The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [180]
Some people have claimed starting in the 1990s your shows grew more and more musical. You’ve opened the songs up to more instrumental exploration and new textures and rhythmic shifts—like you’re trying to stretch or reinvent then. And it seems that some of your most impassioned and affecting performances, from night to night, are your covers of traditional folk songs.
Folk music is where it all starts and in many ways ends. If you don’t have that foundation, or if you’re not knowledgeable about it and you don’t know how to control that, and you don’t feel historically tied to it, then what you’re doing is not going to be as strong as it could be. Of course, it helps to have been born in a certain era because it would’ve been closer to you, or it helps to be a part of the culture when it was happening. It’s not the same thing, relating to something second- or thirdhand off of a record.
You heard records where you could, but mostly you heard other performers. All those people, you could hear the actual people singing those ballads. Clarence Ashley, Doc Watson, Dock Boggs, the Memphis Jug Band, Furry Lewis—you could see those people live and in person. They were around.
What I was most interested in twenty-four hours a day was the rural music. The idea was to be able to master these songs. It wasn’t about writing your own songs. That didn’t even enter anybody’s mind.
In a way, this line of talk brings us to your newest album, ‘Love and Theft.’ Its sense of timelessness and caprices reminds me of ‘The Basement Tapes’ and ‘John Wesley Harding’—records that emanated from your strong folk background. But ‘Love and Theft’ also seems to recall ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and that album’s delight in discovering new world-changing methods of language and sharp wit, and the way in which the music digs down deep into ancient blues structures to yield something wholly unexpected.
For starters, no one should really be curious or too excited about comparing this album to any of my other albums. Compare this album to the other albums that are out there. Compare this album to other artists who make albums. You know, comparing me to myself [laughs] is really like . . . I mean, you’re talking to a person that feels like he’s walking around in the ruins of Pompeii all the time. It’s always been that way, for one reason or another. I deal with all the old stereotypes. The language and the identity I use is the one that I know only so well, and I’m not about to go on and keep doing this—comparing my new work to my old work. It creates a kind of Achilles’ heel for myself. It isn’t going to happen.
Maybe a better way to put it is to ask: Do you see this as an album that emanates from your experience of America at this time?
Every one of the records I’ve made has emanated from the entire panorama of what America is to me. America, to me, is a rising tide that lifts all ships, and I’ve never really sought inspiration from other types of music. My problem in writing songs has always been how to tone down the rhetoric in using the language. I don’t really give it a whole lot of soulful thought. A song is a reflection of what I see all around me all the time.
The whole album deals with power. If life teaches us anything, it’s that there’s nothing that men and women won’t do to get power. The album deals with power, wealth, knowledge and salvation—the way I look