The greatest songwriter to emerge from the 1980s is Marshall Crenshaw. The only two other possible contenders for the title are Elvis Costello and Prince, and while Imperial Bedroom might be better than Field Day and Sign Of The Times better than Downtown, Jaggedland and What’s In The Bag are vastly superior to anything either artist has released in the 21st Century.
But while the music stands on its own terms, the career was a bafflement. “I do feel frustrated sometimes but on the other hand show business is tough, ” Marshall explained, adding a little later, “And again it is really hard, there’s only so many slots.”
Over the past 31 years, Crenshaw has released ten albums of astoundingly consistent power pop songs. The high melodic quotient has never wavered, every album is a jewel and while Marshal claims “I know that sometimes I did sorta phone it in when I was with major labels and was under pressure,” he might be mistaking his mental state with the albums he was producing. In 2012 Crenshaw began a Kickstarter campaign and has released the first two and has four EPs each featuring a new song. a cover and a new recording of an old song waiting to be released. The next release will be this Fall. Crenshaw: “It took me a really long time to get all the songs for Jaggedland and then the whole thing all got dumped out at once and that was it. It’s almost not worth it”
My adoration for Crenshaw’s music won’t be new if you read rock nyc; among the many times I’ve written about him, in 2009 I reviewed every album he had recorded in celebration of a new album . Also, this you don’t know, when my mother died in 2010, I listened to Crenshaw exclusively for a couple of days to help me through the mourning process.
I am a music lover who is moved by two things: beat and melody. If a song is good at either, it will win me over. Which is why I write so much about EDM, it can give me the former, and so much about rock and roll which can give me the latter. And nobody is better at melody than Crenshaw. All artistic composition is an act of faith in god. I am an agnostic and I am certainly not suggesting all songwriting is about an interventionist god, I am claiming that creating songs in harmony with people’s deepest and best feeling is an act that occurs outside the earthly realm. Few people do it better than Marshall Crenshaw and it was an honor to speak with him. Here is the Marshall Crenshaw interview, I’ve cut my question to the punchline because I tended to ramble. I was gonna call this story “Something Happened” but a better name would be “Something Is Happening”:
Your father Howard Crenshaw died last year, was “Stranger And Stranger”, off your new EP, about his passing?
“What really got me going writing the lyrics to that song… my Dad, actually, the day that my Dad died was the day that I had a recording session with Bryan Carrott to record the vibraphone. We had a really nice session, Bryan’s a great guy, I really loved what he did, and as I was walking out the door of the studio, somebody had a TV set on in the lobby of the studio and they were talking about the Sandy Hook school shooting. About two hours later I got a text from my brother Robert that our Dad had died.
“But I was really thinking about a couple of women that I know in my age group that passed away. One was the wife of a close friend, a person that I was very fond of, she just died and I still have no idea why or how it happened. Was it something she ate or breathed or drank, I still still don’t know. It’s so strange , there’s that word. Just a lot of dark stuff during this one particular time period. I wanted to write a song about this girl I’m talking about because she’s a real sweet person and it really, really bothered me for a long time. It was so fucked up and so unfair that she was gone. Then there was just a lot of things that got thrown into it those lyrics, like Hurricane Sandy, my Dad, just that whole time period was filled with all that dark stuff. So that’s what the song is about.”
2012’s “I Don’t See You Laughing Now” appeared to be a political rebuke.
“When the title popped into my head I just started thinking about the general way in about people that to me are villains. I’ve always got my eye on these guys. It seems like there are all kind of grief driven villains in our world and I just really can’t get over the sociopathic behavior of some of these people you know, I was specifically thinking when I wrote the lyrics of one person in particular. I don’t really feel like saying who he is but it is really like… the lyrics is like somebody pointing a finger and telling them off, sticking a finger in someone else chest and saying this, that and the other thing. It is really inspired by all the sociopathic and grief driven villains out there, disgusting hideous people out there, who have done so much to fuck up our country. Not someone I know at all no. Sometimes when I’m about to play the song I say to the audience ‘see if you can guess which disturbing documentary partially inspired this song. So that’s a big fat clue right there.
“But most importantly, I had the music and I had the vibe and the track and I wanted to write a great rock and roll song on top of the track that I had.”
In January of this, I saw you with the Incredible Simulators playing a wonderful version of “Every Little Thing” and years ago covering Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire”. How do you work on cover songs? How do you know what will work?
“It all comes from instinct, I get idea or songs to do and they just appear like pure impulse is all it is. Just something tells me that U can make something out of these songs and I can use them as an expression for myself. I can’t really explain it or define it. Again, it is just instinct and impulse. It’s a mixed bag, I realize. I just remember this moment I went to see Let’s Active many years ago and they came on and played “Shaking Street” by the MC5 for their encore and it was such an oddball choice. It struck me at the time, I’d never expect them to play it at the time, maybe I was already doing that myself, I don’t remember it’s just… I love that: you go see a band and they pull something out of left field and it works and I try to do that. I like when there is an element of surprise to the whole thing. People comment on the fact that I did an Abba song.It seemed perfectly natural to me but I knew that people would go ‘wow, an Abba song, how strange’. It’s just a thing to entertain myself and to entertain other people. I made a kind of editorial choice on the Richard Thompson song, the verse about ‘every time I turn my back, she’s running to the corner look for crack’. I thought I better leave that out.
“I did ‘Move It’ at the City Winery because we used to play it way back when you first caught on to us, which was Day One pretty much. We used to play ‘Move It’ back then. And I was playing cover songs at the 30th Anniversary show that we did used to do at the beginning. We used to do ‘Look At What I Almost Missed’ by the Parliaments and early Funkadelic stuff. That goes back to my growing up in Detroit area. All the ones that we did at the 30 the anniversary thing were tunes that we used to play at CBGBs and around town. That Comrade Birdie thing and stuff like that. They were all upbeat kinda choices that nobody else played. It was just stuff that we used to do back in the day.”
The other side is people covering your material. Do you have any favorites?
“Ronnie Spector. Those are the ones that I love best, the Ronnie Spector ones. For one thing it was a project that I did with Alan Betrock, it was one of his last projects. And while we were doing it, it didn’t really register with me how good it was but it didn’t come out till a long time after the fact. I think it came out just after Alan passed away and I just thought there was some real sweetness in her performances and she really did the songs justice and got something out of them. I really dug it. I love those versions of my songs.
“If you had told me back when I was 17 years old that Ronnie Spector was going to do some of my stuff I would’ve fallen on the floor, jumped for joy I mean to say.So that was really cool. Again, at the time I was doing it, it was just one of the things we were doing. There was a lot going on. I didn’t realize how good it was but when I heard it later I was very grateful that it had happened. I was really glad that Alan had asked us.”
Your last album, Jaggedland, was in 2009. Why the delay?
“The album making exercise is just… I don’t want to say that I’ll never do it again, I might but I might not ever do it again. It’s getting pretty late in life for me and it can really take its toll. It takes a long long long time for me to do an albums worth of songs that I think are worthy. Any more, I just insist that nothing goes out till I know it’s as greata s it can be. I really place high demands on myself. It took me a really long time to get all the songs for Jaggedland and then the whole thing all got dumped out at once and that was it. It’s almost not worth it. At the same time, if I don’t keep creating new stuff then my mental health will suffer so this is the way for me go forward creating new stuff. I have to do it for my own sanity and own soul. But the whole album making thing is just a drag. I just have no interest in it right now. I love the way this is going. I know that the music that’s gone out on these EPs is really good, it’s working for me. The next one’s coming out in the fall and it’s gonna be fucking great so I feel like I made a good call on this.”
Songs get lost on albums. On #447 there is deep album cut “Right There In Front Of Me” -a terrific song that has hit single written over it.
“I know my songs are really good and I appreciate that you like that. That song from 447, ‘Right There In Front Of Me’ is a hit song, it’s just not a hit song for me. I put it on there because I just didn’t want it to never see the light of day. I actually wrote it at the request of a guy named Steve Greenberg (he A&R guy who discovered Hanson, Joss Stone and the Jonas Brothers), he asked me write a song for this act he was working with but they didn’t do it, so what was I going to do? It really wasn’t designed as a record for me, it was designed for this pop group.’
One of your biggest hits “Till I Heard It From You” was written with the Gin Blossoms. Did that irritate you?
“I loved it at when it happened I just felt vindicated. I felt ‘alright you motherfuckers who wrote me off, see I can do this. Sure enough it was a home run and a huge hit. So I’m just really proud and I felt really vindicated by it. The greatest thing about it though was that it was an act of friendship on the part of Jesse Velenzuela because we didn’t know each other and he just kinda found me and said ‘let’s write a song together.’ And that was a really sweet thing for him to do because they were really good on their own, but we really nailed it. I was proud of it, they are still doing great stuff, their style and their sound I always did like it and still do. So I am glad that we crossed paths and Jesse and I are still close friends.”
At a concert I once requested “Radio Girl” you got half way through it and said you couldn’t remember the rest because you’d only ever played it once.
“Now I’m at the point of my life where I don’t actually remember a lot of them. I used to sometimes pretend that I didn’t remember songs because I didn’t want to do them. But now it’s legitimate I can’t remember. The other night I was trying to play this Luton Brothers songs I’d recorded for a compilation album that somebody shouted out for in the audience. Ten years ago I could’ve sung the whole thing word for word fro memory but now I really dont’t remember stuff. There’s been a lot of them, I’ve done a lot of songs over the years. A lot of them kinda got recorded and then were never performed live and ‘Radio Girls’ were one of those, I never really did that in my set. I mostly remember that one, if you asked for it now I could sing the whole thing without flubbing any of it.”
Life’s Too Short is my favorite of your albums, which is yours?
“I don’t have a favorite of my albums. I kinda like my stuff, I don’t listen to it much unless I’m working on something. If I’m working n something I listen to it. It’s pretty good music I think. I know that sometimes I did sorta phone it in when I was with major labels and was under pressure. Sometimes I couldn’t really think deeply enough about what I was doing. There were a lot of things that were clouding my thoughts at times during those years. I really try. I really put my heart in this stuff. What relieves me a lot when I hear my stuff, if it’s something I haven’t heard it in awhile, the feel of it is really good. There’s some soulfulness to it. And I’m always really happy when I hear that.
While there is nothing much to be changed in the recorded work, I feel frustrated that you weren’t bigger. Do you feel the same way?
“I do feel frustrated sometimes.But on the other hand, show business is tough. I did the best I could, I had some success, I mean you’re talking to me now. I’ve lived a life as an artist and I’m still at it, doing it better than ever I think. At least pretty darn good. I’m still going forward and the road isn’t finished yet. And again it is really hard, there’s only so many slots but it could be worse, I know that. I figure the fact that I’ve made a life as an artist is a victory, is a big victory for me. Hopefully I’ll be around to piss on the graves of people that deserve it. It’s pretty good, pretty good. I won’t say it’s all good but it’s pretty good.
I have been a huge fan since the day I first heard you, thank you so much for the opportunity to tell you how much your music has meant to me.
“I really appreciate your continuing interest. I have real clear memories of knowing you and all the contact that I had with you in the early days. I remember it all very clearly. I’m glad we’re both still around and it’s great to hear from you.”