Woven Symbol talks Nebraska

MP: Are you from here originally?

WS: No I’m from Soda Springs, Arkansas.  I came here because I came to Union College.  I didn’t get involved in the music scene until after I graduated college.  I was writing songs and working on that, on melodies and things but after awhile I came to the end of my abilities as a musician.  As far as theory goes, and the underpinnings of music, I don’t know how it works.  So coming to Lincoln I made this transition to sound-art instead of music. .  I like engaging other senses, other minds, other perceptors in the body that don’t understand linear, and don’t require it to be moved.

MP:Do you feel like your art would have developed differently if you’d lived somewhere else?

 WS:  Definitely.  Lincoln is a special place to me for many reasons.  One is that it’s at the center of the country and it’s the most whitewashed, clean space in America.  I don’t mean physically clean, I mean the people, the culture, it’s sort of a white canvas.  It’s the farthest from the coast, so global trends take longer to get here, there’s a raw American sensibility: the settler’s urge, to leave a mark.  That settler’s urge to be who you are to explore what there is to explore, is encouraged here: maybe not consciously but there’s still that air here.  I feel like if I’d been in a place with a stronger reputation, or definitive mark, maybe that would have influenced me too much.  The special thing about Lincoln is that forward is the direction, westward. 

MP: So not being from here, and being a brown person, latino, does that make a difference in terms of your feelings about Nebraska culture?

WS:  Well you know what’s strange is that this town is economically segregated in this weird way.  Today I was walking and I walked by this church on Goodhue, a Hispanic church.  And every time I walk by there it reminds me of my childhood. Because my dad’s a pastor and I grew up in the church.  So that community is how I grew up.  And it’s strange to think of them as “them” now, because I’ve left that religion and that culture.  So I feel grateful to them, but I also don’t feel obligated to it.  Those experiences have already done their fusing in my psyche.  I accept it, and I’ve appropriated it for my own uses.  I feel like I can do that, because of that whitewashing I was talking about.  America’s an interesting experiment , a global experiment.  I feel ok with appropriating everything that comes through.  I feel like it all belongs to me.  I may be economically segregated, or by skin color, but I have all this open culture to draw from and to reinvent using sounds. 

MP: You said your dad’s a pastor.   Is that an influence?

 WS:In two ways.  My band Brothers Family Temple is a very over indulgent preacher man voice.  And my father is an amazing performer when he preaches.  He’s a yeller and he gesticulates very harshly and he has a handkerchief because he gets sweaty.  At the same time, I know him as a Shaman but also as father.  There’s this transcendent intimacy that I kind of still see when I see him, even in that state.  He’s being frantic and worked up but there’s still an intimate peaceful thing:  that I know who he is.  I don’t think he would like being called a Shaman, but I think that he’s really spiritually gifted to understand and to make himself understood. 

MP:  One thing that I really like about your performances is that I can tell you think music is there to perform a spiritual service.

WS: Definitely.  I was going to school to be a pastor. I was a theology major at this school in Texas.  It didn’t work out for me, but the urge to teach and to heal, to guide someone through a spiritual experience is what attracted me to that in the first place.   The school that I was going to wasn’t accepting of different views on God or society, how to behave.  So I was really discouraged from wanting to have anything to do with that.  I got into literature.  Walt Whitman was a big influence. 

MP: He’s the pioneer!

WS: Yeah.

MP: What music did you like when you first started making music?

WS: As a kid there was this station in LA called K-Earth, they played old disco, some really great jams.  I was really into that and I was really into hymns, the sort of vastness that they can invoke.   I think maybe too, it all started with Roy Orbison.  There was this time I was at my babysitter’s house, and she put on Only the Lonely.  I got so psyched about his voice that I got really hyper.  She sent me to run around the block to burn off energy.  So I went out to run, but every time I got close to the house I would slow down to hear a little more, then I’d run around faster, and slow down again.  It was just a beautiful noise.  

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