‘Selfish Portraits’, John Henry Olthoff’s third album is a collection of touching stories tainted of dark humor and harsh reality, sometimes plain tragic, other times funny. After having reviewed his album a few weeks ago, I asked the outspoken country-folk singer a few questions by email. I just still can’t believe he is a teacher (like me),.. and his non-musical inspirations are (among many others) Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens,… people who embrace reason and people who defend the powerless? I think I got this from his lyrics.
How do you write songs?
How I usually answer this question is most of my songs begin with the first line and then they continue on for a while until they end. But there’s a lot of truth in that. Often I’ll start with a line, or two words that (kind of) rhyme, and then build the song around it. Most of the songs on "Selfish Portraits" began with my writing the first line and figuring out where to go from there. Exceptions, if I remember correctly are “Don’t Walk Away,” "Not Much Else," and maybe one more, I’m not sure. Sometimes I have a clear destination in mind, and sometimes I get there, and sometimes I don’t, and I don’t. But they do go somewhere, and sometimes it even surprises me.
I try to write songs that get people’s attention and hold it, sometimes by saying something offensive, often by saying something obviously funny. I want to challenge the audience to think about what I’m writing, not easy, and take them places they wouldn’t have thought of going. "Weekend in Jail" is about a bumbling petty criminal, the type you might sympathize with, but the first line is “Billy broke his hand beating up his ex-girlfriend…” You’re supposed to hate this guy—and then if you come around to liking him or the song or laughing at the stupid stuff he does, then maybe you ended up liking a song that begins by making a joke out of domestic abuse. "Can Your God Do That?" is an upbeat country song with electric and steel guitars and a driving beat that challenges people’s belief in an omnipotent, omniscient deity. A song I just wrote, called "Window," starts out with describing life in so many depressed and depressing towns in upstate New York, places that prosperity left behind sometime in the 1890s, and you should have a little sympathy for the character and then he says “Right now I might kill just to have something to do” and then goes on a paranoid, conspiratorial about how the wealthy have destroyed the country that might actually be true but not in the way he explains it…
In my saddest songs, I try to put something funny in there, and in my most obviously funny songs, there’s usually something dark and sinister right there under the surface. Or I think there is. Just to get people to look up from their blackberries from time to time. (Is that the plural for Blackberry?)
When did you start playing music and writing songs?
I’ve been playing music for a long time, since college, back in the early 90s. I wasn’t writing, though. I’d figure out the chords to songs I liked, play them, mostly by myself, and then go about the rest of the day. I’d wanted to write songs, but I was probably too blocked-up to make anything out of all the anger, frustration, pent-up rage, isolation, alienation, petty nonsense and mundane tragedies I was going through and putting myself through for years. A lot of people can write from those places, and sometimes what they write is good, but I find most of it to be insipid, self-indulgent crap and I’m glad I was able to skip that phase that many songwriters go through. It might be a bit presumptuous making that claim, but that’s my story…
It wasn’t until I’d gotten some things figured out that I was able to get to a place where writing was even possible, and then the songs just started coming. I wrote my first song in a coffee shop in Sunnyside, Queens in 2007. Five days later I had five more songs. Four years later, I’ve lost count.
I was married, settling into a decent job, and feeling generally okay when I started writing songs. I wasn’t trying to work through any deep despair or trauma by writing songs—I’d settled a lot of that and in songs figured out a way to kind of write in exile, looking back, visiting some of the anger, pain, and dysfunction from a somewhat healthier and, hopefully, funnier, perspective.
I’d also come to a point where I think I’d outgrown a lot of my influences. A lot of songs weren’t doing what I wanted them to and so I figured that the best way to fix that was to start making my own. So I did.
Who and what are your inspirations? In music and elsewhere?
Wow. How to answer that and not sound like a pretentious, name-dropping jerk? Well, I’ll try…
Musically, for me, however trite and contrived it sounds, my biggest inspiration has been Woody Guthrie and, later, those who continued his legacy of infusing more traditional rhythms and melodies with narrative storytelling, political advocacy, etc.
My wife says my vocals and my phrasing remind her of (a kind way of saying I stole from) Arlo Guthrie…maybe. I’ll take it. All those years of listening to “Alice’s Restaurant” on Thanksgiving ought to count for something, right?
Others—back in the early 90s when everyone I knew was transitioning from listening to hair metal bands to grunge and so many people were wrapped in flannel and their own exquisite miseries, I heard John Prine for the first time and it changed my life. Up until that point I had no idea, or I’d forgotten, that it was okay to write songs like that—so seemingly simple, deceptively so, and saying so much. If I ever write a song that affects someone half as much as “Six O’Clock News” or “Mexican Home” or “Sam Stone” affected me the first time I heard them, then I’ll figure I’ll have done all right…
And so many others—I’d always loved Tom Petty, REM, fell in love with the Jayhawks, later Uncle Tupelo, its offshoots Son Volt and Wilco, Billy Bragg, John Wesley Harding, John Hiatt, Kelly Willis, too many to count, all for different reasons…
Other inspirations, literally, intellectually, historical, are also numerous. I am lucky that as a teacher of Critical Thinking and Adult Education I get to introduce them to my students. Some, but not hardly all: Eugene Debs, Mark Twain, Sacco and Vanzetti, Mother Jones, Bertrand Russell, then Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver, Ruth Stone, Douglas Adams, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger, Daniel Dennett, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Howard Zinn, photographers Milton Rogovin and Dorothea Lange, and lots more. People who embrace reason and people who have worked to represent the powerless, people who have a tremendous talent for using the English language, people who have lived through to the other side of incredible adversity, people who can maintain a sense of humor about all of it…
Is the process of creation difficult for you?
It’s maybe not as difficult as it should be. Songs come fairly quickly and when they come, they mostly come out already finished. But it took so many years of not being able to write anything worth reading or listening to in order to get to this point. If I “labor” for more than a half hour or so from when I first pick up the guitar to the time I have the first recorded demo of a song, then I usually figure I’ve put too much time into it… "It Hurt" I wrote in about fifteen minutes when I was supposed to be putting pants on and going to work. "99 Cent Store" I wrote in my head on the way back from a weekend in upstate New York where I was working on my cabin and shopping almost exclusively at the Family Dollar that had recently opened up in town. "Broken Meter" I wrote after parking at a broken parking meter when I went out for breakfast at a diner in Elmhurst, Queens. I’m not saying it’s easy but songwriting is not something I agonize over, which, according to whom you talk to, can be either a good or a bad thing.
Why did you choose to make alt-country music rather than any other genre?
My parents came from Hell’s Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan, and I grew up mainly in the suburbs of the city, but we listened to a lot of country music, especially Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and others, mostly from my Dad’s tape deck. So I kind of grew up with the sounds of country music, along with Bob Dylan and all the folk singers of the 60s, along with Neil Young and even John Denver, and I guess I was never one of those who liked “any kind of music but country” kind of people… Then the alt-country “movement,” if you can call it that, hit me at exactly the right time. I’d always loved electric guitars, steel guitars, twangy strings and vocals in more traditional country music, and I’d always been put off by the trite silliness, blind patriotism, and blinder religiosity of some of the lyrics.
Bands like The Jayhawks, Uncle Tupelo, Whiskeytown, the Old 97s, even Drive-By-Truckers and the Bottle Rockets and others seemed to be talking to me in ways I could understand, and when I started making my own songs, it seemed natural to take sounds, attitudes, and phrasings I loved and see what I could add to them, sometimes by roughing up smooth edges, sometimes by taking narratives to dark, harrowing, and bizarre places, sometimes by outright making fun. So I guess my music can be called alt-country. People can call it what they want.
You said your songs are portraits of characters. Are these persons real ones you know or have known?
Some could be. Some are amalgams of people I’ve known, stories I’ve heard, and stuff I’ve made up. Many are grotesques, exaggerations and distortions, the slippery slope versions of real, and sometimes real dumb and often real despicable, people. I’ve got a song called “Note to Self” that on the surface can sound like an angry breakup song, but for me it’s more of a song to my younger, stupider self. It has the line “I don’t remember much about you, except for why I left…” Sometimes when I play the song I tell people that there are some people who might hear it and think it’s about them, but they’d be full of shit.
And then “Weekend in Jail” is a true story. Well, some of it is about a guy I knew who actually did some of the things in the song, and the rest is probably true also, for somebody.
"Partners in Crime: A Tell-All" is for my Uncle Bob, who now is dead, and whose story I can now allude to…
Can you elaborate on the title of your album, “Selfish Portraits”? Why “selfish”?
One of the most selfish, narcissistic, egotistical, solipsistic things a person can do is write songs, then play them and expect people to actually pay attention to them. There are so many people writing and performing so many songs telling so many stories of so many heartbreaks and so many loves and so many sunsets, snowstorms, place names, acid trips, addictions, murders, and puppy dogs, with so many of them sung in so many of the same voices, with so many of them trying to hit the same lowest common denominator sweet spot of aesthetic tastes and human experience that it’s hard to see how one can set oneself apart from all of it or stand out in any way or not be mistaken for more of the same. There are lots of reasons why songwriters tend to be wrapped up in their own sense of how brilliant they are, and how every hackneyed turn of phrase exposing their own skewed image of what they think is their own tortured soul somehow deserves to be in a song and then deserves to be inflicted on a crowd who, more often than not (at open mics I’ve been to, anyway), sit there staring at their glowing smartphones waiting impatiently for their turn to inflict themselves on a grudgingly polite audience.
So how different is what I do? Maybe because I can see all that for what I think it is, and because I refuse to take myself too seriously, I can stand apart from a lot of the music I hear. Maybe I don’t and it’s all in my head. Maybe they’re the brilliant ones and I’m the jerk for making fun of their masturbatory self-aggrandizing and self-loathing. Maybe not.
So I think it’s an inherently selfish enterprise. And the songs are portraits of places, times, and people, with me hiding in plain sight. Or not.
Do you have an all-time favorite song?
It’s hard to pick one. There are songs I love for different reasons—songs that make me cry and songs that make me want to punch walls, for instance. “The World Turned Upside Down” by Billy Bragg makes me want to do both. So does “Two Good Men” by Woody Guthrie, a song about Sacco and Vanzetti. REM’s “Don’t Go Back to Rockville” to me is one of the saddest, most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. The Jayhawks “Baltimore Sun” and, for that matter, the entire “Blue Earth” album are amazing. Most Son Volt songs do something to me. Bob Dylan’s version of “Delia” from “World Gone Wrong” is heartbreakingly and breathtakingly beautiful.
What would be your dream collaboration?
I don’t always play well with others but I’m certainly not the first person to say that, whether it’s said proudly or sheepishly. Working with Frank Schiazza has been great because we’re generally together when it comes to how the bare-bones songs should be fleshed out, he can follow my undisciplined and often frustrating phrasing, can harmonize with my twangy, nasally vocals, and he can put in leads and embellishments on the guitar and keyboards that fit the songs right. I’m lucky to know him.
I’d love to sing a duet with Kelly Willis. I’d love to work with T-Bone Burnett (if he can keep the Jesus crap to himself). I’d like for Justin Bieber or The Jonas Brothers (or both) to take "A Safe Bet" and make it a hit…
What is the most curious record in your collection?
I used to have an old cassette tape of Hulk Hogan and the Wrestling Boot Band. I think I got it at a garage sale. When I was a kid, I made my dad buy me the Stryper album. Those were the gimmicky heavy metal Christian rockers who dressed like bumblebees. I was maybe thirteen. Maybe those are curious, but I don’t think they’re still in my collection. I think my CD of Yodeling Slim Clark’s Cowboy Yodels and Ballads might be curious, and I have a recording of the Sidewinders doing Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man.” I don’t know if it’s curious, but it’s awesome…
What is the most interesting recording you own?
I don’t know if I still have it but years ago I bought a bootleg cassette of a Tom Waits concert where he told this joke about hobos and chicken dinners and bible stories. The punch line was “The only bible story I know is about Swanson. Swanson was a heavy motherfucker—ate out 5000 Filipinos, stuck ‘em in the ass with a jawbone.” Or something like that. That’s pretty interesting, I think.
Any embarrassing song on your iPod?
It’s not embarrassing to me, but I’ve got a whole bunch of Wesley Willis songs on my iPod. Wesley Willis was the chronic schizophrenic genius songwriter from Chicago who used to say hello to people by head-butting them and shouting “RAH!” I spoke to him on the phone once and it was, uh, interesting. A lot of his songs were about him cursing out the demons in his head. So sometimes when I’m on the 7 Train and I’m singing along to "Suck a Cheetah's Dick" or “Taste a Panda’s Ass,” it is momentarily awkward when I realize I’m singing out loud and that the people sitting next to me might not also be Wesley Willis fans…
What are some sounds you like?
