Backyard Tire Fire explores roots in 'Places We Lived'

Katjusa Cisar  —  9/12/2008 7:47 am

Home is at the heart of "The Places We Lived," the latest album from roots rockers Backyard Tire Fire. So, it seemed appropriate that lead singer/songwriter Ed Anderson was at home during the following interview, interrupting himself periodically to whistle at his chew-crazy puppy and joke about the showdown between his two cats and the dog in his basement. Because that's just the sort of thing you have time to pay attention to when you're hanging around the house.

Backyard Tire Fire will be in Madison this Friday, Sept. 12, 9:30 p.m. at the Annex, 1206 Regent St.

They're appearing with Ha Ha Tonka and the Blueheels. (Tickets are $8 in advance at www.intheannex.com or $10 at the door.)

The Bloomington, Ill., trio got its start in 2002 in Asheville, N.C., and broke through with their 2007 album "Vagabonds and Hooligans," which got them opening slots and co-bills with Clutch, Lynyrd Skynyrd and William Elliot Whitmore. Their heartfelt songs are influenced by a working-class background and Midwestern sensibility. Joining Anderson on stage at the Annex will be his brother, Matt, on bass; Tim Kramp on drums; and their friend Fish Carpenter filling out the songs on guitar for a studio sound.

Anderson recently spoke with 77 Square about retaining a sense of home on the road, recording albums in analog and getting inspiration from Ben Folds.

Listening to the song "The Places We Lived," I thought you really evoked the Midwestern experience. That line about "pissing in cornfields" -- I thought, "They have to be from the Midwest originally."

Yeah, you got it. My brother and I grew up 30 miles west of Chicago. Once I was married, we moved to the South for six years, to Asheville. It was between Asheville and Athens. I think we only lasted about six months in Athens, and then we decided we needed to get back to the Midwest and our roots.

In light of that title track, where have you lived that had a profound impact on you and shaped who you are?

That song evokes memories of where my brother and I grew up in Illinois, where there were cornfields to our right and cornfields to our left and long afternoons of baseball. That whole song brings back a lot of memories. I think about the exact living room. There's a line in that song, "Dad's cursing at the TV again." I can remember my old man just sitting on the couch in that living room, yelling at the TV. I can remember the guy across the street, Fred the Neighbor, on his John Deere tractor with his mug of Old Style 'cause he had a kegerator in his garage. I can remember my mom telling us when we didn't want to go to church -- 'cause God knows we didn't want to go to church on Sundays -- "How much is it to give one hour a week? One hour!" And guilting us into church. I don't know who's living there now, but I know that we did.

And I started thinking about all the different places I've lived 'cause I've certainly lived like a gypsy at times before I was married and in relationships. I would just live on people's couches or basements or attics. I was on the road so much and traveling that paying rent seemed stupid. You forget about those places. It's weird how those things just become blurred over time; they just go away.

Are there songs from your childhood that have been meaningful to you?

The Beatles -- "Hey Jude," "Let it Be" -- those are songs I remember from my childhood. Doobie Brothers -- "Oh, black water, keep on rolling..." -- Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Rolling Stones, Faces, Rod Stewart, we heard a lot of that stuff growing up. Rock 'n' roll stuff, for the most part. In my 20s, when I was really, really digging jazz, I remember getting my parents a Miles Davis record for Christmas. They weren't getting it. They're rockers, man. That's what they dig. I had two older sisters who were party rockers, you know, AC/DC and Rush. My sister has a Rolling Stones' tongue tattooed on her chest. My older sisters were pretty rowdy. My brother and I remember trying to go to sleep late at night, with our sisters listening to Pink Floyd's "The Wall" in the next room, probably ripping hitters and blowing smoke out the window. (Laughs.) Both of us remember being scared of "The Wall."

How do you find a sense of home when you're on the road?

That little piece of sh-- called the cell phone. But it's what all of us use to maintain our relationships. We all basically maintain our sense of home through the cell phone, which none of us like. We curse those things, but without them, we'd be in trouble. I was on the road enough before there were cell phones, and, you know, there's no contact. We didn't even have a Web site or an e-mail address. There were no computer GPS directions. You know, we were handwriting out directions for 30 venues before a tour. It was all way different and a lot harder. You just really didn't have contact with home for sometimes weeks at a time. Now, we're talking with home several times a day.

