Tim Kasher
Interview with: Tim Kasher Photos: John Sturdy
The cover art for Adult Film is probably one of the only times an album’s art has made me feel uneasy. You kind of look like a piece of gum that has fallen out of someone’s mouth and rolled in a pile of dirt. Can you explain the idea behind it?
After upon coming up with the title, Adult Film, that was the picture I thought in my head, so I talked to the photographer, John Sturdy, about how to go about doing that and we decided to give it a shot. It was pretty fun. I’m glad with the way it turned out.
A lot of your albums before this one had themes running through them; what would you say is the theme of Adult Film?
On some records I do…it’s kind of an umbrella, an umbrella in terms of covering it one way or another, like all the songs. I made a point to try to have something less thematic and more of a collection of songs. They all fit under that title in a sense that it’s about aging and so this “film” being kind of a filminess that collects on us as we get older. The closest I think that it is about is mortality, mortality specifically in some songs and mortality in relation to the work that we do in our lives, the output we have.
Having worked for a number of years in a full band setting, what was the most difficult aspect of writing music on your own?
The most dangerous thing about it is that I don’t really have a ton of input throughout. Even though I work with musicians, like Patrick Newbury, I worked with on the last two records with him, there is still this detachment. With the bands that I do, there is more opinion brought in the songwriting process. So I don’t have anyone’s opinions. I have to use random judgement calls, for better or worse. I wouldn’t encourage people to work in that fashion. I don’t even encourage myself to work that way, but it’s just what I’ve been doing. I try to be really hard and I try to be a tough editor. It’s unusual compared to working with the bands that I do, because I sit with the songs by myself and there is no guiding hand or force behind it. Nobody else knows the songs. I can throw them all away if I want to and nobody is there to catch them, which is kind of strange. I’ve never decided to scrap a whole batch. Well, that’s not true. I do sometimes scrap entire batches of songs, but with the band, it’s a bit more difficult because then you have these other people who have become attached to them, so I’ll have a tendency to save some of them. I don’t know if this is making sense, but it’s a bit different to have the songs all kind of live in my head and solely in my head.
Do you take negative reviews of your solo albums harder than you would of negative reviews for Cursive or The Good Life albums?
No, but I see your point. I think that negative reviews are just a little bit annoying regardless. So, no I don’t, but I don’t necessarily separate…Maybe that’s what you were suggesting that with the band we share the burden or something like that. I think that for me, every album I do, every album I put out is just a batch of songs I wrote and that really doesn’t change despite who I may be working with. I think it’s always going to be equally personal.
Early albums in your discography dealt with relationships and divorce, what, if anything do you consider your muse nowadays?
I like to think that changes a little bit from year to year. I don’t think it changes a ton. I think as the writer, I like to try to hone in on, my favorite topics, ones I like to explore the most, which is still the dynamics of those very close sexual relationships that many of us have. I think that I also like to explore the approach of writing. It’s just something that I just think about. Songwriting is a weird thing, because it’s just these little of tidbits of stories or these little tidbits of expressions. I think it’s totally strange. I don’t know if I’ve ever completely gotten sort of comfortable with that. Without musicality behind it and melody, it’s just these kind of goofy poems and I don’t really read poetry. So, that said, it becomes kind of weird, like what kind of expression I use just trying to let out. I try to let it come across naturally and it’s just whatever happens to be on my mind at the time, which for the last few years, it’s been a lot about mortality, I guess. Just turning 40 this year, and I think it’s just a weird milestone.
I’ve always found how geographic locations influence an album fascinating, and you said in another interview that it’s inevitable that it’ll happen. Having lived in different major cities, can you spot the different geographical influences in your albums?
Here and there I kind of can, but not a ton. I attribute certain albums to certain areas I’ve lived in and I can recognize some of that. Like Mama, I’m Swollen is a Cursive record that I wrote a handful of stuff when I was out in LA, but that album in particular reminds me specifically of that time period. I think that the relationship and influence of a location to one’s writing, at least for my writing, I’m sure that it affects it greatly, I’m just not the person to recognize it. I think it’s obscure and I don’t see it myself. At the end of the day, I’m almost just kind of by myself writing and still kind of just in my head. I’m sure I’m being influenced by everything around me, because all of it is all real and whatever it is we’re reading and watching. I just don’t personally see those influences. I’m sure they exist.
You’re currently living in Chicago and the city has always had a solid music scene. Is there anyone related to the Chicago scene that you’d be interested in collaborating with?
There is a lot of great music here. I am old friends with the Joan of Arc crew. I’ve done a lot of touring with them. There is an old friend of mine who lives here in town, Matt Focht, who did Head of Femur for a while, he’s from Nebraska. Angel Olson lives here, I think she is fantastic. I’m a big fan of hers and I’m looking forward to her next record that comes out in a month or two, I think. Collaborating, I don’t know. I really actually should just throw a band together while I’m here, because I miss just getting together with people. It’s a good excuse to get together and have a few drinks.
I know you two are friends, but I see a lot of similarities between your music career and Tim Kinsella’s music career in that you both have wildly various forms of output and both have interests in writing screenplays and short stories. Have the two of you ever talked about releasing something together with music or writing?
I think that, sure, we’ve talked and joked around about it, but we really haven’t laid out any plans in such. I think we’ve talked a lot about doing a split 7”, that we need to do one of these days because we’ve had that idea for a long time.
You worked with Laura Stevenson and Nate Kinsella on Adult Film, how did their involvement come about?
Laura I hardly knew at the time. I had just played one show with her in Philadelphia. I liked the show and I picked up the record at the time that was Sit Resist, that was what she was promoting at the time, and I liked the record and it stayed with me. So, I was looking for the right kind of voice for that song and her voice popped into my head and fortunately she was able to do it. So that was great, and then we toured together too last season.
And you asked about Nate Kinsella, getting back to the Joan of Arc crew and Make Believe. I’ve known Nate for a long time and getting to do some of the songs with Nate was really part of my personal wish fulfilment of the benefit of doing stuff under my own name. I’ve been playing with this great band; they’re a great band and great friends that we tour around together and they worked on about half the record. I wanted to do that just because they are great musicians and they’ve always been pretty cool about working on stuff. I made a point to also do a collection of songs with Nate Kinsella too, just merely because I think he is, I mean not to be so flattering, but because I think he is just outstanding, a totally outstanding musician and how cool that I have the opportunity to do that. For me, it’s kind of just that simple. I gave him all the songs that I thought were weirder and that I had a harder time imagining the percussion for. I figured that was perfect for Nate.
That sounds just like what Nate would be into.
It was really that last Birthmark record, other than that, I had always daydreamed playing with him just solely because of watching Make Believe night after night. That last Birthmark record is one of my favorite records.
Whether it’s music, short stories or screen plays, you are always writing. How do you maintain the creativity to write so much and how do you deal with writer’s block?
I guess writer’s block doesn’t bother me much. I just write through. I write through writer’s block for the most part. Sometimes I have enough sense to set something aside. For music especially, I can tell when it’s not a good time to write. Mostly I’ll just write and mostly I’ll just play guitar for hours that day anyway. I guess that’s just my point of playing through it. It doesn’t really bother me. You can still collect plenty of stuff, set it aside, and it might be something you want to use for something else later. Or probably not, because you didn’t really think it was very good to begin with, you know. I figure it’s practice, it’s just practice to get all those bad ideas out. Sometimes I recognize it’s such a bad idea that I’ll just put the guitar down and that’s fine and I’ll go do something else. I have the benefit of I can always just switch over to writing something else. I don’t really experience writer’s block too much as far as screenwriting and story writing goes. It seems like once you have a lot of story ideas and so you just lay one out and kind of just whatever, like cheesy trite statement, “Well then it just writes itself”, but it kind of does. It’s true, you just make an outline and all you have to do is follow it. So I don’t tend to get writer’s block much.
Do you think you’ll ever release all of the short stories you’ve written into book form?
As far as short stories go, I don’t really have a ton. I’ve been writing screenplays a lot more. And those, I don’t think I would. No, I don’t have a thought of publishing them. Some of them read a little bit better because they are set out to be plays as well. There could be some interest reading something like that. I like reading plays myself. But screenplays, they’re a little bit ugly, I think. They’re just these kind of skeletal frames for something. That’s why I think I should not write them anymore, really is they’re just kind of collecting dust.
Having the luxury of just tossing out stories and screenplays away if you are not happy with them, does it make it easier to write certain things knowing that you can just scrap it at any moment?
That’s a great question and I think it’s a really harrowing, depressing question that a writer can ask themselves. I think that for a lot of people there is too much truth about that, but it can be easier to write if you know that it’s really not going to go anywhere. You get that buzz of self-worth of just being a hard working person and feeling a sense of accomplishment, but if it’s not really going to go anywhere, you also don’t have to put any type of failure or anything like that. That’s probably why I’m writing screenplays and nothing else.
Being so heavily involved with writing, is the writing aspect about music or performing the music more fulfilling for you?
I’m so much more interested in writing. Absolutely, 100%. I’m performing to this day and I’m singing to this day and I’m not a very good singer and I’m not a great musician and I’m doing it out of necessity. That’s kind of why a lot of people do it. Well, it’s like this is what I wrote, this is how you get it out. It’s not a bad life. I wouldn’t be opposed to just write for somebody else and let them perform it, but it’s just not really the way it works in this scene. Like who would I meet, who would I run into who would want to do that, really? The motives aren’t right. In this small corner of indie rock, which is essentially the big umbrella you can label it as, the ones who go out there and perform to 50 people a night and say “Well it’s just somebody else’s song, I’m a good performer. I’m great at performing, but Tim writes the songs and he sits at home”, just seems weird right? That said, I’m happy that I’m here.
In another interview, the interviewer asked you about a small summer tour you had done and you replied that you did it because you had the free time to do it. If touring is what you do during your free time, what would you consider to be your work?
