Prana Crafter

Will Sol’s experimental, interstellar sonic scapes are hallucinogenic enough to make you shut your eyes and find yourself transported to his native Pacific Northwest woods. The man known as Prana Crafter‘s early life sounds like something out of an old-timey classic country album, murder-ballad included, but as we chatted, things in his life got spacier and spacier, much like his catalog.

Tell me about your relationship to the Pacific Northwest.
I grew up about 30 or 40 minutes north of Portland, right over the border of Washington. It was one of those really small intentional towns they built for the logging people back in the 20s or something. Pretty much everybody that worked or lived there had a parent or grandparent who was a mill worker, because nobody came other than that. It was definitely a rural logging culture.

When you first start going up the Olympic Peninsula, I live right where it first breaks off from the other part of Washington. The closest real town that’s not just a little logging town is Olympia, the Capital. It’s about an hour from where I’m at. You can go up the Peninsula on the 101 to go to the National Forests. I always tell people, if you go to Washington make sure to not just go to Seattle but to go to the Olympic Peninsula. Seattle’s cool, but it’s not a good example of Washington. I’m not into cities in general. I pretty much just go if I have to, and then I have to get right out of there.

Were you parents in the logging industry?
Both of my grandparents were. My dad’s dad was a logger, and I don’t exactly know what happened but he got injured by a saw or something and so he couldn’t work. He was just a real depressed, old logging dude. I never met my other grandpa who was a chemist. He died when my mom was a teenager from some type of exposure to chemicals. So they both were… involved. And now that I think about it, they both had kind of a negative experience with it but the families both stayed there. When I was growing up, my dad lived in this house way out in the country. I would only be with him on the weekends and stuff, but he still lived there ’til I was out of high school, in that house where he grew up way out there.

So how did you get into music in this small town when you were a kid?
My dad was a bluegrass musician. He was in this band called Silver Mountain. It was funny, I saw that band Thee Silver Mt. Zion that had some of the Godspeed guys. But this band was just a classic ‘70s country-folk-bluegrass band. They made a record, and they were kind of popular in the area. Then they had some real tragedy. There were a husband and a wife in the band, and I don’t know all the details, but the husband killed the wife and then burnt the house down with himself in it so that kind of ended. I think my dad thought he was going be a bluegrass star, and then this thing happened, the band broke up, and then everything just kinda went down. But because of that he still had guitars and still played music and he taught me.

Then being in Washington and growing up in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, that whole Seattle scene was just huge. There was just no way that you would escape that. I was just completely obsessed with Kurt Cobain, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and all that kind of stuff when I was about 12 years old. I got my dad to teach me how to play all the Nirvana songs. He’d teach me bluegrass, and he liked classic rock, so he’d teach me that stuff, but I’d pretty much go to him wanting to learn all the grunge stuff.

Were you at all interested in the bluegrass stuff your dad was?
When I was a teenager, I got into punk rock after being really into grunge, so I really wasn’t into bluegrass. But by the time I was maybe about 17 or 18, I started listening to a lot of Garcia and Grisman stuff and Old & In the Way, because I liked the Grateful Dead, and they have such a country/bluegrass thing going sometimes, it kind of pushed me over to that. Then I was into it but he passed away and I moved away, so I didn’t really get to learn a lot in the amount of time I had with him. He taught me a couple of little Bluegrass riffs and stuff, but I didn’t get to learn as much as I could have of that genre from him. 

He was nice; he would teach me punk things and I know he hated it. I’d show up with NOFX CDs and be like, “Can you teach me this?” And he’d be like, “Oh god, this is horrible!” He’d show me and he’d say, “That’s not their riff, that’s from Mountain,” and he’d pull out the record and he’d be like, “Don’t you hear this riff? That’s where it came from.”  So, he was funny in that way, he could get it, he had an awesome ear. I don’t have a great ear like he did. He could listen and then just play something after he heard it.

What an amazing way to learn about music though, like “I’m gonna teach you; this is where all the roots are, this is where it comes from…” That’s a really special thing to have, especially in a parent.
Yeah, that’s true.  He had a huge record collection but because he was pretty poor, over time it would just get smaller and smaller. When he died, it was basically gone. But at one point he had over 5,000 records and we had this weird attic that was just full and I could just open it and just start grabbing. He was a collector so he had all kinds of weird obscure blues things, and these little compilations they used to do back then where they’d have Jeff Beck on the same album as some blues guy. Most classic anything- classic rock or classic country, he would have had. Where I grew up, contemporary country was the music to listen to in my town, which I hated, but he had some good country, so I’m completely into country because I heard some of the good stuff also.

That’s an important distinction.  Were you in bands growing up, or were you making music on your own?  
I was in one band from about age 14 or 15 until I was about 1. I thought it was good, but it was kind of just play-as-fast-as-you-can type of punk rock. We would play in bars, they let you come in and play and then you have to leave right away. They were really bad dive bars, and my mom came to one of those and she was totally traumatized. There wasn’t any creativity in that scene, sadly, you couldn’t do anything besides the NOFX, Rancid, Bad Religion type of thing. If you went beyond that, people thought it was really weird. I listened to Bob Marley all the time and my friends would get so mad at me, like, screaming at me in the car, “TURN THAT OFF!” It was fun and I learned a lot, but creatively, it wasn’t an awesome music scene or anything to grow up in.

