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His Name Is Alive has a new album out. It’s called Detrola. We’ll have more about that later. To start things off, we have an interview with His Name Is Alive’s songwriter, Warren Defever, circa Mouth by Mouth, from the first ever issue of Warped Reality.

Delirium as a form of higher expression
Interview by Andrea Feldman & Jennifer Ferraro ¶ Warped Reality #1, Spring 1993

In the middle of my freshman year at Parsons School of Design, I decided to start a zine. I don’t know what possessed me —I was working towards a dual degree, it was my first time living in New York City, and I had zero free time. Maybe it was the lack of sleep clouding my judgment. Anyway, I was just starting to get seriously into 4AD and His Name Is Alive was my favorite band. But I also knew next to nothing about them.

(Ah, those halcyon pre-internet days…) So I did what any extremely naïve 4AD geek would do under the circumstances: I called Ivo Watts-Russell in an attempt to get an interview with the band. (Obviously I didn’t know anything about proper press channels. Ah well, live, learn.)

Somehow, my unorthodox methods worked in my favor. Ivo actually called me back. We had a lovely chat and he informed me that not only were His Name Is Alive due to perform in a month as part of their first East Coast tour, but he would be there as well. So I got to interview Warren Defever and meet Ivo all on the same day.

Not bad for a complete 4AD neophyte.

I’m presenting the interview with Warren here in its entirety. As tempting as it was to rewrite the intro to this, I’m reprinting it as is. —Andrea

***
When I first heard His name Is Alive, I was simply amazed. I have no qualms about saying that the music by this Livonia, Michigan-based group is some of the more beautiful, original, inspiring, and often disturbing music I’ve ever heard.

I also knew absolutely nothing about them. So when they recently played a one-off show at the Pyramid Club in New York City, I leapt at the chance to interview this rather mysterious group.

I almost didn’t make it. The night of the show, the weather was so awful that I thought it was a sure sign of the apocalypse. There was hail, freezing winds, and icy, driving rain. To top it all off, Jen and I had to try and hail a cab in this hellish miasma —and there weren’t any to be found! (In New York, a second sign of the apocalypse!) Society dames with fur coats and small, shivering dogs had already snapped them all up. Finally, just as we were about to perish from exposure, we flagged one down. Crisis averted.

By the time we got to the club, there was no sign of the band! Sound-check hadn’t even started yet. Jen and I got a little worried. Finally, HNIA’s guitarist and leader Warren Defever showed up. We went across the street to a bar where we a (relatively) quiet spot to conduct this interview.

AF: How did you come up with the name of the band?

WD: [laughs] That’s just a great question to start with!

AF: You’re probably really sick of that question, but…

WD: No, no. In the past, I’ve always told people that, you know, it didn’t start off as a band that was going to be the big promotion —we had no plan of doing interviews. We were [just going to] put out records. There are a lot of personal things —things that meant something to me— that I never thought I’d have to explain. And that’s what I would tell people about the name and then they wouldn’t ask any more about it.

But the fact of the matter is —I was in high school and when I was in high school I had a little problem with sugar. Well, I would pass out a lot because I’d eat ice cream for breakfast and stuff. One of the things I wrote during one of these blackouts was the phrase “His name is alive.” It was a reference to Abraham Lincoln. There were other references that popped up that I thought were funny, but it doesn’t mean very much at all.

AF: When I first heard of the band, I thought [the name] His Name Is Alive had some kind of religious connotation. There seems to be an ecstatic feel to the band’s work…

WD: I think it fits. This new record [Mouth by Mouth] has more specific spiritual ideas, maybe moreso than the other two. Livonia [HNIA’s first album], the majority of it was written back when I was in high school, so I don’t really feel responsible. I was young, I was foolish …so I can’t say too much about that album. Home Is In Your Head [the second album] is a good album, and it says certain things about certain subjects and that’s interesting, but the new album is where we really put it together.

JF: Were you in any other bands, or was this your first project?

WD: There was a band that I played in for a long time called Elvis Hitler. I just played bass, I didn’t write any of the songs…

AF: Obviously!

WD: But it was a lot of fun. The best part about it was playing really lous and really fast. I got a lot of experience from it in dealing with the music industry and knowing what I wanted to do and didn’t want to do.

AF: What kind of music do you listen to?

WD: Oh, I don’t know…

JF: If you name one band, people think that sums up your—

AF: —you get pigeon-holed.

