To say that Ken Stringfellow is intense is an understatement. The co-founder of The Posies is relentlessly honest, self-critical, and he’s released one of the finest under-the-radar albums of the previous year, Danzig in the Moonlight. He says it’s his best work, and it’s hard to disagree with him. The album’s great strength lies in its diversity, which is a virtue the multifaceted Stringfellow takes to heart. Danzig is a masterful collection of songs, from power pop to the blues to soul to country, woven together by Stringfellow’s sage storytelling and set to his distinctive, otherworldly vocals.
Despite an eight-year break between solo albums, the music never stopped for Ken. He has been in constant collaboration with artists worldwide, from Norwegian garage rockers to Dutch film stars to R.E.M. to a re-formed Big Star. Currently residing in France, Stringfellow is Stateside through early spring on tour–first with The Posies at the Todos Santos Music Festival, then with The Maldives as his backing band before crossing the country solo. When TVD spoke with him, we got a glimpse into the thoughts of an artist who is ambitious, unapologetic, and one of the most unique singer/songwriters of the last three decades.
I am wondering how I escaped 2012 without listening to Danzig in the Moonlight. You’ve said it’s your creative apex and that you want it to be heard by “everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.” I get that, but I’d love to hear why you feel it’s so important to you.
Well, I think because of the amount of information that’s out there in the world, people have a lot to sort through. Often, and this has been true even before the information age, people sometimes go with what’s easy. They go with preconceived notions or they go with hearsay; few people ever have the time or the access to information to get really in-depth into something. Any musician, and this is true even for the biggest at the top, there might be someone out there who doesn’t know what they’re doing.
And then there’s me, who’s a small fry… for example, if I see something about The Posies in an article or even me… if they’re writing about me, they’ll sometimes say, “’90s alternative musician, Ken Stringfellow.” That’s like a horror story for me. I mean, I’ve made so many records—so many more records—since the ’90s than during them and I’ve grown so much. I’m sort of mortified that people might be directed to not even look at those things and see that they exist. That’s kind of the danger of having even the tiny success that [The Posies] had back in the day, that becomes the reference point and then everybody just goes there and says, “Oh, that’s what he does. I understand and, whatever, it’s out-of-date.”
For me, this record is certainly encapsulating all of the studies I’ve been doing—studies by just working in music constantly with so many different artists and making records in so many different ways for the last ten years. My previous album [Soft Commands] came out nine years ago, so there’s been a lot of study since then. I would like people to see me at my best, and I think this is the best thing I’ve done. It’s the most developed and the most complete and the most sophisticated. That might not mean anything in terms of a listening experience, but I think it does. I would rather have a master chef cooking my dinners than someone who’s the first day on the job.
It sounds like you subscribe to the idea that the latest creative output is always going to be the best for you.
Well, no, I don’t. I think that in this case it is, and I’m confident because… this is another part of the subject that kind of relates to the previous question, too. There’s a whole other thing I want to branch off on here and say also that there’s been a lot of “Dad Rock” made out there. There are many times when we see an artist getting older—it’s not all the time—I don’t even think it’s most of the time, but it happens. Sometimes an artist gets older and they get a little bit out of touch, or they get a little bit set into their routines, or they get a little bit rich and so they’re a little bit too comfortable so they don’t have reasons to push themselves and out comes something mediocre. In those cases, those people weren’t introspective enough or able to face the fact and say, “Hey, you’re not hitting the high marks.” Or they’re not able to tell—and I may not be able to tell! But I’m also making records kind of daily as a producer and engineer, and I’m tied into some pretty cool projects.
So, I kind of feel like I’m still dialed in enough and still listening to the current music and bands to kind of have a clue. [Danzig in the Moonlight] is very far removed from those kind of lazy albums. There may be a point where I can’t tell which is, of course, a great source of anxiety and fear for me, but I really don’t think so on this one. I think the reviews in general—even the bad ones—have been sort of confirmation, mainly because the bad reviews so missed the mark that it was clear that the record was kind of over their heads. Or they came in with some preconceived notions that they reviewed the record before they heard it. Those are the two ways that I’ve gotten not really bad reviews, but kind of mediocre reviews. When it’s your baby, it still hurts.
It sounds like there were kind of weird, false expectations of you in those mediocre reviews.
