Norman Salant Interview
Q: I was reading about your bio and you talk about the musical change you went through in 1998. Can you talk about that change and why you even thought it happened?
A: You’re talking about when I stopped playing horn and started songwriting? It’s kind of a personal story, and a long involved story, and usually I just say to people, well, life happened, and playing horn wasn’t a good fit anymore. But I’ll tell you this much: if you’re asking about it you probably already know that for the first 20 music years or so I had an extensive career as a saxophone player, composer, and producer, where I was lucky enough to gain a reputation as a sort of iconoclastic experimentalist, innovator, what have you. I was doing electronic saxes with instrumental rock bands live, and in the studio recording layers of horns, delving into minimalism, new wave, middle eastern, improv, basically an avant–pop crossover. I put out two albums of my own, I played on a Residents record, a Romeo Void record. Out of the gate my records got on the cover of CMJ (College Music Journal) and in Trouser Press’ America Underground Ten Best of the Year. This happened first in San Francisco and then later in New York, where I was living downtown and got very involved in the whole East Village arts scene of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. There were amazing projects, none of them released – and I’ve been releasing some of them as a sort of Saxophone Archive series, things like the Saxophone Duo with Benjamin Bossi from Romeo Void, the 40-Saxophone Orchestra, the Saxophone Stories solo improv stuff, Middle Eastern improv band – and the thing of it was that yes it was totally rewarding, but at the same time I was only living maybe an inch above broke, and to make matters worse, I was finding it increasingly hard to get musicians to help out on projects unless I paid them, which I couldn’t really afford to keep doing.
So I’d been following my muse and doing these increasingly artistic, i.e., noncommercial/nonpaying things and there just wasn’t any money, and my charm didn’t seem to be working anymore (laughs). As any musician living here knows, New York can be tough that way. So I’d been at it a while but I could see where things might end up if I stayed on that path, and honestly it was becoming a little frightening – I was torn between wanting to do the work that I wanted to do, and wanting to be able to enjoy my life on a daily basis without worry, without fear, and I didn’t see how I could have both. I didn’t see anything at all romantic about living the old starving artist myth. I wanted to create, but I also wanted to live. And as I was wondering about all these things, a major family thing came up where I had to leave downtown practically overnight and move back up to the Bronx, where I’m from.
That part of the Bronx, in terms of being an artist or maybe even just a creative type of person, and maybe in many other ways as well, I interpreted it as pretty much a wasteland. Isolating, devoid of inspiration, harsh, ugly, at least for me. Maybe someone else might think it’s really cool and thrive, but for me, I came from there so there was a lot of baggage. Downtown seemed very far away and I really missed it. More importantly, it wasn’t a saxophone environment. It was impossible to do any consistent practicing up there in a thin-walled apartment (saxophone is really loud, and part of the routine requires playing a lot of ugly shit), let alone just finding the time to do the four hours a day/seven days a week I needed to do. It just didn’t fit, and this period ended up lasting four years. So without being part of any plan, the horn kind of went away.
So at 11 o’clock at night after all the day’s tasks were done and everybody was down for the night, I would pick up an old guitar and start messing around. It was quiet so no one complained, which felt like an incredible luxury after getting kicked about for all those years playing horn, and the songwriting came naturally and felt just as satisfying as horn music. Writing words was totally fun and even liberating. My attitude being, to quote the great New York Knick Charles Oakley, “if it ain’t broke, don’t break it,” I just kept doing it and here I am.
Yes, that was the short answer.
Q: I’m interested in how you approach lyrics and the role you think they can play? To narrow it down further, can you discuss some of the themes and ideas that run through your release Always All Around You?
A: I like lyrics to open your mind rather than close it, and I like to tell a story with a certain amount of absurdism, which is my sense of humor. Lyric writing is free associative, but then structured and edited hard. I’ve been part of a songwriters group here for a number of years called the Jack Hardy Songwriters Exchange. It meets every Monday night, and one of its tenets is, “show, don’t tell.” So I don’t want to be hit over the head with the meaning or be preached to. A song needs to create a space you can enter and see for yourself what’s going on there. I figure, if you can say “this song is about…”, well, you may as well not write it. Your work’s already done. So I don’t start with a subject or an idea. I just work with sound. We all have lots of subjects floating around in our heads all the time. What I like to do is build some musical ideas into a song structure and sing gibberish until it feels right, and let those word sounds eventually turn into real words that retain the feel and phrasing of what they sound like when they’re sung, with no thought of meaning or even syntax. But eventually the random words do fall into a syntax that sounds like language, and they might connect with some topic or idea in my head, and then it’s time for pushing and shoving and substituting words around until it starts to make some sense. Anything goes. It’s a non-directed method of lyric writing, for sure.
The end result is hopefully vague enough to mean different things to different people, and I’ll try to account for many possible meanings so it’ll hold up and be consistent no matter who’s listening, though there are always points of view that I miss. That part is unknown. It sounds a little complicated, and it is, and I’ll worry every single word in a song to death. My only rule is “do no harm,” meaning it ought to be life-positive somehow. Not necessarily happy, not full Paul McCartney, but some compassion. Characters are icons, role models, so I don’t want them to act violently or hatefully no matter how angry or hateful they may justifiably be or how difficult they find their situations. So maybe I’ll go as fearlessly dark as I can handle, but use it to show the humanity in there. And I tend to like characters that prize intelligence, that seem intelligent, maybe they have books or they’ll wonder about things. They may be unhappy or conflicted, but they have to be human so that we care about them. At least, that’s what I’m aiming for. Who knows?
But you were asking about the theme of the album? That started with something at the beginning of the first song “At The End Of The World,” there’s a line about cows. “There’s wooden cows, golden cows, living cows, and they’re always all around you.” It’s a little psychedelic, a little absurd. It’s what happens when you mix in a public art piece of hundreds of ridiculously painted full-sized wooden cow sculptures, the ones that suddenly appeared all over New York City in 2000 and always struck me as sort of a ubiquitous non-sequitur, add in a reference to the cultural worship of fraudulent ideas, which is pretty much the fabric our culture at this point, broaden it out to encompass all living things and the wonder of life in a nod to George Harrison, and voila, you have a theme to wrap an album around. It’s a bit of a joke, really, as most things in life usually are. I went through dozens of titles based on the word “world,” but it was just too pretentious. Once I figured out what the cows were about, I had it. Hopefully each song gets at a thin slice of what it feels like to try to live in harmony with a larger thing. And I know this all probably sounds pretty vacant, and is a good example of why it’s always better to listen to an album than talk about it.
Q: What does the process of songwriting look and feel like to you? It seems every songwriter has a different answer. Some think the songs are delivered by a deity while others have a lot more of an academic approach?
A: No deities involved, no Frank Zappa cosmic jive. Songwriting happens because there’s some music I need to hear that’s not been written yet so I write it myself, just so I can hear it. It’s selfish. Whatever it feels like to other people, for me inspiration is just a random thing, often coming after a stumble when I’m trying to play something and miss the mark, and hit on something else that sounds cool, and then grabbing it and start developing it. Nothing metaphysical, no spiritual conduit. The hard part is to recognize that something new happened and then stop whatever you’re doing to grab it, because it’s ephemeral and disappears in seconds. You’ll never remember it. It sounds simple but it’s incredibly hard. I suspect that what we call normal living has the momentum of a train going 1,000 mph, where it’s hard to just stop on a dime and really give full attention to a random idea that happens to appear. Sometimes you’re with people and it’s rude, or it makes you late to something. I always hate when my attention gets knocked off course by something else. The alarm goes off but if you hit snooze, the idea is lost, and maybe that’s the song you were supposed to write.
I think I’ve already talked about lyrics, so I’ll just add that I have no idea what I’m writing about until it’s done and I can look at it for a while, and even then I have to play it for others before I see it. That’s the benefit of the Exchange, it’s a sounding board. I always think a song is done, and then I bring it in and discover it isn’t, sometimes by a long shot. It’s amazing how blind I can be to what I’m doing. Sometimes it takes years before it falls into place. I’m always pulling up songs from years ago, discovering flaws, and reworking them to make them new. A lot of smoke and mirrors, nothing can be done on demand.
Q: I was reading about your bio and you talk about the musical change you went through in 1998. Can you talk about that change and why you even thought it happened?
A: You’re talking about when I stopped playing horn and started songwriting? It’s kind of a personal story, and a long involved story, and usually I just say to people, well, life happened, and playing horn wasn’t a good fit anymore. But I’ll tell you this much: if you’re asking about it you probably already know that for the first 20 music years or so I had an extensive career as a saxophone player, composer, and producer, where I was lucky enough to gain a reputation as a sort of iconoclastic experimentalist, innovator, what have you. I was doing electronic saxes with instrumental rock bands live, and in the studio recording layers of horns, delving into minimalism, new wave, middle eastern, improv, basically an avant–pop crossover. I put out two albums of my own, I played on a Residents record, a Romeo Void record. Out of the gate my records got on the cover of CMJ (College Music Journal) and in Trouser Press’ America Underground Ten Best of the Year. This happened first in San Francisco and then later in New York, where I was living downtown and got very involved in the whole East Village arts scene of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. There were amazing projects, none of them released – and I’ve been releasing some of them as a sort of Saxophone Archive series, things like the Saxophone Duo with Benjamin Bossi from Romeo Void, the 40-Saxophone Orchestra, the Saxophone Stories solo improv stuff, Middle Eastern improv band – and the thing of it was that yes it was totally rewarding, but at the same time I was only living maybe an inch above broke, and to make matters worse, I was finding it increasingly hard to get musicians to help out on projects unless I paid them, which I couldn’t really afford to keep doing.
So I’d been following my muse and doing these increasingly artistic, i.e., noncommercial/nonpaying things and there just wasn’t any money, and my charm didn’t seem to be working anymore (laughs). As any musician living here knows, New York can be tough that way. So I’d been at it a while but I could see where things might end up if I stayed on that path, and honestly it was becoming a little frightening – I was torn between wanting to do the work that I wanted to do, and wanting to be able to enjoy my life on a daily basis without worry, without fear, and I didn’t see how I could have both. I didn’t see anything at all romantic about living the old starving artist myth. I wanted to create, but I also wanted to live. And as I was wondering about all these things, a major family thing came up where I had to leave downtown practically overnight and move back up to the Bronx, where I’m from.
That part of the Bronx, in terms of being an artist or maybe even just a creative type of person, and maybe in many other ways as well, I interpreted it as pretty much a wasteland. Isolating, devoid of inspiration, harsh, ugly, at least for me. Maybe someone else might think it’s really cool and thrive, but for me, I came from there so there was a lot of baggage. Downtown seemed very far away and I really missed it. More importantly, it wasn’t a saxophone environment. It was impossible to do any consistent practicing up there in a thin-walled apartment (saxophone is really loud, and part of the routine requires playing a lot of ugly shit), let alone just finding the time to do the four hours a day/seven days a week I needed to do. It just didn’t fit, and this period ended up lasting four years. So without being part of any plan, the horn kind of went away.
So at 11 o’clock at night after all the day’s tasks were done and everybody was down for the night, I would pick up an old guitar and start messing around. It was quiet so no one complained, which felt like an incredible luxury after getting kicked about for all those years playing horn, and the songwriting came naturally and felt just as satisfying as horn music. Writing words was totally fun and even liberating. My attitude being, to quote the great New York Knick Charles Oakley, “if it ain’t broke, don’t break it,” I just kept doing it and here I am.
Yes, that was the short answer.
Q: I’m interested in how you approach lyrics and the role you think they can play? To narrow it down further, can you discuss some of the themes and ideas that run through your release Always All Around You?
A: I like lyrics to open your mind rather than close it, and I like to tell a story with a certain amount of absurdism, which is my sense of humor. Lyric writing is free associative, but then structured and edited hard. I’ve been part of a songwriters group here for a number of years called the Jack Hardy Songwriters Exchange. It meets every Monday night, and one of its tenets is, “show, don’t tell.” So I don’t want to be hit over the head with the meaning or be preached to. A song needs to create a space you can enter and see for yourself what’s going on there. I figure, if you can say “this song is about…”, well, you may as well not write it. Your work’s already done. So I don’t start with a subject or an idea. I just work with sound. We all have lots of subjects floating around in our heads all the time. What I like to do is build some musical ideas into a song structure and sing gibberish until it feels right, and let those word sounds eventually turn into real words that retain the feel and phrasing of what they sound like when they’re sung, with no thought of meaning or even syntax. But eventually the random words do fall into a syntax that sounds like language, and they might connect with some topic or idea in my head, and then it’s time for pushing and shoving and substituting words around until it starts to make some sense. Anything goes. It’s a non-directed method of lyric writing, for sure.
The end result is hopefully vague enough to mean different things to different people, and I’ll try to account for many possible meanings so it’ll hold up and be consistent no matter who’s listening, though there are always points of view that I miss. That part is unknown. It sounds a little complicated, and it is, and I’ll worry every single word in a song to death. My only rule is “do no harm,” meaning it ought to be life-positive somehow. Not necessarily happy, not full Paul McCartney, but some compassion. Characters are icons, role models, so I don’t want them to act violently or hatefully no matter how angry or hateful they may justifiably be or how difficult they find their situations. So maybe I’ll go as fearlessly dark as I can handle, but use it to show the humanity in there. And I tend to like characters that prize intelligence, that seem intelligent, maybe they have books or they’ll wonder about things. They may be unhappy or conflicted, but they have to be human so that we care about them. At least, that’s what I’m aiming for. Who knows?
But you were asking about the theme of the album? That started with something at the beginning of the first song “At The End Of The World,” there’s a line about cows. “There’s wooden cows, golden cows, living cows, and they’re always all around you.” It’s a little psychedelic, a little absurd. It’s what happens when you mix in a public art piece of hundreds of ridiculously painted full-sized wooden cow sculptures, the ones that suddenly appeared all over New York City in 2000 and always struck me as sort of a ubiquitous non-sequitur, add in a reference to the cultural worship of fraudulent ideas, which is pretty much the fabric our culture at this point, broaden it out to encompass all living things and the wonder of life in a nod to George Harrison, and voila, you have a theme to wrap an album around. It’s a bit of a joke, really, as most things in life usually are. I went through dozens of titles based on the word “world,” but it was just too pretentious. Once I figured out what the cows were about, I had it. Hopefully each song gets at a thin slice of what it feels like to try to live in harmony with a larger thing. And I know this all probably sounds pretty vacant, and is a good example of why it’s always better to listen to an album than talk about it.
Q: What does the process of songwriting look and feel like to you? It seems every songwriter has a different answer. Some think the songs are delivered by a deity while others have a lot more of an academic approach?
A: No deities involved, no Frank Zappa cosmic jive. Songwriting happens because there’s some music I need to hear that’s not been written yet so I write it myself, just so I can hear it. It’s selfish. Whatever it feels like to other people, for me inspiration is just a random thing, often coming after a stumble when I’m trying to play something and miss the mark, and hit on something else that sounds cool, and then grabbing it and start developing it. Nothing metaphysical, no spiritual conduit. The hard part is to recognize that something new happened and then stop whatever you’re doing to grab it, because it’s ephemeral and disappears in seconds. You’ll never remember it. It sounds simple but it’s incredibly hard. I suspect that what we call normal living has the momentum of a train going 1,000 mph, where it’s hard to just stop on a dime and really give full attention to a random idea that happens to appear. Sometimes you’re with people and it’s rude, or it makes you late to something. I always hate when my attention gets knocked off course by something else. The alarm goes off but if you hit snooze, the idea is lost, and maybe that’s the song you were supposed to write.
I think I’ve already talked about lyrics, so I’ll just add that I have no idea what I’m writing about until it’s done and I can look at it for a while, and even then I have to play it for others before I see it. That’s the benefit of the Exchange, it’s a sounding board. I always think a song is done, and then I bring it in and discover it isn’t, sometimes by a long shot. It’s amazing how blind I can be to what I’m doing. Sometimes it takes years before it falls into place. I’m always pulling up songs from years ago, discovering flaws, and reworking them to make them new. A lot of smoke and mirrors, nothing can be done on demand.
Q: I myself have been a musician for over twenty years and still feel like I’m learning and evolving. Do you have a similar feeling, that the process never really ends as long as you are creating? I’d like to get your thoughts about where the passion to make music in the first place comes from?
A: Absolutely. My opinion about is that being an artist is sort of existential; it’s more a way of life than a career or vocation, and certainly not a “thing to get another thing.” If you’re an artist, that’s how you relate to the world, and the work you create is just a result of that. As you’re alive, you’re growing, you’re figuring stuff out, and your art evolves right up to the end.
If the question is, why music, I guess first you have to love music, but that’s the easy part – I’ve been reading David Byrne’s book, “How Music Works,” and he even intimates that our brains may be hardwired to like music. To get from there to actually making music, though, that takes a rather healthy ego, you know, to be so full of yourself that you think “hey, maybe I can do it too!” What a presumption! In my case, I loved music but didn’t have any particular passion to become a musician, I was just a confused depressed teenager who worshipped the music gods, and they lived in another galaxy. For no good reason, one day I just figured I’d try it and see if I was any good, and go on from there. Looking back, I realize it was a moment of incredible bravery. But right away I saw two things: one, that all my listening had given me what might be called an aptitude, a way of understanding music, and two, there was no feeling on earth better than how it felt to make music. It’s funny, because as I got into it more seriously I found most of the work to be pure drudgery, no pleasure at all. Lonely, frustrating, exhausting, especially as a horn player. And songwriting too can be downright painful emotionally, you know, pulling lyrics out of deeper personal truth. Occasionally there are flashes of grabbing the moon when you find a great lyric, or when you’re playing and it all comes together and you feel like you’re one with the universe. But mostly it’s only the extraordinary promise of hearing the end result that keeps me motivated. Basically, I live to hear the song when it’s done, both when the writing’s over and especially the recording. I’ll confess that I’ve met almost no one else who shares that view.
Q: Can you give us any insight into your next album entitled Ten Songs, No Filler?
A: That idea came up at a party! We were talking about old records and the revival of vinyl, how a lot of albums used to have one hit with the rest filler and you’d be stuck with it, you know, you couldn’t pick out a song, you’d have to play the whole side through. So someone was laughing and said, you should put out an album called Ten Songs, No Filler, so I said ok, but there should be a song called “Filler” on it. And it won’t be only ten songs, either. And that was the album.
I’d been working on it pretty steadily since the beginning of the year, was making good progress with about half of it pretty far along, but then things just took a turn with a different group of songs that are very quiet and introspective and have what you might call a post-contemporary folk sound requiring a lot less studio production, and it feels like they might be happier being all together on an album of their own. So now maybe there’s two parallel albums in the works, a big production and a small production. So I guess I’m as curious as anyone to see what the next record turns out to be.
A: Absolutely. My opinion about is that being an artist is sort of existential; it’s more a way of life than a career or vocation, and certainly not a “thing to get another thing.” If you’re an artist, that’s how you relate to the world, and the work you create is just a result of that. As you’re alive, you’re growing, you’re figuring stuff out, and your art evolves right up to the end.
If the question is, why music, I guess first you have to love music, but that’s the easy part – I’ve been reading David Byrne’s book, “How Music Works,” and he even intimates that our brains may be hardwired to like music. To get from there to actually making music, though, that takes a rather healthy ego, you know, to be so full of yourself that you think “hey, maybe I can do it too!” What a presumption! In my case, I loved music but didn’t have any particular passion to become a musician, I was just a confused depressed teenager who worshipped the music gods, and they lived in another galaxy. For no good reason, one day I just figured I’d try it and see if I was any good, and go on from there. Looking back, I realize it was a moment of incredible bravery. But right away I saw two things: one, that all my listening had given me what might be called an aptitude, a way of understanding music, and two, there was no feeling on earth better than how it felt to make music. It’s funny, because as I got into it more seriously I found most of the work to be pure drudgery, no pleasure at all. Lonely, frustrating, exhausting, especially as a horn player. And songwriting too can be downright painful emotionally, you know, pulling lyrics out of deeper personal truth. Occasionally there are flashes of grabbing the moon when you find a great lyric, or when you’re playing and it all comes together and you feel like you’re one with the universe. But mostly it’s only the extraordinary promise of hearing the end result that keeps me motivated. Basically, I live to hear the song when it’s done, both when the writing’s over and especially the recording. I’ll confess that I’ve met almost no one else who shares that view.
Q: Can you give us any insight into your next album entitled Ten Songs, No Filler?
A: That idea came up at a party! We were talking about old records and the revival of vinyl, how a lot of albums used to have one hit with the rest filler and you’d be stuck with it, you know, you couldn’t pick out a song, you’d have to play the whole side through. So someone was laughing and said, you should put out an album called Ten Songs, No Filler, so I said ok, but there should be a song called “Filler” on it. And it won’t be only ten songs, either. And that was the album.
I’d been working on it pretty steadily since the beginning of the year, was making good progress with about half of it pretty far along, but then things just took a turn with a different group of songs that are very quiet and introspective and have what you might call a post-contemporary folk sound requiring a lot less studio production, and it feels like they might be happier being all together on an album of their own. So now maybe there’s two parallel albums in the works, a big production and a small production. So I guess I’m as curious as anyone to see what the next record turns out to be.