This past weekend was fantastic. I played a couple shows, one at Spike Hill and one at Silent Barn, and both were tremendously pleasing. I played better than usual, I think, and on top of it all I saw some relatives and we got to hang out a little bit. At Spike Hill, I met a couple from Serbia who had made a point to come see a Will Stratton show during their holiday in New York, which I am baffled by but pleased with, and I met a lovely lady who knew of my music through her Australian boyfriend, and described their part of Australia as a pastoral wonderland where people farm and ride their bikes everywhere and people listen to my music. Pretty heady stuff, this foreign flattery. My set at Silent Barn was part of a day long fest full of great music, mostly of the quiet variety. I saw quite a few acts that I liked–the one that seems to have stuck with me the most was Gunfight!, a very appropriately named twangpunk band who thrilled me in the same way that the messier Big Star stuff does, but, you know…twangier. My friends Trevor and JJ played right before me, so I missed most of their set, but enjoyed what I saw–their collaboration seems to be producing a lot of very densely-knit, flamenco-y male torch songs, daring and exhilarating. I am excited to see how they develop as a pair (they go by the name “Dropson”)–their work as solo musicians and collaborators in other things already has a lot of dimensions, so there are a lot of places that this could go.

My set at Silent Barn was one where I recall having fun. Usually when I play by myself I am concentrating too hard to have a whole lot of fun (although performing my music is finally giving me the sort of inherent satisfaction that it should, I think), so I consider this a positive development. People really seemed to connect with the songs, which was part of the fun, and I ended the set happier with it, despite a few slips, than I usually do. I saw a few more acts, all of whom were pretty stellar, and then I went home to get some sleep while the show pressed on.

All of which is to say that I have very low expectations for my performance on Governor’s Island on the 12th. It just has too much going against it. Large venue, daytime, built-in audience, outdoors, loud amplification–all of these are things that I am not used to. But I am really looking forward to it! It’s part of an art fair (cool) I get to ride the ferry (cooler) and I get to be shuttled around on a golf cart after that (coolest!). It’s a recipe for a fine September afternoon, even though I’m probably going to be complete rubbish compared to my last few shows. You can’t win them all.

“There is an untranslatable Romanian word that expresses with great precision the kind of unbearable longing and nostalgia that grips one’s heart when thinking of home. That word is dor. I have felt it many times. Nostalgia for the medieval squares of Sibiu steeped in golden light, longing for the outdoor cafes of Bucharest, drinking new wine, all of us young, intoxicated with poetry and song…I missed the real fairy tales I was raised on…”

- Andrei Codrescu

Nostalgia is a funny thing–one of the funniest, to me at least. When we are feeling nostalgic we so often deny it, but in hindsight it is always so clearly apparent that we were under a sentimental spell completely out of our control. We have the most remarkable ability to be nostalgic for things that we absolutely hated at the time, as well as things that we were indifferent to. Of those two paradoxes, I can’t tell which is more incredible. Sometimes nostalgia is foolish, and sometimes that foolishness is apparent to everyone involved from the start. Other times, at its most rueful, nostalgia is entirely justified. Yet, at least in my experience, all varieties of nostalgia, from the mawkish to the tragic, are equally hard to shake because they are equally appealing to our sense of fantasy. Nostalgia involves translating memories (both the mundane and the extraordinary) into fantastical hyper-memories, mental constructions that glisten for us in all of the ways that we desire.

There have been times in my life where I have been at the mercy of my own nostalgia, where I have felt helpless without those feelings. And then there have been times like now, where in the last year I can only recall have felt nostalgic two times, and neither with any real fervency. For a long time I was obsessed with the idea of redirecting nostalgia toward the present, trying to heighten and savor our perception of every moment so that it becomes one continuous moment. I arrived at this idea after reading (of all things) Chronicles Volume One, Bob Dylan’s pseudo-memoir. In it, Dylan plays with the chronology of his life in such a way that every scene that he describes seems perfectly placed in history, pointing back to its origin and forward to its future in a way that is incredibly beautiful. Like a saxophonist obsessed with circular breathing, or like Franny Glass fixated on the continuous recitation of the Jesus Prayer, for a while I became enamored with the idea of prolonging the nostalgicizing sensation of history into infinity.

And now, like I said, this feeling is so faint and so distant that I can barely remember it, let alone recreate it. Nostalgia is such an incredibly powerful commodity, and one that is discussed so clumsily, if at all. In Brooklyn and elsewhere, it has practically become a music scene of its own, one that I barely understand and feel no real affinity for. The things that my generation’s consciousness seems most conspicuously nostalgic for, the entire aesthetic of our infancy–Lite-Brite, “hot” pink, VHS, 8-bit–those things are so blurry and so long ago that it is hard for me to discern whether they ever meant anything to me beyond their individual functions. I suspect that they didn’t, but taken as an immersive experience, they have been spun into a musical ethos like hay into gold. This makes me smile, if not laugh out loud. And it gives me motivation to make music that, if not nostalgic for the present, is not particularly nostalgic for anything at all.

It has been a fun couple weeks. I have played a few shows, including one where I got to take a day trip up to Western Massachusetts (Holyoke, to be exact), which was a treat. I was playing with two Matthews, Matthew Carefully and Matthew Larsen, at a cancer benefit which was put together by the second Matthew. The proceeds went to The SAMFund, which seems like about as worthwhile a charity as there can be–big ups to Mr. Larsen for putting the event together. It was a really lovely evening. Holyoke is an interesting place, postindustrial and a bit troubled, but still possessing the unhurried beauty that they have in that part of the state. It reminded me of Hudson, New York, which is one of my favorite finds so far in my travels around the Northeast.

There hasn’t been a whole lot of response to the new album so far in the way of write-ups, but people seem to like it a lot, and the sales have been steady (if a bit modest), easing the monthly burden of paying rent in one of the world’s most expensive cities. I can’t complain, in other words! I don’t expect people to be falling over themselves to sit down and listen to an album as underpromoted at this one in an era when many bands are giving such things away, and when people care less and less about the album as an artistic object anyway. That being said, this weekend I am going to devote a big chunk of time to putting together packages to send to a few labels. I have decided to only send the record to labels that I really like, because if I am settling for anything less I might as well just sell it digitally myself, as I am now doing! I think a couple substantive reviews of the album will come out of the woodwork in the next couple weeks. Slow and steady wins the race? I don’t know about that, but I am certainly getting into the idea of doing things slowly and steadily, especially if the alternative means becoming a politician/proselytizer/polemicist for my music. Let the music speak for itself, even if it is in danger of being drowned out, I say–this isn’t a record that can be forced to do much else but stand on its own.

Tonight I was just kind of sitting here, reading the news, and waiting for things to happen, when the thought occurred to me that when I don’t have a label, the whole notion of a release date is pretty stupid, sort of like wearing a white linen suit to a barbecue when you know you’re just going to get sauce all over it. So tonight I took off all of the “hidden” designations on New Vanguard Blues, and it is now available to stream and to buy over at my Bandcamp, in all of its spare, unembellished, modest glory. Enjoy it, even if you don’t buy it. And let me know what you think.

Now I am listening to the second movement of Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, and it is so beautiful.

Now that a week has passed since I recorded it, I think I have enough clarity on things to talk about what I am doing. New Vanguard Blues took a little over 48 hours to record, mix, and (not) master. It will be out on Bandcamp on July 27th. It may be up on iTunes/Amazon/et cetera the same day, or a few days after. I have submitted it and it will be up soon enough, but I can’t say for sure when. Those are the facts–the rest is just my less objective take on things. First of all, I loved recording this album. It was so simple–I engineered the whole thing, and aside from a little percussion on the last track by my close friend Geoff, who you New Yorkers may be hearing from again when he resumes making his music public, I did everything else too. The cover art (above) was done by the incredibly talented Dave Bow, who writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. It wasn’t made for the record by any means, but I think it fits the tone of the songs very well. He was nice enough to let me use it and put some words on it. There I go again, talking about facts! I want to ruminate on what this record means to me, but I keep on getting back to describing the process of its coming into existence, and I guess that’s my way of saying that this album’s creation contains as much of the message as the album’s content. These are songs largely written for me to play by myself, some of which were written in the last couple months, but all of which have been written over the last year. Because of the nature of the songs, and because I was so focused on the idea of recording a record quickly and simply, New Vanguard Blues is a spare record, and I think that it is an honest one.

I have decide to postpone the Kickstarter idea, which was originally to be the focal point of this whole thing. This is for a few reasons. First, now that I have made this record, I don’t want it to be a means to an end. I think it stands sufficiently on its own, and I would rather sell it as such. Second, I want to do more research on what is a realistic cost for the next record instead of sleepwalking my way through the process. There may not be a Kickstarter at all, although that isn’t particularly likely. But it will probably be a couple months at least if I do end up doing it. Finally, I want to send this record to at least a few labels and see if there is any interest in releasing it on vinyl, and this process interests me more right now than pursuing the next record, half-written as it may be. New York has taught me a bit of self-discipline, so far, but I’m still a little flighty!

The album is finished (I recorded it this past weekend), and the Kickstarter will begin on July 27th. Here goes nothing! You can preview the first two tracks by clicking the play button above. Enjoy.

When I stop to try and catch my breath I realize with some relish that I am actually pretty excited about what the next couple months hold, and about how wide open everything has become. I have a plan, and I am looking forward to telling people about it in more detail when I have the first tangible pieces of it in my hands (or in my ears, I guess), but for now I can give you the capsule version.

This coming month–when, I can’t say for sure, as it depends on some things that are out of my control–I will be recording my third album, New Vanguard Blues. I have all of the songs for it–some of them have been released in some form already, but many have not. Recording it is going to be a deliciously quick process; I have been playing now for a few months without recording anything, which is foreign territory for me, and I realize that for the time being it is much better for my creative process. When I don’t record anything (not even roughs), the songs remain fluid and changeable in my mind in a way that would be impossible if I were able to play them back in any sort of immutable way. And it is going to be almost entirely voice and guitar, with very little embellishment (and very little expense). In this way it will resemble the process of recording Vile Bodies, except where those songs were often only half formed, and I used those couple days in the studio to flesh them out, or at least to give an impression of completeness, these songs have become more exact and more pointed as time has gone on, and my playing and lyrics writing has improved. So the recording process will be fast, fun, and solitary. When I am finished, I won’t be mastering the record–it will remain as is, and it will not be sold, at least not yet. I am going to immediately do two things with it when it is completed: first, I will send it out to every label that I have ever wanted to be on (there are only a few of them left in business at this point, unfortunately), and before I wait for any sort of response I will use the album as collateral for people who donate to a Kickstarter that I am starting up to fund my much more elaborate and only partially written fourth record, And The Late Romantics. In other words, people who donate money to help me make my fourth full-length will get to download my third full-length. This fourth record is going to be almost entirely through-composed for strings and voices, and will be idiomatically very different from New Vanguard Blues. If my fund raising is successful, the money will be used to pay session musicians, buy studio time, and maybe hire a publicist or something like that. That’s about all that I can say about it for now.

I have a bad habit of getting excited about these projects of mine before I start realizing them (and getting bogged down by the cloud of small problems that inevitably presents itself), but for once I am confident that the wind is at my back. It may end up taking a little longer than I expect, and worst case scenario, no label that I would like to be on decides to take a chance on me, and the pledge drive fails, but even then I will have a record that I can be proud of, and a method for setting things in motion that I can come back to later on.

This past weekend I played at Joe’s Pub, the first place I have ever played where I had a green room! Turnout was pretty good, the crowd seemed to enjoy it, and I shared the bill with the always-excellent Bing and Ruth, who had gamely agreed to come play on very short notice for such a complex ensemble. It was pretty neat to meet David Moore–he is one of my favorite living composers, and in my vainer moments I consider us to be of a kind–quiet Brooklyn scriveners, doing good work and not making much of a fuss about it. Joining me on saxophone for a couple songs was Gabe Birnbaum, aka Boy Without God. I saw his band play at Matchless in Greenpoint the following night, and they tore it up–keep an eye out for this guy, for real.

(For memorial day):

(Embedded song removed)

Friday, May 21st, was what would have been Arthur Russell’s 59th birthday. Every May 21st for the past seven years, performance artist Rafael Sanchez has traveled from Brooklyn to Manhattan on this anniversary, an act which is especially interesting to me because of its mixture of solitude and absolute transparency, and the endurance which it requires. More on that in a minute.

I found out about Rafael from Arthur’s longtime partner, Tom Lee. Tom got in touch with me after my WNYC performance a couple months ago (one of my songs, “Do You Remember The Morning,” mentions Arthur and Tom, as well as referring to Arthur’s song “Our Last Night Together,” an all-time favorite song of mine). Tom is incredibly nice and unreserved, and sent me an e-mail alerting me to what was going on this year, suggesting that I go and watch if I were interested. According to Tom, in previous years, Rafael’s performance has taken him along the West Side Highway in a rowing machine, on the Staten Island ferry, across bridges and through countless neighborhoods in several boroughs of the city, and even to Maine where some of Arthur’s family lives. This year the plan was to start at 9:30 PM, going down Bedford Avenue from McCarren Park in Williamsburg, through Bed Stuy, across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, up Lafayette into the village, through Tompkins Square Park and up to 12th Street to the apartment building where Arthur and Tom resided. I planned on meeting Rafael and anyone else who would be present at the beginning and following him to the Brooklyn Bridge, and probably calling it a night there.

I ended up running late thanks to my laundry, so to save time I took the J train to Marcy and walked over to Bedford, thinking that I would probably be able to intercept the procession and join up with them from wherever our paths met. Thankfully, it ended up being that easy; in the self-conscious commotion of central Williamsburg, I didn’t see them until we were literally passing each other, and so I quickly looped around and began following them. It wasn’t clear to me at first whether I was supposed to interact with the group at all, so for the time being I just trailed them. Rafael was pushing a cart that had a boombox perched in the top, playing a mixture of some of Arthur’s songs. There were sticks of incense burning in his hair, which was tied into a bun. Alongside him were two photographers and a man with a second boombox, playing the same tape, dictating things into a little voice recorder as we went. As the first song came to a close, the group stopped and Rafael danced exuberantly for a moment, threw a couple of handfuls of glitter, and wrote the title of the second song on the ground in chalk, followed by “Arthur Russell 5/21/2010″. Then he took a blue blanket out from the cart, made waves with it on the ground, put it back on the cart, and we started to move again. By now I was more conspicuous as an active observer, and Rafael asked me if I liked Arthur’s music. I said, “Yes! Tom told me about this!” Rafael replied, “Oh! You must be Will!” And with that, I was a participant in the piece–still primarily an observer, to be certain, but as we walked further down Bedford, and I talked a little bit with Rafael and met the others in the group, there was a palpable solidarity between all of us. It slowly became clear that I would be making the whole trip with them.

The other boombox carrier turned out to be a journalist named Ari Rubin, probably a year or two older than me (although I have realized I am terrible at guessing people’s ages), who had recently returned from Uganda. We soon started carrying the boombox in shifts. The photographers were Ari’s friend Evan, who would be with us until Chinatown, and Jonathan, a videographer and former student of Rafael’s. As we made our way down into South Williamsburg, the general plan hit a snag: it was Friday night, and the Hasids would not take kindly to our walking all the way through their neighborhood blasting music. Rafael got on the phone with Tom to commiserate for a minute, and a general consensus quickly took shape: we would walk across the Williamsburg Bridge instead of the Brooklyn Bridge, and prolong the procession through downtown Manhattan. The trip across the bridge was one of the highlights of the trip–there were fireworks coming from what looked like the Financial District across the river, and the songs echoed beautifully and eerily under the amber lights, against the sounds of the passing cars, the bicycles, the murmuring pedestrians and the passing trains.

