This is why I had been pushing Joseph Steinhardt for a sit down interview, because I have read his interviews, indeed, I have interviewed him myself (with Helen, around four years ago), and you need to get him talking. The fear in an email interview is not a lack of forthcoming but rather a sort of self-awareness you might expect in a man who had just spent six years on a 30 minute folk album.
Joseph Steinhardt wrote and recorded with the mid to late 2000s punk power pop band For Science as well as being co-owner of New Brunswick indie label Don Giovanni. I became friendly with Joseph a year after For Science disbanded and, a huge fan of their second album (also a huge fan of their first album and EP though I didn’t know it then), For Tomorrow, Helen and I stalked him for a month before finally meeting the superb musician and songwriter. Some songwriters you just get and I just get Steinhardt, he writes songs the way I listen to them.
I’ve seen Modern Hut maybe five times and For Science only once but it was a killer set. Modern hut’s debut album Generic Treasure is about the best of the year and I’ve written about it many times here.
Modern Hut is currently on tour and opening for Noun and with very little Internet Service on the road, Joe had to fit me in between road trips and concerts. So I especially appreciate him taking the time to speak with rock nyc. What follows is Joe Steinhardt’s response to my questions and they have the sparseness but the essential clarity you might expect from the songwriter and while Joseph said he would be fine with me calling him for follow-ups, I don’t think I shall. The answers sound like the songs they are referring to.
1. You once claimed that when a song was finished you didn’t care if it was never released. Why is that? Do you feel no need for feedback from an audience?
I’m not sure if I said that I don’t care that its ever released, rather that the satisfaction comes from the writing/record and not from the feedback. I think I would be lying if I said I wasn’t curious what other people thought about the music.
2. Why did you decide to release Generic Treasure?
Basically because it was finished. I’ve wanted to release these songs for a very long time and it took a long time to figure out how they should sound.
3. God and the devil lives in the details. The more I listen to Generic Treasure, the more details of sound emerge. Is this why it took so long to produce?
About half the time was spent writing the songs, which is very slow for me. Then I think the rest was figuring out how to record them. My first instinct was just to go for the best recording possible with the best musicianship possible but that didn’t feel right for the songs. It felt like watching a Hollywood remake of a gritty independent horror movie. Just didn’t work.
4. In retrospect, For Tomorrow feels like pages in a diary and in that respect seems more objective; has their been a change in your lyric writing.
I’d like to think my writing has developed but I’m also not sure. The process is pretty similar, but I’m also just older and dealing with different things in my life than I was back then.
5. I thought songs like “History”, “America”, “Heart” were dystopian but they seem to be rooted in now. Do you have problems with the 21st Century.
I don’t know if it’s that as much as I feel like my problems exist in the 21st century. Those songs are definitely rooted in the now and not the future.
6. What did producer Marissa Paternoster (of Screaming Females) add to the sound? It sounds very sparse but the cleanness of the production allows what would be completely lost in a cluttered sound comes through (I’m thinking about stuff like the second guitar in “Wrong”)
I think a lot of the process was figuring out what to add without overpowering the emptiness that kind of made the songs work in the first place and she did a great job with that.
9. You’ve called it “extreme loner folk” -are we talking Unabomber here?
Haha, no. Actually George who owns the record shop in Ithaca referred to Modern Hut as that and it stuck. Loner folk is a genre, and this is just more of an extreme form or something, haha.
10. I’ve seen Modern Hut on stage several times, there used to be a jokey friendliness to the set, but the last time I saw you, you barely spoke to the audience and performed in the dark and played a quiet set (the sound from the club next door drifted in) of songs they couldn’t have known. What was the concept behind the performance? Was it Performance Art? I myself loved it and more now then when I first saw it, but isn’t it asking a great deal of an audience?
I think I’ve just actually become more comfortable with my set. I used to joke around a lot earlier because I was nervous about what I was doing and it felt weird but really I think the jokes and even the talking was didn’t really fit with the music I was playing and it seemed better to just play the songs and then joke around with people after the set.
11. What would you hope for Generic Treasure?
I don’t know actually.
12. I heard several songs that didn’t make the album, a long song, can’t remember what it was called, was troubled and troubling and gone! Can we expect another album?
Gone is on the album! That long song you heard is probably new. I have a few new songs I’m already working on so hopefully the next album will come faster.
13. Anybody who saw the For Science reunion concert in 2012 would hope the band might reform, what are the chances?
Unfortunately they are very unlikely.
14. With the signing of Upset, do you feel that Don Giovanni has expanded from its New Brunswick to New Jersey only roots? Does it feel more like a business?
I actually know Ali from New Brunswick, she just moved out to LA a few years ago, so it’s pretty much the same as how we always do it. Overall it still doesn’t feel like a business except for the businessy aspects of it like dealing with money and stuff.
15. Shellshag still your fave band? Anything to tell us about them.
Yeah. They are playing acoustic at the Modern Hut release show in NYC, which is exciting.