WQHS Interviews Jeremy Messersmith @ World Cafe Live

After Jeremy Messersmith’s recent show at the World Café Live in Philadelphia, WQHS’s Aldrin Abastillas and Nikki Black sat down with the Minnesota indie pop artist for a post-meal interview. Messersmith is currently touring with a full band and playing songs from his latest album, The Reluctant Graveyard; below is about half of their 30 minute interview with this singer-songwriter icon:

Aldrin Abastillas: Is this the first time you’ve been in Philly?

Jeremy Messersmith: It’s actually the third time I’ve been in Philly. Wait….fourth time. Yeah I like it to be a secret when I play. I played a place called Kung Fu Necktie last summer. Which is really funny cause it has that huge industrial fan next to the stage, which was just blowing the whole time. I was playing acoustic guitar and there’s just this huge buzzing the whole time.

AA: So on this tour you’re with your full band, which is weird cause pretty much every YouTube video I’ve seen of you, is just you and acoustic guitar.

JM: Yeah this is the first time I’ve toured with a band. Before that it

was usually just me hopping in my car and driving around playing acoustic guitar at coffee shops. But yeah its way more fun to be on the road with a bunch of your friends than me just driving around just being lonely and talking to my GPS.

Nikki Black: How long are you going to be on the road for?

JM: Not as long, I think total we’ll only be out a month or so. We’ll hit up most of the East Coast and then we’re gonna go visit the West Coast in July.

NB: A lot of people compare you to Elliott Smith. Is he a source of inspiration for you?

JM: Yeah I mean we’re both white guys who play acoustic guitar….so yeah! No, he really was. I think at the time I was listening to a lot of big bands like U2 and things like that, and he was the first person who wrote songs that I was like, “Oh, its like he’s telling a really emotional personal story.” Sometimes his lyrics aren’t super vivid but his songs are always really evocative. He does a lot of complex chord progressions and has a spider-webby kind of voice. And yeah he ended up being a really big influence especially on my first record, The Alcatraz Kid, which was basically me sitting in my basement recording songs and not really knowing what I’m doing and like, “I don’t know if this is just shitty? Is it good? I have no idea!”

AA: So when you write songs, is it more like you would listen to him for ideas or did it just happen that it sounded similar?

JM: I think it’s more like it just seeps into you. You just kind of absorb it and you end up regurgitating it a bit. I do that with a lot of artists. I often sit down and think, “Man I want to write a Simon and Garfunkel song, that’d be cool”. Or I want to write whatever kind of tune. And then it usually ends up sounding not much like them. Sometimes it does, but usually not.

NB: Your songs all tell a story. Is that something you consciously try to do?

JM: I think so. I grew up going to church a lot and we sang a lot of worship choruses and hymns and things like that. And the one thing about them, is that they tend to be very simple so everyone can sing them, but they also tend to be really, really repetitive and they don’t really go anywhere and every once in a while I would hear a song that told a story and it was like, “This is amazing”. I think I kind of like it. In my mind I’m like a frustrated filmmaker who just makes little movies.

AA: So your last album is the final in your trilogy. Is that something you set out to do? Were you thinking, “Alright I’m going to make a band and its going to be three albums this is it”?

JM: No, not at first I just did the Alcatraz kid and it seemed like this is where I’m at right now. I just graduated from college and then I was immediately like I got a music degree and then I was just working a really shitty temp job forever. And you just work a series of horrible things and you’re just like, “What am I doing with my life? Is there even a place for me? What’s it actually take to make me happy?” So a lot of the songs are about growing up. And then I started working on the second one, The Silver City, and that was more about middle age, people driving cars and working boring jobs a lot. And then after The Silver City I thought I should just kill off every character and I’ll just call it a trilogy.

AA: Your video, the Tattooine video. What led you to say, “I’m going to go write a song about Star Wars”?

