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Jesse Thorn: Hey folks, welcome to “The Sound of Young America” live on tape from my house. It’s a public radio show about things that are awesome. On this weeks program we ask ourselves “What does it mean to be ‘indie’?” Two quests on the show. The first one, Bill Plympton, is a twice Oscar nominated animator who’s made a number of both short and feature length animated films which have played all over the world. He literally draws every frame of his films himself, a truly remarkable feat. We talked with him about why he runs his studio completely independently and what it means to him. Also coming up on the show Doug Martsch talks to us about his long career in music. He’s best known as the front man of the Built to Spill who revolutionized alternative rock and had a strong hand in creating what is now known as “Indie Rock”. We’ll talk with him about being independent and how he never supported himself with music until he signed to Warner Brothers. That’s all to come on “The Sound of Young America” here on The Sound of Young America Audio Entertainment Network all across the world via the power of podcasting at maximumfun.org and on the radio in a few little college towns. We’ll be back in just a minute with Bill Plympton.

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Jesse Thorn: You’re listening to “The Sound of Young America”. I’m Jesse Thorn, America’s Radio Sweetheart. My guest, Bill Plympton, is a noted cartoonist. He’s made a number of feature films as well as many, many super popular short films, several of which have been nominated for Oscars. Bill, welcome to “The Sound of Young America”. How are you?

Bill Plympton: Thank you. I’m very fine. I’m happy that you’re interviewing me because there’s lots to talk about.

Jesse Thorn: There you go. That’s what I like to hear. Hit the ground running, Bill.

Bill Plympton: Yes.

Jesse Thorn: I want to talk to you about the sort of the arc of your career or the span of your career, the scope of your career. You’ve been independent throughout all of it, and I wonder what does it mean to you or what is the value to you of operating you know owning and running your own shop.

Bill Plympton: Well that’s a good question because I think it’s an issue that every artist or animator has to deal with. And there’s good things and bad things on both sides. I think if you’re starting out it might be a good idea to work for a company, a big company, and get some security, put some money in the bank, learn more of the programs, learn a lot of the techniques of how to survive in the rough business world. And then if you feel confident, you want to try it as an independent, then I think that’s fine. I started out as an illustrator and so I did have some money in the bank when I started doing independent films. And so I was able to survive for the first year or two on my savings. But the great thing about it is you get up every morning. You have no one to answer to. You can do whatever you want. You can do as weird and wild as you want and no one’s going to say, “Oh that’s bad taste,” or “That’s not going to sell.” And you know certainly I’m not a rich person. I’m not making a lot of money. I don’t have a lot of security, but for me the freedom is more important than the security. And that’s why I chose to be independent.

Jesse Thorn: Tell me about the beginnings of your career. You worked as an illustrator, as you mentioned, and also as a cartoonist. But as I understand it, your goal was always to work in animation.

Bill Plympton: Yes. Ever since I was about three or four years old and I first saw animation on TV, I fell in love with it and that’s, I think it was Daffy Duck who I saw, and that’s what I really wanted to do. I wanted to do that kind of art form. And when I got out of college, which was in the early 70s, animation was pretty much dead. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to build up my chops, my drawing chops, and do illustrations and caricatures and political cartoons. So that’s how I survived the first ten fifteen years before animation kicked in. I think it was like the mid-80s when animation started becoming popular again with things like the MTV, Japanese anime, Roger Rabbit, “The Simpsons”. All these sort of this confluence of all these art forms sort of hit at the same time, and all of a sudden you could make a living doing animation. So it was really, thank God it came back and I was able to make money doing animation.

Jesse Thorn: Were you thinking about it for, I mean that’s a long time before the mid-80s in your career. Were you thinking about doing animation that whole time or planning or scheming?

Bill Plympton: Yeah I was. I was always trying. I did a couple of films. In fact, this “Plymptoons” DVD that we’re promoting has some stuff that I did in college that I just found by accident. I had forgotten all about it and I found some 16mm prints of these of this early animation. It’s pretty bad, but I decided to include it simply because it shows my progress and it shows that if you’re a really terrible animator there’s room to get better. [laughs]

Jesse Thorn: You had.

Bill Plympton: The sound is also equally bad, but that was added later on. So it’s very interesting to see the progress of my talents.

Jesse Thorn: You kind of had some you had some significant success sort of right off the bat in the mid-80s with your first with your first couple of shorts. Tell me about what that was like after kind of thinking about it but not actually successfully doing it for the previous you know ten years or so.

