The Wingdale Community Singers are nothing if not an accomplished amalgam of diverse talent. Singer/songwriter Hannah Marcus is a powerful vocalist and lyricist with an impressive catalog of solo recordings that feature collaborations with the likes of Mark Kozelek of Red House Painters, and Tim Mooney of American Music Club. Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Nina Katchadourian is perhaps best known for her work as a visual and conceptual artist, but also has released an album of her own, The Marfa Jingles, inspired by area businesses in small town Marfa, Texas. Avant virtuoso guitarist and songwriter David Grubbs was a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro and Gastr del Sol, to say nothing of his prolific solo career and his various and sundry exploits as a cultural critic and college professor. Songwriter and vocalist Rick Moody, meanwhile, is also a celebrated author and one of the preeminent literary voices of his generation.
Perhaps such a diverse portfolio has allowed the Wingdales to undertake creative collaboration where ego is clearly not an issue. Spirit Duplicator features fifteen original songs (and one Carter Family cover), two of which are written by Katchadourian, three by Moody, four by Marcus, and five by Marcus and Moody. Each of the four Wingdales performs on every song on the record (with no shortage of guest artists adding to it as well) and every voice gets heard. The Wingdales sat down with The L Magazine after a rainy Saturday night practice to discuss the new record, old timey traditions, and how it's possible to make Appalachian folk music in a Brooklyn walk-up.
The L: When you guys talk about feeling a sort of identification with old-timey music and the related feeling of community, what does that mean to you, in an aesthetic sense? I mean, the Carter Family, who you guys cover on the album and cite as an inspiration, what do you suppose they would make of the music you are making now?
[laughter]
David: It's an interesting question but kind of an incomprehensible one. You know, I can't imagine what the Carter family would make of...
Nina: Hopefully they'd sing along, which is sort of the point in a way. I feel like we come out of that tradition of kind of...
David: Parlor music...
Nina: Yeah. Yeah. And it's Brooklyn and it's not the front porch of a house in the mountains. And we're not pretending that it is and not even wanting it to be. It's sort of that mode but brought into an urban city life of people who are busy with lots of different things and do this together once in a while and really care about it.
David: It's one bedroom apartment music.
Nina: Right, right.
Rick: Dave remarked at one time that we're not purists, we're impurists. In a way that really describes the paradox of trying to make music that has an old-timey influence or reverence for music of the past with the acknowledgement that it can't really be done. That frankly, it can't be done anymore. That would seem to be the predicament that we're in and once you recognize that it can't be done anymore you're free—you're in a post-historical environment and you're free to do what you like. I think this record is a better example of feeling the liberty of wandering around in genres locked into this ahistorical obsession of trying to duplicate old time music, which is where I think the title comes from.
The L: It's interesting, because while you pay tribute to the extraordinary accomplishments and traditions of music like the Carter Family and the Louvin Brothers, the sociological and political sentiments you express would have been anathema in Bristol, Tennessee in 1945. I wonder a lot about the interesting and fundamental tension between this reverence for old timey music and the cultural gulf that exists between the original purveyors and the revivalists. I mean the Louvins might have loved your music, but felt absolutely certain that you were going to hell.
[laughter]
David: Yeah, I don't think the Carter Family would have been approving of the explicitly pro-choice line of the Wingdale Community Singers...
David: ...but I guess there are limits to our reverence.
Rick: Well, for sure. I mean, I think that is what's interesting. I mean, it'd be fun to sort of go back and try and duplicate these songs, but even in the folk revival—if you look at Holy Modal Rounders for example, those guys knew all that old music but even then it had a postmodern...
David: ...an irreverent cast.
Rick: Yeah... a postmodern spin on it. So the idea that you could sort of duplicate music made in the Appalachians in New York City is faulty from the outset, and if it is faulty then why not take the song forms and the song structures and apply your own observations to it? The L: What distinctions come to mind when you think of the differences between folk and pop music?
David: Folk music is changing slowly over time...
Hannah: Folk music is changing slowly over time, right, and it's transmitted from person to person orally; and pop music changes fast and is transmitted through...
David: Mass media.
The L: Are you entirely comfortable, and I mean, I don't have an opinion on this, so this is a very objective question: but are you entirely comfortable with reproducing the idiom of the Louvin Brothers or the Carter Family?
David: We're incapable of reproducing...
Hannah: But the thing is, what I would actually think the Carter Family would say if they heard us is that we're not doing it very well; the truth is, we're doing it super sloppily. So that's probably what they would say. You know they sing every day, every morning together, every night, every... I think we've gotten damned good actually, but...
Rick: That's the other thing, see, I would make a distinction between what we are doing and the sort of indie rock model of doing this, and to me the indie rock model has run out of steam, you know, and by and large they aren't looking at this music... or I guess people in their twenties aren't looking at this music the way that you look at it, I guess, when you've been listening it to it longer or something. And I think you know while I would say you can't reproduce this form, at the same time one thing that we are trying to do or have tried to do is make the singing tight enough that it aspires to some of the cleanliness of some of that earlier music... you know, a sort of professionalism about the rendering, especially in the harmonies, and that's unusual. Not that many people are trying to do that now; I can't think of a band that's trying to do harmonies in exactly the same way.
Nina: Since I came into this a little more recently, it's never felt to me, ever, like anyone has sort of brought a song to the table, with the idea that there was so much concept around it really, like somehow the way we're talking about it makes it seem like there's this concept and now we're going to fit things into it. We never actually frankly discuss this, it happens in a very natural way... It's almost like once brought here, theses go through the Wingdales filter and the Wingdales filter is sort of all these things, but I don't think of this at all as a concept-driven project—at all.
Hannah: We sort of started out with a concept...
Rick: Especially now with this record...
Nina: That's what so interesting to hear you guys talk about, because I've never even—I mean having not been part of it then, it's so not part of my own experience of this but...
David: ...said the conceptual artist turned accordionist.
Nina: [laughs] I mean, I got plenty of concept in the rest of my life, I don't need any of it here.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, once the songs become the program, then you can't really be conceptual anymore because you have to serve the songs.
Nina: I think we've also gotten better at knowing kind of what it is that we do well together and there are songs that lend themselves very well now to a Wingdales treatment. The two songs I contributed to this record are really old songs. I wrote them 15 years ago, you know, and it was this kind of funny thing that they got unearthed and they had this kind of new life here that was very exciting.
The L: You presented them to the others, Nina, and then how did they evolve?
Nina: I don't remember with 'Pofilia,' I remember with 'Aviary,' playing it for you [Moody] and being like, 'I kinda think there's something to this song, I wrote it a long time ago but something's not quite right. I don't think I like the guitar part, quite' and then it was sort of kicked around and you [Moody] said 'play less,' I remember that, then we brought it here, David added piano, it yeah... it was sort of, it morphed once it got here. So, I don't know with 'Pofilia' where that... I mean maybe that was sort of more obviously Wingdaley; it's a waltz, there's, you know, opportunity for harmonies...
Rick: There's a sort of rather intense, in my view anyway, intense editorial board of the Wingdales...
Nina: That's true...
Rick: ...and I frequently don't measure up to the editorial board. And the interesting thing is it's not centered in a person, it's actually sort of a band thing, and I think all of us at one time or another have fallen under the lash of...
[laughter]
David: Actually, you've heard of good cop/bad cop... Nina: But in fairness, you (Moody) also bring a tremendous number of things to the table, which... it's sort of like, statistically speaking there are a whole lot of songs, so therefore a whole lot more maybe don't get played than the few that I bring...
David: You have an excellent batting average.
Nina: Yes.
David: No one bats a thousand.
Rick: I make songs like William Burroughs made paintings. Fire the gun and the paint and see what happens, you know.
The L: Do you guys feel like you have a genial, healthy dialogue, because that's a hard thing to accomplish, you know, to say, 'you know this is an excellent song but...'
David: 'But we'll never play it again.' You know, what is healthy?
[laughter]
Rick: No, Hannah and I, you know, are probably the more prolific—at the moment—songwriting team in the band, and she has an incredible bullshit detector capability with my lyrics that's very useful to me.
The L: What do you imagine going forward? Do you imagine a future record that deals with modern ideas? I know you know and have enjoyed 'White Light, White Heat' and 'Metal Machine Music'; is there a Wingdales record that is a noise record? Is that something you could imagine?
Rick: I don't think so, probably...
Nina: But I feel like singing is going to be at the heart of whatever happens next, I mean, we already - you know, writing these set lists for the next few shows? Half of the set list is new stuff since the record. We've got tons of new stuff.
Hannah: Yeah, we've got like four or five new songs, already.
Nina: So, I mean, even thinking about what the new songs are... hmm... I would say more similar to the...
