Features | Interviews
Centro-matic
By David Greenwald | 1 September 2006
To say the least, Centro-matic’s Will Johnson is a busy guy. In the last twelve months, his band South San Gabriel released and toured for the album The Carlton Chronicles and then reconvened as Centro-matic to celebrate its 10 year anniversary with a tenth album, the excellent Fort Recovery. Johnson has spent the last month out on tour with fellow songwriters David Bazan (Pedro The Lion), Mark Eitzel (American Music Club) and Vic Chesnutt, performing collectively as the Undertow Orchestra. Johnson took a few minutes before a show to call CMG’s David Greenwald, and the two discussed the process behind his prolific output, summer camp with Centro-matic, and his fantasy festival line-up.
*****
David Greenwald (CMG): On Fort Recovery, are these all new songs? When did you write them?
Will Johnson (WJ): One of them was written three days before we loaded into the studio. A couple others had been written for five or six years even, so it kind of varies. There were a few old ones we felt were worth giving attention to so we ahead and gave it a shot and got them in there.
CMG: I was just reading the press release, and Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers is calling it a masterpiece. Is he a friend of yours?
WJ: He is actually a friend. He came across us five years ago, I guess. He would show up to shows in Athens whenever we stopped in town and we got to know him through successive visits. That was where the friendship was really forged. So yeah, it’s been going strong for a number of years now.
CMG: The South San Gabriel album that you guys released last year was about cats. For Fort Recovery is there an overriding theme, or is it just a collection of rock songs?
WJ: It’s a little more scattershot, yeah. It’s just more of a collection of rock songs with many different themes as opposed to the one theme that the South San Gabriel record dealt with.
CMG: The last little bit of Fort Recovery, the end of “Take a Rake,” that sounds like Black Sabbath riffing to me. Was that intentional?
WJ: It was inspired by that a little bit, yeah, it certainly was.
CMG: Obviously you’re a pretty prolific writer. Is the process of writing Centro-matic songs different for South San Gabriel or for your solo material?
WJ: I don’t know about the process itself. Sometimes I get into certain modes where I’m really attracted to writing a certain type of song. So I might write more along the lines of South San Gabriel if I’m home from a big rock tour and my ears are kind of tired and I really just feel like turning it down a bit and experimenting with certain sounds or certain instruments that might inspire South San Gabriel material. It depends on the time but I try not to overanalyze it in the process for the fact that you take a chance on killing the song that way, and that’s the worst thing.
CMG: I’m sure you write more songs than you can use on your albums. How do you choose which songs are ultimately going to be on the album? You said you have songs that are like five or six years old. How do you go back and pick out the things you want to use?
WJ: We’ll go through and listen to a lot of old recordings that I might’ve made around the house and four-tracks or even earlier multitracks that just didn’t make it, and discuss them. We’re pretty democratic in the process of picking what songs we want to go on Centro-matic records. We make a lot of notes and try to maintain a real communicative balance of why we think those songs should make it and why they don’t. It’s fortunate that we all get along well enough and we all find ourselves on pretty similar pages most of the time. Not a lot of arguments taking place, fortunately. Not yet. (Laughs)
CMG: What to you makes a song great? What makes it worthwhile?
WJ: Well, it depends on what you’re trying to convey. I mean, that’s a pretty broad-based question but I think a lot of the time it could be a really unexpected thing. It could be a song that you didn’t give the time of day for years, and something in the recording process might trigger a certain inspiration or a certain thing that you never knew you felt about that song or a certain love for it that you really weren’t giving it, so to speak. I say that because there sometimes are songs that I’ve written that are just sitting around and I may not think much of them. I think of it as a throwaway scrap, but then the band’ll usually provide a better filter than me and say “Man, I think this is worth doing, we should definitely pursue this.” And lo and behold, it can occasionally turn out to be one of my favorite songs on the record. Something I might see as a turd, someone else might see as a nugget of gold.
CMG: We're talking about the band being very democratic – when you go into the studio to record, they’ve already heard the demos or the four-tracks, so how much improvisation goes on and how much musical input does the rest of the band have?
WJ: A lot. A pretty good deal, really. We’ll get the basics down and then just get people in the tank so to speak: get in there and play the piano part, or if you’re inspired by this little part or whatever’s going on, get in there and give it a shot and build the song up from there. That’s when the song starts to take on a life of its own. That's when something truly cool can happen to something that maybe you didn’t think much of at first, that’s just a little 30-second scrap of music. I don’t know if it’s going anywhere, but then once you get other bodies and brains involved that’s where some of the good stuff starts to happen. We go in for a process of three or four weeks it seems like, each time, put our heads down, work 12, 14 hour days. We cook out together, it’s kind of like going to camp with your friends in a way.
CMG: Fort Recovery almost sounds like a live album to me. How do you guys record in the studio? What’s your process like?
WJ: We did do a lot of this live with just guitars and drums. We would do bass overdubs here and there. Most of the time, we’ll cut the drums and guitars, and maybe the vocal, and add things from there. We wanted it to have something of that live feel, we wanted it to be a raw record and even bombastic in places, so we were definitely going for that when we loaded all the gear in to start recording.
CMG: A friend of mine is a big fan of yours and he wanted to ask if you’re going to have any more material out this year. He’s looking forward to more solo material.
WJ: More solo material? Nobody’s ever said that to me! I’m kidding, that’s a joke (laughs). I think there may be. There are a lot of songs left over from these Fort Recovery sessions that we’ll probably find a home for later in the year. It’s not really decided as to how we want to do it. There’s a good amount of material from these sessions to be released, so I’m hoping we can get at least an EP or a tour record or something like that, some little nugget to throw on the merch table out by the end of the year.
CMG: Right now you’re on a solo tour with Mark Eitzel and some other guys, how’s playing those shows been and how did that get put together?
WJ: It’s been great, it’s been chaotic and beautiful. We all share the same manager. It was the idea of our manager Bob Andrews last year, but in a way that it’s not us just sitting there playing acoustic guitars in the round. The concept was actually to form a band and back each other on our own music. So we’re on stage doing two sets of three songs per songwriter, so everybody does six of their own songs, but on the other 18 everybody’s in the backing band. We’re all on stage for a couple hours each night as a full band so it’s definitely been a challenge to get all the songs learned. It’s been really stressful but absolutely wonderful too, for the fact that I think the admiration and the respect for one another is such that we’re all very thrilled to be doing this. It’s changed a lot of things on how I see myself as somebody who writes songs and it’s also lent some new angles on how I’ve always seen their songs, and I’ve been listening to all three of their records for many many years. It’s definitely been one of the more educational musical experiences of my life.
CMG: Centro-matic is famous for touring and touring and touring. What aspect of being a musician do you like better, the writing, or the recording, or the touring?
WJ: It sounds too cheap, but I love them all, and for very different reasons. I think that the writing and the recording, it’s definitely a fun thing but to me it leans more toward a spiritual thing, and a lucid kind of air about it, I guess. The live thing is definitely still spiritual but it’s also more just about having a good time and making the moment exactly what you can, just then and there with a crowd. So they all have different meanings, none of which is more or less important than the other. That’s the absolute addictive elixir of that cycle to me, that so much can be gleaned from all three.
CMG: On the tour right now, you’re with three very different other songwriters. What’ve you been listening to on the tour bus?
WJ: A lot of This American Life. A lot of Mitch Hedberg, the late comedian. A lot of Nina Simone. The new Drive-By Truckers. Kayne West, I don’t know, we’re all over, everybody’s got their iPods in full motion.
CMG: So if you could put together a fantasy music festival like Coachella or Bonnaroo or something like that, what would be your line-up?
WJ: Can I bring people back from the dead?
CMG: Yes, absolutely.
