8 Questions with Nick Jaina

contributor: Ed Thanhouser – June 9, 2009

Nick Jaina is a Hush Records artist known for his street shows and constant touring. His most recent album, A Narrow Way, was recorded completely live in studio.

1. I know from your website that you’ve lived in California, New Orleans, and other places, doing all kinds of things. What finally made you end up in Portland?

I was just circling North America with my (almost) wife at the time, and everything just seemed to lead to Portland. We kept intending to move here, but kept ending up in other cities. At one point we were in a shotgun house in New Orleans, it was early May and already so hot that our dog had rubbed off the hair on his elbows by sprawling on the cool hardwood floors. We looked at each other and said, “I thought we were going to move to Portland?” We packed up a U-Haul, got married in Austin, and were here within a month.

2. What do you like best about the music community here?

It’s a very genuine community. People love each other and have dinner and go camping together. Sure, there’s that initial excitement of, “Oh wow, I’m hanging out with This Famous Indie Musician,” but then it goes away and you just get out your tennis rackets or whatever and hang out like normal people. The music in this community is of a high quality that ruins me for listening to bands from other cities. I go to a site like Daytrotter and look for new music and I find myself just downloading the songs from Portland bands.

3. The music you made previously with Binary Dolls is considerably different than what you’ve been making as Nick Jaina. How did the shift in your songwriting come about?

For me it just comes from what instrument I’m writing on, and what instruments I’m writing for. With Binary Dolls I was playing a Fender Rhodes and we put it through these pedals that twisted the sound around, and I had a lively drummer and an experimental electric guitarist. When you have those elements in place, you don’t write songs about making things right with Jesus. But then for my solo stuff I got back into acoustic guitar and acoustic piano, and that leads to just a certain more American-sounding song. And when I have steady horn players around, I get excited about writing passages for them to take songs to a higher level. When I get insecure about this band’s availabilty for live shows, I start writing songs with more interesting guitar parts for myself so that I can just play them solo and not have twelve bars of me strumming chords and imagining a trumpet solo that isn’t there.

4. What qualities attract you to a given song? That is, what elements do you think make up the best of songs?

I think a song should twist around like a rope swing, taking you on a ride that you weren’t totally expecting. If I’m listening to a song for the first time and I can predict the next chord and what word at the end of the line is going to rhyme with ‘rain’– well, it’s just not that interesting for me. Not that there should be twists just for the sake of twists. It should all emanate as a natural progression, like smoke lilting off someone’s breath. It should have soul, although that word gets a little tainted when Billy Joel starts using it. But really, there’s no point to music if there’s no soul.

Every song communicates something, even if it’s not what the performer thinks they are communicating. Sometime the song is communicating, “I’m nervous up here,” or “I’m insecure about my guitar playing,” or “I really like the blues!” The best songs communicate things that feed the audience, things like, “Things are alright and here’s why,” or “I know you’re hurting and I am too,” or “Just get over yourself and move your shoulders.” Although not with those exact words, of course. Something more subtle than that.

5. What do you enjoy most about being a touring, recording musician?

I enjoy having many different cities feel like home. I enjoy Tuesdays not always being Tuesdays. I enjoy inventing my life three months in advance.

6. As someone who traverses the country regularly, what’s one of the most interesting places you’ve ever been in America?

It’s all pretty interesting, really. If you’re heading east from Dubuque, Iowa, there’s a place in Dickeyville, Wisconsin called The Grotto, which is a large cathedral-like structure made out of a bunch of shiny stones glued together. It reminds me of the place where I got married, which is this cathedral made out of junk in someone’s backyard in Austin, Texas. I appreciate the determination of some people to just keep gluing stuff to the walls to make these beautiful structures. It would probably drive me mad to do something like that, but I guess that’s why I drive around in a van and take pictures of such places. Although, when I look back at the pictures, the places always just look like piles of junk. But when you’re actually there you can see the breath in them and the beauty. So, don’t rely on the photographs. It’s like seeing a dead jellyfish. All the magic is gone. You have to go in person.

7. I overheard someone recently saying that you have the best tour-blog on the internet. I also know (from that blog) that you have some fairly “unorthodox” live performances out on streets etc. What is one of your personal favorite touring experiences?

Well, when you play on the street, you’re just exposed to the city in a unique way, and things happen that will never happen in a gig. And there’s no guarantee that those things will be good or bad. It could be a fire truck or a marching band that completely ends your song, or it could be some magical person that is touched by your presence and wants to contribute. It’s good to be flexible and just keep playing no matter what happens. The best was probably when we were in San Francisco and a team of South Korean photographers asked us if they could place their South Korean supermodel in with our band and take a picture of her holding a maraca while we played. And everyone else who was watching took a photo of the people taking photos of us, and everyone crowded in on the sidewalk at this media event. And right at that moment, a blind man with a cane came walking up the sidewalk, and when his cane touched the horde of photographers his face had the most perplexed expression on it that I’ve ever seen, and I just couldn’t stop laughing.

8. It says on your website that the new album, A Narrow Way, “was played entirely by ten musicians in the same room at the same time, all mixed live to 1/4″ analog tape.” What exactly led you to that decision, and do you think it succeeded in whatever sense you were hoping it would?

It was a long process of trying to find the best way to record the band with all the energy we felt we had at live shows. It was an escalating series of dares, really. First it was just going to be recorded mostly live, and then overdubbing vocals and things. And then it was going to be almost all live. And then I just one day said we should do it ALL live to tape and mix it too and everyone thought I that was a bad idea but they didn’t have the voting power to overthrow me, so that’s what happened. If you ask someone else in the band how it happened, they’d probably have a different account of it. Some people who’ve listened to the album say they wish some of the songs had been more polished, but then other people say they like my older records because the new one is so clean. I just think it was a process that we had to take to a certain conclusion for it all to be complete, like an obsessive compulsive who has to complete certain tasks before they can relax. I believe in having a mantra for a certain project and just taking that as far as you can go, and then doing the next project with a totally different mantra.