Why have you recorded all of your studio albums using analog technology?

We just got attracted to the sound. You can almost feel it. You can almost hear the tape reels rolling, you know? There's a warmth to it that is undeniable. Gosh, these days, the way people make records is really stale and pieced together. There's no soul. A lot of the big hits on the radio, you can tell that they've used things like Auto-Tune to make people's voices sound in tune. And the drum kit doesn't really sound like a drum kit -- it sounds more robotic, because there's no pushes or pulls or pulsating like a human heartbeat.

They've got everything edited to a grid on a computer and they've cut and pasted everything to match up exactly so it's perfectly in time. It's just takes the life out of the music. The whole idea is to get in there and play together and not to cut and paste things until it sounds like you're a good band.

We've worked really hard to not let that happen. We actually set up in a room together and play and get a good take to work with. Then we start working off that. We use studio trickery -- it's not like everything's recorded live.

Once you get that skeleton of a song where you have a good drum and bass track, maybe guitar and keys, then you become like a painter with an open canvas. You can just pepper the song with sounds much the same way the way a painter can pepper a canvas with different colors. We always talk about colors and sounds being kind of similar.

(Co-producer) Tony (Sanfilippo) and I are very much record junkies. I'll sit and read how many takes it took George Harrison to get the guitar solo on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Once we've got those first good takes down where the rhythm section sounds really good, (the other guys) will get cut loose and go watch Cubs games while Tony and I get down and dirty and deep into these songs.

The amount of money we spend on records is minuscule, really, compared to what people pay to make albums when they hire big-name producers. So, we make our albums in our little studio in our little town. And you know what? I like the way the records are sounding. They don't sound like anybody else; they sound like us.

How did you create some of the percussive sounds on this record?

We created this loop using nonmusical, random objects we were able to find around the studio. We took a mic stand and an empty reel of tape and scraped the two up against one another, and that sounded really cool. We turned 'em into this percussive loop that kind of sounds likes an assembly line or factory. It's throughout this song called "Welcome to the Factory," which is about when I used to work in this assembly line in a factory. It works. It's kind of Pink Floyd-ish.

We'll try to make things coincide. There's this song on the record called "Time With You," and it's a conversation that I had with my wife. We were on opposite ends of the country, and it was one of those conversations that just sucked. I hadn't been home in a long time. I wrote this tune right after the conversation and it's from her perspective:

"I know you gotta do what you gotta do, but I just want to pick your brain for a minute or two." There's this middle section that's just absolute chaos where I just started pounding on the f---ing piano in the studio, not playing real chords or anything like that. Real dissonant, weird, strange stuff over this really tight rhythm section. That really was meant to reflect the way I was feeling on the inside after that conversation.

Yeah, Ben Folds does stuff like that.

Oh, Ben Folds is one of my favorites. That guy's a genius. That guy can wrap a crowd around his finger as good as anybody. Seriously, when he starts conducting the crowd, um, it's just amazing. We played a festival this last spring in Florida in the Everglades called Langerado, and Ben Folds was one of the main things I wanted to see -- Beastie Boys, R.E.M. and Ben Folds. There's a little bit of a cheese factor, but I like it, you know? Cheesy in a way where he doesn't take himself too seriously. Supposedly his bass player is a fan of our band.

I heard Ben Folds Five is getting back together for a show this fall.

That'd be great. That original lineup was amazing. All those guys could play jazz, they could play heavy, heavy stuff, poppy stuff, Middle Eastern stuff. The songwriting is just fantastic. I actually think I was a little bit inspired to pick up and start writing on piano from him. I've really only played piano for just a couple of years here, and I mainly just use it as a writing tool.

How is it different to write songs on a piano than on a guitar?

Well, I've been playing guitar for so long -- I'm 36 and I started when I was about 16, so that's a long time. You end up wanting to shoehorn things in there that don't need to go in because you've learned a lot and, you know, you want to show your chops off. I think I've grown up enough not to do that. But I've noticed that when I write on piano, I just write much simpler songs. Real simple, three-chord stuff. I say simple, but there's nothing simple about writing a simple song, really. You want to add things in, you want to do more.

Katjusa Cisar  —  9/12/2008 7:47 am