Well, gosh… I will say that the closer the reviews get to the mainstream—like the main newspapers, with the exception of the UK and Ireland where the reviews were excellent in the mainstream papers—in continental Europe, for example, there was this Swedish daily newspaper… more like a Wall Street Journal type of paper, so not digging in very deep. This guy said that it was all over the place and, “it would be nice to hear what he could do with a real budget.” And I was like, I spent 50,000 fucking Euros on this fucking record, you dickhead! That pissed me off! I recorded at one of the best studios in the world; you cannot tell me that this record is sonically falling short. It doesn’t make any sense to me at all, this kind of thing. It made me really angry; it still does, obviously.
So, this kind of thing is like, “Did you listen to the record? Really?” With reviewers, especially the more mainstream the paper is, the less column inches they have and the more stuff they have to sort through to even fight to get a review, right? So, obviously they’ve got to find something, and they’ve got to sort through a lot of stuff to get to the one thing that they can say, “Okay, I can push this to my editor.” Now you’re dealing with writers who have to listen to 200 releases a week or something like that. So, how much time did they spend on my record? Obviously, not very much, if it’s a review like that. But the problem is, now the review exists and the people believe it. This is the issue.
I’d love to touch back on something you mentioned a bit ago about artists getting out of touch as they reach a certain level. Do you feel like you actually resist fame for that reason, or is there something else at work?
You know, that’s a funny thing that you just said, because it’s probably true. I’ve worked through the philosophy and the kind of, shall we say, the mystical/destiny elements of my life in the search for self-understanding, et cetera. When I look at the things that I’ve done and… pretty much everything that I really, really wanted to do came to be in some way. When I put my mind to something, and you can see some of the people who I’ve played with… coming from a small town as I do, and just being like any other kid picking up a guitar, and seeing who I ended up playing with—almost all of my most admired musicians, some from The Beatles, some from Zeppelin [among others]—it’s clear that I’ve got a pretty good handle on how to manifest things.
And so I think that if being very popular or mainstream or digestible or “famous” or whatever was important to me, it seems like I would have made it happen. But I’ve chosen the interesting path, I guess. Not only is money and fame not interesting to me, I’ve seen them cause plenty of problems for other people and become a hassle and become a restriction on freedom.
You talk about manifesting and the artists that you wound up playing with, there seems to be a definite pattern of similar ethos among them, if varying levels of fame. There’s Big Star, Neil Young, Patti Smith, even R.E.M. has always been kind of on the outskirts of things.
Well, sure. Their way of doing things when I was becoming a musician and learning how to do it… those were the people whose way of doing things appealed to me. There are some people who do slick really well, too, and they’re good. Still, there’s something about being true, and that’s certainly—of all the people we just listed—there is something that’s kind of “what you see is what you get” in a way. I guess that’s the thing. R.E.M., who I was a huge fan of growing up… really, if you saw where I came from, you’d never imagine in a million years that I would end up playing with those guys. They’re the only band I ever wrote a fan letter to—when I was thirteen or fourteen. I was so pleased to find that who they were was pretty much what I expected. There wasn’t a façade by any means.
Even further up, getting into that thing with John Paul Jones or Jimmy Page, there’s a whole other thing going on with what they’d been through. But at the end of the day, they were quite down to earth, really, considering all that they could be. I’ve seen plenty of mediocre people whose music isn’t even interesting who are just, like, atrocious and not worth the effort. If the atrociousness was just a defense mechanism, there was certainly no interest in me looking deeper. You can kind of tell. I hate to put people down, and I won’t, and I won’t name names.
Let me put it this way: A lot of people at the very highest level are pretty much awesome and quite real. In some cases—and we can call the manifestation thing into question with what I’m about to say—but maybe being popular wasn’t really their fault. There’s a thing of music connecting with a time and a generational need to express certain things. When those bands come along, they’re kind of nominated for that. It’s an elected position—not something that people can really make happen. Nirvana is kind of the classic example of that kind of thing. They were ambitious and got on a big label and all that, but they were not shooting for what happened to them. It was out of their hands at a certain point.
Do you feel like that could happen again? With all the saturation of the market that makes it increasingly difficult for artists to get noticed, do you feel there will be another generation-defining album?
Well, I’d like to think that would happen again. It may not be an album; music and its connection to the album format is sort of getting a bit fuzzy and wobbly. Maybe it’ll be something… there could be a “Gangnam Style” that has a bit more substance, or like a one video piece of musical art that isn’t so light and novelty-like. That could happen, and it could actually be a more sophisticated piece of art that does that. I would think that the answer is that… I think we have this idea that in the post-internet world, every niche becomes a community.
