Back in a little month called March, before the sweltering heat killed my fern-pine Kevin who now lies dead in his pink flower pot, I met Casiotone for the Painfully Alone frontman Owen Ashworth after his show at Hailey’s in Denton TX and asked if he would do a little phone interview with us on his upcoming day off. This is the man who brought you 2006’s delightful album Etiquette, a collection of songs anyone who’s ever been frustrated, in hate or in love should probably listen to. That means you.
Here Owen talks about dropping out from film school, Jamie Stewart from Xiu Xiu, his friends from The Dead Science, being on Tomlab, Bobby, Holly, and Vegetarian Soul Food.
This is for you, fern-pine. And for those of the faithful listeners to our inane collection of XM Satellite Radio shows.
N: We are here with Owen Ashworth from the band Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Hey, how are you doing, where are you at?
O: I’m really good! I’m in Homewood, Alabama and the weather is really beautiful, we have the day off before our show in Atlanta tomorrow
N: That’s awesome. Have you ever played Georgia before?
O: Yes, I’ve played both in Atlanta and Athens a number of times
N: I’ve been to Athens before and it’s beautiful. Do you like playing there?
O: I do, yeah! Actually, last time I played in Athens I was really sick with the flu so I don’t remember very much about it honestly…but I always have a really good time. Atlanta in particular…there’s a vegetarian soul food restaurant I really enjoy eating at…
N: What is it called?
O: I think it’s called “Vegetarian Soul Food” or some sort of combination of those words…(laughter)
N: We were trying to find a soul food place when we were there last summer and ended up…not…actually…(laughter) but I’m glad it exists…
O: Yeah. Soul Vegetarian is actually the name…it has some sort of a religious affiliation, I mean it’s definitely…there’s a motivation beyond the dietary for having really sort of clean and wholesome ingredients. It’s kind of a spiritual experience, really good.
N: That sounds amazing. Have you been a vegetarian for a long time?
O: I’m not vegetarian I just like food…I like soul food!
N: (laughter) Oh! Soul food of all kinds. What’s your favorite city to tour? Do you usually like smaller towns?
O: I don’t know, there are so many places I enjoy for lots of different reasons. I tend to go for hyperboles and generally call a lot of places my favorite place to play. We just got finished with some shows in Texas which were all really great. Denton and Austin and Houston are three of my favorite places to be on tour. I have some great friends in all those places there who make the difference, you know? I’ve played there enough times to where I sort of have my spots which I like to visit and I’ve played enough times to where people like me and are excited when I play my shows, and that’s great.
N: Yeah, it’s a good place to be. So you’re touring with Clue to Kalo right now?
O: Yeah, from Australia. I toured with them in Australia about a year and a half ago and we got along really well. We love each others’ music and just adore each other as people so I decided to spend some more time with them.
N: Have they been one of your favorite bands to tour with? Do you have a specific favorite?
O: Well, I feel like there’s something really particular about having this specific band and having toured Australia with them, it makes it really special you know? They’re not people I get to see very often, and it’s definitely been great, just really fun to sort of be a tour guide to America. But generally I just prefer to tour with, you know, bands that are friends, people that I get along with real well. That’s a lot of time spent with somebody.
N: It seems like you work with your friends a lot.
O: Yeah, I try to.
N: I’ve heard that you’re friends with the The Dead Science?
O: I don’t wanna brag (laughter) but yeah I totally know all those guys…
N: And you toured Europe with them?
O: Yeah! We did tours and a lot of shows together in the States and I guess the summer…or the fall…of the year before last we toured together in Europe. It was great! My last record, Etiquette, we recorded it at least in part with everybody from that band. They all appear on the record. The bass player, engineer, they helped produce a lot of the songs. It seemed like a logical choice. It worked out really well, I like those guys a lot, they’re incredibly easy to travel with. We certainly spent a lot of time, and they’re a great band on top of that.
N: Yeah, definitely. They’re one of my favorite. How did you get to know them? Did you know them before they were a band? Just met on the road?
O: Well, I remember Jamie Stewart from Xiu Xiu said they were one of his favorite bands, I was living in Portland, from Seattle and he said that if I was ever looking to play a show I should get in touch with them. They actually beat me to it and got in touch with me about doing a show in Portland based on Jamie’s recommendation as well, and we got along really well right off the bat. Jherek in particular, we’ve been playing music together for a long time now. Incredibly smart and really enthusiastic collaborator, he’s been really great. Every chance I get I spare some time so we can do something together.
N: How did you get to know Jamie Stewart? We’re actually interviewing him on Monday.
O: One of Xiu Xiu’s first shows in San Francisco, they had asked me to play…a woman named Yvonne Chen, who was one of the original members of the band but is not in the band anymore, I’ve known for probably going on seven or eight years and she had asked me to play on this show with her new band Xiu Xiu. I had never heard of them. But since I liked Yvonne so much I said ‘absolutely, let’s do it!’ but turns out I really liked their music. We’ve done a plenty of shows together since then, few tours, things like that.
N: It’s so weird, all the bands we’ve been interviewing lately seem to have some sort of strange connection.
O: Yeah I think that’s sort of the way, I mean people, a lot of bands who are doing things in an independent sort of way play a lot of the same venues and…that’s weird for lack of better word…yeah I find it an extremely complicated and tangled web of different personalities… (laughter)
N: A huge web of really interesting people.
O: Yeah, some of my favorite people in the world.
N: I heard you were going to film school and then dropped out to pursue music full time?
O: Yeah, I mean…I went to college when I was young…when people went to college…and I studied film for a while, studied writing for a while…you know, took some time off to tour and that semester turned into a year turned into the beginning of noticing that I was no longer enrolled. So I was like “well, let’s book another tour then!” and I haven’t gone back.
N: Do you regret it, or do you love touring?
O: Well my parents certainly regret it. (laughter) There are days that I wish I had gotten my degree, but I think I’ve done alright for myself. I mean, I think I’m doing what I like to do. I feel good.
N: Yeah, you can always go back to do it, but right now…
O: That’s what I keep telling my folks, thanks very much (laughter)
N: I can write them a letter for you if you’d like.
O: I’d appreciate that.
N: So I noticed you did an awesome cover–which has been one of my favorite songs that you’ve done–with Caralee McElroy from Xiu Xiu of “When You Were Mine”. I know you did a Bruce Springsteen cover when I saw you play in Denton, do you have any other covers you’ve done or any particular artist that you like covering?
O: I was doing a lot for a while, mostly because they’re songs that I love so much and it feels really good to make those sounds yourself. There was a streak where I was doing a bunch of them. Yeah, I did a couple of Bruce Springsteen songs with my brother. We put a record collaboratively through the mail. He has a bunch of projects and the one that he used for our collaboration is called Concern. I covered Grapevine by Paul Simon for a 7-inch, a song I had been playing live for a long time, people asked me to record it so I did. I covered a Missy Elliot song called “Hot Boys”. That was a few years ago. I was really happy with how that turned out.
N: How does it feel when people start covering your songs?
O: Oh, no, I think you probably heard Parenthetical Girls who…there’s a song that I covered by them. Love Connection.
N: Yes!
O: Yeah I was actually in that band for a while when I lived in Portland
N: Really?
O: Yeah I had made that arrangement to play together live and during that period Parenthetical Girls recorded a Casiotone song. So to return the favor I recorded the arrangement that we had been using as the Parenthetical Girls. So many people make that mistake, I don’t think they’re very happy about it but he wrote every word of that song. (laughter) But I mean, there have been a couple of times when I’ve heard people cover my songs and it’s flattering. I mean, I think my style of songwriting has been really influenced by a lot of traditional American forms of songwriting. Like, Hank Williams songs are so easy to play and they’re the greatest songs. I’ve always liked the idea of writing songs that have very simple architecture but were still effective. I mean these songs are sort of designed to be easily learned. Partially for my own benefit. But yeah, it’s absolutely flattering when people cover my songs. But I do have a leg up on maybe a band such as say the Dead Science who are have just incredibly complicated jazz chords, their songs are incredibly tricky to figure out. You spend thirty seconds fiddling with a piano and you can probably figure out any of my songs.
N: A couple of years ago we had a show here on campus and one of our friends did the opening act [David Shackelford] covering all of Etiquette just with an acoustic guitar and he did a really good job of it.
O: Wow, that’s impressive. I hadn’t ever heard of that. That’s really flattering.
N: Whenever your album came out I think it stayed on top of our charts all eight weeks.
O: That’s great. Thanks! (laughter)
N: So I saw that you had a really really creepy song on David Shrigley’s Worried Noodles
O: Yeah it’s pretty creepy. I agree. I mean, all the lyrics for that compilation were taken from David Shrigley’s book
N: His writings, yes
O: And he sent it to me and told me to pick something and I know he was asking like fifty other bands so I tried to pick something that probably nobody else would try to get…I figured I had a pretty safe bet out of a list of tracks by picking the really creepy one. (laughter) It was really fun, I got a kick out of it…I guess you can’t really play it on your college radio station can you?
N: People still have…it gets creepier with time for me…
O: Excellent, that’s great!
N: It’s like a fine wine. (laughter)
O: Exactly! That’s exactly what I was thinking at the time like “I hope this song ages like a fine wine” (laughter)
N: Definitely. How do you do your writing? I feel like a lot of your songs have a lot of narrative behind them and that’s the charm of them. You know, every time I listen to music, I listen to lyrics and think that they’re autobiographical in some way. Are yours completely fictional?
O: I mean, it sort of started as short stories. There are certainly elements of my songs that are taken from real life but I’ve never really felt any obligation to tell a true story. That’s interesting to me, making up an interesting good story you know? I think that just came from being a fan of music and listening to like the Willie Nelson or Otis Redding records that my parents would play as a kid and listening to these songs and never occurring to me that they would be necessarily true stories, they just seemed like they were really well-written songs. Covering that Paul Simon track Grapevine I was like “this guy is so goofy, I can’t believe his lyrics” you know? So much of his imagery and his metaphors…I was just really impressed that people were crafting these certain worlds and I always liked the idea of just like writing songs that were sort of took you out of your life a bit and were interesting and that had an emotional impact on you. It never occurred to me that I was supposed to be writing about myself until people started assuming that I was. I think that’s part of a reason that on etiquette I used a different singer, I liked of reinforcing that they’re characters singing these songs. I think that it’s a common assumption. For some reason I never had that thing with music where I thought that every song was true, whereas some people definitely do have that.
N: I noted that at your show you switched the names ‘Holly’ and ‘Bobby’. Is that just to mix it up?
O: Well actually (laughter) I’m dating a girl named Holly. And we met long after that song was finished, and it’s a pretty nasty song so mostly for her benefit I stopped singing it. Originally, that song was sung as ‘you’re just a hobby bobby’, I had some friends that were trying to start like a very sixties style girl group and they asked me to be their secret songwriter. I think it’s part of the legacy about a girl group that there’s always some kind of weird producer writing the songs, Phil Spectre or something, they liked the idea of something behind the scenes. But they ended up not doing it. They had just given me the title and so I wrote the song…and I liked it enough that I thought I’d just record it on my own. just made a change in the name for when I recorded it. So when I started seeing someone named Holly and didn’t want to hurt her feelings I started singing it the other way. But, again, switching the names of the songs just reinforces the idea that it is fiction.
N: Yeah whenever you switched the names, it hit home as a realization that you weren’t writing about yourself. Did you choose to do Holly Malone in honor of her?
O: Well, since I switched, it seemed weird to have multiple Bobby songs…someone might have figured I was giving Bobby an especially hard time. So I decided that since I took the name from one song to the other it made sense to just switch them.
N: Yeah. You said at your show that you recently did the score for a film. The Ice Cream Truck for a serial murderer?
O: A kidnapper. This woman who is an aspiring video artist just did her first feature and asked me to do the score for the movie. She sort of asked for certain kinds of songs and certain kinds of music and I’d written Ice Cream Truck to fit the description that she wanted. I didn’t know at the time that it was going to be the theme song for a kidnapper. It certainly works well for the context of the movie, but I had different intentions for the song but…yeah i’m releasing all the music that I recorded for the movie on two 7-inches. On one are some of the vocal songs for the movie and some of the longer instrumental, and the second will be entirely instrumental, a lot of much shorter pieces. I did ringtones for all the characters in the movies (laughter) and only one fo the ringtones actually ended up being in the final cut of the film, but I’m putting all the ringtones on the second 7-inch in case anybody wants them. I actually played them for Clue to Kalo and they’ve got ringtones now on their phones. There will eventually be a CD LP that collects both 7-inches. The movie also features some previously released music but I didn’t see any point in repackaging and re releasing those exact same recordings.
N: Is that the first time you did a large amount of instrumental, is that something you’ve been delving into?
O: I’ve thrown in little instrumental pieces on some of the records here and there, I’ve done some music for films before, a couple of different things, but this is definitely the most involved I’ve been. I did all the music for the movie and all the sound design for the film as well and I ended up actually helping to edit the movie. I had a pretty large take on it.
N: How did you get into sound design? Is that something you studied at school? Because it seems to be really really hard to be a good sound designer.
O: I think just mostly Laurel, the director, just really liked the sound of my records and kind of wanted her movie to sound that way so slowly gave me more and more tasks over the course of the project. I made telephones ringing and a sort of heart beating sound effect and she just gave me anything coming out of a microphone in the scene, she wanted me to be responsible for. So it was interesting, she also requested that I recorded everything at home. A home made feel. It definitely was supposed to be low fidelity and claustrophobic aspect for the film, and it was what Laurel wanted in that context.
N: So you kind of created for her a parallel universe of sound?
O: That was the idea, yeah.
N: I have one last question for you and then I’ll let you relax. How do you like being on Tomlab? It seems like everything they release is particularly interesting. How did you sign onto them?
O: Actually Tom…the actual Mr. Tom sent me a letter years ago, he happened to be in San Francisco and bought a copy of my first album that I had released myself and he asked for permission to license the record for Europe. Originally I was just really impressed in terms of graphic design of these records, they had an eye for detail that I hadn’t seen with other record companies. I told him I was working on my second record and he asked if he could maybe put that out and I really like those guys and we just kept working together. It’s really interesting, I think initially it was a label that certainly I had not heard of, not knowing much about German electronic music, and it seemed like exciting to have my music in a context that was genre-free, I knew a lot of people in bands that were attaching themselves to a certain style and a certain theme just kind of hoping to sell records because they sounded like this band, playing shows because they sounded like this band, and I was excited about my music being taken in its own context because, you know, the other stuff on the label was alien. The label and I have kind of grown together over the years and I’ve encouraged them to put out records by friends on mine. People who notice similarities between my music and their music have gotten in touch with them, so I think that we have definitely developed this partnership that makes more sense now than it did initially. I like them and I want to keep working with them.
N: That sounds great. Well, thanks so much for talking with us!
O: Thanks so much for talking to me
N: And we hope to see you whenever you come around next time
O: Yeah, I’m sure I will be back.