STEVE REYNOLDS
A conversation with ERNEST HARDY

Steve Reynolds is not a trust-fund bohemian. His thin, wiry body comes courtesy of the hard-knock jobs he's held in the course of his 30-odd years on the planet - among them, construction worker and tugboat deckhand. His face is scruffy, and the undersides of his fingers are calloused, a condition thrown into high relief by the long translucent press-on fingernails he wears on his right hand. They're for plucking his guitar. Clad in a white t-shirt, paint splattered worker's shirt, faded blue jeans and well-worn work boots, he looks more like he should be doing odd jobs around the coffee-house we're sitting in than talking about politics, movies and the books that inspire his surreal/poetic/clear-eyed lyrics and music. Sitting in an LA coffee house surrounded by thrift-store chic clad heiresses and the artfully distressed spawn of Hollywood powerbrokers, he sips his iced tea and sits comfortably in his own skin.

Reynolds' debut CD, Exile (429 Records) is a study in contradictions. His voice can veer from deceptively airy to unexpectedly and movingly grainy. Having traveled the world as both wandering civilian and hard working artist, and armed with a head filled with movie images, heady literature and current events (he's a voracious reader of the news) he's penned songs that confidently skip through a host of themes and ideas.

"Dear Rose" is a grieving father's song of bereavement, where the sadness in the words is underscored by the contrasting propulsiveness of the music, by the rushing sweep of guitar, drums and tender vocals. The swirl in the production echoes the emotional anguish of the father. The lovely "That Old Love," a moving short story that layers scenes from a couple's well-worn and unraveled relationship, lays bare the connection between old-school American country music and Irish folk songs, in the process recalling the more wistful work of the Pogues. Throughout the collection, a soulful but gritty vision of the world emerges, one where the tour guide gently nudges you to see and feel what the ordinary people all around you see and feel. It's a work of warmth and compassion.

Bounding into the coffee shop after lending his construction-worker skills to a friend who is remodeling a new home, Reynolds is charming, blunt and very funny. At one point in the interview, he caps an anecdote with a sentence that could be his personal slogan: "I don't want to be such a dictator in my own life that I don't leave the space for happy accidents."

E: So, you were just on a construction project?

S: Just helping out a friend; I used to do it in Canada.

E: You bloody immigrants.

S: [ Laughs ] It's kind of funny, The U.S. government now demands that I play my guitar for a living and happily I get to leave the construction behind.

E: Did you play your guitar for them?

S:   In a way.   It's really weird. I used to get strip-searched at borders. It'd be constant trouble. Now I have this visa - which is very hard to get - that's called an Extraordinary Talent Visa. I'm not making that up.   So, when you come in, they think you're someone super famous. I've had them try to re-name my band. They're like, " Steve Reynolds is the name of your band?! No !" And then they'll try to come up with a new name for me. It's a nice change because I used to be in the back in my underwear. A lot.

E: You know, people project all sorts of preconceptions onto artists and my questions will reflect my own assumptions, which you should feel free to dismantle. My first one is that you read a lot and are hugely influenced by novelists and poets because your lyrics have a very literary bent to them.   They go from abstract to concise, concrete zingers. I wanted to ask who some of your favorite writers are, some of your literary heroes. Or even other songwriters.

S: I'm terrible with coming up with writers but one of the most recent books that I thought was compelling was the Kite Runner . I'm really into pseudo-non-fiction stuff that has a compelling arc to it. Musically, I'd say the Pogues and Van Morrison. I like honesty in a lyric. I think that's why I respond to non-fiction. I like people that are telling me something about their world-view or their own personal experience that is empowering. When I was fifteen, David Bowie's Hunky Dory & Pin Ups album was like, Yes! Yes! That's it! I love stuff that's just really real.

E: Many of your songs have a short-story quality that's sadly lacking in much of the music we hear now...

S: Yeah, I don't have a formula but I think I have a style. It doesn't come from a very conscious place. For me it's just a matter of going at it and never getting the brain involved until the last minute for the final polishing. That's why I wish I could come up with more writers I like so you can get some idea of what inspires me. Oh, there's that book, um... Staggering Genius ?

