MARK OLSON INTERVIEW | WARP | 25.07.17

Mark Olson, former founding member of alt country legends The Jayhawks speaks with Amanda Van Elk about living in the isolation of a Californian desert community and how a unique recording technique helped put the human spirit back into the recording process on ‘Spokeswoman of the Bright Sun’. 

Can you tell me a little about the inspiration behind the title of your 4th solo album ‘Spokeswoman of the Bright Sun’?

Once I dreamed that my grandmother was speaking to me in the Irish language. She grew up outside of Yankton, South Dakota and memorised poems out of monthly magazines. She had a saying “ From here to Cahersiveen”. I think her mother grew up outside of that town. So it’s possible she spoke Irish and it was a cross generational dream. That’s what I think a spokeswoman would do, who speaks a language of the bright sun. Offer up tidbits of information about what’s important about your lifetime and your relatives from different generations. 

You’re just about to release your album on the 25th of August and you’ve got an extensive European/Australasian tour coming up after that. Do you tend to write more or less while you’re travelling and do different landscapes inspire you in different ways?

I have to say that writing while on tour for me is only about taking impressions in the mind and trying to keep them there for later. In the past I tried to do everything all the time but now the music business is, in many ways a ‘do it yourself’ affair. It’s better to focus on each task at hand, one step at a time. I really like to travel and someday hope to live abroad for a period of time.

Tell me a little bit about why you’ve chosen the European/Australasian areas for this tour rather than touring the US first?

This is matter of opportunity. A booking agent from Australia contacted me and so we set our sights on doing something in connection with a new release I was working on. I think Ingunn and I are a good fit for the Southern Hemisphere, we were married in South Africa. We’ve played in Australia before and had a great time and some memorable gigs, including one in Adelaide. In Europe I’ve made a number of albums for the German label Glitterhouse. I really like their mode of operation. They are much more of a group/communal type of organisation than an American label normally is. So I’ve been working in Europe for many years, have many friends and contacts there and Ingunn is European.  We’re doing a tour in the US starting in November. We are happy to be working with a great distributor there and are going to do record stores, radio and open venues. The US music business has gatekeepers posted at the PR promotions level and the booking agent level features guard posts and now after a few trail runs I have gained access to the inner circle. The act of writing music and developing a new sound with your spouse vs the organising firms that run the capital based music business have no earthly relation to one another. Doing music for the sake of art means you have to search out and find another way.

What inspired you go ahead with recording the entire album with the Nagra field recorder and how did that change the recording process for you?

Nagra field recorders have great pre- amps. So with that you can record a very modern, clean sounding album. You just need a good microphone. In California you can rent good 1960’s microphones near the Burbank Airport! So that is what I did. You can move the recorder to a new place everyday or hour… even outside. This is very good for mental reasoning and just the good clean fun factor. The main feature is that you can not overdub. Every track on this album is a complete performance. No ProTools editing. All vocals and guitars are complete performances. This puts the human spirit back into the music and takes the computer editing voodoo out! There is a noticeable difference when you work hard to get a complete performance track versus cutting and pasting things together. The music breathes and is not focused on digital perfection, but beauty in a natural way. 

You’ve said this album is an album that ‘sounds like you’re alone in the desert’ but to me there’s also a sense of community connection and contentment. Would you say perhaps this is a result of collaborating with Ingunn in music and in life?

People who live in the California desert get isolated in their cabins and spend a lot of time alone. When they actually manage to find other people and present themselves at some social event they talk too much! This is the case with yours truly. My father died when I was young and I shipped out to a Grandmother. I went around high school and early college never really speaking to anyone but studying foreign languages and music so I was trying to find my mode of speaking. I started a band in my 20’s and had some self important business types take it out for a test drive, find out they liked it and turning to deal with me unleashed a bunch of dodgy paperwork and formaldehyde stinking suit coats on my sorry songwriting head. They got the best of me with their knowledge of this type of scam, they were practiced in scams and speaking in meaningless anti-truths. I was practiced with a canoe in Minnesota, working minimum wage jobs and thinking of lyrics with my guitar. I got real quiet and isolated for most of my life over these experiences. But when I wandered into town from the desert with a Nagra recorder under my arm and a woman that was born with a natural gift for harmonic music and she had love for me, I started talking a lot! I developed motor mouth and I began to people my songs with community and contentment and joy and laughter and family meals on the front lawn and well houses delivering clean water. I lived in my songs and I wrote them and Ingunn definitely has helped me to do it.

Mark Olson plays Shambles Brewery, Hobart on September 8th.

-Amanda Laver