Natural progressions

The Folk Implosion get serious

by Matt Ashare

Back when Lou Barlow was just another punk-obsessed teenager growing up in western Mass, he had what he now refers to as a "vision," though "notion" may be a more accurate term. "I decided that I was going to play music that was `folkcore' -- I even came up with the name," he recalls. "I was really into hardcore, but I wanted to play acoustic guitar. So I thought that if I put acoustic music together with hardcore, put hardcore lyrics to acoustic songs, and strummed the acoustic guitar really hard and fast, I'd have folkcore. I was very committed to folkcore, and I still am."

There's been at least a trace of folkcore in just about every musical project Barlow's been involved with, from the "Neil Young tussles with Sonic Youth in a garage in the suburbs" outbursts of early Dinosaur Jr to the "James Taylor makes peace with Sonic Youth over herbal tea in the living room" introspection of Sebadoh. But the purest realization of the folkcore aesthetic came on the lo-verging-on-no-fi Sentridoh four-track recordings that Lou started circulating on cassette in the late '80s. It was one such tape that caught the attention of an 18-year-old local indie-rock fan by the name of John Davis 10 years ago. He wrote Barlow a fan letter, enclosing a cassette of his own home recordings, and the two became pen pals, forming a friendship and, once Barlow moved to Boston, a musical partnership that would yield one of the more unlikely indie-rock success stories of the decade -- the Folk Implosion.

To look at John Davis, you'd never guess that four years ago this scruffy indie-rocker had a Top 40 hit, or that Interscope is throwing its considerable weight behind the new Folk Implosion disc, One Part Lullaby. There's nothing unusual about that in the '90s, a decade in which the no-image image has dominated alterna-rock and electronica. But even Davis himself seems somewhat incredulous at the notion that in a decade he's gone from writing Barlow letters to penning a major-label album with him. "I guess somehow we just stumbled on some way of playing that other people outside our little niche appreciated," he says with a shrug over iced coffee at the 1369 Coffee House in Central Square. "It's as much a surprise to us as it is to everybody else."

What Folk Implosion stumbled on in 1995 was the sleek, noirish, hip-hop-inflected single "The Natural One." It was one of several tracks the duo wrote and recorded with producer Wally Gagel for the London soundtrack of the independent film Kids. And it marked the first time that Barlow and Davis, who'd bonded over a mutual fondness for four-tracking, had worked together in a high-tech studio. The experience left the duo in a bit of a quandary over what to do next -- take Folk Implosion back into the living room or push it further out into the world?

"The living room was kind of dying," Davis admits, "but I wanted to make one last record that way. I mean, Lou had been putting out records with Dinosaur and Sebadoh for years, but at the time I had only released a couple singles on Shrimper and one solo record that sold maybe 1000 copies. So I felt like I needed an intermediate step before moving on."

Barlow, whom I spoke to in the company of his mom at the Roxy when he was in town to perform with Sebadoh as part of the Flaming Lips tour last month, had a different agenda. "I thought we should do an album with London to follow up Kids so they could throw `Natural One' on it. That seemed like the logical thing to do."

Instead, Barlow and Davis opted for a compromise of sorts -- one last indie album on the tiny Communion label recorded not on a living-room four-track but in modest eight- and 16-track studio settings. Dare To Be Surprised (1997) was solid enough to prove that "The Natural One" wasn't entirely a fluke. But overall it felt less like a cohesive step forward than like one last friendly look back on the indie-rock underground they were about to leave behind.

"SO THIS IS the first of, you know, a couple of seamless transitions that we've got for you," jokes Davis in a snippet of stage banter preserved from one of the Folk Implosion's notoriously disorganized live performances and tacked on to the beginning of the new One Part Lullaby. For a moment, just a second or two really, you can hear Barlow laughing in the background. And then the Folk Implosion get serious and you feel the duo's days as indie underachievers slipping away into the cluttered past as the metronomic thump of a stripped-down, hip-hoppish drum loop kicks in, a subdued Barlow croons an assurance that he feels "all right," and rich, warm layers of bass tones, acoustic-guitar chords, and electric-guitar lines ripple over the groove. The song, "My Ritual," sets the stage for an album filled with variations that build on the refined aesthetic, stark shadings, and melancholy mood of "The Natural One." There's a consistency here that none of Barlow's previous projects (save, perhaps, Dinosaur Jr's Bug) has achieved. And yet the album overflows with subtle sonic seasonings that give each track a distinct musical flavor, from harp pluckings to 12-string acoustic-guitar arpeggios, from choir vocals to slide guitar, from multi-part vocal harmonies to string arrangements.

"We like playing a lot of different instruments and with this kind of music we can do that," explains Davis. "I used more open tunings and acoustic instruments -- harp, psaltery, guitar, banjo, and dulcimer, and other folk instruments. And then with the computer you can loop those things and add distortion or whatever. In a way it was a reflection of the music we were listening to, which was a lot of Top 40 R&B, like Brandy and Monica, and a lot of obscure folk music, like Moondog -- pop music and art music."

One big change on One Part Lullaby is that for the first time Barlow and Davis divided the musical duties, with Barlow handling all of the vocals and Davis tackling the majority of the guitar parts. "When we listened back to Dare To Be Surprised," says Barlow, "we realized that there were certain parts of the band that we wanted to strengthen -- namely the guitars and the vocals."

One Part Lullaby also features some of Barlow's best lyric writing, something he gives partial credit for to his wife, Kathleen. "When I was struggling with lyrics, Kathleen sat down and read to me -- Aldous Huxley, Noël Coward, Oscar Wilde. I'd just write down what it made me think of. But `One Part Lullaby' is a title I took directly from a Wilde quote -- `Life is one part lullaby and two parts fear.' I was like, `Yes it is. How beautiful is that?' The song is my response to the way people in LA freak out when it rains. Actually, a lot of the record is about the struggle between man and machine. It's funny, because when Marilyn Manson released Mechanical Animals, I remember thinking, `Here's this guy living on a Hollywood hillside pondering the intersection of man and nature.' And there I was, a guy living on a hillside in LA pondering the intersection of man and nature. So I guess this is our Mechanical Animals."

One Part Lullaby itself embodies an interesting meeting of man and machine. The entire disc was put together by Barlow, Davis, and Wally Gagel, using Pro Tools recording software, at Barlow's home in LA. So in a sense it's a living-room recording created in what amounted to a very high-tech living room. "Pro Tools is based on building songs by fitting blocks of loops together," Barlow points out. "It's like musical Legos. When I saw what Pro Tools could do, I was amazed. I mean, `One Part Lullaby' is built from a lot of concepts that I'd been carrying around for a long time. And on `Easy LA,' Jon and I just sat and played riffs together on guitar and bass over a very basic beat. And then we cut and pasted together parts of what we'd recorded to create the song."

For someone who's spent the better part of the past decade working in the rather trad mode of the singer/songwriter, it may seem a little odd to hear Barlow endorsing such an artificial approach to composing. But in many ways, the postmodern collage sensibility of the Folk Implosion is a more accurate reflection of Barlow's musical tastes. "Music is a big soup, it's just one big huge soup. Not even a soup, it's more like a buffet. And I've always made weird plates at the buffet: I'll take some cottage cheese and peaches and then put some pasta next right next to the peaches."

He continues, "When I was little, I just mixed all my food together" -- here his mom nods in agreement. "I just love salads and mixing stuff. And it's the same with music: I'm just not a purist as a musician or as a listener. But, really, the way that John and I have worked together has always been extremely organic and at the same time very studio-based. It's artificial in the sense that it's a studio creation, but it's evolved naturally."

"We do allow ourselves to be influenced by things we appreciated musically," is how Davis explains it, "like Led Zeppelin or Foreigner, or Top 40, or rap, even if we didn't really identify with them culturally. We're just really curious about all kinds of music. I mean, on my first single I put a picture of Tom Petty next to Thurston Moore because I really like both of them."

But the Folk Implosion haven't completely abandoned certain aspects of the indie-rock approach they were raised on. "We made it really clear when we talked to record companies what we would and wouldn't do," Davis says. "We told them that we're not a rock band. We can't play these songs live. We won't go on tour. We will do acoustic shows. We will make a good video. We will care about what our Web site and record cover look like. We will do a lot of interviews. But we aren't going to take over the world. We're in this for creative reasons. [Elektra CEO] Sylvia Rhone told us that that would result in `reduced sales expectations,' and then she was like, `You guys aren't willing to do what it takes to win.' And she's right.

"Interscope asked us directly if we were going to follow through on what we'd done on the Kids soundtrack. And we said, `Yeah, but we're not going to go on tour.' And their answer was, `Well, Steely Dan didn't tour.' They did make it pretty clear that they didn't care about our indie cred. And they were really blunt about asking us if we were going to do something `good' like `Natural One' or another record like Dare To Be Surprised. It was pretty harsh, but I respected the honesty of it."