Brooklyn-based musician and singer Martin Walker is back at it with his musical alter-ego Art Schop. Channeling the likes of Dante, Emily Dickinson, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett and more, the philosophical wordsmith pays homage to a host of literary inspirations on his newly-released LP Death Waits II: The Writers. The album marks the followup to 2015’s Death Waits I: Music and Fine Arts and sees the artist dazzling listeners with yet another series of inspired and thought-provoking vignettes.
Musician and producer Jimi Zhivago and artist Eric Collins, the latter who produced accompanying illustrations for each of the album’s 10 tracks, are among those who contributed to Walker’s new LP. We recently caught up with the singer-songwriter ahead of his album release party — taking place tonight at 8:30 p.m. EST at NYC’s NuBlu — and we got a chance to dive a little deeper into the unique collaboration and complex creation of Death Waits II.
Watch the stripped down video for Art Schop’s David Bowie-esque “Have You Paid The Gasbill” (Silvia Plath) and read on for our complete interview with project mastermind Walker.
Laurie Fanelli: Congratulations on Death Waits: II: The Writers! Why did you want to tell the stories of writers with this release as opposed to those of musicians and artists as in your 2015 album, Death Waits I?
Martin Walker: Thanks, Laurie! It’s good to be sharing The Writers with you.
My task in composing the songs for Death Waits has been that of a prospector panning for gold, stooped over the stream-bed, swirling stones and silt in a makeshift pan, watching out for that precious gleam. Upon reading Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry stories about a dozen years ago, I spotted a glowing nugget, which became the song “My First Goose.” This was, I believe, the very first Death Waits song. And here it is on Death Waits II, shining all the brighter for Jimi Zhivago’s acoustic guitar accompaniment. It has proven a very productive stream-bed. There were simply too many subjects for a single album.
Separating the songs by artistic discipline turned out to have happy consequences — The Writers had more in common than I expected. Seamus Heaney’s character expresses this most directly in the opening line of A New State of Men: “The word came first, the tongue refused it.” Uncertainty, the desire to speak held in check, self-reflection leading to an urgent thought and simultaneous self-doubt. The Writers are a troubled bunch, deeply engaged with the human condition and at the same time abstracted from it by their art, the need to express ideas and feelings in cogent prose.
LF: Which literary legends stood out as the most musical to you?
MW: Oh, boy! That’s not a question I’d considered in this process. As with composers, the styles of the authors emphasize different musical qualities — Beckett has spades of rhythm, his impact relies on timing and syncopation, and plenty of incidental notes, unsettling and jarring, tightly played but seeming improvised. He could share a bill with Emily Dickinson who, for me, had a similar sensibility. Beckett’s erstwhile employer, Mr James Joyce, took things in a very different direction, an outpouring of complex, virtuosic jazz-prose overspilling with an eclectic range of allusions and references. And what about Isaac Babel? Such gorgeous harmonic colors, a tender brutality of melodic lines. Aching emotional depth.
LF: Were there some authors whose essence you captured primarily in the musical composition rather than lyrically?
MW: On A Poor Aunt, Haruki Murakami, or my impression of his imaginary worlds, took control of the music, even though his short story (A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story) explicitly provided the chorus lyric and the original impetus for the song. The progression played by the opening strings reappears in disguise during the pre-chorus and again in the bridge, taken up by different voices. And the chorus pops up like second moon in the night sky, unexplained and unapologetic — where did that come from? When it came to the solo, I asked Jimi Zhivago, my producer on the Death Waits albums, to try to play something stuttering and strange sounding on electric guitar, deliberately avoiding melodies suggested by the chords. A challenge for someone with melody in his veins; but a challenge he met. We then added four more electric guitar parts that overlapped and intertwined with one another. Like spaghetti (a recurring dish in Murakami’s fiction.) It’s one of my favorite musical moments on the album. Murakami is all about unsettling our sense of what’s real, what’s primary, letting the narrative take us where it will.
And then there’s Beckett! I think of “No Maggot Lonely” as a song played by Beckett, or scored by Beckett. A song for which certain elements of the musical arrangement seem integral to and inseparable from the song itself. “Any production of Endgame which ignores my stage directions is completely unacceptable to me,” he once said, and directors quaked. I’m currently rehearsing “No Maggot” for the album release show (NuBlu Classic in NYC on March 15) and I’m finding myself telling Jack Petruzzelli (who has played with the likes of Patti Smith, Joan Osborne, Ian Hunter, and Rufus Wainwright) how to play the acoustic guitar part, because I can’t imagine it being right played any other way.
LF: What inspires you most about being a musical biographer of sorts?
MW: Can I confess to a sleight of hand, a little self-deception, perhaps? I write about other people, or things outside of my immediate sphere, because then I don’t have to write about myself. At least, that’s what I tell people. But what happens? The things that inspire me in the songs inevitably reflect or refract my own interests, my own life. I quote Jose Luis Borges in the album notes: “All literature in the end is autobiographical.” Which I thought was a very clever way of expressing one of the themes of the album. But now I’m thinking it could also describe my work as a songwriter.
From a less reductive perspective, the human striving of the subjects demands attention. To paraphrase Schopenhauer, our existence is a state of perpetual striving. And having lived with these people and their work and having felt a sense of communion or empathy with them, it becomes a matter of urgency to say something for or about them when I perceive it, something that they did not, and perhaps could not, express for themselves.
LF: How did you come to collaborate with Eric Collins on his visual accompaniments to your songs?
MW: Do you remember being a kid and buying records? Am I dating myself? A vinyl disk enveloped in a big twelve inch square of card and paper, the inner sleeve clinging to the record as if it didn’t want to let it go, the allure of the cover art, the lining notes and lyrics to be pored over while you spun it up and dropped the needle. Oh, man, an album! A new album to listen to, and this, hopefully faithful, wrapper to guide us toward its wonders. (Of course, I would sometimes buy an album because of the cover art and find out later that the promise was unfulfilled, but no matter.)
I still believe in the album form. It is a fairly modern art form, albeit one that is under threat these days, as things consolidate online, and most people don’t want the trouble of CDs or records any more. But the album, I think, can survive, and even if it doesn’t, I’ll still be making them.
When I started to think about the Death Waits packaging, I realized that each song yearned for its own imagery, something to reflect the individuality of the subjects. I went looking (online!) for an artist who gravitated to portraiture. I found Eric’s work and I was immediately struck by something incredibly human and yet plastic and larger than life in his portraits — it was a perfect match! Eric lived in Brooklyn back then. We met up and it turned out he was an album lover, too. Working on the Death Waits artwork was a new and thoroughly rewarding collaboration. Eric would listen to the songs, respond with a few different sketch ideas, always with something surprising in the composition. I’d respond to those, and we’d work our way toward the finished portrait. His use of color is fabulous; it was such a thrill to get the final, full-color version.
For those who don’t buy CDs, I’ve set up a page on my website where people can enjoy not only Eric’s portraits, but also the stories behind each song.
LF: Can you share a bit about Jimi Zhivago’s work on the project? How did you work as collaborators?
MW: Jimi produced my one and only album prior to my being reborn as Art Schop. So, I knew he was a musical genius (and a Grammy winner, as he never failed to remind me in his inimitable way of simultaneously expressing pride and self-deprecation). I remember him singing the lines he was hearing to the cellist Julia Kent, and picking out a beautiful filigree guitar part on a song he’d only just heard. I had a few Death Waits songs in demo form, and I liked things about them, but I was stuck. I called Jimi and asked whether he wanted to work on them with me. My only stipulation was that we wouldn’t be satisfied by predictable arrangements; I wanted them to exist in their primal state. He shrugged.
And with that shrug began a musical partnership that lasted eight years, working diligently in my basement studio, and at some points in the now defunct musical palaces of The Magic Shop and One East, and at Trout, where both albums were mixed by Bryce Goggin, and which is very much not defunct. Looking back on it, we began like a pair of castaways from two different ships, or two alien beings marooned on a distant planet. I couldn’t speak the language that Jimi was fluent in, and he couldn’t understand the language that I was grappling to create. But we seemed to have something to say to each other.
A few years later, by the time we worked on Death Waits II, we were finishing each other’s musical sentences. Jimi had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world of the rock album, the way things were played, who played them, how they were recorded, on what instruments. And he was such a great guitar player, and bass player, and keyboardist, that once we knew where the song was going, we knew we could get it there; if I couldn’t play it, he could. What Jimi cared about more than anything was the song — what’s good for the song, how will the listener hear it most clearly and forcefully. I learned a lot from his insistence on that. One of the most revolutionary things he did for me as an artist, and for the albums, was to push me as a singer, to guide me toward vocal performances that weren’t just adequate or good, but which connected with the song in a very deep way by inhabiting the character of the protagonist.
He was a force of nature, and I can’t quite believe he’s not with us anymore. I miss him very much.
LF: Do you have any plans to tour in support of the newly-released Death Waits: II: The Writers?’
MW: I have a record release show and tribute to Jimi coming up on March 15 at NuBlu Classic in New York City (9:00 p.m.). All are welcome! Two of the guys I’m playing with — Cameron Grieder and Jack Petruzzelli — Jimi introduced me to. Fabulous musicians who are helping me transpose the album arrangements for a five piece band. (No mean feat when you consider that most of the songs have dozens of tracks.) So, that will get me out of my borough.
The tricky part of touring with an album like Death Waits II is that you’re most likely to connect with your core fan base if you’re playing libraries, but libraries have a strict ‘no rock music’ policy, so that creates a bit of an impasse. But we’ll see. If your readers know of a knot of interested listeners in a particular town, they can shoot me an email via my website and we’ll get a tour going!
LF: Is there anything else you’d like to share with Eponymous Review readers?
MW: Schopenhauer once said “We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.” (I wonder whether he was understating the problem in this instance.) Follow your instincts and what inspires you, would be a less Schopenhauerian way to express the same thing. If that means writing the kind of music that will appeal to a minority of the listening public, so be it. I would urge Eponymous Review readers who have come this far to listen out for a little voice inside which whispers “you might like this.” With a click, you could find out!
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Purchase Death Waits II: The Writers here and keep up with all things Art Schop through his website and on Facebook.