A Conversation with Wesley Stace – HuffPost 10.2.13

Mike Ragogna: Hi Wes. First off, you went from “John Wesley Harding” to your real name, Wesley Stace.

Wesley Stace: That’s right, although I did start off as Wesley Stace in the first place.

MR: What made you change your mind?

WS: Well, a number of things, really, but I think the most important thing was that a lot of these songs are autobiographical. All songs are autobiographical, these happen to be true. That doesn’t matter at all, it’s not information that anyone needs to hear. I’m just putting out a bunch of songs. But because they’re true, I reported things that happened to me, and in one of the songs, I’m talking about The New York Times interviewing me. You know how they call them “Mr. Loaf” or “Mr. Prince”? In my case, I was “Mr. Stace” because they were talking to me for one of my novels, which came out under my name Wesley Stace. The line in the song is, “Now you call me Mr. Stace.” What that reminded me of was that once when someone broke up with me over the phone years ago and she said, “Goodbye Mr. Stace.” Because of that, I put it in the song. The chorus of the song “Goodbye Jane” is “You said Goodbye Mr. Stace, you didn’t need to explain, I said goodbye Jane.” When I realized I was on the album referring to myself as “Mr. Stace” twice, it just seemed ludicrous to put this out under the name John Wesley Harding. That was most of it, really, although the other thing I would say, a contributing factor, is that I’ve been making music under one name for twenty-five years. I then started writing novels and I did it under my real name, Wesley Stace, and it just gets a bit silly to be referred to as “Otherwise known as singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding” and all this kind of stuff. I just thought it was time to bring it all under one roof. So it was kind of a combination of all of those things.

MR: And you emphasize the point by making the new album self-titled. As you said, it’s mostly autobiographical, and it features songs such as “The Bedroom You Grew Up In.” It’s about one of your best friends dying in a plane crash. There is a very deep introspection on some of these songs. Were you surprised at how deep you went for this record?

WS: Well, the answer is yes. It took me by surprise, the whole thing. I hadn’t intended to do it. It wasn’t any kind of an artistic decision, it was born out of necessity. I was feeling a bit depleted on tour and I wasn’t able to go out so much on the book tour and I started writing songs to cheer myself up. Among the first ones were, in fact, that one you just mentioned, “Bedroom You Grew Up In” and “We Will Always Have New York.” I think I was writing about things to comfort myself, but once I’d realized that this was doable and I was enjoying doing it, I just couldn’t stop doing it. I never felt like it was something I’d decided to do, so the whole thing was a bit of a surprise, yes.

MR: Did it reach this level of depth because you had come off of a novel and maybe your mind was functioning more internally than not?

WS: I’ve already read that said twice by people in previews or reviews of the album, that if the novel-writing was taking care of intellectual stuff for me, then it might free me up to write with more emotional sincerity and play less games in my songs. I think that’s a good perspective on it, yeah.

MR: Has writing novels maybe given you more perspective on things, or at least more tools to approach creativity, especially in your songwriting?

WS: I’d say that’s true, yeah. I could adorn what you just said with more facts, but I think that’s basically true. In the end, it’s all really part of the same project, and I also do a bit of teaching and I put together the cabinet of wonders and it all comes out of the same head and the same head-space, really, despite how different the various skills are. What is, I think, quite interesting is that when I was writing the stuff for this album I was also working on my next novel and my next novel is also much more based on my experience in the world than in any other. So perhaps it was a general move.

MR: I imagine at some point you might have been tempted to call the album Pieces Of The Past, you know, after the song on the project?

WS: Yeah. That was one possible title for it.

MR: The song “Pieces Of The Past” is sort of a clue to what you were doing.

WS: Yes, I agree. We artists all have our old relationships and our tastes and our decisions and the people that we’ve met and the ones we try to avoid and the books that we’ve read and that is, I believe, what we are.

MR: “The Wrong Tree” is also a lovely concept and I think you’re right about denial. And it’s especially hard to admit to yourself when you’re “barking up the wrong tree.”

WS: Yeah. Again, that’s another song that came very early because I was just very much enjoying this new thing I was doing. It’s kind of a philosophical overview of the album, in a way. You’re right to pull that one out because it’s a very simple, straight-ahead song in many ways, kind of a Nick Lowe song or something. None of these songs, I must say, had a lot of musical thought go into their melody; I just let them fall out as they would. A lot of thought went into their arrangement or production. I just tried to write them quickly to whatever level I was happy with. I let them be natural, I tried not to be self-conscious about all of my lyrics, and it felt really good. “The Wrong Tree” was just me kind of celebrating that it’s good to know every now and then that you’re fulfilled in your art.

MR: Another song I wanted to bring up was “The Dealer’s Daughter,” the concept of having no way out. What’s the story behind this one?

