tks: Ok so whats your history? How’d you start out making music? Why?
jp: I used to play the trumpet in grade school, I liked it, but couldn’t practice without pissing everybody off, so my trumpet gathered dust. I inherited an electric guitar when I was 11 and started picking out my favorite tunes. My friends and I started a band called “Captain Pomegranate and the Cave City Kick Down Band”. We wrote a song called “Gravy Train” which was absolutely terrible, and after bombing the end of year dance party with some prepubescent Jimi Hendrix covers and not getting any girls, we decided that we’d never be as good as Silverchair and the band broke up.
I finished high school and got into a really academic university in Portland, Oregon where I would spend the next 2 years skipping class, shooting pool and generally skating by without any direction. So I quit. I regard this as one of the best decisions I’ve made to date. The day after turning in my resignation, as I sat cross legged, confused and alone in the leaky, cold garage I called my home, I picked up my old guitar and wrote my first real song.
tks: Where do you record your music? There’s a really home-recorded feel to the layers in songs like Bottom of the Barrel, but its got this totally clean vibe to it too, its really nice.
jp: When I moved to New Zealand in 2004, I started to dabble in recording. I could do simple multitrack recording on an old boombox by going tape to tape and plugging my headphones into the mic jack in the back. The only tapes I had were these old recordings of a man reading the bible which provided for some pretty prophetic breaks between songs. Those recordings are some of my favourite. I had a jar of popcorn for percussion, some goat hooves that a friend from Costa Rica sent, and a melodica that my brother in New York sent me.
I got a portable digital multitrack recorder after a while, and used that to record my first release “The Birds and the Beasties.” I was able to lay down pretty clean tracks whenever and wherever I wanted to. Some were recorded in New Zealand in my back yard or bathroom, while the bulk was recorded in a dim-lit little room in Jakarta, Indonesia. This was also the room where I made the stop-motion music video which was released on the album.
tks: What makes you angry?
jp: Extreme pessimism, television, scam artists, jet skis. If you expect something to fail, success becomes all but impossible. Television could be such an effective tool for progress, unity and learning but it’s used to manipulate people into buying trash, feeling scared, and then placating their fear with a few empty laughs. I just almost fell for a Nigerian internet scam and jet skis are just loud, filthy and wasteful.
tks: Do you plan to take your music in any one particular direction? You’ve got some really haunting minimal stuff there, but then the kinda countryish feel in some of your tracks too – and even that late-night smoky jazz bar stuff, like on Back porch.
jp: I usually write music without premeditation. Sometimes I’ll just sing nonsense for a while and eventually it’ll take on a shape and I just roll with it and let the song write itself. It gives each tune a different feel. I’m moving toward making an epic stop-motion animation and musical, like Yellow Submarine meets Jan Svankmajer or something like that. I’m planning to release this with my next album in 2010.
tks: Talking about Back Porch in particular, it really feels like a theme song. Like, I listen to it and I keep seeing the opening credits to CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) or something. Do try and take that positively haha. Whats the song about?
jp: Ha… Back Porch came to me in about 10 minutes and I was so tickled by it’s naf-ness that I couldn’t let it go. I was living in Auckland next door to Surf City at the time and i couldn’t help but rush over to jam it out with them on the back porch (thus the name). I guess it’s a song about wasted days and wasting time, but mostly it was just a bbq jam sesh. I don’t watch TV so I don’t know about CSI, but perhaps wasting time is a crime worth investigating.
tks: How did you end up coming to New Zealand to play? Have you visited before?
jp: I live in constant motion like some sort of space age gypsy, hopping planes country to country. I came to New Zealand because my wife’s from here, and it’s one of the many places we call home. We lived in Auckland for a couple of years and now we’re checking out Wellington before we go to France for an artist residency to make a short stop motion film. So far so good.
tks: Best show of your life?
jp: Audiocinema in Portland. It was the first show of my US tour and the owner of the place was a big fan. He opened up a bottle of Petrone for the occasion, fed us chilli, and we partied into the wee hours backstage. It was a V.I.P experience and I thought, man being on tour is awesome. They featured my stop motion music video and it got a standing ovation and then I went on, alone and then more and more people joined me. It was pretty beautiful.
tks: If you had to do the hard sell on your live show, how would it go? In 40 words or less.
jp: It’s like rocking so hard that your rocking chair breaks, so you take to your feet and leap around like a flying jabberwocky. The Nobody is real sweet too.
James Beavis
Jacob Perkins plays Happy, March 6 2009.
