NILS LOFGREN INTERVIEW

I notice that you've introduced a video diary of your UK tour on your website. That's a nice idea.

Yeah, my guitar tech put together a pretty cool five minute clip of the tour so far. He grew up in the whole computer world and he's great at it and he offered to do that. He's got his camera with him so it's kind of exciting. We're gonna even try and do a part two before we get out of here.

How's the tour gone so far?

The crowds have been great. We're just doing a little bit of a different show than last year - a lot of jamming with the acoustics and electric. So far it's been really a great response.

There are some subtle changes to the set-up

Well, just little things. It's such a formal setting in these theatres I thought I'd better start it down front a little, more living room atmosphere, then in the middle something I noticed wasn't really in the show because Buck's such a great guitarist, was the two of us just sitting around jamming. Then there's some songs that people haven't heard in a long time, including A Fool Like Me by Lou Reed and myself.

The electric stuff really does blast out in comparison.

Well, it's part of what I do and we do a long show. To do that entire thing and never touch an electric guitar I think is a little one-dimensional. We try to just touch on that voice of mine too.

Looking at the gigs that you're doing, they seem to be mainly theatres. Do you change your approach for the bars?

Just slightly. When we get into the bars we might throw one extra electric song in. It just depends. Last night (Robin 2 in Wolverhampton) was a fabulous audience - they were very quiet but very energetic at the same time. We could take the acoustic dynamic down to almost nothing, but when we did hit the electric stuff they got fairly energised behind it and it was really just a great combination of a listening crowd and a bar crowd.

The problem is with those bars sometimes that while you've got 95 per cent of the people there willing to listen quietly, you're probably going to have a few standing at the bar who want to chat with their mates, whether they've spent £25 or not.

Yeah, but it's very rare that we see that in England, which is really a beautiful tribute to the audiences here. I've done shows in the States and I guess my impression of my own country is that we're all so workaholic crazy that when people go to a bar I expect them to want to visit, to chat with their friends or their girl and have drinks. I expect the noise and we get the noise. It's so loud sometimes that literally 50 per cent of the dynamic of the show is gone.

We feel incredibly lucky as in the past year you've been here twice, zigzagging around the country, doing hundreds of miles, while the States hasn't seen much of you live.

It's not an ideal routing, but we did want to get to as many towns as possible and just the way it worked out to accomplish that required this kind of crazy driving. It's interesting because in the States they appreciate and respect you as much but you're also part of more of a party and I don't begrudge them that either but it is nice when you have a quieter dynamic. With the band you can just out-volume everybody, but with this show you can only get so low because once you get lower than the audience. If there's a noisy audience, then the people that are listening get pissed off with the people that are talking and then all of a sudden you get people arguing in the crowd and it takes the focus off of what you do, so you wind up not ever taking your dynamic that low. Here everyone is so quiet and attentive it's beautiful because we can get as low as we want and we've been doing that.

You mentioned during the show on Saturday night maybe bringing the album back with a band. How's the album going?

Actually it's really good. I cut some tracks with Timm Biery, a great drummer who I've been on the road with who did the double live CD. He's been playing with me for years and he's an amazing drummer. And Kevin McCormick who's produced a couple of my records and also plays with Jackson Browne and produces him a lot. We've got some great tracks and I was working on them for months alone and going very slow. Actually my wife Amy and my manager Anson suggested I try some things with Roger Greenawalt who produced the Damaged Goods records and Roger came in and we've been working together ever since. We've got an ambitious schedule between my arrival back after this tour and Christmas but we're hopeful we can get it done by the end of the year and the pressings take a couple of months so hopefully by March anyway, if everything goes smoothly, I can get it out on my website. I'm hoping to come back over if I can in the late spring and maybe do some summer festivals.

It was interesting actually because I read Timm's account of the recording - he came over to your place in Arizona for the week - and that was a fascinating dissection of the recording process.

Well Tim's a great engineer and a great musician and drummer and I felt that was great of him to take the time to put that together. I like to work with people of that calibre and see what they think and what they hear. I know what I don't like and it's not that I have a specific idea of what we should play I just kind of have a general feeling of what the song should feel like and I look to the musicians to help me accomplish that.

It sounded quite relaxed that recording process.

It's my biggest challenge. I love playing live more than ever and with studio work I don't have the patience, by nature, to work on something over and over so it's a good challenge to work with friends and people that I trust. It makes it a lot more accomplishable. Boomer, my guitar tech, engineered it, a lot of good friends lent us mics and equipment, so it's the first time I've really done the whole thing start to end in my studio. The plan is to mix it in New York at Roger's studio but all the recording is pretty much going to get done....

With life on the road, how much of that do you prepare? It's a tough old journey you've got this time, but during the days what do you try and do to keep your head straight?