WD: What I think is important is that there are a lot of elements in His Name Is Alive —a lot of different, diverse parts, and that comes from listening to a wide range of things and stealing from them blatantly.

AF: Do you want to talk about the new album? [Mouth by Mouth] How come you re-made “The Dirt Eaters” [a song from Home Is In Your Head]?

WD: I’m in a band right now called the Dirt Eaters —with Melissa Elliott and Karen Neal, who sing some of the songs. Melissa wrote all your favorite songs on Home Is In Your Head, and she wrote the song “The Dirt Eaters.” And those songs are more full, less minimal, more drums, more bass. What we’ve done in the past is combine the two, but in the future they’ll be separate.

AF: There will be two releases?

WD:Right. But I don’t have as much to do with the Dirt Eaters, I’m just the lead guitar player. [laughs]

AF: You have your own studio, right?

WD: Technically, we have our own studio. It’s more like, just a bunch of equipment in a basement.

AF: Well, you can call it your own studio, c’mon!

WD:It is NOT a studio! I’ve seen studios, and this is not one!

AF: You create music there!

WD: Yeah, it’s cool. It’s really convenient. One of the reasons we’ve done it the way we have is that we have infinite studio time. There is no worry about anything. We just do what we feel like.

AF: That’s almost better sometimes. When you try too hard —when you just try to do something and it doesn’t come out, you just get blocked.

WD: Right, right. We’re at the point now where we’re ready to try a little bit. [laughs] Just to help us focus.

AF: I was surprised to hear that you were from America. I guess because, you know, 4AD’s British, but also because you don’t seem to have an American rock sensibility.

WD: Well, we’re trying now. We’re trying to incorporate that. The American influence is coming through more now in terms of older American music, like country music.

When I was a kid, my grandpa would teach us kids how to play. I’d play banjo and he’d play his guitar or fiddle. We’d play country music and waltzes and square dances. At the time, I thought I was rebelling by playing rockabilly! I thought, “You know, that stuff is for the old folks! This is what us kids really dig!”

I was clueless.

[The music] has always been there, but I never figured out how to incorporate it at all. But now I’m getting closer with that, and different American musical forms, like spirituals or hymns. It’s purely American.

Part of what we do is really repetitive, really organized. What we’ve done now is incorporate more freedom, more open space, and more physical improvising. Which we’ve never done before. There’s more ethnic parts on this new record, there’s more sampling, there’s actually more lyrics than on the other albums.

JF: How about videos? You’ve made two?

WD: We’ve done them with two animators from England called the Brothers Quay. They’re crazy, they’re absolutely crazy.

AF: How did you get hooked up with them?

WD: They get these tapes from bands every day. In England, they’re really famous. And over here, they make little spots for MTV and everybody goes, “Oh, those are so great, they should make a whole video.”

AF: They’ve done little movies too.

WD: Films. Long, major works of art that are great. They’d never done a full-length “rock n’ roll” video before. A long time ago they did a ten-second section of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” video.

Anyway, when Vaughan Oliver [head of v23, 4AD’s design firm] was in college, the Brothers Quay were teaching. He didn’t get to know them at all, but he loved their stuff, and he’d always wanted to set them up with a band. But there was never really a band that was appropriate for what they did. Then when The Dirt Eaters EP came out, Vaughan said, “Why don’t we contact them about making a video?” So we went over there, and they said, “We’ve never really done a video before. We don’t even like The idea of dong a video, but we’ll listen to it.” And they called us back and said, “This is really good. We’d like to do it.”

They’ve done a new one for us called, “Can’t Go Wrong Without You,” from the new album.

AF: For 120 Minutes airplay, huh? [laughs]

WD: Yeah!

AF: How did you guys get together?

WD: The band is just me and my friends. Just people I know. It’s pretty close-knit and tight.

AF: How did you all meet?

WD: Picture your friends. Now picture if they all played instruments. [laughs]

Different people play on different songs. Right now, I’m more interested in drummers and singers. On the new album, there are two drummers [Trey Many and Damian Lang], and four singers.

JF: You said you started this band in high school?

WD:Yes. The very first performance of His Name Is Alive was in 1986. It was at a try-out for Battle of the Bands. I sang and played guitar, and there was a string quartet. We didn’t make it.

AF: You self-released some cassettes before you hooked up with 4AD, right?

AF: Right. The first cassette was called [garbled]

AF: What was it called?