Tell me about the evolution from punk rock to what you’re making now.
I think some psychedelic mindset set in it at a certain point in my teen years.  I didn’t know about all the amazing psychedelic music that I know about now growing up in those times. I only knew Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver. My dad had told me about whatever was accessible pop culture-wise, but I just loved that. Especially in my mid-teenage years, it became really popular to be obsessed with Pink Floyd and the psychedelic side of the Dead. I think I mellowed out a lot, too, and so I wasn’t really as angsty as I had been. I was a lot more interested in meditating at that point than I was in skateboarding and going to punk rock shows. I still like some of it, I’ll still listen once in a while to the Misfits and Bad Religion and think, “Well, that’s still good.”

I never liked learning anything specifically on the guitar.  If he showed me something, I’d always just be “Okay, I get the gist of it; now you can play with it,” and my dad was always like, “No, you’re supposed to…that’s not the right way.” I don’t like that convention of having to do something in a certain way.  I really don’t like playing something the way that it was played by someone else, so I think maybe that pushed me more towards the experimental side. It’s not for any philosophical reason, it’s what natural for me. It’s extremely hard to learn something exactly a certain way. I don’t like to do music if it feels like I’m doing a mathematical problem. I’m only interested in that kind of spontaneous side of things.

I’m very open about the fact that my locus of control when it comes to music is very external. It just comes out.  Usually, if I sit down and go to do something, it will come out in a way that is much better than I could have planned it. If I’m recording and I really want something a certain way and then mess up, there have been so many times when I’ve been like, “Oh, the mess-up was so much better than what I was trying to do.” Eventually, at some point, I just kind of stopped. It’s always whatever comes out naturally.

When you sit down, do you have moments or times when it isn’t coming, does it feel like work?  Does it feel like you have to push it?  
There’s definitely times when I don’t feel it’s natural or it doesn’t feel good, but I’ve found that isn’t really reflective of whether or not it’s actually good. There are times when I think it just felt like tension and roadblocks, and then you listen to it and go, “Oh, that was completely awesome!” Then there are times when it feels so good, you’re in that flow state, it feels awesome, and then you listen and you’re like, “Well that wasn’t good.” Something about this self-reflection can be really deceiving. If you’re judging it on how it’s going, it’s kind of like, what are you judging exactly because there’s no universal thing you’re aiming for.

I’ve heard Jerry Garcia talk specifically about that. He used to get really pissed off about how they were playing, he got so mad after one show this particular year that he pushed Phil down the stairs, and he was all up in his face and screaming at him and then they went and listened back to it, and it was the best show of the year. It was just this huge realization to him.  And I’ve definitely had that same realization, that my impression of how well something’s going, by my own gratification, is not reflective of what’s actually happening.

I just try my best.  Sometimes, I’ll just stop, but I’m trying to not let that happen because you get a lot of good-sounding stuff when you let yourself go because something else is driving the train at that point. If I’m going to write a song with lyrics I will only do it if it feels really natural, but if it’s improvisation, then I’m trying to get more comfortable with the fact that even when it doesn’t feel good, you can’t focus on that ‘cause that’s what’s gonna throw you off. If it’s just perfectly flowing, then it’s not pushing into anything new. 

How do you decide whether or not a song needs words?
Those come on their own. It’s always just playing around, and jamming and then spontaneously from that, if something sticks out and I go, “Well, that was a great line,” and from there it kind of just develops. The actual songwriting part is one hundred percent always just a gift, it’s just something that comes to me, some little gem. Usually with improvs, I’ll record one, and then just mix it for a while, maybe add a little bit here and there and be done with it.  But with vocal songs, I spend a long, long time as far as just doing pieces and then waiting and listening to them. I’m talking years between when a song first comes to me and when I actually decide it’s something that I should record. Some of the songs on Enter the Stream were well over five or more years old before I ever recorded that album.

When you’re recording, do you try to isolate yourself,  or do you listen to other music to draw inspiration?
Not on purpose. If someone asks “What influenced that?,” I can say what I listened to, but it’s not a conscious thing. There’s this one song I did on the album Bodhi Cheetah’s Choice called “Holy Tempel of Flow,” and when I listen to it now, it’s very clear to me that I was listening to this Hendrix song called “Pali Gap.” When I listen back I can hear it and go, “Ohhh, I was clearly obsessed with that song.” I can see the influences, but I don’t do it on purpose. Sometimes I’ll listen to Neil Young or certain people that songwriting-wise will inspire me.  I’d say I kind of get myself to feel, not to try to be influenced. Or if I was gonna go play the guitar and try to record something, I would totally want to listen to some Hendrix just to get that feeling of guitar, of wanting to just pick it up and do it.