WS: I’ve jokingly said to people that about the song “Lydia,” you can be sure of one thing: It isn’t about somebody called Lydia. And “Goodbye Jane” is not about somebody called Jane. Some of the songs use metaphors a bit more than others, but they’re all totally related to situations that are very clear in my mind and I honestly believe that it’s a nice thing for me because much of the time in my past, I’ve had to explain songs. These songs, you don’t really need to explain. “What’s the story behind ‘The Dealer’s Daughter?'” Well it’s exactly what you think the story would be. It’s about how love can be very addictive and sometimes you want a way out of something and sometimes it all has to die. That was the idea of “Dealer’s Daughter,” but there are two songs on the album with recourse to metaphor. One is “Dealer’s Daughter” and the other is “Excalibur.” I guess “Wrong For The Part,” maybe, but to me, they’re all part of the same bag because they’re just mining situations that I was in.

MR: You brought up “Excalibur.” You originally wrote that for Robin Gibb.

WS: I did and he died. The news was good for a little while because he came out of the coma for a bit, but he never recovered enough for me to actually bother him with my song. But I absolutely had Robin Gibb’s voice in mind, that he would’ve been my dream person to record that song. When I was looking at the songs for the record, I think I played that for a few people and one of the people in the band was like, “That’s fantastic, you should do it because nobody else will do that.”

MR: And there’s “Only Thing Missing,” my believing the concept to be that you catch yourself observing your life and realize that the only thing wrong is that you’re observing it rather than actually living it. I have a feeling that it’s many people’s survival mode, how many people are unconsciously…or even subconsciously muddling through each day.

WS: Yeah, I think you might well be right. I don’t want to lay any judgment down on that, but if you mine a feeling that you have experienced, the chances are because we’re all unique–but we’re not all that unique–that somebody else will have experienced it too. That song’s about there being two sides of the glass and one is you looking in and missing yourself in the room and the other is you looking out from inside and thinking, “Oh, I wish I was out there looking in.”

MR: Now although the songwriting is autobiographical and very personal, you do touch on a lot of big topics, the concept of “Letting Go,” for instance, being one of them.

WS: Right. What can I tell you? It’s exactly as it appears to be in the song. It’s exactly what it says. I tried to be in touch with an emotion that we’ve all felt, how beautiful it is just to let go when something isn’t right and can’t be right.

MR: Let me ask you then, as a novelist and songwriter, when you’re approaching material do you prefer to go towards these bigger topics? Do you feel like that may be one of the missions that good songwriters and good novelists should be doing at all times?

WS: Not at all, and I don’t even feel that I’ve done it on this record. None of it felt like in any way writing anything other than the first thing that came in my head. “Letting Go,” I was thinking about a particular thing, and I wanted to put that feeling into words. There are very few words in that song, only six lines and a chorus that says, “Letting Go, Falling.” I love that you think that touches on very deep emotions; it does, mine. But I was trying to achieve very little on that song. I was trying to sum up a feeling that I had and thought I could get over, not only with a lyric, which is a very sparse lyric of very few words, but also with the sound of the music and the string quartet, that they would all give that feeling to the listener. That’s really the first time in my career that I’ve tried this more holistic approach to music and lyrics.

MR: Maybe I was laying too much at your doorstep there, but I think you ended up coming off with a collection of more than just biographically-inspired material. You recorded an album that touches on a lot of bigger concepts than what people normally think about.

WS: Well, thank you very much, and what I would say definitively to that is that all you can offer the world is you. Yourself. That’s all you can offer the world in the end. You can try and second guess what’ll be a hit or a great novel or what somebody else would like, but that won’t be successful, probably, unless you’re a professional songwriter or something. All you can offer is you, and this album is me writ pretty large, for better or for worse, and I believe that it’s the specific details in this song that, rather than making them more appealing only to me, more personal, they are actually the very things that make the album universal. That is, I think, what you’re saying, and that was entirely not my intent, because I was just writing these things that I wanted to write and there weren’t any two ways about that. But then I went to the trouble to make music as beautiful as I could in the arrangements and the production and stuff, and now I feel that it’s those little things that are so personal to me that actually are the things that might make it more available to other people.

MR: Does this album now serve as a template that might be used in future recordings by Wesley Stace?

WS: That I couldn’t tell you. What I can tell you is there were five songs we left off this album entirely. I had over fifty that I recorded in one afternoon in Portland. We recorded five others and I left them off this album not because they weren’t good enough, but purely because they didn’t fit in. They didn’t fit in, to me, for the mood of this album and I wanted this album to have a very even mood throughout and be a real mood piece, basically. I wanted that mood to be nostalgic and romantic and very beautiful and these other songs just didn’t fit in, a couple of them because they were too rockin’. I think there’s certainly another album with this material, partly because these songs are already written, but quite how I would choose to present them, I don’t know.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

WS: Oh it’s always the same, it’s exactly what I just told you. Don’t try and do what you think anybody else wants you to do because the only way I think you can be happy in your art is by being yourself and doing what you want to do. Whether that’s successful or not is an entirely other matter, but at least it will bring you happiness.

MR: Thanks. So it seems like you have not only another album or so with all that material, but perhaps a couple of concepts for novels, even within this album.

WS: No kidding, it’s true.

MR: So a year for now, what will Wesley Stace have done?

WS: Well there’s a novel coming out in February, I’ll have taught at Princeton again, and I’ll probably have worked out what kind of record I want to make next.

MR: Beautiful. All right, I wish you all the best, you’re always a great interview and I appreciate
your time, Wesley.

WS: Thank you very much.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne