Wes Tirey : An Interview by Lou Turner
Petal Motel is pleased to publish our first contributor who isn’t Lara. Musician, poet, and writer Lou Turner was kind enough to conduct this wonderful interview with the most talented Wes Tirey about his latest album, The Midwest Book of the Dead, out April 30th on Dear Life Records.
Like most of us, Wes Tirey had a tough 2020. The Asheville-based songwriter and poet lost his full-time job and went through a break-up, but emerged with a double album of new songs called The Midwest Book of the Dead—as well as a companion chapbook of lyrics and prose poems—out on April 30th via Dear Life Records.
This double album is the follow-up to last year’s No Winners in the Blues, which presented Tirey’s folk songs interplaying with experimental yet spare electric guitar from label mate and fellow Asheville-based musician, Shane Parish. Midwest Book’s arrangements feature more of a full band on several tracks, but it’s just as spare in its easy, open feel—leaving plenty of room for Tirey’s aching, striking songs to sit front and center.
In true writerly form, Wes and I recently caught up via Google Docs about his new release, his literary influences, God as “primordial ether,” eggs-in-a-hole, and more. Check it out below.
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LT: How have these times been treating you? I believe we were set to play a show together in April of last year, and about a month out we realized that would not be happening! How has your life changed during the pandemic, and what have you been focusing on most?
WT: At the risk of being too honest, the pandemic certainly wreaked havoc in more ways than one. I lost my full-time job and a romantic relationship fell apart; but it’s hard not to view some things as an opportunity. It allowed me to follow a new career path that had been on my mind before Covid.
I’ve probably been focusing most on that side of my life, with plenty of balance for creative space and time. The early days of Covid was a bit of a writing spree. These days I’m working on collages and reading and giving Twin Peaks another shot.
LT: Congratulations on this new record and chapbook, Wes. When were these songs and poems written? Were any of these written during the last year of lockdown/quarantine?
WT: Thank you, Lauren — and congrats on your chapbook, too! I love the title {Shape Note Singing} and Sally Morgan’s artwork, and the pieces you’ve posted.
Album 1 was mostly composed in 2019, with all tracking in November and December of that year — though Skinny Arms and parts of If Love Blues and Monument Song had been around for a while.
Album 2 was mostly composed in 2020 during lockdown, though similarly to Album 1, there were some stray songs that fit into the cycle. It’s funny to look back on March of last year — I was pretty naive, at least. It really felt like I’d be on a two week staycation and then go back to work. So I tried to treat it like an artist residency. A month in, it was pretty obvious we weren’t going back to normal anytime soon. I’d say I wrote till about September or so. There’s a few others that didn’t make it on this album that might get a proper recording down the road.
The prose poems span about five years time, with a few as recent as 2019 and 2020.
Do you have a different process for writing lyrics than poems?
Thanks! Sally is wonderfully skilled in so many mediums—I’m so stoked that her art could be the cover. I’d say that, for me, writing lyrics and poems are certainly separate practices. But occasionally I’ll have a scrap from a poem that I try in a song. I try to let lyrics come alongside melodies, thinking about sounds a little more, maybe, where poems are typically written with the page in mind first. What about yourself?
WT: Sure, they’re pretty separate practices for me, too. Poems really offer a bit more freedom of form than lyrics. I’m kind of an old school formalist with lyrics. Whereas with poems, especially since I write them in prose, I can just let myself run wild a little. Writing for the page in mind makes sense — I love the way a prose poem looks to the eye.
LT: The arrangements are so spacious on this record — it feels so open, easy, and live. Who are the musicians that appear here, and what was the recording process like?
WT: Thank you — it feels important to keep the space inviting. One of these days I want to make my Lee Hazelwood record, but I keep coming back to sparse arrangements — something to complement the lyrics properly.
My buddy Ryan Gustafson and I had been kicking around the idea of doing a project together for a bit. I wanted to do something where I let someone else act as producer and force myself to work with more of an open attitude — rather than coming in with my mind made up about how the songs were supposed to turn out.
We did Album 1 at his cabin in Sandy Mush. I’d record guitar and vocals, and if Ryan told me to do another take, I’d do it; if he told me it was good, we’d move on to the next. Then we built everything from the ground up. Ryan can play damn near anything, so we could get to work pretty quickly. I hadn’t played harmonica in years — that was fun to mess with; and put together a few lead parts to play upside down on Ryan’s guitars.
My good buddy Tyler Hoskinson came down from Boone to handle all the drum parts. He played on my album Black Wind, too. I’m not so good at explaining the parts I hear in my head, so I just give Tyler a mood or aesthetic description and he always gets it. He’s a close music brother.
