TO BE A MAN
For FRANK FAIRFIELD, it's about far more than the music. The music, in fact, is barely a part of it at all, as he tells B.F.PIERCE.
It’s quite the task – and not just in this particular day and age, but perhaps in general – to quantify authenticity. Musically speaking, is someone authentic because they play a certain style? Are they authentic because of where they come from, what they’re wearing, what instrument they prefer? Or are they authentic because they genuinely care about nothing other than the music they create and labels, money and preconceived notions of how it fits into an ‘industry’ be damned, if at all acknowledged?
Frank Fairfield seems to fit into the latter category, and to be honest I’ve not come across many who actually do; it’s all well and good to profess to not care about anything but ‘the music’, but it’s another altogether for people to believe you. My interview with Fairfield, one which was supposed to happen a few months ago but which for some reason or another got pushed back, shed a little light into the thought processes of a man, a musician – despite the fact it was via email – who seems to live nowhere but in his own head. In fact, the music itself barely seems to register. Until you listen to it; this is freedom, on a disc. It doesn’t fit in this world. I don’t know where it comes from. Same with Fairfield, to be honest.
“I don’t really consider myself to play any one kind of music or another,” he writes when, in my first question, I make the allusion he plays blues and hill-country style music. “I just play popular music. I don’t really play too many ‘blues’, and I wouldn’t associate any music with geographic phenomena such as hills. There are plenty of young people around the world that still play popular music, it’s just not too terribly common to see people exercising an actual human culture in corporatised urban centres. That of course, is no coincidence.”
In 2009, Fairfield was plucked from relative obscurity (in an industry sense) and asked to open for Fleet Foxes on their US tour, providing a brand new stage for this purveyor of simple song, or so I initially thought. “Travelling with the Fleet Foxes was my first exposure to any audience at all, I’d hardly ever played any ‘shows’ before then, nor did I have much desire to do so,” he reveals. “All I can say about that time is that those fellows were very kind and very patient with me. Thinking back about it now, I don’t imagine I was the most enjoyable person to be around. I’d like to think I’ve become a lot more comfortable with playing music for audiences, and I suppose just a lot more comfortable with playing music in general. I only used to play music because I was very frustrated and unhappy, that’s how I learned to play.”
"I only used to play music because I was frustrated and unhappy..."
“I may as well go on the record to state that I certainly would not consider myself to be a good musician, I know people who are real musicians. Craig Ventresco, for instance, is a great musician, in my opinion one of the greatest there could possibly ever have been. I’m just a dumb kid who sings songs, but I’m at least striving to be a man.” Being a man is, quite simply, what seems to be uppermost in Fairfield’s mind, far higher than ‘the music’ or money or fame or anything, it’s what matters above all else. “I’m striving, if for anything at all, to become a man someday, that is all I really want, is to be a man,” he writes at one point
A man indeed, one who plays music, music as rooted in a time gone by as the man who plays it is disinterested in the waves it causes – and yet it fits right now, which methinks just makes it timeless. Timeless popular music. We talk, write, briefly about Fairfield’s latest release, his second, Out On The Open West, a departure from his 2007 7”, I’ve Always Been A Rambler in that most of the songs are originals. “I don’t have a writing process, I just half made up a few little things. I didn’t make them up for being recorded, it’s the other way around,” he tells. “It’s all the other way around. People never played music so that they could play ‘shows’ and make records, they perhaps made records and played engagements because they played music. In regard to ‘bygone eras’, one could go to the San bushmen in Botswana and see them play music from a ‘bygone era’, only it’s not bygone, because they still do it, they’ve been doing it for thousands of years. If anything, I actually play quite novel music, on very novel instruments.”
Novel, popular music buy a “dumb kid” who wants, one day, to become a man. If the definition of becoming a man then, is to be honest, forthright, solid in one’s convictions and true to their own beliefs, then Frank Fairfield has become a man. The music is just a bonus, and to my mind, that is authentic indeed.
THE RAGE NEVER ENDS
In Part 2 of this two-part interview, SAMUEL J. FELL finds there's never a shortage of injustice, and as such, there'll never be a shortage of material for TOM MORELLO.
The record is World Wide Rebel Songs. It’s not, to be honest, a very good record. Tom Morello is no Bob Dylan, but then he’s never claimed to be, and so the lack of cohesion exhibited by this, Morello’s fourth record under The Nightwatchman moniker, isn’t really that big of a problem. Perhaps you may scoff at this, perhaps you may point out the lyrics, whilst pointy and sharp, aren’t very well executed; you might point out that the fact he’s brought in an electric guitar means he’s trying to get this to sound more like his old band in an effort to garner more listeners. You’d most likely be right on all counts. But you’d be wrong too.
For Tom Morello would be the first to admit this is no masterpiece. He’d admit that because it’s not what he’s going for, he’s not trying to make something that’ll be lauded as an album of timeless quality and originality. What he’s going for is the same now as it was back in 2003 when he first started this project – it’s a vehicle, it’s a way for him to get things out of his head, and out to a wider audience. Sure, if the music is no good, then no one is going to buy the record, but what makes it passable, decent, listenable, is the fact he’s so passionate about what he’s singing. It’s this fervour that bleeds from the speakers when World Wide Rebel Songs is thrown onto the stereo. And it’s this fervour which fuels him.
"The Nightwatchman is trying to even the score."
“In some ways, this record was a premonition,” he explains, fitting World Wide Rebel Songs into his answer, “because I wrote these songs before the Arab spring, before the austerity riots in Spain and the UK, before the union uprising in the mid-west of the United States… so it was the time for world wide rebel songs. Certainly in the States right now, there’s a huge gulf between rich and poor, there’s tax on working class poor, it’s really vicious and it’s a war only being fought by one side, and so The Nightwatchman is trying to even the score.”
In a nutshell, you don’t worry about finding something about which to be passionate – it comes to you. Morello said he wrote these songs before these recent events occurred, which really highlights how wide-ranging his lyrics and ideas are. Any injustice, any battle, any fight – this is what The Nightwatchman is about; his music is relevant because injustice will never go away.
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“The first, and really only thing, that I strive for, is to make a record that I’m proud of,” Morello waxes. “I’ve already done that, so in part, my job’s done. Then the connection that I feel, like in that live show in Melbourne that you saw, that connection is really, really important to me. In my life I’ve often been, in some ways, alone; like, I was the only black kid in an all-white town. I was the only socialist in a conservative system. I was the only rock ‘n’ roll guitar player at Harvard University. I was the only Harvard graduate in a political rock/rap band, so connections have not always been obvious.
“But when I stand on a stage playing these songs in front of an audience, you can feel that really palpable connection,” he goes on. “Like, ‘We understand each other’, and that’s very important.” Again, this iterates the fact that this, the Nightwatchman project, is about conveying a message and about Morello connecting with his audiences so he can convey said message effectively. It’s not everyone who has a stage from which to preach (for wont of a better word), certainly not as effectively as this – but Morello does, and that’s what drives him on.
Now, it’d be remiss not to address the aforementioned fact that for the first time in four Nightwatchman records, Morello has indeed introduced his electric guitar. Yes, it may be seen as a move to get more RATM fans interested in his more folk/rock stylings here, but it goes a bit deeper than that – it’s about the songs themselves, for Morello, as every good musician is, is a slave to the song, for it’s the song which holds the message, indeed, the key to the Nightwatchman’s very existence.
“Well, I’m more comfortable now that I originally was,” he muses on this new twist. “When I began it was very important to me that this [project] was in stark contrast to my work with Rage and Audioslave, but this is now the fourth Nightwatchman record, I’ve now made as many records here as we did with Rage Against The Machine. It’s [World Wide Rebel Songs] also the 14th record I’ve made in my career, so I’m much more comfortable in my own skin.
“And so a few years ago, I played an electric version of ‘The Ghost Of Tom Joad’, and that was the first time I’d sung with an electric guitar, and I realised I could do all the things on the electric guitar without sacrificing the integrity of the song itself,” Morello continues. “So now, when I go to make a record, I don’t have to say, ‘Well, I don’t know if I can allow myself to do that’… but now, I want to do it, so I can do it.” A simple explanation really, and one which indeed shows how comfortable Morello is in his own skin.
He mentioned earlier in our interview that the songs also had a hand in informing the electric angle – he’d play around with a song, it’s scream for something extra, out would come the electric and the rest, as they say, is history – we now have World Wide Rebel Songs in our hands, on our stereos, eating away at injustice the world over. Sure, it may be taking the most minute of bites, but any force, any help, any skeric of resistance is what this world needs, and the man who knows this for fact, is Tom Morello. He’s not Bob Dylan, and he knows it. But he’s a man with the means to share what is an increasingly common voice, and the world, with the rebel songs, is all the better off for it.
World Wide Rebel Songs is available now through New West / Shock