… and for once my crushing fangirl tendancies our critical weight and invaluable support for talented but woefully under exposed artists are reciprocated.

j. tillman who, you’ll remember we think is alarmingly ace, pulled himself away from the dancing girls with ostrich feathers round la pigalle when he was holed up in paris last week to answer our questions…

hl: yo, jt…how and where are you?

jt: i’m in paris for the week just recouperating and enjoying not being in transit.

hl:we here at hl all have day jobs which afford us time and some funds to persue our creative exploits, what’s your playing music/getting paid balance like?

jt: the balance is that i go on tour and go into debt and then try to catch up when i’m home at my job. one of which i don’t currently have. so, maybe “balance” isn’t exactly the right word. more like “playing music/poor financial decisions”. a lot of the misconceptions people in this industry have regarding the financial needs of artists are just that, but more often than that it’s just plain robbery.

hl: do you find it weird when people badger you with gushing praise at your myspace page/website/gigs?

jt: well, there is a distinction between the kind of praise that gushes and the kind of praise that has substance and is necessary for keeping morale up on the road. but when people tell me things like “your voice is like audio butterfly kisses” then, yeah, i tend to run screaming for the door. europeans are actually pretty good about letting you know what they don’t like about your music. as in “your songs all sound the same” or “you’re not as good as jeff tweedy”.

hl: ok, so you wrote, sung, played on, arranged, produced and even did the art direction for minor works and you write and record most all the time… do you have a new disque waiting to greet us in 2007, and will it be so hands on?

jt: i always have an ideal pretty early on for how i want to go about a record, but financial/time limitations usually force me to find other ways to go about it, which can ultimately make the record more interesting. so i won’t really know until i get closer to when i have the resources to record. i have two albums worth of material ready to go for 2007, but it all depends.

hl: you’re my favourite internet derived musical trove of 2006 - who’s yours?

jt: i don’t have a computer at home so i’m usually in cafes, etc. when i check email so i can’t say i’ve really listened to much music online this year. my favorite artists that i heard this year was a guy named teitur from the faroe islands that i played with in vienna.

hl: if you could’ve been the singer or drummer in any band apart from the one’s you’re currently in (and have been in) who’d it be?

jt: either otis redding or bill withers. casey foubert, formerly of the crystal skulls, is the best drummer i know and effortlessly cool as hell to boot, so i’d be him.

hl: do you really not like iron and wine’s sam beam? is it a beard envy thing? (but damn ‘cryin’ and whine’ is really freaking funny)*

jt: i was just giving a silly answer to a silly question, i think his music is really vital and it’s incredible that there’s a record buying public out there willing to make a record as raw as “creek drank” a commercial sucess. have you seen my beard recently? it’s pretty burly.

hl: if you were 25 years older and scorsese/robbie robertson call you up to be in the last waltz who would you have gone on with and which song would you’ve been on?

jt: doing inebriated jump kicks in a sequened jump suit with van morrison has always been a real dream of mine.

hl: sooo, imagine its summer; the sun’s shining, beer’s been sunk under the canopy of a spreading oak tree in a park somewhere and damien jurado (the band) are about to play dolorean at baseball - when the teams are picked who’s are you gonna end up on and who’d be the star player?**

jt: oh, team jurado would definately need an ex-varsity sportsmen like myself to make the game anywhere near even. al james’s nickname is “coach thunder” (i’m not kidding) so you can see my point. i could see ben nugent (their drummer) taking home the MVP. he’s the kind of dude who checks game stats on his cellphone.

hl: its nearly Christmas, what do you most want to find under your tree on the 25th?

jt: a mattress.

hl: is there a question you wish people would ask you, so can nochalantly drop a premo fact/self agrandisment in without forcing it and looking like a bit of a tit?

jt: i just love talking about myself so much that any question even remotely tillman-centic is inevitably the most fascinating question i’ve ever heard.

hl: you’re coming back to the uk in the spring for some more dates, wanna hang out then?

jt: yes.

so there we have it. josh tillman is funny, talented and wants to be our friend***

But, please, go buy his records here and here.

tell him he reminds you of your old school rival/first crush here.

and get the sweetest shortest hit of his audio butterfly kisses just about here…

j.tillman - trouble’s always free

*yuk, don’t you just hate insider jokes? see here for the context to that one
** as well as touring/hanging out with/doing laundry for damien jurado (the band) j.tillman also toured with the similarly brilliant seattle outfit dolorean. more about them another time, this here is tillman time.

***this might not be true.

despite traffic jams in purley-gatory (man, seriously the south east’s arterial roads suck the big one) we got to brighton in two relatively jolly pieces and even found a parking space nearby to the pub.

j.tillman was first up on the bill and played three covers (by gillian welch, neil young and the boss respectively) and two of his own (lilac hem and jesse’s not a sleeper) but dayum if that boy hasn’t got one of the most effortlessly melodic voices i’ve ever heard. he doesn’t sing so much as breath an ache over his guitar playing. it was beautiful.

by the time damien jurado (he’s a band now) came on we were the two tall people right near the front with big hair, so apologies if you were behind us. not sure what to say really, except it was a joy to behold that close up. damien himself was super relaxed with his new band, telling stories about his six year old Kraftwerk loving son, chatting with the band and filling the air with 15 of his lovliest songs, including ‘how i broke both my legs’ with j. tillman on drums.
in what is undoubtably bad blogging form, i’m posting another damien jurado track straight after yesterday’s but it was such a standout for me last night its been ringing round my head all day and i do so love to share.

normal non-washington based, un-acoustic guitary meanderings will resume shortly. promise.

damien jurado - lottery

isn’t it funny how quickly we not only adapt to technology but come to embrace it wholeheartedly?my copy of the new j.tillman album, minor works, finally arrived from out of la france and i’ve been indulging myself on my ride to and from work by listening to it. i mean i’ve been listening to the whole album. In the right order. One track after the other. That’s pretty much unprecidented. the funny thing is, listening to it as an album made me feel sort of cerebral.

a bit old school.

very muso.

see, i spend my life on shuffle, and not just my music listening but my reading habits, my working day, my friends and family, my modes of transport, my meal choices. taking a little bit here, a little bit there. and i could blame mtv for the fact that my attention span sees me doing several things at once and none of them particularly well, except i gave up watching tv in 2006. i just like to shuffle.

and really, it makes perfect sense. much as I shuffle my way through my days, apparently unable to commit to one style of dress, or music or a singular political viewpoint - enjoying the lifestyle equivalent of fusion cuisine - its just here that i end up seeing startling links between things.finding sweeping emotional continuity in the tracklisting of my intrinsic ipod dj, marvelling at how not only am i sat in a row of 6 women on the tube but we’re all wearing grey shoes like some gloriously styled advert for multicultural London. I’ll spot an unusually high number of crows on the way to the office, or hear the word haranguing used three times over in the space of an hour. Tiny seemingly inconsequential things but they’re like the threads which knit my life together. And they might seem like a big tangly mess of apparently random things that make me laugh out loud, make me cross, make me think or make me cry but its in the midst of the shuffling that I get to see and be reminded of a singular truth. that God is right there in the detail as well as the expanse. we can’t deal with the notion of randomness because that leaves us floating and subject to absolute whim, it leaves us without rhyme or reason. randomness reduces the universe to a pile of matter likely at any point to disintegrate into a mound of grey pixels at the bottom of our monitors.and another flip side to all this cultural and social cherrypicking is when you take the time to do something properly. to put on an album from start to finish. to read a book in silence. to switch off your phone and devote attention to one singular thing it feels pretty great.

here’s a j tillman track for a lazy autumn saturday playlist

or buck the trend and buy the whole album here.

(review to follow, you lucky people - its just too good not to talk about)