Randall Kirk Jones Interview
Q: Can you talk about your musical history?
A: When I was like 11 or 12, I checked out a book on the basics of music theory from the public library and then got a notebook that was laying around my house and spent the whole summer copying the entire book and every diagram into this notebook. I remember making myself do at least five pages a day. I still have that notebook and don’t know almost any music theory but I guess that was really my introduction into being anything other than someone who just listened to music. Also I think that’s illegal but it’s not like I was selling copies of my 5th grade handwritten music theory book in dark alleys and downtown speakeasies so it’s probably safe to say. I got a pretty cheap little keyboard when I was like 14 and wanted to teach myself piano and then I switched to electric guitar because my best friend played that and I think I just wanted to be more like him. Eventually I got an acoustic guitar and played only covers for a couple of years before working up the courage to actually try and write something myself. And once I started music at 17 I went straight to recording because I just love “the album” as an art form and always wanted to make one. I love thinking about the songs as part of something bigger as a unit with corresponding art and all that. It’s just the most powerful way to present music in my opinion. To this day I pretty much only listen to music as whole albums from start to finish.
Q: The album cover for All the Wonderful and Horrific was something you spent a lot of time painting. Can you talk about how it relates to the music?
A: Yeah, I remember buying the canvas at this art supply store a couple blocks from where I lived maybe two years ago. It’s 4 feet by 4 feet so I was trying to walk back home with it on this really windy day and getting blown around by the wind. I was holding onto it for dear life because I knew that it was going to be in some way the cover of this album, even though I had no idea what that would look like. My arms hurt for days after I finally got it home and it just sat in my apartment for a year still wrapped in plastic and unpainted. I wanted to get the cover right and I spent a long time on the design and about 120 hours painting it. A lot of that process is show in the little documentary I made about the album which you can find on YouTube.
The design lifts a lot from Hieronymus Bosch and a lot of the Early Netherlandish Renaissance. I wanted to make the cover a sort of a contemporary take on The Garden of Earthly Delights. I think of the album art as a cross between the look of that Bosch painting and the intention of Radiohead’s art for Hail to the Thief. It’s a depiction of the worst and best parts of human nature, and just trying to be as objective as possible, leaving room for the grey areas and for interpretation. Like it isn’t clear whether that woman on the left of the album artwork is a materialist shopaholic or somebody selflessly buying their loved one’s gifts. It’s not clear whether the nude woman is highlighting “the male gaze” or standing tall in a sort of representation of empowerment and liberation. The album cover and the music itself isn’t a critique in the slightest; it’s a sort of removed assessment of the world around me, and of me saying “Ok this is where I am. I’m not pretending things are better or worse than they are.”
Q: What is the creative process like for you?
A: Every album starts with me driving a few hours south to this mine that I can’t disclose the location of. I keep this pickaxe in my car and there’s a very large amount of black crystal in this mine with some pretty unique properties. So before writing the album I make a few trips out there and collected enough of this crystal and brought it back home. From there I set the black crystals in a circle around me, each one facing the cardinal directions and then I recite specific ancient Sumerian incantations.
No - hahaha, unfortunately the reality is a lot less interesting and usually involves me in my bathrobe singing to no one. I just slowly piece together bits of melody, lyrics and guitar parts over a period of time until I can start to see how they all begin to fit together. It’s like a puzzle where you simultaneously create the pieces and figure out what the overall picture is and how each piece is necessary to show the picture. I generally know what I want to write a song about before anything else. Then I write the song on guitar, then I record the basic bits of the song (guitar and a rough vocal) and build up the instrumentation really gradually over a year or two. The whole process is usually gradual. It’s rare for me that a song just wazams itself into my life in an hour or two. Even still, I wrote about twenty-five-ish songs for this album and put ten on the record so you gotta know when to let go of some songs and that took me a long time.
Q: Can you talk about your musical history?
A: When I was like 11 or 12, I checked out a book on the basics of music theory from the public library and then got a notebook that was laying around my house and spent the whole summer copying the entire book and every diagram into this notebook. I remember making myself do at least five pages a day. I still have that notebook and don’t know almost any music theory but I guess that was really my introduction into being anything other than someone who just listened to music. Also I think that’s illegal but it’s not like I was selling copies of my 5th grade handwritten music theory book in dark alleys and downtown speakeasies so it’s probably safe to say. I got a pretty cheap little keyboard when I was like 14 and wanted to teach myself piano and then I switched to electric guitar because my best friend played that and I think I just wanted to be more like him. Eventually I got an acoustic guitar and played only covers for a couple of years before working up the courage to actually try and write something myself. And once I started music at 17 I went straight to recording because I just love “the album” as an art form and always wanted to make one. I love thinking about the songs as part of something bigger as a unit with corresponding art and all that. It’s just the most powerful way to present music in my opinion. To this day I pretty much only listen to music as whole albums from start to finish.
Q: The album cover for All the Wonderful and Horrific was something you spent a lot of time painting. Can you talk about how it relates to the music?
A: Yeah, I remember buying the canvas at this art supply store a couple blocks from where I lived maybe two years ago. It’s 4 feet by 4 feet so I was trying to walk back home with it on this really windy day and getting blown around by the wind. I was holding onto it for dear life because I knew that it was going to be in some way the cover of this album, even though I had no idea what that would look like. My arms hurt for days after I finally got it home and it just sat in my apartment for a year still wrapped in plastic and unpainted. I wanted to get the cover right and I spent a long time on the design and about 120 hours painting it. A lot of that process is show in the little documentary I made about the album which you can find on YouTube.
The design lifts a lot from Hieronymus Bosch and a lot of the Early Netherlandish Renaissance. I wanted to make the cover a sort of a contemporary take on The Garden of Earthly Delights. I think of the album art as a cross between the look of that Bosch painting and the intention of Radiohead’s art for Hail to the Thief. It’s a depiction of the worst and best parts of human nature, and just trying to be as objective as possible, leaving room for the grey areas and for interpretation. Like it isn’t clear whether that woman on the left of the album artwork is a materialist shopaholic or somebody selflessly buying their loved one’s gifts. It’s not clear whether the nude woman is highlighting “the male gaze” or standing tall in a sort of representation of empowerment and liberation. The album cover and the music itself isn’t a critique in the slightest; it’s a sort of removed assessment of the world around me, and of me saying “Ok this is where I am. I’m not pretending things are better or worse than they are.”
Q: What is the creative process like for you?
A: Every album starts with me driving a few hours south to this mine that I can’t disclose the location of. I keep this pickaxe in my car and there’s a very large amount of black crystal in this mine with some pretty unique properties. So before writing the album I make a few trips out there and collected enough of this crystal and brought it back home. From there I set the black crystals in a circle around me, each one facing the cardinal directions and then I recite specific ancient Sumerian incantations.
No - hahaha, unfortunately the reality is a lot less interesting and usually involves me in my bathrobe singing to no one. I just slowly piece together bits of melody, lyrics and guitar parts over a period of time until I can start to see how they all begin to fit together. It’s like a puzzle where you simultaneously create the pieces and figure out what the overall picture is and how each piece is necessary to show the picture. I generally know what I want to write a song about before anything else. Then I write the song on guitar, then I record the basic bits of the song (guitar and a rough vocal) and build up the instrumentation really gradually over a year or two. The whole process is usually gradual. It’s rare for me that a song just wazams itself into my life in an hour or two. Even still, I wrote about twenty-five-ish songs for this album and put ten on the record so you gotta know when to let go of some songs and that took me a long time.
Q: You incorporate unique instrumentation into this album. Can you delve into that subject?
A: I get pretty obsessive about the atmosphere of the instrumentation and I’ve always been interested in making songs that weren’t just songs, if that makes sense. Just little additional elements can take songs to a whole new place. That’s why I’ve always used a lot of sampling of conversations, and events, and atmosphere in the world. I have a field recorder that I carry around with me and I’ve recorded a large collection of samples over the years that may or may not make it into any songs. Things like children singing, conversations I’d have otherwise forgot, and walking through museums are a few I can remember off the top of my head. I like to integrate that type of thing because it adds a quality to the music that’s hard to articulate. It just feels more real to me, hearing the actual sample of what the person is singing about? It’s funny that you mention unique instrumentation for this record because I was trying to be a lot more straightforward with this one compared to other records where I was just recording myself scratching walls and slamming drawers.
For this album though I really wanted to keep fighting my “do it all yourself” nature and collaborate with other musicians so a lot of people played with me on this one. I did write almost all of their parts that they played on my computer before they came to record though, so the jury is really out on how well I can actually collaborate. It was really great though to get to record with all of these people and make memories around creating the album. It was a lot of work and commitment for everyone to be part of this thing with me and I’m incredible grateful for them. I bought them all mini vodka bottles to say thanks but they really deserve a lot more, so thank you to everyone involved. I also didn’t record with anyone I didn’t know because I like to be able to hear my friends all together with me on an album. There’s something really satisfying to me about that. Like if every time I heard the flutes on the record I had to imagine this random person that I paid to record for me, then that would be a lot less satisfying than the mental image of my friend. Thankfully my friends own some pretty strange stuff; that’s how I got things like the theremin and accordion parts. As for stuff like the Vitamin B-12 bottle and even the theremin I play, that comes from some weird tendency I have to try to make something that resembles beauty and then simultaneously blow that up. I think I’m just trying not to take it all too seriously.
Q: I found the song titles intriguing. Is there a narrative arch that runs through the songs?
A: The album starts by setting up this problem of being very overwhelmed from the personal and external world and sets out to resolve that problem by sitting with it instead of turning away from it. Learning to try to sit with a problem as opposed to avoiding it was huge for me. It’s something I learned from meditation which is something I’ve been a pretty big advocate of for the past four years because it’s really helped me in ways I thought were entirely “unhelpable.” The fourth track on the album is about sitting with difficulty in the way I’m talking about and the seventh track on the album is kind of subtly making a case for meditation as an antidote to a lot of our current suffering without all the woo-woo nonsense that gets associated with it, like crystals and chakras (sorry crystal and chakra people). That idea of not avoiding difficulty is why there’s a lot of just listing things in the lyrics as well. Something about that method of songwriting for me really got the point across of feeling overwhelmed and addressing it head on. That’s why it’s done both on the first and last song. The first one is this anxious listing of fears, but the last one bears a lot more resemblance to something like acceptance for whatever it is is we’re all doing here. The album also cycles so if you have it on repeat it sounds like it never ends. That’s what the last three minutes of the album are. The tape rewinds the album back through each song to the beginning and it starts again at the first song. I actually spent a whole day just listening to that space between the last and first song and making sure it transitioned just right, and it’s facts like that which make it hard to convince yourself that you’re not at least a little crazy.
Q: What else should we know about your creative projects?
A: I’m working right now on getting all of this right in a live setting with a full band and playing a lot more shows and that’s going pretty well right now. As for next album stuff I’m trying to spend a lot more time on it because I’ve put out six records in five years and I don’t want to get burned out so I’m trying to let this one happen a lot more naturally. This album I just finished took two years and I was working harder than I ever had at it every day so we’ll see what it’s like to really let this one grow naturally. Making this most recent album was clearly not a healthy way of doing things and I’m looking at finding more sustainable ways of doing what I love without burning myself out in the process. The next album already has a few songs written for it though, and I’ll say that it’s definitely more story based. And I’ll let you in on a secret while we’re talking about it. I did put the album title for the next record somewhere in All the Wonderful and Horrific pretty last minute as a funny little way to have some continuity between the records. But other than that I’m just taking life slow for now and spending time with the people in my life while my head isn’t buried in album world because knowing how I operate I won’t be able to stay away from album world for too long.
