Ecstatic (Future Farmer Records) is Kevin Salem's first record in five years, and while it was well worth the wait, I hope it isn't that long between efforts again. I had a chance to speak with Kevin just before Thanksgiving and found him to be a truly down-to-earth, affable person. He's a fan as well as an artist, the kind of guy who understands the enthusiasm that makes people call each other up late at night and play records over the phone because you're too excited to wait until the morning. Matter of fact, I promised him a couple of those post- midnight calls myself.

The following is an excerpt from a long conversation where Kevin touches upon his reason for the hiatus, his feelings about the industry, and some insight into the new music.

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Cosmik: Thanks for calling in today, and congratulations on the new record. It's been a long time coming. I read where you've started versions of Ecstatic over the last couple of years and abandoned them. Why? And what made you pull the trigger now?

Kevin: Well, there's a couple of answers to that question. On a psychological tip, I felt like if I didn't do it now, I wouldn't have never have done it. Musically though, I think it just felt more real to me, like I wasn't looking at other things and being influenced by them. So I think it's an independent statement of what I'm thinking about right now. On the way to this, music was changing so much, and that's fascinating to me. And when you make music in the middle of change, sometimes you can tell that, and I didn't want my record to be like that. I didn't want my record dated.

[Pictured: Scott Yoder.]

Cosmik: Scott Yoder has been along for the whole ride, when did Rich and Rob jump on board?

Kevin: Rich and Rob have been around for about three years. That's the band now, as much as there is now. Scott I consider the other half of the band. Rich and Rob are almost qualified to get their Platinum Club membership (laughs)...I mean I love to work with great musicians, but in New York, great musicians are involved in so many things. I've never done anything and I'll never take an opportunity purely because it's financially beneficial. So that usually means if you work with me, it may not always be your priority. But those guys are so amazing...everyone on this record was so amazing, I was very lucky.

Cosmik: The project is amazingly cohesive for something that's been stopped and started many times. I was wondering whether songs changed several times or you threw songs out for new ones, and whether the change in band members played a part in that decision.

Kevin: I threw some songs out - although I like to think temporarily - but the songs changed sound drastically. Some of the songs were recorded more times than I can count. For example, the last song on the album ("The Party's Over"), Rich and I were working on a track for an R&B singer from Pennsylvania, and we were working really hard so one of us said, "let's jam." And I can't even remember at this point if we were specifically playing that song, but I listened to the tape and thought, "those are some lonesome drums." It was very sad sounding to me, and I thought that's how the song should go. It was very organic in a Pro Tools kind of way (laughs). I mean I couldn't have done the record without the technology, but I pulled in organic elements.

Cosmik: Well, I like your production work here. Soma City and Glimmer had some pretty heavy rock sound to them and I liked Niko Bolas' work. This one seems to pound when necessary but is a lot more atmospheric in its overall tone.

Kevin: Yeah, I think that came out of experimenting with so many kinds of music. It's a strange thing being a guitar player and producer. I mean, when I was a kid I followed Robert Fripp around. And Brian Eno was one of my first big heroes as a producer -

Cosmik: Here Come The Warm Jets!

Kevin: Yeah! Today I was just pulling out a box of old cassettes I had - Eno, Bill Nelson, all that stuff. Here Come The Warm Jets was in there too! I used to get lumped together with very American bands, and I used to mind that, but I actually get it now. It doesn't bother me anymore. But it's not where my heart is, as a writer; I don't do weird atmospheric things. But I love the sound!

Cosmik: Well your guitar style has changed a little as well. Where before there were those looping lines that were the center of the songs, now they seem to share the soundscape a little more.

Kevin: I think part of that was because I was engineering the record, and it was easier to go after sounds when I didn't have an instrument in my hand.

Cosmik: Still, there are those goosebump moments like when listening to Neil Young or Doug Martsch from Built To Spill, where the last couple of minutes of guitar just take you away.

Kevin: Well, at the end of all the experimentation and everything else, I'm still a guitar player first. I was playing long before I was writing songs or singing, and to me it's the coolest instrument in the band. Every couple of years someone pronounces that "guitar is over," and it never will be. It is and always will be one of the most expressive instruments.

Cosmik: In the right hands.

Kevin: In the right hands, right! And I love it...I stepped away from it for a little while and didn't play any shows for a couple of years until right before the record came out. And I think a lot of it is that I felt if I got nervous, I'd default to being a really overbearing rock guitarist. I mean, you can only play the same notes so many times before you play them with a little less authority, a little less emotion. And so I took a little time away, but now it feels right again. We played a gig the other night, and it was the first time in my career that I played as a rock trio. I had never gone on stage with less than four pieces. And it was amazing, you know? Really cool to hear that guitar blasting out of those big amplifiers! I'm pretty re-energized about the guitar, but I have changed the way I'm using it a little bit.

Cosmik: You mentioned before about trying new things. "Jump" has a nice scratch rhythm at its core, and "It's Only Life" has an interesting sound with the tandem of the rap background vocal and the horns. It's very different from what you've done before.

Kevin: Yeah, the rap thing I was really skeptical about, but that guy really made a great contribution. I felt that lyrically I didn't think I nailed what I wanted to say in that song, but I felt that guy came in and heard in the lyric what I wanted people to hear. He sort of crystallized it down to a few sentences. Made me feel better about the song.

Cosmik: It's an odd combination sometimes, as well. "Magnetic" is very upbeat musically and has you tapping on the dashboard and bobbing your head, and then you listen closer to the lyrics and it's like "whoa...not quite!"

Kevin: (laughs) Yeah, it's funny, that song in particular; when I wrote it I was aware of that. I mean you can write that kind of song in sixty beats per minute, you know, pretty dirge-like. But I thought "what if I said this on my fastest song on the record?" Sadly, I'll never get to hear it through your ears, or other people's ears. I think that most writers, in a lazy way, tend to save their most emotional things for ballads, and their most superficial things for rock songs. I'm trying, in my apprenticeship in writing, to get around that a little bit.

Cosmik: Thematically, many of your songs deal with alienation, twisted paths and skating along life's fringes, not always successfully. Ecstatic is an ironic title for a collection like that. "Party Song" is a nice coda, almost a bookend in sound with "1000 Smiles." Two happy titles for two not so happy songs.

Kevin: Well, "Party Song" has to do with something specific, and I hardly ever write about what I think of...well, in my life, when I'm skating along, pretty habitually it's about the music business, but I hardly ever write about how I feel about that. I don't know if this is a happy record or not. When I was making Glimmer I sat down to write happy songs. But Ecstatic is ironic as is that woman on the cover (laughs).

Cosmik: I was trying to decide whether she was contemplating a moment of pure beauty and innocence or whether she was a hair away from just giving it all up. You know more about the painting than I do.

Kevin: Well, I think it's possible to be ecstatic just contemplating one moment of beauty. I mean, right now in particular, things are so different. I took my first flight after September 11th just recently, and no one was partying on the plane, everyone was quiet, looking straight ahead. Sometimes you have to find your own moments. I usually find them with a guitar in my hands.

Cosmik: I didn't mean to insinuate that it's about hopelessness. On certain songs you're pretty blatant about addiction, and the natural conclusion is to make the drug correlation. But many of the tracks could also be interpreted as songs about failed relationships and the abandonment of religion or faith. Am I reading too much into these?

Kevin: No, I think that's a level that we all live life on, that we're all looking at ourselves on. I mean atheism? I don't even know if there is such a thing, but people think a lot about their interior life. I mean it would be pretty hard for me to comprehend your private interior life. But those are the things we really live! We all have our jobs, we sleep, we work, but while you're doing things you have these thoughts and feelings about all the other things in our lives. And addiction...well, I guess going through it and overcoming it was kind of a big deal for me. I mean going down to the last cigarette - it took me ten years to quit smoking - and what we get out of our relationships, where everybody takes up space... it's pretty fascinating to me. Most people live in the nine-to-five world, but I live in the woods, I work alone a lot, so I have a lot of time on my hands to think about these kind of things.

Cosmik: You can probably never see things exactly the same, but as an artist you can press those buttons in other people as best you can. I mean it's like two people watching a beautiful sunset - they will never see exactly the same thing but they can share the feeling of that moment.

Kevin: That's the magic of music. You can hopefully connect in that way.

Cosmik: You can't imagine what a pleasure it is to be able to discuss lyrics for a change instead of just saying something like "wow, that was a real headbanger." (laughs) You work with other lyrically strong people like Freedy Johnston and Todd Thibaud. Does this challenge or influence your own songwriting concepts or reinforce the choices you make?

Kevin: Well, it does both, I think. When I work with Todd or Mark Thompson - I mean that guy is different than me. He can make more out of these little fragments. And Freedy! He can write a story about an angel landing in a cornfield and a bunch of farmers standing around questioning it...I will never be able to do that. He can tell a story from beginning to end, so that the end of the story is the end of the song. It totally inspires me when I hear that. Or when I hear something I've grown up with all my life, like The Beatles...I mean how something like that, forty years ago, can still be culturally relevant is amazing. It still feels youth oriented! And when you consider that the lyrics of most songs put together is maybe a couple of thousand words...I think my experiences have helped me here a lot; I never wrote songs until I was in my thirties.

Cosmik: Well, you mentioned Freedy writing complete stories...a lot of your songs are like scenes, for me. It's like I'm walking in at some point, opening a doorway, catching something, but then I'm the one backing out. It's not like it's over or hasn't reached its natural conclusion, but I've had a little window on it for a while. I mean "1000 Smiles" - and it was the music as much as the lyrics - reminded me of the movie Magnolia and the way Aimee Mann's songs were fleshed out into the narrative of the movie. Your songs are both poetic and pensive in much the same way. Have you had any interest in working in the film medium?

Kevin: I do score films, actually.

Cosmik: Well, that shows how stupid I am! (laughs)

Kevin: No, I mean no one would know that, because it's something I just started to do. I finished my third film this week; it was a western. And it is...amazing! I mean when you write lyrics and sing, and then all the anxiety that goes around that...the more personal the lyric the more anxious the moment. Then someone says "okay, your job for the next two hours is to make someone feel something, and your lyric is going to be whatever noise we recorded."..and you have some dialogue and the sound of a car. And I think that focus really helped this album tremendously because I looked at the songs in a whole different light. I was a little less intimidated with the sound of a piano or any other instrument that I played, because I had just done this film in that way. I mean I love that you see these songs as scenes, if there was a response that I would hope for that would be it.

Cosmik: Well to be able to have so much imagery in the lyrics, but also be moved by the music, that's why this record works for me. I could focus on the lyrics or you could take them away and the music would almost take me to the same place.

Kevin: It's interesting now because of all the film work I've done over the past months. I mean I produce the band now, I insist that the band play live, no sampling...a reaction to my initial reaction, I suppose. It's fun, it's really fun. I mean you can't do music the same way for too long because you get bored. But I don't know how much people focus on lyrics. Do they focus on them?

Cosmik: I don't know...good question. I do and I don't sometimes. "Hang On Sloopy" is a pretty stupid song but I love it.

Kevin: Yeah, like last night we played a bar and I love playing there because of this great jukebox. Right after we get offstage I have to be the first one there and play like the whole Fun House album. I mean the lyrics don't really mean anything, but they exhibit this attitude about the world, being rebellious. If you could make one word, you're lucky. I don't really feel when I write that every word means something; honestly sometimes I go for the sound of the word. If I had to do one or the other, sometimes I'd make sure it sounds good. With "Magnetic" I wanted to have something strong and personal. And "The Medicine Down."..well, a lot of the songs dealt with feelings of adolescence. They sort of dealt with my adolescence, or how I thought. But some of them took five minutes (to write) and others took two years. I still consider myself sort of an apprentice with this -

Cosmik: It's like cooking. It's done when it's done.

Kevin: Yeah, yeah! I mean there's no way to say when it's done it's done, and there's no real way to...well, for example I just wrote this song for a film called "The End Of Love." And the director emailed me with some lyrical suggestions. I collaborate a lot, and I pride myself on being able to work with other people, but for some reason - and the suggestions were really kind of good - for some reason I bristled at it. I mean just because the words sounded good in there, it wasn't the intent that I had for the song, and I really had to think hard about whether I cared that the lines were better or that the intention was clear. And in the end I came down on the side of intention. I think it's the most important thing with a lyric. It's what the writer means. And if I did my job really well as a singer and a producer and a songwriter, when you get my record hopefully you'll feel what I felt and meant the moment I wrote the song.

