The Light Below is a masterpiece. Not that I’d start an interview with Jeff Angell, founder of The Walking Papers with such gushing sentiments (I saved those for the reviews, here), but there it is. A coherent, cinematic album that draws on a wide range of genres, it’s undeniably the work of a rock band but, at the same time, it steadfastly refuses to be pigeonholed. With stunning production, courtesy of Aaron Shapiro, it’s an album that seems to draw the listener into another world (a particularly desirably quality at this point in time) and was glad to have the opportunity to sit down with Jeff, via Zoom, to discuss the development of a record that has been glued to my stereo for over a month now.
I’ve been hooked on the album and really surprised at the evolution of the band since I saw you with Alice in Chains a few years ago.
I’m happy to hear that, thank you so much. I’m glad you took the time to listen.
It was a genuine pleasure and the first thing that I wanted to ask you was that, for me, one of the most important things that I look for in any artist is that desire to make an album that’s dynamic- that ebbs and flows over its run time, and that’s very much the case here. When you started to approach this record, did you have some sort of conceptual flow in mind, or did that come later?
Um, there are a couple of songs on there that are kind of fringe songs; but the meat of the record, we chose a direction when we started.
When we played with Duff and Barrett, Duff is punky and very much a rocker kind of guy; and Barrett’s more of an organic drummer who’s very inspiring. But Ben and I are more into… we dig Brian Eno and Pink Floyd and, you know, Depeche Mode – bands that are a little more ambient oriented. But we also grew up rockers on The Cult, Black Sabbath and the Seattle bands and stuff like that. But we wanted to make a record that more had that cinematic, expansive thing to it, rather than just a collection of twelve, four-minute songs.
It’s interesting that you mentioned Depeche Mode, because that’s one of the influences that I didn’t expect to hear but, particularly on What Did You Expect, it took me to a similar place to Delta Machine – that kind of grinding ambient blues, which is really kind of unusual, I think.
We came across that riff naturally, but there was some point where it kinda reminded us of Depeche Mode, but I thought it was a good thing – we didn’t try to avoid it. There was a thing that was happening in the eighties where the production was really advanced, and everyone had these huge arena snare drums. But I think that there were these bands like U2 and Depeche Mode, bands that wouldn’t normally know how to play the blues, who played the blues. They were trying to get blues into their music and you’d even hear that in somebody who did know how to play the blues Stevie Winwood or someone like that – and there was this cool concept of this blues artefact being carried into the future and I kind of liked that. It maintained its essential ingredient into the future music, and we wanted that to happen on our record. We wanted it to sound modern, but we still wanted it to have that soul of the best things about music.
The approach that you took on this album, in a lot of ways, reminded me of what Tom Waits was doing with albums like Bone Machine and Mule Variations, where he was incorporating everything from his early blues roots right up to much more aggressive, almost industrial kind of sounds. Was that kind of dynamic and diversity sat at the heart of your song writing?
Well, it’s interesting that you mentioned Tom Waits because he’s kind of… [brief interruption as an alarm goes off] When I was a younger guy in Seattle and played music and stuff, I kind of missed the nineties boat, I was a little too young. I wasn’t involved and I figured if I didn’t fit at twenty-six / twenty-seven, then I should probably call it good, because I was supposed to be dead by now!
And then, when I came across Tom Waits at that time (I kinda knew he existed, but I wasn’t familiar with his records) I think he really showed me that there’s a place for people with some life experience and some years behind them to make music that’s probably better than what’s “current” or what’s in the charts. So, he’s a huge inspiration and a liberating person for me to take cues from. So, I think a lot of artists as they get older, they’re looking behind them at all these kids who are coming up and trying to use that as a gauge for what they should be doing, whereas I go the opposite way. I look to the artists that I think still have integrity or are interesting as they get older. And I find that in people like Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen – so, I look towards those guys rather than those other, older artists that we have now that rest on their laurels or past achievements rather than continue to push things forward. I wouldn’t be interested in having that kind of a career.
Exactly. And, again, the thing for me that keeps me hooked on people like Tom Waits and Neil Young is the way that they’re not afraid to take their music beyond the boundaries of what you might consider to be their core sound; so you get something like Le Noise and then he’ll saddle up with Crazy Horse and do something a bit more rocking… and that kind of spirit of adventure is really important to being an artist as opposed to a performer.
