Los Angeles resident Jeff Martin has been recording and performing music under the moniker Idaho for close to two decades. He originally formed the band with guitarist John Berry, releasing the cathartic “slowcore” album Year After Year in 1993. Subsequent releases found Idaho existing as both a solo project for Martin as well as a full-fledged band. In the second half of the 90s, Martin collaborated with guitarist Dan Seta to develop a more subtle version of the Idaho sound.
Since 2001, Martin has primarily worked alone in his Laurel Canyon studio, splitting his time between Idaho releases and soundtrack work. His latest album You Were A Dick is available in a variety of formats: Vinyl, CD, mp3, and even a bonus DVD of high resolution files via Martin’s label Idahomusic.
We spoke with Martin about his recording process, current film projects, and even got into some tech stuff for the audiophiles out there.
You Were A Dick is a provocative title.
No comment. Well, I don’t agonize over titles usually. They just sort of appear, and I go, “oh, that works.”
Much of the record is pretty old. A lot of the stuff was done in ‘06 and ‘07. “You Were A Dick” is the most up to date Idaho song. It was done very quickly at the end of the sessions. It’s basically taken from a cue for this film called Almost Perfect. The cue is nice, it’s got this Neil Young thing, but it was just too traditional. So in Pro Tools I really fucked the song up. It’s a strange song harmonically. I push it to the point of being almost cacophonous. There are these conflicting notes, and I almost went too far with mangling it.
I had a real high school core of friends, and I began to realize that after awhile the way I got along with them was that I’d have to change the way I really am inside to make the relationship work. So in a sense, I’m airing some grievances to people who I may have kissed their ass too much when I was younger. It’s a reference to one person in that line, “you were a dick to me in high school,” but then I refer to other people who I was very close to, and now I’m not.
Originally, the album was called Revoluta, which is more what you would think an Idaho record would be called. You Were A Dick shows a side of my personality that I don’t really bring to Idaho, which is the goofy, childlike, spasmodic side. I thought I’d throw that in, because it felt right to do something offbeat in that respect.
I haven’t approached an Idaho record with 100% of my focus and time since Levitate (2001), so it’s been ten years. In a sense it’s like The Lone Gunman (2005), where this is what I’ve been doing in the background for the past five years. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the reality of the way the last ten years played out.
Is that because you got into film work?
Yeah, film work, and I think everything with Idaho changed in a sense after 9/11. It was moving in a certain direction and there was some velocity, some good attention from Hearts of Palm (2000). That record still has outsold everything by 500%. There was something going on, and then 9/11 happened. I remember our tour for Levitate got cancelled because Swiss Air went out of business, and people weren’t flying. Something just happened. I was not running Idahomusic well, and we were losing a lot of money. This confluence of events made it seem that all of a sudden this Idaho thing was not going to work financially. I panicked and thought, “I’ve got to find a better way of making a living.”
I ran into an agent I knew who was an A&R guy at A&M Records in the 80s. He said, “if you want to try doing some composing, give me a year and I can probably start to find you some work.” I thought this might be a good idea, so I switched directions. It didn’t dampen my enthusiasm, but it seemed like I needed to find another course of action because the Idaho thing was unsustainable.
So it was 8 years of scoring, and not even getting that much work. I’ve done a few television shows and some films. Then I began to realize that I don’t enjoy doing it. I didn’t have the enthusiasm for it, and you really need to be super focused. It’s crazy work; you have to able to produce very quickly, and get into the computerized side of things. I found that to be very inorganic and not exciting at all.
This year the big change is that I’m getting into film-making.
Are you working on a film now?
I made a short film (The Serpent and The Shadow). I shot it two years ago, and it’s getting into festivals this year.
I’m also going to finish this feature length documentary that feels like an Idaho documentary in a way. This first one I’m going to do with material that I have, tour footage etc. It’s an autobiographical thing that centers on my life making music with friends, and the story of the period of time before Idaho that was kind of fascinating in the 80s. There’s a lot of great music there.
