|
Richard Buckner is not a planner by nature. The downcast singer/songwriter might mention that he's thinking two or three albums into the future beyond his latest album Meadow, but that could all change in a spontaneous heart skip, and he knows it.
Take the last four years, for instance. In 2002, Buckner released Impasse, an album that scrapbooked the bleak slice of his life that included canning an album he deemed unworthy, struggling with writer's block and enduring the end of his second marriage. Although he played nearly every instrument on Impasse, he moved away from the solo acoustic persona he'd perfected and expanded his arrangements considerably.
After a move from Canada to Austin, Tex., Buckner tapped into the local scene to populate his music with a wide cast of characters on his debut album for Merge, Dents and Shells. With his writing frustration well behind him, the mood on the album was the most upbeat of Buckner's career, assisted perhaps by the financial and emotional uplift created when Volkswagen tapped "Ariel Ramirez" from his Since album as the backdrop for a Touareg commercial.
All of this brings us inevitably to the present. Before Dents and Shells was released, Buckner had relocated to Brooklyn and was working on his next set of songs when he realized that he needed to shake up the pattern he had established.
"I did the last couple myself and I really didn't want to do that again," says Buckner.
"My old producer, J.D. Foster, lives in Manhattan, so I got a hold of him and told him I wanted to make a record on the cheap so we rented a few things and did it at my house and his house and a few other places and it went from there."
Buckner and Foster, who produced 1997's Devotion + Doubt and 1998's Since, largely considered Buckner's two classic albums, have remained good friends over the past decade, so their teaming for another album was inevitable.
"He's somebody I depend upon, and not just to kvetch about the life of a musician, or the state of the world or humanity and all that crap," says Buckner. "He's one of the few people in the world that I can talk to about everything."
One of Buckner's prime motivations for bringing Foster into the Meadow process was about relinquishing control, something Buckner has had difficulty doing on his past records.
"I write the songs and I work on the demos and the ideas I have down, but I don't want to lean on those when I make the actual record," says Buckner. "So I wanted (to), almost as an experiment to myself, put a bunch of stuff in his lap and whether or not I agreed or understood it, just let it go and see what he came up with. It was a little experiment to see if I could do that. Control's kind of a problem sometimes."
And there's the dichotomy in Buckner's process: he's essentially a non-planning control freak. For his next album, he had initially thought about doing something miles away from the rootsy Jayhawks-channeled sound of Meadow.
"My original plan was to make this weird, raggle-taggle, Giorgio Moroder-esque homemade, gated synthesizer record," says Buckner. "Then I got the songs about the time I hooked up with J.D. so I turned the plan around just because I thought it would be fun to try something else with him."
Another big influence on Meadow's beefier band sound came about through a chance meeting with former Guided by Voices guitarist Doug Gillard at 2005's Tape Op Conference in New Orleans. Buckner invited Gillard to contribute guitar when he was in New York for some scheduled soundtrack work; Gillard's subsequent work is a palpable and powerful presence on Meadow, so much so that Gillard accompanied Buckner on the first leg of the tour (he'll be sporting a full band on this winter circuit).
"I had J.D. over to the house and we got the skeletons of the songs together, then went into a studio and had a couple drummers come in and put drums on things, then Doug came to town, so it took shape that way more than anything else," says Buckner. "After I met Doug, I decided I wanted to get a little less 'home studio' with it."
For all of the control that Buckner tends to exhibit in the studio in the pursuit of his songs once they're written, getting to those songs can be a chaotic maelstrom of creative energy. Buckner has perfected a fragmented system for documenting his ideas that works well for him andhas lately required little more than time and space to process the pieces.
"I usually tour alone and I carry some equipment with me, sometimes full-on recording gear, sometimes a small handheld mini-disc or eight-track digital thing I can record basic ideas on," says Buckner. "So after a period of touring — a year or year and a half — I have maybe a couple hundred little chunks of things I've recorded in hotel rooms or while I'm driving, where I have a melody idea and I shout it into the thing and listen to it later. Then I sort through it and see how many of them are the same song, based on the same idea and whittle it down to have this pile of stuff.
"It's happened that way like the last three records, because I have more gear now and a space to work in. I've actually been living places for a couple years at a time in the past few years, which I wasn't doing for awhile. So if I have enough time off in a period of time, it all comes out and at the end of that period I have the pile of ideas that I can edit through."
If there is an element of planning to Buckner's methodology, it is in keeping his radar attuned for the unplanned. That is where he often finds his greatest inspiration.
"Working at home to get the pieces together, by the time I finish that process I'm totally disgusted with myself," says Buckner with a laugh. "So I look forward to having other people in and other influences. I'm searching for good mistakes, for ideas that I couldn't normally come up with. You have a better chance of that with other people in the room."
RICHARD BUCKNER plays the Southgate House Thursday with Six Parts Seven.
