One of the more remarkable things about your music and Safe Inside The Day is the breadth of instruments you play. Could you tell me a bit about your training as a musician?

My musical training is a little sketchy, a little scruffy. But also kind of princely. I never learned anything that I didn’t want to learn at the time. I sort of picked and chose when I wanted to learn something and who I wanted to learn it from. I wouldn’t have wanted to be one of my teachers if they weren’t the person I decided I wanted to learn what I wanted to learn from at the right time for me.

Why do you say that?

I was absolutely, totally stubborn. I was like, “No, I won’t! No I won’t write that! No I won’t read that!” I just waited until it was the right time for me. Then I wrote that or read that or played that.

What did you start with?

I started with piano. I had piano lessons from an old lady named Ms. Muerkey.

What was she like?

She was kinda cool. She was really really old. She used to fret about us. She was so old she called cars “machines.” She used to fret about us getting run over by a “machine.”

That’s old.

Yeah, the house she lived in would now be in the middle of I-71, the biggest road going into Cleveland. Some justice there. Or injustice there. Nothing but cars going over that house!

Then you moved on to harp and accordion?

Harp isn’t a thing that you know, a regular working-class kid gets. It just doesn’t happen. I had to wait until I was growing up. I think I was 19 when I started saving up money to buy a harp. And then I got one and amazingly enough, it was the right thing. I was right to want to play it. The minute I got one, it felt absolutely right to me.

In what way?

The harp for me represented a kind of insider thing. To be able to play the harp was knowing something from the inside or experiencing it from the inside. And the harp is in fact, a very intimate thing to play. Either somebody doesn’t know how to play and they just go up and just start fumbling around with it and then you can see, they just become transfixed. It just sucks you up inside of it in a way. I love it. But I didn’t know I would love it, because I had never really heard one. I had only seen the inside of a piano and that doesn’t sound like one really. But, I was right. I was right. I wanted it for that incredible intimacy. From childhood, I just craved that. And I was right, it really does sound and feel like that when you play it. It was one of things. You know how some people, know a thing as a kid, way before they’re able to know it.

I’m trying to think of something analogous, something that I as a kid knew before I really did.

It is true, though. I think it’s pretty common. And it’s on the album. You know, that song “The Song of Diminishing Possibilities” is about wanting to play the harp, about discovering that in the wreckage of this piano. It was like tea leaves, you know? I saw my future.

Do you think you’ve had a similar experience at any other stage in your life?

Yeah, but it’s just like you. It’s hard to think of a thing when you’re up there. So much of it goes back to that moment. But I think one of the things that I ended up doing, that was very important to me, was I became a tree-climber. That was a thing that I wanted when I was a kid on that street where they smashed that piano. I wanted to be able to play big trees, not little trees, but really big trees. But I forgot all about it; I grew up. I hit puberty and I forgot all about the fact that I wanted to be a tree-climber until about forty years later. It was true and I turned out to be really good at it.

Do you remember the tallest tree you’ve ever climbed?

Not that many trees get that much over a 150 feet in Cleveland. But it’s not how high you go, it’s how far out on a branch you go. Climbing also doesn’t matter so much; it’s the what you do once you get up there. You have to get up, you have to get down. The scary thing is making those cuts waaay up high when you’re tied to the thing you’re cutting.

I’m afraid of heights.

Well, that you can get over. But being afraid of a big huge thing falling on top of you—there’s no getting over that!

That image, or maybe imagery of the same stripe, seems to be prevalent in your work lyrically. Would you agree?

Well, I wouldn’t say that I want to bring dark things in the world.

Would you call the album an exorcism of some kind then?

Well, songs are lies in a way. There are dark places in myself that I didn’t want to go to, that I couldn’t stay out of. Will [Oldham] and Mat [Sweeney] and everybody made it possible for me to go there and to sing these songs that I couldn’t not sing, but to turn it around so that that dark place… they turned that dark place and they turned in into something beautiful.

How did it feel to have Will and Matt and Andrew [WK] to dive into the project in the way they did.

That’s maybe the best question anybody’s ever asked me in this whole process of being scrutinized by the world. I always have these fake answers prepared for fake questions and now when someone asks me something beautiful, I have no idea what to say. I guess, it made me feel grateful more than anything else. Really really really grateful for having friends, such good friends.

It seems—it sounds rather, as though the recording process in Cleveland was full of so much love in the recording.

There really is. Yeah, they’re my friends and they love me. But they made this beautiful thing. THey made this wonderful album. I’m not, I mean, if you knew me, I never have something nice to say about myself. I’m not a big fan of Baby Dee’s. I’m really not. The people who totally hate what I do because they hate my voice: I’m one of them. And I understand them completely and I have no problem with that at all. But this album is a really good album and I can say that because it’s good in spite of me. This album was a gift that Will Oldham and Mat Sweeney and Andrew WK and Maxie Moston and John Contreras gave me.

What did you mean earlier when you said that all songs are lies?

Well, my songs are lies. It’s just a thing about trying to be truthful. It’s very hard to be truthful and I don’t want to talk about that in an empty sort of way. It’s hard not to. I don’t want to say anything stupid. I’d rather say nothing than to say nothing out loud. Somebody asked me what “The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities” meant and I said something about childhood ending at the age of three! We talked about children and all their beautiful possibilities and I asked him to imagine that same child in a nursing home sixty years from now in a puddle of shit. (Laughs violently) Are you getting all this down?!

I sure am.

Those are all real things that can happen and that’s one way of looking at it, as the diminishing of possibilities and I’ve certainly felt that way in my life. That song is of course, is about wrecking a piano. So that piano lost the possibility of families gathering around it, happy families about to do anything but destroy it. The bottom line is: I grew up to be a harpist because of that piano’s destruction. So in a sense, that makes the whole thing a lie. Because thats a very beautiful possibility that ensued from the destruction of that thing that you wouldn’t normally think of. It’s terrible for a thing to be destroyed, but it’s very beautiful when something is destroyed and takes on another life. Like a beehive becoming a candle. That’s a beautiful thing. There is destruction, but the candle makes the destruction a lie. Do you know what I mean? In a nice way. There are nice lies and there are not so nice lies.

So is “Fresh Out of Candles” a lie?

Yeah, because my sister got me some candles for Christmas!

Baby Dee Official Site
Drag City Records