I just love to complain, and hear the sound of my own voice. That’s a joke—kind of. Whale songs, V-8 engines, rain falling, steel guitars, cats meowing, the shutter of an old SLR camera, footsteps coming for me—those are all okay. But I really like giraffes. Giraffes don’t talk much.
What is scary to you?
Stubborn, even malicious ignorance, and those who play on that in others for profit and political influence are especially scary. Anti-intellectualism is incredibly scary. Denial of scientific facts and all its consequences keep me up at night. Those, and CGI babies in television commercials. Horrifying.
I have noticed some affirmations of the absence of God in your songs (the song ‘Can your God do that?’, or ‘It Hurt’ with the line ‘Hurt like figuring out there’s no one in the sky above you’). Are you a non-believer and how does this influence your writing if it does?
In a word, HELL YES. It’s kind of funny, being a country singer and being an outspoken atheist but it’s what I am and it’s what I can be. I could trot out hundreds of quotes by everyone from Epicurus to Sam Harris to explain why, and name all the books that I’ve read on the subject, but why do that when it’s so much easier to be dismissed, ignored, misunderstood? (Not by you, of course, but the risk of putting yourself and your ideas out for public consumption is that they’re also out there to be misconstrued, ignored, demonized, etc.)
I just tried to sneak that line in “It Hurt” in there and didn’t much think people would notice (oops). But I wrote “Can Your God Do That?” after I had just finished teaching a lesson about the concept of a god in my Critical Thinking class. I showed my students the old arguments against there being an omnipotent being and asked them to respond. Most of them just kind of stared at me, and some acknowledged that there couldn’t be a god who could create a rock so hard, he couldn’t break it, because if he could, there’s something he couldn’t do and was therefore not omnipotent, and if he couldn’t, there was something he couldn’t do and was therefore not omnipotent, and so on…The rest makes fun of what people pray for when they pray, how people don’t always realize the consequences of their own actions, and other hilarity on the way to becoming the most intensely personal song I’ve ever written. My father was killed in an auto accident when I was a teenager, I grew up without him, I miss him terribly, and I know quite clearly and honestly that the only place where he still lives on is in my memory and in that of those who knew him. I have another song, "Still Fine", that also talks about this and has the line “Someday I’ll be right where you are”—living on in the minds of people who thought enough of me to think of me now and again. And that’s cool with me.
What do you think about the role of religion in this country and the world?
It should be no surprise that I would say it has a very damaging effect. Religion gives people bad reasons for doing good when there are plenty of good reasons, supplies justification for people to do quite immoral things that they think are moral, and leaves people satisfied with believing awfully bad information about life, the universe, and everything. Again, I can list quotes from Steven Weinberg to Bertrand Russell to Mark Twain explaining this better than I can.
What makes me saddest is how people’s so-called religious faith would lead them to deny basic, fundamental facts about biology and our connection to every other living being on the planet. The theory of evolution by means of natural selection is beautiful, elegant, and exciting to learn about, and the fact that the United States, due mainly to people’s adherence to primitive religious dogma, is near the bottom of so-called developed nations in the public acceptance of evolution is a tragedy.
Do you ever think about how the ways that we listen to music has changed so much in the last years? Does this affect the way you compose music?
I didn’t really start writing songs until the record industry as we knew it was already dead, or near-death, but yeah, it has changed the way I listen to and write music. In one way, when I record a song and put it online, I know a few people will hear it who would never have heard it otherwise. I also know that there will be billions who will never know it was there and some who do know and will happily ignore it. At least now my songs are able to find those few…
What is your next project? How do you think your music will evolve?
I’ve got lots of songs already, enough for a boxed set or a 3-hour “Live at Budokan” triple-album. I’ll no doubt write more. When I have the time, I’ll work with someone, maybe Frank, maybe another producer, and figure out what to do with some of those songs. I mean, how could I go wrong with lyrics like "You Don't Love Me Because You're Stupid" and "It's such a beautiful night and you're such an asshole?"
Along the way, I’ll pick up sounds, phrasings, and influences. I’ll get better at playing the guitar. Hell, I might even learn how to sing. I can’t imagine how that could hurt…
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