Music | Ragged Band · Dispatches from the Creative Life

Matt Wignall

By: Ben Bishop

04·30·2013

“I started a band in high school with a few friends, and we played some backyard keggers, and by that time it was clear I was not suited for any kind of structured job.”

The word jack is evocative of roguish qualities. Three-day stubble and cool competence. JFK, Jack Nicholson, and Jack Daniels. Jack the Ripper. Blackjack. Sgt. Whiskeyjack and Captain Jack Sparrow.

Fitting, then, that Matt Wignall is a true jack-of-all-trades.

As a photographer he’s shot bands including Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes, My Brightest Diamond, J. Roddy Walston & The Business and Thrice, and worked on fashion projects for companies like Volcom and NSF.

He has his hand in the world of moving pictures, having filled the roles of cinematographer, director and/or producer on a range of projects, from numerous music videos to commercial pieces with a documentary flair.

He is a producer and audio engineer who has cut records with Delta Spirit, Mando Diao, Cold War Kids, The Fling, and Deep Sea Diver. His analog recording studio, Tackyland, sits in back of his Long Beach home.

He is the former lead singer of Havalina Rail Co., whose music is too rich and varied to even begin to attempt describing here.

He is a graphic designer.

He’s involved in some capacity with these guys.

His wife, Judita Wignall, is a raw and organic foods cookbook author.

When I contacted Matt about an interview, I opened my e-mail with the following three anecdotes:

1 – In the fall of 1999 my insufferable thrash band, 4 Pete’s Sake, opened for Havalina Rail Co. in the fellowship hall of a small church on the west side of Santa Cruz, CA. Seventeen people attended. One was my mom. Midway through our set our bass player fell down and simultaneously unplugged all of our amps. You and Orlando were kind afterwards.

2 – In the spring of 2007 some friends and I were picking up a trailer that our buddies in Cold War Kids had gifted us. It happened to be parked in your driveway. While lifting the trailer to back it onto our truck’s hitch, we inadvertently struck, knocked over, and utterly destroyed a ceramic chiminea that belonged to you and your wife.

3 – Last year while having coffee with a friend who will remain nameless I was told an apocryphal-sounding story involving you, XXXXXX, a Mexican wedding, a speedo and a toothbrush. I’m not sure I believed it.

Andy Barron

By: Ben Bishop

02·01·2013

Design, Film, Interviews, Music, Photography

I have a clear memory of the first time I saw Andy Barron. It was a warm evening in late August, 2001, and I was lying in bed. It was my first night away at college. Just as I was about to fall asleep, the door of my dorm room cracked open and someone slunk inside, attempting to be quiet.

I knew that one of my two roommates was named Andy. We’d even spoken briefly on the phone ahead of move-in day. But I had no idea what he looked like. Being the shrewd fellow that I am, I feigned sleep. I figured if I was about to be robbed by a malingering undergraduate taking advantage of unattended belongings during the chaos of move-in week, I would wait until he got closer and then brain him with my alarm clock.

Instead, the shadowy figure clambered up the edge of the bunk bed, shaking it crazily in the process, such that if I had been asleep I would have woken in a panic thinking an earthquake had struck, and proceeded to fling a guitar bearing a Jimmy Eat World sticker onto the mattress along with a backpack and various other sundry items before climbing back down and immediately leaving again. Two days later I found out it was Andy.

The phrase “one thing led to another” seems to have been invented for Andy, who by now has been making his living as a graphic designer, photographer, tour manager, press wrangler and videographer for over a decade. He has toured extensively with Switchfoot and Foster The People, and has taken captivating photographs, perusable on his website, of everyone from The Jonas Brothers to Paper Route.

Of all the artists I’ve had occasion to know, he is one of the least pretentious, least neurotic, and least anxious. He comes across as being singularly unconcerned with whether or not people find him, or what he “is into,” to be sufficiently cool. Which makes him a very easy person to be around in an industry generally rife with insecure men and women desperately trying to manage others’ impressions of them.

We corresponded via email.

We Barbarians

By: Ben Bishop

01·08·2013

Music

If you’ve ever experienced the mixed blessing of attending a show at Chain Reaction, the all-ages rock club located in an Anaheim strip mall that trafficks in horny tween-punks, screamo bills six bands deep, and the drama which this volatile combination predictably ignites, you will resonate with the somewhat incongruous feeling I had on the evening during my senior year of college when I first saw a band called The Colour. Contrary to Chain norms, nobody onstage was screaming, skanking, or Nazi-stomping. Nobody had pink hair, giant tribal plugs in their ears, or a safety pin through their lip. The guitars weren’t even distorted.

Which is not to say that there wasn’t some serious movement taking place up on the boards. The front man, Wyatt Hull, was in fact gyrating quite a bit, but it was a sinuous, hip-swiveling affair, more Elvis Presley than Fat Mike. I remember him looking a lot like Jim Morrison, and engaging in a lot of interpretive tambourine while the rest of the band churned out a sort of Bravery-inflected indie disco.

It was not bad. But it did not, as they say, grab me.

David Shapiro of Pitchfork Reviews Reviews

By: Ben Bishop

10·15·2012

Music, Writers

So, my brother and I are going back and forth on upcoming movies the other night, what we want to see, what trailers have left us spooked, how we feel about Brad Pitt’s hair in Killing Them Softly, etc. A few rounds of texts and e-mails ensue about Cloud Atlas, the forthcoming Wachowski-helmed adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel which, when I first read it back in 2005, I assumed was patently un-adaptable.

I inform my brother that I’ve recently read a New Yorker piece on the making of the movie. The next day he e-mails me a link to a Grantland review of the New Yorker review (yes, a review of a review) with the following passage highlighted.

There’s always the moment in these extended New Yorker profiles where the writer, drunk on bottomless word count, climbs to the top of a stack of Marshalls and starts playing a seven-minute reporter’s-notebook solo…

Jacob Bannon – Artist, Entrepreneur, Vocalist of Converge

By: Ben Bishop

04·04·2012

Design, Interviews, Music

Once I create something, it’s no longer internalized and only mine to experience. Others experience all of it through their own eyes, ears, and emotional filters. At that point, the music is part of the fabric that makes them, that helps them through their own trials and tribulations. – Jacob Bannon

One night during my first semester of college I ended up getting involved in a labyrinthine conversation about music that ended up feeling like one of those formalized mating dances that birds of paradise engage in; adversarial and flirtatious at the same time. Bands and records were reduced to chips in a poker game, with each player bluffing about their hipster cred. The girl in whose dorm room I was sitting had pink hair, a lip ring, and an encyclopedic knowledge of gender-bending feminist spazz rock. Our ritualistic exchange ended up centering on hardcore though, and at the end of the night she gave me a copy of Converge’s Jane Doe. It was a record that would change my life as a lover of music.

That album seared itself into my car stereo and my memory, changing the way I related to every other heavy band. The men of Converge seemed to be playing at the bleeding edge of their technical abilities, blazing through songs at speeds that felt positively centrifugal, as if the entire operation was just about to break loose of that one rusty screw holding it together and go cartwheeling off into the void. Vocalist Jacob Bannon’s distorted howling was largely unintelligible, but his lyrics were poignant, and, when I finally got a chance to see the band live years later, his presence incendiary.

During the course of the ensuing decade I’ve followed Converge’s trajectory, and Bannon’s specifically. He co-founded Deathwish Records in 2000 and is a prolific visual artist. Jake has always struck me as an interesting figure; a lover of aesthetics with a fine eye for detail; a prolific writer whose emotions seem to spill onto the page; a charismatic frontman at the forefront of a genre that touts tolerance and unity while simultaneously being predisposed toward violence, or hijacked by it, depending on one’s perspective. We corresponded via e-mail this spring.

Paul Meany, Lead Singer of Mutemath

By: Ben Bishop

03·12·2012

Interviews, Music

People start feeling as though they’re entitled to give their opinion on something and that they should be heard. There may be some validity to that, but when it starts distorting the purity of what we feel like we’re trying to do as a band it needs to be corrected. So, accessibility is fine to a degree, but it’s a slippery slope. – Paul Meany

Of all the occupational hazards faced by rock musicians, the threat of the sophomore slump is the great equalizer. Regardless of musical style, off-stage behavior, or sales numbers, it’s an unavoidable fact that if you’ve done well on your first go-round, the stakes are going to be higher when you role out album number two. The expectations of fans and management can be crushing, particularly in a day and age when consumers are pushing for more and more access to artists, handlers have expectations around social media and fan engagement, and no one seems able to guarantee that a finished record will even make it to its release date without getting leaked. All of which is to say nothing of the self-imposed stress any artist faces when trying to live up to their own past successes.

Paul Meany knows all about the fear of the sophomore slump. He should. He lived through one. Following the release of their critically acclaimed debut, Meany and his band mates, who together make up Mutemath, a percussion-driven, jazz-inflected New Orleans rock quartet known for impossibly energetic live performances, were faced with the challenge of building on the measurable success of their first record while remaining faithful to their own personal vision.

After an agonizing journey through a creative desert, during which they shelved an entire album of material and brought in a second producer, Meany and company finally unveiled Armistice. For all the pains the band had taken to account for the opinions of others during the gestative process, their second album received a tepid response from both critics and fans. While Meany stands by the record, the process of making it clearly wore him out. So, when it came time to get to work on album three, Meany, along with drummer Darren King and bassist Roy Mitchell-Cárdenas, decided to hole up in the singer’s New Orleans home where they could be free from the chatter of the outside world. The fruit of their labors, Odd Soul, was released last fall. I reached Meany during an afternoon break ahead of a Valentine’s Day show in Salt Lake City.