E: Dave Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius .

S: Yeah! It's like this stream-of-consciousness of sorts but you can also hear his personality, the inflection in the phrasing. All that stuff, to me, is the real humanity. That's how I try to write, to not make it so pointed in what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to discover it along with you.

E: Your lyrics read very much like poetry; their power is not necessarily so much in the content of what's being said, but in the sounds of words and the way they're used together to strike certain emotional chords in the listener. If you take certain lines or phrases out of context, they don't quite make sense but taken as a whole everything clicks. Does that make sense?

S: It does. I can be a little oblique at times. [ He laughs .] You hope, as a writer, that there's an arc in it. I find a lot of singer-songwriters tend to live in melancholy or they're so political that it's didactic. But a lot of my stuff, like [the song] "Exile" - I sort of imposed a meaning on it after the fact. It was only later that I realized I was writing about a real theme.

I do hope that I'm creating something where I'm telling a story that might start out in the gutter but have a light at the end of it. That's not a conscious thing where I feel like I always have to put hope in there but I don't wanna live in bleakness. I find that a lot of stuff [out there] is just so dark that I'm not lifted out of anything. And music doesn't have to do that but I just think, for me, it's important to feel there's a forward motion.

E: Let's talk a bit about the use of repetition in your songs and the way the chorus is employed. Often in pop songs, the chorus is simply the catchy, sing-along part but in your work it often takes on the feel of an incantation or chant, almost a prayer and...

S: Did you have a specific song in mind?

E: Oh, yeah, a few - "Static," "Miner's Lamp," "Dear Rose..."

S: I'd be curious to know what you thought about "Dear Rose." "Miner's Lamp" is a perfect one to start with. An A&R guy said to me, I want you to go home and come up with something in different time signatures , or something like that. So, I went home and wrote. I spent about forty hours just playing the guitar - I always start with a guitar 'cause I'm a guitar player first. Then, on the seventh day, it all happened at once. I go to this place where I'm not consciously thinking of what I'm doing. I'll just sing utter rubbish and then, all of a sudden there it is: "Miner's Lamp." I still, to this day, have no idea where the hell it came from, if I'd seen a film or a painting or whatever. But as soon as I locked on the idea, I could see the helmet with the light on it and it built from there. It's really an unconscious thing, where I sing   rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, and I'll probably get three or four verses from that. Then I write it out and craft it a bit. It's a constant battle to balance what is constructive, the external, and what my intuition tells me.

E: How does performing live affect the shape and evolution of the songs, especially when they're new and still being formed?

S: For me, it changes a lot. Many people I know really work a band - the arrangements are set and you can pretty much see the same show every night. I've always really admired that to a degree. I'm consistently inconsistent.   I like to invite the messiness of life onstage.   I mean, there's a certain bar that hopefully I don't drop below.

E: How about the origins of "Satellite" and "Static"?

S: I'm criticized a little bit by people who think that I have un -choruses, where the choruses tend to step down as opposed to that build up that people are used to. The song "Satellite" was me going, " Okay, you want a traditional song? Then here, I'll give it to you ." They always say the chorus has to lift and I just don't think that's always the case. It depends on what I've set it up with in the verse. I mean, "Static" is the perfect example. [The song's protagonist is] telling himself, I'm just here in static ... It doesn't want to go up . That's an instance where it's not there to lift you into some other dimension. It's a kind of sighing.

E: What about "Dear Rose"?

S: What did you think it was about?

E: I think the song crystallizes in the passage, "Behind these lines there's faces too young to see / That this is not the way it's supposed to be..."

There's a high school near where I live, and everyday I see kids whose faces are just hard. They've clearly been through so much and there's all this brutal experience on their faces, but that's not the same thing as wisdom or perspective. And you see that gap play out on their faces. Those two lines I quoted just immediately brought those kids to mind: the naiveté, the flickering notion that the life you live and all that you've seen are not necessarily the way things have to be or should be.

