Making god and the fbi

When you were putting together god and the fbi was there a central theme in your mind?

No, it's my usual eclectic mistake where I put together all of the best songs that I had and sat down with a production team. I think we started with 22 that I felt were really good songs -- or songs like "Boots Like Emmylou's," which is a funny song. It's not a great song but I love it because it mentions Kitty Wells and people like that. To me it was my funny little homage to where I live. We narrowed it down to 18, and by the time we actually started to record parts it was 13, and then I wrote one. It becomes pretty obvious what doesn't hang in there -- what doesn't make sense with the rest of the work. We cut "god and the fbi" first, and that sort of dictated where the album was going.

Sometimes another musician, like your former percussionist Jim Brock, will show up and contribute something that casts a song in a whole new light.

That was the whole theme of this record. What I did was take Philip Clark, my sound man and co-writer on two songs, and Marc Moreau, who was an engineer just coming off seven years with Madonna in the studio, and Jim Cregan, who was an older English guy who was coming from Rod Stewart, and sit down and say, "Okay, we're doing this entire album with just the four of us. So what do we do? Since none of us play 'x,' how will we do it?" In the end it turned out that Marc was a pretty good drummer and bass player. Consistently with a lot of the songs Philip and Marc would look at me and say, "We'd really like to try something and we need a day." I'd leave. I'd haul Jim out with me and say "I don't care if you are the oldest here, let's calm down and let these guys do it. They're 33 and they're thinking differently from the way we think, and who knows what they'll get?" Sure enough, the majority of the tracks, they took them somewhere that made so much sense and the couldn't have taken it there if I'd been standing over their shoulder going "But I always heard a Bb there!" It's knowing when to get out of the song's way and let it run its course.

Guitars & Practicing

I understand that you found your stolen Martin D-18 after 27 years.

It's amazing. My Martin is an unusually good D-18. It's balanced -- a sweet guitar.

Do you have specific "writing" guitars?

I have a Ryan that someone gave me -- a Kevin Ryan that I wrote most of the last album on. It's a comfortable guitar but it's a little bit to big for me; it's almost a dreadnought size.

Do you take it on the road with you?

No. I do a lot of playing on the Ryan, though, and I have the Santa Cruz that they make for me. It's the only thing I play on tour. It's just the right scale for me, so I tend to write on that. Like right now my back is out, and I don't want to put any pressure on my back, so I'll work with the smallest guitar I can. At the end of the day it doesn't matter that much to me. When I was younger I thought, "Oh, if I don't have this guitar, I can't write!" I made a fetish out of it. It's a lot easier to write on a decent instrument. You're discovering stuff every minute then, and you play a new chord and you go, "Whoa!" -- as opposed to some piece of crap where you play a chord and go "Naah." I got a really trashed-looking National Steel last year. Three hundred bucks ! Horrible looking but great tone.

You can always tune it down to low C.

Yeah, Dylan used to do that a lot. I work with such light-gauge strings that they start getting really boingy. I find that I go with guitars in one-year intervals. I was lucky that I was in New York in the '70s: Lloyd Baggs [inventor of the Baggs pickup] was making guitars, and Jimmy D'Aquisto. They were reasonably priced and I had money, so I bought guitars. I managed through the years to hang on to five of them. The D'Aquisto is a flattop -- one of the few he made.

Do you ever practice?

No. I think I'm the laziest, least disciplined person in the world, but everyone I work with says I'm impossibly driven. So I don't know where the truth of it is. I rehearse with Philip for a tour but I guess that's just not where my attention goes.

That small house on the beach next to the little club --

That's it exactly. I'm going to have a small house on the beach with two bedrooms. One will be an office for me and Pat, and the windows will open on to the beach, and I'll have a piano and I'll have a guitar and a pad and a lot of CDs.