Walrus Comix' Brant Miles interviews:
Singer/Songwriter Extraordinaire, A. A. Bondy

       

Second acts have always been about disappointment and opportunity. Unfortunately, such maneuvers all too often find themselves long on the former and short on the latter. In the case of A.A.Bondy, the redemptive and revelatory power of second acts has been harnessed in the way of a solo release entitled American Hearts. Bondy, the former frontman of one-time Alabama buzz band Verbena, truthfully has nothing to apologize for the way in which his first musical outfit imploded, as the band quite capably acquitted themselves in approximating a dirty south mash-up of Nirvana and The Stones. As with the vast majority of bands who take the major label plunge, Bondy and his cohorts found themselves awash in the kind of clusterfuck schematics that hasten the end of a band's career even as said band begins to confidently assert its sound. With 2003's La Musica Negra, Verbena damn near perfected both their sound and vision, only to succumb to both internal and external stimuli and emerge as yet another casualty in the seemingly unending war on good taste. The timing of the dissolution of the band was all the more tragic considering the gains their front man in particular made in sharpening his focus and honing in on the soulful themes ensconced within the hormonal exoskeletons of his songs. If La Musica Negra hinted at a wellspring of talent that would remain unearthed somewhere at the feet of the then Scott Bondy, then American Hearts serves not only its primary function as a killer record but as a welcome proclamation of a continued evolution in the mind and heart of the now A.A. Bondy.

For much of the last decade, Bondy had bounced between his native Birmingham and Los Angeles, but in the face of his former band’s break-up, he found himself in upstate New York . After briefly forsaking any semblance of a music career, Bondy armed himself with a guitar and two microphones (and little else) and proceeded to hole up in a converted farmhouse known as The Red Barn. Recorded and mixed within the span of a couple of weeks, American Hearts emerged as Bondy’s entry back into music, but this voyage would be one shaped solely by his imagination and the execution of the themes he wished to explore. The album is a departure sonically from the raucous caterwauling and grindhouse flourishes of his earlier efforts, as Bondy employs the spare acoustics of his converted barn while relying on a soulful lilt to communicate the gist of his songs, though the record reflects an advancement of some of the imagery he touched on in previous incarnations.

If American Hearts owes its inception to The Catskills, it nonetheless possesses a backbone wrought of southern gothic mystique, and Bondy cleverly narrates his imagined journeys as if he were part preacher/ part scoundrel/ part conscientious observer in a world populated by souls destined for other climes. Some souls may be headed upward while others stand as targets for riders on an apocalyptic storm, but Bondy gives them their collective just due regardless of their diverging destinations. In the spirit of Cash and Dylan, Bondy displays an affinity for storytelling that goes beyond the spoken word into the vibe that informs the proceedings. American Hearts feels intrinsically introverted, yet Bondy has presented his narratives in such a way as to encourage a shared introversion. When Bondy asserts that “Six riders stand upon the ridge tonight/ O Lord, they have found me/ O Lord, they have me/ My time is nigh”, he does so in a way that makes identification with the horsemen and their bounty possible. Bondy may have invented a genre of his own with the postmodern, post-apocalyptic poetry that encompasses American Hearts, and the album plays like a campfire soundtrack in which sinners and saints swap stories and steal souls. Even as Bondy pleads “Rapture, sweet rapture/ Won’t you lay your hands on me”, it’s not readily apparent which side of the ledger he inhabits, but the effort he has put into bringing the characters that populate American Hearts to life (not the least of all himself) is enough towarrant a saving grace or two.           

I recently had a chance to catch up with A.A. Bondy on the eve of a European tour. American Hearts was re-released through Fat Possum Records in April, and Bondy is still touring extensively in support of the album. He’ll be appearing at the Bowery Ballroom on Tuesday, June 10, before heading back to Europe and hitting the states in August.

 

Can you talk a little bit about making American Hearts? It seems like there is a kind of gothic undercurrent at play. Is that something that you’re aware of when you’re putting the songs together?

