Q: First things first. What’s up with that album title? A: I chose the title just because it’s one of those persistent themes that comes up, not because it was a line from a song on the record. When I first decided on “Bowl of Fire” for a band name, it was from this magic catalog from the early 20th century. Kind of a novelty book, a catalog of sensational-sounding things that were actually pretty ordinary. On one page there was a “bowl of fire,” which was just a bowl with lighter fluid in it, and on the next page was “the mystic production of eggs,” which was also a pretty basic magic trick, but it sounded so grand. I almost called the band “The Mysterious Production of Eggs,” but it was a little too wordy. [The phrase just kept] popping up ever since in dreams and chance occurrences, and I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Then there’s the fact that I have several chickens, and they are without a doubt mysterious creatures. Q: Speaking of titles, what’s the meaning of the word “Sovay”? A: Well, I always prefer to misunderstand songs. I think a lot of great things come out of misunderstandings. That’s why I love Charlie Patton. I’d rather not get a lyric sheet. I’d rather misunderstand what he’s saying and have it be a spark for a new song. So anyway, in this case, “Sovay” was from an old English Childe ballad—“Sovay, Sovay, all along the day”…something about some highwayman or something—but I never bothered to research it, and I never knew what it meant; it was mysterious. I was working on this song, and suddenly that word popped out. I was looking for a new word to describe unprecedented circumstances, and that word had not been defined for me, so it fit the bill and it sounded good. It’s a new word. Q: How did the new album come together? A: It started with building a barn to make a record in, and bringing in musicians from Chicago and New Orleans to make that record[, three years ago]. But while I was building the barn and getting used to this lifestyle change, I was writing new material, which was really naturally coming out of that change, which I [felt I] had to suppress in order to make the next Swimming Hour—you know, the next “band” record. So I tried to make a record that I wasn’t really feeling. I wasn’t happy with it, so I scrapped it; I went and made Weather Systems, which was the natural accompaniment to this rural, pastoral setting. I was just trying to figure out how to record these songs, which had already accumulated a lot of weight, [because] I had [already] been doing some of them live for years. But I was learning so much from [performing] solo and from making Weather Systems: this whole different palette of sounds and this whole, maybe more subtle, approach to entertainment. [I felt like I was] finally moving on from that idea of “putting on a show” and having to jam every song full of exciting events. Weather Systems was like the big experiment in letting some of the pressure out of a record—to kind of diffuse everything and let it relax and spill over and breathe more. So I was trying to figure out how to keep the [Eggs] songs alive and interesting to me until I could figure out how to record them. Almost every song went through about 15 or 20 complete rewritings: I mean, different melodies, different lyrics, different arrangements. Right after I finished Weather Systems—like, the next day—I started recording TMPOE with [the same producer,] Mark Nevers. That was too atmospheric. The first version had been too… sort of ballsy and punchy and rock and rolls, too highly produced. And that just didn’t feel right at all. And this second version went too far in the Weather Systems direction; the structure of it, the rhythm, wasn’t coming through. So I scrapped it a second time. Then I had this generous offer from Tony Berg to record in his studio in Los Angeles, where many, many records have been made, sort of in a not-entirely-official capacity. It’s not a commercial studio. But it’s full of beautiful guitars, and it’s got the board that Lou Reed and David Bowie recorded their records on in the early 70s.Tony hooked me up with this engineer, David Boucher, who’s this very young, extremely competent, talented guy. Going to LA was just like going to work. It was pretty no-nonsense, but at the same time very creative. And that’s where the bulk of this record was made, with Kevin [O’Donnell, drummer] and myself and David concentrating on how to get all these years of accumulating melodies and ideas and themes to come together and make sense. I eventually settled on a guerrilla-style approach to recording: in Chicago I’d ride my bike downtown and record at Wall to Wall Studios and then send stuff off to Los Angeles and see what David did with it. We took snippets of stuff that was just exceptional from the scrapped sessions, for example “Opposite Day” was from the original barn session and it just had some things that I could have never replicated on it. But I think I probably scrapped and muted more tracks than you actually hear on the album—way more. I would go back and just peel back