After
the breakup of Minneapolis cult heroes Trip Shakespeare, Dan Wilson brought his
impeccable sense of pop polish to the trio Semisonic, who scored a Top-10 hit
in 1998 with "Closing Time." With that group on an extended hiatus, Wilson set
out on his own as a producer and writer, striking gold earlier this year with a
Song of the Year Grammy for co-writing Dixie Chicks' "Not Ready To Make Nice."
For the last five years he's also been working on a solo album, Free Life, which broadens the scope of his sound
without losing the hummable quality of his earlier music. Released in October, Free
Life, was co-produced by
Rick Rubin and features Sheryl Crow and former Jayhawk Gary Louris. Wilson
chatted with The A.V. Club about the new album, the importance of
unstructured recording, and how to approach your first solo record.
The
A.V. Club: Are there any fringe benefits to winning a Grammy that the general
public isn't aware of, like a 10-percent discount at Starbucks or something?
Dan
Wilson: No, none of
that! But you do get a little statuette that all your friends want to touch.
Doesn't matter how cool they are, they still want to touch it. [Laughs.] There
wasn't a little coupon booklet that came with it or anything, sadly.
AVC:
Your solo album, Free Life,
has been in the works for quite some time, with some of the songs dating from
when Semisonic was still in high gear.
DW: Several of the songs I wrote or recorded
basic tracks for in 2002. Most of the work was done a couple of years later.
And I've basically been adding this or that song, and posting this or that song
for the last couple of years while waiting for everything to get together.
AVC:
Why did it take so long to get the album released?
DW: I think there were a couple of big
delays. One was that my record label, American Recordings, changed parent
companies twice during this time. I'd guess there was about a year added to the
process for each of those journeys from one label to another. Maybe a little
more. Another thing is that I got really sick, and I had to have lung surgery.
That cost me maybe half of 2005.
AVC:
How are you feeling now?
DW: Oh, I'm great. I think I can confidently
say that they cured me. I'm better than ever.
AVC:
Did that affect your singing?
DW: Yeah, it really did. I didn't realize
how much I had learned to compensate.
AVC:
How so?
DW: I was writing songs with short phrases,
and I had slowly, over time, developed a lot of tricks that made up for my
reduced capacity to breathe. Since then I've kind of gone overboard. I have one
song on the album called "Easy Silence" that I did with Dixie Chicks, and it's
got the longest phrases. When I sing it, I almost get mad at myself for pushing
the envelope of what could be reasonably expected of a singer. Same is true
with "Breathless," [from Free Life]
which has really long phrases. I think it actually works as a part of the metaphor,
the unconscious part of the song.
AVC:
At the beginning of "Breathless," just for a moment you can hear a child's toy
piano. Is there a story there?
DW: The story is pretty simple, but it's
good, because it has a lot to do with how the record was done. Early in the
process, I had this idea of leaving a couple of toys in the room where the
drums were, and not really talking about it. Like, not saying anything, I'll
just leave these toys out, and then maybe whoever's drumming will turn around
and see it and get excited and play something on one of the toy instruments. In
"Breathless" it's not that prominent, but it gives it this sort of spooky,
scary, tinkly kind of feeling. And I really love what [Eric Fawcett] did. I
didn't ask for it, he just picked up this toy piano and played that little
melody.
AVC:
So you were going for something more unstructured in the studio, sort of
providing opportunities for randomness.
DW: Everyone I worked with on these tracks
is really musical, and has a good sense of what belongs where. One of my
favorite things about the song "Golden Girl," is that there's no drums. Eric
Fawcett was going to play drums, but he had this idea for a melody on the
piano. It was so beautiful while we were rehearsing the song that we just recorded
the song like that. And that kind of thing happened over and over again, where
because people knew that I was probably going to say yes to what they came up
with, they just came up with the most brilliant ideas. It was definitely
different from the experience of recording with a band, in which often the band
members are kind of jockeying for the same area of the midrange. It's almost
like a territorial fight that happens during the recording. That can lead to
amazing, great things, but I wanted this experience to be really different, so
that the sound would be really distinct from Semisonic. For example, "Cry"
needed a guitar solo. Well, I'm sure I could have played a guitar solo on it,
but it was much more fun for me to ask Gary Louris to play a guitar solo, and
what happened was something I never
would have thought of myself. I didn't give him any direction or ideas, I just
kind of cheered and laughed and kept things rolling until he nailed what he
wanted to do. That was a very fun, positive part of it, for me, not to control
[the recording], but almost emcee it.
AVC:
How important was it to make this record sound different from Semisonic?
DW: I pretty consciously wanted to do
something very different from Semisonic, partly because I've had the experience
of hearing the "solo" album that sounds like a watered-down or slightly
confused version of the person's band. And I've never enjoyed that. I've always
liked it more when it seems like the person went off into more of a unique area
that they hadn't gotten to do before. That was a conscious decision or ideal on
my part, to have it not sound like the band. I think a lot of my tendencies,
for this album, were to have everyone, as much as possible, be in the same room
together, and [create] a kind of candle-lit, bottle-of-wine vibe about it for
the musicians. When you're doing that, and singing in the same room as the
instruments, there's going to be a lot less gnarly, squonky guitars. You just
can't have a giant SVT bass rig fired up and blasting. If you're going to set
up and sing in the same room as all the instruments, then it pushes you toward
acoustic instruments, or instruments that just don't have that kind of blaring,
distort-y, midrange-y thing that Semisonic is very good at.
AVC:
Even going back to Trip Shakespeare, your music has always had a strong sense
of melody and harmony.
DW: I think it's
interesting, because aside from "Honey Please," which has a few jazzy chords in
it, I think there are probably fewer "interesting" chords on this album than on
any song of Trip Shakespeare's. It's been about boiling down and boiling down
and getting simpler and simpler. But I hope that there's a similar sense of
lift-off to the melodies, that there's an ascending feeling.