Take us back to the beginning. Did you study music formally as a child?
I'm from Minneapolis. I started out taking piano lessons in second grade, because I think my parents thought it was the thing to do. They found a teacher three blocks from our house; her name was Marlys Strand, and her teaching method was really theoretical. We talked about things like the circle of fifths, key signatures, and how different keys relate to one another. There was always a music theory component to her lessons; even for beginners. So from the very start I was steeped in a music theory approach, which I think affected me a lot. All during elementary and junior high school I was listening to pop music. At the same time, my parents listened to things like The Beatles and a lot of folk rock – like Carole King, James Taylor, and Simon & Garfunkel. But I never put those two things together. It never occurred to me that my piano lessons and the music we were listening to were the same thing.
Were there any other kinds of music percolating in your house, like jazz or classical?
Christmas carols were a really important part of my emotional life, for some reason. I'm not really sure why. When my brother Matt and I were 13 and 11, my parents gave us an acoustic guitar to share. We quickly learned a bunch of the basic chords, and very shortly after getting the guitar, we wrote our first songs. It was up in our cabin in the north woods of Minnesota. We had the guitar, and we somehow cooked up the idea that we were each going to write a song. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and each of us wrote a song. I remember mine had chords that I really liked, but my brother Matt's seemed like an actual, really great, song. So I was actually kind of dismayed at my first effort. But it was an early revelation that there were two different things going on.
Do you remember the name of that first song of yours?
I think mine was about "going down the road," or something like that. We lived on a long dirt road that had about six miles of dust and dirt between us and the nearest highway. There were always big trucks rumbling by, kicking up huge clouds of dirt. So I think it had something to do with that vibe. I was probably trying to sound like George Harrison! In junior high school, I wanted to become a drummer, but my parents couldn't afford a practice pad for me. So I continued playing guitar.
That may be the first time in history that a rock drummer's career was stymied because of the lack of a practice pad!
True! [laughs] A couple of years later they were a little more "flush," so they got my brother a practice pad, and he became the drummer in the family. In junior high school, I used to build puppets with my brother. We built a rock band out of puppets, and they were very elaborate. You could make the drummer do lots of things with his sticks, with rods that were attached to the arms and head. We were able to put on entire rock shows for our friends with these puppets.
This would be about the mid 1970s?
Yeah, we're talking about junior high school, which would have been around 1976. At that point, the songs we were using for our puppet shows were all kinds of glam rock – things like [Elton John's] "Bennie and the Jets," and other ultra colorful songs by people like David Bowie. We were miming along to those records with our puppets. Soon, my brother Matt's drumming got so good that we decided to start a band together. We had a neighbor who was a guitar player – who's now a Los Angeles-based producer known as Jimmy Harry. And since it was my brother on drums and Jimmy on guitar, I decided to become a bass player, which started getting me into [the music of famed jazz bassist] Jaco Pastorius. That got me into a lot of jazz music, which got me to switch my piano lessons over to jazz piano lessons. I took a year and a half of lessons from a guy named Herb Wigley, and he basically taught me how to read songs from a "fake book." I learned things like what kind of chord substitutions would work in the left hand, and just how much liberty you could take with an innocent show tune. It was very interesting for me – I suddenly realized that the piano was an expressive tool, and not just a job I had to do every week for my lessons. Classical music is written so differently than jazz. With jazz, the whole idea is that you're left to your own devices a lot of the time. You're standing or falling, based on what you do in the moment. That started becoming really important to me.
After high school, you went to Harvard University. What did you plan to do after graduation?
I had plans to be a fine artist. My puppet efforts were part of a larger practice of doing a lot of drawings, cartoons, and sculpture all through junior high and high school. These were just things I did when I got out of school every day. At Harvard, I thought I was going to go into the painting department, but the head of it took a leave of absence for the entire time I was there. I was a bit disappointed, but almost instantly during my freshman year I started auditioning for bands. I soon got into a band called, regrettably, The Seal Beaters. It's not a name I'm particularly proud of now, but it seemed like a good idea at the time!
What kinds of things were you doing with the band?
I started writing songs for the band. We had okay songs, but I thought we could do better. I started writing songs so we would have some material.
This was the early 1980s?
Yeah. I was listening to things like Elvis Costello, Squeeze, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and The Clash. I was still listening to a lot of Led Zeppelin and Joni Mitchell. My brother came to Harvard two years later, and we formed a band called Animal Dance. Later, a band from Los Angeles took that name, so we formed another band called the Love Monsters, and we played a lot of shows. I was probably away from school two nights a week playing gigs with the band on bass. It turned out to be a good way to get a job in a band, because no one else could play the bass!
Were you singing as well?
Yes, more and more. I also started to be a lead singer, although my brother Matt was the lead singer of the Love Monsters. I was the lead singer in other bands. During this time, I was writing songs; but Matt had become a better and better songwriter, so one of the things I got good at was helping him finish songs of his that he hadn't finished himself. So if he had two-thirds of a song finished, but he didn't know where to go, I learned that I was pretty good at suggesting the last thing to do in the song, or adding a chorus to a verse. So that became one of my roles in my collaboration with my brother. Or he would give me a bunch of lyrics and I would write a melody for the lyrics. It was really an early start on what I do a lot of now. The last thing that happened to me while I was at Harvard was that my brother and I got lured, with our band, to record in New York City at Electric Lady Studios. So we went to New York and stayed at our guitarist, Oswaldo Costa's, parents' house. His father was the Brazilian ambassador to the United Nations, so we stayed for three nights in his parents' amazing brownstone. Each night we'd hear from the house engineer that someone bumped us from our session and that we'd have to wait until the next night to record. On the third night, we got the same news that we couldn't come into the studio, so we drove back up to Boston without ever having recorded anything. I found that very dispiriting. I didn't realize that it was just business as usual! I was bummed, so I decided that I was going to move to San Francisco and not do music for a while. I was just going to focus on my artwork. I moved there for a couple of years and lived a bohemian life. I had a fabulous time, but I also cried a lot because I didn't know what I was doing with myself. At the end of those two years of me doing a lot of painting and artwork, and making some really great friends, I got a call from my brother asking me if I would move back to Minneapolis and learn all the second guitar parts for a band he was starting called Trip Shakespeare. I agreed. I learned how to play electric guitar, which I hadn't really done a lot of, up until then.
You seem to relish the challenge of learning new things, whether it's a new instrument, new pieces of music, or, recently, your newfound social media-displayed interest in calligraphy.
Yeah! I'd hate to think I'm floating aimlessly through my musical life. On the other hand, every time something interesting that I don't know how to do yet comes up, I jump on it.
So you moved back to Minneapolis?
I did. I learned all of the parts, note for note, and I became the fourth member of a quartet. We started touring. I had very long hair and I wore a lot of beads. We jammed a lot, and had long jams. I helped bring long, improvised sections into some of our songs. I got a digital piano and played a lot of piano on stage. We started touring, and basically never stopped. I'm sure we had several 200-plus show years during that period. We broke up in 1992.
Why did the band come to an end?
I think we had been on the road for seven years together. We had gotten signed to A&M Records, and they didn't know what to do with us. We made two albums and an EP for them, and then they dropped us. So everybody was looking for a fresh challenge and something new to do. At that point, my brother used to tease me that I listened to the radio too much and that I was too influenced by pop music. But when Trip Shakespeare stopped, I decided that I was going to try and make a band that really could be played on the radio. I was going to learn how to write songs that were really simple and iconic – songs that expressed my vision, but that wouldn't perplex people too much. That was the idea behind Semisonic.
Were you looking at the hit music around you and asking yourself, "What is it about this that's reaching people? Why is it successful?"
I don't think I was thinking about success, per se. If I was thinking about a band or a musical artist that I loved, and what song I loved the most of theirs, it was always their biggest hit song. I was a huge fan of Miles Davis, and I listened to all of his albums, but Kind of Blue is my favorite one. It's no coincidence that it's his biggest hit. Music that didn't capture my attention was often elaborate and didn't have a populist element to it. For instance, all of my friends really liked Frank Zappa, but I was just so mystified why anyone would like [his music]. And I think it's because it was only for super-knowledgeable "musos." It wasn't for normal people. When I was transitioning out of Trip Shakespeare into Semisonic, it wasn't that I was like, "How can we make a lot of money?" Or, "How can we be successful?" Because all I thought of at that time was, "How can I convince people to give us a budget to make another recording?" To me, it was all a big scam to convince the next person to invest a bunch of money in us so that we could record. I wasn't trying to have the most success, I was just thinking, "Where's the action? Where are the coolest things happening?" And it was in the hits of Motown, The Beatles, Elvis Costello, and others. I loved Led Zeppelin, and I used to listen a lot to all of their music, but my favorite album is their fourth album. I think I just wanted to be part of that conversation – of that big picture. I wanted to try my hand at writing songs like that – what I perceived to be big, great, classic songs. When you're learning jazz, you're learning songs like, "My One and Only Love," and "My Funny Valentine." Songs that are the fucking most powerful, beautiful, expressions of pop song writing. That's what jazz did for me, and where the "rubber hits the road." And I wanted to be part of that.
Was the drafting of this new "mission statement" for Semisonic when your songwriting really started to take off?
I think around that same time, I kind of figured it all out. It happened with a series of songs where I suddenly realized that I needed to write about my daily life and adventures, and I also needed to allow myself to look like a jerk once in a while in the lyrics. I was probably too couth before that.
Give me an example of a Semisonic song that evinces this new lyrical directive.
There was a song called "Temptation" on the first Semisonic album, Great Divide. When I first wrote it, it was almost about how I was resisting temptation with regards to a woman in my life, and how I was behaving myself and being a good guy, because I was married at the time. When I played it for my wife, she said, "Well, the problem with this song is that nothing happens." And I was like, "You're right! Nothing happens in the song." And I thought that I was going to have to have the song be about cheating. That was uncomfortable for me, because I had to present myself as very fallible. There was also a Semisonic song called "Brand New Baby," [also on Great Divide] which was about being dumped by somebody who was pretending that they needed time to think about things. But, as it turns out, they were really just falling for somebody else. The song is super resentful, with a level of vengefulness and wounded-ness that I think, early on, I wouldn't have known how to present. But, what I figured out is that you need to stand up in front of people with your arms outstretched and be almost transparent, as well as super vulnerable and open. [You have to] try your best to show whatever crazy feeling you're having, even if it's not what you would share with your family at the dinner table. So you have to be vulnerable, open, and embarrassing in your music, even if you are trained to be more guarded and polite in your normal life. You have to live both of those lives.