WD: Doesn’t matter. The second tape was called I Had Sex with God. That was the one Ivo [Watts-Russell, the head of 4AD Records] heard.

AF: Has any of this stuff appeared on albums? Have you compiled it, or is it gone forever, never to be heard again?

WD: Most of it ended up on Livonia. There are two songs on Home Is In Your Head that are older than ay of the songs on Livonia. But I’m not saying which ones!

JF: Do you always have stuff to write about? Do you ever get dry and can’t think of anything?

WD: I don’t write anything. The majority of the lyrics are jus quotes from people strung together randomly. No, that’s not true1 I don’t really think about what I’m writing, so I‘m not sure that it comes from experiences on a literal level. So, I don’t run out because I’m pulling stuff out that I didn’t know was there anyway. But there’s plenty of quotes!

There’s a song on the new album that has the phrase “Mouth to mouth” on it, right? We were thinking of that as the name of the album. But it just wasn’t satisfying enough. So then we came up with “Mouth by Mouthwest” which we thought was really funny, right, but kinda dumb. Then we came up with “North, East, Wes, and Mouth” which wasn’t even funny. It was just no good at all. Then we got it: “Earth to Mouth: Come In, Mouth.” Then we saw it on paper and the phrase “come in mouth” just did not look right. Scratch that. Eventually we ended up with “Mouth by Mouth” which looked good next to the other titles.

AF: Another question floated through my head, but—

WD: It’s gone!

AF: I think we’ve exhausted our questions, and possibly yourself!

His Name Is Alive’s third album, Mouth by Mouth, was released domestically by 4AD on April 13th. The band will launch its first national tour in support of the album in May and June.

Live, their sound is very stripped-down, consisting of Warren on guitar, Trey on drums, and Karin on vocals. But it is extremely powerful nonetheless. Plus, Warren will tell little stories about the cornfields back home in Livonia, Michigan.

POST_SCRIPT

There is some mystery regarding the His Name is Alive song “King of Sweet.” The title is listed (albeit upside-down) in the Mouth by Mouth CD booklet, and the March issue of Ray Gun featured a Vaughan Oliver/Colin Gray piece ostensibly illustrating the HNIA song, “King of Sweet.” Yet there’s no “King of Sweet” to be found anywhere.

Or is there?

In a recent phone conversation, Warren explained: “There’s this Japanese noise band who just released a box set called ‘King of Noise.’ And you know how Godzilla is the ‘King of Monsters’, right? Well, Vaughan (Oliver) suggested that we [HNIA] be ‘King of Sweet,’ and that I write a song around that idea. I didn’t come up with anything that was worthwhile, but we decided to use the name anyway.”

So it’s all a myth?

“Yeah. But there’s a limited edition CD of unreleased His Name Is Alive stuff coming out in June that will be called ‘King of Sweet.’”

Well, that’s one cryptic 4AD mystery solved. I forgot to ask Warren about the “Inner bag/Quality” seal featured prominently in both the Ray Gun artwork and that of the import vinyl of Mouth by Mouth.

In other HNIA news, the video for Can’t Go Wrong Without You, directed by the Brothers Quay, was finally (finally!) shown on 120 Minutes. Host Lewis Largent (who makes me pine for the days of Kevin Seal —and that’s saying something) called them “a wacky band from Michigan” and played the video dead last.

It’s sad (but predictable) that 120 Minutes plays two hours of benumbing grunge and “arty” videos only to relegate a work of art to the dead zone of 1:58 in the morning. Typical. I don’t suppose they’ll ever play it again.

His Name Is Alive has begun their first national tour, co-headlining with Swell. They’ll be playing TT the Bear’s in Cambridge MA on June 15th. You missed it.

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You can watch the video for “Can’t Go Wrong Without You” thanks to the wonders of YouTube here. ¶King Of Sweet, released in very limited quantities by Perdition Plastics, has been remastered and re-released. You can order it through the official His Name Is Alive site. Just click on “Sounds.”

Here’s a track off the import-only version of Mouth by Mouth (which includes samples left off the US version!):
His Name Is Alive, “The Homesick Waltz” [right-click-save-as, s’il vous plaît]

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
— from “Not Waving But Drowning” by Stevie Smith

I first heard Vic Chesnutt in 1988, when my friends and I drove from Tallahassee, Florida, to north Georgia for the first Athens Music Festival. Celebrating a scene already past its prime, the event was held on a beautiful Fall day, in a farm-country pasture just outside of town. Modest in size and presentation, the festival air had a beguilingly provincial “Hey, kids, let’s build a stage, and put on a show” ambience. Arriving early, we spread our blankets on coarse, sunburned grass in a position close to the stage, dropped some acid, and awaited our entertainment.

There were hours to go before Michael Stipe would take the stage, performing as a trio with a local folk act who went by the name Indigo Girls. In between would be groups known and unknown—Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, Gravity Creeps, Kilkenny Kats, Dreams so Real, Love Tractor, Widespread Panic (not yet the jam-band phenomenon that has contaminated the world in the years since) and others—playing music that ranged from simple blues stomps to epic rock anthems. For me, one of the earliest acts would turn out to be the most memorable, for all the wrong reasons; an act that would change my life forever, for all the right ones.

Unknown and as yet unrecorded, Vic Chesnutt performed late in the morning, carried up the stage steps in his unwieldy chair by a pair of grunting stagehands, who wheeled him to the microphone and put his battered guitar in his stricken hands. What came next, with us now deep under the influence of LSD, we simply weren’t prepared for. He was crippled, and angry. His hands, incapable of caressing, clawed and scratched their way across the strings. His voice, harsh and raw, declared his defiance through lyrics childlike and strange. “I am not a victim. I am intelligent!” he wailed in “Speed Racer.” He threw his head back to whistle, and what came out was little more than air, pushed forward with desperate force.

In our impaired state, my friends and I found him ridiculous, and we laughed. We laughed. When he sang “Mr. Reilly,” with its lines “just a week ago she was beautiful, but now she’s rather vile” and “they found her in her skates, she was the coldest cadaver in the state,” we lost all control. Close to the stage, and thus in his line of sight, my friends turned their backs on him, lest he see their laughter. Unwilling to turn my back on someone performing for me, I struggled to keep my mirth under control, even as tears poured from my eyes. In the midst of my shaking, I was ashamed, but I could not stop.

Redemption, in the guise of revelation, came nearly a year later. Browsing the racks of my local record store, I happened across the latest release from the Texas Hotel label, by Vic Chesnutt. I had not forgotten Vic from that day in the pasture, that ridiculous little man with his ridiculous little songs. The album title seemed entirely appropriate: Little. I added it to my purchases, partly to see if the music was as silly as I remembered, and partly to play it for friends so they could hear for themselves the truth of the funny story I brought back from Georgia.

Arriving home, I placed the A-side on my turntable. A few plucked notes that bent upwards, a plaintive harmonica, and then the first line, “I dreamed I was dancing with Isadora Duncan.” I was smitten, and devastatingly so. Everything I had thought and felt before was wrong. This was far from ridiculous. This, this music, this little song, was simple, sad, and crushingly beautiful. “I whistled to her how I loved her the best, but she sang ‘I can’t believe you own this attitude.’” All I would come to love about Vic was right there, as he, bound to his chair for life by a car accident of his own creation, dreamt of an impossible dance with a dead dancer whose life had ended in a car accident of her own creation. “With some ballet moves I removed her shoes, and I painted my lips to hers, and still she sang, ‘I can’t believe you own this attitude.’”

To say I devoured the rest of the album would be an understatement. That weekend, I played it over and over and over; by Monday I would know every word by heart, feel every word in my heart. Michael Stipe, who produced the album, had the good sense to just turn on the mic and let Vic sing his little songs and play his guitar, without adornment. What came out was everything—anger and defiance, hope and dreaming, love and longing, melancholy and regret, passion, pain, sarcasm and humor—in lyrics that were strange, elliptical, and occasionally sweet, about characters made brittle from the difficulty of being.

In the years since, the songs on Little have been my constant companion. I have wooed a girl by playing her “Speed Racer,” and dealt with the bitterness of lost love by playing myself “Soft Picasso” and “Independence Day.” I have remembered the scarred loneliness of my childhood through “Rabbit Box.” I have found comfort in times of depression by listening to “Stevie Smith,” in which Vic sings the verses to the British poet’s famous poem “Not Waving But Drowning.” Seventeen years later, I still can’t listen to the album once without listening to it repeatedly, for days on end. I sing along, in my head and out loud.

Despite over a dozen brilliant albums to his credit (the first five of which I would place in the same pantheon as the Ramones’ first four records, or the Rolling Stones’ four-album streak that began withBeggar’s Banquet and ended with Exile on Main Street), Vic remains little more than a cult figure. His music is difficult to categorize, and, if you value slick and polish, difficult to listen to. His voice, brittle and nasal, serves lyrics that, at first hearing, can seem clumsy, even goofy. They plane in on their themes obliquely, arrive at a crucial point, and then dive-bomb to an emotionally devastating conclusion. His songs are bitter pills to swallow, but they reward with a gradual, diffuse warmth.

Since that first encounter at the Athens Music Festival, I have seen Vic perform several times over the years. At one show, I even had the audacity to shout out a request, something I had never done before (and haven’t since). The song was “See You Around” from Vic’s album About to Choke. Vic responded by saying, “Awww, I don’t wanna sing that. That’s an asshole song.” He’s right, of course. It’s bitter and angry, in an “Idiot Wind” kind of way, only with a little sadness and regret thrown in. When he sings the lines “and hang out all night/in the familiar fluorescent light/of Dunkin Donuts” and “I’m sorry, but your routine/is coming off a bit ragged,” his delivery is entirely reminiscent of Dylan’s sneering, snarled performance of “Idiot Wind” on the live Hard Rain album, but his delivery of the refrain, “I will see you around,” is drenched with melancholy.

Desperately seeking atonement for my cruelly dismissive first reaction to hearing him all those years ago, I have since been a one-man choir hell-bent on getting Vic his due, preaching his gospel to any who will listen. Few do. My brother-in-law called Vic’s lyrics “shallow,” and I never forgave him for it (it seemed an especially grievous transgression on his part, considering his love for the ethereal insipidness of the Cocteau Twins). In the past twenty years, I have had just one fight with my brother, after he made fun of Vic as we were driving to dinner with our girlfriends one night. The tension built to the point that I had to pull over, so we could both get out and talk our way through it in private.

Sound silly? You bet. But I can’t help it. I love Vic. And, for an album so little in its ambition and presentation, with its little songs of love and loneliness, Little still beats large within my heart.

***

Vic Chesnutt, “Mr. Reilly” [right-click-save-as, s’il vous plaît]

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Giles Cassels lives and breathes in San Mateo, California. His favorite word is “Dolores.” He can be reached at jakelives@excite.com.

Once upon a time there was a lovely little band called th Faith Healers. (Don’t ask about the ‘e’ —it went missing early on.) They were the first band on then-fledgling label too pure (now home to Electrelane, Laika, and Stereolab, among others), and they were cornerstones of the Camden “Lurch” scene. (Don’t ask me to define Lurch. If you’re lucky there’s a Wikipedia entry by now.)

They kicked up a righteous racket —a furious, expressionistic squall. I don’t know that I could tell you what they were “about” any more than I could explain why their gleeful brand of organic motorik stomp—a style that melded a kind-of angular, oddly articulate grunge to the clean, crisp rhythmic mantras of Krautrock— remains so compelling, more than ten years after their untimely breakup. Part of it was due to the fact that the band never once took itself too seriously. Part of it was due to the manic, charismatic energy of singer Roxanne Stephen, whose vocals could switchback from sweet and delicate to full-on shriek and back again.

I think my eardrums have only just now recovered from seeing th Healers, Band of Susans, and God Is My Co-Pilot all in one night, way back when. Which could mean only one thing:

They’re touring again.

That’s right. To support the release of their Peel Sessions, they’re doing a little reunion tour. So far, the schedule is looking something like this:

March 11th Berlin, Germany – West Germany
March 17th – Austin, TX SXSW Ba Da Bing!/Leaf Showcase at Blender Balcony At The Ritz (w/ volcano!, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Colossal Yes and Beirut)
March 22nd Boston, MA – Pa’s Lounge (w/Bright)
March 27th Brooklyn, NY – Northsix
March 29th New York, NY – Mercury Lounge
March 30th Philadelphia, PA – The Khyber (w/The Nethers, The War On Drugs)

I’ll be at the Boston show. And I sure as hell won’t forget my earplugs this time.

I’m posting one of my favorite tracks of theirs, a marvelous dub edit of the 25-minute long monster “Everything, All at Once, Forever” that closed out their album Imaginary Friend. This track is pretty much unavailable (as far as I know). Enjoy!

th’ Faith Healers Peel Sessions is out now on BaDaBing! The tour starts in March.

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th Faith Healers, “Everything, All at Once, Forever (Dub Edit)” [right-click-save-as, s’il vous plaît]