Run Downhill Interview
Q: Can you talk about your history as an artist/band?
A: I’ve been a musician since the age of 4, a songwriter since age 12 and a professional performing musician since about age 15; it’s easy to say I’ve done this my entire life, but I’ve made my living as a professional musician since about 1999. Run Downhill formally began in about 2011 but it had been brewing in the years leading up to that; I had been a member of a contemporary chamber ensemble consisting of flute, clarinet, bassoon (later replaced by guitar) and percussion, and at a certain point I began composing for the group. I wrote probably 6-10 pieces for the group, and then I had the idea to morph into a more guitar-centric folk music group, still centered on instrumental music but with a rustic edge. The other members of the group were not interested in making this shift, but they did wish me good fortune on the endeavor, and we parted ways; this was probably around 2009 or 2010. I worked for another year or so writing, and I compiled enough tunes to make an EP which I began recording in 2011. For cover art, I asked my friend Scott Angle to create front and back covers, and in our discussions about the band name, he asked me “what does the name mean?”
My answer: Run Downhill is a command…to run toward the bottom, directly into harm’s way; in this case, straight to hell, and to run as fast as you can. I described to him an encounter on a lost hillside between a Seeker of truth and dark Stranger, ominously pointing down the hill toward an unseen but inevitable end, that which lies at the bottom. And behind the Stranger, a giant supernatural Bull watching over the landscape, ready to charge and maul any intruder to his domain. The Stranger warns the Seeker of the singular choice before him: there is no escape from this Bull, he cannot be beaten, and he cannot be outrun on the flat ground. But if you run straight down, his legs are too weak, he cannot follow. And so there is one chance to escape, and that’s to run straight to Hell, as fast as you can.
I described this scene to Scott, and he was overwhelmed…”Can I draw that?” he asked. Of course, please do…and days later the image arrived in my inbox and when I opened it, I was hit with a massive burst of inspiration, wherein the complete story of a mythic town and the thin border between Hell and Earth began to weaken, and people began to burst into flame, was born in my mind. It was here that Run Downhill was officially “born.”
After that we played as many shows as I could produce, and I began making albums and video content with a comic narrative centering this storyline alongside the music. I made five albums/EP, four comic books, and a dozen or so comic videos derived directly from the comic artwork. We would project these videos next to the band as we played, creating sort of a silent movie environment which was very cool but somewhat difficult for average audiences to digest. One of our albums, SPURS #1, was produced as a 22+ minute motion comic video, and accepted for competition at the Seattle Transmedia and Independent Film Festival (STIFF 2015), and I showed the work at numerous comic conventions up and down the west coast for many years.
But the band, and the comics industry, was changing in ways that I felt were incongruous with the project as I had envisioned it, so with Nineteen/Twenty, I took the project in a different direction. I shut down the live band in 2017 (except for solo shows), and focused on writing for awhile. In late 2021 I assembled a new band with new players, and we’ve been rehearsing ever since, though somewhat sporadically, and we’ve got some upcoming live shows that I hope can help us build the momentum we seek.
Q: What inspired you to make Nineteen/Twenty?
A: I joined a songwriter collective called Song A Day For A Month (SADFAM), which is exactly as it sounds: each day, all writers participating would create a fresh song, make some sort of recording, and upload it to the public site for comment. At that time the focus was on months January and July each year; my first month was July 2019 (the “Nineteen” in Nineteen/Twenty). It was an incredible experience, and I had a massive output during that time that continued beyond the confines of the month; not every song was a good song, necessarily, but the exercise of daily writing suits my process and creative flow quite nicely, and much of my output for that month was quite good. I skipped January 2020, but we decided as a group to add April 2020 as a work month to keep our spirits up after the country shut down for COVID; along with July 2020, these three months’ worth of songs were what I drew from to create Nineteen/Twenty.
I forget exactly when, but I had joined a comic creators collective called The Comic Jam; in a similar fashion to SADFAM, we would vote on a weekly theme, and writers would generate a one-age script for a comic story. Artists would then be paired randomly with the writers, and over a two- or three-week period, render the script into art, which was then lettered and put up on the Jam’s website. It was here I met CGhirardo, the surrealist comic artist from Toronto, Canada, who generated the artwork for the comic videos for Nineteen/Twenty, which to me is still the ultimate manifestation of how the album should be taken in.
I wanted to focus heavily on the songs for Nineteen/Twenty, rather than on a larger comic arc…but I had an idea for comic stories and pursued it, and actually ended up making the biggest Run Downhill album to date, in terms of the largest number of songs, and each song has a corresponding comic video, so it’s my largest comic output to date as well, an abstract narrative of a variety of travelers finding themselves at the edge of the world, where sometimes a phantom Trans Am offers a ride exactly where they need to be.
Q: Can you talk about your history as an artist/band?
A: I’ve been a musician since the age of 4, a songwriter since age 12 and a professional performing musician since about age 15; it’s easy to say I’ve done this my entire life, but I’ve made my living as a professional musician since about 1999. Run Downhill formally began in about 2011 but it had been brewing in the years leading up to that; I had been a member of a contemporary chamber ensemble consisting of flute, clarinet, bassoon (later replaced by guitar) and percussion, and at a certain point I began composing for the group. I wrote probably 6-10 pieces for the group, and then I had the idea to morph into a more guitar-centric folk music group, still centered on instrumental music but with a rustic edge. The other members of the group were not interested in making this shift, but they did wish me good fortune on the endeavor, and we parted ways; this was probably around 2009 or 2010. I worked for another year or so writing, and I compiled enough tunes to make an EP which I began recording in 2011. For cover art, I asked my friend Scott Angle to create front and back covers, and in our discussions about the band name, he asked me “what does the name mean?”
My answer: Run Downhill is a command…to run toward the bottom, directly into harm’s way; in this case, straight to hell, and to run as fast as you can. I described to him an encounter on a lost hillside between a Seeker of truth and dark Stranger, ominously pointing down the hill toward an unseen but inevitable end, that which lies at the bottom. And behind the Stranger, a giant supernatural Bull watching over the landscape, ready to charge and maul any intruder to his domain. The Stranger warns the Seeker of the singular choice before him: there is no escape from this Bull, he cannot be beaten, and he cannot be outrun on the flat ground. But if you run straight down, his legs are too weak, he cannot follow. And so there is one chance to escape, and that’s to run straight to Hell, as fast as you can.
I described this scene to Scott, and he was overwhelmed…”Can I draw that?” he asked. Of course, please do…and days later the image arrived in my inbox and when I opened it, I was hit with a massive burst of inspiration, wherein the complete story of a mythic town and the thin border between Hell and Earth began to weaken, and people began to burst into flame, was born in my mind. It was here that Run Downhill was officially “born.”
After that we played as many shows as I could produce, and I began making albums and video content with a comic narrative centering this storyline alongside the music. I made five albums/EP, four comic books, and a dozen or so comic videos derived directly from the comic artwork. We would project these videos next to the band as we played, creating sort of a silent movie environment which was very cool but somewhat difficult for average audiences to digest. One of our albums, SPURS #1, was produced as a 22+ minute motion comic video, and accepted for competition at the Seattle Transmedia and Independent Film Festival (STIFF 2015), and I showed the work at numerous comic conventions up and down the west coast for many years.
But the band, and the comics industry, was changing in ways that I felt were incongruous with the project as I had envisioned it, so with Nineteen/Twenty, I took the project in a different direction. I shut down the live band in 2017 (except for solo shows), and focused on writing for awhile. In late 2021 I assembled a new band with new players, and we’ve been rehearsing ever since, though somewhat sporadically, and we’ve got some upcoming live shows that I hope can help us build the momentum we seek.
Q: What inspired you to make Nineteen/Twenty?
A: I joined a songwriter collective called Song A Day For A Month (SADFAM), which is exactly as it sounds: each day, all writers participating would create a fresh song, make some sort of recording, and upload it to the public site for comment. At that time the focus was on months January and July each year; my first month was July 2019 (the “Nineteen” in Nineteen/Twenty). It was an incredible experience, and I had a massive output during that time that continued beyond the confines of the month; not every song was a good song, necessarily, but the exercise of daily writing suits my process and creative flow quite nicely, and much of my output for that month was quite good. I skipped January 2020, but we decided as a group to add April 2020 as a work month to keep our spirits up after the country shut down for COVID; along with July 2020, these three months’ worth of songs were what I drew from to create Nineteen/Twenty.
I forget exactly when, but I had joined a comic creators collective called The Comic Jam; in a similar fashion to SADFAM, we would vote on a weekly theme, and writers would generate a one-age script for a comic story. Artists would then be paired randomly with the writers, and over a two- or three-week period, render the script into art, which was then lettered and put up on the Jam’s website. It was here I met CGhirardo, the surrealist comic artist from Toronto, Canada, who generated the artwork for the comic videos for Nineteen/Twenty, which to me is still the ultimate manifestation of how the album should be taken in.
I wanted to focus heavily on the songs for Nineteen/Twenty, rather than on a larger comic arc…but I had an idea for comic stories and pursued it, and actually ended up making the biggest Run Downhill album to date, in terms of the largest number of songs, and each song has a corresponding comic video, so it’s my largest comic output to date as well, an abstract narrative of a variety of travelers finding themselves at the edge of the world, where sometimes a phantom Trans Am offers a ride exactly where they need to be.
Q: I loved “Rock and Roll Ain’t a Rhythm.” Is there anything you can tell about that song in regards to how it was made?
A: That song was written on July 9, 2019; this is one of the few tunes on the record that I had to edit the lyrics a bit, there were some clunky elements in the original draft that warranted a revisit. I love jam bands like Luna, and this tune has a very Neil Diamond-like strumming pattern on the guitar. I think the time between the day I originally wrote it and when I made the album version really helped to season the song; I had time to practice and take more control of the lyrics and how to deliver them.
The recording starts out with a frame drum groove captured via a contact microphone on the drumhead; I filtered the sound a bunch and passed the whole through a multi-fuzz plug to give it the resultant tone, and that’s the first sound you hear on the record. I recorded the basic tracks on acoustic guitar and drums myself, then had Adam put bass on; Nate LaPointe put down the lead electric guitar part, and my brother Will Rainier contributed a supersonic electric guitar part when the chorus first kicks in that I think serves the tune quite nicely. .
The chorus singers are some volunteers from SADFAM…I put out a call on the website and asked if anyone would be willing to sing some backup parts, record them at home, and send them to me to be mixed into the record, and quite a few people wanted to participate. I grabbed anyone who was around to sing a part and kept adding depth to the choir, it ended up being a very cool aspect of the song.
Q: Can you talk about some of the themes on the album?
A: It’s easy to say this was a COVID album, but it was a bit more existential than that; I was massively concerned that music would never return to what it was pre-pandemic. I am a professional freelance musician making my entire living off of performing and recording music; I was rightly concerned that there might not be any industry left to engage once the dust settled (which is still hanging in the balance, by the way). As such, the metaphor behind the album acknowledges the pursuit of music as a journey whose destination will not be known until the end, when the journey is completed and for most lifelong musicians like me that means life’s natural end. Except, thanks to COVID, music was prematurely ended, and it felt like my life’s journey, the lifelong pursuit of music, had brought me to the edge of the world, only for the edge to fall away.
So the characters that appear in the comic videos are often at a pivotal point in their journey; they are brought to the literal edge of the world, and similar to the Seeker on the hillside who has no choice but to confront his fate at the bottom of the hill, each character is faced with a choice to either fall off the edge of the world, or take a chance and try to jump from an old and dying world to an unknown one. And there’s a Driver in a phantom Trans Am that sometimes appears to offer a ride, though it may not be to the place you had intended; and some of the stories are memories, all true, but some elaborated…and collected, they tell a common narrative of arriving at the edge of the world with nothing left but the momentum carrying you over, and the last thing left to do is fall, or reach, toward worlds below, or across…and maybe, the Trans Am can give you a ride over to the other side.
Q: What is your creative process like?
