CURSIVE
I remember seeing CURSIVE with FROM AUTUMN TO ASHES and THURSDAY back in 2002. I was confused by their performance. Very confused. My high-school mind half-assedly attempted to process their noisy, art-rock and big word using lyricist Tim Kasher. As they say, the band was lost on deaf ears, more pumped on massive breakdowns, and pile-on’s, traits that certainly didn’t fit CURSIVE’s description. Then The Ugly Organ fell into my hands, and I was hooked. The themes were complicated, full of self-loathing sentiments and nihilistic angst, amidst music that sounded like nothing I’d heard before. Seven years later, CURSIVE are still at it. They released a new album titled Mama I’m Swollen on Saddle Creek, and are gearing up for a tour, which will take them through the United States and then across the pond to rock the tea out of them Brits. Kasher, the band’s lyricist and lead guitarist, is hot off what he described as the calmest year in the past ten, and is excited to share the new album to new audiences. His sense of urgency to share his love of creating definitely comes through in the interview below. And for those youngsters in the crowd, definitely give it a second chance before you decide it’s not catchy or brutal enough. It’ll make since soon; trust me…
Pastepunk: I imagine touring can be kind of limited as opposed to being at home. What do you do when you’re at home? Do you have any hobbies?
Tim Kasher: I work daily on music. I scored a film last fall. I guess that’s a job in a sense. I had a boss. He was the director. And I work on screen plays. Like this month, I’m working on scheduling for a screen play.
Pastepunk: So you’re keeping pretty busy?
Tim: Uh, yeah. But, you know, it’s also pretty nice. The deadlines are pretty lax.
Pastepunk: What’s the movie you did scoring for?
Tim: It’s a film called “My Suicide.”
Pastepunk: Was it electronic, or did you use acoustic instruments?
Tim: It was mostly acoustic.
Pastepunk: What was that process like as opposed to writing songs for CURSIVE?
Tim: It was a pretty enlightening experience. They’d send me clips, and I’d watch em, and prepare music deemed appropriate for what they were looking for. It was a lot of trial and error. It was pretty interesting.
Pastepunk: Yeah. That’s kind of exciting because music really shapes how someone sees a movie. That must be exciting to have such a big impact on the film.
Tim: It was. It was exciting to see it. I’ve seen it. It was showing at the South by South West festival. I saw a screening of it down there on a big screen. It was fun.
Pastepunk: Were you happy with the way it came out?
Tim: Yeah. I’m pretty well protected because the scoring’s kind of vague. It just says music by Tim Kasher and there’s such an amazing sound track on the movie. It really makes me look good, like RADIOHEAD, BRIGHT EYES, and MY MORNING JACKET.
Pastepunk: And what’s the screen play you’re working on?
Tim: It’s one i wrote a couple of years ago. It’s called “Help Wanted Nights.” Loosely said, it’s about a stranger. His car breaks down in a small town and he spends a week kind of getting in trouble in the town. I’m feverishly trying to get it made this summer. Working on that in between tours.
Pastepunk: In the past, what was it that drew you to music and writing lyrics as opposed to doing screen-play’s, books, and short-stories?
Tim: Um, a lot of it I see as a discipline issue, as well as feasibility to what you could do. Feasibility as in there was a guitar in the house, and I learned how to play guitar. It’s just feasible, and that’s what’s great about music. Especially… you’re using Garage Band to record this. With technology coming to where it is, it is really feasible to maybe pick up an instrument and record your songs. The discipline side being that writing songs is just a much shorter attention span discipline. I think a screen play is the same way. It’s just baby steps towards a bigger writing medium. A screen play is very skeletal.
Pastepunk: Coming into a new genre, has it been hard to create a discipline? It’s very different than writing music…
Tim: Yeah. It is hard. It’s certainly something I’m still working on. I’m certainly at my happiest when I’m working diligently on either really, an album or a screen play. But I turned thirty a few years back and that was kind of a landmark age. You gotta move on, not move on but if I really do have a passion to get into filmmaking, I need to start somehow.
Pastepunk: What was it like playing Letterman? That must have been a pretty crazy experience…
Tim: Yeah. It was. A good friend of mine asked if it was like a Pleasantville experience, where you feel like you’re kind of zapped into the T.V. It does seem like that because in grade school you watched David Letterman and you watched bands. So somehow I end up standing on the other side of the camera with David Letterman kind of off to my left sitting at his desk. It was absolutely unusual.
Pastepunk: It sounds really weird. It’s like that’s David Letterman…
Tim: Yeah. He seemed very stern and grandfatherly.
Pastepunk: Was he a cool guy?
Tim: Yeah he was. The most we talked to him was on camera. We didn’t meet him before hand or anything.
Pastepunk:He seemed kind of stoked on the performance, I thought. A little bit.
Tim: I didn’t know at the time. I was like, I didn’t know. I was like, man, maybe I screamed too hard or something. But when i watched it later on, it was like, ‘oh, he seems happy.’
Pastepunk: It was funny. He kept making comments about the Mama I’m Swollen album title, like these little in-between things. He would kind of note the sexual innuendo with his face.
Tim: Right. Yeah.
Pastepunk: How has your attitude towards touring changed as you’ve gotten older, like compared to when you first started the band?
Tim: Um, it really depends on what time of the season you ask me. Right now I really love it. But last year was one of the quietest years I’ve had in probably ten years, in the sense that I kind of let THE GOOD LIFE down and CURSIVE was writing instead of touring. So again, you’ve caught me at a point where I think touring is great, but we’ll get to the other point of the spectrum.
Pastepunk: So you were definitely ready to jump back into it after taking a year off?
Tim: Yeah. Absolutely. We’ve been doing little jaunts here and there and it’s been going really well. We’re all ready to get out to new cities. It’s an exciting time when you just release a record. You want to just get out and play the songs for people.
Pastepunk: What kind of reception are you getting for the new record? Do you read reviews or do you just leave that aside?
Tim: It seems like it’s been fairly polarized. We’re also pretty ok with that. It’s hard to keep a career going in this industry. We’re pretty happy to have done six records and still remain relevant. I think the polarized reaction…I think it shows a lot of promise, that there’s people who adamantly dislike it, and conversely, people who are really into it. I think that’s good music to make. You never set out to make everyone happy.
Pastepunk: What do you think it is about the new record that is polarizing people?
Tim: That I don’t really know. I don’t know if it’s my role to analyze that, and try to figure out why people react one way to one and not to another.
Pastepunk: Like that might be kind of counter-productive?
Tim: Yeah. Maybe it’s better to not know the mystery of what works and what doesn’t. Lest you start abusing your knowledge or something. I dunno.
Pastepunk: Do you ever get sick of playing your old songs live? I imagine you’ve played them a million times. How do you keep yourself interested in material that your fans still want to hear?
Tim: I’m going to throw this out there. I think we’ve been playing long enough now that, in a small way, I can relate to that question. The question, like when you see BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN play “Thunder Road” or something like that. The thing is, the songs that we still do play, there is is kind of a quiet agreement that we only play the ones we still have an interest in. There’s a relationship there where there’s songs that the crowd is generally wanting to hear and has an interest in. There’s areas where we don’t get along. There’s some songs that get called out all the time and we just don’t play ‘em. We just don’t agree, you know? For the most part, it seems that we are all kind of in agreement. It’s become the show, or the performance that you’re doing. I think I went through a couple years where I couldn’t stand playing Domestica songs. But now you just get in the groove and you learn to appreciate them in a different way, in a nostalgic way maybe.
Pastepunk: Is it kind of funny having these old songs that maybe people are more attached to now than you are anymore?
Tim: Yeah, actually. Totally. I never really thought of it in that way but that’s certainly true. Again, if were playing something off Domestica, it’s probably a totally different experience, what it means to me after all these years as opposed to what it means to someone who it’s their favorite record. Something that’s always been their favorite of the albums.
Pastepunk: I noticed a lot of references to animals on Mama I’m Swollen. There were a few lines, one was “Were better off animals,” and the other was “Don’t tell me were just animals awaiting our next kill.” I was wondering what that theme means to you, and where it came from?
Tim: I think it was just one of the over arching themes of the record. I was struggling with this man made society that we constructed, and kind of the conflict of that. Just trying to establish some kind of maturity and enlightenment of human beings is what were supposed to do in these constructs. On the other hand, just recognizing that were just dogs or bears or monkeys with suit and ties on, you know?
Pastepunk: How does being in CURSIVE help you reach, or walk towards that kind of enlightenment? Like as opposed to having a day job, or doing something else instead?
Tim: I suppose, just as far as the practice of writing; that’s kind of an exercise in…just writing these ideas and exploring these ideas. I’m just kind of more internalizing the question. Under the large umbrella of what music is, there is a chance to kind of stay outside the norm as you get older. You are still running around, and playing around. But it’s still in conflict with doing the right thing; of a domestic life. Especially when you get into tour, and stuff like that, it’s really very much at odds with the domesticity.
Pastepunk: Are you married?
Tim: No. I’m engaged. I’m getting married in the Fall.
Pastepunk: Does she come on tour with you? It just sounds like that would be hard. Not just that, but just keeping relationships going while you’re dealing with the drudgery of tour.
Tim: Yeah, I think it just takes the right kind of people for that kind of relationship. Truck drivers and airline pilots are probably out a lot more than I am. They probably have a wife and kids. It’s a life style choice, I guess, for both sides. For both myself and her. For both touring musicians and their significant others. They also make that decision of who they’re with.
Pastepunk: Who came up with the concept for the “From the Hips” video?
Tim: That was a treatment that I had written out and passed on to the director.
Pastepunk: That was pretty funny.
Tim: It’s kind of ridiculous.
Pastepunk: Definitely ridiculous, but it was funny. What was in your head when you came up with that concept? What did it mean?
Tim: I guess I was imagining for every relationship that we delve into, we bring all this extra…basically taking all your old relationships, and putting it into one date. So when you go out on a new date, you bring all this baggage of all your past experiences. But then, by the end of it, it kind of deconstructs the whole thing like. Well, it’s all irrelevant.
Pastepunk: I really liked a lot of the guitar work on Mama I’m swollen. Who was one guy who made you want to pick up the guitar when you were first getting going?
Tim: Really, I’m not quite sure. I mean, I’m trying to be specific. Maybe it was like U2 or something like that. But I do know specifically that the first stuff I started learning was SIMON AND GARFUNKLE songs on acoustic guitar.
Pastepunk: Who would you say are your biggest influences lyrically?
Tim: I’d definitely say PAUL SIMON. His earlier stuff. TOM WAITS, ELVIS COSTELLO. FUGAZI. I don’t know if I ever really ended up writing much like them, but I definitely have the utmost respect for the quality of their writing.
