Photo credit Julian Ochoa. Left to right: Ken Stringfellow, Darius Minwalla, Matt Harris, Jon Auer.

By Paul Freeman [November 2010]

The Posies’ new album, “Blood/Candy” (Rykodisc), is a sumptuous masterpiece. Not bad for a band that broke up in 1998.

The Posies have always elevated the genre, creating distinctive music of elegance, substance, intelligence and texture.

Founding members Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow still front the band. Masters of harmonies and hooks, they began writing songs together in 1986, in Seattle. The Posies’ 1989 major label debut, “Dear 23,” yielded a modest hit “Golden Blunders,” which was covered by Ringo Starr.

The Posies became modern rock darlings, but never quite managed a mainstream breakthrough. The cult favorites disbanded, but Auer and Stringfellow got together for occasional collaborations.

Both were active as producers and solo artists. Stringfellow also played with R.E.M. He currently fronts another band, The Disciplines. Auer worked with such bands as Redd Kross and Monostereo. He also played guitar and sang on Ben Folds’ acclaimed William Shatner project, “Has Been.” Both Stringfellow and Auer played with legendary Big Star for 17 years. All of these projects helped them expand their musical palettes.

In 2005, The Posies returned with a comeback album, “Every Kind of Light,” including new drummer Darius Minwalla and bassist Matt Harris (Oranger). It took another five years before they unveiled “Blood/Candy,” which was recorded primarily in Spain.

The Posies have never repeated themselves, from one album to the next. Their musical path is guided less by design than by being receptive to inner changes.

They only seek to please themselves musically. They’ve never chased fads. In fact, their melodic sound contrasted completely with the grunge erupting out of Seattle in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

And yet, the band’s melodic, harmony-laden tunes actually seem very timely today. Perhaps the wider recognition they so richly deserve is still forthcoming.

Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow talked with Pop Culture Classics.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
How did the songs on the new record come together? What was the songwriting process like?

JON AUER:
Remarkably straight-forward, actually. The Posies have never really made the same record twice, ever, in our careers. They’ve all been born of such different circumstance. Just kind of what we had available at the time, as far as resources. And also, what we had available as time, as a resource, as well.

For instance, our last record, ‘Every Kind of Light,’ we made up in the studio, basically because we had a chunk of time that we could either make a record in or not make a record in... and that kind of steered the direction of that record [Chuckles]. This record is more of a traditional approach, where we actually wrote songs before we went into the studio [Chuckles again]. Did a thing called ‘rehearsing,’ before we went into studio. Actually had a loose blueprint of what we wanted to do before we stepped foot into the studio.

Of course, that all said, once we actually got to where we were going, a lot of what we perhaps thought in our heads was a direction to follow fell by the wayside and suddenly, this record that we had intended to keep very simple, became this kind of complex and baroque, layered affair. It’s very detail-oriented. There’s a lot of little details on everything, basically. It’s not like a case of there being one song that was harder to record than another. It’s like everything we put on there was processor intensive [Laughs], I guess you could say.

PCC:
Is it just a matter of your hearing a new line, a new texture that you want to try, rather than actually plotting out that you want to add layers?

AUER:
Yeah, well, there’s that famous quote from John Lennon - ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.’ And I find that’s very apt, especially when it comes to creativity. It’s not an exact science. You can plot and plan all you want, to your heart’s content. And invariably, if you’re kind of open and aware and paying attention, the project, the music, will lead you in its own direction eventually.

And that’s kind of what we did. We had to follow this muse. Unfortunately, we’d only allotted a certain amount of time for that particular muse [Laughs]. And this one demanded more than we had originally set aside, let’s say.

So we had this initial burst of recording in Spain. That’s where a large part of the record was done, as far as the foundation, but, they say that God’s in the details. Well, the devil’s in the details, as well. And we actually spent more time in what I would call post-production almost - editing and assembling and mixing. That took the bulk of the time. And that happened after we left Spain and went home to our respective studios, etc., etc.

PCC:
Where are you based now?

