A Quote by Kieran Hebden
I've always explored things that people find a bit more freakish, like free jazz, and I'd gotten to a point where the live music I was making was really hectic and turning much more confrontational. So when I started working on Everything Ecstatic, that was very normal for me. I think it was a departure, but people read it as an escape from something, whereas every record I do is, I feel, a departure.
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I felt like the last record was a real step forward for us. I was very pleased to see some people saying the same things - that it was a real departure, that it was much more individual, that it sort of a power of its own. I really did feel those things very strongly, it's our most realized record.
It's very interesting to read why Cornelius Cardew became disenchanted with academic avant-garde music. He wanted to reach as many people as possible and change their consciousness. He wanted to reach the "working classes" in England. The kind of music he was making was very much from the academy, even though it had a lot in common with things like free jazz and improvisation, and he felt that it was the music of the elite, and that he wasn't really speaking to the people.
I find that at almost every press junket I get that comment, "this character's different from what you generally play..." And that's OK! But I think "generally play" stems back to Mr Darcy. I'm fine with it but I tend to find that if it's a departure, which in other people's words it always is, it's always a departure from that.
I used to be the guy who wanted to do everything myself, wanted to write and play everything myself, but the older I've gotten, the more collaborations I've gotten. I really enjoy working with other people to create different styles of music, because I really do listen to everything, and I enjoy every kind of music. I think some of the best stuff comes from working with people who have different perspectives on the same thing.
I always just wanted to have the wherewithal to make another record. I never really dreamt of fortune or fame, because it seemed so unlikely. I'm much more interested in people's perceptions of me than what my life is really like. It appears that some people think it's all cocaine and caviar for Okkervil River. And it's not. I'm making a little bit more than I was making at the video store right now.
I don't know that I read more than the average person. I don't think I do very much. I tend to read more when I'm on holiday. That's when I can go through books like you wouldn't believe. I read a bit of everything, but the novel has always been very important to me.
I do think Tim Cook is doing a very good job, I think he has almost impossibly big shoes to fill with Steve Jobs' departure. And so, that's the context always someone has to put things in. But, I do think that for the most part that Apple is at a point where it's much more focused on scale than on doing new things.
In making a record there are so fewer people involved - at least in our case. There were no more than three or four people in the studio at once. So I really feel like I can stand by everything on the record and say this is something that I personally endorse.
The hardest part of this year has been learning to enjoy it. It's almost like a full-time job reminding myself to live in the moment and not look for more, more, more...I see now that people who make movies, this world of creative geniuses that I grew up idolizing, are just normal people who wanted to do something and made it happen. Everything that's happened to me in the last year has only made me feel more like a normal person, more human, but in the most beautiful way.
As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.
The people in Japan love jazz music, man, and also in Europe, far more than they ever did here. And that always puzzled me until I went over there to really get into it for myself and find out what it is. It's their tradition and culture, man. We've gotten away from that in America, man. We live in a country of complete fantasy.
As things have progressed and I've gotten older, I've gotten more and more involved on the producing side. It's been a natural progression. The more you become exposed in a particular medium, the more you can bring to the table and people start trusting you. You're valued a little bit more, so you have more of a voice. It's something I would like to do, through the rest of my career.
Comedians could do mindless things - and by mindless, I mean the easy jokes and things that you already agree with - but I find it more interesting, more of a reward, for people to feel something. I like to make a human connection, and that involves speaking emotionally, a bit more intellectually, or with a bit more moral complexity.
I never want to feel complacent, and I had started to, a little bit. I had started to feel like "I have this thing I can do, it's worked a few times," but not only does that get boring, but you feel stagnant and unproductive. So I was feeling a lack of creativity and motivation, so I started making a more conscious choice to grow personally. It wasn't even an image-conscious thing, like, "I don't want people to think this way about me." It was really just a way to keep myself energized and feel excited about this thing I love doing. Like I went to couples therapy or something.
The live thing is separate from the record for me. I have to figure out a way to make the songs work live. It's always going to be different than it is on a record, because every record I've made, there are people playing parts on there that are not going to be coming on tour with me. As much as still feeling connected to it, it's more like rediscovering.
It's always interesting to me to see people projecting things, like people would say, "This record is much more mature than your other record" and I would think, "Well, this record has more songs from when I was 18 on it than the other one."
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