into their ears and to really make waves with it, as vague as that might be. I’m still toying with all that. I guess I will have sold a ton of albums and you’ll hear some of those songs of mine in movies and on TV shows or just in your CD player or whatever device you’re using at that point.

MR: What songs will you bring when you mentor the kids on American Idol?

CG: I’d have to say something at least a little subversive, I would feel the need to do that onAmerican Idol, just make people go, “Huh?” Either subversive or just off the wall and out of place.

MR: Colin, other than asking you what your favorite animal is, I think we covered a lot of territory here. On second thought, what’s your favorite animal?

CG: You know, I like bats a lot. From a distance. I wouldn’t want one as a pet but I think they’re really cool. I think they look cool and I like that there’s something with fur that flies.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne