Gregory Alan Isakov Studio Session + Interview

5/6/14

Gregory Alan Isakov is a singer and songwriter who calls Colorado home. We had an opportunity to check in with him in advance of his Red Rocks collaboration with the Colorado Symphony. He performed solo acoustic versions of Living Proof and Virginia May. (Originally recorded for broadcast on KGNU - May 6, 2014)

Practicing has always been a weird idea to me. Trying to get to a feeling has been sort of the challenge. That becomes what I'm after, and that becomes my practice.

RADIO RETHINK: Joining us in the studio is Gregory Alan Isakov. He had a little time to stop by and chat with us, so, welcome and thanks for coming to the studio.

ISAKOV: Thanks for having me.

RADIO RETHINK: Talking about your writing style, I've heard you mention that sometimes it's a little mysterious for you. Because for the most part, or maybe completely, your songs are not about you.

ISAKOV: Yeah, it definitely feels that way. The process of writing for me is sort of a mystery, especially when the guitar is involved. Because, I'll scribble lines all day and they come from all of these places in my life. Maybe I notice them in other people, or feelings, or in the middle of the night, and then when the guitar becomes involved it sort of all gets molded together. I don't really know, at first anyway, what it's about.

RADIO RETHINK: Do you write fiction as well?

ISAKOV: I do, yeah! I write short stories and poems. You know, a lot of the songs actually for our latest record, called The Weatherman, come from a series of short stories I was writing about this woman. She lived in the desert in a trailer park by herself. She talked to herself and everyone kind of thought she was crazy, and she always had the television on in the background and it was always playing the weather. But then, the weatherman starts becoming this mysterious mythical character who starts revealing the future. At first he was just telling her the weather and what it was going to be like tomorrow. But she asks, "Well, how do you know what it's going to be like tomorrow?" and then he starts to explain all of this stuff that's happening and that its going to happen to her in her life. It's something really simple, a Weatherman, it happens every day, there's this guy on the radio that's telling us what's going to happen and no one cares. So I took a lot of lines from those stories that kind of made it into the record. They're not about that story, but definitely had a lot of the themes.

RADIO RETHINK: Have you put that out there at all?

ISAKOV: I haven't yet. I have a lot of unfinished poems and I also write comics - just one block - one picture comics. So I do that too on the side which is another thing that I'm really into. But I really want to put out a series of comics at some point. Which I think will be finished before my book of poems, if that ever happens.

RADIO RETHINK: Well it makes sense to me that you also write in a traditional literary way, because when I get a new release from you, I have a similar feeling to when I get a book from a favorite author. Like, if there's a new Michael Chabon book out, I know I'm going to stay up way too late with that book. For me, there's a parallel to how you approach storytelling in your songwriting and storytelling in literature.

ISAKOV: Well, yeah, you know, I spend a long time making recordings and I don't even know what a good song is anymore. All I know is that if I don't feel something when I listen to it, during the window of time that I'm not completely biased anymore, or kind of jaded - there's a small window that I can be a listener, like a true blank page listener - and if it doesn't make me feel something it's gone. Even if I thought, oh that was a cool line, or this is kind of a cool song. And then I'll have one song that's just coming out of the blue, there's hardly any chord changes, and that's the one that gets me, and that's the one that will make it. So, it is a lot like writing a book. It takes that long for me to seem to get it right.

RADIO RETHINK: I think too, when I hear your work, and this is not intended to say that your style is bound in some way. But, you have a sound - which is an achievement in itself, I mean its really elusive for a lot of people to develop a certain sound.

ISAKOV: Oh, I've never thought about that… yeah.

RADIO RETHINK: Nick Drake, for example, you hear it and you think, oh it's a Nick Drake song. And your material kind of has your sound built into it. On the one hand, it's amazing to have developed that. On the other hand, do you ever feel limited by things you might want to explore because you feel like it wouldn't be representative of your work?

ISAKOV: It's funny, I know what you mean, and I think I'm always trying to break it. I think as artists we're always trying to grow and not repeat ourselves, and not do the same thing. You know, with this last record that I had, I thought it was like totally… like I took a left and went to the circus. I was like, I don't know if people are going to like this. But my friends who would stop by the house while I was mixing would react like, "Well, I'm not sure what you're talking about Gregor, it sounds like you, man!" But to me it was really dramatic. So,I think, as much as I want to, I don't know how far away I can get from, I guess, my sound - for lack of a better term.

RADIO RETHINK: And so, putting in different instrumentation, I read that you learned a lot of new instruments just to be able to put in the record - or things like a broom as a percussive element?

ISAKOV: Yeah, a lot of different sounds like that, and I learned pedal steel and ukelele and I love sitting in with my friends bands that play like Punk music… I love doing other stuff like that. It kind of makes me feel like I'm looking at things from a different angle. But, I'm noticing more and more, as I'm playing more over the last few years, that my aesthetic choices are the most important part - more important than my technical skills, you know? Practicing has always been a weird idea to me. Trying to get to a feeling has been sort of the challenge. That becomes what I'm after, and that becomes my practice.

RADIO RETHINK: And the instrumentation, that is obviously a deliberate choice. But, that kind of leads into your work with the Colorado Symphony. Because, the elements that a pedal steel will bring to a song versus a ukelele - I mean, these are bringing completely different elements to a song - but it's orchestration in some way. So to add that mentality of how you approach things musically to a collaboration with the symphony, how did that evolve?

ISAKOV: It was amazing. I worked with two great composers, Tom Hagerman from Devotchka was one of them. We'd send each other ideas back and forth and he's a brilliant musician. He totally got where I was coming from with the arrangements and how deliberate I was about space in the recordings. And I think he did a great job working a fifty person orchestra around that kind of space and bringing everything in when it really needed it. But, there'd be probably like fifty bars of music where the woodwinds are just sitting there - because you want to use as much of the orchestra as you can - but we made really aesthetic choices around that as well. It was one of the coolest experiences that I've been a part of.

RADIO RETHINK: And then the other side of it is that suddenly you're playing with an orchestra. So you have it conceptually, but now you actually have to do it. How did that feel in terms of collaborating?

ISAKOV: It was super humbling, you know? Because I'm sitting in front of these world class musicians that have been so disciplined and are in one of the most prestigious symphonies that there is and I'm playing this songs in C! (laughs) You know? It felt kind of strange for me. But then by the end of the second rehearsal we were all feeling good. It was just such a cool experience to get to play with these people that I was totally enamored by.

RADIO RETHINK: There's a certain precision of a symphony and a certain lack of precision of a band.

ISAKOV: Oh yeah. Totally.

RADIO RETHINK: So to get those two to gel, was there any difficulty initially?

ISAKOV: Yeah, it took a minute for me. Plus, everyone is reading arrangements and scores so if I run an intro too long, that's just a train wreck! I have to know exactly where the lyrics come in and how many bars there are - which I just don't think about when I'm playing with the band because we just read each other. Luckily we had an amazing conductor who just got it. In a lot of ways I really connect to symphonies and their sense of time because nothing is to a metronome. The meter is this living thing that can speed up or slow down and it's very emotional and I really connect to that when I play with the band. Because we don't really have four on the floor very much.

RADIO RETHINK: It's an amazing thing, these collaborations with the Colorado Symphony, and I hope we're just at the tip of the iceberg for how cool this will continue to be. I just wanted to follow up on a future project of yours that I read about. You're thinking about doing a record with Brandi Carlile that would be cowboy songs?

ISAKOV: I've been writing a lot of cowboy songs the last couple of years. Kind of in a traditional sense and really listening to a lot of old music. We have this one song called Feed Your Horses, and when I was recording with Brandi for This Empty Northern Hemisphere we always thought it would be fun to do a kids record together or a duet record. But then I thought, maybe we should do cowboy songs instead. So, we're trying to figure it out, but, yeah, I think we'll be doing that in the next… little bit actually.

RADIO RETHINK: Would it be like Gene Autry style material? I'm just trying to imagine it.

ISAKOV: Yeah, there's a couple of covers, but a lot of them are original. It's been really cool to try and write in that kind of style.

RADIO RETHINK: It seems like an interesting limit to put on yourself. For some reason I think of Jack Kerouac and his Book of Haikus.

ISAKOV: It's totally like that for me. It's funny because I want to get weird for a second but I have to stay true to the style.

RADIO RETHINK: Well, very cool. We'll look forward to hearing that some time down the road. Great to have you in. Thanks for taking the time to hang out in the studio.

ISAKOV: Awesome. Thanks for having me.