AUER:
I live in Seattle. Ken lives in Paris. Our drummer lives in Vancouver, British Columbia and our bass player lives on Mars, sometimes, but usually he lives in Palm Springs, California. We’re four guys, three countries, one band.

PCC:
So were all four of you involved in the mixing? Or was that you and Ken?

AUER:
Primarily, Ken and I handled that. Although, Ken ran out of time and we were going to split it pretty much equally, like half and half. There’s 12 songs on the record. So we each took six. But he ran out of time at one point and had to hire a ringer, I guess, or what would they call that? I’m not really into sports. A relief pitcher. So Ken mixed two songs and he had someone mix four. And I mixed six.

But you know, mixing these days, with the computers and whatnot, it’s funny how, really, you’re recording right up till the last minute these days... because you can. You have this technology that allows you so many options. It’s like, if you have the ability to fiddle with something, you’re going to do it, forever, until it has to be turned in, really.

PCC:
So you were still recording new things as you were mixing?

AUER:
Yeah, because you hear new things. Or, for instance, when I went back to Seattle, it was kind of left to me to get the strings together for the record, which was the first time we’ve had actual arrangements written for a record and then performed by somebody. I didn’t write the arrangements, but I had to be there to help facilitate what needed to happen. And then it was left to me to edit and mix another 20 tracks of strings on top of the already prodigious number of tracks that were on any give song.

So a couple of them, it got kind of, shall we say, hairy, in the mixing process, because we’d also decided to work at really audiophile sample rates, like the highest we could go, basically, to get technical, for a sec. That, of course, taxes your computer. Long story short, there’s no way we could have predicted what a task it became. We really just got it in at the eleventh hour. And I’m glad we pulled it off. I think we pulled it off well. But I hope, the next time around, we actually maybe have learned from this experience finally that maybe we need to allot ourselves a lot of contingency time, because we just have too many ideas and we want to try them all. That’s fair. But I think it’s kind of unfair to ourselves to get that stressed over something at this stage in the game. I think the next go-around, it would be just be better to not be so optimistic as far as our approach to the amount of time we schedule.

I think we were kind of overly optimistic. We just think, we’ll schedule it and it’ll happen and that’s that. But next go-around, I’d like to see what happens, if we actually give ourselves too much time, see what we do with it then.

PCC:
Is it difficult, once you’ve gone through this process of experimentation and all the mixing to have objective ears and say it’s finally ready, it’s where you want it to be?

AUER:
Well, I’m lucky. The Posies began as a recording project in a home studio. My Dad was a musician, back in the ‘80s, before computers were everywhere and Pro Tools was such a normal thing or Garage Band, even. We had this small, yet powerful recording studio in my rec room, essentially. It was fairly primitive, very basic. But it was enough that I could learn how to record. And I got used to, at a very early age, spending long amounts of time being very focused on something.

Like I can spend 16 hours on a session or on a mix and not get burned out on it, because I’m used to it. It’s fair to say, somewhere along the way, during the process of completing this record, that yes, we did get lost in the wilderness at times. But we worked on it long enough that the perspective came back. You get that second wind. I mean, in our case, it was probably our 22nd wind. But we were able to see it through, because that’s the kind of attention to detail that we’ve learned along the way., just picked up over the years.

PCC:
Being involved in so many interesting non-Posies projects over the years, has that helped you to grow musically, as well?

AUER:
Oh, yeah. When you put more energy into something, often you get more energy out of it. The more creative you are and the more you are creating things, it just breeds more creativity. It’s kind of a paradox. It’s like the more you do, the more you can do. And the better you get at it. There’s never a moment when I’m not gaining something from the experience I’m having while recording or working with somebody else. It all kind of goes into this collective kitty. And you can access it later.

It’s funny, too, there are times you are working in situations and you find that you’re doing something that you don’t want to do, like you don’t want to repeat. And I think you can learn just as much from that as from a good experience. It all contributes.

PCC:
Are you conscious of not getting too comfortable, of the need for taking risks?

AUER:
You kind of have to force yourself to. There are times when I feel comfortable and there are certain chords I will go to instantly when I pick up a guitar or there are there are certain guitar tunings I use that I’ll play for people and they’ll go, ‘Wow, that definitely sounds like something out of your playbook.’ The trick is, after being around as long as I have, or we have, you have to do something to keep yourself interested.

I suppose, if I was making millions of dollars off of some formula from The Posies that had worked, then that would be maybe a reward or an impetus to continue just to do it one way and keep it that way, so that maybe you could keep reaping those kinds of benefits. But I’m not doing this because I’m getting rich off of it. I’m doing it because it has to be enjoyable. There’s not much other reason to do it at this point. It’s essential that it feels necessary, not just by the book or by the numbers or the same as it ever was.

PCC:
The fact that the band has never tried to follow any trends, do you think that’s why the music sounds so timeless?

AUER:
I appreciate you saying that. I think that there is something to be said for not being associated with any particular one movement or moment in time. You never have to become dated by it either.

Also, there’s the syndrome of the band that has the one song so much bigger than anything else they’ve ever done. We’ve never had to experience that. The people that are our fans are fans usually of our body of work. If they’re not, they get into one thing and want to find the rest and find this really eclectic, unique, melodic catalog of stuff that we’ve done over the years that have all been true documents of exactly where we were at that moment in time. So I think there’s something to be said for it. It could be the kind of thing that’s appreciated best over the scope of time, rather than at any one particular moment, because we’ve never had that one moment that defines us, I guess. So in the end, it becomes about the whole body of work and the life that you put into it.

PCC:
The fact that your fans seem willing to go on this journey with you, does that free you up to create without considering what might appeal to the listener?

AUER:
I never think about that. I never do. It’s funny, my other obsession, besides music, is film. In fact, I don’t really read music bios anymore. I tend to read bios about directors or how films are made. There’s always the talk of the test screening, how it’s going to play to the audience. I’ve never been able to do that. I’ve never thought about what a test audience is going to think about something. It really just has to be about doing something that you enjoy. I figure, if I like it and the people who are in my band like it, then somebody else is going to like it. But I’ve never been good at playing that game.

Not that The Posies haven’t sold a few records in our time, but maybe we would have sold more had we had more calculated consideration for something like that. But we’re always just out of time with that stuff, just doing our own thing. It just always seemed to work out that way, timing-wise. Whatever we were doing wasn’t part of some perceived zeitgeist.

Although, I will say, it’s funny, with a record like ‘Blood/Candy,’ and with how music is currently, the current musical climate, we seem to fit in better now than we ever have. It’s kind of ironic.

It’s funny, coming from Seattle and everybody always wants us to talk about the whole Posies versus grunge [Laughs] situation, which was never really an issue for us. It was just something that people wanted to talk about. It’s more from an outsider’s point of view. We never really thought about it. We just did what we did and that’s the way that it was. But now, I find, for the last few years, decade, there seems to be a real move towards acceptance of melodic, harmonious, thoughtful music. People used to scream about their angst and now it’s okay to whisper about your pain, instead of having to be so outwardly obvious with it. It’s funny how it’s kind of turned 180 degrees from where it was, almost.

You look at where Seattle was and think that Alice in Chains was maybe a huge band and now like a band that everybody loves from Seattle is a band like Fleet Foxes. It used to be hard rock and distortion and now it’s reverb and harmonies. It’s like reverb is the new distortion. My Morning Jacket. It funny how things change. I just think that, maybe if we put our records out now, maybe we wouldn’t have had this Posies versus Seattle grunge scene scenario. There wouldn’t have been as much of an issue.

PCC:
With all you’ve explored musically already, does it seem like the possibilities are endless within the context of The Posies? Or are you eager to explore other avenues, maybe film?

AUER:
Doing solo stuff is very important for me and I know it is for Ken, as well. I’ve got another solo record I’m going to work on next year. But one thing I will say about The Posies is, I think we’d like to try and make a record faster this time. Like we actually took quite a bit of time between our records. And I think we’re feeling, I wouldn't say cocky, but I would say confident, about our abilities right now, after making this record and having it surprise us, that we could make a record this late in the game that felt as vital to me as it does. That bodes well.

So I think the concept now is, ‘What would happen if we tried to make a record as fast as we can?’ Kind of ride this wave of creativity and see what happens. And as far as anything else, yeah, I’m always open to trying anything new. And personally, I’d love to get into the film industry in some form. Even beyond the musical sense, film is something I would love to get into, in terms of maybe directing or something like that. Of course, the obvious thing is to try your hand at a rock video first. Film is just something that I love so much, obsess over just as much. And that’s usually how I go about learning to create, is I get obsessed over something. I think it’s not implausible that, if I worked at it, I could work my way in.

But one thing I will say about the film industry versus the music industry is, you can, arguably, make a record by yourself. You can’t make a film by yourself. I mean, sure, Robert Rodriguez can make ‘El Mariachi’ with a skeleton crew and whoever’s around. But you can’t just make any old movie by yourself [Laughs]. That would be a pretty interesting experiment, actually, if you tried to do that, see if you could pull it off. But you need a lot more people, is what I’m trying to say.

PCC:
Tell me a little bit about your writing process, do you do a lot of experimentation? Do you build off a melodic line? A lyric?

KEN STRINGFELLOW:
Well, for my contributions, first of all the way I write, and when I write, and all these kind of things, I’m like a sniper. I don’t squeeze off tons of shots, AK-47 style and hope that I hit a target now and then. I patiently wait until the conditions are kind of perfect. And I save it up for the right moment.

It’s kind of complicated, but, for example, I’ll go six months without writing a song. And then maybe I’ll spend a lot of time. Like I’ll go on retreats, book a cabin, get out there and bring some of my recording gear, and sit out there and say, ‘Okay, this week I’m going to write some songs.’ And I always do. And, in this case, for most of the songs that I contributed to this album. I knew we were going to make an album in 2010. This was in 2009 when we talked about doing it. And, as always, I was working really hard on tons of stuff. I could easily go without a day off for an entire year. That’s not an unrealistic scenario.

So I knew, to get some quiet, and to not be working, to give myself some time, I set aside some days to do some writing in December of 2009. And I had like four or five days. And I wrote four or five songs in that time.

PCC:
Isn’t that putting a lot of pressure on yourself? To say now’s the time I have to create?

STRINGFELLOW:
Yeah. I remember talking to the guy from Lightspeed Champion, Dev, and he’s like, ‘I’m going to write a song every day for the next year.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s just pushing it a bit too hard.’ I don’t think every one of those songs is going to be that memorable. I mean, maybe that are. I haven’t listened to all 365 of the results.

But I have to let experience come in and sort of process. I know that, as I go around, I’m listening to people’s conversations and reading books or watching TV or traveling around or playing shows or interacting with fans or whatever. All of those things, they’re all going in. Your brain records every experience, sorts through it. And like anybody else’s, mine sorts through all that experience, but it’s always working on things in the background, I guess.

It’s pretty hard to describe the writing process, really. It is something I leave a bit mysterious to myself. But the best I can say is, those experiences and observations coalesce. And I think it’s because I haven’t forced them that much, that I can put the pressure on myself for those moments and get results.

All those songs that I wrote in that period, in December, for example, there are four of those songs on The Posies’ album and one that I contributed to my other band, The Disciplines, album. And those five songs were written in five days. And that’s probably the last stuff I’ve written, really. Oh, no. I wrote a song or two in the studio for The Disciplines’ album.

I sort of need a goal. I like to write with the goal in mind of where it’s going to go and knowing what kind of personality is called for. For example, those two bands, The Disciplines and The Posies have very different personalities and specific sort of guidelines for what would work. Of course, having said that, I was trying to expand what The Posies are capable of, because I think, in songwriting, you get to explore. You can do kind of a period piece pastiche one song and you can do something really futuristic in one song, and because you’re a songwriter, then it’s just about production, in a sense.

So maybe I didn’t explain much. But that’s how my mind thinks of the subject. Maybe I’m the worst guy to ask.

PCC:
It must be valuable to have the two different musical personalities,The Discipline and The Posies, to channel different creative sides of yourself into.

STRINGFELLOW:
Yeah. Then there’s the solo aspect, which is completely different, as well. It’s a certain kind of emotional tone that works well. In my solo world, I know that I’m likely to be playing the songs unaccompanied. So, structurally, they require different things, too. I did this in-store in Paris, because I live there and the label said, ‘Hey, since you’re in town, can you do an in-store appearance to promote The Posies’ album, even though Jon won’t be there?’ And I said, ‘Well, okay. It’s worth a shot.’ And I played the songs from the album by myself. And like a couple of them were just impossible to play without a band, which I think is cool. I mean, we built ourselves in kind of a folkie template in the past and I think we’ve expanded beyond that, which I think is cool. It really means it’s like a band track.

PCC:
It must be important to you to keep growing musically. Every album seems to have its own personality.

STRINGFELLOW:
Well, yeah. I’m in my forties as this album came out. And the last Posies came out in my thirties. And the one before that came out in my twenties. So being that we space stuff out that much, they should be radical. I’m not sure that they’re radical, but I think they at least show we have an eye on moving forward. I don’t think there’s anything nostalgic about our recent albums, the ones we’ve made in this century.

PCC:
Do you ever ponder how much you can change without alienating the fan base? Or are they adventurous enough that you don’t have to worry about that?

STRINGFELLOW:
Well, the fans that I want are. Generally, on this album, we’ve gotten like incredible reviews. Some of the best reviews we’ve ever gotten. But, in Sweden, where we’ve always had a great following, our records have gone into the charts and we’re quite known, we got some lackluster reviews for this album. Only the really snobby music publication, Sonic, who normally holds us at arm’s length, they really dug this album. They really got it. But the mainstream newspapers, they didn’t go for it. They criticized us, saying like, ‘You are a power pop band and you shouldn’t try and be anything other than that,’ which I think is a very strange thing to tell an artist. If I want to be that kind of artist, I’ll write f--king greeting cards. That’s not my game, man. I’m here to grow. And I found it insulting.

And, you know, I don’t think this is an album that shows contempt for our past. I just think it builds on it and is a great update and great move forward, without being contrived. That’s how I view it. And that’s what I hope people get out of it.

PCC:
The songs that you wrote for the album, how fully were they envisioned before you hit the studio and how much do you allow for surprises in the studio?

STRINGFELLOW:
I think, arrangement-wise, we pretty much worked everything out in rehearsal. In some ways, if you listen to the demo, the song is pretty much sketched out. A couple of the songs, interestingly enough, that Jon contributed, Jon takes more of the classical way of doing things. He might throw a few demos out there and then he picks among the best. That’s kind of a safer way to go in a way.

I just say, ‘Hey, man. These are my songs. Love ‘em or leave ‘em.’ And I am pretentious enough say that everything that I’m going to I write is going to be awesome [Laughs]. But Jon presented a few demos of stuff that we didn’t end up rehearsing. And a couple of the songs on the album, most notably, ‘Accidental Architecture’ and ‘Holiday Hours,’ I don’t think a demo exists for them. I think he just played them for us. Correct me, if I’m wrong. He could correct me, if he was here. So, in that sense, those songs really came to life, arrangement-wise, in rehearsal, much more so than the songs that we demoed more fully, which really were already alive by the time the band heard them.

My demos just had vocal and piano or vocal and guitar. But still the arrangement followed very much what the band ended up playing. And then it’s the feel, what feel do we give to it. And all of that got worked out in our week of rehearsing right before we recorded in Spain.

PCC:
So all the layering and texturing, did that come in the rehearsal process or did you keep adding through the recording process?

STRINGFELLOW:
Yeah, well, we just made the live track and basically how it was going to sound. And then we didn’t really know what kind of overdubs would go where. We tracked the songs, the four of us playing together in the room, in Spain, then added from there. We were sort of clever about how we did it, so we could isolate the drums pretty well, if wanted to, if we needed to fix something or whatever.

It’s so interesting to me. It sounds like such a studio creation album to me, with lots of little bells and whistles and stuff, but, I’ll tell you, the core of each track is really true to the live recording. Maybe with the exception of ‘Holiday Hours,’ which is not really what Darius does on the drums. It’s just like a loop. I think we actually did loop him on the recording and added stuff on top.

PCC:
So it wasn’t too difficult to make the transition to playing this material live on tour?

STRINGFELLOW:
Well, that’s what’s so weird is that the overdubs changed a lot of things, like it changed what was focused on, in terms of what harmonies or what kind of additions. So when we finished our rehearsals in Seattle, at the end of the week, we played a show in Seattle and we debuted all 12 songs live. And the show was really good. And then we went to Spain and started overdubbing and the parts that we overdubbed became more like main parts, in a way. We made the guitar parts a little trickier than just strumming, etc. And, of course the vocal harmonies totally changed and developed in the studio and in the weeks afterwards.

So the next shows we played, we played this big festival in Seattle at the end of May. And the album was still in progress a little bit. And we were kind of lost when we played the songs live. Whatever we’d done in April, a couple of months later didn’t work anymore, because the emphasis of things that were important about the songs had changed, just by what they went through in the studio. It’s really weird. I don’t know if anybody but us would notice. But if you listened to the demo, you’d go, ‘Yeah, that’s the song, but there are subtleties that make these songs what they are.’

PCC:
So it’s a constant process of evolution. Do the songs continue to grow as you’re on tour?

STRINGFELLOW:
Yeah, of course, you know, we can play them harder and harder [Chuckles]. And, of course, we all wish, like, boy, it would have been great to do like a three-month tour, playing these songs before recording them. But that’s just not how we do it around here. [Laughs] We only get one shot with the touring and that sort of needs the album to be out.

PCC:
You’ve worked with so many interesting artists. Has that really helped you expand your palette musically?

STRINGFELLOW:
Definitely. Yeah. Radically. I have some ‘what if?’ moments about like, if we hadn’t split up in 1998. But actually, we couldn’t have gotten to where we are now, musically, without that happening. And that includes the fact that Darius and Matt, who have been playing with us since 2001, are so brilliant and are so much more committed. As great as Brian Young and Joe Skyward were, who played on the last two Posies albums before the breakup, it’s not the same vibe. And I think the vibes are so much better now, not because Matt and Darius are better people or whatever or better musicians. But a perfect fit is a perfect fit. And that’s not something that can really be explained, the chemistry and a common vision, which is what a band should sort of be about, in a way. I mean, I know that conflict in a band can also help, in a way. But you need to be, at some point, four against the world or whatever and getting your vision across by any means necessary.

So, once the band split up, we played our last show as a band in like end of September, ‘98, in San Francisco, and I was back in San Francisco like three weeks later, rehearsing with R.E.M. and that opened up a lot of things, as far as new things to learn.

PCC:
What were some of the other collaborations that meant a lot to you in terms of musical development?

STRINGFELLOW:
Well, R.E.M. was a big one, because it changed my view of how to work in the studio. For such a big, professional band, they kept things very loose. If they were in there with their Legos, building a song, they weren’t afraid to rip it all down and start all over again and look at it another way. And they were very fearless, considering that there are always expectations, when people are giving you millions of dollars to make a record. They have expectations about raising the bar for themselves, too. And they didn’t choke under that pressure. They were really free. They didn’t over-prepare. And they weren’t that meticulous. They let things happen and they were very spontaneous, which I loved. And that’s how I’ve worked ever since.

Other than that, just opening musical doors, whether I actually incorporate them into my own stuff or not, I mean, like, there’s a risk of becoming Sting or Paul Simon-like, albeit without their success, I made an EP with a band from Senegal, in Senegal. And the thing that came out of it was really cool. You can get it on iTunes. ‘Ken Stringfellow and WaFlash.’ It’s great music and what I like about it, it’s not me backed by them. It’s like down-the-middle collaboration, like ‘What would it sound like, if we mixed this Senegalese band, which plays, rhythmically, Senegal pop music, with my stuff?’ And the results are very cool. We all sang and we all wrote lyrics in all the different languages that we can do stuff in. It’s really quite cool.

Obviously, playing with Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens in Big Star, that was very cool. Alex was a very interesting guy. And, he too, had a great ear for spontaneity in recordings. And making a record with him, he totally thwarted my desires to be more meticulous and to fix certain things that were ‘mistakes.’ He go, like, ‘What did you do wrong?’ And I was like, ‘Well, this thing doesn’t really...’ And he would go, ‘Why is that wrong? Just because it doesn’t line up like you think it should, doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing. Sit down and actually listen to it.’ And he was totally right. Like the stuff that I was worried about, that he didn’t let me fix, I couldn’t even tell you where it is now in the track. And it’s a bass part, which is real loud and obvious. So that was instructive.

PCC:
So it’s how you’re listening to it?

STRINGFELLOW:
Yeah. And your expectations. And your expectations of how people will perceive you. Those are things to let go of. It’s good to trust yourself. But you have really trust yourself and you have to trust that by trusting yourself, you won’t become lazy and think that everything you do is great. I think we still try. But then again, everything we do is great. [Laughs]. I mean, I have to believe that, too. It’s totally weird, man. It’s a mindf--k, because the purest artistic impulse, it is kind of genius.

All kids are geniuses. My daughter’s a genius. The stuff she comes up with when she wants to draw is all good. It’s all funny and it’s all clever. You could say, ‘Well, it’s only child art and it’s only interesting because she’s your daughter or whatever.’ I don’t know. An artist finds their audience. I think that kids are so clever. Of course, later, as you get older, you tend to get boxed in.

PCC:
So is one of the keys to being effective as an artist being able to go back to that childlike quality, unfettered and unfiltered.

STRINGFELLOW:
In a way, yes. You can’t really undo things. But I felt like, this album, for example, the sessions in Spain to me, though we worked hard and put lots of hours in, I think it was really play. The studio is really a playground. There’s all sorts of fun toys around to hook together. I really feel, when I’m plugging in a bunch of pedals, guitar effects pedals, and I don’t know what the result’s going to be, and I’m going to run a synth through it, I totally feel like I’m building stuff with blocks, like when I was five years old. Exact same feeling.

Then, after that, with editing, which mixing is really just a very specific, musical kind of editing. It’s deciding which thing is louder than the other and how it will all fit together. And we did most of that work ourselves. A friend of mine named Scott Greiner mixed four of the songs, but the other eight we did ourselves. And that was hard work, organizing all of that. So I guess that’s about context, in a way. Just like, in the right context, someone making a very childlike painting, like a Basquiat, in the right context, that’s a major work of art. In the wrong context, someone can say, ‘Wow, just a bunch of scribbles and bullshit.’ Interesting, right?

But I think the fact that we were able to play in that studio and just go nuts, it felt so relaxed and good. We didn’t have anybody else around, didn’t have anything else around. There’s really nothing in that neighborhood, but a few other houses and a bunch of empty lots. That was the perfect environment. But I feel that the playfulness of those sessions is reflected in the result. I think the album is very lively, in that sense. And that’s good. It doesn’t act our age, this album.

PCC:
So with all you’ve been learning and growing, do you feel that you’re just entering your prime, creatively?

STRINGFELLOW:
To be honest, I really do. I really feel like the knife is sharp and the observations have meaning, because I’ve been around enough to have perspective, to give you something. I’ve lived some life.

We’re so into teen prodigies, in this modern life. That’s all very well and good. But even if they’re a brilliant vocalist or whatever, what do they really have to say? They can fake it, but I can see the difference. I remember maybe 10 years ago or whatever, when Avril Lavigne was getting huge, people were really into her and I was like, ‘What can she possibly have to say?’ She barely writes those songs. And the more you dig into it, the more you find out how much help she had. She can sing with conviction, I’ll give her that. But you couldn’t be more than 14 and really get anything from it. Otherwise, you’re kind of weird.

PCC:
So maybe the world is now opening up to the point where we can appreciate artists with some life experience?

STRINGFELLOW:
I think good art is triumphant, even just in the fact that it does exist. You get fooled by stuff that’s drawing attention. Whether you agree with it or not, it would be silly to get frustrated by the ‘American Idol’ phenomenon, for example. It’s got its place. But people get offended by that and think there’s a fight to be had and, therefore, someone like me is losing the fight, because I’m not up there. But that’s just crazy, man.

I think the art, having the bravery to just put your shit out there, no matter what, whether people, in the end, do or do not get what you’re doing, it is influencing. Like someone once told me, a very wise girlfriend that I had several years ago, she said, ‘You don’t know what effect your art has... and you don’t get to know, really. And a lot of the things that happen with a piece of art, you don’t get to see. So, on the day that you get a bad review or you play a show and nobody comes, think that maybe, on that day, somebody you don’t know, or don’t even know about, just flipped through a record bin and found your record and took it home and fell in love with it.’ The world moves forward in that way.

PCC:
So, if all that matters is just the act of creating the music, knowing that it exists, do you give any thought to the songs standing the test of time or to how you might look at it years down the road?

STRINGFELLOW:
Only to the fact of like I do what I believe. And once I’ve locked in on that... There’s a learning process to what we do. And that’s why, the albums that I consider part of the learning process, I consider them less interesting. And I consider the albums that are sort of post-that, which is really like basically everything that happened from my first solo album on, because something sort of changed in my methods and I had another perspective all of a sudden, instead of just doing basically The Posies full-time.

From that point on, all those records, I enjoy listening to them. If somebody puts on one of my records while I’m there, I’m not the kind of person who fakes modesty and goes, ‘Oh, I can’t listen to that.’ I’m just like, ‘Good record, man. I like it.’

Also, I think our perpetual out-of-fashionness is a great asset. Fashion is fashion. Being in fashion is its own kind of art form, when done well. But music is not fashion. People confuse it with it. And they cross over, in certain ways. But music is a different art form and I think it’s subject to different laws of nature, as it were.

I think people can look back on what we were doing . We have an album, ‘Frosting on the Beater,’ that’s 17 years old. And people still really look at that album as something unique and they look back on it with a lot of affection. And a lot of the stuff that was really on the money in those same years, I don’t hear about as much. But again, everything has its place.

But by being outside of trends, at all times, if possible, okay, our music is not a time capsule of the times, but it’s not a cliché of those times, either. And I would like not to be a cliché, thank you.

PCC:
And do you give much thought to what you want to accomplish musically, over the course of a career? Or are you just focused on the whatever the next project might be?

STRINGFELLOW:
Well, I’d like to be me as long as possible [Laughs]. The future will be what it will be. It’s impossible to know what kinds of twists and turns are coming up. I look at the people who had really long careers that I admire and I hope and pray that my version will at least keep on keepin’ on and hope that there’s a place for me and hope that I can do what I do.

Right now, a lot of what I do is incredibly physical, from the way that I perform on stage to the way I sing. So, how long? I don’t know. And there’s always this thing of like, at some point, like a Neil Young has sold like bajillions of records. So it’s kind of hard for him to go away... although he kind of hit rock bottom, career-wise, at one point, too. Still, that didn’t erase the hundred million records sold before that.

I don’t really have that kind of legacy as a fallback position. So it’s a little more of a scramble for me, in a way, in theory. Although, things keep happening. So that’s another part of the trust, to keep going, keep reading the wind. Hopefully you’re not totally fooling yourself. So far, things keep going.

PCC:
The willingness to take risks and the inventiveness must add to the longevity.

STRINGFELLOW:
We hope. You never know. But we hope. But at least, I would say this, you can’t go wrong with quality. And I think quality is just putting care into it and not being lazy and, for some artists, as they get older, that’s easy to do. They don’t take it too deep. I’d much rather be pertinent than pleasant. But, at this point, our band is a marriage of what we think is both.

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