I heard years ago that you were a Tape Op reader. Am I correct?
Oh, yeah. I still get Tape Op. I told these publicists, “Your one directive is to get me in Tape Op, and then you will have effectively earned your money.” [laughs]
Well, there you go. It was worth it!
Yeah. I directed a movie years ago called No Way Jose in which I played a musician, and my friend Caitlin, she's a musician, and her husband John were in the movie – he's a musician too.
Oh, the Gutenbergers! They both used to work for Tape Op.
Yeah. She gave me a whole bunch of Tape Ops that are scattered all throughout the movie. We're in New York now, so we haven't seen them in quite a long time. They're great people.
Totally. I was in the studio years ago, and one of my clients said, “You’ve got to see this film (Untitled)” that you were in.
I'm super proud of that.
That's one of the coolest art versus commerce films I've ever seen.
Yeah, I love that film. That was such a fun character, and we got to go to Philip Glass' studio [The Looking Glass Studios]. I’ve always been into Steve Reich [Tape Op #15] and Philip Glass. But I didn't know quite as much about that kind of real out-there minimalist music. It was fun to do a deep dive and then get to play a fucking crazy asshole! [laughter] Some of my gear is in that movie, like some [Electro-Harmonix] Memory Man and Moog pedals and shit that I brought with me.
When you were portraying this avant-garde musician, did it help that you actually play music?
A little, but the character's a better musician than me. He's supposed to be a classically trained pianist, so there's a lot of bluffing that goes on there. But the sampling was relatable, so that was easy to get into. The basic premise of being such a purist is something that has, in a way, probably been a little self-defeating. It's definitely a thing that has consumed me, and maybe to my commercial detriment to some degree.
With music and film?
I guess. I don't know. Music to me is: I do what I can do, and it just happens to be whatever it is. There's no real ideology. I find that it's more of an impediment when I write. As a writer of screenplays and such, I find myself really self-editing. Sometimes, I won't write anything just because it's not up to my standards. I thought I was going to be a filmmaker when I was a teenager. I've written or co-written and directed three movies, but I assumed that's what I would be doing. I think part of it is that it's very hard to make a movie, especially one that breaks through. It's hard to make a movie that you even like. But I have found that I'll be thinking about writing something, and before I'm even at the fifth page, some combination of self-loathing and a dogmatic, puritanical, artistic self-consciousness shuts me down. Like, “If I would criticize this, then I shouldn't write it.” My friends think that I'm very hard on media, the movies, or whatever, but I'm no harder on it than I am on myself. But that's not necessarily a good thing. I probably should be more forgiving.
I'm sure you find that with music you have to have the doors wide open at first, and then edit or critique.
Yeah, 100 percent. This new record [When the Ships of My Dreams Return] was particularly challenging because there was no sounding board at all. In the past, there had been at least one other person; and in this case, there was no one. Having so much to do technically kept me distracted enough that I didn't have as much bandwidth to worry about the artistic stuff. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it got me through the process. There are parts of this which are up to some artistic standard I have, whereas there's music that I've done in collaboration with other people in the past that I prefer, probably because there was somebody else there and I wasn't worrying about all the technical details. But, having said that, I would go to bed each night wondering if I should even be doing this. I was split in so many different directions that one part of me couldn't overwhelm the other part, in terms of criticism.
When we're constantly learning, like the technical side of this, there's a beneficial aspect of that for our brains.