WJ: That’s awesome. Thanks for letting me do that. Roy Orbison, Jimi Hendrix, I don’t know, Woodie Guthrie, Randy Newman, My Morning Jacket. There’s a few. [Laughs] Let’s start with those and branch it on out from there. Probably have Aretha, she’d be there. Robert Johnson would definitely be there. It’d be a crazy festival, it’d be nuts. Willie Nelson would play…it’d be good.
*****
David Greenwald (CMG): On Fort Recovery, are these all new songs? When did you write them?
Will Johnson (WJ): One of them was written three days before we loaded into the studio. A couple others had been written for five or six years even, so it kind of varies. There were a few old ones we felt were worth giving attention to so we ahead and gave it a shot and got them in there.
CMG: I was just reading the press release, and Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers is calling it a masterpiece. Is he a friend of yours?
WJ: He is actually a friend. He came across us five years ago, I guess. He would show up to shows in Athens whenever we stopped in town and we got to know him through successive visits. That was where the friendship was really forged. So yeah, it’s been going strong for a number of years now.
CMG: The South San Gabriel album that you guys released last year was about cats. For Fort Recovery is there an overriding theme, or is it just a collection of rock songs?
WJ: It’s a little more scattershot, yeah. It’s just more of a collection of rock songs with many different themes as opposed to the one theme that the South San Gabriel record dealt with.
CMG: The last little bit of Fort Recovery, the end of “Take a Rake,” that sounds like Black Sabbath riffing to me. Was that intentional?
WJ: It was inspired by that a little bit, yeah, it certainly was.
CMG: Obviously you’re a pretty prolific writer. Is the process of writing Centro-matic songs different for South San Gabriel or for your solo material?
WJ: I don’t know about the process itself. Sometimes I get into certain modes where I’m really attracted to writing a certain type of song. So I might write more along the lines of South San Gabriel if I’m home from a big rock tour and my ears are kind of tired and I really just feel like turning it down a bit and experimenting with certain sounds or certain instruments that might inspire South San Gabriel material. It depends on the time but I try not to overanalyze it in the process for the fact that you take a chance on killing the song that way, and that’s the worst thing.
CMG: I’m sure you write more songs than you can use on your albums. How do you choose which songs are ultimately going to be on the album? You said you have songs that are like five or six years old. How do you go back and pick out the things you want to use?
WJ: We’ll go through and listen to a lot of old recordings that I might’ve made around the house and four-tracks or even earlier multitracks that just didn’t make it, and discuss them. We’re pretty democratic in the process of picking what songs we want to go on Centro-matic records. We make a lot of notes and try to maintain a real communicative balance of why we think those songs should make it and why they don’t. It’s fortunate that we all get along well enough and we all find ourselves on pretty similar pages most of the time. Not a lot of arguments taking place, fortunately. Not yet. (Laughs)
CMG: What to you makes a song great? What makes it worthwhile?
WJ: Well, it depends on what you’re trying to convey. I mean, that’s a pretty broad-based question but I think a lot of the time it could be a really unexpected thing. It could be a song that you didn’t give the time of day for years, and something in the recording process might trigger a certain inspiration or a certain thing that you never knew you felt about that song or a certain love for it that you really weren’t giving it, so to speak. I say that because there sometimes are songs that I’ve written that are just sitting around and I may not think much of them. I think of it as a throwaway scrap, but then the band’ll usually provide a better filter than me and say “Man, I think this is worth doing, we should definitely pursue this.” And lo and behold, it can occasionally turn out to be one of my favorite songs on the record. Something I might see as a turd, someone else might see as a nugget of gold.
CMG: We're talking about the band being very democratic – when you go into the studio to record, they’ve already heard the demos or the four-tracks, so how much improvisation goes on and how much musical input does the rest of the band have?
