Gruff Rhys, Onstage at San Francisco's The Chapel, November 2014

GRUFF RHYS: MUSICAL EXPLORER VISITS “AMERICAN INTERIOR”
Known For His Brilliant Solo Albums,
As Well As Unforgettable Work with Super Furry Animals and Neon Neon, Rhys Returns With One Of His Most Fascinating Projects Yet!

By Paul Freeman [November 2014 Interview]

Originality, integrity, wit, emotional depth and a rare intelligence - these are but a few of the qualities that make the songs of Gruff Rhys so consistently engaging. And he delivers them with an incredibly expressive voice.

Since Welsh rockers Super Furry Animals’ debut album, 1996’s “Fuzzy Logic,” Rhys has been serving up music that’s fresh-sounding, exciting and entertaining.

In addition to his imaginative excursions with SFA, Rhys has teamed with Boom Bip to record the acclaimed Neon Neon electro-pop albums “Stainless Style” and “Praxis Makes Perfect.”

Rhys’ brilliant solo recordings include “Candylion” and “Hotel Shampoo.” His latest project, the fascinating “American Interior,” led him to follow the 1790s trek of his unfortunate explorer ancestor, John Evans, from Wales, across mid-America. Though the expedition - aimed at finding a lost tribe of Welsh-speaking Native Americans - ended in disappointment, the maps Evans created helped Lewis & Clark find their way on their historic expedition. Evans’ adventures inspired the clever Rhys to put together not only an exhilarating album, but a film, a book and a mobile app. The musician tapped into all of the story’s relevance, poignancy, irony and humor. As misguided and prone to mishaps as Evans may have been, through Rhys’ eyes, we see the ill-fated explorer as endearing and admirable.

“American Interior” follows another Rhys odyssey, this one to Patagonia, to meet with distant relatives whose ancestors had emigrated from Wales in the Victorian era. That one resulted in another Rhys collaboration with filmmaker Dylan Goch, “Separado!”

The ultimate troubadour and an artist in the truest sense of the word, Rhys continues to broaden his musical palette.

Rhys composed the score for the new film “Set Fire To The Stars. It stars Elijah Wood and depicts poet Dylan Thomas‘ first encounters with his American agent.

During his U.S. tour, the Cardiff, Wales-based Rhys, ever amiable and thoughtful, took time to chat with Pop Culture Classics.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
Every one of your albums has its own character, every song, its own personality. Is that something you think about. Or does it just happen organically?

GRUFF RHYS:
I still fantasize about making an album where every song has the same sound. And it’s something that I’m unable to do, for some reason. I gravitate towards very different things. I tend to look for variation, rather than consistency.

PCC:
That’s one of the aspects of your work that makes it so fascinating for listeners - all the surprises. It’s truly a journey.

RHYS:
Yeah, it keeps me interested, in the studio. With this record, we thought it was going to be quite consistent. And I could have chosen songs that were more in the vein of the title track, more kind of guitar, piano, bass. But I was unable to curb my search for something sonically more maybe unexpected, you know [chuckles].

PCC:
You have to go where the music takes you.

Gruff Rhys, Backstage at San Francisco's The Chapel, November 2014

RHYS:
Yeah, maybe I shy away from simplicity. Though I like minimalism, I tend to gravitate towards maximalism [laughs]. I very much appreciate minimalism, but it can also be a little boring, I suppose, if you’re exposed to too much minimalism.

PCC:
On these last couple of projects, the urge to explore your roots, where did that come from?

RHYS:
I think I’m interested in tall stories, you know - tall family tales. And I’m interested in verifying them and seeing what’s true and what’s been distorted over time. I think I come from a family that is generally not very extroverted. Every family has the odd extrovert and it’s quite interesting to just look at these characters. And I’m more interested in the stories than in the familial connection.

So in the book and the film, I don’t dwell too much on the family connection. I cover it. And the reason I know about these stories is the family connection. But beyond that, I think, as humans, we’re all one big human family. So I’m not interested in DNA testing or finding out if I’m related to anyone. I think that’s irrelevant. It’s also a way to sort of figure out what’s caused me to be a musician and why do I think it’s a good idea to document all these songs. It’s quite a peculiar vocation [laughs]. I was intrigued about the possibility that there might be parallels between the ego that drives exploration - and that kind of glory-seeking - and art, music. And it was easy for me to make those parallels.

John Evans, could be viewed as a kind of deluded explorer. It reminded me somewhat of the way that rock musicians, in their twenties, also are, for the most part, beautifully deluded, in a way, speaking for myself, convinced they’ll find some kind of glory on the road. It’s so passionate a pursuit.

PCC:
So what ended up being the most valuable lesson you learned over the course of this journey? What was most surprising?

