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Home  Archive music profiles The Wit and Wonder of John Vanderslice
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The Wit and Wonder of John Vanderslice |
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Written by Sean Moeller
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Friday, 16 December 2005 |
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And I speculate, that if it’s the millionth,
Vanderslice makes it feel entirely possible that of all the people at
the other ends of all the phones in the world, you were his first
choice as the person he wanted to chew up some words with.
A conversation with John Vanderslice, whether it’s the first or the
millionth one, is right up there with a dejá vu moment. If you’re
talking to him for the first time, it’s as if you’d been college
roommates not so long ago. And I speculate, that if it’s the millionth,
Vanderslice makes it feel entirely possible that of all the people at
the other ends of all the phones in the world, you were his first
choice as the person he wanted to chew up some words with.
Before you’ve gotten 20 minutes into an interview and you’ve got him
explaining why he mentions a man in a cowboy suit in one of the 12
stunning songs off of his new album Cellar Door, he’s saying things
like, “The cowboy reference is an ode to the [David] Lynch film
Mulholland Drive. I think you might like that movie. You might not like
it, but it’s something to check out, man.”
He’s already
wagered a postulation on your distinct taste in cinema based
exclusively on your questions about his days as a waiter at the
Berkeley, California restaurant Chez Panisse and whether John Darnielle
of The Mountain Goats is a big-time Chicago Cubs fan or not. He’s got
you all figured out using his Vander-Sense. He’s analyzed the nuances
in the pitch of your voice and run a mess of mental lab tests
deducting, within minutes of knowing you, that Mulholland Drive just
might be something you’d take a liking to.
How he does it
might be the same way that we try to assume things about him using only
his music as evidence. But Vanderslice will not be so easily sussed
out. Using his own lyrics to describe him would plant embellishments in
everything you took for truth. Sweet little references that a fact
checker would red-mark for removal are the backbones of what make the
San Franciscan songwriter and unseasonably nice guy such a venerable
enigma.
With a remote control in his hand, his fingers
gravitate to whatever soft, rubber buttons will take him to the Turner
Classic Movies channel. It’s a passion for movies that has made him a
harder man to say, with any certainty, is who he sings he is. He could
have a cousin in Columbia hunting down rebels in coca fields and he
could know a former stripper named Angela. But he probably doesn’t. It
doesn’t change anything for me. I still believe him. You believe him.
We all believe him.
A better sense of him comes from a
further description of the above movie that inspired “Promising
Actress,” a thumping song that would have been a soundtrack watermark,
distinct and exact.
“It’s a big movie. It’s a really
interesting, weird statement,” he said. “It’s a pretty realized movie
on a lot of levels and there’s a lot of cowboy imagery in that movie
that harkens back to ’30s and ’40s Hollywood. In a way, that’s a love
letter to Hollywood. One of the reasons I wanted to write a song about
the movie was because I feel the same way. The more I get obsessed with
’40s and ’50s movies, the more that that filters through how I see the
world.”
He sees the world as a Technicolor movie with himself
as the writer, director, and set builder. Each role comes in turn. He’s
the one who wheels out the freshly painted span of a bathwater-warm
ocean needed for the backdrop of “Wild Strawberries,” with himself cast
as the lead, swimming in a “dying Filipino light.” He hammers the final
nails into place right before the curtain rises on the dooming horse of
the apocalypse in the stirring call to arms of the opening track “Pale
Horse.” It all seems so real.
And depending on what’s real
to you, it could all be considered that way. Once a voracious reader,
Vanderslice has ceased his bind-cracking and takes all of his subject
matter from what’s already inside. This, along with his movie hunger,
is what assists him in developing his own brand of reality—one that’s
alarmingly soothing regardless of the matters involved.
“I
used to read a lot of novels and then about five years ago I stopped
doing it and I don’t know why. I literally stopped. I was probably in
the middle of a Don DeLillo book. I put it down and I just stopped
reading novels. Really, it baffles me whenever I look back on it.
Sometimes I feel really guilty about it and other times I think it was
the best thing I ever did,” Vanderslice said. “I spent so much time
reading and I thought, ‘I’m not going to input any more information
into my brain.’ I’m only going to write songs. I’m just going to
concentrate on what I’m doing. At some point, it’s just like doing
anything. I just felt like I’d read enough books for a lifetime.
“And so now, I’m like ADD Central. I read Harper’s magazine. I read the
San Francisco Chronicle. I’ll read The New York Times. I’ll read any
local rag on tour. I don’t care. It could be the Des Moines Register.
It could be the Baltimore Sun. I don’t care what the newspaper is; I’ll
read it. I just really stopped needing that 300 to 400 page narrative
going through my brain. And maybe movies took over because I didn’t
really watch that many movies until five or six years ago and now I try
to watch four or five movies a week. That, for me, is when I can kind
of shut my brain off.”
It’s an easy thing to mistake the
kind of person Vanderslice is, if you’re not careful. You’d think he
was sad, maybe. You’d think he was lonely, as a writer for Esquire
magazine recently did. You’d be wrong. He’s just a remarkable
storyteller who happens to like the not-immediately-uplifting stories.
“I think anytime someone writes about my records, it’s all good,” he
said. “I don’t expect a lot from the world on a lot of levels and when
you get something like that, I think it’s pretty great. With that said,
I don’t really feel very lonely, but I’m a total loner. I’m a loner who
hangs out with people all the time.”
And they’re people just
like you. Or at least that’s what he makes you believe. All that
matters is what he can make you believe and, right now, you believe you
know John Vanderslice. He probably likes it that way.
Cellar Door, Vanderslice’s fourth LP, is released January 20 on Barsuk Records.
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