A Conversation with Harper Simon – HuffPost 7.26.13

Mike Ragogna: Your new album Division Street has a very different sound than your debut album. Was that intentional?

Harper Simon: Well the sound of this was more about me playing electric guitars on every song, which I didn’t do much of at all on the first record, which had a lot of session players on it from the sixties era in Nashville and some New York avant-garde type players like Marc Ribot. But this was more just about me on guitars and then Pete Thomas from Elvis Costello & The Attractions playing all the drums. Also it had a different producer; I had Tom Rothrock producing, and a totally different person mixed it, and I had different influences running through this record.

MR: When I listened to Division Street, “Eternal Questions” popped up for me, not so much because that may be my favorite song, but because it seemed to me that the album is set up around that theme. Everything seems to be a little open-ended no matter what the story is, like there are question marks within almost every song.

HS: Well…I think that’s very insightful of you to say.

MR: Thank you. So within the songs, you reference big concepts like about the unified field, and they sit comfortably next to the simpler themed tracks. How did you approach writing the songs this time out? Was it just that you had a body of work and it finally was time to record?

HS: I wish that were the case. I’ll try to do that next time. That’s certainly the way to be more proficient. No, I always seem to get anxious to get started, so I just start recording. Usually, I have the musical ideas. This time around, me, Pete Thomas and Tom Rothrock, got in our rehearsal space and I’d have all these musical structures, and Pete and I would work them out together. We would change the feel or change the tempo; we’d try it on an acoustic guitar or an electric guitar, and we’d get all these structures together and then record them–just Pete and I–so that the foundation was there. Then I had some lyrical ideas. At one point, I thought I would go away for a few weeks, then that turned into more like a few months. I’m always completely delusional about how long this process takes.

MR: [laughs] How long did this one take?

HS: Well, over a year.

MR: Which is reasonable, that’s about the amount of time many serious artists put into their projects.

HS: I guess so. I would like to try and get it to be a shorter period of time.

MR: You had a video for “99” that Rolling Stone premiered. What’s the story behind it?

HS: My manager hooked me up with a man named George Salisbury, who does all the music videos and album covers for The Flaming Lips. I didn’t know…I still don’t know The Flaming Lips; I’ve never met them, but I was a fan and I liked his work for the Lips and other videos he’s made. I looked at his site and I just thought it would be interesting. They all lived in the Oklahoma City area where I had never been, so I just thought it might be fun, like a little adventure, to go to Oklahoma to meet those guys, make a couple of videos down there, and check out their scene.

MR: Let’s get to a couple of the songs, like the title track, “Division Street.”

HS: Sometimes, I write a song and I’m thinking about myself in a certain period of time, and I write about it in second person or I write it out like I’m sketching a character. I remove it from myself but I really have my own experience in mind. That was a song like that, but that’s probably one of the only ones. I was thinking about New York, about myself in another period in the nineties when I lived in New York on the Lower East Side. Actually, I thought about New York a lot on this record, where I haven’t lived in ten years, but it’s where I grew up. I thought about the New York that I grew up in and that I lived in my twenties and about the records that either were made there or that I associated with living there.

MR: How about “Dixie Cleopatra?”

HS: There is a friend of mine who’s actually named Dixie Cleopatra. We were never lovers or anything as the song might imply, but something about her name… I’m very close with her and her whole family, so in a way, I wanted to kind of give a shoutout to them. But in another way, I thought that her name–“Dixie Cleopatra”–sounded like a great Warhol superstar type of name, which put me in the frame of mind of a Lou Reed song or something. I like names like that, or even “Bonnie Brae.” There was a joke on that that reminded me of a made-up punk name that one take. I kept thinking about characters’ names that reminded me of Warhol superstars and punk rock aliases.

MR: Nice, and Bonnie Brae is, of course, a girl who looks like Patti Smith.

HS: Correct, yeah. And Bonnie Brae is a street here in Los Angeles.