You seem to be pretty selective about playing shows.
Yeah, I don’t play that often. I don’t go out there looking to try, I don’t have a booking person for a couple of reasons. One is that personality-wise, I kind of have a lot of social anxiety. I’m not someone who’s good in a lot of those scenarios, so it’s hard for me to seek it out, because if I do, as soon as they say, “Yes,” I’m like “Aughhhh!” 

If somebody asks me and it’s someone I really respect and I really want to do it, then I’ll definitely do it, but I don’t seek it out. I never became a touring career musician because that kind of lifestyle is really bad for my particular personality. And I have six kids. I homeschool all of them, and I’m in a graduate program working on a Ph.D. I’m close enough to Seattle or Portland and I’ll go to either one of those if somebody invites me. But it’s also hard to travel very far away to a show that’s not on Friday or Saturday, nobody’s there, and you drive for all these hours to go do all this stuff and spend a bunch of money to get there, it’s tough. But I am going over to The Netherlands next month to do a festival (Le Guess Who?), and so that’ll be the farthest that I’ve ever gone away to do something.  Maybe in the future, though, when my kids are out of the house, I’ll definitely do more playing out then, but it will always be a little bit difficult with my personality, I think.

Yeah, sounds like a full plate. What’s the deal with the Ph.D.?
I’m bridging it with my interest in music, which is helpful so that it’s not a complete disconnect. I’m doing the proposal for the dissertation and it’s on sense of agency and improvisation. There’s been a lot of great research on improvisational music, there’s a lot of neuropsych stuff on it. One recent study found that these people had a really decreased sense of agency talking about music, saying things like, “At one point, you know, music became an entity and it was writing or playing itself,” and, “My decision was the group’s decision,” that kind of stuff. All musicians who improvise know that experience, but it’s not something that’s really been explored. I’m hoping to do that speak with different musicians and have them do an improvisation, then do an interview with them about their sense of agency during that and do this qualitative analysis on it and try to figure out what that general experience really is. It’s been a kind of way to bridge things together because I’ll get to work with lots of musicians. I’m not all the way approved yet but I’ve been putting the feelers out there for people I wanted to have involved in it.  And so far every person that I’ve talked to has been like, “Absolutely.” They know exactly what I’m talking about when I talk about it, and then they’re stoked about being a part of it.

Every musician I’ve talked to says the same thing; this life chooses you. 
I strongly suspect that even when people think they’re intentionally doing certain things, a lot of it is more precognitive and preconscious than people think it is.

I’m not a musician but as someone who feels like music can definitely take you to another plane, watching musicians, I definitely see when people kind of transcend.
You can really feel it. I came across one kind of study from 1986, a scholarly paper on the effect of Grateful Dead music on the fans.  It was really funny, it was talking about how many people believed that they were in psychic communication with Jerry Garcia. It was a very common theme, like, “I wanted him to play this song, and the very next song was that song!” That’s a pretty common experience that people had, the thought that they were communicating with the band, the band was fulfilling their desires psychically by playing things a certain way. I’m more interested in the musician experience, but that showed me “Oh, it actually could affect the sense of agency and the consciousness for people there around it.” One of the things I was looking at really recently in that area is looking at musical improvisation as a system and I think the audience in that scenario is a hundred percent part of that system with the band and everybody else. It would make sense that if there was non-verbal communication going on between the band members and of course that would be happening with the audience, too.

I guess that’s why it affects you so deeply.
I think it’s because you’re a part of it. I think it really is more of a meshed kind of thing where, I don’t know how, obviously, but I’m sure that the thoughts and emotions and all that of the audience members come out and I would assume they have to have some type of effect. I don’t believe that you can only receive the messages you hear with your ears. I believe that probably, maybe Jerry was making improvisational choices based off of the psychic communications. Who knows?

What’s your favorite Grateful Dead recording?
That’s really tough. I’ve been listening that Pacific Northwest box set they put out last year a lot lately. It’s right in my favorite years, the early ‘70s and it’s in the Pacific Northwest, so I have some weird feeling that it was going on 10 years before I was born in the same place that I was, and it’s got that energy.  And for some reason, “He’s Gone.” I’ve been listening to all kinds of different versions. Mainly all from between ‘72 to ‘74 or something, but for some reason, I’ve just been really wanting to hear that song a lot, which is a song I didn’t care about for 20 years, it wasn’t a song that ever was something I wanted to listen to, and for some reason, I just can not stop listening to different versions of it right now. I don’t have necessarily a favorite show right now, but just, kinda, still hangin’ around in the early ‘70s. I do like some of the stuff in other eras, too, but for some reason, I just can never stop listening to shows between ‘72 and ‘74. It’s definitely a sweet spot.  With Jerry, I love the custom guitars, but I really like some of the old stuff when he was either playing on Gibsons or playing on Fenders. Some of that of that stuff is so good. That guitar tone he would get, I just love it. He got better as he got older, obviously, in certain ways, but also, there was a change, you know, when you get better, you start to kind of rely on certain things because you can, and when he was younger, I thought there was a lot more raw kind of cosmic stuff coming down.

Listen to Prana Crafter’s latest release with Tarotplane, Symbiose, here or visit his website for links to other releases!

photo credit: @rad_stevens