Steve Tibbetts in his own words – on his work and on the new album.
Music Philosophy
Music is as close to magic as we mortals have. Musicians do revel in being thought of as wizards or shamans or conduits or vessels or prophets. News flash: we have no idea what we’re doing.
Music is a twilight language. The job is to translate some shadow into sound.
Family
Both sides of the family always sang. Union groups, relatives, church groups, holidays, reunions. My father mimeographed a songbook filled with hymns, folk songs, and selections from the IWW and Joe Hill songbooks. Our family spent hours in rooms full of smoke and singing and slightly out of tune guitars. It put me on a glide path to multitracking.
I anticipated that the singalongs would stop when my parents died. The children always inspired us to gather together and sing. Now there are more children. We kept going. We end each singalong with slow, melodic songs and lullabies. That’s how the album ends.
Change
Change can be sudden, inexplicable, and random. Absence becomes a presence. Working alone day after day has always been a challenge. Now, closing the door, locking up the studio in the evening, and walking to the car: was the absence, the shadow, satisfied with this day’s work? Does the music clear the bar? Is it worthy? – “I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.” – Charles Baudelaire
Evaluation
Marc Anderson said, “Don’t change it. Yes, I can hear you breathing in the recording. Yes, I hear fretboard sounds when you bend strings. You’re playing with a lot of force and it sounds like you need to.”
Music is a kind of speech: subtle, ambiguous, mind-to-mind. It could be the most pure and evocative expression of mind. I trust the people who listen.
My ECM
When we had concluded our last day’s work on “Close” and I was opening the door to leave Manfred said, “Almost 50 years!” I shook my head and said, “Hard to believe.” He held his hands out, and replied, “Like a miracle!” I didn’t ask him to explain why it was a miracle.
My personal ECM Playlist:
This Album
At times I miss working in a record store. I miss the camaraderie of sullen, sneering record clerks. I miss hearing all the new releases, right out of the box. Closing up the store and going out to see Prince or Motörhead.
Tom Smith was part of our crew working at the Wax Museum record store in Minneapolis. My daughter and I go visit Tom at the Electric Fetus record store at the end of every year. Tom has 10 albums ready that he thinks I will like. Laura Marling’s Once I Was an Eagle was in the stack some years ago. It stayed in my CD player for a long time. One long song. The same key. Repeating motifs and melodies. A trance.
I could do that.
Technical Writing: Dropping Amps
In 1987 we played a gig in Irvine, California. Some of the people helping us load out were tripping. One of them dropped my amp in the gap between the loading dock and the truck. When I plugged it in at our Tuscon sound check it sounded incredible. That’s the sound I wanted.
Later, an audio tech in St. Paul told me that dropping the amp might have separated some leaves on the power sink a little bit, perhaps giving it the new sound. He said, “If Marshall Amplifiers ever issues a Tibbetts Custom JCM 300 there will have to be a guy at the end of the factory line who has the job of dropping the amp, just so, off a loading dock.” In later years the amp was re-tubed and “fixed.” The sound was gone.
My own fix was to try different combinations of output tubes. The tubes overheated and the amp caught on fire. I like the sound; you’ll hear it at 4:06 in “Somewhere pt. 3”. But using mismatched tubes that explode is not a practical way to proceed.
Technical Writing: Guitar
My 12-string guitar is strung in double courses instead of octaves. Double courses give bends and vibrato a phasing, singing, overtone-rich timbre.
My acoustic and electric guitar tuning drops the low A and E down to G and C. There’s always a bass drone available. That tends to keep all the tunes in the same key. I’m comfortable with that, having spent some time around gamelan ensembles, Tibetan longhorns, court music from Java, Hardangar fiddle from Norway. Most of the world’s music stays in one key or another.
There’s not so much concern about getting perfect sound anymore.
I am still reaching for the evocative sound of Sultan Khan.
– Steve Tibbetts
