BEERS & POP WITH… Backyard Tire Fire
Sep 22, 2008
The pride of Bloomington get their working-class groove on.
BY ANDY TENNILLE
"Yesterday was pretty damn painful."
Ed Anderson sighs deeply, his grimace palpable over the thousands of miles of telephone line separating me from his home in Bloomington, Illinois. It's the dog days of summer, and the 35-year-old frontman for Backyard Tire Fire is lamenting last night's stinging loss by the Chicago Cubs at the hands of the St. Louis Cardinals, the North Sider's archrivals and perennial nemesis.
"Man, they just took a beating," Anderson says with the familiar disappointment of a life-long fan of baseball's loveable losers. "It was one of those days where the Cubs had nothing going, so I decided I was gonna drink as many Budweisers as I could."
Anderson is a Bud man, the very personification the folks that famed broadcaster Harry Caray sang about in his 1985 "Cub Fan Bud Man" television commercials: beer-drinking, working-class Midwesterners whose blue-collar work ethic is exceeded only by their religious-like devotion to their local sports franchises.
That same salt-of-the-earth persona is prevalent throughout the 10 songs Anderson penned for The Places We Lived, Backyard Tire Fire's new album on Hyena Records and by far their most ambitious effort to date. Whether it's the rollicking rocker "How In The Hell Did You Get Back Here?" or the menacing, guitar-buzzing "Welcome To The Factory," Backyard Tire Fire has retained much of the stripped-down, dive-bar charm that fans have come to appreciate from the group's four previous studio releases, but The Places We Lived also represents a marked evolution into more melodic pop structures driven by Anderson's simple piano playing. Tunes like "The Places We Lived" and "Shoulda' Shut It" seep with the pop sensibilities of the best of the Beatles, early Wilco and classic REM whereas slower songs like "Rainy Day Don't Go Away," "Everybody's Down" and "Time With You" fit comfortably alongside Randy Newman's 12 Songs, Paul McCartney's 1970 solo debut or John Hiatt's Bring the Family.
Beyond their own headlining shows supporting the release of The Places We Lived, Backyard Tire Fire will hit the road this fall with the likes of Avett Brothers, Ha Ha Tonka, Rose Hill Drive, Los Lobos and Squirrel Nut Zippers before joining up with Reverend Horton Heat and Nashville Pussy for a few dates in December. For all things Backyard Tire Fire, visit www.backyardtirefire.com.
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BLURT: Let's talk about this album. I've really enjoyed spending time with it the last couple weeks and wanted to start out by saying that it sounds like it's your most expansive and ambitious album to date. Would you agree?
EA: Well, I always think that your latest records are your best. You can't help but believe that your newest work is the best that you've done, ‘cause that's the idea: you want to get better as you go along and learn more about yourself, about writing and about working in the studio. I think it's most representative of where we're at right now.
BLURT: Set the stage for me about this record a little bit.
EA: That record was made outside of a contract. The band financed it, and then we shopped it around for a while before getting hooked up with Hyena Records. It took several months to get through that process. I think we recorded it like a year and a half ago, so it's funny to do interviews now about the album. I'm trying to put my head back in the space where it was when we recorded it, ‘cause I've probably written two more albums since this one was recorded.
BLURT: Is that difficult to do: putting yourself back in the mind frame of an album you did so long ago?
EA: Yeah, it is tough ‘cause I do like to work fast. I record a lot of demos in my basement studio at home. Most everything that's on this new record was demoed there. I'll demo the stuff as it's coming, which is cool, ‘cause I like to get it down while it's fresh.
BLURT: This new album seems more ambitious than your past records for the simple fact that you guys sound more comfortable in the studio now and open to experimenting a bit more now. I was listening to the album last night and noticed the vocals on "One Wrong Turn" and the loop on "Welcome to the Factory" are pretty out there. Are you guys are getting more comfortable behind the knobs, playing with different sounds?
EA: For sure. You can't help but learn every time you're in there, and we're really lucky enough to work with a good friend named Tony Sanfilippo who runs an analog studio here in town called Oxide Lounge Studios. I think this is our fourth full length record that we've made in that studio and we've done a couple EP's in there, too, so we've got a comfortable feeling there that allows us to stretch it out and experiment. Like that loop on "Welcome to the Factory," the idea for that was to take random, non-musical objects and make music with them. If you listen to it, it's like a drill bit on a brake drum, an empty reel of tape scraped against a goose-necked mic stand and a few other really weird sounds. We ended up coming up with this really hypnotic, mechanical kind of feel.
I also like to take things from the lyrics of a song and try and match the sounds to the words or themes. On "The Places We Live," I wanted to use the chimes ‘cause I felt like they sounded like an old-time doorbell. That went thematically with the whole subject matter of the song and really with the whole record for that matter.
For the vocals on "One Wrong Turn," I sang through a table leg. It's hollow and long and I got a mic set at one end of it and a mic set by where I was singing into it. Between the two mics, we got this isolated feeling, which is what the song's all about. We did the vocals on "Rainy Day Don't Go Away" on a $10, piece-of-shit Radio Shack microphone. We tried a bunch of different mics, but this was the one that I liked ‘cause it gave the song a weirder, Tom Waits-y feel to it.
BLURT: It's interesting that this album is your most experimental to date, because I'd also say it's the - and I don't want this to carry a negative connotation - but it's also the poppiest of your catalogue. It's certainly the most Beatle-esque album that you guys have ever done.
EA: I don't think "pop" is a bad word. I love pop music. I love Cheap Trick, I love Big Star, and I love the Beatles. There's definitely a pop element on this record, and I don't know if that was by design or anything like that. For the most part, the songs just come out and they are what they are. This one just happens to have more piano-driven songs, probably because I just happened to be sitting at the piano more at that time when I was writing it. This album is more about the words and the hooks and the tunes than it is about getting your face ripped off with a guitar solo.
BLURT: It's interesting too, ‘cause this is a peak moment for you guys as a band as far as signing with Hyena, getting out on the road, and growing your fanbase, but ironically the themes that run through the album deal a lot with the idea of home.
EA: Well, it's hard not to think about home when you're gone. You leave for six weeks or something like that, and you can't stop thinking about home sometimes. It's not that we don't love the road, ‘cause we do. We're road dogs, and I've done 200 nights a year for nearly a decade. I'm certainly not afraid of going out there and traveling and playing and having a good time. I love that stuff, but at the same time you can't forget about those people who are waiting for you to come home.
The song "Time With You" on the record is written from my wife's perspective and it was based on a conversation we'd had after I'd been out on the road for six weeks. I was in Burlington, VT - couldn't be any farther away from home - and we're having this conversation and she's like, "I just want to spend some time with you, is that so wrong?" The song just kind of flowed out of that. There's a very chaotic section in the middle of the song where I just start hitting really strange piano notes and play some dissident stuff, which was very representative of the way I was feeling inside after that conversation. I was just torn up.
Life as a touring musician is a great thing, but it'll also beat the living shit out of you. And it will throw your personal life for a loop as well. We long to be home when we're on the road and then when we're home we want to get back out on the road. It's a very strange dichotomy. I don't really understand it, but it's the easiest thing to write about a lot of times ‘cause that's what we do. I haven't written my last road song, I can promise you that.
BLURT: In an interview on Chicago NPR a couple years back, you said that your songwriting was evolving from autobiographical to a more fictional, storytelling approach, but a lot of the songs on this record are very intimate and personal. Can you talk to me a little bit about that evolution and your feelings towards wanting to write less autobiographically and more fictionally?
EA: It's natural to write about what's going on in your life and what you're going through, but I think it's good to take yourself out of your comfort zone as a songwriter. Writing about something other than you accomplishes that. You can do anything you want, ‘cause it's completely fictional. It's an open canvas. You can have these characters do or say whatever you want. They don't have to adhere to your life or what you're going through. If you're able to write about people who don't even exist, then it's limitless: you can do that forever. You can only write so many songs about how much you love your wife, or how much you miss being at home or out on the road. I think it's a good thing for me to do as I tend to be an introspective songwriter, like the classic tortured artist, always tormenting himself. So it's good for me to take a break and try to write outside of my comfort zone.
BLURT: You guys recorded some tunes at Sun Studios recently. Tell me about that.
EA: Man, what an experience that was. I'm telling you, man. That was like a religious kind of thing, you know? I'm not a religious person, but that felt like church, it was just...I had goosebumps. They fed us a bunch of Budweisers, and we were supposed to do five songs but ended up doing 14. We were there until 2:00 in the morning. We were supposed to be out of there by 11:00, and they had to throw us out at 2:00. They loved us, and we loved them. It was amazing. The engineer was totally cool and it was just...I can't even describe it. It was an amazing experience. You think about all the people that played there: Howlin' Wolf, Ike Turner, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. You just stand in that room, and you can feel it. It's there.
BLURT: In the video, you can see Roy Orbison's picture over your shoulder. Did you pull any covers out or was it just all your material?
EA: Yeah, we did. They told us going in that one of the five songs we were going to do had to be a cover of a song that was originally recorded at Sun Studio. So we did "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" by Carl Perkins. Later in the night, we covered "Lawyers Guns and Money." I'm glad I can say I covered "Lawyers, Guns and Money" at Sun Studio. (Laughs)
The funniest part about that was that they fed us all these beers, and we're having the time of our lives. It wasn't like they were shoving beers down our throat, but we drank a lot of beer that night. After we were done recording, we were on cloud nine, all buzzed and happy. Then they sit us down to do the interviews about the songs we just recorded. If you see that interview, I'm slurring my words, my brother's just staring down at the floor and we're joking with each other in between questions. We're drunk off our asses and just slap happy. It was like the greatest night of our lives and one of the coolest musical experiences that I've ever had. We've played a lot of shows in a lot of places, in pretty much every state in the lower 48, through Canada, and on cruises, but that night was something that I will absolutely never, ever forget. It was like a religious experience.