A: I get pretty obsessive about the atmosphere of the instrumentation and I’ve always been interested in making songs that weren’t just songs, if that makes sense. Just little additional elements can take songs to a whole new place. That’s why I’ve always used a lot of sampling of conversations, and events, and atmosphere in the world. I have a field recorder that I carry around with me and I’ve recorded a large collection of samples over the years that may or may not make it into any songs. Things like children singing, conversations I’d have otherwise forgot, and walking through museums are a few I can remember off the top of my head. I like to integrate that type of thing because it adds a quality to the music that’s hard to articulate. It just feels more real to me, hearing the actual sample of what the person is singing about? It’s funny that you mention unique instrumentation for this record because I was trying to be a lot more straightforward with this one compared to other records where I was just recording myself scratching walls and slamming drawers.
For this album though I really wanted to keep fighting my “do it all yourself” nature and collaborate with other musicians so a lot of people played with me on this one. I did write almost all of their parts that they played on my computer before they came to record though, so the jury is really out on how well I can actually collaborate. It was really great though to get to record with all of these people and make memories around creating the album. It was a lot of work and commitment for everyone to be part of this thing with me and I’m incredible grateful for them. I bought them all mini vodka bottles to say thanks but they really deserve a lot more, so thank you to everyone involved. I also didn’t record with anyone I didn’t know because I like to be able to hear my friends all together with me on an album. There’s something really satisfying to me about that. Like if every time I heard the flutes on the record I had to imagine this random person that I paid to record for me, then that would be a lot less satisfying than the mental image of my friend. Thankfully my friends own some pretty strange stuff; that’s how I got things like the theremin and accordion parts. As for stuff like the Vitamin B-12 bottle and even the theremin I play, that comes from some weird tendency I have to try to make something that resembles beauty and then simultaneously blow that up. I think I’m just trying not to take it all too seriously.
Q: I found the song titles intriguing. Is there a narrative arch that runs through the songs?
A: The album starts by setting up this problem of being very overwhelmed from the personal and external world and sets out to resolve that problem by sitting with it instead of turning away from it. Learning to try to sit with a problem as opposed to avoiding it was huge for me. It’s something I learned from meditation which is something I’ve been a pretty big advocate of for the past four years because it’s really helped me in ways I thought were entirely “unhelpable.” The fourth track on the album is about sitting with difficulty in the way I’m talking about and the seventh track on the album is kind of subtly making a case for meditation as an antidote to a lot of our current suffering without all the woo-woo nonsense that gets associated with it, like crystals and chakras (sorry crystal and chakra people). That idea of not avoiding difficulty is why there’s a lot of just listing things in the lyrics as well. Something about that method of songwriting for me really got the point across of feeling overwhelmed and addressing it head on. That’s why it’s done both on the first and last song. The first one is this anxious listing of fears, but the last one bears a lot more resemblance to something like acceptance for whatever it is is we’re all doing here. The album also cycles so if you have it on repeat it sounds like it never ends. That’s what the last three minutes of the album are. The tape rewinds the album back through each song to the beginning and it starts again at the first song. I actually spent a whole day just listening to that space between the last and first song and making sure it transitioned just right, and it’s facts like that which make it hard to convince yourself that you’re not at least a little crazy.
Q: What else should we know about your creative projects?
A: I’m working right now on getting all of this right in a live setting with a full band and playing a lot more shows and that’s going pretty well right now. As for next album stuff I’m trying to spend a lot more time on it because I’ve put out six records in five years and I don’t want to get burned out so I’m trying to let this one happen a lot more naturally. This album I just finished took two years and I was working harder than I ever had at it every day so we’ll see what it’s like to really let this one grow naturally. Making this most recent album was clearly not a healthy way of doing things and I’m looking at finding more sustainable ways of doing what I love without burning myself out in the process. The next album already has a few songs written for it though, and I’ll say that it’s definitely more story based. And I’ll let you in on a secret while we’re talking about it. I did put the album title for the next record somewhere in All the Wonderful and Horrific pretty last minute as a funny little way to have some continuity between the records. But other than that I’m just taking life slow for now and spending time with the people in my life while my head isn’t buried in album world because knowing how I operate I won’t be able to stay away from album world for too long.