all the layers and start over. And I think the reason it was so difficult to be happy with what I was doing—because any one of the versions I scrapped would have been acceptable by most standards—was the fact that I was playing live almost every night and learning new things. As soon as I get into the studio—it’s such an unnatural environment to me, compared to that. Q: So how do you deal with recording, given that performing comes more naturally to you? A: You really have to accept that an album is nothing like a live performance. The way I got around studio stagnation was just to get in and out really quick. The actual songs were done very fast; I had almost everything you hear on the song “Measuring Cups” within two hours of work. The trick for me was to get instant gratification and be inspired by what I was doing. Otherwise, you slow things down to such a grueling pace that you completely forget what your original intentions were. I just love going to the studio for a couple hours and coming home with something, listening to it, and thinking, “I made this today.” …I think the process I use on stage is so malleable because I’m by myself and because of the nature of the way I’m putting things together. It allows me to do what I was trying to do over time with the record, which is just to keep the songs new and fresh and alive for me, which is a challenge every night when you’re playing night after night, not to get too methodical. Every night I gotta throw in some kind of wild card to keep me on my toes, just to make sure I’m not phoning it in. That’s the worst possible scenario to me: going on autopilot. I’m just not the kind of performer that holes up in the studio for a couple months or disappears from the whole live touring circuit for a while to write and produce a record, then they come out with these 12 measured songs with hooks, and then they go on the road for this concentrated period of time playing night after night. You hear a lot about it from bands, getting bored with their songs. When I hear a musician saying that, I think, “Man, I’m not like that at all, and I don’t want to be like that.” I’m trying to disperse the whole creative process to where the day before a record is released to 8 months after that are very similar types of days, creatively, if that makes any sense. The whole point of building the barn was an attempt to make recording and performing and all of it just the same, just part of getting up and making breakfast and the rest of your routine. I wrote a lot of the songs for Weather Systems while I was drywalling the barn, and that’s mostly when I write: when I’m driving or just doing some kind of task. There’s never any specific pressure to create, it’s just what you do, it’s part of your everyday life. It’s no big deal, there’s no pressure. And that’s what I was trying to with recording, but it’s exceedingly difficult to try to treat life that way once the tape’s rolling. But I did my best. I’m gonna start [touring] with my drummer again and bring someone into this thing that’s become very solitary and private, where I’ve had total control over all the parts that everyone hears. I think I’m trying to cultivate a particular sound that I’ve found in songs like “Sovay” and “The Happy Birthday Song” There’s a sound, a texture, that I want to try to create with the drums: a “gentle hugeness,” where the drums are not this pointy, rhythmic thing that’s jabbing out, but just kind of this textural wash. I’m interested in creating a wall of noise, of texture, and have the drums be part of that instead of [just maintaining] a particular beat. And it’s exciting to me to try to cultivate a sound that I’m hearing instead of just saying, “OK, here comes the bridge, OK, we need to do this…” Kevin, my drummer, and I have been playing together for 12 years, and we’re pretty tuned in. It’s kind of a unique relationship we have. We’ve taken a break for about three years from playing together, which I think is good, but I’m pretty excited to be playing with someone else again, I have to say. I can’t promise that he’ll always be there for every live show from now on. But the plan is to try it for the next few tours. Q: Just a duo, not a band, eh? A: People keep asking, “What’s up with the Bowl of Fire?” I say, “I’ve retired the name, or the idea, of Bowl of Fire, and it’s unlikely that I’ll ever put together a traditional rock-band format again.” That is, I think, if I got a bass player, a drummer, and I followed it all the way through to a traditional rhythm section again. I don’t think I could handle the restrictions of that, and I think it would ultimately be less interesting and less personal than what I’ve been doing. Q: It’s hard to think of other pop/rock/whatever music that is so grounded in the violin, and the main things that come to mind are progressive rock of the 70s and maybe Celtic folk-rock, neither of which has much to do with what you’re about. Care to talk a little about the instrument and what you do with it? A: Well, I’m pretty over being a violinist, or thinking of myself as a violinist. I’ve