I write interviews for Splendid strictly for selfish reasons. The process usually starts like this: I fall in love with some new band or have taken to a section of my record collection with a vengeance, playing the catalogue of a band or singer for weeks. I want to know about the people making the music I'm currently going nuts over. I want to know about how they write their songs and how they record. I want to discuss the process of something I'll probably never do: write, play and record music for a living. That's when I email George and ask if he is looking for an interview with this singer or that band. More often than not, George agrees with my choice and sets things up. Ah, the joys of being press.

(Editor's note: After this, a couple of months pass, during which I badger Jason about turning the article in. Deadlines come and go, while he sits at home and moons over guitar lines and lyrical phrase-turns, until he finally turns something in that rarely satisfies more than seventy-five percent of the stated goal of the project. Ah, the joys of being the editor.)

A few months ago, while listening to Nina Simone, I got to thinking about the life span of the music I listen to. Who will still be around when I am fifty or sixty years old? Not in the classic-rock-radio-Zepplin-yeah! way of being played but being dead, but who will still be making music? Looking through the stacks, Steve Earle seemed a likely candidate. Where's a new Morrissey record? Stereolab? Why, sure. What about Shannon Wright? Three albums in three years, each better than the last. Hell of a performer live. Might Shannon Wright be like Nina Simone, still playing years after she first debuted? Based on the albums, I think there's a chance. The music is a sort of studied repetition. Lines of piano build over drums in smart, spacious arrangements. Nothing is preciously modern or dependant on the present. In fact, the common theme across Wright's three albums is the waltz. She's almost preoccupied with it. Wright is definitely working towards something. Speaking with Shannon Wright, I was unable to confirm my suspicions about her songwriting, but I did find proof that she might have some longevity. You can't be as level-headed, as talented and as deeply concerned with your art as Wright is with her music and not make some sort of long, if not brilliant, career out of it.

Splendid: What do you do outside of music? Do you have a day job? Barely scraping by?

Shannon Wright: Barely scraping by, but some months are tougher than others. Now I just play music.

Splendid: Do you think it's necessary for fans to know personal facts about musicians in order to appreciate them more?

Shannon Wright: No. It depends on the kind of art you make. I think if you are trying to speak to everyone, and you're just sort of a vessel to create this thing that everyone can touch on, they don't need to know things about your personal life or have an image of you. At least for me, that's the kind of thing I would like to do rather than have someone being inquisitive about my personality or anything about me. I want to stay out of it.

Splendid: Do you think it is a particularly American thing, always wanting to know everything behind people?

Shannon Wright: No, I don't think so. People in Europe are very interested in artists and musicians. I think it just goes along with the idea that something is personal to you, regardless of where you are from, you just want to know more about the person who is creating something that you are being touched by. It feels personal.

Splendid: You were in a band, Crowsdell, before you started making records on your own. I haven't been able to find that much information about Crowsdell or information about you for that matter. Are you comfortable talking a bit about your history?

Shannon Wright: Crowsdell is the only other band I've ever been in. It was my first band, so it is what it is. As I started playing more and writing more songs, started finding myself as a musician... When we made the second album, things were a bit darker. The band wasn't happy with that and neither was the label. I got a really big taste of what it is like in the music industry and the ugly side of things. I just didn't want to be a part of it if that is what it was going to be about. The label we were on (Big Cat) was an independent label, but all along it was trying to merge with a major label. The guy who ran the label wasn't as he portrayed himself to be. He used a lot of bands to step up the label. The label started in Europe, and they had bands like Pavement, Palace Brothers and the Dirty Three. He screwed those bands over as well. Maybe not Palace, but the Dirty Three definitely. It was an ugly way to see things work. Once the band broke up and we got off the label, I didn't even know what I was going to do at that point. Then I ended up making three solo records!

Splendid: After everything you went through with your first label, are you happy with Quarterstick/Touch and Go?

Shannon Wright: Yes. I didn't think I would ever even... When I decided to quit, I was so anti-everything. I was not impressed with bands. I was not impressed with record labels or magazines or anybody getting signed or any of that. It just did not sit with me. I'm still sort of that way, because I think it's all sort of silly, this stuff. People get so involved in the importance of it. You know, like if you've gotten a certain review or if you've gotten a feature in a magazine. It is important, but I feel like if people miss what I am doing and they never catch on, then what can I do about it? I just enjoy what I'm doing. It's amazing to me that people have found out about me, because it's not as if Quarterstick is a big distribution thing or I'm really getting pushed. It just kind of happens upon people, and I really like that because those are the true fans because they aren't being told "You should listen to this." They find it themselves. When people come up to me and are really genuine, that's the best reward I can possibly get. When I met Corey Rusk, who runs Touch and Go, for the first time, we hit it off so well... I was in a very bad state about the music business, and I had a lot of complaints. He listened to me about every single one and agreed with me on everything. As we got to know each other more, I just felt that if there was any label in the world to put records out on, for me, it's got to be this label. So he asked me if I'd like to do it, and I asked him if he'd like to do it. It seemed like the right match. I've been so happy ever since. The people up there are just real; real people that care about what they do. They don't make a ton of money at it, but they do it because they believe in it. They think it is important, and that is what I do. That's what most of the bands on the label are like. It is like a working class label, and I respect that. There are no frills about it. Everybody there works at one goal.

