Q&A: Slaid Cleaves
Austin's favorite New England transplant talks about grave inspirations, the merits of a good mentor and adopting to Texas.
Like one of his most famous fans, Stephen King, Slaid Cleaves hails from Portland, Maine. But unlike the prolific horror novelist, singer-songwriter Cleaves, who moved to Austin 18 years ago, isn’t what you’d call a cranker. After knocking out three independent albums in quick succession in the early ’90s, Cleaves landed a deal with Rounder/Philo records for 1997’s Gurf Morlix-produced No Angel Knows, but since then, he’s given the world exactly three more albums of self-penned tunes (plus one full of songs written by friends). 2000’s Broke Down was the one that elevated him to household-name status among the Americana crowd; it’s also the album on which he consciously chose to pursue his path as a chronicler of sorrow and sadness, of “the common struggle of life.”
His finely whittled tales of suffering also filled 2004’s Wishbones, and he borrowed from lesser-known songwriting friends, like Adam Carroll and Karen Poston, for 2006’s Unsung. Carroll and other collaborators, including longtime songwriting buddy Rod Picott, also contribute to his latest, the fine Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away. So does King, the aforementioned master of macabre, who provided the album’s liner notes. Which is somehow even more appropriate considering their shared love of Bruce Springsteen and the fact that the final song on the album, “Temporary,” was inspired by and composed from cemetery epitaphs (and Cleaves’ realization that he’ll likely be called on to deliver some eulogies soon). Maybe the Pet Sematary author and the songwriter have more in common than they realize — even though Cleaves sheepishly admits that he’s yet to read a King novel.
Despite his propensity for tragedy and morbidity, Cleaves’ stage patter is frequently rather hilarious. During his Everything album release show at the Cactus Cafe, his natural habitat in Austin, he follows a tune with the announcement, “That was ‘Broke Down,’ of course — the song that brought me from complete obscurity to relative obscurity.” After the new album’s “Cry,” he quips optimistically, “that’s a AAA hit, if ever there was a stock market failure to recoup from.” Then there’s the yodeling; he keeps idol Don Walser’s spirit alive in songs like Wishbones’ “Horses and Divorces.”
Everything You Love … is Cleaves’ first release with the newly launched Music Road Records, an independent cooperative founded by fellow songwriter Jimmy LaFave, Austin recording engineer Fred Remmert and financial backer Kelcy Warren. With Music Road, Cleaves retains ownership of his masters and, along with his wife and manager, Karen, gains significantly more control over the direction of his career — and significantly more responsibility, too. “There’s a little bit more work that I used to depend on the record company to do that Karen and I are doing now,” Cleaves says. “I’ve spent many, many hours trying to make sure this project works.”
Much of that work is done out of the couple’s vintage East Austin cottage, where a wood stove fills one corner, vinyl records are within easy reach, Beatles songbooks sit on the piano and a giant portrait of Huddie, Cleaves’ geriatric, “selectively deaf” dog, covers one wall.
But as he explains below, there’s one album-related task Cleaves doesn’t tackle at home: the actual act of songwriting.
Let’s talk about your writing methods. Do you get up in the morning and say, “OK, I’m gonna write today,” and see what comes?
Lately, my M.O. is to arrange a house for me to go to, a “safe house,” to hole up in for three or four days at a time. I have a network of friends and supporters who will offer me their lake house or spare house or their guesthouse. And I’ll just pack up enough food for three or four days and my laptop that I write on and a little tape recorder and a guitar, and maybe some books and some movies, and just relax. I just have to get away from the constant barrage of radio and TV and Internet and phone and family and chores and pets and everything. So if I get away from that stuff and hole up, I can just have that silence. Now the problem is if I don’t show up with anything to write about, I’ll just gaze at my navel for four days. That’s no fun. So what I’ve learned is that when I’m not writing, when I’m on the road or promoting a record or recording, I need to have the discipline to keep my ear cocked for any interesting ideas, any phrases or stories or concepts. And if I can just get those down on a little scrap of paper or on a little electronic memo machine or something, I collect those throughout the year, and then bring those out to these songwriting retreats, then I can delve into them and try to fit them into song form.
Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away is a really arresting title. What made you pick it?
Hard to Believe was the working title, and it sounds like a Slaid Cleaves record. But one of the primary goals for this record was to have it stand out from my previous work. I’ve been on the folky Americana scene for 10 or 12 years now and I’ve put out a few records; they’ve been well-received, and I think the challenge now is to make sure people don’t just yawn and say, “Aww, another Slaid Cleaves record.” I just wanted to do everything I could to make this record a little different in every way. And having a different title was one way to go about that. The line is from the leadoff song on the record [“Cry”]. And Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away is provocative, and just the fact that it’s long is weird. People kind of chuckle when they hear you say that title. So it gets people’s attention; that was the theory and it’s borne out pretty well.
Having Stephen King write your liner notes has gotta help on that front, too.
It’s been great. He was very, very generous to offer to do the liner notes for this record, and I was able to put a little blurb from the notes on the back of the record and people notice that. Everything about this record was designed to stand out from my earlier records, and to have a celebrity endorsement on it is just one more little thing to get people to open it up and check it out.
It seems that this album explores the state of resignation — the place people go after they’ve lost love, hope, dreams … was that your intent, to examine lives less lived, the lives of quiet desperation?
In early ’07, when I was starting to gather the ideas for these songs and think about what direction the album would take, I wanted the album to be a little more internal, a little more emotional, less narrative story-telling lumberjack songs.
Oh, those are great songs.
Oh yeah, I really got into the narrative workplace disaster song for a while there. But I thought, “Well, I have enough of those in my set.” And I know from the past that songs that really delve deeply into emotional issues, and really break the heart of the listener, so to speak, a song like “Broke Down,” for instance, everyone can relate to them. Everybody’s been through a bad relationship, and the imagery in that song depicts that really beautifully. So I wanted to go more in that direction, of songs that presented a picture of people going through really hard times. And I tried to draw on some of those troubles I’ve had in the last few years, or seen people around me go through, to make these songs as touching as possible.
Do you generally pick a theme to work from when you’re working on an album?
Not explicitly. I gather up ideas and look for a theme in those ideas and I use that to try to shape the record as I’m making it. I’m an old-fashioned guy, and I believe that the album is a collection of songs that all fit together, somehow.
That song, “Temporary,” that you used to end the album, has not left my head since I first heard it. The melody is so gorgeous, and the words just blow me away. Did you know immediately that that was the album closer?
It’s a special song because the melody did come in a dream. I remember waking up with that melody in my head one morning. I was in New York in a hotel and luckily I had my laptop out on my desk, and so I shuffled out of bed and was able to hit record and record a little snippet of that melody before I went back to sleep. That rarely happens. Usually when I hear a melody when I’m sleeping, by the time I open my eyes, it’s gone. So the melody was special, and I worked on the lyrics, the idea of the transitory nature of life, for a while, and then I started jogging in the cemetery next to my house and I was looking at epitaphs and tombstones all day. And I realized that there was some really good poetry on these tombstones. Actually, most of the ones in the song I got from a Web site that lists a whole bunch of Colonial-era New England tombstones. So two of the three verses on “Temporary” are actually composed entirely of these epitaphs that I’ve rearranged.
You got here in ’91 and won the Kerrville New Folk contest in ’92. Did that rapid acceptance surprise you?
Yeah, a little bit. It was a great little validation that we made the right decision. We got here at Christmastime ’91, and Kerrville’s in May, so we’d only been here five months. But Kerrville was the crowning achievement of a year of me playing on street corners and waiting my turn at open mics and a lot of frustration and a lot of fear that, “Oh my god, I don’t know that we’re gonna make it down here. This is tough.” Then getting the Kerrville nod was just enough validation to keep goin’ for a while.
What was behind your decision to come here?
I played for almost three years in Portland, Maine, built up my career from the open-mic, playing-on-the-street level to playing-at-the-clubs level, and Portland at the time had a great little local, vibrant music scene, but not nearly the infrastructure you need to build a regional or national career. It didn’t have radio stations like [Austin’s] KUT and KGSR. It didn’t have a great [alternative] paper — it had a little weekly paper but it didn’t have the studios, the producers, the wealth of musicians, the culture and history of music in the town. There’s no Willie Nelson of Portland.
Do you see a significant difference in the school of songwriting between the James Taylor/New England approach vs. the Townes Van Zandt/Texas thing down here?
Yeah, definitely. But I was so sheltered up in Portland, I grew up listening to Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen in the ’80s as a teenager, and Tom Waits, so I was a fan of that lyrical-based, character-driven songwriting and storytelling. And I grew up listening to the Clash and Woody Guthrie, so politics was in there, too. When I got down to Kerrville, I was quite shocked that it seemed like folk music was defined from James Taylor forward, like nobody had even heard Woody Guthrie at the Kerrville Folk Festival. That was weird, and I realized that that was kind of a New England thing as well. A lot of the New England/Boston-area folk songwriters were of the more love-song, confessional kind of ’70s folk song, ’70s singer-songwriter inspiration. And I thought Kerrville seemed to be like that, but then of course, as I dove deeper into the Texas scene, I learned about Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and realized that’s the scene I want to be a part of.
Do you think your career might have gone differently, or would have even been sustainable, if you had not moved to Texas?
I honestly don’t see how I could have done it from Portland, because I wouldn’t have had, for one thing, the mentors that I found down here. People like Joe Ely that I got to open up for and watch, and people like Ray Wylie Hubbard, even people like Tom Pittman from the Austin Lounge Lizards. [He] was an early fan of mine and I got to open shows for him, and get in front of a couple hundred people. In Portland, I was playin’ the local Cactus Cafe-type club, and there was nowhere to go from there. There was nobody a step ahead of me in town that I could learn from and follow around and watch and emulate. And my heroes, Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, I knew they were way out of my league as far as contact with them, or getting up close with them. So I needed somebody like Joe Ely and Lucinda Williams to sort of be on the edge of their atmosphere, the edge of their environment, to be able to watch down close and then learn from them.
What were you quickest or slowest to adapt to down here, culture-wise?
You know, the friendliness. We noticed that people were open and friendly and welcoming in a big way. We made lifelong friends in our first months here. And I became a Don Walser fan within a few days of getting here. … We drove down in June of ’91 just to check it out. We knew a New England couple that transferred here for their job. They took us around to Amy’s Ice Creams and Treaty Oak, and the touristy things, and we picked up the Austin Chronicle and saw all the places we could play and all the music goin’ on, and we had dinner somewhere and our waitress was a musician, and we said, “Yeah, this is probably the place.” One thing that took us a while is bein’ called Yankee. We didn’t expect that, and it was that little ribbing, you know, not hostile, but just joking and …
“Don’t forget that you’re not one of us yet.”
Yeah, exactly. I remember being surprised by that and we both naturally adopted some southern accents to fit in. You have to if you want to fit in. I still really don’t consider myself a Texan. But I was six weeks old before I ever set foot in Maine, and Mainers are extremly proud of their native heritage, so I could never call myself a Mainer, either.