S: You've nailed it. I used to go speak in juvenile jails in LA... [ He pauses. ] The song also draws from my own experience because I sort of lived in that world growing up; everyone used to always say to me, Oh, you're a really old soul.   And you see it on these kids today. They just look like they've lived these hard lives yet there's also a naiveté there that's shocking. That's what it's written about - this girl who lives in [L.A.'s] Boyle Heights. Everyone thinks it's a love song and that's fine. If that gets it on the radio, I don't give a shit. [ He laughs .] But it's about this father crying over his daughter's grave because she got caught in the crossfire of a gang battle. I saw this documentary about kids and gang warfare and I thought, fucking hell . Is this what growing up has become for this generation? But it's the naiveté behind that face - behind the bravado and the toughness - that I was interested in. You just see that one little glimmer: Maybe I can be a kid .

E: "Painter and Son" seems very stream-of-consciousness, very elliptical in a way...

S: That's actually the first song, in terms of lyrics, I ever wrote. It was written from here to North Hampton to Montreal and back, all on planes. I went to see this show one night - and this is when it became clear to me what I didn't want to be as a writer - but this girl was onstage, this friend of a friend, and she's had record deals and she's super-tattooed. And every song had rain in it. I was getting so uncomfortable listening to her. I was like, You're just keeping me under water all night . C'mon man, throw me a towel. And that's what the first few lines [I heard a girl singing about the rain / And it seems she could never get dry again / And yeah, I'd like to know / Does she know where to go?] are about. I just sat there thinking, Oh, my God. Shine a light. Get an umbrella.

E: Talk about "That Old Love," which struck me as a lovely short film set to music. It made me wonder how much of an influence film is on your writing.

S: It's a huge influence. Huge. I have to have a visual in my head in order to write. That song comes from my seeing a movie about James Joyce and his exile to Italy. Actually, that's also where I got the idea for the song "Exile," and so many of the themes that run through this record. I've always thought my stuff would be more appropriate in film than it would be in any other setting.

When I saw that film on Joyce, it was about him writing Dubliners from Italy. I guess he'd exiled himself there. And there's a line in the film that says he wrote his best stuff about Ireland when he was actually outside Ireland because that's when he could get the best perspective on it. I think that's what happened to me. Before I came to America, I'd never written a lyric. I'd never written anything. As soon as I got outside my messy life in Vancouver and started to forge a different path, then all of a sudden I got some clarity. And because I didn't think any of what I wrote would see the light of day, I had the freedom to tell it like it is. That was so liberating.

E: Has it been difficult to take your music, which - as you said - you originally never thought would be put out in the world and therefore was a process of stripping yourself bare, has it been difficult to then perform that material before audiences?

S: Not if I've done it right. There are songs I don't play anymore because they are a little too baring. Even some of the lines in "Static" are like that but it just depends on where I am, personally, at the moment I'm performing. I actually find it to be kind of the opposite where, because I said something that really was true, I have no right to back away from it.

E: Market Fool" reminds me just a bit of some of Joni Mitchell's recent work where she really slams the current state of the music industry: "Heroes never make it to the show / They're always caught holding the door..." Just the whoring of art and artist, the degradation and lopsided values that leave those who are truly created stranded. Is that a misreading?

S: It's a day in the life of being a writer, kind of a rumination on that. You probably said it better than I can.

E: Let's go back and get some biographical info. You were born in Canada, right?

S: Yeah, Vancouver.

E: What inspired the move to America?

S: A couple of things. I'd sort of bottomed out in my life there. [ He chuckles .] One day I saw an ad for a two hundred dollar flight to Scotland so I went in to my boss' office and said "I'm going to Scotland." She looked at me and said, "Yeah, you probably need it," and gave me her credit card. I booked a flight to Scotland for four days later, took my guitar and bummed around Scotland and Ireland. I ended up meeting this person way up in the north of Scotland - nobody in Scotland even knows where the hell I was - and she was a friend of a friend, from LA. We were talking one day and I said, "Oh, I have a cousin in LA. Maybe I'll come down." Instead, I went back home to go back to work but realized I couldn't do it. So, I packed up my van and drove down here. I lived in my van for nine months, played around in some clubs. That was 8 years ago.

