Analogue: I have to admit I’m newer to the catalog. I loved the EP and then found myself going back and realizing I had all these older releases to dig into.
John Calvin Abney: More often than not, there's so much being put into the atmosphere, it's hard to grasp at everything. You never know what you're going to run into, what you'll sit with, what's going to be put in your realm of perception. I feel like there's a lot of artists that I listen to and when you find them, you’re like, ‘Why haven't I heard of this artist?’ And you realize that they have a huge back catalog, and it's kind of a gift because you get the opportunity to delve into it.
Analogue: To get into Shortwaving, that title track in particular really kind of sets the tone for maybe what you’d call “earnest defiance”, this longing to connect even if you feel disconnected. Is that easy for you to conjure? Difficult?
Abney: Are you asking if the sentiment of the song was hard to conjure?
Analogue: Yeah, and even, it feels purposeful, right? It’s the title and the first track in the sequence, so it feels like you want to make this statement clear from the outset—this song that says you’re putting out a signal and hoping it will connect in some way. Then there’s the repeated refrain at the end.
Abney: “It gets awful quiet, awful quick.
Analogue: Yes. It's like you’re admitting there’s a real cost to doing this or there's a real darkness to face and yet you do it and it all feels so purposeful put up front.
Abney: Yeah, with ”Shortwaving” the song, I think there was a loneliness from it that wasn't born of isolation per se, but it constantly goes back to ‘Why are we making sound? Why are we doing what we do in the first place? Is it reaching anyone? Does it matter? Is the act itself granting us anything?’ Not to sound too metaphoric, but, you know, transmitting signals, is there something inherently either useful or positive in that, or are we just all screaming into the void?
It sounds dark, but I think it could easily be talked about in the idea that, as a musician, there are so many other musicians, but I think it goes past that. In this world, we all can get ahold of each other so easily, but communication is a little bit more difficult these days than I think it used to be. What are we all trying to say?
It can feel like no one’s listening at times—not to my music, but to you in general, to a person who’s trying to speak out or reach out and yet getting buried underneath the noise and the storm and the fury. We all lead these wildly busy lives and I think even rest is a hard concept to grasp in this day and age, So I don’t know. I feel like we all sometimes are just trying to find someone to talk to.
Analogue: If you're making music with others and building your own career musically in various ways, how do you know when it's time to carve out space for an EP like this?
Abney: I really love spontaneity sometimes when it comes to projects, and this project is probably one of my favorites that I’ve conjured because I was just visiting my partner Lydia [Loveless] in Columbus. We were enjoying ourselves, just having a really nice time, and we were talking. I was like, ‘You know, I got these songs. Maybe we should get the band together and record them.’
She had her band—her guitar player, Todd, and her drummer, Sam—and we were just kind of talking, and it wasn't even going to turn out like this. I think it was going to be more of a stripped-down acoustic thing, maybe with some electric guitars and some voices. Then we were going in—Lydia works at a studio called the Secret Studio in Columbus—and I talked to Lydia and the people who own the studio and asked, ‘Can I get a day?
So we literally on a whim all went in. We honestly cut the whole record in a day, and it was amazingly fast and super fun. Lydia did an unbelievable job capturing how fast everything was going, too. She was moving microphones and capturing sounds in ways that were just so quick. I mean, we were cutting a song every two hours. [Laughs]
"We just did it so fast. We were just drinking some beers and just made a record in a day. The EP just made itself. It was amazing."
Analogue: Were the songs ready?
Abney: I had some songs. I finished one of the songs in her kitchen, “Truckee River Blues.” I was just sitting at her kitchen counter and the lyrics “sickle blade moon,” I’d had those three words forever and they just fit into the words I was writing at the time. It was just kind of amazing how it all coalesced, because it was really, truly a spontaneous whim. Lydia wanted to work in the studio. I wanted to work in the studio. We got Todd Maye and Sam Brown in there from her band and it was lightning in a bottle. We just did it so fast. We were just drinking some beers and just made a record in a day. The EP just made itself. It was amazing.
Analogue: Wow, did that serve the song well to not overthink it?
Abney: Yeah, 100 percent. 200 percent even. [Laughs] All the choices that were made in the studio were made with swift finality. We were just like, ‘Okay, that's it. Cool. Got it, That's what we're going with.’ We didn't second guess a thing. It was amazing because it felt like we were all on board with the same idea of making this project. We weren't thinking, ‘Who are we going to give it to? Who’s going to hear it? I wonder if people will like it.” Everything was final. We were just going to release it and we didn't have a plan behind it. We just wanted to make an EP, that's it.
Analogue: At what point after that day do you start to worry about what to do with it?
Abney: I just didn't think about it with this. Shortwaving was just a gift from the ether, you know? I just finished it and as soon as I had final mixes, I just gave it to my manager and was like, ‘We should put this out on all platforms.’ We had final mixes a month before we dropped it. It was just like, ‘Let's just put it out.’
Analogue: Does this feel like the way you'd like to work in the future?
Abney: I don't think so. I think there's a magic in Shortwaving that might not be able to be reproduced. It was funny, though. It kind of made me think a lot about what I've been doing, because by the time we went in to record Shortwaving, I had already recorded another full-length at another studio.
Analogue: You’re kidding.
Abney: Yeah, I've got a full-length right now that's finished. We did that one over the course of a week, and I had some really wonderful musicians on it and friends who knocked it out of the park. It’s real composed. I have these two ways of thinking about music inside of me. One is composed and intricate and orchestrated, and the other one is like reckless abandon and feedback, and it's hard to reconcile those two sometimes. But I think being able to do both has granted me some release and some joy, you know?
VISIT: John Calvin Abney