A: For this album and the comics accompanying them, pure free association. I begin with the song, usually on a guitar or rhythm instrument, and for SADFAM sessions, I generally work until I find the first idea that works musically, and then I start manipulating it…the idea is to fully commit to making a song with this material, not to jump ship to some other idea after 20 minutes because I get stuck, but to work with the material at hand and shape it into a workable form. And, some are way easier than others; if you’ve got a good song going, it tends to write itself, and often very quickly (often less than an hour), and if you’re a songwriter you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I start singing melodies almost immediately, and here I go back and forth a bit between drafting a melody (or sometimes just a poem) and having that drive the harmonic changes in the song; or, draft hip chord progressions and improvise lyrics on top until something organic emerges. Either way, once you’re on to a good song, it really does tend to write itself, in the sense that with each decision you make, you’re further bound to all the previous decisions. At a certain point I learned to trust my own inner voice and allow the writing to proceed very naturally and very uninhibited.
The arrangements usually are born within the writing process, though that’s not always the case; several songs on Nineteen/Twenty have very different arrangements from how they were originally written. Because I’m tracking everything myself, I have a wide array of familiar sounds that I draw from right here in my home studio, and after awhile they all start to make their appearance felt; I have a marimba right behind me and a vibraphone in the garage if I want to bring it in and track it for a day; I have several drum sets, half a dozen snare drums and various hand percussion from India and the Middle East; I have a few weird guitars and two nice ones, and an old grand piano in the living room. I tend to reach out and grab whatever’s close by and fits the world being made in my head as the song matures; as I’m writing I tend to imagine the arrangement and start making informed decisions early, so the arrangement actually informs the composition as it develops. It’s definitely something I can hear in my head, before I’ve done any major work recording/tracking the arrangement.
Q: How do you usually go about writing lyrics? And did you try to tie in the general theme of an entire piece of work?
A: I have various approaches to writing lyrics, and the most effective is phonetic singing and free association. Once I have a draft of a verse or chorus going, I start singing melody lines using just syllables with different phonetic shapes, and I record these writing sessions and when you listen back, some of these mumblings turn into words in your imagination, and from there I begin to free associate. Sometimes, a poem or phrase appears intact in my mind and I can piggyback on that and have something nice, but mostly I start with fragments that I string together until something coherent emerges.
Sometimes, it’s not until the very end of a song that I know what that song is actually about; such is the case with the song “The Daylight Would Not Come” from Nineteen/Twenty, I had some interesting lyrics and ideas but it wasn’t until I got to the chorus at the very end of the song that I understood what this was all about, and from there I went backwards and changed and omitted some of the clunky stuff. What’s nice is if the lyric is driving the song, it can help inform edits in the overall form and structure, which tends to leave the best music in and sloughs off some of the crap.
I didn’t have a general theme for Nineteen/Twenty in the lyrics, but in retrospect it’s easy for me to see how some of the recurring themes subconsciously emerged throughout the lyrics. The idea of arriving at the end of the journey with unresolved crimes of conscience, or reaching the end of an arc and being forced with a choice that might be the last choice you ever get to make…these are songs that remind us to fix what we can fix, let go of what we cannot, and when it’s time, roll the dice with reckless abandon.
Q: What else should we know about your music?
A: Most of the sounds on this album were made by human hands on real instruments; but, interestingly, more synthesizers appear on this album than on any Run Downhill album previously. I took some interesting approaches to recording drums that I had always imagined but never tried until I was faced with the time limit imposed by the SADFAM format of finishing and uploading a fresh song every day; there wasn’t time to set up a full kit in my small studio every day, nor could I allocate a single day to tracking all the drum parts to a dozen songs. My solution was to split up the drum set in Bass Drum/Ride Cymbal, and Snare Drum/Crash Cymbal, and perform these in two separate passes. It made for a very interesting touch and sonic imprint, especially when the big Concert Bass Drum does its thing…it’s an approach I have used again, but it has become a “signature” of sorts, and as such, I have to be careful not to overuse it.
