The following text was first published on October 13th, 2023, in conjunction with Movie Club #8: ‘Gestures’ by Vincent Guilbert. It is now published publicly for the first time, in celebration of Loren Connors’ 76th birthday.
All images by Vincent Guilbert.
by Ruairí McCann + Maximilien Luc Proctor
MLP: What was the experience of being filmed for Gestures like for you? You seem very comfortable going about your daily activities on camera—did this come naturally for you or was it more about Vincent’s ability to just blend in and make you feel at ease?
It was just like having a friend come over. We talked and I showed him some of my music and artwork, and my Bob Crotty record. It was a relaxing day. Vincent was very low key and easy-going.
Ruairí McCann: In the film, we see you taking out and playing a few records. The first one is Volume 5 of your The Departing of a Dream series. What was the idea behind starting up this series and what inspires you to keep returning to it and adding new volumes over the years? You also listen to “TB Blues” by Robert Crotty, who I know was a friend and musician you valued very highly. What, for you, is special about his musicianship?
The recordings in The Departing of a Dream series all have a certain feel to them, and they all relate to each other. It was inspired by Miles Davis, in particular the “He Loved Him Madly” piece, from the double record Get Up With It. That was a major influence on me, so I keep coming back to it. Certain influences never leave you, because you just keep finding deeper levels.
Bob Crotty was a tremendous inspiration for me. He was truthful. Nothing was put on. He didn’t try to be anybody but himself. He was blues through and through. I learned a lot from him. Bobby introduced me to Lonnie Johnson’s song “Blue Ghost Blues”, also called Haunted House. I showed it to Suzanne and she took it in. She calls it the greatest love long ever written. Haunted House became the name of our band.
Bob never paid much attention to recording. I’m glad I got his “TB Blues” song, by Jimmy Rodgers, on vinyl. I never get tired of listening to him on that song. He lived hard. He died in his late 50s. It was a big loss…
MLP: No need to include it in the interview if you prefer not to, but can I ask if you’ve been able to sustain yourself financially through your music alone or if you’ve had to work simultaneous day jobs?
I ask because I’m reaching a point in my own life where I am really working towards supporting myself only through work that I find meaningful. It’s proving difficult but looking promising. Just a very slow process… Would love to hear any insights you might have on this.
For several years I worked part time. When Suzanne met me, I was a janitor at Yale. She had just graduated from Yale Law School. (Neither her friends nor my friends understood why we came together.)
At various points I worked in a health food store, or just delivering newspapers on rural roads in my pickup truck. Eventually, Parkinson’s got me and I could work no longer. But throughout all this, Suzanne was a big help to me. She worked for nonprofits—not a high income, but enough to get by. And she was my aesthetic advisor and editor. She never let me get lazy. I’d always object when she said “It’s not quite done yet.” But then I’d always go back and work on it until she was happy.
So the trick is, find your soulmate.
MLP: I’m curious about your countless collaborations. Ruairí and I both recently listened to the podcast interview you did, wherein you mention all of your collaborators have come to you, and sometimes you’ve never even heard their music before you sit down to start improvising together. How do you approach recording in a solo versus collaborative context? And in either context, do you generally sit down with a vague idea (especially in terms of what kind of mood you’re going for) or is it mostly just complete improvisation and allowing surprises to present themselves?
I should correct the statement on collaborations. I invited Alan Licht for our first collaboration, and we both alternately invited each other for the many collaborations after that. The Issue Project arts organization put Kim Gordon and me together, but I think it was Suzanne’s idea. And I’m not sure if it was me or Steve Dalachinsky who first got Daniel Carter and me together, but one of us did.
Now you’re going to have to tell me more about yourself and how you got so serious about music.
MLP: Personally I’ve been into playing music from a very young age, but always in different stages…My parents started me on violin lessons at age 4, but I quit after a few months. Then a few years later they started me on piano lessons but I quit after a few months. From about 11 until 14 I played Violin again in the school orchestra, but quit after I tried guitar. It felt like I finally had found the instrument I’d always wanted to play.
I played in bands and wrote tons of songs, but it really wasn’t until Ruairí opened my eyes to the truly infinite multitude of what’s really out there and what’s possible a mere few years ago that I began to understand the real freedom in writing and recording in a way that had always come naturally to me but I felt was somehow not legitimate enough…Jim O’Rourke was certainly an important ‘crossover’ artist for me, in terms of coming from a pop/rock background, and learning that someone can write great songs in that style but also work in these completely different registers simultaneously…
How did you get serious about music?
I started on violin too. And my mother was an opera singer and music teacher, so there was always a lot of piano playing in our home. My father was an inventor, a fiercely original person.
I got into visual art in college—[I] was taught by Michael Skop, who was taught by Meštrović who was taught by Auguste Rodin, so I was educated through an oral history of aesthetic instruction. Very lucky to get that. I was also playing acoustic guitar at that time, starting with blues and getting more and more abstract. Ultimately I focused on guitar because that was where I could be most original. And I really found my voice when I got into electric guitar, in the late 1980s. The electric guitar really frees you. You can go anywhere on it.
RM: I am curious about the Irishness of your work. I know Irish folk or airs have been an influence. I also really like your albums inspired by Irish-New York life, like St. Vincent’s Newsboy Home, and the literary/mythic suites, Battle of Clontarf and Deirdre of the Sorrows. Where does this interest in Irish music and culture come from? Does your family have Irish roots?
I know you played in London just a few months ago but it would be lovely to see you play in Ireland one day.
I also read that while you were living in New Haven and working at Yale, you used to spend a lot of time in the library researching folk and blues. And of course, there’s the research that went into St. Vincent’s Newsboy Home. Does reading influence how you perform and create new music these days, or do other sources and feelings play a bigger part?
My father was half-Irish, but culturally I’d say he was all Irish. My great-grandmother on my father’s side was a big influence on me. She told me stories about banshees and fairy folk, wild stories that fired my imagination. She got me into stories, and stories have been a big part of my music.
Because I worked as a janitor at Yale, I had a library card, and I could get into the stacks. I spent hours upon hours there. And when I moved to New York City in August of 1990, I embedded myself in the New York Public Library in Manhattan. Lots of research. Nowadays I focus more on artists and art books, and I get a lot of inspiration from that.
When Jim O’Rourke and I did a tour in 1997, we played at several spots in Ireland. That experience was the genesis of our Two Nice Catholic Boys CD. Jim was the one who introduced John Fahey and me. He did a couple pieces dedicated to me, one on the Red Cross album and one on the newest release. They came out after he passed away, like a message from the other side.
MLP: How did you get so interested in Matsuo Bashō and Haiku? Unaware of Basho’s influence on you, I read The Narrow Road to the Interior just last year.
I got into haiku in 1985-1987. It taught me a lot—how to distill to the essence.
MLP: In Gestures, the giant prints you are unrolling in the hallway are your own work, right? These are works made from re-xeroxing details of images over and over? What can you tell us about the mannequin?
What can you tell me about your early Daggett, St. Joan and Black Label record labels? I haven’t been able to find much info on those apart from the fact of their releasing your early work, and that they were your own. Why three different ones?
I’m not much for computers, but we had an old computer back then that had an image editing program that was easy for me to use. So I would make a small abstract pencil drawing, then photocopy it to enlarge it and change the texture. Then I’d scan it into the computer and start playing with the color. Then I’d bring it to a print shop on Court Street and have it enlarged further, and have it printed on “banner” paper so the image would be more durable. When that computer died, we got a new one but found that Windows wasn’t using that program anymore, and I didn’t relate to the new one, so that was the end of that.
About the record labels: My earliest records were on a label I named after the street where I lived, in an old, abandoned factory building in New Haven that a bunch of us turned into an artists’ loft space. That’s where I did my extended blues abstractions, on my Gibson acoustic guitar. I used that label from 1978 to 1982. I had the records pressed at Cook’s Lab, a small pressing plant in South Norwalk that produced mostly educational records.
There weren’t any other crazy musicians like me around New Haven, but there were a lot of folk musicians, so I kind of got pulled into that for a while. It was so different from my solo stuff that I created a new label for it, St. Joan Records, and I did several records on that. I used that label name from 1983 to 1989.
But toward the end, my music was changing again. I got a 4-track Tascam Porta 5 and was recording in tracks, which allowed me to do more compositionally. I was also getting into themes — the struggles of early Irish immigrants, the poetry of Keats and Shelley. So I created a new label for that, calling it Black label. I still use that label name on rare occasions, but from 1994 on, Road Cone, Table of the Elements, Father Yod and other indie labels started putting out my recordings. Then Family Vineyard became my main label.
Then sometime between 2007 and 2010, can’t remember exactly when, somebody stole my Tascam from backstage at a gig, and I found the company wasn’t making it anymore. I tried other models but never could really work them, and I tried getting old Porta 5 models on eBay but they were always broken. So that was the end of my layered suites.
I did a few recordings in a studio. When Suzanne and I formed a band with guitarist Andrew Burnes and percussionist Neel Murgai, it was recorded by Northern Spy in 2011. And she and I also did a duet recording in collaboration with a visual artist, Mp Landis, on the Northern Spy label in 2012. And there have been a couple other instances, but mostly I’ve either recorded at home or been recorded at a performance.
Now I do all my composing live, on stage, and what I’m doing now suits me best.
See ya,
Loren
One thought on ““What I’m Doing Now Suits Me Best”—An Interview with Loren Connors”