I love William Faulkner, Dolly Parton, fried chicken, Van Dyke Parks, the Grand Canyon, Topanga Canyon, bacon cheeseburgers with horseradish, Georgia O’Keeffe, Grand Ole Opry, Gary Snyder, Gilda Radner, Radio City Music Hall, Big Sur, Ponderosa pines, Southern BBQ, Highway One, Kris Kristofferson, National Arts Club in New York, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Joni Mitchell, Ernest Hemingway, Harriet Tubman, Hearst Castle, Ansel Adams, Kenneth Jay Lane, Yuba River, South Yuba River Citizens League, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”, “Hired Hand”, “The Jerk”, “The Sting”, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, clambakes, lobster rolls, s’mores, camping in the Sierra Nevadas, land sailing in the Nevada desert, riding horseback in Canyon de Chelly; Walker Percy, Billie Holiday, Drag City, Chez Panisse/Alice Waters/slow food movement, David Crosby, Ralph Lauren,San Francisco Tape Music Center, Albert Brooks, Utah Phillips, Carol Moseley Braun, Bolinas CA, Ashland OR, Lawrence KS, Austin TX, Bainbridge Island WA, Marilyn Monroe, Mills College, Elizabeth Cotton, Carl Sandburg, the Orange Show in Houston, Toni Morrison, Texas Gladden, California College of Ayurvedic Medicine, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Saturday Night Live, Aaron Copland, Barack Obama, Oscar de la Renta, Alan Lomax, Joyce Carol Oates, Fred Neil, Henry Cowell, Barneys New York, Golden Gate Park, Musee Mechanique, Woody Guthrie, Maxfield Parrish, Malibu, Maui, Napa Valley, Terry Riley, drive-in movies, homemade blackberry ice cream from blackberries picked on my property, Lil Wayne, Walt Whitman, Halston, Lavender Ridge Grenache from Lodi CA, Tony Duquette, Julia Morgan, Lotta Crabtree, Empire Mine, North Columbia Schoolhouse, Disneyland, Nevada County Grandmothers for Peace; Roberta Flack, Randy Newman, Mark Helprin, Larry David, Prince; cooking on Thanksgiving; Shel Siverstein, Lee Hazlewood, Lee Radziwill, Jackie Onassis, E.B. White, William Carlos Williams, Jay Z, Ralph Stanley, Allen Ginsberg, Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk, RFK, Rosa Parks, Arthur Miller, “The Simpsons”, Julia Child, Henry Miller, Arthur Ashe, Anne Bancroft, The Farm Midwifery Center in TN, Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, Clark Gable, Harry Nilsson, Woodstock, and some other stuff. Buuuut, the ol’ U S of A can pull some pretty dick moves. I’m hoping it’ll all come out in the wash…

    When I listen back to those first EPs, I’m like, well, that voice does sound fucking crazy. There is no way around it. But I know exactly what space I was in. I was so sure that I didn’t know how to sing that I was just going balls out. I was like: I’m going to sing my heart out, as crazy as it sounds, and I’m not going to care because there’s no hope of sounding anything like what people consider beautiful. I sure as hell wasn’t affecting anything. I mean, the institution of singing is inherently an affectation!

    Certain aspects of physical appearance are mutable, boiling down to mere decisions, and, to the extent that those decisions operate as elements of an artistic project, I consider them valuable. All my three record covers depicted “me” in an allegorical setting—embroidered, on the first album cover; painted, on the second; and then photographed on the third. In each case, there are factors relating to physical appearance that can be tempered to underscore the spirit of the album and the identity of its narrator. The photo on the cover of Have One on Me was modeled after typical Orientalist fantasy-figure iconography, like an odalisque or a Venus in Furs—a sort of cartoonish amalgamation of feminine signifiers stylized to illustrate the Lacanian idea “Woman is a symptom of man.” Annabel Mehran, the photographer, used black-and-white film that the artist Becca Mann later hand-tinted over with watercolors. The idea was to mock-up a shabby, 1920s Parisian studio with an absinthe-dulled lady posing on a divan in bits of old drapery fabric, and then paint over the resulting tableau into some idealized, Technicolor, hedonistic fantasy set. The specifically female, earthbound, corporeal, and decadent character in that album art reflects the character of those songs’ narrator as well as the idea of feminine self-diminishment. That was a definite application of the idea of beauty.

   

I think some people perceive me to be part of a movement or something that I don’t really associate myself with. I think there’s a lot of fakery, a lot of posturing — a handful of kids who just latched on to what they saw as a scene, and set themselves industriously to the synthesis of a particular vibe. I’m pretty insulted when I occasionally get credited in the press for having anything to do with the dissemination of that vibe. I keep to myself. I have friends in my hometown, and a few in other places, but I’m not part of some epic, bracelet-clanking, eyes-rolled-back, blasé, nihilistic scenester cult. I’ve seen some awful displays, let me tell you. I’ve gone to some shows that have left me feeling heartbroken about the state of music. A soulless, mindless, watered-down, image-obsessed, artless stab at John Fahey or Marc Bolan or Karen Dalton or Donovan or Vashti Bunyan is no less lame than Nickelback. There are so many kids who have this energy — you can tell they were into electro-clash five minutes ago, or whatever was big in Williamsburg or Berlin at the time, and now they’ve grown their beards out and they’re doing this thing that they think they understand, but they don’t understand it at all.

I know that’s a bitchy thing to say, but the discussion of this issue requires my being a bitch for a minute. I’m sick of being blamed for bad music. Or associated with bad music. That said, there are plenty of people I’m honored to be mentioned in the same sentence as. I’m not trying to dismiss an entire type of music, just fraudulent vampires.