Q&A with the Long Winters

The next song is called "Unsalted Butter," one of my favorites. And apparently it's a favorite of my friend Kay, who applauds enthusiastically. She tells me, "I always think this song is about me, but I'm probably just dreaming."

We're watching John Roderick's the Long Winters at L.A.'s Spaceland. I was unaware until the day before the show that Kay has been close with John since they were in the fourth grade in Alaska. The just perfect refrain to the song goes, "If you think you're gonna be here long/I'm gonna miss you so much when you're gone." The sentiment, from what I gather, is basically, "You'll be lucky if I stick around this relationship long enough to finish singing this fucking song." And what young lady wouldn't dream of having a little ditty like that penned in her honor?

The album is called The Worst You Can Do Is Harm (Barsuk), a great line from one of the kinder songs, "Scent of Lime." The other songs are either "You don't wanna get mixed up with me Sweetie, I'm trouble" or "I'm outta here Sweetie, told you I was trouble." But it's done with poetry instead of posing.

And then there's the CD insert. Every song on the lyrics sheet is preceded by a dedication: "This is for Miss M___ who held on through the heavy drinking." Or a brief synopsis: "This is about a road in Alaska where beautiful and terrible things happen." Roderick fills several pages of the insert with reproductions of fuck-you letters from various ex-girlfriends who sound quite irate. When Kay told me about her relationship with him, I immediately scoured the letters to determine whether she could have been one of the authors. And yeah, she could have been. But so could anyone.

"They are the bitter letter from the ex-girlfriend," says Sean Nelson, coproducer of the record and keyboard player for tonight's show. Nelson compares the letters to Roderick's songs. "You don't know what it's about but it's obviously about something very specific. But it's what's left out of it that sort of completes it in a really interesting way in John's songs. But what distinguishes that from your typical indie rock or certainly the fuckin' abominable emo movement is that it's not confessional?or it's not just confessional."

The Long Winters is something of an indie rock supergroup effort, featuring Nelson, formerly of Harvey Danger, and Chris Walla, currently of Death Cab for Cutie, as well as Ben Gibbard of Death Cab and the Posies' and REM's Ken Stringfellow, plus a handful of other folks all gathering to back up Roderick. For a guy who sings about nothing but fucking people over, he seems to have a hell of a lot of friends.

"A great community of enablers," offers Nelson during an interview in their tour van, Nelson in the front seat, Roderick in the back bundled up in a sleeping bag like a pupa with black-frame glasses.

In the late 90s, Roderick fronted the Western State Hurricanes. They were the next big thing in Seattle for a while, and now they're the stuff of legend, primarily because the band imploded before anything could be released on record. With the Hurricanes' demise, Roderick turned his back on music and left the country to walk around Europe for five months.

"I had the option of staying in Seattle and putting another band together and I just couldn't stomach it. So when I was walking I didn't really think about music. I certainly didn't play any music. And then when I came back from that trip, again, I sort of stayed out of it until Sean offered me a job in Harvey Danger."

Roderick and Nelson can talk at length about their time in the 90s music scene. When they start going off, I imagine them as indie rock grampaws sitting on lawn chairs outside a club preaching to the kids about how it was done in my day.

"The dawning realization," says Roderick, "was that just screaming your pure rage wasn't art and it wasn't necessary and it didn't produce anything other than just a lot of tired ears." He sees the new album as a mature step forward from that period. "To say, I don't know, this is the evolution that we would have chosen for that early 90s sense that we could change the world through just our angst. This is where it could have gone, rather than where it did. Which was just to commercialize angst and make this one-note scream that has stood in for 10 years of popular music."

The germ of the Long Winters came to be when Nelson had Roderick accompany him on guitar for some solo shows. To fill out the sets Roderick would sing some of his own songs from the Western State Hurricanes. "And that blossomed over time, so that we started doing shows like that all time, with the two of us singing with an acoustic guitar," says Roderick. "And then as the Harvey Danger tour was winding up Sean sort of pushed me into the studio to record those songs."

The recording session was intended to be a small affair. "Once we got into the studio it started to snowball," says Roderick. "When we first went in, I think the idea was to record an acoustic record. And that started to evolve really fast after we got in there. Within a week, it was a zoo."

"I think that every time we made a plan," says Nelson, "it was no time flat before we violated the plan completely."

"It was a combination of people sitting in the room and a combination of instruments lying around that dictated what got played," says Roderick. "And it was very much Sean's musical esthetic, and [coproducer and engineer] Chris Walla's and mine. And often the place where those three esthetics clashed resulted in some sound that we would produce."

Nelson adds, "It's a great headphones record. Maybe at the very bottom line, I think we all agreed that it had to be a great headphones record. It wasn't gonna be like a rock band album."

I have to disagree. While it is a great headphones record, The Worst You Can Do Is Harm is also a fantastic rock band album. There's a balancing act going on that threatens to teeter over the edge but never does. All the wacky production tweaks could have easily strangled the rock, but instead they serve to pretty it up. And the rock could have stomped all over the imagery of the lyrics, which are both cryptic and very obviously personal.

"I am almost completely incapable of writing fiction," says Roderick. "Yet somehow I'm pretty good at fictionalizing reality."

His lyrics are permeated with experience, but nothing gets recounted. Memories are blurred out, as on the beautiful lament "Mimi." It's a pretty puzzle until he hits home with a simple, "Mimi I know you're a gold mine."

And then he can go hookier than shit, as on the straight-ahead rocker "Carparts," where yet another relationship that he did all he could to fuck up is summarized with "Baby wasn't down with the heist." And "Give Me a Moment," the album's opening track, is practically a dirge. "Won't you give me a moment, I've been away" is repeated with the bleakest of foreboding. And that one line seems to say, "I've been fuckin' up for a while. Someone needs me right now. And I'm pretty sure I'm gonna fuck this up too."

"Who wants to hear some 20-year-old guy tell about his life?" Roderick wonders. "It's not interesting. But as time went on I realized that if you could just defocus, just a little bit?even changing the details of the color of a person's hair?that was enough to allow you to let the song become its own thing. And not just me railing against the cruel fate. Something broader."

Yet as much as he tries to defocus, everything about the design of the CD booklet seems to be an effort to clarify, or at least to drive home how loaded the songs are. The dedications preceding the lyrics, snapshots of John in various bleary-eyed states and of course those letters. One opens with, "John?You are a world-class bullshitter." Another counsels, "You have to learn how to be with people." Whether they were included as an apology, a fuck-you back or simple vanity, the letters are reproduced verbatim. But like the songs, they offer only a blurred glimpse into his life.

Watching the Winters live, it's clear that what holds all the different elements together is not just the lyrics but the man who's singing them. On the countrified "Samaritan," when Roderick opens his mouth wide and sings, "Please don't report me to the police," it's with crisp enunciation, like every syllable simmers in his belly before he lets it fly, and there's a treble kick to his voice that sounds like it could cut glass.

They're the opener tonight, so for most of the set no one's here, and John and Sean are getting a little pissy with the industry yapping by the bar. Apparently the Winters have yet to catch on in L.A. Not so elsewhere, like when they last played the Mercury Lounge one month after the record's release.

"We fully expected to play to four people," says Roderick. "And when we took the stage the room was full. And I looked out and definitely had the feeling that everyone was there on the wrong night. Like, why are you all here? And I introduced us as the Long Winters. And a cheer went up from the crowd. People were singing along. And so it was a great feeling."

The Long Winters return to the Mercury Lounge, with Ken Stringfellow, Tuesday, May 7, 217 E. Houston St. (betw. Ludlow & Essex Sts.), 260-4700.