In that sense, I guess you could say that people don’t need unifying statements anymore because they can go out and sift through all the people in the world and find the people who think just like them and just branch off and form their little community. And that’s kind of true, but then that gets so specific that you’re back to square one, which is that people need to know what everybody else is doing and need to feel connected, traditionally. Maybe that tradition will end, but I don’t see it ending anytime soon. So, yeah, I’m certain that in my lifetime I’ll see one or two more generational kind of everybody-signs-on-for-something [albums].
Even though you feel that the album is becoming kind of a “fuzzy and wobbly” thing, you released Danzig in the Moonlight on vinyl. What was your thought process behind that?
Well, there’s a thing to that goes back to what we were talking about with the reviews and stuff that when there’s a mediocre review of my album, it’s often mentioned that it’s not cohesive or it doesn’t have a central theme. I’m like… I just don’t think that every album has a central theme; I don’t know why you’re laying this trip on me, you know? In that sense, if I step back and look at it a little bit critically I can say, yes, this is a collection of songs that I think flows well considering it’s so diverse. But there isn’t a central theme, so is it an album or is it just a compilation? Personally, many albums that have given me a lot of pleasure are like compilations.
The “White Album” comes to mind…
Exactly! And I actually wrote back to one reviewer who went on the whole thing of saying that my album was made hastily and wasn’t very well thought out. I was like, “Dude, do you know how much I worked on this album? There’s not one thing on this album by accident.” I said, “As far as the central theme thing… the ‘White Album’?!” I put that in an email and when he wrote back he said, “The very fact that you would compare yourself to The Beatles is part of the problem.” And I was like, come on, dude… I was just using that as an example. I wasn’t saying that my album is as good as the “White Album.” I was just saying there is some precedent; if they got to do that, why not me? Why do they get to be diverse and not I? I’ve been making music for a long time, so if you want a linear album I can go find you some examples from my catalog, but this isn’t one.
A lot of albums that are like compilation albums… I was thinking of the Dukes of the Stratosphear album where they take you on a little journey—it’s a pastiche of a period piece—but they take you on several different aspects of that, and take you on a tour of different clichés of the psychedelic era and it’s really fun to see how many of them they nail. In that sense, it’s a theme, but it’s like a compilation album of different bands because the styles are quite diverse. And even bands that I’ve liked over the years, it was cool to see how they would bend and shape themselves. Actually, XTC is this kind of band that, from album to album, it was a radically different song approach in each case. I’ve just kind of done that in one album—and I don’t even think it’s that radical, to be honest.
That criticism is kind of bizarre to me.
Well, I got it a lot. And the only thing I can say walking away from it was, well, if my album’s CinemaScope, novel-like length is too intimidating for people who review music for a living or a strong kind of hobby, maybe I just made something that’s out of people’s comfort zones. I’m not considered a cutting-edge artist, but it’s clear to me that [Danzig in the Moonlight] is outside a lot of people’s comfort zones. I think, well, good! I didn’t conform to anyone’s expectations and some people got mad about that. That’s a sign of good art.
And even still, you’ve released it on vinyl. So, as far as being “sprawling,” it is somewhat constrained by that format is it not? You had to be more considered in your song choices.
Well, it is a double vinyl, I’ll give you that. It could’ve fit on three sides, but we thought that was weird, and that the second disc wouldn’t get played much. So, we decided to spread it out onto four sides. It’s sonically better to spread the music out over more sides. Again, with it being a double album, I start thinking of those red and blue Beatles compilation albums from the ‘70s; [Danzig in the Moonlight] is kind of an anthology in a sense, in that there’s been so much time since the previous one, and I’ve been through so many experiences in terms of different kinds of artists and living in different countries… that’s a lot of experiences to digest.
It is a pretty accurate reflection in a way of where I’ve been. I guess I could have gone more into artifice and disassociated myself from my experiences and made something more abstract from my experiences. But that’s not really what I’m about. For me, a solo album is going to be very reflective of my actual world. I’ve done some really interesting things and I’d like to share them.
You’re about to embark on a huge North American tour in a couple of days, kicking off with festival dates with The Posies. Where do you feel you’re at with the band right now, especially in light of this new solo venture?