Splendid: How did you come upon your delivery, your singing style? Is that how you started singing or is it the result of some kind of process or decision?

Shannon Wright: It's hard to say. I'm kind of unsure. I think as I became more comfortable with my voice... I was sort of an anti-social singer when I first started singing. I really wanted to be a great guitar player. I use to get really annoyed when people would say, "I just love your voice." That's the worst. I don't want you to like my voice. I want you to like my guitar playing. (Laughs) I don't know if that has to do with just being a female and people always talking about the female voice. I think maybe because I was anti-singing or aggressive with my voice and not afraid to be aggressive with my voice, I developed a certain style that was fitting with my voice. I've always had a very loud voice when I wanted to, although I was shy when I first started out. It is kind of a very constricting way to learn how to sing. I think it just developed over time with getting comfortable and really wanting to express something. When you really want to do that, you end up forcing yourself over boundaries you wouldn't go over normally.

Splendid: Do you practice? Do you think that musicianship is craft or does it come naturally?

Shannon Wright: I need to practice more, definitely. Sometimes I tend to write better when I don't practice at all. It just leaves my mind open. Usually I write some of my favorite songs when I haven't picked up an instrument. If I've just gotten off of tour or I've been home for a couple of weeks and haven't picked up an instrument, that's usually when I write some of my favorite songs. I don't know why. Sometimes I play my best when I haven't practiced. But I think on tour it's important to practice a little bit to feel comfortable. Regardless of how good you are, just having the movements, being used to being on that instrument, is important.

Splendid: Does touring get in the way of recording?

Shannon Wright: I'm sort of a stress master. I deal with things better at a sort of intense level. I write more consistently when I'm under pressure because if I leave too much time to think about things, I tend not to do so well. Because I question everything. Nothing is ever good enough if I have too much time to think about it. If I have a timeline, then it just has to be as good as I can make it, and then I've gotta put it away.

Splendid: Is that one of the reasons why you've put out three albums in as many years?

Shannon Wright: Yeah. It's like, tour, then, "Okay, I'm gonna make a record." The label says, "If you want to have it out by this time, we need to have it in by this time." That makes me work. If I do it on my leisure, where I take a year -- I can do that, but I pressure them to give me a time. That works best for me, I think.

Splendid: Do you enjoy recording or live performance more?

Shannon Wright: I enjoy them both in different ways. I really love recording. I want to record bands myself eventually; get involved in engineering. I just don't have the time right now. I really enjoy playing live. I enjoy playing live more than anything else. For me that's the ultimate gift. I think they're both so different. When you are sitting in a room for twelve hours recording, you use your brain more. Playing live, you're using other emotions.

Splendid: Will you ever release a live album or EP?

Shannon Wright: I'd like to. I think a lot of people who come to the shows -- certain people enjoy the live show much more than the records. It's hard to capture certain things on record when you're limited to a certain amount of time. It's not the same setting. I do better when there are people there because I'm playing for the audience. For me, that's like my connection to myself -- having people there. Sometimes it's hard to conjure that stuff up when I don't have people there, don't have people there to do it for. If it's just me, then my confidence level goes way down. It's harder to do. I would like to record something live and maybe an EP would be the sensible thing.

Splendid: Do the props help? Does having the piano light rig help you get into performing? (Wright always has a light box set up to mimic her playing of the piano and often also has slide projectors displaying random images behind her.)

Shannon Wright: It's funny, I've had that Wurlitzer with the Visualizer -- that's what it's called, a Visualizer -- and I've always played with it like that. It doesn't feel weird not to have it up there. I don't even think of it as a prop, but more as that's the way it should be played because it's a teacher's model and it was made for that. I've only played one time without it, and it was like, "Where's my buddy?" I just enjoy it being there. I enjoy that people enjoy it.

Splendid: I didn't mean it in a negative way, like you're ELO up there with fourteen keyboards and other crap. It just seems like a definite part of your show.

Shannon Wright: I think it's pretty mesmerizing to watch.

Splendid: Do you think you'll ever stop?

Shannon Wright: I can't imagine ever doing that. I tried to do that before, when I quit my first band. I tried to quit playing music altogether and just go back to college, figure out something else to do. I became a whole other person. It was a very difficult time for me when I didn't play music. I can't imagine that I won't always be recording. I don't know if I'll always be playing live. It will become less and less, I imagine. I would like to be the 60 year-old woman who is still playing music and is still doing live shows -- maybe just not as much as I do now. I don't think of it as a youth thing. I think of it more as hopefully I will become better as a musician as I age. To me, it's a life-long thing. It is who you are, and you have to accept it. You have to make the money to support yourself, but you have to do it.

Splendid: You've toured a lot in the past couple of years. Is it something you've gotten used to, the constant nomadic existence, or will you slow down sooner than you just said?

Shannon Wright: At some point; I always say that, about not touring. Not touring, though, I feel odd, like I'm not working enough. When you're on tour, you have goals: you get up, find breakfast, get to the club, load in, soundcheck. It's like a regimen, day after day after day. At home I miss it, miss having my day planned out. But there is a certain point from touring, where you lose a lot of time just to live. There's never enough time to go out and visit people. There's never enough time to see things. You go to great, amazing cities and you're in the club. That's it. After a while, you feel like, "I'm just in the shitty club." Not to say that all the clubs are shitty, but there are some shitty ones out there. If that's all you do and they don't treat you nice, and it's a shitty place, it really gets to you. I also feel very fortunate that people come to the shows and they're interested in the music. For me, playing live is my favorite part of it, and I think the only way I would stop doing it is if it stopped being fresh. I feel really lucky, in the way it changes a lot with every show. It can be a certain way or another way. I really want it to be that way.

I think it's important that the audience takes away their special time, and that I have my special time during a show. I can look back and say that show was special because of...whatever. I think that's essential to what I do. If I was just going through the motions, that would be devastating to me. I can't imagine it's gonna happen, but I've seen it happen to other people. To me, there is no reason to go out and play shows if you're just going through the motions, unless you're doing it for the money. Then you're not really doing art anyway.

Splendid: What's the story behind the Perishable Goods EP? Why the limited release? If I wasn't a writer for Splendid, I wouldn't have a copy, as I couldn't find it in a store to save my life.

Shannon Wright: It was a limited edition and it sold out. Touch and Go has the full CD, but not with the complete artwork. We did 1000 of them, and they sold out much quicker than I ever would have imagined. It sold out really quickly. It was more for the real fans that have been there from the beginning and have stuck it out with me. I had written a couple of the songs back when Flight Safety was written, and I wanted to do some different versions of songs from the new record on there. I also wanted to do the cover song ("I Started a Joke" by the BeeGees). Also, Alan (Sparhawk) from Low, when we tour together, will play with me, so we got him down there to play on it. So it was just sort of a tribute to the people who come to the shows.

Splendid: Is "Azalea" from the EP a love song?

Shannon Wright: No. It's a love song in the way that falling in love with someone's spirit, but not a romantic love.

Splendid: Why the different versions of "Path of Least Persistence" and "Hinterland" on the Perishable Goods EP and Dyed in the Wool?

Shannon Wright: I've done that before. Flight Safety has "Heavy Crown" on it. Because of the way I do live shows, with things very improvised, some things become significantly different from the record. I had played both of those songs that way, and I just feel that most of the songs I do have different sides to them. I think the live show represents that. Sometimes things that are really fragile on a record can be really aggressive on stage, and vice versa. For me, it is creatively satisfying to show both sides of songs.

Splendid: On your records, Shannon Wright is always run together as one word: shannonwright. Is that a sort of stage name?

Shannon Wright: It's funny; I've always had people write things about me and say "What's the deal with her name?" and this or that, but it's not that big a deal. Before I was even signed to Touch and Go, I had made some tapes for some friends of mine of the songs I had written. I have this old '40s typewriter that I write all my lyrics on, and by mistake I typed it out that way and left it. I haven't thought much about it since. It's just easier to me. The name "shannonwright" is just not that important to me, but everyone else thinks its this big, important thing -- that I've consciously thought up this "what can I do" thing. It is silly to me because a name is a name, but ultimately the music is what's going to speak for me and not my name. If it's shannonwright or Sara Rider or whoever. It just happened that way and I left it.

Splendid: You type all your lyrics on a typewriter?

Shannon Wright: Mmm-hmm.

Splendid: Is that what you just had available or is it a specific thing you chose to work with?

Shannon Wright: I've had it forever. I love typewriters. I absolutely love old typewriters. I have a few, and I think they are beautiful. It's something very creative for me to sit down at a typewriter and type out the lyrics. I like the process a lot.

Splendid: What comes first when you write a song -- the lyric or the music? Does it vary?

Shannon Wright: It changes. Sometimes I can sit down and just write the music and the words come out immediately. That's great when that happens. Rarely do the lyrics come first. The music inspires the words for me. It's usually the other way around for people, but I'm a very visual person and for some reason the music itself creates a lot of words for me.

Splendid: Sort of like synaesthesia?

Shannon Wright: Sort of, yes.

Splendid: On the first two albums, the lyrics seem constructed more for the sound of the words than for their meaning. On Dyed in the Wool, more of the songs have a narrative quality to them. Is that intentional? Is it something you decided to try?

Shannon Wright: I think to me they're all very similar. I use words that don't have the correct meaning, grammatically correct meaning. Not to fit in melody-wise or how I sing them, it just kind of... kind of the way I just am. I don't know how to explain it. I don't try to have a conception of how I'm going to do something. I just do it. It makes sense to me. I write in a metaphorical way. I like to leave things open. I like for the listener to apply themselves to the music. I don't like to have a storyboard where this is the beginning and this is the end and this is the story. That's just such an open place that people could go and apply themselves to the music. That's what music is for. Everybody has their song or their mood, and they can put on a record and it's talking to them. That's what I want my music to do. I don't want to have a specific tale and make somebody go on my journey of that day in my life. I use words in that way sometimes, I think, to convey something that can be a visual thing or whatever. It's more in a poetic sense than a "lyrics" sense.

Splendid: As your albums progress, the production gets more polished. I don't mean that they are made more "radio friendly", but the tone seems tighter. Are you working towards a particular sound or is it because you have more time and money with each album?

Shannon Wright: Definitely not more money. (Laughs). I think it's just having a more knowledgeable approach, whereas when you start making records you're learning. I think Flight Safety sounds pretty good. The drums don't sound as good as the new records. I'm trying to think... Maps of Tacit is a weird record. To me it's like the "opium den" record, which I love. It is my favorite record, but I can see where people could say it's weird or doesn't sound right. It's my favorite one. It definitely has a feel about it that's very strange, but I really love that, because it's such a true moment captured on tape. To me, that's the best thing.

Splendid: Why play almost everything yourself on the records? Does that make it easier for you to produce? Is it a control issue?

Shannon Wright: The music is obviously very emotive, and sometimes it's hard to bring people in on the songs unless there is a big trust factor there for me to let go. I have to let go of a lot of things to do certain songs and things like that. The main thing is that I hear all the instruments in my head when I write the song, so when I already have the idea of how something is suppose to sound, it's just easier for me to do it than to have someone come in and say, "Well, I hear it this way." It kind of works out easier for me. Every layer to me is important to the song. Some of the songs are very stark, so if you have a piano line and this bass line is not really working with how the song is supposed to build or what it is supposed to convey, it causes problems. I know how those things should sound because I'm writing the songs. I guess in some ways it probably is a control thing, because it's very important to me how the songs are built.

Splendid: You say that when you think of a song, you hear all the instruments. So when you get an idea you hear drums, guitar and bass?

Shannon Wright: I hear how I want them to sound. It can be difficult, though, because when you hear all that stuff, it can seem frustrating for the people that come in to play with you because they have their own thing. I respect that, but there is a certain limitation to that, because if I'm writing the song or a piano line and hear how the drums are playing along in my head, then I already have that part written. It can be a little trying to record with me.

Splendid: Have you ever seen Krzysztof Kieslowski's movie Blue? The main character in the movie is recovering from the death of her daughter and husband, a famous composer. What is hinted at through out the story is that she was writing his music for him before he died. She has these musical epiphanies, though. She'll be sitting in her living room or swimming and all of a sudden an orchestra swells up in her head. Does that sound similar to what happens to you?

Shannon Wright: That actually happens to me. Sometimes I write things inside my head that I can't play. That's why I need to get better at instruments, because there is a lot of stuff up there I'd really like to play and I can't. I can't physically play them. As I get older, hopefully, I can.

Splendid: Do you keep a workbook with some sort of notation or stuff like that?

Shannon Wright: I'm completely self-taught --

Splendid: I don't mean musical notation, exactly. More just a summary or whatnot so that you can go back to it later.

Shannon Wright: It kind of just all stays up in my head.

Splendid: I'd be afraid I'd forget it all.

Shannon Wright: Sometimes I write a piece of music or a section of a song, and then I go on tour. I'll write the rest of the song in my head as I'm driving or whatever, and then go back to the piano or guitar, whichever one it's on, and play it that way. It makes it fun to write -- to write over time. I'm sure I've forgotten some things, though.