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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Mason Jennings: the long and winding road
Wednesday 11 February @ 12:02:24 |
 by Rob van Alstyne
Mason Jennings is arguably the most polarizing artist the Twin Cities music community has ever seen. The mere mention of his name triggers wildly varying responses from Minnesotans: from rapturous fans stirring themselves into a frenzy describing his singular voice and speaking of the “next Bob Dylan,” to nonbelievers sniggering over Jennings’ optimistic heart-on-sleeve lyricism.
 Since storming into the local spotlight five years ago with the release of his self-titled home recorded debut, Jennings has remained a lightning rod for lofty praise and harsh criticism in his hometown. Not that he’s had the time to notice, ever since the release of 2000’s Birds Flying Away, Jennings has been too busy traversing the globe, slowly increasing his rabid cult following, to spend much time eavesdropping on local hipsters debating the merits of his work.
 Never has an artist built such a massive underground following (his four albums have sold in the neighborhood of 100,000 copies completely independently) with fewer trappings of hip-ness. Jennings finds his support in public radio and word-of-mouth rather than the typical cred-making avenues of college radio or rock-crit press. A good-looking everyman, it’s easy to envision Jennings becoming the next Dave Matthews (a jam band icon for the clean cut set) if he weren’t so intent on following his own creative drive and giving no quarter to the advances of major labels that invariably would in some way look to shape his muse.
Now comes Use Your Voice an album poised to take what few people may have been sitting on the fence regarding Jennings and kick them clear off. It’s the most unadulterated and (for lack of a better term) “Mason-like” record he’s ever made. Recorded mostly live and produced by him, it’s an uncompromising snapshot of Jennings at work. Over its scant half-hour of running time we get to know Jennings the jaded lover, the homesick family man, the awed world traveler, and the sentimental liberal. All of the tunes are rendered with the kind of ease and directness rarely seen from high-profile artists anymore consisting of little more than Jennings dexterous acoustic guitar work and the understated rhythmic support of touring bandmates Chris Morrisey (bass) and Brian McLeod (drums). If there’s one thing Use Your Voice makes abundantly clear, it’s that Jennings was aiming to please only one demanding and critical audience: himself. The big-hearted rap of “Keepin’ it Real” is a lock to set the collective teeth of cynics around the world gnashing, and Jennings wouldn’t have it any other way. If you love Mason Jennings’ voice and words then you’ll be in heaven: there front and center on every track; if you hate them … Mason’s got bigger things to worry about.
I met up with Jennings a few weeks before the release of Use Your Voice to talk about, among other various topics, his fourth album, the changing face of the record industry and how he reconciles being a family man with the demands of his musical career. Chatting over a late lunch at an area coffee shop I sensed that beneath Jennings’ modest laid-back demeanor remained a seriously driven and passionate musician, the heart of the 16-year-old kid who dropped out of high school a dozen years ago to pursue music head on still beating strongly within him.
Pulse: When I found out the new record was titled Use Your Voice I was expecting a full-on political record. But what actually strikes me about this record is that it appears to lie exactly in between Birds Flying Away, which was pretty overtly political, and Century Spring, which was really personal. Did you consciously try to get both sides of your songwriting personality on there this time around?
Jennings: I was just trying to put something out there that was really honest, to get my whole personality out there. I wasn’t really conscious with Birds Flying Away that it was going to be political, it just kind of turned out that way. And I realized like, “oh wow” it was kind of heavy with that side of it. And the other one, Century Spring, turned out to be really poppy and about love. So then this was just kind of making sure that I didn’t…
 That you didn’t play one hand more than the other?
Yeah, just getting more of my personality across, that was kind of the goal. The whole idea of what a voice is, just getting your whole voice in there, Use Your Voice …
Use Your Voice is so spare that I feel like it harkens back almost to your very first recordings [1998’s Mason Jennings and the compilation of early material released in 2002 as Simple Life]. Did revisiting the songs on Simple Life have any impact on the making of Use Your Voice?
Simple Life was made right about at the same time as Century Spring, so it didn’t really affect making this record. This was more kind of a reaction to seeing a lot of people in the music business older than me and seeing that their sound always got more and more produced as they got older. I was always bummed out by that, like people felt they needed to make a bigger sound because they were on bigger stages, you kind of feel forced to do that. So I decided, “Well, I’m kind of going to basically do the opposite and see what that feels like.” To just focus on the intimacy of the song or lyrical craft rather than production, talking to a bunch of people just kind of led me to this direction.
Was it a really effortless record to make?
Yeah, it was by far the most fun. I just took my time in the studio and went for takes and didn’t worry about overdubbing, it was all really live—it was just really fun, it felt like playing music every day.
