Front Page Reviews & AIR

Fred Eaglesmith is one of the most prolific songwriters of our time.  His songs range from folk to blues to Americana to bluegrass, though most of his music could be loosely defined as “country.”  But unlike most mainstream country artists, he has managed to stay fiercely independent for his entire 30-year career; comparisons to Steve Earle or Townes Van Zandt are more apt than comparisons to Garth Brooks or Toby Keith.  As these interviews bear out, Fred isn’t interested in the clichés; he’s interested in the music.  And that comes through in his songs too, in their often painful authenticity.  He sounds like someone who’s been there.

I was introduced to Fred Eaglesmith’s music nearly 10 years ago.  It came to me in my post-college years, at a time when a lot of my friends and I were in and out of relationships, going through painful breakups, and doing our best just to cope.  We would sit around each other’s apartments drinking cheap whiskey, smoking cigarettes, listening to sad songs, and trading war stories from the dating trenches.  At some point we dubbed the commiseration of those times “The Pain Train.”  And the music we listened to was a huge part of it, finding songs that expressed our pain better than we could ourselves, songs that felt like they were written about us.

In retrospect, it’s easy to say that those times felt more desperate than they actually were.  But at the time, finding Fred Eaglesmith songs like “Brand New Boy,” “Rodeo Rose,” and “Water in the Fuel” was like meeting a new best friend.  We listened to those tunes over and over again, reveling in the heartbreak until, suddenly and almost surprisingly, we found ourselves on the other side of the worst of it, ready to move on.  I still feel a debt of gratitude to Fred Eaglesmith, and it is satisfyingly appropriate that we’re able to feature him and his music as part of a Mule Variations month dedicated to “music and heartbreak.”  Thank you Fred.

Me:  The theme for this month at Mule Variations is “The Pain Train,” you know, music and heartbreak.  Are there times when music has helped you through a difficult period?

Fred:  Oh, many times.  I’ve had a lot of dysfunction in my life: agriculture, religion, poverty.  And I get to go on stage and pour it out; it’s like going to a shrink every night.  I worked a lot of it out in my late 30s and 40s.  Every night, just pouring it out, until one night it just doesn’t hurt anymore.  Then either you’ve got to find a new song or you’ve gotten it out.  It’s very cool.

Me:  I was actually introduced to your music while I was going through a difficult time, a difficult breakup.  And I found your music, just listening to your music, really helpful.  Do you get that a lot?

Fred:  Oh yeah, though I don’t have that many kids at my shows.  I have sort of a middle-aged audience.  I almost think you need to go through a couple divorces and a death before you can come to my show.  Because the kids come and they think, “Oh my God, this is intelligent.  I don’t want to hear that.”  But every once in a while, some young guy, some kid, will come up to me, some 25-year-old, and he’ll stop me in the autograph line and look me right in the eyes and say, “I’m alive because of you.”  Or “You got me through.”  Or “You don’t know,” they always say this to me “You don’t know.”  And I go, “Yeah I do know because I went through it too.”  I was really susceptible to pain.  Just because of the way I was raised and what happened to me and my fucked-up-ness.  I was susceptible to pain and so it came out in my songs.  And so I recognize them.  Those are the young guys that come to my show at first, the ones who get the brutal stuff.

Me:  Do you think that being “susceptible to pain” helps you as an artist?

Fred:  Well, as an artist, it has helped me.

Me:  Because it’s a double-edged sword.

Fred:  I’m not celebrating it like I used to.  I used to sort of just ride that wave all the time.  But you’ve got to watch out for preciousness.  There’s so much preciousness.  There are a lot of people with pain.  But I think it helps with the show a lot because I can always feel it, and it translates.  But I’m wary of how much I should go there.  You know in Zen they say brilliance is what gets people through pain; it doesn’t matter if it’s happy brilliance or sad brilliance.  It doesn’t matter what you’re saying.  What really does it for people is brilliance.  So I don’t always just go to the well.  You know?  I go to another well.

Me:  You’ve got a song called “Alcohol and Pills” that talks about the long-standing tradition of substance abuse by musicians.  Beyond the stereotype of “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll,” do you think there’s a link between the artistic process and addiction?

Fred:  The thing that most artists realize, artists who are called, is that they have this light, this incredible light that burns.  And it burns way too bright.  And the art sort of helps dim the light.  When you’re younger, that light, I remember – I still have it a lot of times, but I don’t have it like I did – that light burns so bright and the only way to turn it down is with booze or drugs or sex or whatever is going to turn it down, something has to turn it down.  When I realized what was going on, how bright that light was, I sort of recognized it and sometimes rode the creative wave, and just said, “I’m going to write 150 songs.”  This light recently just flared up in my life again, just flared up, and I’m working on 130 songs right now.  I show people the list and they think I’m out of my mind, but if you can take that light and turn it towards…  I mean, the trouble with so many people these days, because of “Pop Idol,” they take that light and try to turn it into fame.  And consequently you see this real effort towards getting famous and it’s not towards their soul anymore.  And consequently it doesn’t turn the light down, but it burns it out pretty quick.  The thing is, that light is pretty brutal.  And spirituality will turn it down if you can get that together, but that’s usually over time.  But booze, man, two whiskeys can take it off me just like that, and it’s like, “Oh, I can relax for a minute.”

