courtesy photo
by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
In 2008, Blitzen Trapper came to national prominence with a song about a boy who turns into a wolf and then later, with some lingering regret, turns back into a man.
But the broader journey of personal discovery explored metaphorically in that lycanthropic folk song, “Furr,” has unfolded for songwriter Eric Earley over the course of seven Blitzen Trapper albums.
On the Portland band’s forthcoming album VII, to be released Oct. 1 on Vagrant Records, the journey continues by way of psychedelic gospel rock. It’s a noisy collection of oddly barebones songs, many of which originated from Earley’s experimentation with an Akai sampler.
VII is Blitzen Trapper’s first album since 2008 away from Sub Pop Records, which released their breakout album Furr and 2011’s rockier American Goldwing. Marty Marquis — Blitzen Trapper’s resident multi-instrumentalist — called VII both an important “reset point” for the band and a clear demonstration of the band’s deep bag of roots music tricks.
Blitzen Trapper will begin a two-month national tour for VII on Tuesday at The Waiting Room. Omaha’s Oquoa will open the show and tickets are available here.
But first, Marquis spoke to Hear Nebraska about the happenstance of their folk rock classification, songs on the new record that sound like they’re falling apart and an important caveat about melodica shopping.
Hear the full interview with Marty Marquis here or read it below:
Hear Nebraska: The title of this album marks it really kind of clearly in the Blitzen Trapper discography: It’s number seven. What does it mark for you, Marty, in your career with Blitzen Trapper? Does this one, number seven, signify anything for you in particular?
Marty Marquis: Yeah, there’s all kinds of freight with the number seven in Western civilization. The seventh thing of anything, whether it’s the seventh son or the seventh years of marriage or the seven-year itch or magical symbolism that goes along with seven. In the Bible, the seventh year was the jubilee year in the Old Testament where everybody’s debts got forgiven and everybody could kind of start off fresh.
So it’s kind of a combination of those different things. It is kind of a magic record. It’s my favorite one we’ve ever made. I think it functions as a reset point for us. We’ve got a new label and new management. We’ve grown up, I guess, and gotten people who know what they're doing to work for us, finally. So yeah, it’s kind of a jubilee record for Blitzen Trapper.
HN: When you say it’s your favorite, do you mean the one you’ve had the best experience making? Or if you sat down and put them all on it would be your favorite to listen to, as well?
MM: Well, you’re always more in love with the thing you made lately and we’ve been enjoying playing these songs for people. They’re all fresh stuff and seeing people’s responses. When I said that, I think it’s the most entertaining listen through of all of our records. It does a lot of all the different things that I think Blitzen Trapper does well and is kind of a summation of all these different things. I just think it’s really enjoyable to listen to.
HN: Well, I would I agree with you. It’s interesting with the timing — you guys are about to go on kind of doozy of a tour — it seems possible that starting out no one knows any of the songs on the record and then you finish and then people know all of them. Is that an experience you’ve had before on a tour?
MM: Usually it takes longer than that. I remember when we put out Furr. That was kind of our first experience of people singing along with the songs. But it didn’t happen until six months or so after we put it out. And it was only to the song “Furr” itself, and it had actually been out by that point for almost a year. It’s still our most successful song we’ve released. Usually, I think it takes longer than that.
This summer after going around after taking a break for several months, we noticed people singing along to stuff from American Goldwing that we hadn’t when we were actually doing the tour cycle. And we toured a lot for American Goldwing. But it seemed like it took awhile for people to actually digest and get into it. But, yeah, they were singing along to all kinds of stuff that if you look at the sales and digital downloads, they’re not hits, but they're definitely appealing to people.
Yeah, there might be a couple songs that people really know. There’s one song “Shine On” that’s the first single. It’s so simple and catchy and easy.
HN: It’s a very singable song. It’s almost meant for a chorus.
MM: Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if people were singing that one. But that might be on the first time we play it for them because it’s so easy.