Did you play all the instruments on this album?
Yes, except for Eleni Mandell who did backing vocals on one song, and Jessica Catron who played cello.
I was thinking how much I love working that way, but that I miss some of what happens when you collaborate. You listen to Hearts of Palm for instance, and there’s really a Dan and Jeff thing going on there. I did play most of the instruments and many of the songs I play alone on that record too. But there’s still something really special that you can’t achieve alone when you have that collaborative environment. You can hear it on Year After Year. With me and John, there’s definitely a thing that you would never get with one person. It’s something that I maybe want to look into again in some way.
Did you record everything yourself in your home studio, or did you work with an engineer?
For the most part I recorded alone in my living room. The recording studio got taken out by a mudslide in ’05, and is barely functioning now. So this was mostly done here and then mixed out in the studio. Bill Sanke mixes all the Idaho records and has since the Forbidden E.P. (1997). He would come and tune the drums, and I’m going through his Neve preamps that he designed.
Bill was kicked out of his space in the bank building downtown where we mixed the Forbidden E.P., Alas (1998), Hearts of Palm and Levitate. I let him put his equipment in my studio so I’d have all this vintage gear out there. I had to wear a mask because it’s still moldy. It’s really annoying to have to sit there for hours with this rubber pressed against your face.
With the recording resolution being 24 bit/96k, Bill is finding that we’re getting this detail that you don’t get when you bounce to tape, or even with the older Pro Tools 16 bit stuff. I’m authoring all the high resolution tracks for the bonus DVD. If you configure your Mac or whatever to play back in 24 bit, or play the vinyl on a good system and listen with headphones, it’s amazing the three dimensionality you’ll get from this record – which is not something you would have heard with the last ones.
I have a turntable again, and listening to older records that were recorded well in the late 60s and early 70s, you hear a purely analog chain. Even though vinyl is flawed in that there’s a lot of other noises happening, it’s still an unmolested picture of a sound wave.
Would you consider reissuing any of the older Idaho records on vinyl?
Yeah, it’s just really expensive and time consuming. The cool thing is you don’t have to remix the record. If I do well with the vinyl of You Were A Dick, which is already outselling the CD 4 to 1, I will take Hearts of Palm as the first project and re-release it on vinyl. I’d like to add a song that was supposed to be on it that didn’t end up happening, and maybe do a small run of that in a year.
Are you planning any live dates for this album?
We’ll try to put together something simple and do at least a West Coast thing this year. It still takes as much work to get a set together to do a small tour, but it would be healthy to do.
What would the lineup be?
The way it seemed to work when we went in ’08 to Europe was just me and Bill, who is an amazing bass player, and a drummer. It’s sad because Idaho really works as a four piece. But we have a tiny room to rehearse in, and we can make the set work as a three piece. It would be cool if Dan Seta or somebody had the time to do it.
I’m such a perfectionist that playing live is challenging. As I get older, it appeals to me even less. When everything’s firing on all cylinders it’s pretty amazing. Idaho is such a home studio kind of thing that it doesn’t really translate live. I’d almost rather go and play something like The Jesus Lizard, really simple and in your face and powerful and big, and I don’t do that here.
Would you ever consider doing a sort of “Idaho Classic” tour? Your earlier music was a lot more direct (and loud).
Yeah, but you’d have to get the right people together. If you could get the Three Sheets to the Wind (1996) lineup of Mark Lewis, Terry Borden and Dan Seta all together, I’m sure we could do that thing. I recently looked at all the footage from the ’96 tour and we really got good at doing that form of Idaho, which really was the four of us.
About four years ago we almost did a reunion thing for that band. Everybody’s older now with kids, and we don’t have the time we had when we were 26 and 31. I’m not saying it wouldn’t happen, it could be really great. But you’re right, there was a time when it worked in that respect. The live and recorded music were sort of one and it could exist in both arenas.
Photo: Lara Porzak