Yeah, I think so, even though some of it is spontaneous. I mean, pretty much all of the songs on the new record just happened. They weren’t really like constructed or engineered to be anything, so to go the other way, I think I’d be more aware if I was trying not to be that way.

Do you feel like you always had this album in you, or did it surprise you that you were ready to jump back into making music again?

I think there was some time involved in getting there. When I moved from Alabama, I didn’t really have any notion of playing music anymore, not in the same way. I knew that much. Even though I kept recording and playing and stuff like that, I didn’t have any idea that after things fell to the ground that I would get back into it. I began to latch onto old blues records and blues guitar players, and I kind of renavigated towards a different shore, which took some doing. It was probably conscious on some level, but it kind of just happened. Without playing electric guitar for a really long time, I just found myself at the end of a couple of weeks with a bunch of songs that eventually made up the record.

Even though you instrumentally are taking a much different approach from you earlier work with American Hearts, do you feel like it was a natural progression from that material to some of the themes you’re exploring now?

I don’t know. If I had to compare them, I might split my head in half. This stuff is a little more deliberate just in terms of me knowing what I was doing thematically. It seems like the other stuff...you know, it happens with a lot of rock and roll records where it's like words become less important in a way when there's a big chugging machine behind them. In that way, I think this material is definitely more fleshed out. There is some commonality with the earlier stuff to a degree, though. I don't see how there couldn't be.

Assuming that there has to be some kind of a shock factor when you take the stage as a solo artist versus as part of a full band, once you get past that idea of being alone out there, is it more fulfilling in some ways because everything rests on your shoulders?

Yeah, and I've said that before. When you're in a band, it's sometimes difficult to tell what's working and what's not. Now, if it goes poorly, then I have to figure out some way to make it right. It's just easier to move when you're by yourself in terms of what you want to do with your songs and how you present them. It is kind of liberating. It was definitely kind of daunting at first.

Not only are you out on the road as a solo artist, but you're working as someone who has been in the major label system and now is back on the indie circuit. With the majors seemingly in disarray, is it more comfortable working with the smaller labels now and getting your message across that way?  

I mean, I was never comfortable with it before, being on a bigger label. Regardless of what your ideas are about being in that kind of situation, if you don't have even small success with them- and to them" small success" is hundreds of thousands of records-and you don't have a hit on KROQ or whatever, you're just fucked. You're then constantly reminded of that situation, so there just seemed to be little room to do real work on what you wanted to do. With smaller record labels, it seems like you turn in your record and your artwork or whatever, and you may a few hurdles to jump over for it to come out uncompromised, but for the most part they respect the fact that you know what you're doing. With major labels, you know, you had to meet with someone over what you were going to put on the cover of your record. I didn't know stuff like that going into it, and it just seemed so stupid. I think that's why you have so many bands that, whether or not they started out as real bands, just become a product. And that works for some bands. Some bands don't have any idea what they want to put on the cover of their records. It's not really about making music. I suspect most indie labels are pretty healthy because they don't have to sell millions of records. One band like Arcade Fire doesn't have to support an entire roster of bands for the label to get by, and even if they did, they don't have to spend so much on the backend to get their music out to the people who want to hear it.
When you're working on a smaller level, does it allow you to focus more on the music itself and not waste time with a lot of the peripheral things that most of your true fans probably don't care about anyway?

That's the way it's intended to be. There are people out there who can sniff out when someone's trying to put something over on them, so yeah.

Have you given much thought to where you'll go from here? As you continue to tour and play this material, do you think you'll make more records in this vein?

Yeah, definitely. I really like what I'm doing now.

Any downsides to being out on the road by yourself?

(laughing): Ah, man, people with cellphones at shows is just like the lowest. We didn't have to contend with that back then because we just had everything turned up so loud, but now that I'm onstage by myself, I'm a lot more aware of what's going on in the room. You know, some girl will stand right by the stage and have the longest conversation with someone about nothing at all, and I still don't really know how todeal with it.

Go with the gun in the guitar case trick.

Alright. Be good, man.