Reeves Gabrels is perhaps best known as David Bowie's guitarist [in both Tin Machine and Bowie's band] from 1988 through last year, and for his collaborations with The Cure, David Tronzo and Adrian Belew among others. Mike Keneally is Frank Zappa's former guitarist and current leader of Mike Keneally & Beer For Dolphins, who has also worked with Steve Vai, Dweezil Zappa, Andy Prieboy and more. Both, however, are very much their own men, having issued their most adventurous work yet as solo artists [visit reevesgabrels.com & keneally.com for more]. Without any further introduction to slow you down, NFYD brings together two of the most interesting guitarists making music -- Reeves Gabrels and our own Mike Keneally -- turns on the recorder, and lets them go... What follows is a wonderful, in-depth, LONG conversation between two good friends, who also happen to be two of the best rock guitarists today. MK: Speak! RG: Hello. Hello. Hello. Is this thing on? MK: When did the first Tin Machine record come out? '88? RG: It came out in, uh... yes, '88. Was it '88? No, it came out in '89. MK: It was at a period in my life where I was looking for gigs, so the fact that the first Tin Machine album came out sounding so strong -- I remember hearing it on the radio and just being, as any good guitarist would feel, jealous. Not just that you had landed such a cool gig... RG: But that I was so inept. MK: Well, it didn't come out that way -- you sounded self-assured right out of the box. You were just spraying your sonic signature all over everything right away and that was really striking. RG: Yeah, I guess that's true. You always have that crisis of confidence, where every time something new comes up, you have that eight seconds, or ten minutes, of going "What the fuck am I going to do now?" And then you rally. I guess it's having a big enough ego to go "Oh shit, I don't know what I'm going to do" and deciding you can handle it, and having the confidence to just piss all over it. Especially at that point in time, when I was just like...I had nothing to lose, you know? I wasn't a kid in my early 20's at that point. I was like 30, it was like I should have quit by now. That was the first time I'd ever done anything that was released on a major label, and it was with David [Bowie]. MK: What had you done before then to get you to that state, that you were already that formed by the time you were unleashed upon the public at large? RG: Just existing in a vacuum. [laughs] Well, playing in Boston and... I remember Tommy Tedesco coming to Boston and doing a clinic, and saying "I'd quit now if I had to live in Boston, because everywhere I look there's somebody walking with a guitar case," you know. "If LA was like this, I'd give it up." My wife is a hard news journalist, so I travelled with her on occasion. When she was on story assignments I would tag along. I remember talking to this kid in a youth hostel in Brussels and asks "Where are you from?", so I say "Boston," and he asks what I do, and I tell him I'm a guitarist. And he says "Ah, you're a guitarist from the city of guitarists!" You know? I don't know if it's still that way -- Berklee in the late 70's, early 80's was still kind of a jazz school, and now it's like a trade school. You know, go there to learn how to become a working studio pro or a pop star. MK: When you were a student, were you already equally as interested in textures and sounds as you were in the notes themselves? Was that one way to set yourself apart? RG: Well, I went there wanting to be like Steve Lukather or Larry Carlton, and you needed to be able to play "swimming pool guitar", which is when you hear the rhythm guitar part, you can picture someone's house in the Hollywood Hills with a swimming pool in the back yard... MK: I call that "beer commercial guitar." RG: And I like the romanticized, like, Deacon Blue type of loser-hero, suffering-artist hack genius. That genius or fool thing which I guess I'm still living out. MK: It's not quite as much fun when you're actually it, though. RG: Well, I was aspiring to it, so how much worse can that be? [laughs] It's like trying to get out of the quicksand and into the swamp. I saw Adrian Belew play with Talking Heads in 1980 as I was coming out of the Jeff Beck / Leslie West kind of thing. I still liked rock music so as a player there was that, but I remember one spring getting "Blow By Blow" [Jeff Beck] and "Caty Lied" [Steely Dan], and between "Because We've Ended As Lovers" and "Bad Sneakers", those two solos just changed me. And in a weird way, on the new track I do with Robert Smith, the solo has a little "Bad Sneakers" in it, to my ears anyway. But I suddenly realized "Shit, you can play with a rock guitar sound over more than 3 or 4 chords," you know, as long as you can hear your way through them. So there was that. That's why I went to Berklee, but what happened was I saw Adrian one night, after being totally into Holdsworth and Carlos Rios and Carlton and Di Meola and Pat Martino and John MacLaughlin, and coming out of Albert Lee and Jeff Beck and stuff like that. So I went to see Adrian with Talking Heads at the Orpheum Theatre in Boston in 1980, and suddenly music didn't just exist on an X/Y axis. It wasn't just two-dimensional, there was a third dimension. I remember coming home at the time and looking at my Franken-Strat, which was a '73 Les Paul Deluxe Gold Top and a Strat that I'd put together from spare parts, which I still have... and I remember just looking at the guitar in the corner and saying "What the fuck was he thinking?" It was like suddenly it's not just harmony and melody, it's like there's this other thing that's both of those things but spread out in a very three-dimensional, Dali-esque way. And that's where the change started, in a roundabout way of answering your question. And that's when I also realized that they were paying extremely accomplished guitar players to sound like The Edge on beer commercials, so you know, what was the key here? It's like what Les Paul said to Pat Martino: "Sure, you can play a lot of notes, kid, but can your mom recognize you on the radio?" So that started hitting home, that it wasn't about how much you could play or how harmonically... the harmonic depth of what I might want to pursue was pretty much there for me and the trainspotters. It was the emotional impact. That was the thing about Belew, and Hendrix -- that you could impact upon civilians, you know? You could make the hair on the back of their necks stand up. MK: There's a visceral impact that a sound can have, or a noise can have sometimes, that a traditionally executed series of notes can't have. What's enjoyable for me about what you do, and for my tastes what Henry Kaiser does, are things that come off as seemingly random on first listen but the more you get to know a piece of music, the more you really find the melodies in these...squalls, and how much more satisfying they can be than a traditional melody. There's an unusual sequence of notes that pops out of a noise that becomes as much of a hook in the song as "We Can Work It Out", or something. RG: That's the thing. Actually, Vernon Reid & I were talking about it, back in the early 90's, and I think it was Vernon who said that in a lot of Hendrix's stuff, like "Crosstown Traffic", there was a sonic thing that shook hands with the song, and they were forever linked. And it's one of those pain-in-the-ass things that if you're ever lucky enough to have success with something like that, it means that for the rest of your time playing with that band, you're going to have to bring that one pedal for that one song. You might never use that particular distortion pedal again except for that one song. You know what I mean. MK: Yeah! That's one of the primary contributions of rock music to culture, is more than any other music, it is its sound. It's its timbre. RG: Yeah. That's the beauty of it, versus pop music, is that at it's best it's honest -- you know, honest aggro, kind of. Where as pop music, it's about appearing like you don't have that kind of aggression. MK: [laughs] RG: I always get bugs when like -- I don't know, it seemed like in the early 90's when, like, Michael Jackson is referred to as a rock star.... I remember TV Guide having Janet Jackson on the cover and I'm standing in a conveience store in the middle of Boston going "What the fuck is this?" to no one in particular except the TV Guide. Standing there holding an empty coffee cup, staring at this TV Guide and next thing you know someone has dropped a quarter into the coffee cup. MK: [laughs] Yeah! Janet Jackson contributing to your one moment of genuine homelessness. Pop music obviously requires a certain amount of tidiness that rock music doesn't have any time for. RG: But sonically you can do that, you have the option in rock music to do that. I think jazz is remarkably almost as restricted as pop music is, sonically. MK: Which, if the players are inspired enough, isn't that much of a concern. RG: It's sort of like enjoying an amazing black & white film, when the fact that its black & white is a non-issue. But that's one of the reasons I get frustrated with that, as well. It's also -- to get back to the original question about why did it seem to be so fully formed from the start -- because I realized I had this leaning towards sounds and stuff like that, I had to be able to play "Giant Steps" [Coltrane], because with a lot of people I was playing with at the time, the snob aspect was "Oh, you're just a noisemaker." So the cutter aspect that lurks in my personality to some degree had to be able to play a variety of styles in a least a craftsman-like way. MK: Trace the steps between these formative stages and meeting David Bowie. How did you end up in that band? RG: Well, I was just playing around. I had a band called Life On Earth that was kind of a weird, anthemic U2/David Bowie/King Crimson alternative rock band, when alternative meant alternative and wasn't yet just a marketing term for mainstream. And I was playing weddings and bar mizvahs and giving guitar lessons, and around everything else I was playing country gigs, playing pedal steel and guitar and stuff. MK: How were your pedal steel chops? RG: Mediocre. I aspired to competency. But I played pedal steel for a little bit in a band called Rubber Rodeo, which was like Roxy Music with Dolly Parton singing. MK: Were you actually a member of that band? RG: It was like a lot of things, I joined it on the way down. MK: [laughs] RG: I had developed a reputation for two things: being asked to join bands as they were getting dropped by their label, or joining a band and having the keyboard player leave within two months. Sometimes both would happen in the same band, as it did with Rubber Rodeo. MK: Did you find yourself, as a guitarist with an unusual command of texture, having to fill in for the departed keyboard player? RG: Well, apparently the story is that that's what drove them out in the first place, but I don't know. Getting a harmonizer was a big discovery. Standing one day at a rehearsal with Life On Earth, in the kitchen that we used to rehearse in, near the refrigerator, and the drummer's counting in the song and I've got my Rat pedal on -- it was the Rat into an Ibanez HD1500, which was the second generation harmonizer with a foot pedal that gave you three different pitches, and I had one of those U405 Ibanez double-space units with a parametric and a compressor and a chorus and a delay. So I think I was standing there with the harmonizer on a 5th up, the Rat was on, the compressor was on, the delay was on, and the chorus was on... MK: [laughs] RG: And I'm waiting to start the song and just trying to keep the strings muted, and then the refrigerator comes on. And the sound of the motor just got sucked through the pickups and it sounded like a choir of angels. The band started and I yelled "Stop!", and you could just hear this [choir-of-angels type sound]. That was a really key moment in, um, answering where the texture thing came from. But anyway, my wife Sara was doing a story on the exploitation of children in the third world in 1986-1987, and she was gone almost 6 months. One of the things we discovered after we got married was that her contract with the paper she was writing for said that they would fly her home, or fly her spouse to wherever she was, once every three weeks if she was away on assignment. So she was in South America doing a story on child labor in the silver mines, she was in the Phillippines doing a story on child prostitution, India for child labor, Bangkok for child prostitution and also up to the golden triangle area. So I went with her to the golden triangle and stuff like that. Going to India and Kashmir, being around all the people... actual snake charmers. And I'm just sitting there listening to these guys and recording them on a little Walkman. That had a big effect on me. Never having been entirely comfortable with a 12-tone system anyway, or an 8-tone diatonic system, and never understanding why, and feeling like I shouldn't really be doing this because I'm not playing the right notes.... I thought I shouldn't be playing an instrument at all. But all of this gave me new courage. MK: To escape traditional notions of melodic movement? RG: Well, I realized I was hearing okay, maybe I was just hearing it in the wrong country. The wrong culture. So, when Sara came back she had about ten weeks of vacation coming to her, and somebody recommended that she do press for David Bowie. And she'd never done that but it was one of those summers when everyone was out. MK: So, '87 would have been the "Never Let Me Down" era...? RG: Yes. It was "Glass Spider". MK: Okay. So -- without judging -- the low ebb of David Bowie's career. RG: Yes. And I remember going backstage with Sara, and because I hadn't seen her that much they worked out a thing where I would fly out every week to just visit with her. She was supposed to do it for like 8 weeks. We were going to go on a vacation, but she got this gig and it was more money and it was like, what could be more absurd? You've been sleeping in jungles and crawling through the mud with giant rats in your room in South America, and getting hijacked.... "Go on the rock tour!" [laughs] So she ended up being David's on-the-road press person for like 10 weeks. I met him a bunch of times and I just enjoyed talking to him. I figured I'm never going to play with the guy so why ruin it? And he thought I was a painter, because I had gone to school for illustration and design, though not for painting, and he thought I was involved in the arts but I knew about music. We just used to talk about stuff. I had an all-access pass, and he & I were probably the people with the least to do before a show. He came over to the house when they played in Boston and we had dinner. At the end of the tour, they were trying to get Sara to go to Australia with them but she had to go back to her "real job". MK: Crawling through mud with giant rats. RG: Right. But the stuff she has on tape, and the stories, are incredible. MK: Yeah, but you're a guitar player. RG: Yeah, right. I do something important. [laughs] Not like teaching school or collecting garbage. I said that to somebody: "You know, no one will notice if I stop playing, but if they guy doesn't show up to pick up the garbage this week, they'll notice that." So what's really important here? MK: Don't tell anybody. RG: "We'll just open another can of guitar players." MK: [laughs] RG: Just add water. Or something. Just add beer. So anyway, Sara said she couldn't go to Australia and David said "Well, is there anything we can do?" And Sara said, "Why don't you listen to this tape?" And it was a tape of this band I had called Life On Earth, and also some other stuff with a band called Too Happy, which was me and Hal Cragin (who ended up playing with Iggy), and Tom Dubé, who's a producer who works with Richard Thompson a lot these days. Kind of an American version of XTC, is what we were going for. Not that I was a huge XTC fan, but I would think everyone else in the band was, and that was a place where I could manifest some of the microtonal, Indian-inflected stuff that I'd picked up in the preceding six months. David called up about six months later. We had moved to England, and I had come back to the States to finish up some work with Rubber Rodeo, and this other band called The Bent Men, which was kind of like Gwar, but pre-dating Gwar. Full costume changes, somewhere between Gwar and Slipknot -- but when I joined the band there were two horn players, two guitar players, three percussionists and drums on tape. No bass player, the keyboard player did that, so there were like 8 people. It was some industrial, bohemian, nasty shit, and on the last record we did, I actually got Adrian to come in and we cut a couple of solos simultaneously, facing off, which was lots of fun. So David called and he told Sara that he had found this tape in his jacket when he was unpacking 6 months later, which was just luck, and he left the names of two producers in England that I should call when I came back. So I started working with Clive Wagner, who also produced Madness, and more recently produced the first Bush record. I started playing with his band a little bit and doing studio work. When I got home again, I sent David a postcard, and within a week he called. And I was having a really bad day -- I was hanging up posters to give guitar lessons and I'd miscalculated how much money I needed to get home from hanging posters, and I'd spent more on the posters than I had, so I had to walk from, like, Denmark Street to South Kensington in the rain to get home. And of course in England, it rained, the sun came out, and it got warm. Then it rained again, then it got cold, then the sun came out and it was cold with the sun. MK: [laughs] RG: This is all within the space of about three hours walking. So the phone rings. I'm sitting there now with my 4-track trying to do some stuff, and I'm just starting to get somewhere, and the phone rings and a voice says "Hi, I'm David." "David who?" And he says "Remember David? David Bowie?" MK: Yeah, remember? [laughs] RG: And I'm like, "uh huh," and I'm thinking to myself it sounds like the one person I'd told that David had called, who was my friend Tom in Boston. He said "I've been listening to this tape that Sara gave me, and you sound like the guitar player I've been looking for." And I thought.... MK: Note to who will be transcribing this interview... Reeves is now doing a wanking gesture. RG: Sorry. So now I'm like "Who the fuck is this?" and he just started laughing. And a week later I'm over at his house. It was supposed to be a weekend but it went much longer, just writing and hanging out. The first thing we did was a benefit for the ICA in London, which was just one song, an expanded version of "Look Back In Anger." I had two minutes at the front of the song and some in back, and I said to him "Well, I could do this, or I can do this" and I remember him looking at me and saying "I've heard the tape. Just shut up and play." MK: Do what you do. RG: And so I did this kinda like Glen Branca thing. When I went into Tin Machine it was with the idea of fusing this Sonic Youth - Glen Branca wall of guitar -- simple, repetitive two-string things stacked up to create dense harmony, and close voiced. Simply put, if you want to break it down to just ripping other people off, it was Glen Bronco meets Jeff Beck, in my head. MK: And David was at a point where he was obviously seeking collaboration, where he was just trying to -- RG: He said he didn't like his last couple of records. He said "The record company's paying me a lot of money, I had a hit, I don't know who my audience is, I want to make stuff that I like." MK: So you're thrust into the limelight, and the reviews start coming in for this stuff. It was clear to me, and a lot of other people who were listening, that there was a real sincerity and a desire to do something passionate and somewhat dangerous on that record. RG: Thanks for saying that! [laughs] Obviously you're not from the British press. MK: So Tin Machine went away, but you continue working with Bowie. Was it a fulfilling collaboration for you musically? You were happy with the work you were producing? RG: Oh yeah, for the most part. I mean, David and I wrote 60+ songs together. Tin Machine was fun, but it was a struggle because there was a variety of personalities in the band. I think of myself as the easiest one to get along with, of course, but I was a controlling fuck. I decided that I knew exactly what everything should sound like, and I'd do things like record 60 tracks of guitar, do a stereo pair of that, and wipe everything so it either got used as I'd pictured it or it didn't get used at all. MK: Really. You'd submix and say "This is the way it's supposed to sound." RG: Yeah. MK: Wow. RG: Because on the first record, I didn't know how involved in the mix I'd be. It was kind of like the Jimmy Page architecture concept. MK: Well, that could be looked upon as controlling fuckiness, or smart. RG: Well, it depends on if you're looking at it as the guy who's mixing it or as the guitar player. Of course any guitar player will read this and go, "What a great idea!" [laughs] MK: It is a great idea! RG: The only thing I left loose was, like, a solo, so it could be seasoned to taste. MK: So you actually did that on the first Tin Machine record? RG: On a couple of tracks, yeah. MK: You had multitracked guitars, then mixed them down to a stereo pair so the mix between the elements couldn't be fucked with after the fact. RG: Right. MK: That's really cool, I think. [laughs] RG: I felt like I had nothing to lose. I felt if I only ever did one record at this level, it was going to come out sounding how I wanted it to sound, at least as much as I could control. But in terms of fulfillment, referring to the question you actually did ask me, yeah, it was great. "Earthling" I think, in a lot of ways, is the one I'm most satisfied with. I would have liked to follow it with an "Earthling" 2.0, like "Aladdin Sane" followed "Ziggy", but David's interests were elsewhere. And it just became obvious to me after 12 years that.... I love David and he's my friend, but it was time for me to go and do other stuff because at the end of the day, it's his record and he has to be happy. I just felt like I could be putting this kind of effort into other things and be maintaining total control. MK: But you co-wrote much of "Hours". RG: Co-wrote and co-produced. And on "Earthling" I co-wrote 7 out of 9. MK: While you were in the writing process for "Hours", did you find yourself helping to write songs that weren't really getting your rocks off? RG: There may be one or two in there, and there may be one or two that I would have included, that showed up as B-sides instead that I might have swapped, but writing songs is the fun part. It was only in the mixing stage that I really got... MK: It got a little too pastel? RG: Yeah.... It was a lot more jagged and edgy and a lot more demo-y sounding, in the way that maybe "Diamond Dogs" is. Then after letting it sit -- MK: It turned into "Hunky Dory". RG: For me it was just becoming a little too VH-1. But you know, that's just the way. It isn't my record, ultimately. So you have to make sure that the person whose name is on the cover is happy. MK: And ultimately it might not have been a bad direction for David to go, to get a little VH-1 with that record. RG: Right. And that's one of the things I realized, that I was constantly imposing my will, in terms of what I wanted from music and being 12 years younger than David. It's like, why should I look at him as being the singer in my band when it comes out under his name, you know? That was the manifestation of my bad ego. When I'm starting to look at it and go "I know what's best for this guy who's been doing this for 30 years", then, you know. I owe David an incredible debt -- he's probably not even aware of half of the things he's done for me. When I did my first solo record [The Sacred Squall of Now], I was opening shows on the Nine Inch Nails / David Bowie tour, which was like being a mouse in front of a bulldozer, but it was really valuable experience. Plus I was playing with Nails at the end of their set and then with David... so, things like that. MK: So once you decide it's time to part ways, where do you go at that point? RG: I had my own record to finish and I'd been working with The Cure off and on. So there was a bunch of stuff I wanted to do, or attempt to do. MK: How did the Cure connection happen? RG: From David's 50th birthday party. I was teaching everyone the songs and I had to teach Robert [Smith] to play "Quicksand". Which apparently I didn't do all that well, but he picked it up. Robert really delivered at the show too, he really sang great. And then there was one point at the aftershow party at Julian Schnabel's house, when Robert & I were trying to figure out how to steal one of Julian's paintings. I think that's really where the friendship... MK: [laughs] That's where the connection really happened. RG: I kept saying "Well, just take it down and we'll just walk out with it -- if anyone stops us, we'll say he 'He gave it to us!'" MK: [laughs] Tell us about your collaboration with Robert on your album -- can you describe the recording process and how the song came to exist on tape? RG: I'd booked time at a studio and I wanted to start at noon, but Robert wanted to start at 2. When I got there, Robert's gear was all there but Robert wasn't there yet. He showed up around 5:30 and then we went to the off license [liquor store], he wanted to get supplies for the evening. We got supplies which I think consisted of two bottles of red wine, a bottle of Captain Morgan rum and two 6-packs of lager, which were consumed. We had discussed the lyric content of the song during the last part of the last tour I did with David. On tour The Cure were sometimes just a day behind us so I might stay in the city that we had played, if I had the next day off, and play with them the next night and then I'd fly to catch up with David. So sometimes around 