John Cale Talks Us Through His New Album
We managed to grab a quick chat with the legendary John Cale about his brand new album 'Black Acetate'. Here's what he had to say.
"The first two songs on the album are guitar based songs. ‘For a Ride’ is pretty much a studio event – it doesn’t translate into live performance very well, but it’s a guitar based song and so is ‘Outta the Bag’, but ‘Outta the Bag’ is more of a joke. It has a goofy quality to it about the voice that’s in falsetto. A lot of people suggested I sing it normally and I tried, but it just lost all of its charm – it’s just this quirky little number that works when you sing it in falsetto. And even when you can’t do it, I figured out, when you do it live people just enjoy if you can’t hit the notes, so that just works for that particular track.
‘Brotherman’ is an improvised track. I have this bad habit of rattling off about things in the world, like politics and stuff. So when I listen to that track what I really hear is me trying to stay away from it, and it’s one of the funkier tracks on the record because I worked on several different ones and this is the one that I kept – it has a good humour to it.
When I was writing ‘Satisfied’ I wrote it on the bass line, and I imagined myself doing a Sting song or a Blue Nile song – it was empty and focussed on the vocal. It really came out as a really romantic, affectionate subject matter.
‘In a Flood’ is more of an acoustic number – it has a slide in it and very little movement. It’s a story about someone running away and realising when they were half way gone that maybe they’d made a mistake and maybe things weren’t that bad after all, so they found that they just turned the car they were driving around and went back.
‘Hush’ is a song that has no bass in it. I was very happy to discover that you could write Rock ‘n’ Roll songs without a bass – funky Rock ‘n’ Roll songs. It’s quite a sensuous number. The whole idea of working the drum groove on this – I worked it on a background and there was a pad on there that was kind of like a generator noise or a power station noise that was constant throughout the song, and we ran into trouble placing the vocal properly so I dropped the generator, but it really works well live – this whining sound of a machine throughout the song.
‘Gravel Drive’ is a statement of understanding – I wanted it to explain to my daughter that I understand how she feels when I went off on tours, but the life of a troubadour is what her dad was into and not to panic because I always came back. Even when I didn’t come back, I came back. It did the job – I think the understanding is better now than it was.
‘Perfect’ is something I wrote in a dressing room – it’s the only song that wasn’t written in the studio. It was written in the dressing room at the Paradiso and was a throwaway guitar riff on an acoustic guitar, but when it got on the electic guitar it got a life of its own. Once you got the hook it was pretty straight forward – it wrote itself pretty much.
‘Sold Motel’ is an older one and it’s the one track that was done with my live band. We had chosen about 15 songs out of 48 and we still weren’t happy with what the variety we had there was. I remembered this song that I hadn’t really done justice to, so we got the band in and recorded it and it expanded and got better from recording it with a live band.
‘Woman’ is the one track where I was messing around. It was a problem, but it has this dual personality now with the sort of anthemic, stadium chorus and this really push and pull of a funky groove at the beginning of it – and it works for what it is.
‘Wasteland’ went through plastic surgery – it started off as one kind of song and then veered off into another. One of the songs that we started off with had a harmonica in it - it was tuning for some Stevie Wonder harmonica parts – and the song was in the key of that song. The way ‘Wasteland’ is now is in another key, but the harmonica still works in the new key. That was freaky coincidence, but it was a great one.
‘Turn the Lights On’ came from the studio I was working in. I had been using a Marshall stack, but the studio itself happened to have rows of old amps – original old amps and Supros. One day I sat down with about four or five of them and plugged in from one to the other to the other – I was playing a Les Paul – and they all had real interesting sounds to them. So we picked one of them and we wrote these changes with a click and ‘Turn the Lights On’ became the guitar monster that it should be, and it started off with these great old amplifiers. The Supros were valve amps, but they were made to go with Lap Steel guitars, so every one of these amps had a Lap Steel that was paired with it, because they made the guitars to go with the amps.
My favourite song on the album is ‘Mailman’. It’s about lying – if you tell someone you are a liar is it true? Contradictions and all that are a lot of fun. It has this atmosphere of someone who is caught in a kind of vortex of a mood and is talking about it very knowledgably, but has no idea of what he’s talking about in the end."
-- John returns to the UK in January 2005 for a string of Live dates. |
About Petrol Records
About Petrol Records