HN: I just want to duck back for a quick side note. I would agree with you about “Furr” being your most popular song. And I tend to find that bands have sort of complex relationships with their most popular song. As you guys are, say, five years out from that now, how do you think you guys as a unit relate to “Furr”?
MM: I don’t think we’re tired of playing it or anything. I think we're all really grateful that people have been able to identify with that tune because it’s made a world of difference in our careers and our positions. So I think we all have a lot of respect for how important the song is to a lot of different people and I think that’s only grown since the time we started playing it.
And it’s a fun one to play. It’s always a rousing sing-along. Some nights, the song is almost transcendent. It’s almost sublime. Makes you realize how important music is to people and how these stories in the tunes help people to feel uplifted somehow. That’s a weird tune to feel uplifted about, but people do, they love it.
HN: Yeah, maybe something about the animality of all of it, the relationship between humans and nature.
MM: Yeah, and it’s a coming-of-age thing. I think everybody can identify with that story in some way or another. You grow up and you look kind of wistfully back at the wild you left behind. Or maybe it’s just Americans that do that.
HN: That’s a good point. I thought it was neat that for all intents and purposes Eric wrote the press statement for this record. Somewhere in there he’s talking about how the quickest way between two points is a straight line. Especially with reference to “Furr” — because I think there are moments on VII if you gave it a blind test and if you put someone in a room and didn’t tell them it was Blitzen Trapper, I’m not sure they’d ever come up with the word “folk” — but are you guys on a trajectory at all? Are you going in some direction?
MM: It’s a good question. We’re all on a trajectory toward maturing as humans and as a band, as a set of people with complex relationships with each other and with the crowd, but I don’t know if it’s anything more abstract than that. The fact that we have been labeled as a folk band or folk rock band stems a lot from “Furr” and the song “Black River Killer,” the second most popular song, the other engine that drives our craft.
But from the very beginning we’ve done all kinds of different music and different styles, so I think the fact that “Furr” came out on Sub Pop in 2008 along with Iron and Wine and Fleet Foxes and all the other stuff that came out that year, is a big reason why people think of us as folk musicians or folk rock dudes. But we've always done all kinds of different things.
I think that’s another reason I like this record a lot because it’s maybe going to broaden people's understanding of what we’re all about and the kind of stuff we do.
HN: As I’m looking, VII makes it four albums in six years. Is “momentum” a fair word to use in relation to you guys or maybe a workman-like approach? Why is it important to keep producing?
MM: Well, I don't think any of us have ever thought of it as important other than just the fact that if you want to be touring — which is how musicians make most of their money — you have to put out new products. But Eric, when gets home off a tour, if he’s in the mood, he’ll sit down and write a record’s worth of stuff in a few weeks. And it’s fantastic. He’s always been that way. He’s the most prolific songwriter I’ve ever heard of.
People talk about Ariel Pink. But there’s this record and a whole other record’s worth of stuff and it’s just sitting up on a shelf. And it’s really good, too. But we like the collection of songs on VII and the way they hung together, but we’ll probably put out an EP in the spring with some of these other rad tracks. But he's definitely a craftsman. He’s got a method and a ton of ideas, so he’s just a super productive songwriter and it makes sense for us in the marketplace to get the stuff out there.
HN: Any way you slice it, that’s 60 recorded tracks in five years. I can’t imagine how much there also is that didn’t make it to light.
MM: Well, yeah, that’s not counting all the EPs and everything else and all the Record Store Day stuff and all this other crap. When we started out playing together, we were doing the same thing, but we were just giving away our music. So every three months or so we’d have another EP’s worth of fresh stuff and we would just burn copies of it and give it away to the handful of people that would come to our shows. So we've always kind of worked that way.
And it slowed down actually once we started working with Sub Pop. And rightly so. They were like, “You shouldn't put out a record any sooner than 18 months after the last one.” Because there’s not enough time to go around and promote. So that makes sense.
HN: So come back with me for a second to 2007 when you guys land that deal with Sub Pop and Wild Mountain Nation and is getting buzz and then a year after, “Furr” is pushing you over the edge of notoriety. If I had asked you at that point to look forward six years to now, could you have envisioned VII?
MM: Oh, yeah. I think so. Musically, I could. I think the lyrical conceits and the sort of conclusions Eric is drawing in his stories are something I wouldn't have expected. I think it’s generally more positive and upbeat these days than back then. Musically, I could have imagined it. I tend not to think a lot about the future.
We had this vague plan back when we started the band. Like, “Let’s just work as hard as we can on this for ten years and see what happens.” And we were always frustrated, like, “Why doesn't anybody care about our music. It’s so good! Why can’t we get any attention? Why isn’t this working?”
But then one year we got lucky and some stuff fell together for us and we were able to push it out. Back in 2008, I thought if Furr was this much more popular than Wild Mountain Nation, then the next record will be even more popular and it will just be easy going from here on out. And it hasn’t been that way. I’ve been surprised to find that you can’t count on anything. You can’t count on the marketplace embracing what you’re doing, even if it’s the same standards of quality. It’s fickle out there and you have to work your ass off no matter what.
HN: Now, you’ve kind of alluded to the struggles and the frustration of laboring as a band that self-relates and does everything with their own hands. I think I was listening to an interview with The National recently where they talked about the importance in their careers of working day jobs until they were in their thirties and then being able to commit to music full time, which is maybe an experience comparable to you guys. Does that shape your view of your careers, where are you are now?
MM: Oh, yeah, for sure. When we initially pushed out, we were just doing it on our power. I sold a house about that time, so I had a little bit of change, so we used it to hire a publicist and make a bunch of records and buy a van, and we were doing it all ourselves.
They were reminiscing yesterday about going to bins at the Goodwill and buying shirts by the pound and screenprinting Blitzen Trapper T-shirts ourselves and doing that all ourselves. So even more than before we started touring, that first year and half or so before we realized that we had a hit and audiences were coming out, I enjoyed this feeling of being in the trenches. It gives you a good perspective on the business and how rough it is for the vast majority of the bands out there who are just doing for the love.
There’s lots of people who just work, save up money, so they can go and tour and every once in awhile something hits and you can make a living off it. You realize after awhile that there’s no good reasons to do it unless you really love playing music and being on stage and traveling around. All of those things are important to realize.
If you're super young and you get some major labor deal and you just have handlers the whole time, you’re kind of inflated from the road and what it’s really all about, I think.
HN: Let me switch gears for a second. I wanted to jump to one of tracks on VII that I found the most interesting. That for me was the song “Oregon Geography.” It’s almost this dissonant combination. It reminded me almost of the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou, you have a kind of out-of-tune banjo and harmonica, but pressing up against a little bit of record scratching and studio effects. Was that one a little bit of an experiment in the studio?
MM: Well, yeah. What happened on that one was Eric bought a sampler, like an old ‘90s Akai unit because he'd been researching the Wu-Tang and he found that RZA used one of those in the ‘90s for Wu records. So he started making these compositions on that. So that’s one of the tunes that came out of his experiments on the Akai. But a lot of the other ones did too, like “Valley of Death” and “Earth” and the opening, “Feel the Chill.” I think all those were originally composed on the Akai.
So on all those tracks, you'll hear vestiges of the original composition methods and that’s why they sort of come off as hip-hop flavored in a certain way. But, yeah, “Oregon Geography” is definitely the most interesting composition. That’s my wife’s favorite one and it totally surprised me. She was like, “Yeah, it sounds like the song is about to totally fall apart.”
I like his lyrics on that one a lot, too, because they actually do describe Oregon in this impressionistic way that’s pretty great.
HN: How do you plan on doing that one live? Or do you?
MM: (Laughs.) We’re still trying to figure it out. Yeah, our plan is just run a banjo loop and send a click track to our drummer, so he knows where the beat is. Because the banjo sample is so weird that it’s impossible really to play it. Like, Eric is the only one who plays banjo in the band, but he’s also going to have to do this rapid-fire singing. We’ve been trying it that way and it just doesn't seem possible.