JM: Well it was Minnesota in the winter time, and I was driving home from work and I just had this little melody pop into my head that was like *hums tune*. And you just get a melody and you start singing things over and you try out different syllables and see if it works. And being a Star Wars dork I was like, “Oh I should write something about Tatooine, cause everyone knows what that is! That’d be fantastic, it’s universal you can say that to anyone.” Anyway, I sat down and I was like, “This is a fun idea. I don’t think ill ever do anything with it. What do you do with something like this?” I just sat down on  the piano and I wrote the song and I plopped my MacBook on top of the piano and I just played and sang the song using GarageBand. I didn’t even use a mic, I just used the laptop mic for the whole thing. And then I just recorded it and put it on the Internet and I was working with Eric Power, the director on some other music videos. He was like, “I see you have this Star Wars song that’s posted. Do you mind if I do a video? I’ve wanted to do Paper Star Wars for a long time.” And I was like, “Sure go ahead.” And that’s what he did and yeah by far its my most popular music video and it’s the song I worked on hardly at all. It’s ironic. It makes me think I should spend way less time working on songs. If I could just not try.

AA: I saw it a lot on blogs and newspaper did you feel like people were calling you up more or anything?

JM: Um no.

AA: Really? You’d think after getting all this attention people would want to hear the rest of it.

JM: Well I got a lot of attention from a lot of nerd people that are really important to me. Like Wil Wheaton was messaging me and stuff, just other sort of geeks and I consider myself to be one. And like that was cool. But anything else? No, nothing really happened. I thought maybe ill get a phone call that would change my life. But oh no I still wake up and put my pants on everyday its pretty amazing.

AA: On your website you adopted the Radiohead music theory, where you pay what you want. What led you to do that?

JM: That’s how I like to be treated, as a fan of a bunch of bands, so why not just do it. That’s what I’d want, so I think other people would want it. The funny thing is, people still buy lots of CDs and they still buy stuff from iTunes. But for a certain group of people I think it’s really important.

AA: It’s weird because CD sales are going down but record sales, like vinyls, are going way up.

JM: Yeah I sell a bunch of vinyl and that’s pretty cool. I think its better that way. Its already out there for free. I can go to The Pirate Bay and download all my records and sometimes I do if I don’t have a copy of it. Its already out there for free, so at least if you get it from my website maybe you’ll have a more pleasant experience. Maybe you’ll give me your email address and I can pester you for years about coming out to a show. Who knows?

AA: You’ve been putting stuff out for a while, but you’re still unsigned. Is this a decision where you said, “I’m going to keep doing this by myself.”

JM: I’ve never gotten any offer that I thought was any good. At some level if you want to get bigger you have to get people working for you and doing more things and that’s what record labels do. But I just want one that isn’t trying to gouge me constantly. I can’t talk about anything specifically probably. I tired to one time and my manager was like, “You can’t do that.” Why not? “Cause if you ever get a good deal its gonna piss these people off.” But they want everything and I don’t really want that. I’d rather do small tours and play for 40 people and be my own boss and put out records when I want to put them out, when I think they’re good and not when somebody else does.

AA: Whats the biggest show you’ve played? Is this a normal size for you?

JM: Well it depends on the city. So in Minneapolis, I’ve played for some pretty big crowds like 3,000. I’ve opened for President Obama when he was there.

AA: Did you talk to him?

JM: Haha no. I thought about it and I was like, “There’s nothing that I could say to him in 5 seconds that would even be worth his time.” But it basically depends where I am. In the upper Midwest I do really well. I can pull in nice crowds in like Chicago and obviously Minneapolis. And I do really well in New York and D.C., but those are where I have radio that plays my music. Pretty much every other place in the country really doesn’t, so its usually if I play in Pittsburg or Philly or Cleveland so 30, 40 people is a pretty good night.

NB: At what point did you decide to start going on tour?

JM: Well I’ve always kind of toured although it was usually like when I did The Alcatraz Kid, I just toured for 2 weeks and then I was just done.

AA: Was that too much for you?

JM: I just couldn’t get time off of work. So I’ve tried to tour as much as I could, especially for The Reluctant Graveyard; it seems like its worked out a lot. I did 3 months of touring last summer and I’ll do about a month with a full band this year, and I think that’ll be it. As soon as I get back I’m going to start on new music and stuff.

AA: That was my last question. What are your plans for the future? Since you’re unsigned you can pretty much do whatever you want.

JM: Right, so I don’t really have a boss so I think I have two ideas for records. One will maybe be a very radical departure from anything I’ve done. It’ll be dancey I think, like sci-fi you can dance to or something like that. My other one is to do a really acoustic record, really mellow and something you’d buy for your mom.

AA: Like a mother’s day gift.

JM: Yeah something like a Simon and Garfunkel record.

-Aldrin Abastillas