We ended up walking about 9 miles, weaving in and out of different neighborhoods in downtown Manhattan, onto docks and past nightclubs, running into an amazing variety of people, and pausing once in a while to appreciate those fleeting moments when the two tapes lined up with each other exactly and then quickly fell out of phase again. As I remarked to the guys who were there, it seemed especially apt to me that there were tape phasing phenomena going on as we walked through downtown, since Arthur had been such an important part of the Kitchen scene in the 70’s when Steve Reich was perfecting his own exploitation of phasing in the same area. Echoes of the past and all that. The night ended at the church across from Arthur and Tom’s apartment in the East Village, and the tapes, having played through three times over the course of the night, stopped as if on cue. As I walked to my train on the Lower East Side, I ran into a couple of the chalk inscriptions that Rafael had made in the hours before. It was a gorgeous night.

I ended up meeting Tom in person the following evening–we had dinner in Park Slope where he lives at the moment, and we talked about all sorts of things, and then we walked to Nat Baldwin’s show at the Issue Project Room in a former cannery down the street, where we met up with Rachel Henry, Arthur’s niece and singer in the band Cabiria, and her friend who was visiting from Charlottesville. It was a really nice show, and a great space, and Nat closed his set with a song of Arthur’s, “A Little Lost.” I felt strange and privileged being there for that, sitting next to Tom and having just talked with him about the amazing web of people and experiences that continues to form because of Arthur Russell’s music.

Dear Joucim,

Pardon the quickness of my reply–I get Google Alerts, and while they creep me out, I feel obligated to make use of them when I can. Usually they are just signs of people pirating my music, and it’s always refreshing to receive one which is anything else. In short, I appreciate what you’ve written, and I largely agree with it. No Wonder was a transitional record, and one that has pained me to listen to ever since it was finished. At first I was a little defensive about it (the record, not your review), but enough time has passed for me to accept it for what it is. It’s a little disappointing to think that my sporadic work on it, spread over a few years (!), went toward something that people can view as a misstep, and thankfully I know enough about myself to be comfortable with its transparent calculations and its forced eclecticism. I take issue with your characterization of my influences, because they are largely wrong, but it is a minor qualm in the end. It was a “look what I can do” record, not a “look what I have to say” record. I felt that when I decided to stop making it, and I finished it with a vow to never make a record like it again. My adolescence is coming to a close, and I couldn’t be more thankful for that.

That being said, I’m not sure you will ever enjoy anything that I make again. I am moving further away from the intuitive songwriting of my first record–I have grown past it for the same reasons that your review was so self-conscious. I don’t live in a world where the first record makes sense anymore. I don’t live in a small town–I don’t sentimentalize loneliness anymore. And why should I? Why should I cling to anything that doesn’t do me any good?

I played a show tonight at Silent Barn, in Ridgewood Queens. There were probably 30 people there. My friend Gabe sang with me and played some saxophone, and it felt kind of wonderful. As we finished the set I had the realization that I no longer make music to impress, or to attract. I only make music to speak my mind, and that’s all anyone can ever hope to do with any success. There’s no telling whether I will ever put out another record on a label–why bother to do anything but make what I have the capacity to make? Why fight the mechanisms which collectively make most of our work commercially obsolete? Why not abandon the pretense of marketability in order to make music which pleases me? I don’t have anything better to do.

I hope you continue to find what you are looking for, and let me know if you hear signs of life on my more recent work (either my free EP from late last year, or my free live EP from WNYC). While I don’t expect your answer to be any sort of affirmation, and it no longer makes any difference to where I am headed, I’d be interested to hear your response.

Best,

Will Stratton