A Conversation with Pink Martin’s Thomas Lauderdale – HuffPost 10.11.13
Mike Ragogna: Thomas, I’m calling because I want to know why in the world Pink Martini wants us to Get Happy.
Thomas Lauderdale: Well, things are pretty bleak in the world right now. The idea initially was to create an irresistible album that’s uplifting and hopeful despite everything we know and everything we’ve been through and everything we’ll be facing years ahead. It is sort of uplifting, it’s not deliriously happy because I couldn’t manufacture that, I couldn’t quite get there entirely. But I think that hopefully Pink Martini has always been for many people a tiny glittering beacon of hope.
MR: That’s true, Pink Martini, in general, mostly has an uplifting sound.
TL: Yes. We’ve been inclusive along the way to all kinds of people, really, from conservatives to liberals and everybody in between, and people of different ages and different cultures and all of that. It’s somewhere in-between “It’s A Small World” by Walt Disney and The Muppet Show and maybe a tiny little bit of Lawrence Welk.
MR: And conservatives and liberals alike would probably get a big smile out of “Smile” with Phyllis Diller. What’s the story behind that one?
TL: We were playing at Disney Hall on New Year’s Eve two years ago and our friend Kim Hastreiter, who’s the editor-in-chief of Paper magazine in New York who also plays glockenspiel with Pink Martini, I knew that she was good friends with Phyllis Diller, so I begged her to introduce me to Phyllis in the days following our performance. So she did and we went out to Phyllis’ house for dinner. She made us chili. In her recent years, she’s been a painter so there were hundreds of paintings on the wall, each with a price tag. You’d take her paintings off the walls and at the end of the night, you’d be tallied up, you’d write a check, Phyllis Diller would sign the paintings and then off you would go. So I bought a whole suitcase of Phyllis Diller paintings. As we were talking, I suddenly realized, knowing her history and how she recorded several albums in the sixties and seventies and was a pioneer in comedy and she studied classical piano in Lima, Ohio, I asked her if she would consider recording a song for our album. With the good counsel of her friend, she was convinced to do it. Within twenty-four hours, we decided the right song was probably “Smile” by Charlie Chaplin who was a friend of Phyllis Diller’s. It’s so evocative and such a bittersweet song; it’s sort of perfect. One month later, our engineer Dave Friedlander and I flew down to LA, set up an impromptu recording studio in her living room and she recorded without hesitation “Smile.”
MR: You also have the ever awesome Rufus Wainwright on a couple songs, “Kitty Come Home” and “Get Happy/Happy Days.”
TL: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I met Rufus when he first came to Portland on his very first tour. My good friend Gus Van Zandt who lives in Portland called up and said, “Yeah, there’s this guy named Rufus Wainwright who’s coming to town, do you want to go?” So that’s where I met Rufus, and whenever he came to town, I’d always come and take him around town and introduce him to cute boys. In the recent years, he’s become even sweeter and nicer. I think he’s a total genius. I think Rufus Wainwright is just incredible. I have such a huge amount of respect for almost everything that he does. For as long as I’ve known Rufus, I’ve also liked the song “Kitty Come Home,” which was written by his aunt Anna McGarrigle. When I first heard that song, I thought it was about cats and sort of whimsical, about a lost kitten or something. Then Rufus said, five years after I’d listened to the song, that actually, it was written by his aunt as a plea to his mother Kate–Kitty–to leave Loudon [Wainwright III] and come back to Canada and bring her children Rufus and Martha. So it’s much sadder and deeper than a song about a lost cat. So he knew that I loved the song and once he agreed to record something for our album, I asked if he would consider “Kitty Come Home.” I said, “Clearly this is your family, this belongs to you and I totally understand if you don’t want to record this song with us and I almost feel somewhat weird about even asking.” But he did say yes. So backed by the great-grandchildren of Maria and Georg von Trapp who are now living in Portland, Rufus recorded “Kitty Come Home,” and I think it’s really, really gorgeous. We sent mixes and copies to Anna McGarrigle to get her approval. That family, that whole cluster of McGarrigles and Wainwrights, and now Rufus is a father because the daughter of Leondard Cohen asked him for his sperm and got it, so he has a child with Leonard Cohen’s daughter. Isn’t that amazing?
MR: That is amazing. It was pretty damn bold for somebody to have taken on Judy At Carnegie Hall as well as what he’s done throughout his various projects.
TL: Yeah, he’s daring. He’s totally daring. He takes risks and sometimes they’re reckless, but I think that in the end, he’s just going through life without a lot of apparent self-doubt whereas a lot of people, I think, are constantly positioning themselves for this or that. The way that he worked in the studio, he was there until the finish trying to figure out the right way to record all of these songs that we recorded. The couple songs that were not released that we recorded in that same session, one was a German song first performed by Hildegard Knef and the song is called “Für Mich Soll’s Rote Rosen Regnen,” the translation is “For Me It Will Rain Red Roses.” He recorded it because it was Jörn, his husband’s birthday, and it’s Jörn’s favorite song. He just plowed his way through the German, we got a German language teacher in there and we just did it and it turned out so well. He also recorded a version of “Blue Boom,” which is stunning. That may come out on a future record. But just watching him work was incredible because he was so committed to getting it just right and not knowing what the “just right” was, but knowing when we’d gotten there.
MR: The first half of your album is kind of “worldly,” was that an intentional thing, or did it just happen to end up in sequence.
TL: Wait, does that mean that the English songs are all towards the end? Are they all clustered together?
MR: Sort of, yeah.
TL: Oh, that’s funny, I didn’t even think of that. Wow. That’s interesting. That is fascinating. Actually, if I had noticed that, I think I might have changed the order. That’s interesting. No, especially with this album it’s all over the map. We’ve got like fifteen different singers including the Von Trapps and there are all these sort of disparate things that are kind of coming and going. I guess I just tried to use my gut instinct and the melody and mood of each song sort of predicated what was going to come next. At one point, “Zundoko-Bushi” was earlier in the sequence and I just felt like it was too aggressive to come too early, so we put in “I’m Waiting For You,” the Chinese song with Meow Meow followed by “Omide Zendegani,” the song in Farsi. Hold on, I’m in a cab hurrying towards the airport, we’re going to Turkey today. The order of the songs really makes all the difference. Aside from the songs themselves and what they sound like, it’s the most important aspect of an album, the order. There’s a sort of ballet to it.
MR: You did the same thing as far as the sequence on your retrospective. I particularly liked the way that it conceptually flowed. As you were just saying, I agree, the sequence is as important as the message being delivered.
TL: It’s totally important. It’s like lighting in a room. Who wants to work under fluorescent lighting? I think this has a nice kind of glow to it. Hopefully, the album does have this kind of glow. There are certain albums that I might want to redo if I could, but mainly, I feel like the order has been pretty good on most of the records.
MR: Tom, what advice you have for new artists, oh international cavalier artist that you are?
TL: Well, I would say be prepared to be broke for a decade, say yes to everything, work with people who are better than you, be sure to go to lessons occasionally just to brush up and make sure that you’re not becoming a sloppy bohemian. What else? Don’t assume that people are going to come to you, go to them. Like when the band first started, I realized that there was a whole sort of patron and matron set that would never go to a rock club, so I would take Pink Martini and set up in the dining hall in the fanciest restaurant in town at the time, Zephyro on Saturday night at midnight, and we’d do late night lounges in this fancy restaurant and play for all the patrons and matrons of Portland. That was very helpful, actually, just in terms of reaching a broader audience. So I think you have to be sort of inventive about how to reach people. Everybody thinks that somehow they’re going to become rockstars overnight. I don’t know why anybody would want to be a rockstar overnight. There seems to be very little loyalty from moment to moment. Our crowd is a different crowd than the pop crowd. I have a feeling that Lady Gaga in three years will be nowhere. She’ll be playing casinos. Not really, but you know what I mean? It’s all so fleeting these days. I think that it’s a good idea to have a strong base, an intensely loyal fan base. It’s the NPR crowd, the Starbucks crowd, but not just those crowds. We’re popular with both camps of Texas, the really conservative people and the very liberal people. If there’s nobody else in between, we don’t worry about that. [laughs] And we’re popular in Utah! I think what I like about the fans and what I would advise is this, “How accessible is it to people?” I think at this point, this culture could use as much music as it possibly could and can stand because we need to have these tiny moments of joy amidst a world of suffering. More people are broke and more people are hurting. It’s kind of a ridiculous culture right now.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne