The Many Worlds of Nathan Moore
By Team JamBase Oct 23, 2007 • 12:00 am PDT
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“He’ll be the pastor at my wedding. He always knows the right thing to say,” says Andrew Barr of JamBase.com/Artists/Artist.aspx?artistID=28472″>Surprise Me Mr. Davis (the pop savvy quartet comprised of The Slip and Moore) is a scenario where everyone’s part is very clear. There’s no struggle. For me, it’s the happy role of lead guitar player and occasional singer. The Slip is comfortable and well balanced and a lot of paying serious attention to everything going on. Having Nathan up there deflates some of that pressure. He reminds us how fun it is to be up there with people you love.”
And from the unpublished liner notes this writer composed for Moore’s brilliant new solo album, In His Own Worlds (released June 27 on Frogville Records):
Nathan does a soft shoe with the Cosmic Be All And End All, the tunesmith’s Stephen Hawking sussing out a theory of everything. He uses ecclesiastical ideas but never in a way that’s cloying or familiar. Instead, Jung’s invisible world unfurls in his songs, God smiling at us behind the trees. Moore’s willingness to engage big ideas – knowing full well he’s in a bear-wrestling match – emboldens us. If Jacob wrestled an angel then maybe so can we.
Rare is the time Moore’s music hasn’t filled my eyes with tears. Like Bob Dylan and Elliott Smith, he’s continually fearless in the face of dark, truthful mirrors. His metaphysical striptease dresses the listener down, and naked together we’re born anew in trembling laughter.
JamBase: It’s subtle and that’s not ever a good thing in terms of American marketing. I think it has be one of the hardest parts of the recording process to take that last step and decide what is the umbrella you’re going to throw over this thing. Have you always had that battle with titles? Nathan Moore: It’s usually a struggle. Sometimes it just falls right into place. Once or twice I’ve made a recording where we knew what it was before we started, and that’s a gift. Single Wide (1999) was sorta made that way. We knew what it was, the vibe of it. But, on most of the records we put down the songs that were hot at the time and then tried to come up with the umbrella. With In His Own Worlds, ultimately it fits in some way or another. JamBase: When you were working on the new record did you know these songs would be solo stuff? How do you compartmentalize things as you write so you know which ones go to ThaMuseMeant, which to Surprise Me and which ones are just for you? Or is the material malleable enough that it can fit anywhere? It amazes me how songs do tend to fall into the different camps. I knew I was going to make this record with a few months advance notice, so my whole being went into crafting this thing. It’s the same way if I know there’s a Davis or ThaMuseMeant tour coming up. The songs that come out of that time point in that direction. That’s even without much conscious effort. Once the seed is planted particular seeds bring particular plants. Continue reading for more with Nathan Moore… -Nathan Moore
In His Own Worlds is Moore at his finest, which is saying something. Whether rockin’ like Warren Zevon fronting Badfinger in Mr. Davis or plying a more subtle acoustic trajectory with
Saying that Christ is not my savior is like saying Jim Morrison is not my Lizard King.
You do take the fruits of different plants and taste them with different configurations. How does it change for you where they start in one band and end up in another? “Rubberball” is a good example of this.
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There’s a number of tunes on the new one I can’t imagine making the leap to these other settings, like I can’t see say “The Tanks” working elsewhere because it’s just so you.
I wrote that song on Slip tour and it was first debuted with The Slip at Stanford [University] but it went to sleep for a few years and woke up on this record.
I like that you speak to power but you don’t do so in the traditional Woody Guthrie way. This very gifted songwriter I know once said, “It’s hard to write a protest song” [from ThaMuseMeant’s “Protest Song’]. It’s tough to avoid getting up on a soapbox these days, to avoid preaching to people, but at the same time you have to say something.
Right, right. I think living at home in Virginia has really changed a lot of things for me, and I even see it now that I’m out touring the West. I’m doing rants on this last tour that I would never do at home. This record was definitely made in the light of being back home. When I’m there I have my grandmother and mother in the audience. I have my high school teachers and 16-year-old kids. It’s the community holistically represented. In that sense, when I was making this record I couldn’t really live with myself if I didn’t speak against the injustices or for the evolution we all like to feel a part of as often as possible. But, I wanted to do it in such a way that it wouldn’t put anybody off or my grandmother wouldn’t feel uncomfortable giving the record to her friends at church [laughs]. It was a pretty daunting task for someone used to waging a war on drugs with a million friends. I wanted to find a more backdoor approach to these topics. I think Jesus is mentioned on the record three or four times. A lot of it was definitely in the hometown light.
I think there’s a value in putting conscious restraints on yourself, not the ones other people put on you but ones where you go, “I’m going to put this wall up here and operate within that boundary because I see value in it.”
Anybody who’s ever worked with a rhyme scheme knows how brilliant that kind of restraint can be. So much magic can come from that restraint. People think, “Oh I don’t want to be tied down. I don’t want there to be rules.” But, it’s pretty amazing when you have to rhyme one line with the next. The most perfect thing you would never have thought to say comes from being forced to find that rhyme. That’s just always amazed me. I used to say, “My limits are my wings,” and that was sort of in praise of the form I was sticking to – not free verse, not abstraction – but trying to find beauty in such formulas.
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I agree. I don’t have anything to add to that [laughs].
As you say, you bring up Jesus a few times on this record. That’s a hard subject, especially in 2007 America. God has been so co-opted for so many stupid, ugly, even barbaric things. I guess it’s really all around the world. You can’t limit it to America. There’s tremendous stupidity involving God happening all over the place. And it’s almost as if God has dropped out of the discourse with rock and folk songwriting. I guess it’s easier for most people in that world to not deal with God at all.
I don’t personally have much issue with the language of religion. Saying that Christ is not my savior is like saying Jim Morrison is not my Lizard King [laughs]. I just don’t have that big an issue with the language. I was raised by it, found beauty within it and made it make sense to me. It took a lot of work, and maybe that work wasn’t necessary. It could have come from other kinds of work but I worked with that language, that story and found truth within it. After I’d done all that work I didn’t want to throw it all away. I know so many people, especially where I come from, that still go to church every Sunday and are still speaking that language. So, I don’t mind throwing my interpretation of the story back at ’em using the same language. At the same time, I completely understand why someone would throw that language away and start anew. For me, it’s part of how I was raised, what I went through, and I happily refer to that story. I still believe Jesus said and did all the right things. It’s the perfect story that we need today.
The other point I wanted to make is for a while there, the zealots – be they Christians or Islamic fascists or whatever side of the spectrum – really looked like they were taking over and we were going to live in their world for a while. What I’ve seen in the past few years is the majority of the societies on all ends are not accepting that, not letting them have their way. I don’t think religion in this country has been co-opted by the Right. They tried and it seemed like they had for a few really frightening months, maybe even a few frightening years, but I don’t think they’ve ultimately been successful.
Continue reading for more with Nathan Moore…
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If you love words you cut yourself off from such amazing imagery, language and touchstones if you totally reject religious subject matter. What would the Grateful Dead be without songs like “Sampson and Delilah”? These are bedrock stories, and they’re in the air whether you want to believe them or not. Even our cartoons are informed by these stories. So why would you want to cut yourself off from them?
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Being Americans, I think it’s impossible to not have the Judeo-Christian tradition be the one you tap into on some level. I know plenty of people who’ve converted to Buddhism or Hindu paths but that doesn’t diminish the impact these stories had on them as little boys or girls. They grew up within the same meta-structure we did. It’s sort of funny, this conscious rejection of it when it’s impossible to really get away from it.
We all know Jesus studied Buddhism during his missing years. He traveled the Orient and picked up on the mystic ways.
The number of congruencies in all the big religions, which were birthed largely around the same time, far outnumbers the places they don’t sync up. That tells you they were all listening to each other.
They all serve a different purpose. Buddhism really represents the inner struggle towards enlightenment, and Christ energy relates to a more social realization of the enlightened state. Buddhism’s internal action is really the same thing as the external Christ action. To me, religion isn’t that important, but there’s a part of me that sees the wars we’re in, the caretaking of the environment and other issues. There’s hypocrisy with the religious community waging these wars and damaging the environment that made me want to pull the Jesus I knew up. The Jesus I know is completely against these wars and the use of fossil fuels. The Jesus I know would never be in favor of these things. On [In His Own Worlds] I wanted him to be there in the room, to invite Jesus into the conversation, hopefully as tactfully as possible [laughs].
It’s an expressly hopeful record. It’s striking. I like the wit and cynicism in your earlier work a lot, maybe because it plays to my own cynical tendencies, but when I really dug into this record – and it didn’t take very long – there was a sense of a light being held up, no matter how small it may be, that says, “It’s not all darkness out there.”
A lot of times I tend to do that for myself. I write myself advice. I write things I wish people would say to me like “It’s all going to be okay.” I’m not even necessarily saying that to you, I’m reminding myself. In some way, I was trying to put a light up there for myself.