We'll try it. I don’t know if we’re going to do it in Omaha, but it’ll be on stage at some point.
HN: Well, let me know how it works. Sounds like a challenge. Eric does some really cool track commentary where he does some talking about the songs on VII over top of them on YouTube videos. The really common thing about them thematically is that they’re all — and this goes for “Oregon Geography,” too — rooted in place. I know you guys all have your roots in the Pacific Northwest. For you, not as the writer, but somebody close to the songs, do you attach a place to them?
MM: Not in the same way. They're all definitely from the Northwest and I feel strongly that our fans more abstractly associate the music with mountains or wilderness places, which might just be a function of Wild Mountain Nation begin the first thing anybody ever heard, or Furr. But yeah they all speak to the Northwest, or we call it Cascadia, this region that stretches from southern Alaska down into northern California and over into Montana and Wyoming.
More than anything in particular, dropping place names and stuff, there’s just a feeling for what it is to live out here and what it is to live in these places. So I guess there's nothing really specific about the place in these songs for me, not in the same way that they would be for Eric.
But the whole corpus of this whole Blitzen Trapper work is definitely Northwestern to me. I don’t know what people think about the Northwest in other parts of the country. When we go in the Rocky Mountains, I think people strongly identify the music with their particular locale. We do great in places like Salt Lake City and Denver and Missoula, Montana and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I think the people there are taking that music and I think making it represent their own home in the mountains wherever they are.
HN: We can’t do that here in Nebraska.
MM: (Laughs). You’ve got some bluffs and stuff, right?
HN: Mmm, I don’t know about all that. Quick one here: I saw a video of you performing one of your songs, “Nch’i Wana’s Revenge,” a really nice tune.
MM: Thanks!
HN: You already talked about how Eric is really prolific. Spending so much time around a songwriter so adept at production, what do you take away from that when you have the time and energy to pen some of your own stuff?
MM: The thing that’s been most instructive working with a band for me with my solo stuff has been thinking about arrangement in more sophisticated ways. I don’t have any training as a musician, really. I took some theory in college and everything else I just learned from being around people who are better than me.
When you play with a band, everybody can do pretty simple stuff as long as everybody is hanging together and it’s tastefully done. I think Eric’s composition method, which he started doing when was 19, he bought a four-track and just started writing songs on the four-track, so every song he ever writes comes with an arrangement. So I’ve never heard him play a song on the acoustic guitar and say, “Listen to this new song.” It’s always like, “Listen to this new batch of demos.”
So as a songwriter, I pay a lot of attention to his arrangement aesthetics and his economy of style. There’s definitely some techniques I’ve learned from him. I learned how to fingerpick from Eric. I’ve learned a lot about playing the bass. I have this bass synth I play with my feet these days when I’m playing solo gigs. Our bass player is a really brilliant musician, too, so I’ve learned a lot from just watching him and how he places his notes.
HN: Last one: I feel like the melodica gets a bad rap in general as kind of a novelty instrument. What’s one thing about the melodica as you’ve kind of dove into with it that you think casual music fans would be surprised to know?
MM: Jeez, I just would just point them to Augustus Pablo. Probably most people have never heard of this guy. But he’s one of the greatest dub musicians. The productions that King Tubby does with his stuff is crazy with melodica. It’s a really simple instrument, just as simple in certain ways as the cowbell.
Like, the Erics can both shred on guitar, they’re just like metal gods, but I get way more compliments on my cowbell playing than anybody in the band probably. And it’s like the simplest, most boneheaded instrument to play. It’s not even an instrument really, like banging on a piece of junk. But people love that. And the melodica is similar. So I think there’s a novelty aspect to those instruments that surprised us when we pulled them out and started playing them. We didn't realize people would get crazy about them.
Melodicas are also really hard to find these days that are in tune. So if you go out to buy a melodica, you should always ask to see if it’s in-tune first. Get a little tuner for your phone or something. It’s terrible.
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. HN should produce a feature called “Marty’s Melodica Minute.” Title pending. Reach Chance at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.