That is Not a Simple Question

On the lost songs & rarities compilation Drunken Soundtracks the Walkabouts look back to the years 1995 till 2001. In the interview Chris Eckman speaks about leftovers, what he will do when is 50 and what makes him cover a song.

Robert Pally: What is the story behind the title of your new compilation
Drunken Soundtrack? I can see why you called it Soundtrack but what is with Drunken?

Chris Eckman: Well, the easy answer is that the first song on the album
shares this title. But we are no strangers to drinking, and more than a few of our songs over the years have had drinking as their theme.

RP: What criteria beside being recorded between 1995 to 2001 had the songs to fulfill to make it onto the compilation (certain mood, availability)?

CE: For the most part the criteria was availability and quality. There were
5 or 6 things we could have included, that we left off because we felt they
hadn't aged very well. The mood sort of took care of itself. We sequenced the album in reverse chronology, the newest songs first, the oldest last, and this worked surprisingly well. The first CD has a more experimental, even electronic bent to it, and the second is made up more of tight, traditional songs.

RP: A compilation like Drunken Soundtrack is also a way to look back. Was
that also a bit the case when you did it?

CE: It was that, although even the oldest tracks, are really not that old.
The last rarities album we did, Death Valley Days filled in the time period
between our beginnings in 1985 up until 1995. That one was a harder
experience to endure. The early tracks were very raw and unfocused and
really did not represent the band, as we were in 1995. This time, I really
was not scarred to listen to the stuff. I don't love all of it equally, but
all of the stuff on Drunken Soundtracks I am proud of to some extent.

RP: And it is maybe also a bit to concluded with ones past to start
something new. Is there are also some truth in that or am I speculating too
much?

CE: I agree with this. Now that this material is cataloged and filed away, I
really don't feel much compulsion to deal with it anymore. It is a closed
chapter. We are freed of the duty to be archivists, and we can create new
music. Hopefully we will build on what we have done, without being too
impressed by it.

RP: Do you think that you still will be touring and releasing records when
you are 50? Is there something else that you could imagine to do? Maybe
writing books?

CE: Well there are many things other things that I can imagine doing, and
many of them I am already doing: producing other people's music, doing music
for films, things like this. I do not have the «Troubadour Complex» where I
imagine myself dropping dead in some little club, having played the same
songs over and over for years. No thanks. I imagine the time we spend on the
road will get less and less as the years go by. At this point we seem to
average about 6 or 7 weeks a year. In the mid-nineties we were doing close
to 20 weeks a year. We are slowly and gracefully, quieting down. I can't
imagine not making albums, but even they will probably not come as quickly as they have in the past. I would like to write something else besides songs: short
stories, poems, a novel, whatever. I keep waiting to be disillusioned by
songwriting, so I can in a sense switch over to another type of writing for
awhile. The problem is, I am far from disillusioned. I still get excited, I
still feel challenged, I still feel hopeful that I haven't written my best
songs.

RP: When you write songs for an album do you have a lot of leftovers?

CE: Absolutely. I write two or three times as many songs as we use for an
album. We don't learn all of those as a band, however. Maybe we learn 17 or
18 songs, and record 14 or 15. This means there is always a couple of tracks
leftover, and that is how albums like Drunken Soundtracks come about.

RP: There are some covers on the compilation. What has a song to fulfill
that you wanna cover it?

CE: There is no one criteria that we use, when considering a song to cover.
That said, the most important thing is that we can find a window in the song
that we can crawl through. There must be a space in the song, either real or
implied or imagined, where we feel that we can add something to it, or at
the very least assert some of our own personality. We try not to be too reverent
to the original. We are not afraid to deconstruct the song, and use it as a
starting point for our own interests and ideas. Good songs will survive, and
even flourish, when treated this way.

RP: Special is the cover of the Antonio Carlos Jobim song Corcovado. What
fascinated you about it?

CE: It is interesting how that song came about. We were approached by a
small French label to be part of a tribute album to Jobim. At that point in
time we had said we were going to be on no more tribute albums. We had
contributed to a lot of them, and we had frankly grown tired of the concept.
This one was intriguing, however. Jobim's music was not necessarily an
obvious fit with The Walkabouts, and it certainly was not something that we could count as an influence. It was a great opportunity for us to learn something, and this excited us. Now, things are different. There is a track on Trail Of Stars called «Till I Reach You» that incorporates some of the feeling we learned doing the tribute track. The best part of doing covers is that you can learn something from them. The entire Train Leaves At Eight album was an exercise in that. We entered that album brazen and confident, and left the experience humbled and awed and much wiser.

RP: Looking back which is your favorite album and why?

CE: My two favorite albums that I have been involved with are Swinger 500 by
Chris & Carla, and the last Walkabouts album: Ended Up a Stranger. I think
these are the most honest albums I have done, the free in concept and the
ones that surprised me the most when they were finished. These days I look
at recording more as a process of discovery, and less as an activity where
you take a picture of a song. The way we are working these days, the
recording process itself determines what the song is, every bit as much as
the lyric or the vocal or the performance.

RP: Drunken Soundtrack has like many of your more recent albums a kind of
spiritually in it. Are you a spiritual person?

CE: I am a person who questions things. My education background is in
philosophy. I think when you look at the world, and try to peer behind the
surface of life, at some point you confront things that are not simply
rational, that are not easily explained. I guess this is where spirituality
and faith enter the picture. While I would not call myself a religious
person, I am certainly intrigued by spiritual questions.

RP: You are more popular in Europe than in the US. Have you ever thought
about it why it is like that?

CE: That is not a simple question. At times I have thought that it could be
down to the fact, that we have simply had better luck with record companies
in Europe than in America. Bad business experiences can really kick the wind
outof a career. But there could be more to it. America is a meat and potatoes
country. It is one of our strengths and it is one of our major weaknesses as
a culture. Europeans are more open to sauces and eclectic flavors. There is
a lot of «sauce» in our music. We are not very direct. It is often hard to
describe exactly what genre we fit into. Our albums are like a Swiss menu in
fact. We take things from a variety of places and mix it together. Some
people like that, and some people don't.

www.thewalkabouts.com

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