Pitchfork Staff Writer & New York Magazine Pop Critic, Nitsuh Abebe

By: Ben Bishop

02·07·2012

Music, Profile, Writers

There’s this idea that floats around — the one where critics are mostly just snobs and know-it-alls, the people who have heard everything and live to tell you why your taste is bad and what you should be listening to instead. But that isn’t really the goal, right? – Nitsuh Abebe

It can be difficult to grasp the speed at which the internet has moved, and, in moving, changed our perceptions of what is both normal and possible. Just ten years ago the web was a very different place. Blogs were only just gaining traction, and if you wanted any kind of group interaction with someone, small web boards and e-mail listservs were sometimes your best bet. No Twitter. No Facebook.

Ten years ago, current New York Magazine pop music critic Nitsuh Abebe was toiling away at a desk job, spending his lunch breaks and free moments sifting through threads on various message boards geared toward fans of independent music. Laboring in obscurity like any young twenty-something with literary aspirations and a boring day gig.

Over time he became acquainted with another young man, Ryan Schreiber, whose small music website, Pitchfork Media, would one day grow to become the most influential taste-making site in the history of internet-based music criticism. The Rolling Stone of a web 2.0 generation. Abebe began writing for Pitchfork in 2002, when it was still a fledgling startup. He still contributes regularly to the site, most recently in the form of his insightful “Why We Fight” column.

Interview with Jordan Butcher, Designer

By: Ben Bishop

09·13·2011

Design, Interviews, Music

“I survived on the Subway $2.50 six inch sub of the day. I didn’t have a car, so laundry was always an issue. We were directly across the street from a huge porn shop, and I would fall asleep counting the flashes of the pink lights through the window.”
- Jordan Butcher

I am sitting in King’s Hardware, regarding Jordan Butcher from across the rough wooden expanse of our corner table where we are surrounded by taxidermy and vintage beer cans. It’s early, and what will become a deafening roar of conversation and music is still at a reasonable drone. So it’s not that hard to hear Butcher as he picks up his pint, leans in, and, with a twinkle in his eye, tells me a story. Despite being able to hear him fairly well, I ask him to repeat himself.

“Sorry, it sounds like you just said Katy Perry kissed you.”

“She did. On the cheek.”

When Jordan finishes telling his story, the one where Katy Perry kisses him on the cheek outside the bathroom at the afterparty for the Grammys, I find that I am not all that surprised. For one thing, he tells a lot of outrageous stories. For another, the guy is on a career-high tear, having just returned from Los Angeles where he’d been invited to the mother of all music awards shows after being nominated in the category of Best Special Packaging for his work on Underoath’s “Lost in the Sound of Separation.”

I am trying to picture Ms. Perry kissing Jordan’s whiskered cheek, when I realize I need to refocus. He’s already on to the next story. Something about Andy Summers greeting him as they waited in line to walk the red carpet.

“Andy Summers of The Police?”

“Yeah. He told me his kids were big Underoath fans.”

Sure they are, I thought to myself. Then again, it sounded about par for the course. Butcher’s date had showed me a picture from the afterparty on their return. She was hugging Leonard Cohen.

Bryan John Appleby, Musician

By: Ben Bishop

08·08·2011

Music, Profile

We live in a time when hipsterism and gentrification continue to levy their tolls on the music world as pointedly as they do the spheres of fashion, art, politics, religion, and, let’s face it, food. It is a time in which the word vintage has been used to the point of obscenity. A prime example; each time the Indie Folk Beard Fetish Movement seems as though it must have reached its nadir, another man slinging a weathered Martin six-string emerges from some corner of the American landscape brandishing a set of whiskers evoking a Chia Pet sponsored by ZZ Top.

My problem is not so much with the decision to grab some suspenders and stop shaving, as it is with the often attendant claim of authenticity, a veneer that seems to say, “Gosh man, we don’t care about being cool, we just want to make honest music.” As if fashion, or genre, had anything to do with authenticity. Gag me with a banjo. It’s a wonder Judee Sill hasn’t come back from the dead to punch some of these guys in the face.

Matt Wignall

Andy Barron

We Barbarians

Jacob Bannon – Artist, Entrepreneur, Vocalist of Converge

Paul Meany, Lead Singer of Mutemath

Pitchfork Staff Writer & New York Magazine Pop Critic, Nitsuh Abebe

Interview with Jordan Butcher, Designer

Bryan John Appleby, Musician

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