Me:  So you feel like it’s a calling, this life?

Fred:  Oh, I was ten years old when it happened.  I’ve been writing songs for 42 years.  I mean, it’s stupid.  The light’s so bright you sacrifice your family, you can’t have relationships.  It’s ridiculous.  I mean, you go, “Really?  I’m 53 years old and I’m still doing this?”  I’ve managed to mend some things and fix some things from when it was so bright that I would just tear cloth.  And, you know, what we’re doing isn’t even that important.  We were talking about this at lunch today.  It’s such a minor thing compared to kids with leukemia and their doctors.  We’re just these stupid musicians and yet we’re called.  We’re still called that hard.

Me:  Of course there are those guys in the autograph lines.  I mean, music can be important for people.

Fred:  It can be, but you know, if you’ve got leukemia, you can go to a healer or a doctor.  There are only a couple places you can go.  But if Fred Eaglesmith ain’t gonna save your ass when you got heartbreak, somebody else will.  It’s not an essential part of life.  People will argue that it is.  But I’ve been doing this forever and I can tell you that it’s not.  It’s a good thing.  It’s beneficial.  And I know the benefits of it in a metaphysical way.  I know what it does for me.  And you can say, “What would we do without songs?”  Well, that wouldn’t be a very good life either.  But it’s a weird thing.

Me:  Back to the light and turning down the light.  I’ve known you for a while.  And you seem to lead a pretty clean life.  I mean, I don’t want to ruin your badass image, but you seem…

Fred:  No, no, I don’t mind.  I’m not a hard drinker.  I mean, when I drink, I drink hard, but I go for months without drinking.

Me:  Is that something that came naturally to you?  Or is that something you’ve had to work on?

Fred:  I always tell the young guys, I see them drunk and I say to them, “I thought you wanted to be a musician?  It looks to me like you want to be a drunk.”  It’s easier to be a drunk than a musician.  But, you know, they get mixed up.  And I just really wanted to do this for a living.  I really wanted to do this.  And I’ve always had 8 or 10 families depending on me to keep the business going: my agent, my managers, my kids, my band and their families.  I have people depending on me.  I’m really responsible for a lot of people.  If I screw up, it screws them all up.  I got them to work for me, I got them to help me, and now I’m just going to drink that away?  That just didn’t make sense to me.  So I never drink the day before a show.  I never drink the day of a show.  I might get home from a long tour and sit down and let myself go one night.  But I’ll get right back at it the next day and say, “That was that.  It’s time to get back to work.”  And also, it’s not good for you.  I mean, I can still outlast the young bucks.  I can still run up those stairs with two amplifiers.  But artists tend to hurt themselves really bad, and then they’re no good.  I was at this festival when I was very young and I saw an old blues guy, I forget his name, but he was one of those legends, you know.  And he had a show early in the morning, but he had the DTs [Delirium Tremens, usually caused by withdrawal from alcohol] and he couldn’t play his banjo.  And I thought, “I’m not doing that ever.”  And I never did.

Me:  It’s refreshing to hear you talk about the responsibility, because so many people get caught up in the lifestyle.  Like the hard-partying lifestyle has to go hand-in-hand with it.

Fred:  Well, a lot of them you know, I had a really hard drinker in my band for many years, and he couldn’t help it, you know, he had the disease.  He was a brilliant artist, too.  But a lot of these guys are making up for their lack of talent.  They’re all shtick, no dick, you know?  It’s like, “I’m a drunk, ain’t I a badass?”  And really, you’re not.  I mean, Kris Kristofferson was a badass drunk guy, but he had every right to be.  He was that good.  But you’ve got to be that good, because then I get the thing.  But a lot of these guys are putting the cart ahead of the horse.  It’s too much cool.

Me:  But that’s the nature of the music business, and show business in general.

Fred:  But it didn’t used to be.  The “cool drunk guy” really only happened in the 60s and 70s.  Before that you were just a drunk.  The cool drunk guy – the whole, “Look at him, isn’t he disgusting, isn’t that pathetic, oh how fantastic!” – this is really the last half century that this has become prevalent.  Before that, you were just an idiot.  Now it’s like, “Aren’t I cool, I’m gonna die young!”  It started with Hank Williams, really.  Hank was so cool.  And he was such a drunk.  But I bet if you could ask Hank today, he’d go, “Man, no.  It wasn’t fun.  It wasn’t fun at all.”  But it got legendary.

Me:  Wouldn’t you say Hank was someone who “had the disease?”

Fred:  He had the disease, no doubt.

Me:  And it wasn’t so much that Hank himself thought it was cool as much as other people did.

Fred:  I don’t think Hank thought of it as cool one bit.  He had a bad back and was on drugs, probably didn’t know what was reacting in him.  He had a lousy relationship with his wife.  I think Hank was just hurting to death.  The thing is these guys today want to show that kind of hurt, but they don’t have the chops.  I meet them all the time.  They’re always talking to me like I’m part of that world, and I’m just not.

(CLICK HERE FOR PART 2)