RHYS:
The distances he traveled, on foot, quite remarkable. The North American continent is beyond the scale of Europe. It’s almost unimaginable for a European to imagine what the distance is that he traveled. That was the most shocking thing for me about his story. After the tour, the mood of the songs I wrote was very somber, whereas the ones I had written earlier were upbeat. I came to the realization how hard life had been for John Evans.

PCC:
What did you learn about yourself during the trek?

RHYS:
There are instant epiphanies, but I tend to find that experiences take time to manifest themselves. I mean, I got my immediate experiences into songs. But getting to interview the last speaker of the Mandan language, for example, was extremely moving. It has made me appreciate my relationship to the language I grew up speaking. Maybe I’ve taken the lost language for granted to some extent. But I don’t know, maybe it will manifest itself in some way in time.

PCC:
So it also reminded you of the importance of the Welsh language surviving?

Gruff's Touring Companion/Ancestor, John Evans, As Designed By Artist Pete Fowler

RHYS:
What a great opportunity we have, which may well be squandered, because, politically, it’s extremely difficult to build that political consensus that’s needed to save the language. The power of money always seems to trump cultural value. I think the Italians call it “turbo capitalism.” It’s the age of turbo capitalism. It’s going to steamroll over us, steamroll over everything. The speakers of a lost language are kind of being priced out, out of the old communities that speak Welsh. They’re being broken up by the value of real estate. They tend to be areas that are depressed economically. It’s hard for local people to own property and there’s basically no one left that speaks the language. It can happen over a very short period of time. And it has done in Wales to dramatic effect. It’s in constant crisis, because the political will isn’t there to create areas where the language is protected.

PCC:
What do you hope the takeaway is from these projects, for the reader or the listener?

RHYS:
Well, for me, the interesting thing was looking at a time in history, through the lens of a deluded explorer. So you get that kind of adventure, which is enjoyable. It’s a gateway to that time in history, which is a revolutionary time. John Evans’ generation were inspired by the American revolution... and the imminent French revolution and just the ideals of a fairer society, where wealth was redistributed to all the people and power was redistributed to the people. And John Evans grew up in a time where the land was owned by huge land owners and there was no democracy, as such.

PCC:
There is a contemporary relevance, yes?

RHYS:
It’s the ideals of cultural sovereignty... although he found out that there’s no historical connection between the tribes of Missouri and Wales, as he thought. In a way, there is a political connection in every small group of people being faced with assimilation policies.

PCC:
With all these different forms - the CD, the book, the film, the app - was the idea for them to each stand on their own, but also to complement one another?

RHYS:
Yeah. The tour was the central element. And I’d been thinking for two years about following John Evans’ tour through America. Being a musician, for that to happen, I had to arrange shows along the journey. I went to see my booking agent in New York with a map of John Evans’ tour, his travel in the 18th century. And within a few months, he’d arranged the tour for the following August. So that was exciting. And my friend Dylan Goch came to document the tour. He interviewed a lot of people along the way, which contributed to the film and the book.

The film is the most immediate way of of getting the whole story - in 90 minutes. And there’s the book. I didn’t feel the pressure to be detailed in the music. The music could be more emotionally driven, capturing the moods that John Evans had been through. It was just inspired by his journey.

PCC:
Is there another of these journeys you’d like to document?

RHYS:
I’ve always seen it as trilogy. I made the previous one in Patagonia with Dylan. I think we took six years between tours. It’s been so overwhelming. It’s started taking over my life completely over the last few years. So I’ll probably concentrate on music for a while. Hopefully make some records. And then I’ll probably reach a point where I start thinking about another adventure.

PCC:
Was it a natural seque for you to write the score for the film about Dylan Thomas?

RHYS:
Yeah, that was really nice, because I was a gun for hire. There’s less emotional attachment. You have to fit in a song here, a bit of music there. It was kind of a two-week process, rather than a two-year process. And the film itself is the center of attention. I’m just doing something to complement someone else’s vision. So there’s much less pressure, in that sense. It was extremely enjoyable.

PCC:
Was it even more special, because the story involved Dylan Thomas? Was he an important figure for you?

RHYS:
Yes, it’s inevitable. In Wales, he’s such a dominant figure of the 20th century. He was one of Wales’ biggest cultural exports. So in Wales, everyone’s aware of his work. And so, from an early age, at school, we’re indoctrinated with his work. It’s gone way past the year of celebrations of his birth [laughs]. It’s continuous. And that’s great, because it’s a great gateway to poetry in general... and culture in general. But his story is tragic. I read the book by John Malcolm Brinnin, who was his agent. The film is based on their first week together, in 1950, the first time Dylan Thomas came to America. John Brinnin’s job was to keep him sober. So the film captures that really well. You get a real sense of how domineering Dylan Thomas really was, not domineering in a negative way, but just that, when he came into people’s lives, he dominated their lives - like a kind of tornado.