Everything I do is luxury really so, I just try to work all the time. I think what I meant about free time is that I had time open, like my schedule was free to do some shows. I guess it’s obnoxious to call touring work, but technically that is a job.
Having been involved in the music scene for over 15 years, and been through the stages of the digital age of music, is it easier or harder now to be a musician?
Easier…right? It’s easier for a lot more of us to call ourselves musicians. Not specifically speaking, I read something on the internet vast numbers, but it’s something insane like, something crazy like…and you can look it up for yourself and see how far off I am, but in something like 2001, there was 8,000 releases and in 2011 it was like 35,000 releases. Who knows how far off I got. The digital age and the internet, people say it’s for worse, I think it’s for better actually. If more people are feeling comfort and confidence to write their own stuff and there is an outlet for it, that’s great. All we have to do is not listen to it if we don’t want to, that’s all you have to do. And we don’t. Most of it we don’t hear. At least it’s there and people are taking a stab at it. That’s me too. For as small as my career is, if I was born at a slightly different time in 1954 instead of 1974, I’d be doing something else now probably, right? I probably wouldn’t be able to get my music out and around as well if I was doing the same stuff, but it was in the 80’s. I think whatever label I would be on would be forced to drop me, you know. I’m becoming a relic songwriter where I actually used to get royalties for album sales and so it can irk the older people some. The next generation of songwriters, they’ll achieve great success without ever getting a royalty and that’s fine. You know the whole song and dance, if you can go out and perform, that’s how you can make a living at it.
One figure I had read, said something about I Am Gemini having over 430,000 track streams on Spotify, do those types of figures mean anything to you?
I suppose so. I’m lagging behind a little bit as far as what the relevance of that is. But yeah, I should say it’s important to me. I just don’t know what a good number is yet. I don’t know what that means yet, I guess is what I’m saying. It sounds good! I know that wouldn’t equal that many sales, but if it equaled a tenth, that would be huge.
How have you maintained relevant throughout all these years when other bands can barely make it half as long?
I feel pretty lucky. I know that seems like dull to say, but it’s true. I think I don’t know how. I think it’s really cool that people still are willing to hear me out. I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing anyway. I think I’ve gotten pretty zen about it over the years. I think there was a time maybe 10 years ago where I thought a lot about what success is and needing it and stuff like that, but I don’t care a ton about it anymore. And if I have to start working a day job that…like I’m a big boy, you know. I’ll definitely be depressed about it, because we are all depressed about day jobs. But it’s fine, whatever, you know. I guess I work a lot at it and I put out a lot of stuff.
Do you think there will ever come a day where music will no longer be of any interest to you?
Yeah, I worry about that. I never thought that would be the case most of my life. I guess I’m just having fun with the question. I guess I know it will always be relevant to me. Like, I really know that. I know that. It’s way to big of a part, it’s way too important. Whoever it is that I am, like whatever weird, creepy question that we all have to ask of ourselves. It‘s like well, I know that’s what I am. Music is totally immeshed in my being. I’ve been doing it for so long. I’ve been doing it since I’ve been wanting to do it. Since I was 7 and then started I doing it when I was 13. Being older, I do…That’s what I’m playing around with, is like, I do start wondering if when I am 60 I’ll be like “We’ll I think I’ll retire in 10 years or something like that, I suppose.” I worry, just because you get so dull, you get old and so dull and I worry that that would happen, but I really don’t think it would.
Looking back on your entire discography, is there any release you can listen to and be like “Yep, totally nailed it”?
For one, I pay almost no attention to my discography anyway, because it’s just boring. It truly is just kind of that, whatever that kind of narcissism is doesn’t appeal to me that much. It all just seems like old shit. Old stuff that’s already behind me. That said, I’ve noticed that I definitely pick favorites and pick others to really shit on in my head and that rotates over the years. So, that’s probably healthy, I think. I give them some time to shit on them in my memories and then I’ll come back to them later and I’ll think that was a really inspired time in my life.
Having done so much with music already, is there any goal or achievement that you haven’t reached yet that you’d like to?
(Long pause) I don’t know. I mean, I guess the continuing unanswered question for me is just getting to continue to do it. That was the same unanswered question 10 or 20 years ago. To be able to maintain a career as a songwriter with some level of relevance, not just burning songs to a CD to give to your loved ones or something, which is not unimportant. I think you know what I mean. Some semblance of a career, you know. That’s just something you never can know. I suppose I can answer that on my deathbed. I can make that decision and be like “ Oh cool, it worked” or it worked to whatever point.
Looking ahead to the rest of 2014, will you be doing any more touring for Adult Film or writing for any other projects?
I’m doing a lot of writing. I’m just always doing that and I’m a bit unsure what I’m writing for, so I’m just kind of filling in space with writing, with songs and stories. I’m not totally sure what it will become, I think it’s because I’m just being really indecisive. I hope to do more touring for Adult Film, but I haven’t scheduled anything yet.