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning we'd be discussing this song that we should write together. So while I'm waiting for Robert I started sketching out the music for it, and he came in and wrote a couple of drafts of lyrics. He had a list of words that he would not use, which I thought was interesting -- words he feels he uses too often. We basically did the song between 6pm and 4 in the morning, during which time all of the consumables were consumed, as can easily be proven by soloing the last piano track. [laughs] MK: For me, the other nice moment of providence on the record is the collaboration with Frank Black and Dave Grohl, with the unexpected fade at the end. RG: Most everything is first or second take. Or in the case of my vocals, meant to be replaced later. MK: [laughs] RG: Meant to be taken away, but not. But as my friend Mark Plati pointed out, "What are you gonna do, sing better tomorrow?" It's always nice to be surrounded by love. But this track is Dave Grohl on drums, Frank Black playing guitar, Mike Plotti playing bass and me on guitar. We wrote it the night before, and the next day Danny Saber managed to find me time in the studio. So again between about 6pm and 4 in the morning, we did it. We were all there and David Bowie came down, and we basically cut it second take. The first verse is sung by Frank Black and Dave Grohl, the second verse is David Bowie and me, and the choruses are me and Frank Black. At the end of the song, which had this long ending, we were fading it when we mixed it and for some reason the fader, the master fader, wasn't pulling down Frank's voice. So Mark is mixing and we're just looking at each other, and Mark says "What do we do?" So I said, "Well, just bring the song back up." Upon listening to it later I thought it was kind of a cool idea. MK: It should be mentioned that your new record, which has been available only on your website [www.reevesgabrels.com] as an mp3 download, was nominated for Yahoo's Best Internet Album award. RG: There will be a hard copy version of the album available October 3 through Emagine Music with a new track called "Trap", and the Robert Smith track included on that disc as well. MK: The Robert Smith track we were talking about wasn't available on the mp3 version of the album. RG: No. Actually, it's available on my website if you put either The Sacred Squall Of Now, which is my first solo record, or Bloodflowers by The Cure into your CD-ROM drive while you're on my site, it unlocks a room with a free download of that track. MK: That's fun. RG: There's a company I work with, called CD Database, that has a patent on this unlocking technology. And what we're going to do now with the disc that's coming out on Emagine is that if you put that in when you're on my site or the Emagine site, you'll be able to get a 10th track. MK: Yay! RG: What I'd like to do eventually is do each track live, and if you insert the disc when you're on my site you'd be able to get live versions of all the songs. MK: The music you write seems to be very straight forward and spontaneous, tapping into some darker emotions a lot of the time, but to ask the question that is the bane of any musician's existence, how would you describe -- RG: Well, with my first record.... I think it's Don Henley who said once that you have your entire life to write your first record and then a year to write your second one, or six months. MK: Every once in a while Don just nails it. RG: The first record was kind of bringing everything up to speed, and with this one, I wanted it to be more of a piece, more of a complete thing. I grew up with that sort of American rock songwriting, rock songs with choruses -- I guess I can relate that to Joe Walsh and Neil Young. And somewhere in the middle is, like, Curtis Mayfield and Todd Rundren, of whom I was a big fan. And Hendrix, and everything from George Jones to Miles, you know. That's kind of in there a little bit too. And the underpinning is like Tricky or the Chemical Brothers and stuff like that. So I wanted to bring all that together and make it congeal. There were a couple of years where, the stuff I was going through.... It's a fairly confessional, dark record. And I wanted it to be soulful in the way that "I Think You Know" by Todd Rundgren is, and I've got this blues thing that I can't shake. Even if I do shake it off in a modal sense, conceptually the blues thing -- it's still about the catharsis of it. It's about getting this stuff out of you. And that's what the record is about, quite a bit, for me. You know how in school, you'd make those collages where you'd cut the lips out of one picture, and the eyes out of another picture, and you glue it all together? I wanted to take all those things, but make it coagulate into something more seamless, something that didn't feel like a collage. I just wanted it to meld together, like if you could put the collage under your bed at night and in the morning you had a painting. So it wasn't different things glued together anymore, it's its own thing now, it's congealed. The word congealed works well for me. It's a very good word. END back to top
					Interviews REEVES GABRELS interview by Mike Keneally conducted oct 2000 for NoneForYouDear