Bill Plympton: Yeah well you know the first real showable film I did was I think 1985 and it was called “Boomtown” and it was financed and written by somebody else. I just did the animation and directed it. And the film sort of introduced me to the world of animation, the film festivals, the distributors, you know, selling the film to TV and becoming meeting your fans. So I was really inspired by that to make my own film. That was a film called “Your Face”, and basically it’s just me doodling, just sort of picking up this guy’s face and seeing how many weird things I could do with that head. And it’s just you know I really believe in day that daydreaming is very good. I remember in school I used to daydream a lot. That’s what this film was about, just me sort of daydreaming what would happen if this head started doing these weird things. And it just took off. I really can’t explain why. It’s a quirky film. It’s a bizarre film. The song is pretty good, but it’s not really like a Warner Brothers or Disney short. It’s just kind of this these doodles. And people responded to the doodles. They thought it was really good and low and behold it was nominated for an Oscar. So it was really my intro entrée rather into the world of independent animation.

Jesse Thorn: “Your Face” is one of a significant portion of your films that involve sort of contortions and sort of body mashing and strange sort of flights of fancy related to the body.

Bill Plympton: Right.

Jesse Thorn: What do you think is the appeal of that for you?

Bill Plympton: Well, for me personally it’s I find that surrealism is a wonderful source of humor. In fact, I think it’s the primary source of humor. So cartoons like “The Simpsons” or “South Park” which are you know very successful deal with verbal humor and I want to deal with visual humor. And so for me visual humor is taking surrealism to its ultimate distortion to places that it’s never been before to show visuals that you’ve never seen before. And that’s why I think people watch it is because they’re going to see something totally bizarre totally twisted that they’ve never seen before. And that’s what movies should be. They should be fresh and different and exciting and different. And I’m exploring the surrealism of the body and that’s where I find a lot of my humor.

Jesse Thorn: Do you think that part of the appeal for audiences for your films that are more kind of bizarre and off the wall and surreal come from your visual style which is very much based in basically pencil drawings and sketches that feel very, very personal?

Bill Plympton: Absolutely. In fact, some of the my favorite animations from someone like Winsor McCay who was the ultimate surrealist cartoonist and the Warner Brothers stuff you know Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck especially people like Tex Avery and Bob Clampett really stretched the limits of surrealism. And in fact that’s why they’re loved so much in France and by a lot of the high class critic cultural critics is because they take the surrealism and push it so far that is does become a new art form. And I think that’s where a lot of my audience is is not necessarily just the lowbrow but also the highbrow, the people who really love seeing weird different things.

Jesse Thorn: You’re listening to “The Sound of Young America”. My guest is animator Bill Plympton. You’ve always drawn all of your own work, which in the field of animation is kind of a monumental undertaking. I mean, Matt Groening certainly doesn’t draw every cell of “The Simpsons”. You know what I mean.

Bill Plympton: mm-hm.

Jesse Thorn: Why do that? Why not just you know send make some storyboards and send them out to you know a factory in Korea or something?

Bill Plympton: Well, first of all, it’s too expensive. I’d rather just do the drawings myself. That’s the fun part, doing the drawings. But also, Matt Groening is this is a major corporation. It’s a huge budget for these things, like a million dollars for each show, and I just don’t have that kind of budget. So there’s two reasons. One is the economic reason and the number two is the pleasure. I just love doing the drawings. For me that’s the pleasure is making the drawings, and I don’t want to let someone else have the fun.

Jesse Thorn: [laughs] I hear that. Tell me little bit you worked so much in the short form earlier on in your career and that’s a lot of what’s compiled on this “Plymptoons” DVD.

Bill Plympton: Right.

Jesse Thorn: But more recently and not all that recently but you know the past five or ten years you’ve moved into feature length animation.

Bill Plympton: Right.

Jesse Thorn: What are the what are the different challenges that making a feature length animated film give you?

Bill Plympton: Well one of the hugest challenges, I’m up against the big boys you know? Dreamworks and Disney and Fox and Sony. So it’s really hard to compete with those people because they spend so much money on their on their films that it’s there’s no way I can get that kind of distribution or publicity. So I find that my films are not really taken seriously. Also a lot of the animated feature films that you see from these people are for kids and my films are generally not for children. There’s a lot of adult themes. There’s a lot of sex. There’s very violent sequences. And so a lot of the distributors stay away from me because they don’t really believe that there is a market for animated feature films that only appeal to adults. I, of course, disagree and I think that eventually distributors will find that out. But I’ve found that my films get much better distribution in Europe than they do in the US just because I think the audience is a little more sophisticated over there in terms of humor and animated feature films that deal with adult theme. So I’m hoping it’ll change and you know my stuff does all right on DVD and they’ll show occasionally in movie theatres. But it’s just really hard to compete with the big boys.