This album took the longest to produce, more than any album I’ve worked on in the past. I ran into several roadblocks along the way…burned through three computers, several filthy fader pots on my mixing board that would not come clean during mixing, broken drums, and the demands of life and where duty and obligation call…plus the comic videos took an enormous amount of time to compile artwork, edit videos, render and upload, etc, it was all time-consuming, but I am very proud of the final product and would not have done it any other way. Things take time, especially if they are to be done right, and I think I got most of this one right.
Music is a full-time endeavor for me, and I still feel like I’m learning and growing everyday. This music is made in pursuit of the truth, about accepting the world for what it is and holding on to what’s good in it. I hope you enjoy this music, I hope you listen to it many times, and I hope it resonates in a meaningful way; I take great inspiration in the making of it, and I hope it brings joy and meaning to your life as well.
Thanks so much for letting me share a bit of my world with you.
A: That song was written on July 9, 2019; this is one of the few tunes on the record that I had to edit the lyrics a bit, there were some clunky elements in the original draft that warranted a revisit. I love jam bands like Luna, and this tune has a very Neil Diamond-like strumming pattern on the guitar. I think the time between the day I originally wrote it and when I made the album version really helped to season the song; I had time to practice and take more control of the lyrics and how to deliver them.
The recording starts out with a frame drum groove captured via a contact microphone on the drumhead; I filtered the sound a bunch and passed the whole through a multi-fuzz plug to give it the resultant tone, and that’s the first sound you hear on the record. I recorded the basic tracks on acoustic guitar and drums myself, then had Adam put bass on; Nate LaPointe put down the lead electric guitar part, and my brother Will Rainier contributed a supersonic electric guitar part when the chorus first kicks in that I think serves the tune quite nicely. .
The chorus singers are some volunteers from SADFAM…I put out a call on the website and asked if anyone would be willing to sing some backup parts, record them at home, and send them to me to be mixed into the record, and quite a few people wanted to participate. I grabbed anyone who was around to sing a part and kept adding depth to the choir, it ended up being a very cool aspect of the song.
Q: Can you talk about some of the themes on the album?
A: It’s easy to say this was a COVID album, but it was a bit more existential than that; I was massively concerned that music would never return to what it was pre-pandemic. I am a professional freelance musician making my entire living off of performing and recording music; I was rightly concerned that there might not be any industry left to engage once the dust settled (which is still hanging in the balance, by the way). As such, the metaphor behind the album acknowledges the pursuit of music as a journey whose destination will not be known until the end, when the journey is completed and for most lifelong musicians like me that means life’s natural end. Except, thanks to COVID, music was prematurely ended, and it felt like my life’s journey, the lifelong pursuit of music, had brought me to the edge of the world, only for the edge to fall away.
So the characters that appear in the comic videos are often at a pivotal point in their journey; they are brought to the literal edge of the world, and similar to the Seeker on the hillside who has no choice but to confront his fate at the bottom of the hill, each character is faced with a choice to either fall off the edge of the world, or take a chance and try to jump from an old and dying world to an unknown one. And there’s a Driver in a phantom Trans Am that sometimes appears to offer a ride, though it may not be to the place you had intended; and some of the stories are memories, all true, but some elaborated…and collected, they tell a common narrative of arriving at the edge of the world with nothing left but the momentum carrying you over, and the last thing left to do is fall, or reach, toward worlds below, or across…and maybe, the Trans Am can give you a ride over to the other side.
Q: What is your creative process like?
A: For this album and the comics accompanying them, pure free association. I begin with the song, usually on a guitar or rhythm instrument, and for SADFAM sessions, I generally work until I find the first idea that works musically, and then I start manipulating it…the idea is to fully commit to making a song with this material, not to jump ship to some other idea after 20 minutes because I get stuck, but to work with the material at hand and shape it into a workable form. And, some are way easier than others; if you’ve got a good song going, it tends to write itself, and often very quickly (often less than an hour), and if you’re a songwriter you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I start singing melodies almost immediately, and here I go back and forth a bit between drafting a melody (or sometimes just a poem) and having that drive the harmonic changes in the song; or, draft hip chord progressions and improvise lyrics on top until something organic emerges. Either way, once you’re on to a good song, it really does tend to write itself, in the sense that with each decision you make, you’re further bound to all the previous decisions. At a certain point I learned to trust my own inner voice and allow the writing to proceed very naturally and very uninhibited.
The arrangements usually are born within the writing process, though that’s not always the case; several songs on Nineteen/Twenty have very different arrangements from how they were originally written. Because I’m tracking everything myself, I have a wide array of familiar sounds that I draw from right here in my home studio, and after awhile they all start to make their appearance felt; I have a marimba right behind me and a vibraphone in the garage if I want to bring it in and track it for a day; I have several drum sets, half a dozen snare drums and various hand percussion from India and the Middle East; I have a few weird guitars and two nice ones, and an old grand piano in the living room. I tend to reach out and grab whatever’s close by and fits the world being made in my head as the song matures; as I’m writing I tend to imagine the arrangement and start making informed decisions early, so the arrangement actually informs the composition as it develops. It’s definitely something I can hear in my head, before I’ve done any major work recording/tracking the arrangement.
Q: How do you usually go about writing lyrics? And did you try to tie in the general theme of an entire piece of work?
A: I have various approaches to writing lyrics, and the most effective is phonetic singing and free association. Once I have a draft of a verse or chorus going, I start singing melody lines using just syllables with different phonetic shapes, and I record these writing sessions and when you listen back, some of these mumblings turn into words in your imagination, and from there I begin to free associate. Sometimes, a poem or phrase appears intact in my mind and I can piggyback on that and have something nice, but mostly I start with fragments that I string together until something coherent emerges.
Sometimes, it’s not until the very end of a song that I know what that song is actually about; such is the case with the song “The Daylight Would Not Come” from Nineteen/Twenty, I had some interesting lyrics and ideas but it wasn’t until I got to the chorus at the very end of the song that I understood what this was all about, and from there I went backwards and changed and omitted some of the clunky stuff. What’s nice is if the lyric is driving the song, it can help inform edits in the overall form and structure, which tends to leave the best music in and sloughs off some of the crap.
I didn’t have a general theme for Nineteen/Twenty in the lyrics, but in retrospect it’s easy for me to see how some of the recurring themes subconsciously emerged throughout the lyrics. The idea of arriving at the end of the journey with unresolved crimes of conscience, or reaching the end of an arc and being forced with a choice that might be the last choice you ever get to make…these are songs that remind us to fix what we can fix, let go of what we cannot, and when it’s time, roll the dice with reckless abandon.
Q: What else should we know about your music?
A: Most of the sounds on this album were made by human hands on real instruments; but, interestingly, more synthesizers appear on this album than on any Run Downhill album previously. I took some interesting approaches to recording drums that I had always imagined but never tried until I was faced with the time limit imposed by the SADFAM format of finishing and uploading a fresh song every day; there wasn’t time to set up a full kit in my small studio every day, nor could I allocate a single day to tracking all the drum parts to a dozen songs. My solution was to split up the drum set in Bass Drum/Ride Cymbal, and Snare Drum/Crash Cymbal, and perform these in two separate passes. It made for a very interesting touch and sonic imprint, especially when the big Concert Bass Drum does its thing…it’s an approach I have used again, but it has become a “signature” of sorts, and as such, I have to be careful not to overuse it.
This album took the longest to produce, more than any album I’ve worked on in the past. I ran into several roadblocks along the way…burned through three computers, several filthy fader pots on my mixing board that would not come clean during mixing, broken drums, and the demands of life and where duty and obligation call…plus the comic videos took an enormous amount of time to compile artwork, edit videos, render and upload, etc, it was all time-consuming, but I am very proud of the final product and would not have done it any other way. Things take time, especially if they are to be done right, and I think I got most of this one right.
Music is a full-time endeavor for me, and I still feel like I’m learning and growing everyday. This music is made in pursuit of the truth, about accepting the world for what it is and holding on to what’s good in it. I hope you enjoy this music, I hope you listen to it many times, and I hope it resonates in a meaningful way; I take great inspiration in the making of it, and I hope it brings joy and meaning to your life as well.
Thanks so much for letting me share a bit of my world with you.