Hillingdon Mind interview outtakes
These are the outtakes – parts that did not make it to the final cut. The actual interview is here. Many thanks to the interview author, who was so kind to share this with John’s listeners.
Can you describe the essence of your new album?
(Long pause and a groan from John)
“Ah man. I guess… yeah I don’t know if I can answer that. I find myself thinking of the places it was coming from or the things that tied it together. I feel like I’d be doing them a disservice to try to put them into a paragraph or something. I’m sorry about that. I never felt so much like I’d put myself in a state where the record that insisted on being made. It was almost more like the record made me- like the record as a sort of a… I guess you could say like a level of existence that isn’t expressed through matter or through people in their activities, that the level of existence that is always there and I had put myself in the right place for that level of existence to express itself through me- and that is just what occurred.
I’ve just never felt so much like, except maybe with the exception of my first solo record- it felt like that same thing was happening. That it felt like there’s some other plane of existence that’s expressing itself through me that couldn’t be expressed any other way than for somebody to be in exactly the mental place, the mental and spiritual and psychological place that I was at, at that time. And for it to be through music and could not be expressed in any other way but music and words set to music.
The essence of it is some immeasurable, unfathomable, unquantifiable place that’s not a place that anybody could put their finger on. That’s the best way I can describe it without just trying to reduce everything to understandable things- that would be true to what happened. It was almost like I’ve had ideas for things and they would just seem like ideas of a direction I wanted things to go, or sound that I was looking for- and the way that circumstances would end up, so in harmony with that, whatever that vague spot was: as a concept. What was happening a lot was that these vague ideas of a concept or direction or continuity in the lyrics, as things gradually came together as I worked on this record, every so often over the course a year I would find that things that would seem to be chance would end up having a direct link to fleshing these vague ideas- that wasn’t something vague at all. And so it carries that feeling that this is something trying to express itself and it’s using me to do it. And although I had specific conceptual ideas in relationship to it- they were much more vague than the final result was. And for that reason I felt that my brain and my soul were a sort of a middleman, and felt like the real participant in it was something unknown, and the final result which couldn’t be anything other than it ended up being.
That’s the closest I can come to describing the essence of it because it’s something that isn’t accessible in any other way than exactly the way I went about accessing it. I was really wanting to make a record that I could sit down and listen to late at night and it would trip my head out. I really wasn’t listening to much rock music and was really wanting to make rock music that had all the qualities that I was wanting to hear in music. I can’t go too deep into it but things like tonal variation and things like sonic effects and certain psychedelic… the music sorts of builds like a… the music builds spaces. You might be in a room with a 12 foot ceiling but the music you’re hearing makes you feel like it’s a hundred foot tall or something. I wanted to produce those kind of effects with music. It was important for me to need to create these spaces with music. So I think a lot of my motivation was wanting to build rooms and spaces and create a certain artificial environment through the electronic medium of the studio. I guess I don’t want to …I’m not prepared to go into the lyrical aspect now, but what I wanted to achieve with the lyrics was also very specific. And again I had no idea how specific it was gonna be. As specific as it was to me in relationship to anything else I’ve done- it was still very vague in a lot of ways compared to how specific it ended up being. And for this reason I feel like I was just some sort of a link- that there was something that needed to be expressed. So the essence of it is probably all unknown stuff.’ (John laughs)”
In music this idea is being express, and by the end of the song there’s every element of the music that has been doing something, is constantly at a different number than other things, and to top it off depending on where a musician puts something- in relationship to where the other musician puts something- these things seem to have sort of way of pushing and pulling at each another- of offsetting one another. The straightest drumbeat can sound like a really funky drumbeat if the guitar player is delicately placing his notes in between in certain ways. I’ve got the point where I’m constantly analysing music from this numerical standpoint, as I’ve become aware of a system of analysing music where it’s very graspable from these relationships. I’ve been learning music on my guitar my whole life studying- learning the bass part, learning the guitar part, learning the keyboard part, and I’ve noticed that in music I hear as being bad- it expresses very little about change- and that’s another thing that I feel like music is constantly expressing- is that change: that’s the nature of motion and movement, and in the end it’s nothing actually that’s changed… I’m getting off the subject.
This outtake continues directly onto the second portion of the interview.
In music that to my mind sounds good, it’s expressing the ideas like change- but there’s also a certain inter-relationship between the instruments. They’re not all constantly playing the same accents at the same time. They’re not all constantly following the same rhythmic structure. What happens in a good band- the guitar player is feeling the rhythm in one way and accenting certain rhythms in one way, the bass player- the way he’s accenting the rhythms contradicts what the guitar player is doing. It interweaves between them and it’s literally a contradiction. If the bass player was following the guitar player, there’s less room in that for it to be interesting, to me. What I like hearing is where the drummer is feeling the music in one way, and hitting certain accents, certain numbers- the guitar playing is hitting and feeling it in another way, and hitting on other numbers. What I’m doing is reducing the various potential 16th notes that a particular piece of music – every note on it is hitting more or less on one of those 16th , or 99% of the rock music that exists.
For example if you divide a bar into 16th notes- the guitar player may be accenting on the first one, the third one, and forth one, the seventh one- and the bass player may be accenting on the first one, the fifth one, the ninth one and so on. The guitar player may be playing soft, and the bass player playing loud- if they’re hitting on the same accents, what it creates is this constant…Each person is doing something different but at the same time they’re doing one thing together. This is a very pleasing idea because so often to a human being the world it seems like it’s this chaotic place where everybody’s doing something different, everybody believes something different, everybody has a different idea of what’s true and what’s false; everybody has their strong opinions about everything. There’s so much difference that it’s overwhelming and I think that it’s one of the pleasing things that music is expressing is that- yes… the bass is different from the guitar, is different from the drums, is different from the vocals- they’re all doing different things but they’re doing one thing together. This is something that families can’t seem to do and schools try to force on people and they can’t do it- and bands do it; classical composers do it; jazz musicians do it.
It shows that people can move in a type of harmony and that harmony exists as potential in the universe. I feel that this is one of the things that music is constantly expressing that is so pleasing and soothing to us. I think it must be part of the reason people look to music for its soothing qualities. I look to music for a lot of other things besides that, but people really seem to like it when there’s a certain type of mellowing effect on the mind and I think that this idea of there being differences, that it’s the reconciliation of those differences- it’s like an argument that’s finished. You may go to your school and the message that the teachers giving you could be reduced to numbers, it would be ‘No I say that 4 is 4 and 8 is 8, and 10 is 10 and 15 is 15′ and the message that music is telling you is 15 is 9 is 8 is 5 is 3.
That’s what’s happening if you analyse it in terms of numbers. Music is constantly saying 300 is the same thing as 200, is the same thing as 150. Because like I said the guitarist is on his 150th note- if you only heard the guitarist that’s on his 150th note, 150 would be all you could see. But when you notice that when it’s heard with the bass, with the drums, the bass is on 200, the guitarist is on note 150, drums and you know, might be on the 175th snare hit, on the 100th bass drum. There’s all these numbers that really we don’t keep track of them in our minds on any conscious way. Our brains, our subconscious, our brains are very advanced that way. We take in everything that comes in in detail like that. There’s just a drastic difference between every number to our brains and so to ear music express this idea that they’re all one thing and that they’re not different from one another is really pleasing in a world that tries to tell you ‘this is this way, that is that way’ ‘This is only what I say it is and nothing else’, and music it’s so open to be whatever you want it to be and even reduced to its numerical formulas. These formulas are very pleasing to people. I know it has to do with the numerical content of it.
Even the traditional pop song format, which is so pleasing to people for some god-damn reason. It’s the same numbers throughout. It’s like you have a 4 bar intro or an 8 bar intro; you have a verse that goes on for 16 bars or 32 bars- one or the other- not 17 bars, not 33 bars. Then you go into the chorus. That’s typically half the length of the verse. There are some songs where it’s a ¼ of the length or some songs where it would be 1/8th the length, or some songs where the chorus is one line, but that line last for you know- it’s always going to be a multiple of two. It’s usually going to be 4 or a multiple of 4. And 4 would be the shortest it would be. These are numbers that have been set in stone for 100’s of years- most music is written in 4/4. Though people aren’t aware of it, and the person that’s listening isn’t going to say ‘this song’s in 4/4′, unless they’re a musician.
But the fact is they don’t listen to any music that isn’t 4/4. When music isn’t in 4/4, it throws most people off. So to think, people don’t have a very real understanding of the numbers that are going on with the music. Their appreciation of it is dependent on a certain type of organisation of those numbers. In a pop song format- after the first chorus you go back to the verse, and this verse is going to be the length of the first verse or it’s going to be half as long. Not 1/10th as long, not 1/12 as long. It’s very precise- it’s all in 4’s- and sections are half the length of another section or twice the length of another section. Also when the vocal comes in- that’s when you start counting how long that section is. The 2nd verse has an intro to it. That intro might be 2 bars or 4 bars, but once the singer comes in- the brain immediately says ‘one’.
You’re not conscious of the brain saying ‘one’, but that’s how we hear music. If it didn’t come in there, you’d think something was wrong. So the idea that this numerical organisation of music, it tells us something not so much about the music, but what our brains like to hear, and what our brains perceive as being organised. Where a cat hears music- they don’t hear it as being organised as we do, because that music was created with a human sense of organisation. Cats don’t perceive time in the same way we do, and so they can’t possible hear music in the same way we do. It’s organised by human beings for human beings. This need for it to be so structured as people have made it, I think is really unnecessary.’