Jesse Thorn: What about artistically? I mean, many of your many of your short film are basically all of your short films are exceptionally simple and many of them like “Your Face” which you described are just about something kind of just kind of a flight of fancy so to speak. And it’s very difficult to hang 75 minutes or 90 minutes of of movie on a flight of fancy.

Bill Plympton: Right right. Well. I hope that it’s more than just a flight of fancy. There is a story there. There are three or four characters that are featured characters that hopefully the audience will be attracted to and curious about. But a lot of the critique that I get, a lot of the reviewers, they see my film and they compare it to a Pixar and they say “Well, it’s not a tight story. It’s not a well crafted plot and a well crafted story.” And I happen to disagree. I think that you don’t necessarily need a well crafted plot to have a great film. You look at some of the Marx Brothers films or the W.C. Fields films and there’s no real story. There’s no real plot. There’s just humor and that’s the point of the film is to make you laugh. And the point of my film is to make you laugh and show you some crazy gags., you know, something like Mel Brooks or you know “Airplane”. These films were basically a bunch of gags and they did quite well and that’s what I’m going for. But somehow the critics always compare me to Pixar and say my story is not as strong as Pixar’s story. And I just it’s very frustrating to hear this.

Jesse Thorn: Is one of the appeals of this for you that it’s so self-contained? I mean, one of the reasons I host a radio show is that you know I couldn’t make a television show by myself, but I can make a radio show by myself.

Bill Plympton: Right yeah yeah yeah.

Jesse Thorn: Is that one of the appeals for you?

Bill Plympton: That’s true definitely. Yeah. I can make the film by myself and that’s it’s really great that’s really cool. And you know it’s like being a painter only I make films. So it’s really a wonderful freedom and to explore ideas and to do wonderful you know just crazy ideas that I came up with. For example, there’s an idea I’m coming up with now. It’s going to be my new short. You get a first here on this. You get a breaking news.

Jesse Thorn: Exclusive.

Bill Plympton: It’s about this pillow, who when people fluff up pillows at night this one pillow is in a hotel. It’s a hotel pillow and people keep fluffing him and he gets he doesn’t like it because he gets it’s like beating him up.

Jesse Thorn:[laughs] Uh-huh

Bill Plympton: So at night while this person is sleeping on the pillow, teeth start growing out of the pillow and he starts eating this person’s head. And so I always thought that was a good nightmare you know the pillows started consuming a person’s head.

Jesse Thorn: [laughs]

Bill Plympton: So that’s going to be the concept behind this new film. “The Head Eating Pillow”. I don’t know what it’s going to be called yet, but watch for it.

Jesse Thorn: It seems like it’s still sort of a never ending struggle to get people to accept at least an American adult animation.

Bill Plympton: It’s stereotyped. Animation in America is stereotyped into a kids stuff. And unfortunately that’s the way it is. I’m hoping that it will change eventually. I’m hoping that you know they grow up, the audiences and the distributors will grow up. I think the audience is there. I just don’t think the distributors realize that there is an audience for that yet. You know my God is Quentin Tarantino. And I want to take the Quentin Tarantino humor and characters and stories and use it for animation. I think that would be very popular and I just wish that the distributors would understand that.

Jesse Thorn: You’re one of the sort pioneers of short form animation on television with your kind of early work with MTV, which in the mid-1980s and through the early 90s was a real animation pioneer.

Bill Plympton: It sure was, yeah.

Jesse Thorn: That’s not so much the case with MTV obviously anymore, but there are other sorts of animation that have and even shorter form animation that have grown to prominence that are for grown-ups in the past five and ten years.

Bill Plympton: Right.

Jesse Thorn: Both on the internet and on you know things like Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” and things like that. Do you follow any of those things? Are there any of those things that are interesting to you?

Bill Plympton: I don’t watch Cartoon Swim. Mostly it’s too late for me. I’m usually in bed by about 10:30 or 11:00, something like that. But I heard that MTV is bringing back animation. They want to do it for MTV2. They want to bring back some animation. And yes the Comedy Channel is showing a lot more animation and it’s starting to become popular again. So I think that it is changing and you know it’s really popular in Europe though. A lot of the Europe stations show tons of animated short films and Asian too show a lot of short animated films. So I think that we’ll be changing soon.

Jesse Thorn: Bill, thank you so much for being on “The Sound of Young America”.

Bill Plympton: My pleasure. Thanks a lot.

Jesse Thorn: Bill Plympton recently released the compilation “Plymptoons” of his earliest short films including the Academy Award nominated “Your Face” and many more. You can find out more about all of Plympton’s work at Plymptoons.com.

You’re listening to “The Sound of Young America”. Still to come Doug Martsch of the band Built to Spill. We’ll be back in just a second.

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Hey it’s me, Jesse. My dad has worked in non-profits for basically his entire life and a big chunk of that was in fund-raising. And when I told him that I was thinking about asking for individual donations on “The Sound of Young America”, he was pretty skeptical about it. Obviously “The Sound of Young America” is not an incorporated non-profit or anything, and we’re not really offering you very much in return for your donation besides good will. You get the show one way or the other for free. But I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all the people who have subscribed financially for proving my dad wrong. The money that you’ve donated has made a huge difference to this show. It allowed us to print the stickers and make the Maximum Fun Club cards and send stuff out to people and buy equipment that we needed and pay for our web hosting and pay for the huge bandwidth costs and all that stuff. So sincerely and truly thank you from the proverbial bottom of my heart.

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You’re listening to “The Sound of Young America” I’m JESSE THORN, America’s Radio Sweetheart. My guest, Doug Martsch, is the progenitor of the rock and roll band Built To Spill. Their new record is called “You In Reverse”. Doug welcome to “The Sound of Young America”.

Doug Martsch: Thanks.

Jesse Thorn: I want to ask you what you’ve been doing in between records. It’s been a long time since you’ve put out a Built to Spill record, and you did put out a solo record a couple of years ago. But how do you use that time? What do you do?

Doug Martsch: Well, we finished making our last record. We did a little bit of touring and then I kind of just. We decided to take a little time off because we were all kind of burnt out. I was kind of burnt out on just alternative rock music. I was listening to a lot of blues and stuff. And I’d actually made that solo record a coupe years before that because I’d lost interest sort of in what Built To Spill sounded like and similar you know our contemporaries and I wasn’t interested in that kind of music. I was kind of immersed in old blues and other things. So I just decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to be making music if I wasn’t too excited about it.

Jesse Thorn: What was it you think that you got tired of specifically? I mean, what was it that was you know you’ve been in the game a long time. What elements do you think were burned you out?

Doug Martsch: Well I think the main thing that happened is I started listening to some old blues stuff and it really I’ve kind of found some really good stuff for once. You know, I’d always liked aspects of the blues, but I never really knew which stuff was good. And I stumbled across a couple of things that I that really you know resonated with me like Fred McDowell and John Lee Hooker. You know some of the older some things from like the 20s and 30s like you know Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson people like that. And then all of a sudden my whole opinion of music kind of changed. I’d grown up listening to well in my formative years and when I was a teenager I was into punk rock and I was really I liked the idea of people that weren’t very good singers or players but just had good ideas and taking what meager talents they had and turning it into interesting music.

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And then I kind of my whole philosophy kind of changed when I listened to those blues things because they were all kind of playing the same song over and over again but the magic was how they played and how they sang the quality of their voice and the their guitar technique. So all of a sudden, everything I was listening to and you know my own music, I’d kind of been sort of losing interest in alterna- other people’s alternative rock for a while and then I was no longer interested in it at all. I guess that that that’s about it.

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Jesse Thorn: Do you think part of it was about becoming more and more of a grown up? I mean it seems like a lot of people lose a taste for the kind of the intensity of rock music when they get to be in their whatever once they start to really be a grown up

Doug Martsch: Yeah, well I think it had something to do with you know things the people that were making the kind of music that we made. They didn’t really there was no mystery there. There was nothing very compelling. It was like you know talking to my friends or you know. It didn’t the old blues things seemed to be coming from some you know far away place, which they obviously did. And I don’t know I think I tended to romanticize them a little bit. I think when you’re younger part of why you listen to music is to learn about the world. The same reason you watch TV or go to movies or whatever is you’re trying to some degree to sort of find out what it’s all about and what makes people tick and why we’re all here. And you know as you get older you settle into your own philosophies and whatnot and I think that a lot of you know a lot of what you listen to music for changes. You’re no longer looking for you know the what the world means so much. You’re more looking for things that can either really surprise you or you know or things that kind of reflect your own worldview.

Jesse Thorn: A lot of people when they’re younger and especially you know from the time they really become sincerely interested in music when they’re you know an adolescent through sort of their teenage and college years will look to music for their own kind of self identity. Was that the case for you?

Doug Martsch: Absolutely, yeah. I you know that’s how I sort of defined myself was by my musical taste and the people that I wanted to be around. It was important to me that they had similar tastes or at least had a similar kind of passion.

Jesse Thorn: What was the music that you first remember feeling that kind of passionate way about?

Doug Martsch: You know, when I got into high school things like David Bowie was kind of my transitional music from like heavy metal music to basically to punk rock and things like that. When I was that age, I moved from a small town in Idaho to Boise, the bigger town. And REM was just starting and that was a band I felt that way about that kind of you know was important to me at the time and like the Smiths you know. Husker Du was a band that I felt that way about. The Replacements. There’s a lot of them you know. Post-punk alternative bands. SST bands from the mid-80s, late 80s. Dinosaur Jr. was you a band that really had a huge huge impact on me.

Jesse Thorn: What was your social scene like when you were you know in high school in Boise?

Doug Martsch: I was pretty nice. It was when I first moved here it took me a while to meet people, and I spent that time half a year or so my first year of high school kind of alone but that’s when I learned how to play guitar and started writing songs and you know. I just immersed myself in music. And then I was lucky enough to live close enough to downtown to go to Boise High School which was by far the most progressive of the you know high schools in town. And there were a lot of punkers and you know I met a lot of skateboard people and stuff like that and met some people that turned me on to punk rock shows. Through that I met other musicians. Those were really good times.

Jesse Thorn: Were you into that kind of that kind of harder that kind of hard aggressiveness of some traditional punk rock?

Doug Martsch: Yeah sort of. I mean you it kind of I liked part of it. There was a band a local band called State of Confusion that I loved and they were a total hard core band. But there’s a limited amount of those things that I like. I mean I liked the fact that other people didn’t like it as much as anything.

Jesse Thorn: [laughs] You’re listening to “The Sound of Young America”. My guest, Doug Martsch, is the front man and we say proprietor of Built to Spill. Did you was there a point where you decided that you were that you were actually going to be a musician or was it something that you always sort of did kind of as a thing and it didn’t occur to you that it could be the thing?

Doug Martsch: The latter for sure. But you know I definitely focused most of my attention on it. When I was younger I thought I would be an artist and I drew a lot when I was a kid in high school and slowly music became more interesting to me and I found that I. You know, it was just more immediately satisfying. It was more social. And you know just over time I just always assumed I would be making music and always did from high school on. As I got into my 20s my mid-20s and stuff I for the first time I started to think “Well shoot, what am I really going to do with myself?” I knew that I wasn’t going to make a living off of music but I wanted to keep doing it. And I started thinking how I really hadn’t gone to school or anything, and all my jobs were unskilled labor type of jobs. And I started to kind of think “Well maybe I need to start thinking about going to school or do you know my future.” And right around then we kind of stumbled across a record deal.

Jesse Thorn: Did that did that knowledge that you know you would have to you would either have to kind of go really into the music field or get something else going as it were. Was that a motivator? Was that something that started you know pushing the rock down the hill or whatever?

Doug Martsch: Not at all. I mean I was just making records. I just kept plugging away making music because that’s what I liked to do. And I never pushed anything extra hard to try to get a record deal or anything. That honestly just you know we made a record that appealed to some people at some big labels and all of a sudden someone was interested in signing us. But we didn’t you know we didn’t have a manager. We weren’t pushing in that direction at all. We were just happy to have people recording or paying for the recording of our records you know. That was basically my goal was to not have to pay for studio costs out of my own pocket.

Jesse Thorn: Tell me about Built to Spill is a band that that’s deeply associated with the the Northwest sound and you spent some time living up there. What led you up there and what brought you back to Idaho?

Doug Martsch: Well when you live in Idaho, that’s kind of what you do. You go you go to Seattle or maybe you go to Portland or San Francisco but you know at some point we almost all want to get out of here. And the band that I was taking about, that hardcore band when I was in high school State of Confusion, those guys are a few years older than me. By the time I finished high school I kind of I was really good friends with them and their band dissolved and we formed Tree People three of them and me. And then you know one of the one day the drummer decided he wanted to get out of Boise and move up to Seattle and we said “Yeah that sounds like fun.” So we moved up there together.

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Jesse Thorn: What was it like? Was it what you had hoped it would be?

Doug Martsch: It was great. Yeah, it was really exciting. I enjoyed it a lot. It was you know the band was central to our lives. We practiced three or four times a week. And we had bad jobs working at Kinkos or working at you know like one of our jobs like a few of us worked at like the Husky Stadium like cleaning up doing maintenance stuff. Phone survey jobs things like that phone sale. And you know but all the time the focus was on getting the band going. And we were all really lucky. We kind of fell into a couple of scenes that you know we were able to get regular gigs. And you know we had a person in the band who was just sort of a natural leader and a real go-getter who would book us studio time and you know get us shows out of town and you know make T-shirts and that kind of stuff. I was never very I don’t know I I’ve always been sort of intimidated by those things. And so it was really fun it was you know we were doing what we wanted to do.

Jesse Thorn: It’s it seems like you’re kind of disinterested in the sort of go-getter aspects of being in a band which for a lot of people are very important. Is that reasonable to say?

Doug Martsch: Yeah. I mean, that’s just my nature. I think you know I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having that. And sometimes I do. Right now we’re trying to do I have this sort of idea of having some like slides behind the band of of artwork by the artist who did our band’s album cover. And so I’ve been spending weeks just trying to organize it and get it all you know buying DVD players and recorders and figuring it out. So I I do get into some aspects of things but yeah I’m not too interested in I don’t have a very good business mind. I’m not a very organized person. I’m more of a you know just like to make music. But I understand that there’s certain things that have to be done and I’ll do them. But I’m not a I don’t know. I think some people really thrive on on solving those kinds of problems, and I don’t.

Jesse Thorn: Let’s get back a little bit to your your kind of story here. Why why leave Seattle and go back to Boise?

Doug Martsch: Well I came back to Boise. I was enjoying myself in Seattle. I came back to Boise because I got a girlfriend who was finishing school here in Idaho, so I followed her back. And the Tree People, one of the guys had already moved back to Idaho to have a baby. So the band was sort of half here anyway. So I figured it wouldn’t matter if I came back here too.

Jesse Thorn: How did it feel to go back there after having been in the you know I mean Boise’s hardly a tiny place but it’s significantly less bustling sort of place than Seattle.

Doug Martsch: Sure and actually I went to Caldwell which is a tiny place and spent a year there while my girlfriend finished school. But you know I didn’t really mind. I didn’t I would I wherever I live I’m not a real like a social person. I won’t go out to clubs. I wasn’t a bar person. I hardly even would go to very many shows or anything. So I was pretty much fine as long as I had music and you know. I was completely in love and just happy to be with my girlfriend.

Jesse Thorn: Were you supporting yourself with music at that point?

Doug Martsch: No not at all. I never supported myself until Warner Brothers supported me.

Jesse Thorn: [laughs]

Doug Martsch: Up to that point you know we’d make we’d almost make no money on any aspect of it. Play live we’d just pay you know the tour any little tours we had just paid for themselves and we’d kind of have to maybe spend some of our own money. Any recordings we’d done came out of pocket and there was never any return from that. So until Warner Brothers started paying me I was not making any money.

Jesse Thorn: It’s such a huge investment of yourself and not only in the sense that you know. I mean lots of people pursue things that they really love that there’s no money in. But I mean being in a band like that as you kind of described is sort of I mean if you’re going to if you going to make a wholehearted commitment to it it also kind of keeps you from doing other things in your life. Did you ever feel did you ever feel bad that you know you weren’t you know going to computer college or or something like that?

Doug Martsch: No not at all. I mean it was all enjoyable. Calvin Johnson, a friend of mine who runs K Records, he had something interesting to say to me a long time ago. And it was this sort of comparing those “Decline of Western Civilization” movies, you know? There’s the first one about the punkers and the second one about the heavy metal people?

Jesse Thorn: Sure.

Doug Martsch: And there’s this scene in the heavy metal movie where they’re like “Well what are you going to do if you don’t make it?” And they’re like “Oh yeah, we’ll make it.” You know.

Jesse Thorn: [laughs]

Doug Martsch: And that’s just sort of the idea of that movie is like they want to make it. They all want to. But in the first movie no one even mentioned. That’s not even a question. It’s like they’re already making it. They’re doing it. And that’s how I always felt. I never felt like this is just a you know a stepping stone to get me to where I really want to be. I felt like from the first gig we ever played that I was doing what I wanted to do and I was in the middle of making it you know.

Jesse Thorn: Tell me about the circumstances of the beginnings of Built To Spill.

Doug Martsch: Well, Tree People, that the band that I had with those other guys who moved up to Seattle, that broke up somehow for some miscommunications and whatnot. And and then I had a batch of songs I wanted to record while I was living out in Caldwell. And there’s a little studio in Boise that was willing to record it for cheap. And the record label that had put out Tree People’s last record said said they would put out the record. So you know I made that record. And at the time we were like I said we were living in Caldwell and my girlfriend thought that she was going to go to Montana next for more school. So I had decided well I’ll record with a couple of friends here and then when I get to Montana I’ll keep the bands name but I’ll switch line-ups. In fact maybe I’ll just do that all the time and and then we’ll always make different kinds of records and I won’t have the same sort of obligations and sort of family-like ties to people you know intense relationships with people in the band. So that was the original idea of the band. And then we ended up not moving there. We ended up moving to Boise instead. And and we did that for a little while a couple years. I changed line-ups a few times and and then and then I kind of got tired of that for several reasons. One was it was a lot of work teaching people the songs over and over again and they would change so dramatically. It didn’t really appeal to me anymore. Also I found two people I really wanted to play with a be in a band with. And I wanted those people to have a stake in it. And I also wanted to collaborate musically with other people. I didn’t want to just write songs and show them to people anymore. I wanted to have people that wrote their own parts and we could just jam and come up with songs together.

Jesse Thorn: Was there more than just kind of like the logistical appeal of having the different band line-ups? I mean were you were you kind of gun-shy about investing yourself emotionally in a group after sort of a.

Doug Martsch: Exactly. Totally. Yeah. You know the band that I was in, for one thing there were two brothers in the band. And then there was you know one of one of the founding members and one of the other members got in a fight. So we’d had like we were on our third drummer and you know to me it wasn’t the same since we lost our original drummer. And yeah definitely like I said I didn’t want another you know set of relationships that that were that intense.

Jesse Thorn: How did it come to be that you started to feel more comfortable with having real members of the band who were invested in it that way that you were?

Doug Martsch: It was really easy. For one thing, Scotty our drummer lived in in Olympia at the time. Now he lives in Seattle. And and then Bret, the bass player, he had been in the band and he was my he was my best friend from junior high school. When I moved to Boise he stayed in Twin Falls and we kept in touch and we started a band together and we’d visit each other all the time. We were best friends through high school you know even though we lived you know 120 miles away from each other. And so you know he was someone that I knew that I could always play with. He was someone that you know maybe the maybe the person that I clicked with best musically. And also you know a perfectly a person I could completely trust as a human being. So I didn’t have too much trouble wanting to play with those two guys. And and you know I knew that we’d avoid the pitfalls of Tree People because it was it was by nature just going to be way less intense you know. We were all older and we just weren’t you know Tree People we were all kind of really wrapped up in it. It was everyone had was was spending was dedicating so much of their time to it. And I knew that with Built to Spill we weren’t going to practice four times a week you know. We’d have months apart from each other. And so it was just a completely different experience and I didn’t I had no worries at all that it was going to be anything like that.

Jesse Thorn: It’s also kind of a matter of giving away part of the kind of the band’s identity which is so which had been so tied closely tied to you and kind of sharing it with other people. Was that was that hard for you?

Doug Martsch: Oh not at all. That’s I mean I wish that I wish that people would recognize that more you know. It bums me out when people you know I see a review or something and all they talk about is me. And they don’t they don’t seem to understand that it’s not just me you know. It’s definitely a collaboration of a bunch of us. And too with the Tree People, I would like to point out too that I loved being in that band. And I loved the emotional intensity really wasn’t it really didn’t effect me very much. It was more other people dealing with each other. And I had I you know don’t regret any bit of it. I had a blast with those guys. It wasn’t as bad as I probably just made it sound.

Jesse Thorn: [laughs] So your your new record is now practically 15 years into the Built to Spill timeline and certainly 15 years into your timeline as a professional musician. I mean what does it what does it mean to you to be recording a rock record with a wife and a kid and you know as a 100% grown up now?

Doug Martsch: [laughs]

Jesse Thorn: What does it I mean besides the fact that you’ve already made your blues solo album, which I think is a pretty classic move? What does it mean to be recording a rock record now? How is it different from when you were you know 24?

Doug Martsch: Hm. I don’t I don’t really know. I know that right now I’m more excited about music than I’ve been in a long time. You know, maybe since I was 24. You know with music it’s so subjective I would never say that what we’re doing what we’re going to do is better or worse than what we’ve done before because that’s completely a matter of someone’s opinion. I think that I don’t know I’m I’m just glad that I’m excited about it and that there’s still things for me to look forward to in music.

Jesse Thorn: Do you feel like?

Doug Martsch: With the I’m sorry I wanted to say something about the solo record.

Jesse Thorn: Sure.

Doug Martsch: That was something that like I said I got into blues and basically I just wanted to learn how to play the blues a little bit. I wanted to learn that technique, Fred McDowell’s technique of slide guitar with open tuning. And so in order to learn it I just kind of would just practice little licks that I made up because I really didn’t feel like learning actual real songs. So I just kind of had a bunch of little practice little parts. And then after a while they started to grow on me and I kind of strung them together and made song out of them and recorded it. And then three years later maybe we got a different A&R guy at Warner Brothers and he heard it and decided that he wanted to put it out. So it was really kind of not a solo move or solo record. It was just kind of an exercise that turned into a into a record and then got put out. So I don’t I just want to make sure that it’s understood that I wasn’t trying to go solo or do anything other than something I just stumbled across.

Jesse Thorn: You’re about to go out on this gargantuan tour. I think it’s like 50 or 60 dates.

Doug Martsch: It’s actually two tours.

Jesse Thorn: Two tours, okay. Clarify for me.

Doug Martsch: There’s about a month and a half in between them.

Jesse Thorn: Tell me about how you feel about doing that kind of huge you know huge engagement. And you’re doing a number of in a number of big cities you’re playing smaller venues for a number of nights and that kind of thing. How do you feel about doing that having been in the rock and roll world for 20 years? Is it are you tired of it or does it still kind of excite you or how do you feel about it?

Doug Martsch: You know to me just I don’t really even think about it until we go out and do it. And when we go out and do it so far I’ve always been really surprised at how enjoyable it is. Playing live is the funnest part of music. It’s funner than making a record, funner than practicing. It’s funner than sitting there writing a song. Each of those things has its moments. There are moments at practice or writing a song or recording that you’re ecstatic, but mostly they’re not nearly as fun as playing live which has a few down moments but for the moments playing live is a blast. And then traveling is obviously the worst part of it and that’s not so bad. We have a really nice group of people that are in the band and that travel with us, a sound guy and a friend’s going to be along selling shirts. You know just really good friends and you know we have a good time. It’s nice.

Jesse Thorn: So I want to ask you to tell us a little bit about a couple of songs on the new record. Are there any songs on the new record that you’d particularly like to say something about?

Doug Martsch: Hm-mm. No.

Jesse Thorn: Ok well then tell us about I think the single on the record is and I know this kind of the idea of the single on a Built to Spill record is a is a little bit odd with such an album oriented band but. The single on the record is “Conventional Wisdom” right?

Doug Martsch: Yeah.

Jesse Thorn: Tell me a little bit about that record.

Doug Martsch: You know for me music is really about the sound of the music. I’m not I didn’t I don’t make music to get any message across with my words. The words are an afterthought. They’re the last things that happen. And that’s a song that we made up during one of our many jam sessions just Jim started playing that lick that’s at the beginning but it happened to be in a different key and about half that speed. And over the course of a couple minutes I kind of worked out that lead guitar part that starts the song and you know then we changed, like I said, we changed the key and sped it up and turned into that song. And then all the other parts of the song kind of changes from that into several different kind of passages sort of classic rock sounding passages. And those are all based on different jams that we had that we kind of spliced all together. I mean not spliced together. Spliced together in our heads. And you know we it was written and recorded all in one big long thing. And then the lyrics you know the lyrics are kind of they’re mostly nonsense but sort of the main idea of them is this sort of they’re conventional wisdom. To me conventional wisdom is you know what seems like the mainstream media will tell you about you know why things happen and that’s not the way this world is. Those people a lot of conventional wisdom is based on certain people’s interests and I think people should be questioning the conventional wisdom.

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Jesse Thorn: You mentioned writing songs from from the music and the sound side a opposed to the sort of message and lyrical side. I thought it was pretty I thought it was pretty wild that you kick off the new record with just kind of a huge almost a nine minute song. What led you what led you to choose “Goin’ Against Your Mind” to to start things off as opposed to say close things out?

Doug Martsch: You know it was really hard to sequence this record. There just really didn’t seem to be a good starting song. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it’s really hard to sequence a record and this time it seemed especially hard. That really was the only option you know. For some reason that was just the song that seemed to be able to do it. And once the record got sequenced once we did decide that was going to be there a lot of the anxiety that I felt about the record. And you know we worked on it a long time and I had really lost interest and was pretty burnt out. And that kind of made me think that the record might actually be good at all and once once it got sequenced.

Jesse Thorn: Well Doug thank you so much for sharing all this time with us. I know you’ve got a lot of rehearsing to do for this tour.

Doug Martsch: Well thanks for the interview.

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Jesse Thorn: Doug Martsch is the front man of the band Built to Spill. They’re on tour right now with four days next week in San Francisco, four days the week after that in Los Angeles and a date in between in Santo Cruz. You can find out more about their tour schedule and the band at builttospill.com. Their new album is “You In Reverse”.

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Well that’s about all the time we have for this week’s “The Sound of Young America” broadcast. I’ve been your host Jesse Thorn, America’s Radio Sweetheart. The show is produced by Speaking Into Microphones. Theme music from Dan Grayson with some help from myself. Incidental music from DJW. You can always contact “The Sound of Young America”. Just send us an email at splangy@splangy.com. Or you can give us a call 206-984-4FUN. I always welcome your feedback. On next week’s program, Davy Rothbart of Found Magazine. Hey, also we just got some new stickers in. Do you want some? If you do, all you have to do it send an SASE, that’s a self addressed stamped envelope if you’re keeping track, to “The Sound of Young America” 725 Grove St #5, San Francisco, CA 94102. That’s “The Sound of Young America” 725 Grove St #5, San Francisco, CA 94102, and I’ll send you out some absolutely free of charge. We’ll see you next week. Bye-bye.