PCC:
Your parents were both poets?

RHYS:
My mother is a great poet. She’s not a prolific poet, though. But sonnets, she’s written some extremely powerful ones. My Dad compiled poetry. He didn’t write poetry, as such. But he did write quite a lot of non-fiction.

PCC:
That sort of background, did that spark your interest in literature and poetry at a young age?

RHYS:
It’s inevitable. Not in a self-conscious way, but it’s inevitable that you’re going to be affected by what’s around you. There were always lots of books around, things to read.

PCC:
Being from Wales, do you think that contributed to your viewing music as a way of life?

RHYS:
It’s hard to judge. It’s just something I’ve been more interested in since I was really young. I’m not sure why that is. By coincidence, I grew up in a town that had like a music boom in the 1980s. There was a mushrooming of bands in my hometown. There was was this really popular lost language band called Maffia Mr Huws. They became kind of a phenomenon in the lost language community. They inspired countless bands to start in this town, which is a small quarry town of about 5,000 people. So a lot of teenagers started bands. I imagine that’s why it became more viable for me to be a musician. I was playing shows since the age of 13, every weekend. So that’s what I’ve been doing, because there was a demand there for bands. So I think maybe that’s more down to this anomaly that happened in my hometown in the 80s, rather than a cultural characteristic.

PCC:
You seem to have really embraced the role of troubadour. Has that always seemed to be a natural fit for you? It seems to be much more about traveling, sharing your music, than making more materialistic career choices.

RHYS:
Yeah, because the decisions I’ve taken in music are definitely not careerist [laughs]. I think I belong to a community of musicians, some in Wales, some beyond Wales also. People approach music in a certain way, which I’m not sure how to define at the moment. It’s just maintaining links with other musicians. I’m building on that.

PCC:
To this point, what have been the most rewarding aspects of your life in music? And the most challenging?

RHYS:
The rewarding aspects - getting to make the records and document the songs. That is extremely rewarding. And the whole experience of being allowed to perform. And the generosity that people have shown in letting me into their lives. I can’t calculate how much that’s meant.

And the thing that’s been, and continues to be the most challenging is being able to continue creating, though the records may not sell as fast as other records. I try to make uplifting music that brings people together. But somehow I’ve been able to make a living from music for over 20 years.

And the other aspect that is most challenging is when my so-called success affects other people negatively. If my work creates conflicts for other people, that’s always challenging to me. It seems like it should be very simple and very enjoyable.

Even on a simple level, I didn’t get my working visa on time to come to America. So I had to cancel the show in Philadelphia. And people had made flights to come to the show, for example. A lot of things seem to create problems for other people. That’s just not something I set out to do in any way [chuckles].

PCC:
Making music isn’t a choice, it’s something you feel compelled to do?

RHYS:
Yeah. I feel extremely lucky to be able to make records.

PCC:
Is there a chance of more Neon Neon records?

RHYS:
Well, it’s a question of location. It’s such a distance between Los Angeles [where Boom Bip is based] and Cardiff.

PCC:
Is there something you’re still striving towards, creatively?

RHYS:
I still want to create music that’s unique... out of a medium that’s quite conventional. I write fairly conventional songs in that they’ve got verses and choruses and things. But my ambition is to make something that’s truly unique, as a songwriter and a musician. So I’m always working towards that. In that sense, I’m insatiable - you know what I mean? I don’t feel like I’m there. I haven’t written that song yet. Maybe that’s something that all musicians feel.

PCC:
Do you decide when it’s time to write? Or do you wait for the muse to sit on your shoulder?

RHYS:
I’ve got family now and I want to devote time to them. So I think it’s just a matter of creating the time. On tour I have more time. The songs come quite fast. In that sense, I don’t think there’s something as defined as writers’ block. Or the muse. It’s more casual than that. Things come and go. If something comes, that’s okay. I’ve always kind of looked at if that way.

PCC:
Is there talk of another Super Furry Animals project?

RHYS:
Well, we’re all really busy right now. Cian’s album is amazing. Guto’s band, Gulp, has an album called “Season Sun. ”A label from L.A., Everloving, has put it out in the States.

PCC:
You really are a musical explorer. Does music seem as much of an adventure as it did when you began?

RHYS:
Yeah, it’s infinite, isn’t it? As I travel, I’m always coming across new things, new inspirations. It is always an adventure. Today the world seems to be moving faster. Everything is so immediate, the internet and all the new technology. I grew up listening to pop music from England and America. That was dominant, even in places like Southeast Asia. It wasn’t so easy to hear other voices. That has changed. As I now listen to music from all over the world, the possibilities seem even more infinite.

For news on the artist’s latest adventures, including upcoming U.K., Ireland, Japan and Australia tour dates, visit www.gruffrhys.com.