Yeah, and I think that’s right. I think Neil Young is probably more common for me to listen to around my house. Seriously, if we have dinner, that’s usually the record that goes on. And I’ve also been kind of fascinated lately with the Dead Man soundtrack –
Oh yeah, that’s really cool!
Yeah, I’ve found that pretty inspiring during COVID and stuff. I’ve been just recording random, just me playing guitar and not really looking at it like a song. It’s like WWNYD – What Would Neil Young Do? He would probably think that sometimes you can just record some pure emotion and there’s something that’s more real there then when you’re actually analysing it. It’s a different thing.
Another person who I think is great too is Lucinda Williams – I think she really has hit her stride. She’s got to be in her sixties or something and she’s just putting out these great records and I think that’s awesome! Not only is it awesome because they have so much life experience and still have something to say. It’s also incredible because it inspires people that are older to have a reason to live. I just went to see Neil Young play in Seattle, last year before COVID. And there were a lot of older people and I think a lot of those people were using him as a role model – you know that life has a purpose after you’re not young and pretty anymore and I think that’s a great gift to give to people.
Another area that I thought you had a certain similarity with Neil Young, is that your lyrics engage in what I would kind of call a light touch politics – you’re not preaching some sort of didactic statement, but then you are kind of commenting on the situation in the world today, through songs like the Value of Zero, where you seem to be stripping away some of the noise and chatter that surrounds you. I don’t know if that’s a valid interpretation, but that’s how it felt to me.
Well, I appreciate that you say that. When people do sing about politics, they do it in a way that’s very judgemental and they’re mainly saying things that are alienating people rather than saying things that are getting people to think for themselves. And I think that’s one of the biggest problems going on right now – it’s polarising people. People are choosing these extreme sides and these judgemental things, like if you… without getting too far into it, if someone wants tolerance from the other side but they’re not offering tolerance to the other side. People aren’t talking about it; they’re not thinking about it. They’re just pointing fingers and wanting everybody to think how smart they are. And I don’t really… I’m a little bit bummed on both sides of that kind of position to where people are forgetting to be objective about these things and to have the conversation. Why can’t you believe in god and the environment at the same time? I don’t understand that. Why do people, who think we should have less government, then want to tell people what they can do with their bodies? There are so many contradictions, hypocrisies, and political positions that I think It’s more important to just think about the issues rather than try to wrap your identity up in red or blue. Although, I do tend to go with… I don’t trust any of them, so I go with the environment and medical for everybody, that’s where I vote.
I agree wholeheartedly. But, I think it’s a difficult lyrical line to walk, because trying to engage with certain aspects of the world but trying not to be preachy and to make it relevant at a wider level, it’s difficult to achieve… but listing to songs like Value Of Zero, I didn’t feel like there was an agenda, but it felt like there was something you could get to grips with beyond the more banal rock ‘n’ roll cliches of “Woah, yeah! Baby, tonight!” and that’s at the core of the idea of music as a unifying force for me…
Yeah, I think so. But I also think… I have this weird kind of idea that so much wisdom is in bumper stickers. A lot of times these things are these short statements that have so much wisdom in them. Being preachy – I don’t necessarily want to be preachy, but I like this idea of thinking and getting people to think versus telling people what to think.
I think that, for most people, if they asked themselves these questions, rather than follow the script of some 24-hour media thing. If they actually thought about those things themselves, I think most of us would find ourselves a little more centred than we think we are. Some of the things that people choose to fight about politically, it seems like they’re almost… they’re not thinking about the issues, they’re looking for trigger points to find ways to criticise the other person or the other side.
I don’t know I feel like it’s… I think it’s great that you appreciate it, but I don’t really think too much about it, I just feel like it’s stuff that’s worthy to put into a song. I don’t care if anybody found it alienating or not because I have to sing about something! All I can do is be myself and write the songs that I find interesting and I find the process of writing songs interesting so that’s what I find entertaining to write about.
Thinking about the process of writing the songs, one of the things that stood out was Divine Intervention and the way you came up with multiple choruses, couldn’t decide which one to use, and so put them all in and I like that fluid style of composition where you don’t necessarily have to go verse-chorus-verse-repeat and it seems like your process is a very organic thing between you and the other members of the band.
Yeah, I think being the singer gives me the liberty because I’ve got to find something to say and then figure out a way to say it. Sometimes we’ll play something spontaneously and I’ll put ideas to that. But a lot of times, the way that it works is that I’ll have a rough idea of what I’m trying to write and then the band help me to expand on it and make it better. Sometimes it gets stretched out into something that’s cool and they also help me with my confidence in the idea or, if I have different directions in mind, they’ll help me with which way to go. And sometimes they’ll inspire me to take it home and work on it again in a different way.
But that song was giving me a lot of trouble because I couldn’t decide and it was one of those things where I had too many ideas that I had faith in, so it was like “which one do I throw out?” It was actually Ben’s position of why throw them out. I don’t think he feels as an artist, that you have to throw everything out. He tends to like to fuck with the formula a little bit and he often tells me to consciously fight the way that a song should naturally go, and I think that, because we’re both pushing these directions of challenging each other, it helps to make the songs better and go a little further.
And sometimes I agree with him and sometimes I’m like “why avoid the obvious thing a song wants to do?” So, you want to challenge yourself, but you don’t want to put weird things in there just for the sake of it. If they disturb the song… if they’re not benefitting the song, you shouldn’t be doing it.
That makes perfect sense and, again, it’s challenging to get everyone to think about serving the song. You know, you get bands that insist on adding random time signatures to things purely because it’s “good to make things complicated”, but I think it’s more important to follow the emotions of the songs and you know, that horrible expression that less is more… that idea of serving the song is so important, particularly on an album like this that flows.
Yeah! I’ve written a few songs that have weird time signatures, and there are songs that have weird time signatures on this record too, but I don’t know that it’s noticeable. When I come across it, it’s just an accident. I’m just doing something organic and I’ll go “that seems like it could be odd…” and when I count it out, I’ll go “I guess it is – check me out, I’m fancy!” [Laughs]. But I definitely don’t do it on purpose. To me, it’s OK to write outside of the lines, but I do think there are certain mathematical truths to how music works.
If you study… I don’t know if you know this, because I didn’t know – a lot of Eastern music and Moroccan music in particularly, they follow the melody and not the time signature. So, instead of thinking in bars or counting, they’re just following the melody. And I’m not saying all their music. It’s some… I went to Morocco with my wife and I was jamming with some dudes over there, I found myself jamming with some Moroccan guys and it was hard to jam with them and they explained to me how the traditional music works, and that’s how it goes. So, yeah, they follow the melody, and you’ll be counting it off like: “this one’s seven, this one’s nine, this one’s thirteen…” To them it’s totally natural to not be counting at all, they’re just following the melody and I thought it was pretty interesting and that’s why we need to explore other cultures and think about these things, because it can really expand your ideas. I haven’t tried that yet, but I did think it’s pretty cool.
That idea of exploring other cultures and ideas is a great way to build new elements into your music – it’s an interesting topic and it builds into pretty much every art form.
Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be going off to some indigenous tribe – I started listening to what my teenage daughter was listening to… there’s all sorts of cultures going on, even in your own neighbourhood probably, if people open their eyes to it. A lot of that, like rave music and stuff like that – electronic dubstep and stuff like that. There’s some crazy music going on in that. Like a lot of people, I think are just getting bored – perhaps they think the beat is simple. But sometimes I’m listening to it and the things they’re doing with layering sounds and filtering sounds to have crescendos and stuff and there are some interesting things going on in that.
I agree, I think there’s a load of influence that can be taken from electronic music and, again, that’s something that I found in the many layers of the album. It seems like Ben’s influence with keyboards and electronica, it really brought out this cool, ambient atmosphere that I thought was cool.
Yeah, he’s really great at that and that’s kind of like why we work together. I started a record with him a really long time ago and then we figured we should just partner up. So, usually I’m writing the guitars and he’s then approaching it from a whole other way and he usually adds a new layer that keeps it from being too rootsy. And I like that.
Some of the songs I enjoy are like when you go to a movie and before it starts they have all these trailers and some of those reimagine some (and this is something we thought about a lot when we made the record) classic song that you know and then they twist it to be like the soundtrack for the trailer, so it has this really cinematic thing and it fills the theatre, but maybe the bones of the original song are all that’s left – like the progression or the melody. And I love that. This feeling that music can be like a movie without the visuals.
One of the things, when I was writing the review of this, one of the things I found myself doing was trying to picture where I felt you were when you were writing the music. So, Going Nowhere for me, conjured up images of a kind of dusty, mid-west church… obviously I know it’s all subjective interpretation, but how do you see your music and if it’s in that kind of cinematic landscape?