Hannah: They're very harmony based and they're utilizing sort of the fact that we all can and really enjoy singing harmony to sort of explore the more of the... death chant...
[laughter]
The L: I hear a little bit of Fairport Convention in your music and I hear a little bit of the Magarigolds. I don't know if you acknowledge those as influences but they seem true to me. Are there others working that you relate your sort of idiom to or your identity to?
Nina: Working now?
[pause]
[laughter]
David: ...timing the pause... the 45 second pause...
Rick: We all like Leonard Cohen a lot, I mean... but there are only a few...
Hannah: Didn't he just come out with a record now that his ex-girlfriend the Tibetan Buddhist emptied his bank account?
David: I think his manager emptied his bank account...
Rick: ...But there are no harmonies in Leonard Cohen... I mean, I like Fairport a lot, but I don't think there's even that much harmony on the Fairport albums.
Hannah: The Roches?
Nina: I was just going to say, I had a seven-hour drive from Vermont two days ago and I listened to that first Roches record and thought time and time again, every time I hear that, there are these moments that are fantastic; amazing moments of songwriting and singing... that's not exactly what we're doing.
The L: I said that—when I heard your record—I thought you sounded like the Roches, for what that's worth.
Nina: You did? Oh really? That's like the highest praise, that's great to hear, they've been a personal favorite for a long time for me...
Hannah: I always have such trouble coming up with anyone at all... I was listening to 'Sunflower...' and surf stuff...
Rick: Yeah, the Beach Boys certainly, I guess...
Nina: But maybe the more interesting question is what do we all listen to and somehow that filters in here that you would never expect to be a big influence?
Rick: Showtunes...
Hannah: Sweeney Todd, yeah...
Rick: Showtunes, Stephen Sondheim.
The L: So the notion of community...
Nina: Here it is!
The L: Is this something wherein you anticipate all of you reconvening every six months or every year to compare ideas and sort of advance a vision? Is there a future for the Wingdale Community Singers?
Nina: I hope so...
David: I don't know why there wouldn't be...
Nina: Yeah, we already have half a record's worth of new songs...
Hannah: I wasn't sure if there would be actually, like a few months ago, but the fact is, it just seems like there's a de facto future because we just have a bunch of songs that we haven't recorded yet and we're just going to have to do it. It's not like we're going to be touring... that our major label is throwing $150,000 a week at us for a double-decker tour bus and we're like, hanging on by a thread and we've got to perform...
Nina: People sometimes ask me, when I tell them I'm in a band, how often we practice and I'm like, 'you know, this might sound kind of bad, but we don't have a regular practice schedule. When we sort of all come together, I don't know, it's often because there's a show coming up and it becomes a kind of chicken and egg thing of which begets which. Right? Hannah: Yeah. And it is evolving and it will evolve... your [Moody] songwriting has evolved and my—I'm not exactly sure how my songwriting is going to appear in the next iteration... or yours [Grubbs], right? You didn't have a song on the last one; you're going to have to make up for it...
David: Yeah, I have some titles, 'Bad Citizen of Wingdale...'
Rick: There is no such thing as a bad citizen in Wingdale.
David: Yeah, it's a non-citizen membership organization... 'Burrow of Broken Umbrellas'... I've got some ideas...
Nina: What about the famous 'I started to live when my barber died' or whatever that is you guys are always bringing up—I've still never heard it...
Rick: No, That just needs to stay...
Nina: ...as a concept...
Rick: I think that one thing I wanted to say about the question is to me it's of interest that the band can in no way claim any kind of youth culture association. To me that's a great positive. We're absolutely all middle-aged and to me that's revolutionary, it's such a negation in the expanse of pop music that it becomes an affirmation and so in terms of the future... for me the possibility...
David: Old age?
Rick: Yeah, the possibilities are exciting because we're so completely outside of what's appropriate to the sort of pop music thing that we are completely liberated at the same time. We're old people, for god's sakes.
Nina: That's true.
Hannah: Of course if we were in conceptual art, we'd be...
David: ...young people.
Hannah: young, yeah...
Nina: Well, come on...
Rick: If we were mathematicians, we'd be dead.
Hannah: Well, yeah, if we were mathematicians we'd at least be retired...
David: If we were cops we'd be retired...
Rick: If we were sanitation workers we'd be retired... Ok, on that happy note...
The L: I think we've done it!
The Wingdales were then kind enough to play us a very pretty song. Enjoy the video below:
