Andrew Savage is in a pretty good mood. When the Parquet Courts co-frontman answers his phone, it’s Thursday night in New York, and he’s just finished packing a carton full of vinyl copies of Thawing Dawn, his first solo record. Savage is releasing the album on his own Dull Tools label, which he’s run since the band’s earliest days, and he still does the mailing himself; that this isn’t terribly surprisingly says plenty about the kind of person Savage has made himself to be in his five or so years in the public light.
Thawing Dawn is a different kind of record for the New York singer, who made his bones spitting four minute songs stuffed with four hundred words laced with so much subtext they take four times as long to unpack. Maybe it’s an effect of growing more comfortable with adulthood–or, rather, aging beyond the presumed urgency of existential questions and into a life more concerned with other people; “I’ll be thirty-one next month and I only want you by my side as I wake,” goes a characteristically bare line in “Winter in the South.”
For the moment, at least, it seems as though Savage is feeling optimistic, at least about himself if not the world around him, and the sturdy version of himself that he presents as a solo musician is a welcome light–at least until Parquet Courts’ next dark fraternal blast. But we called him up just to make sure.
Aquarium Drunkard: To start at the start, what is the genesis of these tunes? You wrote them for yourself and not for any particular project, right?
Andrew Savage: Yeah, that’s pretty accurate. Some of these songs started a bit ago–maybe “Phantom Limbo” being the oldest, maybe ten years old on that one. I knew it was a good song and tried to introduce it to nearly every band I’ve been in since then and it never fit. There are other songs that for some reason or another didn’t fit with what I was doing at a given time.
I guess maybe around the end of last year, just before I started recording [the album], I realized that there were these songs that were old and hadn’t been used and that I still liked. In my experience, when you have songs like that, they kinda bug you. They don’t leave your brain, and they just kinda stay there vying for your attention–especially when you’re in a songwriting slump, which happens from time to time.
Once I kinda realized what I was working with and what the common denominator was on these songs, I said, “Okay, I’ve got a framework here to work within.” I knew what things were gonna be like aesthetically and stylistically, and I was able to depart from there.
AD: The record feels like a complete, coherent picture, rather than something that’s been pieced together from the past decade or so. What do you think that common denominator is?
Andrew Savage: [Well,] we’re only talking about four songs that are older. In order to fit with the rest of the record and in order for it to be interesting enough for me to want to continue working on them, I had to make them specific to my life in 2017. So they did get reworked a bit. When I was writing the lyrics for this record, I was able to ask, “What am I generally talking about, and how do these songs fit together?”
AD: That must be a strange thing to confront a decade-old version of yourself. Updating your thoughts and seeing your old self from your current framework would be such an odd and maybe uncomfortable experience.
Andrew Savage: Sure, and that’s why there are a lot of songs that have gone by the wayside; the point is that these didn’t. They stuck around and stood the test of time.
AD: As you’ve aged as an artist and have developed a body of work that a number of people are interested in and pay attention to, have you become self-conscious at all about the way you present yourself in that work?
Andrew Savage: To a degree, yes. There have probably been periods of my life where that’s been more of an issue–say, when Parquet Courts was going to do our first recordings after Light Up Gold, I would say that there was for the first time in my life an awareness that there was an audience that was going to have expectations about what I was doing. I certainly did then, and I guess at the beginning I did a little bit on this record, but I think I’ve discarded that for the most part.
AD: That must be a freeing feeling.
Andrew Savage: Ultimately, this is probably the record I’ve most done just for me, because it is just me. It’s not really what you’d call a collaboration–while there are a lot of great musicians on the record, they’re playing my parts. [But] it’s the record that I was doing for me, and that’s what mattered for me while making these songs.
AD: What’s interesting about you saying that is that you seem less interested in yourself on this record than you have on Parquet Courts records. These songs are about other people. You’re taking that same framework that you assess yourself with–searching for what you actually mean, determining what your motives are–and you’re turning that on other people.
Andrew Savage: That’s an interesting thought. I tend to think of Parquet Courts lyrics as being me projecting outwards, and this one seems like it’s more inwards. Though there are other people mentioned on the record, it’s people that have to do with me, and it’s pretty strongly in the first-person, too.
AD: There’s a different risk you take when you write about people you know. Were you apprehensive about naming names or knowing that someone might know you’ve written specifically about them?
Andrew Savage: A little bit. When I was making this record, I was really thinking about it in the context of the solo record. I looked toward a lot of solo records that I admire, and people do that all the time: People write songs about people in their lives. I guess I have to suspend that concern, because ultimately, there’s nothing directly exposing about anybody that anyone would take offense to [on the record] so I don’t think I’m gonna lose any friends over this (laughs).
AD: I think about a song like “Sunbathing Animal” or “Berin Got Blurry,” which are primarily songs about you trying to understand something that you’ve gone through, and to me it seems like it would be easier to put out a song like that knowing that the only person I could fail would be myself in that situation. Whereas in these songs you’re putting forward your interpretations of relationships that, whether they’re romantic or not, are out in the world where somebody could say “That’s not how any of this feels or goes.”
Andrew Savage: A lot of these songs are about romantic relationships, though not all of them are; some of them are about other relationships. But when I look back at Human Performance, I think it’s a pretty personal and introspective record. I knew that I didn’t want to make another record like Human Performance, [and that] I did have this personal and introspective record in me, so I thought “Now is the time to do it so that I can move on and get back to writing about the world around me.” The world at large, not really personal relationships.
AD: You do that some on this record, too. “Buffalo Calf Road Woman” is obviously not about you or anyone you know.
Andrew Savage: Yeah, exactly. I had the Standing Rock resistance on my mind when I wrote that one.
AD: You haven’t done a ton of political songwriting. Was there something about that experience that spoke to you in a particular way?
Andrew Savage: Well, I have, actually. When I was younger and wanted to be a punk revolutionary, I did have a lot of songs about geopolitics and stuff like that–like a lot of punk and hardocre bands did in the mid-00s. But that all feels really fitting within the context of punk and hardcore. And I guess Parquet Courts has had a few [songs that], if not directly political–like say, “Careers in Combat”–they at least have some kind of larger social commentary.
I think what I’m most interested in as a writer is writing within my moment. That’s something that was happening in the moment that felt real and tangible to me, and something I felt strongly about, so it made sense to write a song on that.
AD: You mentioned earlier going back to other solo records. When you’re working on a project, do you gather things in a programmatic way–do you say, “I’m making a solo record, here are classic solo records from the past, here are some books that talk about what I’m interested in”–or is it a more organic process?
I don’t think about that so much in the songwriting, but definitely within the presentation of a record, I look towards other people’s solo record–John Cale, Nico, Kevin Ayers, Warren Zevon, Emmylou Harris–I had those to guide me. I knew I wanted to do a photo on the cover, which I haven’t done many records like that. I wanted it to look different from a Parquet Courts record, for one, but I also think record covers should make evident what you’re about to hear, and a photo of the artist on the cover is a pretty classic move for a solo record.
AD: Were you reading anything in particular this time around?
Andrew Savage: You know, it’s interesting, I’ve been reading Karl Ove Knausgaard a lot this year, and I hadn’t really thought about this–I can’t really assess if it had a direct influence or not, but I guess the literary autobiography is the solo record of novels. | m garner
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