Pulse: I think the song that everyone is going to key in on initially is “The Ballad of Paul and Sheila,” at least in Minnesota. Certainly you could write the song whether you knew the man or not, but did you have any personal interactions with Senator Wellstone while he was alive?
I never met him. It was after he died during that first day that it really hit me how big a figure he was in my life even without knowing him.
 One of the things that I think is always hard with “political” songwriting, or whatever term you want to use, is that whenever you’re overtly dealing with political issues in a song it seems hard to avoid being really trite or preachy. How conscious are you of that danger when you’re writing the songs? Do you handle a politically oriented song that much more carefully than you would a love song?
Not more carefully, I think that love songs can be just as dangerous because people just tune it out and stop listening. But with the political songs I find that the older I get the more I try to get it to be really personal. The same way I would with a love song—rather than saying like “baby, baby” I want to talk about how it makes me feel and just deal with specifics and work in detail.
You were on the road for a lengthy amount of time in support of Century Spring pretty much all over the world. Is the road a creative place for you song-writing wise? With a tune like “Southern Cross” [which mentions surfing in Biondi] it’s pretty clear that road life experiences directly shaped at least some of the songs on Use Your Voice.
When I’m actually on the road I don’t write very much, but when I come back I usually try to take the summers off and take most of December and January off and that’s when I end up writing most of the songs—just because I can go in and work in my space every day. But definitely, like the experiences on the road, just meeting so many people and learning to trust people is huge. With a song like “Southern Cross,” I wrote that in Sydney when I was living there for like a month—so that kind of thing happens too.
Now that you’ve been all over the world, how content are you to stay in Minnesota? Do you ever have the urge to move and set up home base somewhere else?
I really like Minnesota. For a while I used to think I should move to New York just because so much of the music industry is based there and I was dealing with New York a lot. The thing is though that I’m on the road so much I still get to be in New York City like four or five times a year for long periods of time. I’m in pretty much every city for a little while every year. My favorite city is Minneapolis, the arts here are awesome plus the weather’s always changing which I think is wicked—it helps with creativity. (laughs)
It seems like it might be easier for you to live somewhere else where you’d have a larger degree of anonymity. Do people ever bother you when you’re out in the Twin Cities?
People don’t ever really bother me. I feel like for the most part if you make the music that you love, the kind of people that will come up to you are pretty much people that will sort of be like you. People talk to me but it’s kind of a good thing because I’m sort of an introverted person and it’s nice to get to meet people. Plus Minnesotans are kind of reserved. Actually in different cities it’s a lot worse because people will just come running down the street and grab you from behind and stuff. (laughs)
The dominant images and themes attached to a lot of big independent rock music now tends to be cynical or coming from a place of ironic detachment. That’s pretty much the polar opposite of your music, which tends to be very direct and largely positive. Do you ever feel like a man apart? Do you ever worry about how your music fits into the industry’s whole marketing scheme?
I don’t worry about it, but definitely, like, whenever a record comes out everybody that’s in the business, like the bigger magazines and stuff, definitely think of me as not fitting in. It’s the kind of thing where you get a lot of people just scoffing at your music. I get a ton of people who really don’t like it—which is totally awesome because it means I’m doing something that’s me. A lot of people don’t like certain people and that’s fine. You can’t worry about other people’s reactions. Especially the way the music industry is now I just feel like I have to make my own way. A lot of the big magazines now, like the top five music magazines, the reviewers don’t even really listen to the records—like they’ll listen to the first few tracks and that’s it. When I found that out I was like, “Man, what a bummer—these people aren’t even listening to the record.” So you get reviews based on the first two tracks, which isn’t even a review of the record as a piece of art. Even movies today—they’re mostly judged by how many tickets they sell in the first weekend—which has nothing to do with how good the actual movie is. So on that [critical] side of it I kind of feel on the outside, but on the other side of it the shows are always really good, there’s lot of people coming out, and I’m able to do this for a living.
From talking to a lot of different musicians one thing most of them agree upon is the difficulty of writing a good happy song. Most claim it’s easier to write a sad song because their happy songs end up feeling disingenuous or grating in some way. As someone who’s managed to write a lot of positive songs, is that a skill you’ve had to hone over time? Happy songs don’t seem to be a natural tendency for most songwriters.
I think people write happy songs, but the reason most of them don’t come out is that artists are too self-conscious about looking cheesy. For some reason I’m able to be OK with it, I think those songs have value to them. Artists probably write happy songs and just kill ‘em—I bet they’re out there. (laughs) It’s really easy to make fun of a happy song, and it’s really easy to make a happy song sound like “Sesame Street” if you’re not careful.
