Gary Louris: Meandering To The Morning

It worked well from the first note. There was an indefinable chemistry in how the notes collided, especially on the ethereal stuff. The pedal steel and the keyboards, in particular, created this ethereal backdrop that I really liked. We hadn't planned that at all. It was just players playing off of each other. -Gary Louris

Wrestling Water

Strip it down to what you can believe in
Pass it on, what is right and true blue

Louris & Olson from Reveille Magazine

"I certainly think of it as a craft. For me, it has to be inspired first but to finish things off you need to roll up your sleeves and do the hard nuts and bolts work of polishing it off without ever overworking it. I tend to go with my first impressions, though with [Vagabonds], more than ever, I worked extra hard writing that extra verse or maybe not singing the same chorus each time, really pushing myself," says Louris.

"Around the Smile period [the 2000 Jayhawks release], I remember Bob Ezrin [famed producer best known for helming Pink Floyd's The Wall] accused me of being an inspired writer. I said, 'Thank you,' and he said, 'Oh, I don't really mean that as a compliment. You write when you're inspired but you don't tend to do the hard workmanship to finish it.' Bob and I are friends and he's a fan but there's times I can be lazy," continues Louris. "Going down to Nashville I've seen where people view it much more as a craft. I think I have a natural feeling towards what feels balanced. To me it always seems so obvious but working with a lot of people I've found that maybe this is a talent I have that most people don't. I pick up on when something's been going on too long or the balance of the bridge or whether you even need a bridge, those kind of things. Where I got it from I don't know. Maybe it's my architecture background [laughs]."

"What makes Gary unique is his relation to craft," says Robinson. "You have to be able to do that more on-the-fly than in the past. You don't have eight weeks to make a record; you have three weeks to make a record. Working with Mark and Gary on their record set the stage to work on [Vagabonds]. Gary and I have been friends for a long time. He's adventurous, and he has his expression of what he wants things to be, true to who he is, which is different to his other collaborations. In that sense, I was thrilled he called me to facilitate that."

"The other main difference from Mark and Gary's record, where we went out to the desert to a little hotel for two nights to work out the tunes and then cut the record in 10 days, was for this we spent 10 days in pre-production, where we really sat down with the band," adds Robinson. "In music you have to go with how you feel. Some of these songs are very complicated and we wanted to make sure once we got in the studio everyone was on the same page. There's intricate parts and a lot of layering, and I think the pre-production really solidified everyone's role and the dynamic really well."

So Beautiful

Tortuous though it seems
Pouring forth bittersweet
Wrestling with the good and evil
In ourselves, within our struggle
I want to laugh, but do I dare?
I never had a cross to bear

Gary Louris

"If there's ever been an issue that people had in the past, especially live, is they couldn't hear enough of my voice. I don't have a loud voice, so it made sense to go for a quieter approach and have background people be truly background. I guess that's a real difference between this record and a Jayhawks record, though at times I thought I was a little too loud [laughs]. But every time we tried mixes with the vocal down you couldn't hear the words as much and these songs really rely heavily on the words. So, we went with the loud vocal. Personally, I like records where you can't hear the vocals that much," laughs Louris.

"Another thing that really spurred the type of record I wanted to make and how I sang and how the songs were written came a bit out of this new love affair with folk music and fingerpicking such as Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Jackson C. Frank," observes Louris. "I found that when I was playing with Olson we started doing that. Our forthcoming record has a lot of that on it. It was something I'd never really worked on and it's very hypnotic. When you pick the guitar like that it tends to lead you into these wordy, jaunty, lilting kind of melodies. It's not so much about the high singing style. I think that was a big thing for me to do."

"Another discovery I made was doing Rainy Day Music [The Jayhawks' last studio album from 2003] with Ethan Johns [Ray LaMontagne, Kings of Leon]. He really encouraged me to sing live, to go for the keeper vocal and guitar. It was kind of eye opening to me," says Louris. "You sing around your guitar playing and you play guitar around your voice. There's a natural ebb and flow, a natural dynamic that doesn't happen when you overdub. You can't help it, when you overdub that guitar you're going to try and make it as steady and perfect as you can. When you sing you try to sing the best you can each note, but you lose the natural ebb and flow when you separate them."

The Laurel Canyon Family Choir is Louris' free love street choir on Vagabonds and includes Robinson, Susanna Hoffs [The Bangles], Johnathan Rice, Jenny Lewis, The Chapin Sisters, Andy Cabic [Vetiver], Farmer Dave [Beachwood Sparks] and Jonathan Wilson.

"It was really super fun, man," enthuses Robinson. "It just opens up friendships, too, like I went and sang on Lewis' record with Rice and everybody. It's nice to be in a communal vibe with people you think are really talented and really sweet. I want to do a whole Susanna Hoffs record. I was trying to talk her into it last year when we were doing [Vagabonds], 'Come on, let's do a real folk record!'"

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