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Q&A with Birds of Chicago’s JT Nero and Allison Russell
Real Midnight, the Joe Henry-produced sophomore album from Birds of Chicago, is set for release February 19. The band recorded the album with Henry (Solomon Burke, Bettye Lavette, Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris, Carolina Chocolate Drops) in Los Angeles at Henry’s own Garfield House studio. The result is an elemental, spiritual type of rock-n-roll.
The album features 11 tracks written and performed by Allison Russell and JT Nero. Nero is the group’s chief songwriter, with Russell taking most of the vocal turns.
People often compare your brand of rock and roll – and rock and roll poetry – to gospel. I have heard your music actually described as “secular gospel.” What does that mean to you?
JT Nero: Our music is very elemental – sun, wind, rain, bitter tears, love, joy. We write it to “save” ourselves and don’t shrink from the idea that it can “save” other people…though we don’t mean that in a religious sense. We are a band full of severely lapsed Lutherans, accidental Buddhists, vaguely hopeful whatevers. I just believe – on a gut level – that words and music together heal and transform like nothing else in this life.
But not just any words…
JT: Well what rock and roll poetry means to me, as opposed to any other kind of writing, is that it’s for the people. We are writing songs for everybody to sing – and I don’t mean dumbed down, I just mean elemental and universal…streamlined. When Sam Cooke sings,
“it might be 1 o’clock and it might be 3/time to don’t mean that much to me/I ain’t felt this good in I don’t know when/and I might not feel this good again”
That’s poetry to me. There’s some awful heavy stuff in those lines, but this is one of the great party songs of all time! And you just gotta sing along.
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Allison Russell: That’s where I feel a connection between JT’s songs and gospel. In great gospel, you just have to sing the words. I mean, “Go tell it on the mountain/Over the hills and everywhere.”
Don’t you just want to sing those syllables? It just feels so good coming off your tongue. It all starts there, words and the way they feel – Sam Cooke knew that, Van Morrison knows that, Lucinda Williams knows that, JT knows it.
Oh! Young lovers/lyin’ on the trestle Down through the tracks/swollen river hold it there baby/don’t move a muscle c’mon do you love me?/God I love you Reverberation/another train comin’ Gotta get movin’ gotta get movin’ I don’t wanna/I don’t wanna she said “come on babe, it’s time to go” -“Time and Times”
Allison, you were the primary writer in your previous band, Po’ Girl, yet you let JT handle most of the writing for this project. How did that come to be?
Allison: JT just spits them out a whole lot faster than I do. He did, even before I had a baby (laughs). And now, well...But truly, one of the main allures of this project was the chance to be a real interpreter of songs of a writer of JT’s caliber. So to be digging into words that I know he wrote for me to sing, that’s a thrill and a challenge. Also, I love singing with him. JT downplays his singing, but I love it, and along with Michelle McGrath, who came in and sang those high harmonies, we get some arrangements going that scratch my Staple Singers, gospel harmony itch.
JT: When she does pick up the pen, she sharpens it first (laughs). Barley (Allison’s song) is right at the heart of this record—a crusher every time she sings it. It could have been written a couple centuries ago, but it doesn’t feel like some sort of retro exercise.
What was working with Joe Henry like?
JT: Joe’s a hero of ours. He has been building righteous spaces for great singers for quite some time—I mean, Solomon Burke, Bettye Lavette, Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris, Rhiannon Giddens and the Carolina Chocolate Drops. It’s a scary thing going in to work with someone you admire greatly. In the most essential way, you are set up for some sort of disappointment...Joe blew it all out of the water.
Allison: Joe’s not there to slap the “Joe Henry Sound” on anybody. He’s all about excavating the precious thing, the beating heart of any one song, and making sure nothing clutters up that main line between whatever that essence is and the listener.
JT: Joe and his usual suspects, especially Ryan Freeland (engineer) Jay Bellerose (drums) are just a tribe of monstrously talented men with huge hearts and a serious love of music making. They disappear,with seemingly no effort, so many of the impediments we create to keep us from making the music in our minds. When we step into a studio it’s the song and nothing else. Those guys let you go all the way in and get it. We came out to L.A. with our band, our family, and everybody just fell in like old school pals. Nobody wanted the week to end.
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This project got its start when you, JT, started writing songs specifically for Allison to sing, correct?
JT: True. Duets for us, and lyrical set-pieces just for her. A singer on Alli’s level gives me a certain freedom to really go for broke in terms of the emotional scale/scope of a given tune. I mean, Alli could sing me a real estate brochure and those words would spring back to life for me like I’d never ‘em before. “Beachfront access? Split level, two bedroom with hardwood floors??” OH MY GOD! Seriously, though, a singer of Allison’s caliber and depth just really widens the strike zone for a songwriter, lets me take a stab at some things I know I wouldn’t try on my own.
JT, your songs often feel like collages of connected images, vignettes, or moments as opposed to classic storytelling. Is that a conscious choice? Can you talk about that a bit?
JT: It’s not so much that I don’t want to tell a story or let a story emerge, but it doesn’t usually happen for me in a linear way. I am digging for those underground rivers of feelings we all have. Memory is a big part of that. We don’t remember things—or I don’t anyway—in a clear way. It’s a tangle of images, fragments of moments, sensations, that have great power.
Allison: One of the things I love is seeing a glimpse—a caught moment, a fragment—but seeing so much. It’s like a painter who seems to be able to give you so much info about a person’s pathos/personality with just a couple of quick strokes.
Well his mind was bright, but his body played tricks Would not be long before it flat out quit Chopsticks in a bag of old leather Alone in his room with the ghost of past summers He can see her now he can see her now Sunlight through her camisole One hand over her eye to block the sun Waiting by the window for her only one —“Remember Wild Horses”
Allison: An old man, body failing, alone with only his memories, these fragments that persist and hang on in our minds. This is the kind of thing that drew me to these songs and this project in the first place.
What does Real Midnight mean to you?
JT: Well, it’s why anybody ever sang anything. I know I am going to die, but I don’t want to die. I’m so alone. I am not alone. Love is enough. Love is not enough. It’s all for nothing, it’s not all for nothing...
Don’t we all just pinball between those fixed points? Music is a way of processing that riot of consciousness without going completely nuts. That’s all it’s ever been for me, so that’s what I try to reflect back with the voices in these songs.
For more information, contact Jimmy Rhine - [email protected]
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