Cosmik: The proof is in the pudding, so to speak, with the guy who did the rap on "It's Only Life" - you mentioned how he read into it and nailed his part accordingly.

Kevin: I think a lot of the capitulation that went on with this recording was to achieve that as much as possible. Y'know, if you get four or five guys together, and you really spend a lot of time together, sometimes...like I felt that on Soma City we were so close as a band that we could make that record in a few days. I don't really have any problems with that record; I feel that it's pretty complete and there wasn't a big thought process. This record I feel is equally complete, but through an entirely different process. Like the songs asked for a lot more.

Cosmik: You mentioned before about being compared to American bands and how that initially bothered you. When I was first getting into your music and reading about you...well, we've all heard the Dylan meets Petty thing, but I hear more left of center guys like Dan Stuart of Green On Red or John Easdale of Dramarama. Like you, their sound may change song to song but it's always an emotional buy in. And both those bands always had that same quality for me of "we're taking you here on all cylinders" kind of vibe to it. Not formulaic bands at all. I like your vocals on this record very much.

Kevin: Yeah, those guys are both really accomplished singers, they both really do it for me.

Cosmik: Are you a fan of those bands as well?

Kevin: I remember doing some shows with Green On Red and thinking..."God, you guys...whew!" Well, I'm a believer; you know what I mean? I never really got to think about what I thought about them because I was always just in awe. Dramarama I didn't hear until after we made Soma City, and I didn't listen to them a lot, but I thought the guy was a really great singer. So it's flattering to be compared to...I mean singing is such a weird thing. Have you ever sung in front of people?

Cosmik: Yeah.

Kevin: When I first started doing it, I had to take pills! (laughs) I still get nervous before getting on stage. Last night we were sitting in this club in New York where we were getting ready to play, and I was thinking that during the day, I really got out there and was forceful; took some meetings, walked around the city, got a lot accomplished. I was feeling pretty cool all day long. And then, right before we were to go onstage, I felt it in my hands, my arms...here we go again! So like five minutes before the gig I turn to the guys and say "hey, just in case you were wondering, I'm still terrified!" And it's never going to go away. If it does, I think I'm going to have to quit, actually. It's a great rush coming out the other side after a great gig, and nothing worse than having a shitty gig. And I never know that on any given night...I mean, will my tongue and my hands and my heart all work at the same time?

Cosmik: It just shows that you don't take it for granted.

Kevin: Oh, I don't, believe me! I remember when I was just content to play the guitar and not sing, but now I've come out of the other side. I mean, there is nothing like singing.

Cosmik: I never did anything in your level but certainly remember some nights where I felt like all the liquid had been sucked out of my body right before I hit the stage. And I'm thinking "please don't let me be up there licking my lips as I sing!"

Kevin: (Laughs) Yeah! But once you do it and you know you did it well, it's just fucking amazing. I can remember the first time I went on stage after I stopped doing drugs. I remember the date, the place - it was at CBGB's - and I was thinking "oh my god, I don't know what to do!" It seemed impossible to me. But I remember taking about ten seconds before the show and realizing that I didn't notice any difference at all, between being totally obliterated on super hi-test marijuana and mushrooms and...whatever, blow, whatever...and just being up there playing. There was no difference. I think I really enjoy that moment, like you say, where everything gets sucked out of your body. It might be the last great physical thrill there is for me. I don't want to sound corny, like it's such a great high being on stage, but I definitely thrive on it. I mean, I can't sleep the night after a gig. I don't know where that comes from...that kind of ecstatic feeling of being exhilarated.

Cosmik: Ah, ecstatic...nice of you to work the album title back in!

Thanks to Matt Johnson of Future Farmer Records, Dr. Bristol for the transcription, and Kevin Salem for a great chat about the true spirit of rock and roll.

(C) 2001 - Bill Holmes