Saturday’s WMOT festival gives us a fresh reason to pause and think about the fuzzy quantum energy particle that is Aaron Lee Tasjan. He’s a shapeshifter, a rocker and a folkie, a singer and guitar player for the ages, and a mensch beloved by his Nashville community. In the dozen years he’s been in Nashville, he’s released a wildly daring and diverse string of albums. Among them: the jangling alt-country of In The Blazes, the Glamericana of Silver Tears, two different versions of his Beatles-ish rock and rolling Karma For Cheap, and last year, the delicious and sometimes snarky synth-pop opus Stellar Evolution. A bit of all those moods will work their way into ALT’s set on Saturday for Roots On The Rivers. It was time to catch up with our restless friend. My interview has been edited for clarity and length.
You’ve become renowned for your rapid musical evolution and reinvention. Are there any other aspects of your life or personality that you've noticed go through similar dramatic pivots and changes through time?
Yeah, I mean, I feel like a totally different person than I was even just five years ago. I think life influences who we are, and that can be a really scary thing, because change seems sort of unavoidable in those moments. And maybe the uncertainty of the times, the uncertainty of the industry that I work in - all of that has shaped me into a person who thinks about my life and my music and my creativity in a totally different way than I used to. Whereas, you know, when I started out, I feel like my goal was to try and be like a lot of my heroes, a Todd Snider or a John Prine or a (John) Hiatt, you know, somebody that just kind of carries on making records and playing gigs for their whole life as kind of a lifelong pursuit. And, you know, given the conditions of the world that we live in and the sort of fickleness of our industry, my perspective on that changed greatly. I feel now like I want to be really in the moment and just doing whatever inspires me most and feels the closest to who I am. So yeah, the music is really a reflection of more of the way I feel as a person trying to kind of navigate everything that's in front of us these days.
Yes, last time we talked, you had described going through some personal trials and feeling a lot better. Are there any foundational shifts you were able to make in your life that made you feel either more centered, more healthy, more directed, and more motivated in some way?
I became more grounded in a lot of ways, and just really honest with myself about where I am and learning to value very deeply the small audience that I've been able to build through touring. It's not a big audience, but it's a very dedicated one. And I recognize that oftentimes we try to measure all these data points nowadays in our business with Spotify and social media. But I've come to really appreciate and understand the depth of connection that can exist between an artist and an audience that really connects to what the artist is singing. That's where I feel like I've gotten to on my journey so far. And I just really appreciate being a small-time entertainer (laughs). Especially in a time when a lot of people I know are trying to figure out how to move on to other things. You know, the fact that I'm able to keep doing what I love, and that there's a group of people out there that really want to hear that is a big one for me. And I'll tie this up by saying I was recently at a barbecue where I got to hang out with that guy, Cyril (Jordan), the guitar player for the Flaming Groovies. And we had a sort of philosophical conversation about life and all of these things. It was one of those moments where you sort of recognize that those guys were never obviously as big as the Stones or anything like that. But the influence that they had and the audience that they connected with has sustained them for decades and a lifetime’s worth of music and connection. Again, you look for the little signs in life that you're going down the right road. Every time I get a chance to connect with somebody like that, who you know has had that sort of experience that doesn't necessarily musically mirror my own, but I feel very much connected to in terms of just appreciating earning a spot in the canon, the lexicon of music and influence. I really relate to that.
Touching on Stellar Evolution specifically, can you tell me a little bit about how you started playing with that synthesizer-based sonic landscape - with those instruments - and how the sound began to take shape in your head?
Yeah. Gregory Lattimer who produced the record, I gave him a lot of leeway as far as how he was hearing it. A song like “The Drugs Did Me,” I had written it and brought it in thinking that it was somewhere along the lines of a 70s English pub rock song, like a Nick Lowe thing, or something like that. Gregory kind of heard it more like a 1990s Beck track. And I was just trying to really be playful and let go of a lot of preconceived notions that I had had about what my own music needed to be. It was a great exercise for me in exactly that and seeing what can happen when I am allowing someone else to really have a say in what they feel like I can do and how far I can stretch it. And I think the only way to really find that stuff out is to kind of take it what I would consider to be a little too far. And I think in that way, it was very successful (laughs).
So when we see you on stage on May 31, what sort of instrumentation and repertoire are you presenting? You have a new batch of songs that are in one kind of musical idiom, but you've got a whole body of work before it. I imagine there will be guitars!
Yeah, I would consider the guitar to be as much a part of my voice as my actual voice, so that's kind of like front and center. For this Roots on the Rivers set, I'm going to have some really great Nashville musicians. Doni Schroeder was in Bobby Bare Jr.’s band for a long time and plays (drums) with the great Rayland Baxter. (He) and the wonderful Ted Pecchio on bass will be the rhythm section. And then we're going to have a few guests that are going to jump up and play on a few songs with us. I'll be on electric guitar. And I think we have some additional guitar and some fiddle and a few different surprises throughout the set, which will be really fun. One of the ways that I think Stellar Evolution has found a place in my live set is through being able to kind of reinvent some of those songs in different settings. I have a bigger band that has sort of pulled off the versions from the record, but in this setting, we're going to be doing some of that material in a more organic kind of way. And at least for me, it's really fun to hear how the songs still stand up and function in that setting as well.