It’s another million dollar question, you know, because people ask me about a lot. There’s been many an interviewer where we talk about the album and I make it clear that it’s the most important thing to me. And then they ask me, “So, when are The Posies doing an album?” [sighs]
I respect that and I get that, but I felt since you’re performing with The Posies in a few days you might want to talk about where you’re at with the band.
Thank you for that. Of course you had to ask about that because of course we’re playing this week. That’s the thing—it’s like… even though I think The Posies made a really fine album [Blood/Candy] three years ago, the last thing we did, but for me I see the potential in what we can do. I felt like I was a bit sad to say that that album really showed a lot of growth for our band, but our audience shrank—both live and sales, although with sales that’s kind of hard to gauge these days. But, still… we musically raise the bar and that sets us back somehow. Great. That may be the case with this record of mine, too.
With The Posies… boy, it’s hard for me to… it’s hard for me to imagine having the strength and resources to push them because it requires pushing for me to get them to advance musically. This is going to be controversial, but I feel… I’m out there working, doing records all the time with some pretty big bands and artists—not in the States so much, but in other places. And I feel like I’m pushing myself all the time. The other guys are… less the kind to be pushing themselves, in a way.
So, when I think about that we don’t have huge resources—like if our last album [Blood/Candy] had sold a lot and we had, like, a good situation where we could count on… I don’t even know if a Kickstarter could get us money to make an okay record—that’s how skeptical I am. I’m thinking… gosh… without the resources and without the will, I don’t have the other three guys saying, “I want to do this and that, and I have so many ideas!” If that was the case, we could work on [something]. But if [the enthusiasm’s] not there and the resources aren’t there, it would all probably fall on me to organize it because I’m the organizer. Then that’s just not very appealing when I can work with artists who are coming to me like, “ I’ve got so many ideas and let’s do this and that!”
You feel like it’s all on you?
It’s not really all on me in the sense that I know that [The Posies] can deliver. Jon Auer, my bandmate, is not such a self-starter as me, and he’s really sometimes very introverted. He considers things for a very, very, very long time and I could never imagine him coming to me saying, “God, I’ve got so many ideas and I want to do this and that!” He’s more, like… opportunistic, shall we say. If it was a label, and he saw that it would be easy and there was money there and he could do it and get something for it in a way, he would be sort of compelled in a sense. But for him to do it for us is kind of… far-fetched, shall we say.
So, it’s just a matter of… I’ve got really great artists working with me all the time, or I could just be on my own and do this kind of record and go play these shows. The live thing, for me as an artist, is really rewarding. So, it’s kind of like… I have no bad feelings about the band, but it’s hard for me to… it just seems like so much work. And if that work results in a great album that nobody listens to, like our last one, I’m kind of like… I just can’t take it. I’ve got to put my efforts to where they’re going to be heard, or at least where it’s mine—one of the two.
Since you like to stay busy, are you already thinking beyond this tour to what’s next?
Yeah, I’ve got several things lined up. There’s going to be more touring for this album back in Europe and Japan and other places over time this year. But in the meantime, I’ve got several things laid out. One is an electronic instrumental album I’m doing with someone—with a couple guys, actually—and we’re kind of working on that for some time in the next year or so. I’m involved in a couple of other things. There’s this Dutch actress called Carice van Houten, whose album I worked on… We’re looking at doing another album.
And then there’s a couple of other things that are really too embryonic to discuss. Suffice it to say that there are projects that can keep me busy—not even counting that I’ve started to get into film scoring, so that’s started to open up a huge door of stuff—and then the music production thing. I can sort of see, just off the top of my head, being busy for the next couple of years. Once again, it’s like… the idea of having to insert into that the organization—which kind of really would fall on my shoulders—of a Posies album, that seems very far-fetched.
But the weird thing is Jon Auer has just gotten re-married and his wife and he live near Paris, of all things! Not that I’ve ever seen him there! But still, it’s kind of bizarre! Is there an opportunity there? But by the very fact of what I just said, my bandmate—in theory, my bandmate—lives forty miles from me and I’ve never seen him, should tell you a little something about our schedules, too. But also… hmm.
But, yeah, I plan to be pretty busy, God willing and the creek don’t rise. It seems like I’ve got several things laid out in front of me that are all really appealing.
Ken Stringfellow’s Danzig in the Moonlight is on store shelves now. Find a complete list of tour dates right here.