WJ: A lot. A pretty good deal, really. We’ll get the basics down and then just get people in the tank so to speak: get in there and play the piano part, or if you’re inspired by this little part or whatever’s going on, get in there and give it a shot and build the song up from there. That’s when the song starts to take on a life of its own. That's when something truly cool can happen to something that maybe you didn’t think much of at first, that’s just a little 30-second scrap of music. I don’t know if it’s going anywhere, but then once you get other bodies and brains involved that’s where some of the good stuff starts to happen. We go in for a process of three or four weeks it seems like, each time, put our heads down, work 12, 14 hour days. We cook out together, it’s kind of like going to camp with your friends in a way.
CMG: Fort Recovery almost sounds like a live album to me. How do you guys record in the studio? What’s your process like?
WJ: We did do a lot of this live with just guitars and drums. We would do bass overdubs here and there. Most of the time, we’ll cut the drums and guitars, and maybe the vocal, and add things from there. We wanted it to have something of that live feel, we wanted it to be a raw record and even bombastic in places, so we were definitely going for that when we loaded all the gear in to start recording.
CMG: A friend of mine is a big fan of yours and he wanted to ask if you’re going to have any more material out this year. He’s looking forward to more solo material.
WJ: More solo material? Nobody’s ever said that to me! I’m kidding, that’s a joke (laughs). I think there may be. There are a lot of songs left over from these Fort Recovery sessions that we’ll probably find a home for later in the year. It’s not really decided as to how we want to do it. There’s a good amount of material from these sessions to be released, so I’m hoping we can get at least an EP or a tour record or something like that, some little nugget to throw on the merch table out by the end of the year.
CMG: Right now you’re on a solo tour with Mark Eitzel and some other guys, how’s playing those shows been and how did that get put together?
WJ: It’s been great, it’s been chaotic and beautiful. We all share the same manager. It was the idea of our manager Bob Andrews last year, but in a way that it’s not us just sitting there playing acoustic guitars in the round. The concept was actually to form a band and back each other on our own music. So we’re on stage doing two sets of three songs per songwriter, so everybody does six of their own songs, but on the other 18 everybody’s in the backing band. We’re all on stage for a couple hours each night as a full band so it’s definitely been a challenge to get all the songs learned. It’s been really stressful but absolutely wonderful too, for the fact that I think the admiration and the respect for one another is such that we’re all very thrilled to be doing this. It’s changed a lot of things on how I see myself as somebody who writes songs and it’s also lent some new angles on how I’ve always seen their songs, and I’ve been listening to all three of their records for many many years. It’s definitely been one of the more educational musical experiences of my life.
CMG: Centro-matic is famous for touring and touring and touring. What aspect of being a musician do you like better, the writing, or the recording, or the touring?
WJ: It sounds too cheap, but I love them all, and for very different reasons. I think that the writing and the recording, it’s definitely a fun thing but to me it leans more toward a spiritual thing, and a lucid kind of air about it, I guess. The live thing is definitely still spiritual but it’s also more just about having a good time and making the moment exactly what you can, just then and there with a crowd. So they all have different meanings, none of which is more or less important than the other. That’s the absolute addictive elixir of that cycle to me, that so much can be gleaned from all three.
CMG: On the tour right now, you’re with three very different other songwriters. What’ve you been listening to on the tour bus?
WJ: A lot of This American Life. A lot of Mitch Hedberg, the late comedian. A lot of Nina Simone. The new Drive-By Truckers. Kayne West, I don’t know, we’re all over, everybody’s got their iPods in full motion.
CMG: So if you could put together a fantasy music festival like Coachella or Bonnaroo or something like that, what would be your line-up?
WJ: Can I bring people back from the dead?
CMG: Yes, absolutely.
WJ: That’s awesome. Thanks for letting me do that. Roy Orbison, Jimi Hendrix, I don’t know, Woodie Guthrie, Randy Newman, My Morning Jacket. There’s a few. [Laughs] Let’s start with those and branch it on out from there. Probably have Aretha, she’d be there. Robert Johnson would definitely be there. It’d be a crazy festival, it’d be nuts. Willie Nelson would play…it’d be good.