I’m glad you hear the church part because as a singer, I really am gravitated towards that. As a singer when you listen to singing and when I played covers in the path and stuff, I always kind of chose these kinds of southern sounding things. I liked some of the bends they do in the singing and who doesn’t love a pentatonic scale and some of these progressions? Or the blues and some of these country classics?
Another thing we thought, we wanted to sound like… we’re goth rockers at heart. We grew up on that kind of stuff like The Cure and The Cult, and then we got into industrial, like Skinny Puppy and Ministry and all that kind of stuff. Both Ben and I. But I also grew up on AC/DC and the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith and Black Sabbath and Guns ‘n’ Roses and all tat kind of stuff.
So, we were trying to figure out how to bring all that together, and it sounds like it could be a sort of southern gothic kind of thing. We’re from Seattle but I spent some of my childhood in Eastern Washington too, where there’s a rural element – so I drove tractors and built fences and my dad’s an organic farmer and I picked up a lot of rocks and stuff like that as a kid too. So, I did feel the earth. I kind of bounced back and forth between my mum in the city and my dad in the country and I think that, in some way, found its way into the songs too.
The album, I thought, was meticulously produced. It sounds stunning, you’ve got the sax passages that sweep across, the keyboard elements. Can you tell me a little about the production and arrangement side of things?
It’s Aaron Shapiro, who’s the producer. He’s a local guy and he hasn’t really had… this will probably be the most heard record that he’s worked on. He did work on some records with this band, Motopony and they’ve had some success. But we went to him to just do the demos, but when we did them, we figured it sounded better than most records we’d done, so we figured we should just carry on. So, the demos grew into real takes.
Usually, when we go into these things, we lay down the stuff and try to be as live as possible as far as the guitar and the bass and the drums. But, since the bass was on the keyboard, that was di’d into the board so he can play with that as much as he wants. And Ben has a home studio, so usually we’ll record that kind of stuff and, while I’m doing all the vocals and stuff, he’ll run home and make a whole bunch of different sounds on his own at home and then he’ll bring it back. And because he doesn’t really know what I’m doing… he knows what the song does and what the melodies do… he’ll come back with these great ideas and we’ll pick the ones we like. So, we listen through those and choose the ones we want and then build more off that. So, it really is… although Aaron did a great job of recording it and he added in a bunch of stuff too… most producers we’ve worked with are just amazing engineers and they’ll have comments like “how about some more energy” or “that’s too slow” or “that needs an intro” or something. But he would sometimes take the drums and add an effect to them that gave them mor of a swing or he did some interesting things that we wouldn’t normally get from a producer. And he was also musical with the melodies. He’d point out that we were repeating melodies and get us to change the approach and he would kind of sing the parts, looking at different ways of singing the same melody to stretch out notes and stuff, which was cool.
We had never had that experience before and now we have me, Ben, who’s a producer in his own way, and then this other guy who’s a producer in his way. And then, I think, he ended up having the record with three producers at that point and it worked because we were collaborating not competing with each other.
I kind of felt that way about the other Walking Papers albums… not so much sonically, but I felt like in every incarnation of Walking Papers, you had three dudes who can produce a record and that’s why you end up with all that stuff. And we love that stuff. Sometimes, I like that sugar more than… sometimes that’s what makes a song. We love guys like Nigel Godrich who can take an artist like Beck and then you get an album like Sea Change which is totally outside of his realm and then you can compare that with what Nigel did with Radiohead and you can see what it is he brings to he bands. I think that’s sometimes as important as the songs themselves.
Good production can be so complimentary to what’s happening and it’s having those ideas, as you say – those little bits that you didn’t really hear, but you’re singing or playing, and it pops into your mind as something that would be cool to have there. For me, I love the spontaneity of having that kind of creative process, where you’re sat at the desk and like: “maybe we’ll put a gong on there…” or whatever – you know, stuff you’d never have thought of but, if you have multiple people in the band who have that kind of vision, it can create something really special.
Yeah, I think so. It’s also the case that there can be a lot of those things on the record, but good production is not putting everything on… it’s making sure the things that are on are important or heard. So, we made a conscious decision to not have bass all the time. And let’s not have layer on layer of guitar to the point it’s competing all the time. We wanted to leave a wide-open room for the drums in this area so people could hear those ambient swells. We wanted dynamics, but a lot of times people think production is putting as much stuff on as possible, whereas a lot of the time, it’s putting special things on there, so they make a difference. Tom Waits was a genius as production. He strips those songs down to like a jazz trio, but with a musical saw! Or another one might be acoustic guitar, drums, and a violin… but he doesn’t put all those things on at the same time. Because, at that point, none of those things are special anymore. You’re bombarding the listener. How many things can a listener pay attention to at the same time.
Yeah – that Radiohead thing again. I remember having this discussion with some friends about the opening track on OK Computer and pointing out the way the bass is barely on that track – it just pops up and stabs in at various points, and it’s so much more effective for being stripped away and then you can have the layers of guitar doing their thing, so yeah – a huge part of the production battle is to know when to allow things into the mix.
It’s funny that you said that. I heard that Moon Shaped Pool record – the most recent one – and when I heard it, I heard it on some phone or computer or something and you couldn’t hear the bass and I was like “this record isn’t very good” [laughs] right? And It kinda drones on and they have these twinkly guitar parts that just drone on and go nowhere and it doesn’t really have… I figured it might be their worst record. And then, I heard it on a stereo where you can hear the bass and I was like “oooohhhhh – now I get it!” Because, if you can’t hear his bass on the records and, like you said, he just kind of stabs in at various points, and it allows the other guys to do all the things that they’re doing. Without him doing it, the kind of stuff they’re doing is like eating a handful of salt. If you don’t have something for that salt to be seasoning, it probably doesn’t taste too good. So, that’s another thing sonically in which I think Aaron did a great job when he mixed this record, was to make sure he wasn’t overdoing it on any one thing where anything wasn’t being complimented. He did a great job.
There’s a real subtlety to the record and it’s one of those things that allows it to really expand – the more you listen to it, the more you pick out these little bits. It really does sound amazing.
Well, I really appreciate that. Thank you so much, I’m happy to be a part of it.
My final question is that, you know, releasing an album at the start of 2021 no one knew what was going to happen, and it’s kind of looks like we’re going to be in this weird lockdown twilight for a while yet. Do you have any thoughts about how you’re going to be promoting the record?
Well, we’ve made three music videos for it and we’ve got a fourth one going on, which we haven’t really done much of, which has been kind of fun. We’ve tried doing some streaming stuff from our rehearsal room, but the problem we’re having is like the discussion we’ve just had – so far, mic-ing it up and playing it live and knowing people are going to be watching on their cell phone or something – we’re just finding that it’s not going to do it justice.
If we can find a way to pull together some versions that we think are worthy of doing, then we’ll hopefully do some of that kind of stuff. But unless you’re in some pro-studio or something – and we’re doing this in our rehearsal room – it’s kind of like it cheapens what people can hear on the record. So, to hear us playing it live – we want to play it live; but we’re not finding a way to make it sound that great. At least, in our rehearsal room and stuff like that. If we can figure that out, we’ll do it.
But I think a lot of people are putting out whatever, like “hey, here’s me in my home office playing guitar” and I’m like “it sounds like shit!” I’m bored after thirty seconds. If we’re going to do that, I’d rather they just heard the record and watch ed the videos that go along with it. But if we can find a way to do it well, which we’re trying, then we’ll have something come out. But, so far, not feeling so good about it!
We did do a couple of things, and we thought it sounded better than most people are doing, but it’s not meeting our standards of what people want to say.
And the other bummer is that you find a lot of pf people (and I’m not going to name names) aren’t doing it live. They’re faking it, like they did in the eighties or whatever, they’re’ recording it in a studio and making it appear like it’s a live session, but it isn’t live. But I’m not into that at all. In Walking Papers, we did do the Kill Room sessions a little while ago – but that was at a pro-studio with six camera guys. I’m proud of that because we played live, it was really, there was no funny business going on. If we can figure out how to do that, we’d love to, but we don’t really have a facility set up to nail it right now.
I’m with you and it’s refreshing to hear – you don’t want to let anything go out that doesn’t meet that quality and it’s even disappointing when bands do that, because once it’s out there, it’s out there forever. I’d rather have the art piece and the record and leave it there.
Yeah. And we have a bunch of live stuff from tours we did that sound a little raggedy – like four Go Pros on a stick, so there’s some energy there… but if you’re charging people money for it, especially these streams, it better be worth the money, I think.
Thank you so much for taking so much time to talk me through these things.