MR: And yet another character is “Chinese Jade.”

HS: Well, that was actually written about a specific person and a specific romance. That was actually very literal. It was a real depiction of a relationship that turned into a friendship. Most songs are more like composites. Even “Dixie Cleopatra” has bits in it about different people, and even my mom makes an appearance in my own brain. One would never know. You draw from a lot of different people and experiences when you’re writing a song. You take lines from all sorts of different notes and chapters in your life. I rarely write a song that’s just literally like, “I’m going to write a song about you.” I’ve done it a couple of times, usually not, but that actually is one.

MR: Before I ask you about “Just Like St. Teresa,” are there any Seven songs on here?

HS: Seven as in Seven McDonald?

MR: Yes.

HS: No, but that song on my last album, “Berkeley Girl,” was.

MR: Right, I remember that from our last interview, that’s why I brought it up.

HS: But no, although there might be a couple lines inspired by her throughout the album. Different people who are close to me always seem to make an appearance. “Just Like St. Teresa” seems to me to be the most interesting song in the bunch, at least lyrically.

MR: I think it’s my favorite song on the album.

HS: Really? Oh, good. I like it a lot too, but whenever I do an acoustic song or I finger-pick an acoustic guitar, some people just say something snide about my dad or something, so I figure maybe I should just stop doing that from now on.

MR: No, don’t even think about it! [laughs] In my case, it’s totally flattering and wanting to acknowledge that I think it’s cool.

HS: Yeah, I always think that I should “represent” a little bit, but maybe I shouldn’t because the truth is that I feel like the world doesn’t really like story of someone who’s a second-generation singer-songwriter. I don’t know, they just don’t like it.

MR: Or maybe they don’t know how to digest the concept and get over themselves.

HS: I just feel there’s kind of an insurmountable prejudice in a way. I don’t know…they don’t like the story, as opposed to in Hollywood where they like that story better; if you’re an actor or something, they like that. They don’t mind if Kate Hudson is the daughter of Goldie Hawn. They like it, you know?

MR: That’s a very, very good point. I never made the comparison, but you’re spot on.

HS: I’ve thought a lot about it, and I think it’s because the world of rock ‘n’ roll is very much invested in the mythology of the working class hero, even if it’s totally bulls**t. They just like that story.

MR: I think you just presented it in the best way I’ve ever heard it put, thank you. Harper, you began the last album with the gospel-ish “All To God,” and this album includes “Just Like St. Teresa,” the song we spoke about earlier. Do religious icons interest you?

HS: I wouldn’t say I have a deep knowledge of it. I’m attracted to the imagery and to the words, and I’m attracted to the symbolism. I like it in song. I think it opens up doors to discuss other things. You see it in lots of different songwriters’ work. Of course, I’m always looking at all sorts of things to draw from when I’m trying to go through the painstaking, often agonizing ordeal of crafting some kind of lyric. I wrote most of this album in the library.

MR: Beautiful. Which one?

HS: Different ones in Los Angeles. A good thing about being in the library is you’re trying to disconnect from your phone and the internet and be in a quiet place where other people are working. You also have all sorts of reference books and resources, so you can kind of follow your own trajectory in an interesting way, and sometimes pull lines, pull ideas… So I would easily be pulling from the lives of saints and different iconic or mythological figures. When I think about that as an approach to songwriting, I think of Bob Dylan because he would do that all the time, but so do lots of people.

MR: Another highlight for me on Division Street is the very positive song, “Breathe Out Love.”

HS: That was another song that had to do with spirituality. That was a mantra that comes from the Tonglen meditation practice, which is not my own, and I’m not really familiar with it; Seven McDonald was the one who was talking to me about that. That was just a mantra: “Inhale suffering, exhale love.” I just turned it to “Breathe out” because that sang better. Then I thought, “Mantras make for pretty good choruses.”

MR: I think choruses strive to be mantras.

HS: Yeah, exactly so.

MR: You close the album with “Leaves Of Golden Brown,” which seems a little like “Berkeley Girl” as far as closure, the way you’re ending the album. Perhaps that wasn’t the intention, but it feels a little bit like…

HS: That’s it!

MR: Oh, okay. [laughs] Whew!

HS: Does it feel kind of folk-rock or something?

MR: Not folk-rock, no. To me, it just thematically seemed like it could be the same person you’re singing this song to.

HS: That really was a work of fiction. I’m really not addressing specific people most of the time.

MR: Right, like you said earlier. With this one also, the concept of “leaves of golden brown” references the fall, a change of season of season of sorts, a change of life, maybe the move into something more serious after the fun of summer. Was there any of that going through your head?

HS: Oh that’s good, that works. [laughs] If there’s some kind of metaphorical attachment that you can get that level of meaning out of a lyric and it’s in there and it seems to work as a song, you just get another level of meaning. That one certainly works.

MR: Thanks. Also, with respect to the earlier concept, I thought it was about acceptance, letting things be at ease, especially with the line, “Come on over, throw a jacket over your shoulder, dream a while, what more can I say?”

HS: Yeah, although to me it seemed that this character was sort of pining for this unavailable
person.

MR: [laughs] See? I’m totally wrong. Love it.

HS: No, I like that somebody else thinks something else. I guess that’s the beautiful thing about lyrics, that people can interpret it however they want, right?

MR: Well, yeah, and I guess. Harper, what advice do you have for new artists?

HS: Oh, gee. Well, I don’t want to get too dreary… It depends, are you asking me to give advice to someone who wants to be an artist or just somebody who has decided to make money out of the marketplace?

MR: [laughs] Advice for people who want to be artists.

HS: I thought Patti Smith’s book was sort of fantastic about her trajectory of how she became an artist. Did you read that?

MR: Yeah.

HS: Just Kids. That would be something that a young person should read because it was so interesting. I felt like she really let people into her process and also her influences, you know? All the French symbolist poets she admired and the different kinds of painters and poets and the whole world of creativity and books and her working in a bookshop… That was sort of a fascinating glimpse of her trajectory to become an artist I thought. Yeah, I don’t know, maybe my advice would be, “Go read Just Kids by Patti Smith.”

MR: Sounds good. They really should read that book. I hear you’re going to be on tour with Polyphonic Spree.

HS: That’s right, yeah. That’s going to be fun.

MR: Where’s it taking you? Do you know?

HS: It’s just an east coast tour, so from Columbus, Ohio all the way to New York.

MR: Are you going to have every single one of them–I think it’s 150–on stage with you during one of your songs?

HS: I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out what kind of band I’m going to assemble to bring out. I’m thinking I might bring out a larger band with me because I have a good platform to try out something more ambitious since I’m touring with the Polyphonic Spree.

MR: Yeah, and you’ve got your electric guitar this time.

HS: Yeah, I’ve got an electric guitar. I pretty much lost my whole band that I had assembled, though. I lost them all to bigger acts for the summer. That’s what I’ve got planned at the moment.

MR: And what about that next album? You’re going to be jumping into the studio like right after that to start recording the next one, right?

HS: Well it depends on how much touring opportunities I get. It depends on how long I’ll be promoting this one. I don’t have an idea of any material or what kind of team I’m going to work with on the next one, but I’m starting to think about it.

MR: Will there be any cool side projects?

HS: I don’t have any, no. I hope so. If something cool comes up I might do a side project. I just get tired. To go out and be me all the time seems exhausting.

MR: [laughs] On a personal level, what else are you involved in at the moment?

HS: I’ve got some other things that I’m trying to do. I probably shouldn’t talk about it, but I am trying to develop a television show at the moment. I can’t say too much about it to the press at this point, but I feel very hopeful about it. It feels like it’s moving like it might get made.

MR: Harper, good luck with that, I really wish you all the best with it and everything.

HS: Thank you, Mike.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne