Features

Jackie Greene: Boy Wonder Grows Up

Jackie Greene’s new album, Till the Light Comes, is going to surprise a few people. The songwriting is, as you might expect, uniformly strong, freely moving from the personal to the more opaque, often within the same song—or even the same line. Over the course of six albums, Greene has established himself as a first-rate singer, capable of delivering wispy ballads, uptempo rockers or deep blues with equal authority, so the quality and diversity of his lead vocals is to be expected, too. No, what’s most different about Till the Light Comes is the overall sound of the album, which leans heavily in a ’60s psychedelic pop direction. There are glistening harmonies that recall The Beatles, Byrds, Beach Boys and other groups, rockin’ Rickenbacker (and a million other) guitars, Mellotron, swirling B-3 organ, even electric sitar! Greene’s previous two Steve Berlin-produced albums— American Myth and Giving Up the Ghost —certainly had their share of adventurous sonic touches, but nothing quite like this.

I sat down with Greene in the control room of his Mission Bells recording studio in San Francisco for a far-reaching interview about the album, his deep creative connection to Tim Bluhm of The Mother Hips, the influence of his tenure with Phil Lesh & Friends on his current music, and how his ever-increasing fame is affecting him.

Several nuggets from this interview appear in the July ’10 issue of Relix, but we thought his rabid fan base might enjoy seeing (nearly) the whole interview in the relix.com exclusive.

Tell me about how work on Giving Up the Ghost and the way tunes from that album evolved over the last couple of years affected how you worked on this new album?

One of the main differences is the last record was done in pieces in many different studios and with different players, so there was an element of… unrest, maybe. It ended up being fine—I’m pleased with it—but this one was all done here, top to bottom. And the other thing I really like about it is it’s like a record that was made between friends—like what you saw when you arrived and Tim [Bluhm] and I were having lunch? That’s sort of how the record was made. It’s Tim and me and/or Dave [Simon-Baker, engineer/singer] and the drummer and the bass player from the Mother Hips, and the guys from my band, and that’s pretty much the guys on the record—all the guys who play on it are people I know well personally. So it was really comfortable.

As far as playing the songs from the last album live, there’s always a sort of after-the-fact evolution of songs, some songs more than others.

Like “Animal” is a song that seems to have developed and gotten richer since you recorded it.

“Animal” is a good example. A lot of it is just understanding where you can take chances with something. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it isn’t. And some songs, just by the nature of the song, aren’t really going to change that much.

These new songs we haven’t really played a lot of them live yet, on purpose because… Well, for one thing it’s such a different set of tunes for me that I didn’t want them to get out on the Internet right away. I wanted people to be surprised by them when the record came out. It’s a sort of Old School thinking that I don’t necessarily always subscribe to, but it was important for me because we put a lot of effort into making these the definitive versions of these songs. There are only a few songs we’ve played live. We’re saving some of them.

What inspired the production direction, which some might call “psych pop”—it has a lot of that Beatle-y, ’60s-ish vibe?

The paradigm is really ’60s San Francisco bands. We’re here, we made it in San Francisco…

Really? It sounds more British to me.

[Laughs] Okay, that’s cool, too! I love that stuff! But there’s a definite influence from playing in Phil’s band and taking some chances and realizing I can do whatever I want to do and nobody’s telling me I can’t. Like, I can have an outro that’s different from the rest of the song. You can’t be afraid. The psychedelic stuff is where my mind has been going a little bit lately, largely due to Grateful Dead influence.

But to answer your question, the production is out of necessity, doing it here, and also Tim was involved in co-writing about half the songs, so it’s a record we really did together and it has that influence.

It still sounds like you.

Right, I’m not saying it sounds like a Grateful Dead record.

There’s only one moment on the record where I even thought of the Grateful Dead and that’s on the little guitar solo on the outro of “Holy Land,” which is kind of unexpected. It sort of skips along at a Garcia-ish tempo and gait.

That’s all done by design because that’s what it wanted to be. There are a bunch of tunes on there that have odd outros. I don’t know what the musical term for that is…

I’d call it a coda, because they’re all so different than the main song that precedes them. When I was listening to the coda on “Til the Light Comes,” I thought of “Layla.” But then, there’s a noble tradition of codas in rock, from “Hey Jude” to Donovan’s “Atlantis.”

“Layla” is definitely the paradigm for that sort of thing to me. I thought, “How do I get it in there?” Oh, I just cut it in! [Laughs]. I’ve always been attracted to music like that because it paints a sort of grander picture. It’s just something I’m into right now. Who knows—next year it might be two-minute pop songs.