been away from the classical music world for 10 or 12 years now. I don’t like to get involved in particular stylistic scenes. I find them really oppressive and kind of depressing—for me. At this point, the violin just happens to be the instrument I have on hand to make most of the sounds that I hear. I like to kind of abuse it and just pull as much sound out of it as I can. Q: Another key element of your sound as I hear it is your own voice. It seems to me that you use your own particular qualities of your voice really well. That may be a hard thing to articulate in an interview, but is there anything you can say about it? A: I’ve been whistling unconsciously since I was 5 or 6 years old, all day, driving people nuts with it. The voice came along a lot later, but it fits right alongside [the whistling, the glockenspiel, and the violin]; they are the 3 or 4 options I have for creating a melody or a linear sound, different ways of something in my head escaping. My voice is the most difficult thing in the recording process for me to record. It’s the first thing that goes when I get stressed out. But it’s also the most wild and unpredictable thing live, too. I think I have more fun shooting for high notes and doing weird inflections with my voice than in the other mediums. It’s also the most personal thing, because it’s an actual part of the body. Q: What kind of stuff do you listen to lately? A: I’ve been listening a lot to African music from the 70s. First I got into the Ethiopiques series, which is a great series of lost music from Ethiopia. It’s basically these bands that got together and were listening to James Brown or Afro-Cuban music, but they definitely didn’t let go of their roots. Wild basslines and rhythms that are really, really intuitive, and really kind of crazy lo-fi sounds. I’ve been pretty hooked on that for the last couple of years. Beyond that, I keep coming back to old country blues stuff, gospel stuff, but I listen a lot less to music than I did. Q: Why is that? A: Because it competes with what’s in my head. The ear is not a very discriminating organ; it’ll soak up whatever it hears and spit it back out. I’ve been aware of that, and the less I listen to music, the more weird the music that comes out of me is. Given the right space and the right environment around me, there’s usually an unlimited supply of melodies coming up every morning. The less I listen to other music, the less they conform to some 8-bar phrase. And when I do listen, I seem to like stuff that doesn’t conform—your Charlie Patton and your Joseph Spence and this African music. It’s intuitive and it’s got elements that a good pop song could really use. I’m not thinking of that consciously, but I think your 3- or 4-minute pop song is really in need of something less methodical than what keeps coming out. A good example is “Lull” or “Sovay”—you can hear it; it’s not like “OK, he’s listening to African music,” but I’ve got in my head this rhythm. It’s not the backbeat thing that’s so common in rock and roll; it’s like a weird kind of polyrhythm thing, but it doesn’t beat you over the head. It’s not like King Crimson playing some weird meter; it’s just kind of subtly there in the bassline and working against the drums. If I’m cultivating any kind of sound that’s in there, along with the wash of sound—if I were to make any references, it might be something between the ideals of this sort of African music and My Bloody Valentine or something. Yeah, there you go. Q: Well, come to think of it, it’s easier in the Bowl of Fire albums to guess what you might have been listening to at the time… A: On the earlier records, I was still educating myself, and usually the way I educate myself is I hear something, I like it, and I think, “I’m gonna write a song like that.” But I don’t want to just do it cut and dry, I want to make it my own and make it different. You can make a whole career off that if you want, but at some point that wasn’t enough for me. I keep trying to strip away anything that might be a crutch, anything that might get me in a rut, anything that might make me more methodical; I just do away with it. Q: Various reviewers have called attention to the experimental side of your recent recordings, but you’re not really all that out there; there’s always a strong melody, for instance. A: I’m ultimately not a shoegazer or avant garde in my mindset. The way I perceive myself, I feel more akin to Louis Armstrong–he’s trying to improvise, but the goal is to try to create a melody for you there on the spot. Somehow, when I’m doing something new that night, when I’m trying to create a new song, the audience can sense it, and know that I am doing something for the first time. I try to make that part of the show. I don’t want to take the audience on some kind of improvisational journey; that approach is boring to me. I want to arrive for the audience, not kind of lead them out to deep water. The goal is to create a melody, but do it different every night. Interview with Ron Ehmke 12/21/04 |
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