I recently re-read an interview with you from five years ago where you talked about how the music had such a hold over you that you would frequently forget to eat and sleep. Has music making’s grip on you loosened any since getting married and having a child? Or do you still forget to eat sometimes?
Oh man, it’s exactly the same. If anything it’s even crazier because six months of the year I’m out on the road and up until 3:30 in the morning and traveling everyday. It gets real frenzied, and with a family, too, there’s just so much more day-to-day stuff that I really feel a push to do my art whenever I can. It’s still exactly the same.
I was interviewing some other local musicians recently when the subject of children came up and they were debating whether having children was conducive to being a musician or a detriment. It was a strange conversation but their general conclusion was that in the case of one of their friends, having a kid had actually made him a much better musician and lit a fire under him to make something he could leave behind for his kid to see. To kind of have a recorded legacy for his child …
I think about the issue a lot. I always debate if I should be on the road a lot when I have a little boy—but that’s what I do, I have to do it. I feel like I have more of a capacity for love because of my son and the songs are definitely getting better because of that. I understand more roles in life now, which helps me as an author, just writing from different perspectives. I feel like [fatherhood] is all pretty much amazing and it’s definitely the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
So many musicians sort of remain in that “tortured young artist” mode into their middle age, sort of living just in their own head and writing about it, which is certainly fine, and plenty of great music has come out of that, but at the same time …
It’s great stuff, but you’re mostly going to be appealing to a younger 15-year-old audience, which is awesome in its own way but then I’m always going to try to appeal to myself—and I get older ever year. (laughs) Hopefully my crowd will go with me and hopefully they’ll be all different ages, but I would expect the audience to be mostly people right around my age.
Having done some touring with Jack Johnson and getting to see him reach a massive level of commercial success first hand, you’ve gotten to experience big stardom sort of one step removed. Does that kind of fame hold any allure for you?
Parts of fame are cool—the part of it where people give you respect and say that you have value as an artist. Somebody like Jack, we were friends before he blew up, and we were on tour together when he blew up and he was kind of just like, “What the hell?!?” and was totally surprised by it. The part of it that was appealing to me is that now Jack will always be considered a musician—he has value on a national and international scale. For me, like on a pop scale, nobody knows who I am. Which is fine, because there are so many negative parts of [big success] too. So many of the shows we were playing together you could tell people were just there to be a part of a scene, and most of the time everybody was just talking during the whole show, which happens once you get above like 2,000 people in the crowd. It’s hard to even play a show in that situation. My favorite thing is just creating art in a small theater, I would hate if I couldn’t do that anymore. I saw both sides to [the fame], but the main thing I took away from the experience is that I’m not about to change anything I do to try and get [more commercial success]. Jack did what he’s always done and it popped and that’s cool – but what I do is what I do and if it pops that’s cool, but there’s no way I’m going to change.
Plus there’s the whole issue of if you were to make some conscious concessions and reach really massive success you could have that nagging feeling of “are these people here for the right reasons?”
I’m not about to go down that road, it sounds like hell, like stuff that would keep me up all night. I don’t think I would be able to live with myself.
When you’re working at making music and touring constantly it seems like the process might start to feel more like a job than a passion. Do you ever have those kinds of feelings or is making music still as exciting for you as it was in the beginning?
It’s still exciting—I still feel really new at the craft. I don’t feel like I’ve gotten anywhere near what I’m hearing in my head yet, and that’s the goal. I feel like it’s going to take some time for me to get my voice totally honed in to where I’m going to be able to sing like I want to. I feel with my music that songwriting was the thing I got better at first and now everything else is sort of catching up to it. It’s really fun for me to do because every year I feel like I’m a little bit better guitar player, a little bit better singer, a little bit better at the piano, better at playing live, better at all kinds of stuff—just even dealing with people because I grew up making music by myself. I think every year you’ve just got to put challenges in front of yourself and try to push yourself. [Records] might flop, but the thing is if you’re shooting to be famous you can put yourself in a massive creative block where you get screwed because you’re just shooting for one prize the whole time. But if you don’t think about [music] like that, if you think of it as an art you’re trying to develop, there’s no end to it and it’s really rewarding. It doesn’t hinge on anybody else’s thoughts but yours; all that matters is what you think about the music.
Mason Jennings plays his CD release show for Use Your Voice on Fri., Feb. 13, at the State Theatre with the Beautiful Girls. 7:30 p.m. $22.50. All Ages. 805 Hennepin Ave., Mpls. 612-339-7007.
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