We did 14 songs total, and they're all good. I've got the mixes. It should surface at some point, ‘cause it was all shot on nice digital video cameras and the audio was all recorded in the control room. The images look sharp, the audio sounds great, so at some point, more of that stuff will surface. I don't know when, but it will.
BLURT: With your songwriting, typically do words come first, does the music come first? How does it work for you?
EA: It could go either way. Mostly, I'll either come up with some progression on the acoustic guitar or at the piano, and then I'll kind of piece together a structure to a song. A lot of times, the progression or the music that I'm coming up with will make me feel a certain way. I'll start humming a melody and then maybe like one line will come - could be in the verse, could be in the chorus - and at that point it's off to the races. One line generally sparks the rest of it, but generally it's music first for me. But there's no real right or wrong way to do it. That's one of the things I like about my job: I have very few rules that I need to adhere to. I don't take orders from anybody. I can write whatever I want to write whenever I want to write it. It's pretty cool. My wife will go to work and come home for lunch and there will be something that's created that wasn't there when she left.
BLURT: Your new album comes out on vinyl, which has seen a bit of resurgence of late. Are you a vinylphile?
EA: Honestly, I don't even fucking buy CDs anymore. Does anybody?
BLURT: I don't. It's either vinyl or digital now.
EA: Yeah, I don't even have a CD player here in the house anymore. It's just a record player, and I think one of the channels is blown on the receiver so I have to listen to really old records that are in mono. (Laughs) I can't wait until I get my copy of the new one on vinyl though. I've never been able to drop the needle on one of my own records before, so that'll be really cool: twist up a fatty and listen to my own record on the turntable. But I'll only be able to hear half of the album, ‘cause one of the channels is blown on the receiver. Some of the cool parts are gonna be gone. Shit, I guess it's time to get a new receiver. (Laughs)
BLURT: You guys have expanded from a trio into a quartet recently. Tell me about your next guitarist and how that transition has been.
EA: His name is Fish Carpenter, and he played on Barroom Semantics, which was our second record. He's an old friend of ours who runs the sound at one of the local clubs and plays in a band with the guy that co-produces all of our stuff and owns the studio. I feel a little bit bad ‘cause we kind of stole him away from that band. We got their blessings and everything, but I felt a little bad about stealing him away.
He's a real good guy and easy to get along with, which is almost as important as being a good musician, because if you can't get along with people, I don't want you involved in this. We like to play as a trio, but the live show has really evolved with him and it's kicking ass. These last couple months, we've been rehearsing with him, playing some gigs and festivals here and there, and watched this trio turn into a four piece. It's really sounding good. We wanted to bring him in early so when the record came out, we had him in place so we can play these songs more like they are on the record. I'm playing a lot more keys live, because we've got that guitar there and Fish sings good. It's been fun to watch it develop. Every gig feels a little more and more natural.
BLURT: The change makes sense because the music that you were writing for this record feels more suited to a quartet than a trio. Will the songs that you're writing now require another guitarist or is it back to the old trio format?
EA: No, I think we're evolving and heading into the direction of having someone else in the band. I can feel that, ‘cause I'm writing stuff now with Fish in mind: I'm actually thinking that a guitar part would be really cool working off this other guitar part. It's exciting for me as a songwriter because it means I have another element to work with and write for. So that's been really fun.
BLURT: Your records have always been...and the word isn't dense...but multi-layered, I guess. It's not to say that the live show didn't deliver on what was represented on the records themselves, but there was always that dichotomy with you guys as far as very lush sounding recordings versus more stripped- down, live rock sets.
EA: Yeah, a real loud, raw trio sound with dirty tones was what we've been known for as a live band, but I never felt like we weren't doing the songs justice. We were just doing them in a different way: the only way that we could do them, honestly, as a trio.
In the past, we've been a band that did really cool studio stuff and then just adapted it to the trio in the live setting. Something that maybe wasn't a big guitar rocker on an album would turn into one live cause we were a trio and that's just how it works. There has always been that division in the past with us. Now, the two are kind of becoming one, and I think it's a good thing. There's an evolution that's happening right now with us that's exciting. The live sound and the studio sound are getting closer, and I feel a lot more relaxed. I don't feel like I have to play as much; I can actually take my hands off the guitar in certain places and let Fish go for it. I've never had that luxury, so it's pretty cool.
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