You mentioned the song “The Drugs Did Me.” I also think of songs like “12 Bar Blues” from Silver Tears. Humor has been a thread through your music as long as I've known it. Do you know when a song is turning in a serious or a sardonic direction? And how have you managed that over time?
Yeah, that's just kind of how I live my life, you know? I was going through something funky earlier this year, and I was on the phone with my buddy, kind of sorting through it. And one of the first things he said to me was, ‘I'm really glad to hear you laughing about this.’ And you know, that is oftentimes my response to the bumps and grinds of life, to find what it is about it that I sort of view as entertaining in some way. And definitely, there's times when I've tried to be more honest on social media when I do feel down. But so much of life is about balance, you know, and so much of suffering you sort of see later on that it’s like a gift. It leads to creation. I mean, gosh, without suffering, we wouldn't have rock and roll, for example! So my songs end up being sort of a reflection of the way I look at life, which is always with a bit of a side-eyed smirk, you know? Randy Newman and Todd Snider and John Prine - their songs just always hit me with this dose of humor that felt like a breath of fresh air and made it feel that it was possible for me to not be self-conscious about my goofy personality, I guess, and gave me the confidence, maybe, to try to put it into my songs.
In recent years, I've seen you grow ever more outspoken on behalf of the LGBTQ community. Was that a shift in terms of what you wanted to talk about or any change in your life?
It can be tricky. As a queer person, sharing that side of yourself can sometimes relegate you to this box of like, oh, this is gay music or queer music, or any of those sort of labels that to me feel reductive. Because no one ever is like, ‘Oh yeah, I love the straight music of Kacey Musgraves,’ or whatever. And I just don't believe that whoever someone's attracted to should enter into how their music is categorized. So I made a conscious choice. I was always sort of singing about it, you know, like on In The Blazes, there's this song about Judy Sill, called “Judy Was A Punk,” who is like a bisexual icon who inspires a lot of folks that I've talked to. But I think as things kind of continued to get hairier and hairier for queer folks and trans folks, I kind of felt the need to sort of be like, yeah, I've dated men. I've had boyfriends. I have had girlfriends. You know, I never really, for a long time, I didn't really label myself in any sort of way. But when you see things kind of happen and, you know, taking a negative toll on the mental health and emotional stability of folks that are in your community like that. It's, it's sort of, I don't know. I think there's maybe not even a call necessarily It felt more like an obligation to to stand up and let people know more about who I am and in that way sort of be able to advocate on a level that maybe I wasn't able to when I was sort of just choosing not to talk about that as much, I guess.
Let's wrap with just a cultural question that maybe relates to that. You moved from New York City after playing with the New York Dolls and what must have been a life with more theater and rock and roll. It was urban and cosmopolitan. Then you come to Nashville. When did you arrive and how did it come to feel like home as an artist?
So I got to Nashville in November of 2013. I was actually coming to join a band called Everest that was on ATO Records. And that band sort of quickly went on hiatus. And when that happened, I wasn't sure exactly what my next move was going to be. I had written and was preparing to release my first EP, which was called Crooked River Burning, and that was definitely more acoustic guitar driven, right in the vein of the Americana music that I was hearing at the time, and that scene felt very fresh and very open and like an interesting place to be. I'd known Jason Isbell for a good long while at that point, and had opened some of his shows in New York City. And I was always dragging everybody I could find in New York to see him play at like Bowery Ballroom - all before (the release of) Southeastern, obviously. And I just remember feeling very pulled towards that sound and that music. Whereas, in New York at the time, it was more bands like MGMT or TV On The Radio, a lot of that kind of weirder indie rock stuff. I'd been in New York for 10 years playing in all these various bands, yet sort of writing these acoustic Americana influenced songs, kind of thinking I was just doing it in a vacuum, and I didn't really care if it was cool or not. It was just what I liked. And coming to Nashville, and all of a sudden it all kind of turned around and became a thing that was really cool to do and to be a part of that scene. And I'm just enormously grateful to the generation that came before us, you know folks like Mary Gauthier and Elizabeth Cook, certainly Todd Snider, Chuck Mead, and all of those people who kind of laid this groundwork for folks like me and Margo (Price) and Josh Headley, all of these amazing singers. The fact that there's space for all of us to do the very different versions of that kind of music that we all do and exist in the same space at the same time, it just felt like breathing to me, moving to Nashville. Because suddenly everything that I was doing that maybe wasn't that hip back in New York City, this felt like the place to be.