It carries over to the listener but it makes sense that it would start with you. You have to figure out what advice you need before you start giving it to others. That’s actually pretty enlightened, dude.
[laughs hard] It is a little weird though, huh?
What does playing in a number of different settings like Davis or ThaMuseMeant do for you?
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It’s got to be a kick being the one who brings these fantastic musicians the songs, the springboards of your craft, so much of the time.
I feel really lucky. I don’t know any other way to put it. I have no idea what I’ve done to deserve such a royal slot. I feel I benefit a lot from having these great people willing to play with me and do my songs. I just scored big time.
Don’t think I’ve ever asked you this but where the hell did Percy Boyd (Moore’s demo spewing alter ego) come from?
It came from Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy that includes The Manticore. Percy Boyd Stanton is one of the key characters and I’m from Stanton. I was reading that trilogy when my dad came up one night. We’d been drinking all day and he tells me I need an alter ego. I had a lot of trouble playing in the Shenandoah Valley because I came from the West, where I was a ranter, a political spokesman of sorts and I liked my stump, but I’d get out there and I’d shut down. I’d be playing at a gazebo in the park or something and there’d be all these normal people in front of me and I wouldn’t know what to say because it wasn’t a bunch of radicals or hippies or revolutionaries. I like preaching to the choir. I like being a cheerleader for the counter-culture. That’s just really comfortable for me. Talking to the mainstream I just shut down, so my dad suggested I come up with this other identity. He said, “They’d love your voice and playing. Just be this other guy who doesn’t have to represent everything you are.” So, I came up with Percy Boyd, who’s a sort of Everyman but still ambiguous. He’s not necessarily this innocent guy that everybody would know and love. He’s just as complicated as me but maybe a little more fun [laughs].
Continue reading for more with Nathan Moore…
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You’re a mix of that, where you’ll write a long, gorgeous love ode and then say “Rubberball,” which is a ditty in its way. You value toe-tappers as much as weepies.
No doubt, no doubt.
I was really frustrated at the lack of response to the last ThaMuseMeant record [Never Settle For Less released 2006 on Frogville Records]. I felt like everything you folks had been trying to do for a few years gelled on that record. Even the cover photo of all of you dressed to the nines, looking good, seemed to suggest that your four-way conversation was in great shape. Is it hard to pour yourself into something like this and have it not get the reaction you hope it will?
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I can only tell you that it makes me crazy. The biggest reason I write about music is to tell people about this kind beautiful, wonderful music that they shouldn’t miss. If it moves me there’s a decent chance it might move others. Never Settle For Less is one of those rare records I can put on every few months and it gets to bowl me over all over again. That’s such a grand surprise that only the best records possess. Most albums don’t give you that jolt every time you listen to them.
The good news is ThaMuseMeant just came off two weeks from Santa Fe to High Sierra, and I’ve never heard the quartet sound better or more excited. We had a couple new songs to boot, and it felt like we’re about ready to make another record. It’s sorta like Davis, where somebody came up after High Sierra and said, “You have to do this! You’re our generation’s band. You’re singing our song.” On the one hand, I thought she was right but the reason she was so excited was she’d just heard Surprise Me Mr. Davis. There it was. It exists. It’s not like this sad thing that never happened. It just happened and that’s why she was so pumped. That’s a cool thing we’re finding with all these bands. It’s not like we’re out there hitting the pavement trying to make some big deal. We’re coming together to make this music because we love it, and in that these bands are stronger than they’ve ever been.
That’s it! Even though the mechanism of radio and traditional publicity can’t seem to get a handle on what you do, if people actually hear this music it seems to do the job.
Almost every time. The batting average is definitely respectable [laughs].
No doubt about it!
The other thing about not getting out there and hitting the pavement is we’re not getting rejected. We’re not getting jaded, and we don’t have that same ‘jade’ that a lot of bands who push it but don’t break have. We’re not pushing. We’re just making the music whenever we get a chance to do it. That adds levity to it. So many musicians my age are SO jaded at this point. It’s understandable in this changing music business but luckily the bands I’m part of come together to make music and the rest is just not our game right now. Maybe someday it will be. I know each band would maybe like to try to break but it’s just not what’s going on right now.
I think you love music too much to play a lot of the games necessary to reach that next level of fiscal and fame success.
Either that or I’m just really lazy.
[laughs until out of breath] Oh lord…
I think, “Not today, just not today. Maybe tomorrow [laughs].”
JamBase | Virginia
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