One fact of life: we're all gonna die someday. It's perhaps
the only fact of life. And nothing you
do -- no trendy diet, no workout regiment, no mountaintop meditation, no pact
with any sort of higher being -- is gonna change that. It's what we chose to do
each and every day until that final breath that separates brother from brother,
neighbor from neighbor, you from me.
Somewhere along the way Robert Fisher started getting his
head around the concept. He found several traditional songs that fit his
exploration, his wrote several more in the same mode. He then processed them
through the elegant and pastoral sounds of the Americana-minded collective he
has helmed for nearly a decade, the Willard Grant Conspiracy. The result is
WGC's fifth studio effort, the aptly titled Regard
The End (Kimchee Records) -- a personal archeological dig as interpreted
through the sensibility of a modern-day post-punk, indie-twang gypsy. A soaring,
Gothic collection, indeed.
The album comes at
a time when Fisher himself has steered his life in a different direction,
abandoning his longtime base of Boston for his boyhood home in Southern
California, the same place he abandoned a quarter-century earlier in order to
outrun his own personal demons. Regarding his own end? Maybe. Funny how those
things work out that way. MoMZine editor Neal Weiss learns more about life, death
and the art that comes in between as seen through the eyes of Robert Fisher.
MoMZine: When did the
concept for Regard The End manifest
itself?
ROBERT Fisher: I knew we were gonna make a record like this
record before we did Everything's Fine.
I just didn't know the form it was going to take, but I knew it was a subject
and scene that I wanted to approach. I'd noticed from actually, probably the
second record on, that a lot of my songwriting was veering toward traditional
territory. You see it in songs like "St. John's Street," "Another
Lonely Night," "Love Has No Meaning," "Notes From The
Waiting Room." I only noticed it because some people would come up to me
and say, "That song reminds me of this other traditional song…" And I
thought, well that's kind of interesting. As a songwriter, somebody who cares
about the development of my craft, that's something worth exploring.
I'm not a folk musician, I wasn't raised on folk at all, so
I spent about 4-5 years sort of looking into traditional music and using the
Lomax books. And I found a bunch of songs that lyrically sat with me in a way
that had resonance. And then it was a matter of collecting those together and
then finding the ones that not only sat well with me but sort of suggested
melody. And I took that approach and kind of rewrote the songs and made them
Willard Grant songs and then wrote a bunch of new songs that hopefully had the
same kind of weight as those songs so that ideally, the experience should be
transparent. You shouldn't really know what's old and what's new on the record
unless you look at the liner notes or credits.
MoMZine: It must be
daunting, trying to write songs that hold up to traditional songs.
FISHER: Yes,
absolutely. But if you're serious about your work, you try to measure up to
stuff that you think has substance and weight and carries the time in it. You
listen to the American Recordings,
the Johnny Cash stuff, there's a perfect example of somebody who can take
modern songs, even in the songwriters' hands, that don't carry the same resonance
and the same weight. As a fan first, I'd like my stuff to be able to measure up
in a basic way.
MoMZine: Do you write
differently with traditionals in mind?
FISHER: Not so
much. I found I was really comfortable continuing writing the way I wrote and it
fit. And that was the thing that was interesting about it. I didn't really have
to change anything I was doing so much as I just had to measure my songs
against these great folk songs. I was concerned about the length of the record,
I tried to keep it short and I tried to keep it so that it wasn't like a
treatise. I wanted to do, like, a classic '60s record, you know, 45 minutes and
that's about it. But I didn't really have to change much of anything. Some of
these songs were written before I got the formed idea of how to do it, a song
like "The Trials Of Harrison Hayes" was written at the very end of Everything's Fine and would have fit
nicely on that record but fits even better here. A song like "Ghost of A
Girl In The Well," which I think is really the spine of the record in a
lot of ways, was actually written almost 13-14 years ago with my friend Manny
Versoza, who passed on about 10 years ago.
MoMZine: You say "Ghost"
is the "spine of the record." How so?
FISHER: It's kind
of like a song that's completely timeless. It's a subject that's completely
appropriate these days. It was written based on a true story which a lot of
traditional songs were written from. This happened to be about a girl who fell
in a well in the '30s and the radio networks and print media at the time all
swooped down one the rescue attempt and reported it to the rest of the country
in real time. And that's maybe the first time that's ever happened. There may
be other events but I don't know of them. It struck both Manny and I as this
kind of amazing story with such heavy resonance now. It seems like not a month
goes by without something like that occurring and galvanizing the population
and then we forget about it in two weeks. Nevertheless, it seemed to us that it
had a real powerful quality to it. And the idea to write the song from the
perspective of the girl's ghost, who's so unquiet and it's so important to the
ghost that he come back and try and tell people what happened, why was she in
the well to begin with. That sort of seemed like it fit the kind of murder
ballad, the kind of little oh-me-whys and that sort of tone that you find in
traditional song. So for me it's maybe the most traditional of the new songs
that's on the record and yet if you don't know, it's a new song it could be a
200-year-old song. It's also a personal thing. I wrote it with Manny and Manny
was killed in a car accident just before we did the first record [Flying Low]. On the first record,
there's a whole thing at the end which is "Chinese New Year." That
was a tape that Manny made and gave to me in New York. And I put it on there
because he would have been on the record had he lived. The other thing is
having Kristin Hersh sing on it, which was an incredible honor because she
doesn't do that for many people at all. And she so completely inhabits the
song's character.
MomZine: The album's
been described as a "meditation on mortality." Explain.
Fisher: Once you get into
traditional songs, traditional art of any kind, the biggest theme is death, and
I think that's totally explainable and understandable. Everybody who, at
whatever age they discover their mortality, has to learn how to deal with that
in order to be able to live their life. Oftentimes, coming to terms with your
mortality defines the way you live your life. And so some people become
extremely cautious and hold up in their room and never do anything and other
people realize that even if you do that you could end tomorrow so you might as
well live your life as full as possible. And there's everything in between. I
think it's a traditional theme that's universal. Mortality and loss and the
effects of that and how you come out the other side is really kind of what this
record is all about. It's the illumination that happens when we look at the
darkest things. It's like the experience of going to a blues club. If you go
see a great blues musician, people don't walk out of the club depressed, they
walk out of there inspired because they've shared a universal humanness with
everybody in the room and it becomes something bigger. I think for me that's
really how the record got focused. I wanted that kind of feeling.
MoMZine: Does coming
to terms with your own mortality factor into the album?
Fisher: I guess so. I think
everything that I do has to have a certain level of personal experience. In
order to be good songs, I think they have to be invested with personal
experience. But don't look at
songwriting as therapy. I try to combine elements of fiction and universal
observation and personal observation together and leave enough room for
interpretations so that people can invest these images with stories with their
own experiences and come up with their own internal stories as well. But I
guess all of my work certainly has a tone about that. It comes from sobriety I
think. It comes from learning at a fairly early age that I could die very
easily and didn't really want to. I've struggled with all the issues about that
and will always struggle with those issues. It's a subject that's not too far
away.
MoMZine: How long
have you been sober?
Fisher: It's now 24 years. I'm 46.
It was part of my reason for leaving California actually. I got sober and
straight, I got straight first and sober second, I couldn't deal with both at
the same time. And then just figured out that I had to leave the place I lived
with all the connections that I had both good and bad, family and friends and
people who sort of saw me one way, and I had to rediscover who I was without
all those chemicals involved. And that took some doing. So I moved as far away
as I could and still be in the country and still be in a town that had some
culture, and that was Portland, Maine. But it was just too small a town for me,
having grown up in L.A., so a couple years later, 1980, I moved down to Boston,
which is a wonderful music town. That was the main reason I went there, the
music has always been amazing.
MoMZine: With regards
to this exploration on mortality, what does it mean to be back home in
Lancaster, California after all these years?
FISHER: Leaving
here 24 years ago was about trying to get away from people and experiences and
history that I didn't want to keep repeating. I felt the best way to do that
was to remove myself. And there's no guarantee that you won't repeat and I
won't call myself a healed person, particularly, but a work in progress like
everybody. But coming back, I'm now living in the back pocket of my family
again and that's a different thing. Being in Boston, with everybody here,
that's more than arm's length. Now there's a difference. And I have consciously
made that decision to participate. I don't know if it's mortality, in a grand
sense I guess it is. It's about time passing and the realization that you only
have so much time with your family and your parents. It had something to do
with that. Personal mortality? I think I kind of live with the idea every day
the last day that I spend on the planet. In some days it's more forward in my
mind than others because, you know, I'm not the healthiest person on the planet
just in terms of my history, so I kind of live with that. Some days it's not so
big an issue, on other days it is. More
important than that is just more about the aging of my own personal world. I
have a nephew who's 19 and just had a kid, I don't think spent more than 60
hours with him as a kid. That's difficult. Being on the road the way I am,
living in Boston, you miss all these things: my sister's wedding, I missed my
father's second wedding, all kinds of things. So at least while I'm here I'm in
everyone's backyard so it's a little different.
There's this weird thing that happened a few years ago. I
decided to surprise my family at Christmas time and come home. The only person
I told was my cousin Debbie, who lives here in Palmdale. I came and took the
shuttle bus out and that morning my cousin picked me up and we drove out to my
sister's house and I walked into the house, my mother was sitting on the sofa
reading a book to some of the kids and my sister was down the hall getting
things ready and there were things cooking. And I walked in and stood in the
living room for a few seconds and nobody noticed that I had walked into the
room. And I walked down the hall and kinda looked in the bedrooms and saw
everybody doing their stuff and walked back down the hall and stood in the
living room again and still nobody acknowledged my presence. I felt like, you
know when you're a little kid and you want to be the Invisible Man, I felt like
that, like "Wow, this is cool, I'm the Invisible Man all of the sudden."
And I finally said, "Hey mom, how you doing?" And she freaked out and
then my sister heard my voice and came running down the hall and everything
broke loose. But in a way it was sort of this weird galvanizing experience. I'm
not a small person, it's not like I could be ignored easily, but I could
actually walk into my family's house and walk around the house without anyone
knowing that I as actually there. Well, maybe it's time I'm here more often.
MoMZine: One
noticeable change with Regard The End
is the departure of your chief collaborator, Paul Austin. What happened?
Fisher: He
decided he didn't want to tour at all and wanted to explore his own music. He
moved to Seattle and got married to the drummer in the Walkabouts. With Willard
Grant, people come and go when and how they need to, so I would never say never
but for right now I think he's really happy exploring his own musical
directions. I think he's really doing well. And after almost 20 years of
collaboration, that seems reasonable. It seems like both of us needed it. He
needed it and I needed it. I certainly relied on him and this forced me to pick
up the guitar and learn to play in such a way so that my band mates don't kill
me when I play with them. Those kinds of things. So, it's been really good for both
of us.
MoMZine: Much of the
album was recorded in Slovenia. It seems ironic that and album that feels so
deeply American was recorded half way around the world.
Fisher: That's interesting
because some of the European press and people I know in Europe say it's the
most European record we've done. I would have never consciously thought of it
that way but then again, half the people playing on it are Europeans. So yeah,
it's gonna sound like the sum of its parts. It's interesting because not many
people know where Slovenia is. It's one of those places that's a border country
with border towns, and it has all these different influences. It was originally
part of the Hapsburg Empire and it borders on Austria, Hungary, Italy, the
Adriatic, and Croatia. The people are really warm and really wonderful, they've
lived on the edge of western and eastern Europe for such a long time that their
culture's infused with all of it. So it's a lot like the U.S. in a weird way,
like how the U.S. is a big melting pot of ethnicity and culture all together.
There's this wonderful realization I've come to over the last few years in
touring so many different places that there are more things in common that
people have than differences, really. When it gets down to the basics, everybody's
really concerned about the same things: do I love somebody, does somebody love
me, do I have a roof over my head, are there basic creature comforts around,
what's my fate? And that's what people care about there just like people here.
And they care about their folk music and their folk art, just like we do.
MoMZine: What's the
ideal headcount for Willard Grant Conspiracy in the live setting?
FISHER: It changes with each record, but at the moment
it's six to seven people. I'd like eight but six is almost impossible to
afford. One time we had 14 on stage in London but that was at a festival and
they could afford it. It's a lovely sound. We've done 12-14 a number of times,
usually in Boston, and it just gets this Phil Spector-ish kind of sound, with
everybody kind of hitting the same chords, all the sudden I start hearing
instruments that don't exist. It's amazing. But six people, it gives me a rhythm section,
it gives me violin and piano or viola and piano, and that gives me enough to
work with. I think I can show people all the things that Willard Grant does
because it's not just quiet music. I think we can do a really intense show with
two people and over the last few years I've become a little more comfortable
with solo shows, but it's hard to rock when you don't have a rhythm section. I
miss that. I want to say to people, this is one version of the band. Come back
and see a six-piece too. It's the same but different.
We're not the first band to do this. Howe Gelb has been
doing it for years in Giant Sand. It's a moveable feast for him as well. I
thanked him for it about a year ago, I said, "I just want to thank you for
creating a model that when Willard Grant started to happen I could actually
look at something that existed and say, 'well somebody does it, somebody makes
it work, so I should be able to, too.'"
MoMZine: Do you write
songs thinking that they should be flexible to varying numbers of players?
FISHER: Absolutely.
For two reasons. One, I love XTC but I would never, ever write a song like
that. It's too clever, it's too tricky for me and it's not what I'm about
personally. The other thing is, I'm not technically a great musician, I'm still
learning the instrument, so for me it's like, I probably wouldn't be able to
get really tricky with this stuff even if I wanted to. They're simple songs.
That's part of the beautiful aspect of this band, the songs are really simple
and it's the layering of instruments and the adding and taking away of
instruments that… it's like a Christmas tree. Start with a pretty good frame
and you can either go crazy and decorate it tons and it looks great and you can
do anything in between.
I think my strengths as a songwriter are, one, the lyrics
and, two, the kind of vision of this whole thing. It's kind of like I have this
movie that's been going on for the last seven years and it's like I'm the
director and my job is to put everybody in the right place mentally to work on
the subject. And it moves from place to place, the cast changes, and it's my
job to keep the tone consistent and keep it moving forward.
It has it's challenges because you have to be a logistics
expert and take on a role of babysitting, in a way, not in a bad way, but you
have to call people up and say, who's available for this? When you have four
people in the band you don't have to worry about it. In a thing like this it's
different. You have to assemble a band. This is something Howe said to me when
I was thanking him. He said, I don't know if you should thank me really because
this is like the hardest road. In a world where McDonalds hamburgers are
successful for a reason, because people like the consistency of knowing they
can get the same hamburger whether they're in L.A., Ohio, or Paris, it's a
smaller audience that's going to accept this idea of, "Well I don't know
who's showing up tonight, exactly, I just know it's going to be good."
