Crooked Fingers

Crooked Fingers frontman Eric Bachmann describes the songs on his new record, Dignity and Shame, as modern peasant music – simple, heart-on-your-sleeve songs, not for intellectuals and different from the dark and menacing folk-blues he has become known for. Bachmann, who previously fronted seminal North Carolina indie rockers Archers of Loaf, began Crooked Fingers as somewhat of an extension of the solo material he had worked on during the last years of that band. After releasing two albums on the Warm label, Bachmann moved to Merge Records in 2002 and issued an EP of covers, Reservoir Songs, presenting his take on such artists as Queen, Kris Kristofferson and Neil Diamond, to whom he has frequently been compared. 2003’s Red Devil Dawn saw growing critical acclaim, and its subsequent tour began establishing the core group of musicians Bachmann tours with. Having now released as many discs with Crooked Fingers as he ever did with Archers of Loaf, with the new full-length Dignity and Shame having hit shelves in February, Bachmann continues to just let his songs come to him. He spent an early afternoon multitasking, talking to Recoil via phone while dealing with a hangover and looking for a new spare tire to replace the one stolen from his band while on the road.

Recoil: The first thing I noticed when listening to Dignity and Shame was how it seemed more like a collaborative effort than some of your past releases. Just how much did the rest of the band contribute to creating the songs this time around?
Eric Bachmann: Yeah, it was definitely collaborative – way more collaborative for sure. There was a band this time. All of the other records I’ve made, I’ve completely done it myself. I’ve arranged it. I’ve written the strings out, the horns out. On this one, I did some of that, I did write out some horn parts and some stuff like that, but basically we were six days tracking in the studio for twenty-three songs, so we spent no time tracking, really. But the actual rehearsal time was two months, so we spent a lot of time rehearsing and we took a lot longer to put stuff together. We kind of arranged it as we went.

R: I read that Dignity and Shame was loosely inspired by the story of a bullfighter and his lover. How did you come upon their story and what was it about that story that inspired you to write some of these songs?
EB: That just sort of came across to me as well. The first song that I wrote for the record was ‘Dignity and Shame.’ And that song fell out, and obviously who knows where the hell they come from. I was reading a bunch of Victor Franco and shit like that. Holocaust survivors who are still really happy and positive. Really admirable people like that. So the song came out and when that song came out I felt that was a really cool way to make a record cohesive, make every character in the song and the songs have to deal with these issues. Every song, even the outtakes that didn’t make the record, all the characters are dealing with that, and in a way in every song ever written all the characters are dealing with that. They have to choose either dignity or shame or whatever the hell you want to say. So when that happened, bullfighting, the whole thing about bullfighting [is that] if it takes the matador one [stab] to kill the bull quickly, he’s dignified. He’s killed the beast in a dignified manner. If it takes him ten, twenty, it takes him a long time, it’s this gross butchery slaughter thing – the crowd boos him. He’s shamed out of the ring. So that was an obvious thing to me when I was thinking of dignity and shame, well obviously the biggest test of that is bullfighting, in terms of visual things that look cool. You know violence is always interesting, to me, not in a good way, I’m not saying it’s a good thing, but it’s interesting, how it happens and why it happens. Organized violence in culture is just bizarre to me. So again, I think it’s kind of a shameful thing for our species to come up with this shit. But maybe not. I’m not going to criticize anybody for doing what they want to do. So that story came out of all that and Manolete is the most famous bullfighter and I found out that he had a lover named Lope Sino, and she asked him to quit and a few months before he was to quit, [a bull] put his horn in his nuts and he bled to death. And I thought, ‘This is a great story. This is a real romantic, tragic thing.’ I felt compelled to write about it.

R: Dignity and Shame was originally intended to be a double album. Why did you end up deciding on it being a single disc release?
EB: I don’t know, man. I feel like double albums have got to be kick-ass and I think there have been a lot of double albums released lately that aren’t kick-ass and I didn’t want to be one of them. And I also feel like the songs that we had that we did leave off weren’t quite baked, they weren’t quite finished. There were two of them that were, and they’ll make it on the next album, and the ones that weren’t, there were three of them that weren’t, I’ve already started rewriting them and reworking them and letting them present themselves in a different way to me. These things happen for a good reason, so I’m just waiting for them to be finished.

R: Have you had any opportunities to do any more film scoring or producing since working on the movie Ball of Wax or Azure Ray’s Burn and Shiver?
EB: I have not had time to do that. I would like to do more of that. I’ve had people ask me to do stuff. There was this one hip-hop thing that I was to do where I would have been able to work with Cee-Lo and stuff but I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I was sort of intimidated out of that. I intimidated myself out of that. I don’t know what the hell they want. I’m not an R&B, hip-hop guy. I was honored that they asked me to do it, but I didn’t want to screw up their record because when people give you that trust, you don’t want to screw it up. So I didn’t do that. So I’d love to do [more producing] and I’d love to do more scoring and soundtrack work.

R: Are there any bands you’d be interested in working with?
EB: Yeah, I’d like to work with a lot of bands. Right now we’re on tour with DeVotchKa. I think they’re a great band, but what are you supposed to do when you produce them? They do what they do and it’s really good. But I’d like to hang out with them more because they’re fun to hang out with and to record their record would be great. They’re just one example of many.

R: This is going to be your first full band tour in almost two years. How has it been working on a live show with more musicians?
EB: It’s been great, man, because we don’t have to fill any gaps. We don’t have say, ‘Well this is all we have, so we have to figure out how to make this work.’ So it’s almost like we can do whatever we want. We’ve got flute, trumpet, upright bass, piano, guitar, lap steel, drums, vocals all over the place. So it’s really fun for me because I get to do [the set] the way I’d want to do it, or at least get closer to doing it the way I’d want to do it.

April 2005