What are you hoping people will hear in this album?
I’d describe the album as state-of-the-art singer-songwriter. The songs are about being left alone, not wanting to lose someone, about desperately wishing for connection and togetherness. The sound of the record lives at the intersection of Americana and Beatles-influenced rock and roll. A little bit of twang and a lot of cinematic emotion.
Many of the songs seem to be about loss. What inspired the album’s lyrical focus?
When I first started writing these songs, I disappeared from my family and friends for a couple of months. I’m usually a really family- and friend-oriented person, but I cancelled everything for the entire winter and just removed myself to the studio. I was still living at home but I hardly saw anyone.
I got the girls fed and ready for school in the morning and then disappeared every day until very late. I didn’t go out, I didn’t converse, I didn’t collaborate, I just wrote songs alone day after day. I think that isolation might have affected the songs: the first batch that emerged from that period was super-lonely and aching. At that time I was experiencing some changes that influenced the songs, too: a couple of important friendships of mine seemed to be fading away; I was finding some of the relationships in my family deeply challenging; and some of the people close to me were going through their own losses and disconnections. Also, during the making of the album, I moved from my hometown of Minneapolis to Los Angeles, and I missed my home so much. All of those stories made their way into the songs.
After all of the co-writing you did with other artists, did you feel a need to return to your solo voice as a writer?
Just to keep my artistic sanity, I need to periodically go back to the well of writing my own solo songs. But I’ll always love co-writing – it’s something I very consciously decided to make a part of my life, in about 1998, and I’d never want to give it up. It took me a bunch of years to figure out really how to do it well. One thing that really helps is that I’ve had success through my own recordings, so I don’t have to live vicariously through my collaborators. I just want us to try to create a great piece of music that will feel personal and true when they sing it. And knowing what having my own hits feels like gives me a lot of motivation to try to help my writing partners have hits, too.
Co-writing to me is trying to help someone else find the best way to express themselves, to find the best notes for their voice to sing, to think of something that I as a fan would want to hear them say. There’s something more objective, more “one step removed,” about co-writing for someone else’s voice – like you’re floating above the scene and trying to hear things objectively, like a fan would hear the song for the first time.
Whereas, when I’m writing for myself, I can’t have that objective, out-of-body perspective on the song – I’m in the thick of it, I’m just trying to channel music to express my emotions, I don’t even know if the song is any good until a few days later when I listen to it again.
It’s really great to be able to move back and forth from those two perspectives of artist and co-writer – from the heat of battle to the pilot’s-eye view, from my own passions and pains to the fan’s perspective. The back and forth can make you a little crazy, but there is power in that combination.
As you set out to make this record, how did you conceive of it?
My initial concept for recording the album was to play all the instruments myself like Stevie Wonder or Elliot Smith, all alone in my attic in Minneapolis. The songs were so lonely and lost, it felt like the right approach. But when I finished that version of the record, a lot of the songs just sat there. Part of the problem was that I had moved to LA halfway through that process, and the vibe was so different here – I was reconnecting with a lot of friends in California, I was starting a new phase of my musical and personal life, I was gathering a community around me, and it seemed stranger and stranger that I was working on the album all alone. So I threw out most of the recordings and started over with a bunch of Californian friends. The more I had other people play on the songs, the better the songs sounded. I think the sound we found for the songs started with Skeeter Davis, heartbreak and major chords, but with my friends playing on it, it sounds more like 2014 than 1974.
Who are some of the guest performers?
Natalie Maines, Sara Bareilles, Missy Higgins, Sara Watkins, Lissie, Sean Watkins all sing harmonies or duet with me. Blake Mills and Sean Watkins play a lot of guitar. Greg Leisz plays pedal steel on a couple of songs. Aaron Sterling, Aaron Redfield and I played the drums. John Munson from Semisonic plays upright bass on “Disappearing.” A lot of other friends are on there.
I have to confess, I didn’t really “curate” the guests on the album according to the needs of the songs. More like I thought, “Whoah, wouldn’t it be cool to have Natalie sing on some songs? I wonder which ones would sound best with her voice? Hey, Blake, want to come over and play guitar on some stuff? I’d love to hang out and watch you play guitar for a day or two!”
You’ve recently resumed your second life as a visual artist by way of your illuminated set lists, your illustrated video for “Disappearing,” and other projects. What inspired this?
I got super-inspired to get back into my visual art maybe a year or two ago, as I looked through some older journals of mine that were full of drawings. I loved the constant switching back and forth between words and images. That picture-making impulse had gotten buried in the past five or ten years – I was too busy with all of the music making.
So over the past year I’ve been doing a ton of drawing and cartooning, a lot of it related to being a musician, that life and also related to some principles or observations I’ve collected about the life. Some of them are almost like slogans or proverbs. It’s fun. I’ve also been doing a lot of calligraphy and fancy lettering, and making cool graphic versions of the proverbs and advice.
One of the things I’ve been doing is making what I call “Illuminated Set Lists.” One day before a gig, I was writing my set list for the show and I realized that I could make an illustrated set list for the audience, a picture that not only lists the songs but has drawings and little side notes about the different songs, where they come from, what they’re about. I think this gives people a new look at my musical life and my relationship to being an artist. So I’ve done that now for several shows. It’s another cool way to make pictures that help me share a glimpse of my musical life.
You’ve recently started playing shows titled “Words & Music by Dan Wilson” in which you play songs and talk about the discoveries you’ve made about songwriting. How did the idea come about?
The “Words & Music” shows came about partly because for the last five years I’ve been asked many times to do appearances that are like half performing a show, and half talking about my experiences as a writer and collaborator. So I would tell a story or share something I’ve learned about being an artist, then I’d play a song that related to the story. After I’d done several of these appearances, I realized I wanted to develop it more and turn it into a full-length performance that I could present to fans. So I’ve been doing “Words & Music by Dan Wilson” occasionally over the past year. It feels really good, and I plan to take it on the road in 2014.