John Vanderslice: Obsessed With Making Music

SAN FRANCISCO — Referring to "Me and My 424," an intense rocker about his teenage protagonist Kevin's obsession with technology and a key cut off his recent album, Life and Death of an American Fourtracker (Barsuk), John Vanderslice laughed and admitted, "Yeah, it's a love song."

"I loved my four-track, I cannot even tell you," Vanderslice said of the tape recorder he used as a teenager to make recordings of his music. "I never had a 424, because 424 was the elite model; it's the most expensive four-track. I had what was called a 422, which was a smaller, much more stripped-down version features-wise. My attachment to that thing, like my attachment to my tape deck now — it's just unlimited love. That thing has given so much back to me."

Millions of rockers are consumed by music, but John Vanderslice, who gets excited and starts talking faster when the subject comes up, takes obsession to extremes. He puts out a thoughtful album every year and tours behind each heavily. He's also the owner of a highly regarded analog recording facility, Tiny Telephone, where such artists as Beulah, the Court and Spark, Mates of State and Red House Painters' leader Mark Kozelek record. And, like Kevin, he's been making tapes since he was a teenager.

With seven experimental smart-pop albums to his credit, first with former band MK Ultra and now as a solo artist, the irrepressible blonde art-rocker sounds something like Hunky Dory-era David Bowie with the lush production artistry of Low. His studio-intensive guitar-pop pulls from a pastiche of influences from the Baroque era to the '60s to the present, from Bach to The Beatles, Brian Eno and Yes to Neutral Milk Hotel and Beulah. His music is easy to like, yet it doesn't sound exactly familiar. It's quirky, socially engaged and intellectually appealing. But most important, it sounds good and satisfies purely on a sonic level.

Vanderslice formed MK Ultra, an underground four-piece, in 1993. They produced four albums and toured twice with Sunny Day Real Estate. After a year recovering from a severe vocal chord injury, Vanderslice left the band to pursue a solo, yet highly collaborative, career. For example, Fourtracker, which was released in May, features guest players from such leading indie bands as Spoon, Mountain Goats, Beulah, Mates of State and Death Cab for Cutie, each of whom wrote their own parts.

He's already returned to the studio, and his next album will feature even more collaborators. So far, Vanderslice has been joined in the studio by former Tarentel member/engineer Scott Solter and Death Cab for Cutie producer Chris Walla. Drummer Christopher McGuire (Kid Dakota) flies in from the Twin Cities to record in July, joined by Bill Rousseau (Monolith) on bass. (Both accompanied Vanderslice on his 24-date May 2002 tour across the U.S.)

Due out fall 2003, his fourth solo release will be a collection of personal songs. "I want it to be about my life," he said over coffee at his favorite bohemian cafe in San Francisco's Mission District, halfway between his home and his Potrero Hill studio, where he nearly blends in with the locals. "Even if it's not autobiographical, I want it to be close enough to where you think it could be."

Vanderslice said he's written two new songs since Fourtracker. "My Family Tree" is "really off-the-hook sad. I don't know why it's so sad, because I love my family."

This is a different kind of album for Vanderslice. "For me, what is disappointing about anything in art is when it's just on autopilot. What you want to be is surprised all the time."

Vanderslice's solo releases could be called concept albums. "You've got to be careful about making a pompous-ass concept record," he said. "The Who pulled off amazing narrative and conceptual records without having that self-seriousness thing. Quadrophenia is one of the greatest records ever made. That's the Holy Grail in pop culture — to have content and not be pretentious. I just wish that a lot of the prog rock that I grew up listening to — King Crimson, Yes, Gentle Giant (I have a fondness for these bands) — wasn't so damn pretentious and self-serious. And so for me, if you're going to do a concept record, it just better have some elements of humor and absurdity."

Fourtracker and Vanderslice's previous solo efforts, Mass Suicide Occult Figurines (Barsuk, 2000) and Time Travel Is Lonely (Barsuk, 2001), all have elements of humor and absurdity.

Vanderslice began studying music seriously as a child before getting into home recording. "I could read music better when I was 7 than I can now," he said. "You go through that phase when you hit junior high and start smoking pot and listening to Pink Floyd and you're like, 'Screw any kind of technical or theoretical underpinning of music — it's totally irrelevant.' I'm sorry, but no kid wants to take piano lessons. But it helped, and I still thank my mom for doing that."

A fan of Bach, Vanderslice terms his own musical style "baroque pop." "Bach is so fucking good that the stuff he wrote at 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. for his patron, just to get it off his desk — on deadline just to get the prince off his back — is brilliant. He has, like, 300 cantatas. He's remarkably consistent." Vanderslice uses samples from recordings of Bach's music on Time Travel Is Lonely.

Vanderslice combined his love of the classics with his love of D.I.Y. ("do-it-yourself") musicianship on Fourtracker. "Kevin was this super-prolific, hyper-independent self-releaser of multiple album-length cassettes — three or four a year," he explained. "That's where I was at 17. My goal was to release two cassette-only records a year of original material, and I would burn, like, five copies and I would give one to my brother, one to my mother and a couple to my friends.

"It's funny," he laughed. "In a sense, what any musician is doing, independent or not, is the exact same thing, just on a different scale. Four-tracking is a wonderful subculture that's dying out because analog is dying out. But digital is here, and while it makes me sad on certain levels, there's going to be a continuing if not even more blown-up D.I.Y. aesthetic taking over independent music the next 10 years."

Still, Vanderslice is an advocate of analog recording. "This is something I didn't want to get into because it's pretentious," he confided, "but the very last notes of Fourtracker are this Schumann piano sonata, played on vinyl. I took my turntable down to the studio and played Schumann's sonata, and those are the last notes." — Jillian Steinberger [Monday, June 17, 2002]