Rick Moody

I wrote all the music on three of the songs. I wrote some of the music on some of the others. I played guitar on it. I played piano on one track. I sing quite a bit so I wasn’t uninvolved in the music part.

It’s fun. It gives you a chance to be with other people. Writing is obviously very solitary and you know, in this endeavor, I get to collaborate and learn a lot so it’s great for me.

Yeah, it’s something I like to do. I’ve worked with other musicians on radio pieces and stuff and I like being involved with other kinds of art. So the learning process for me is great. I’ve no need to sort of run the show particularly. In the musical setting, I like to see a player among players. I don’t want a group of subjects to do my will. It’s more that I want to have fun and deal with other people.

I could never be happy in that circumstance so specific case or not, I would probably run fleeing from the room. [laughs]

Yeah, Hannah actually is in Greenpoint. So she’s sort of not far away as the crow flies but it’s kind of a pain in the ass by subway. But Dave and I live only like seven blocks from each other.

I mean I know both of them independently pretty well. I’ve known them both for four or five years. But they haven’t met before at all.

That’s the really interesting question about this band because there are three songwriters who write in very different styles working together. That’s interesting music mix. The record sounds like it has a lot of range. It’s not all just one thing. But there’s definitely push and pull and various compositions about how people are going to play on them and so forth. That’s what’s exciting about it. But if you listen to their solo albums, they both record under their own names; you’ll find that they’re very different from what we’ve done here.

My recorded voice makes me want to slit my wrist but they’ve tried to convince me that I’ve nothing to feel ashamed about. Also at least one person from the Japanese press singled out my voice as one of the good things about it which made me feel okay for about ten minutes.

It was fascinating because I’ve never really been in a studio for any length of time before. It only took us about ten days or so to make the record. But I’m very interested in all the stuff you can do with advance recording technology. It was a steep learning curve for me but really incredibly interesting. Also all the sort of political issues that come out in a band in that setting are really fascinating to me too. That’s where you find out what everybody’s made of.

Marshmallows.

Wingdale is a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York. It used to be called Harlem Valley Psychiatric Hospital and was one of the big state holding pens in the 50’s. So when I was a kid in the 60’s, we used to drive by there all the time on the way upstate to see friends and family and I thought it was the creepiest looking buildings I’ve ever see and I still is. So the idea was, you know, we knew that we wanted the name to have kind of a folky old-time feel to it. But I didn’t want to be like a dumb-ass touchy-feely folky thing but more like a scary folky thing.

I think it’s like modernist folk music so it’s not like…

Yeah or take a sort of unpalatable example. It’s not like you know Peter, Paul, and Mary or something like that. We knew that we wanted to make acoustic music and not in any way electronic. What you hear is what actually took place in the studio. So it’s like punk rock made by people in their 40’s basically.

We paid for the recording and got reimbursed along the way by the various labels.

Well it’s just a different set of thieves.

No it’s not at all. Actually, I think it’s like from Minnesota or something. That guy who took the picture, Alex Soth, is this amazing photographer. He made a whole series of photos that were taken on or around the Mississippi River along its entire length. The cover photo and also the one on the inset of the booklet are both from these 50 photos by him. He’s a really outrageously great photographer and we were really lucky that he liked the record enough to let us use the picture.

No, actually what was interesting about it was for it not to be personal. There’s not a really autobiographical song on that record except for maybe my song about rats.

Because I do get really creeped out when I see rats on the subway tracks.

Yeah, I find it disturbing. It’s not that I’m like afraid that they’re going to come up and get me or something. It’s just their ubiquity that I find disturbing.

We’ve only played out like five times maybe and we’re getting better considering that I never play live at all. I think of that as the last thing I’m interested in. I think there are two kinds of people in the world, people who write and people who perform. I’m so totally in the writing camp but we’re going to play a few more shows for the record release and we’ll see how it goes.

Oh, no that’s a completely different thing that I gave lyrics to. That’s for this band in Brooklyn called One Ring Zero. They’ve made this record with all these writers on it and I’m on that record a little bit too.

I did lyrics on that one but I’ve also played with them. Actually I’ve made a whole spoken word record with them, where I played a little guitar and played the theremin on one track.

I can’t but I can fake it pretty well. You have to have a perfect ear to play the theremin or else just play it like it’s electronic noise and I’m the latter.

Nah, not really. Music is always a little influential just in the sense that as a prose writer, I think a lot about how paragraphs move and sound and stuff like that. I’m interested in the sound in my head of prose not just how it tells a story or what it looks like. So to that extent, I’ve always been really influenced by music but this process of actually making it hasn’t particularly changed my approach.

I saw the trailer yesterday because I actually went to see the new Star Wars movie.

It’s certainly better than any of the other two in this series. But I thought it a little on the long side and kind of ponderous and pretentious and but I really loved all the parts that are flipping the bird at George Bush however.

Yeah it’s better than the teasers that I saw before but none of these actors feel right to me, particularly. They look really faceless. What was really important about the Fantastic Four was their humanness and their foibles and the interrelationships between the two. Now it’s got like a lot of people with really excellent abs and stuff like that. It’s not totally relevant.

Nah.

No way, I don’t like working for the Hollywood bunch. Hollywood movies just make me just stare lately.

I kind of liked Spider-Man 2. I like Tobey [Maguire] a lot because I met him on The Ice Storm. For me, he’s the antithesis of an action hero. As an actor, he does actually get in the direction of the kind of humanness of the Marvel Comics as I experienced them. I think those movies are ok but comic book movies in general just do the same shit every time. Like you can plot the three act structure on them as if to deviate a tenth of a degree from that formula will somehow cause the immediate firing of every scriptwriter who worked on it.

It’s about filmmaking. It’s a comedy about an indie production company that tried to sell out really massively by trying to develop a television miniseries.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck