Lyrical Memory

Pitchfork's interview with Califone's songwriter Tim Rutili is a fascinating read, especially towards the end when Rutili describes the the poetics of songwriting:

Pitchfork: How do those samples go from being just field recordings to, in some cases, mirrors of the melody?

TR: Well, the one's that made it onto the record that are standing alone were added as an afterthought. Actually, there is this book my friend Zach gave me called The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos, and it's right before World War I, and it's part of a U.S.A. trilogy. The way the book is structured, the first part of each chapter is cut up things from newspapers around that time, and the second part of a chapter is kind of a blurry memory written with no capital letters, no punctuation. The third part of each chapter is just these beautiful stories story that follow one particular character and what they were going through right before, when the country was really new and about to go through World War I.

I just imagined that it would be great to put a record together that way. So, I figured a lot of that sound collage and sample stuff would be newspaper clippings. The book is really structured but the way it appears, it feels really random and natural, like a beautiful collage.

Pitchfork: So the melody is the third part of each chapter?

TR: Yeah, definitely.

Pitchfork: And the samples are the first?

TR: Yeah, it's called a "camera eye" in the book. It's beautifully poetic, the way the newspaper clippings just fall together in the book.

Pitchfork: What about the memory?

TR: That's almost the lyrics, for me.