E: What kind of kid were you?

S: I was really into sports. I had kind of a fucked up childhood, though.   But I was quite, a good kid, a real people-pleaser...'til the teen years !   then all bets were off.

Happy enough, I guess, in the midst of chaos. I never was artistic in any way, shape or form, though. I'm not Radiohead. Didn't go to art school. [ He laughs .] I had no talent in that way.

The thing that I'm most proud of is that I engaged everything. For me that meant doing a lot of drugs, which I don't do anymore, and a lot of just... [ He pauses for the right words. ] I was the yes man. No matter how crazy the scheme, count me in. I was Withnail and I . I was just fucking out there. And as much as there's always shit that goes along with living that way - it was painful and it's really an uncomfortable life a lot of time - it was also exciting. I did shit that was insane but now I have my head full of stories. I got to see the world.

At one point, I was in Raratonga and I saw two guys under a tree with an ice cream bucket that had flies overhead. They called me over and I spent the afternoon drinking homemade grog out of a bucket. That, to me, was the life to explore.

E: Does anyone else in your family have any sort of creative leaning?

S: Well, my dad was into music. He was a trombone player. My mom was on real spiritual paths and she played a little guitar. But there was nothing that I'd consider real artsy. She was a librarian and she wrote a little. It was definitely an environment where whatever I wanted to do was encouraged though.   My mom got me my first guitar lesson. I think her line of thinking was that if I was gonna spend all that time alone in my bedroom, I should be good at something.

E: I'll resist the easy joke, there. [ He laughs .] Do you have any siblings?

S: I have a younger brother, older sister.

E: Did you go to college or university at all?

S: Not really, though I did take a Thai language course. Not really sure why...It's comes in handy for when you go get a massage I guess.   But I did go to a guitar school in Bremerton. I think my mom actually sent me there. I was the youngest guy by at least fifteen years. I went there and I met this one guy who played seventeenth century harp songs on the guitar. It utterly blew my mind that this guy could sit there and make what sounded like fifty-two strings come out of his guitar. It was the most beautiful music I'd ever heard.. I also signed up with a banjo teacher. We would just walk into the woods and sit on a stump - I think you had to bring your own log - and that was class. I think there was even a clothing-optional ukelele class.. Again, it was just crazy characters telling their stories.

E: So, aside from the hippie music school...

S: Yeah, no college. [ He laughs .] I took those three months of guitar lessons and the rest is...

E: Self-taught...

S: Yeah, self-taught. I've had some good mentors, people who thought I was better than I thought I was. I just got used to tweaking a guitar in my own way and that opened up my world.

E: How did you get the nickname Scotch & Soda, the Head Laborer ?

S: Aw, yes. The good old days.   I've always had these day jobs -cook,   carpenter, sawman, tug boat hand - and people could never reconcile the fact that I was always the most wasted individual, yet I'd work harder than most. I would have union guys coming up to me like, "Uh, hey man, pace yourself." And I'd be like, No, no it's cool. I like to work hard. I don't like to waste time. And they'd repeat, No. Pace yourself. [ Laughter ] I was like, Ohhhh... gotcha . But I was always a little tipsy on the jobsite back then. Whoops.

E: What's the New Zealand Motorcycle Tour?

S: Oh, I was in New Zealand -and this motorcycle gang was having a tattoo convention at the top of the hostel where I was staying. And they are freaky looking guys. I mean, hardcore. So, I wandered up there and somehow ended up becoming their little buddy. Now, there's no way that I should have been hanging out with these guys but the next thing you know, someone goes, "Aw, man, you should join our band." I can't even describe these guys. Their whole faces were tattooed. But I ended up being their little buddy. It was just insane. But I'm so glad I experienced stuff like that. I don't have to act out anymore. That's what my music is for.