Honestly, when you're doing nine cities in a row, it's just survival most of the time. It's just resting, a little exercise or stretching, try not to eat anything too rough on your belly and trying to shut up and not talk too much. With a band you can afford to be a little hoarse but this acoustic show is a very pristine, intimate night. So you've just got to be a good boy and watch what you eat and rest and all that and just be very careful at the soundchecks. But I've been doing it for 37 years - last month was 37 years on the road.

That's amazing.

Yeah, it's a little shocking to me too, but I'm just grateful to be alive and not too crazy. I'm actually more disciplined on the road than I am at home, but it's harder to leave home every time - I've got a fabulous wife Amy and my stepson Dylan and a couple of dogs and cats but they understand. Fortunately too, when I'm in front of the audience after all the work and preparation, it's quite a medicinal adventure at best, so I try to really make it a special night for the audience. If we accomplish that it tends to have kind of a healing affect on all of us too. With this schedule, on a day off you're just pretty much required to shut up and rest - that's about all you can do. You have to be careful to stockpile a little bit of energy because the shows can take as much energy as you can put into them and you have to be careful not to get fatigued.

Your website's always fairly lively. How important is it to you these days?

It's been 11 years now since I left my last record deal. I have no record deals and I don't want any. So I'm hoping just to carry on and to make music I'm proud of and bypass the politics of what I consider is a really counterproductive creatively music industry. They've got this whole 'soft-porn belly pop' going and it's obviously not a place I fit in to. So I'm hoping to keep the website going and take some leaps forward in the next year with the new record. I may get Roy, my guitar tech, who's great with this and posted that video, to help me maybe even do some guitar lessons that I can make available and just find other ways to access the fans and offer them some other things that they might want to access that might be of interest. I just want to try to take it to another level because I really don't see myself being aligned with a record company again. We have some distribution in Europe through Hypertension, which is great, so it gets in some of the shops, but of course they do no promotion. So that's really kind of a grass roots outfit I want to build through my website to reach more people.

It seems to work really well for the fans.

Well it's a start. Again it's very grass roots, off main grid, but that's OK. The fans have been great and just slowly but surely one at a time hopefully we can find some new ones as we go.

This year Bruce has also been doing an acoustic solo tour. Did you pick up any tips... or has he picked any up from you?

I think we all learn from each other. I think if you're seeing someone that's talented, that is in the moment and immersed in their gift, I think you can learn from anybody. Bruce to me is the greatest living writer we have today. But anyone - a young act who is into it rather than just looking for the party - I think we are always open to learning, at any level, at any time and that kind of keeps you young at heart.

Do you get the chance to listen to much music on the road and pick up on new stuff?

I don't seek out new stuff so much. I have some CDs I love, like I have a greatest hits of Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, I have some assorted tapes from America of all kinds of stuff, from the British invasion, to Motown, to the blues. Just stuff to keep at low levels in the dressing rooms to alter the mood of the room and keep me from getting too homesick.

So you're not one of the iPod generation?

No I have not! My stepson Dylan has got a good iPod but I'm just not ready for that. I know it's a great tool. Last year I was running around for cassettes (I know - it's embarrassing). This tour though I've actually burned some CDs from some compilation music that I like in my studio, so I've got a few of those. I've got to keep playing in the afternoons - I get a guitar and I try to memorise lyrics and make sure I know the words each night.

So presumably Dylan's not putting pressure on you and telling you you should be moving with the times?

He's not impressed with what I do, but he's not uninterested either. He's been to shows and he likes hanging out with the crew and he's been on the road with me and on the Bruce tours. So Dylan's got a good understanding of it. He loves music and he plays a lot of music. My wife, Amy, and I are fascinated because we're starting to hear things out of his room like the Doobie Brothers, all these old great rock acts and it's kind of shocking because my wife used to do merchandise for the Doobie Brothers. When she was younger she had a run of a few years where she did the merchandise for big acts. It's heartening that him and his friends are just, you know - Led Zeppelin we're hearing and it's quite nice. In fact we're all excited because him and one of his best friends are coming with us to see the Rolling Stones at Thanksgiving.

It's all come from the same roots anyway hasn't it?

Just like my heroes the Beatles and the Stones turned me on to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and Chuck Berry and Little Richard and all that stuff, now the young bands they are really into are telling their fans about the sixties and about Eric Clapton and Jimmy Hendrix.

There appears to be a greater respect for the bands of the sixties and seventies than there ever has been.

I agree and it's heartening to see young kids asking questions about Neil Young. It's funny because I used to have parent drag their kids to the shows and they weren't that interested but now some of them are teenagers and they're very interested. It's heartening to talk to them about a guitar or whatever at the merchandise table at the end of the night and realise that they're really into it - it's great.

Interview took place on Monday, October 24 2005 in Manchester