My friend Liliana Hudgens provides backing vocals on a number of tracks. She’s such a pro. We tracked a handful of takes just for the sake of it, but literally every first take she did was perfect.
Album 2 moved a lot quicker. Ryan and I did all those songs in the middle of December 2020 over the course of three nights at Bagatelle Books here in Asheville. Same deal: if the first take felt like the one, we’d move on to the next. Ryan was the best to work with.
LT: The title of the record is The Midwest Book of the Dead, and I’m assuming it’s referencing the Tibetan Book of the Dead; which feels both playfully wry and also sincerely relevant. There’s a mysticism to your writing that feels similar to the “bardo” state of that text—particularly your use of paradox and suggestion of a collective unconscious, like in “One Among the Many,” for example: “I’m Jesus / I’m Cain // I’m a station / I’m a train // I am a song / I am unsung // I am one among the many / I am many among the one.” Can you tell me about your relationship to the title, and if any, to Tibetan Buddhism?
WT: That was a strange song to write, because I wrote those lines and then just abandoned the idea of putting any music to them, coming back much later. It was almost like an exercise to force myself to work with such a small amount of content compared to the work I usually write. I don’t know where it came from, though — just kind of showed up and disappeared in a flash.
Have you listened to Dylan’s Rough & Rowdy Ways yet? I saw somewhere that the lines in “False Prophet” (I opened my heart to the world / and the world came in) is also in The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Maybe that was on my mind. I’m not sure. I don’t have much background in Buddhism, though I like some of the Zen stuff I’ve read — doing by not-doing, “artless art,” etc. Stoicism has a similarly (w)holistic cosmology. I spent some time studying a lot of those texts. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where that sentiment comes from.
LT: Buddhism isn’t the only religion to be found here. I’m reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s idea of the “Christ-haunted south” in these songs and poems—a kind of Southern Gothic Christianity that is both transgressive and full of grace: “There is honor among the righteous/there is honor among thieves/If love is blind/ Then let me see” (“If Love Blues”). Did you grow up in the Christian church? What frames your perspective on these big ideas of love, honor, and redemption?
WT: Sort of. I went to Sunday school with my grandma when I was little; it was old school, but not fire and brimstone stuff. The older I got, the more church-going got kind of sporadic. I played guitar in youth group for a bit in high school, but by the time I graduated I was pretty done with it all, personally.
But I do consider myself lucky, in a way. My folks never really forced a Christian worldview on me, as much as they wanted me to be the God fearing type. So it’s easy for me to engage with Christian texts or Christian imagery without being put off by it.
As for what frames my perspective on those things, probably lots of things I don’t quite understand yet. I’m probably closer to a Transcendentalist to anything else. God, Love, Compassion — it’s all part of a whole we have to participate in with one another. It says somewhere in the Kabbalah that God is “primordial ether” — that’s pretty far out, but it makes sense to me.
LT: Mmm, me too. You currently live in North Carolina, but there are lyrics about Ohio and Arkansas here, too–there’s a deep sense of place to your songs. Do you consider yourself a Midwesterner or a Southerner, and how does your environment impact your work?
WT: Rooting the content in a place is something that helps me focus the content more — where the stories are taking place, where the characters are from, where the characters are going. I don’t think it’s possible to be a writer of any kind and not be influenced by your environment. But the radical freedom that comes with writing is that you have permission to put the story anywhere. Richard Hugo talks about that in his book The Triggering Town: “The poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another.” I’ve never even been to Arkansas.
I remember one of my community college professors telling the class that when he moved to Dayton he had no idea he was moving to the south. It’s a really interesting blend of both midwestern and southern sensibilities there. In Ohio I felt like a midwesterner with southern heritage and in North Carolina I feel like a southerner with midwestern heritage. After almost a decade in the south, though, “you guys” has been replaced with “y’all.”
LT: You write a lot about work and blue collar concerns—being “overworked and underslept,” being hungry and appreciative of eggs-in-a-hole; the simple pleasure of butter and bread. What kinds of jobs have you had, and how does work find its way into your writing?
WT: Damn near all of us are overworked and underslept. And underpaid. The early days of Covid definitely felt like there was some creative space to explore that feeling.
I started working with my parents’ small business when I was thirteen, so at this point it’s been some kind of service industry work for over twenty years. But the last fifteen years have been spent in the coffee industry, mostly as a barista, and then a couple years as a sales rep for a roaster. I always tell folks that as a musician with a philosophy degree, I was destined for a long life selling coffee. These days, I work with a couple importers and sell green coffee to roasters.
I’m sure my work shows up in my writing somehow — just as all kinds of things filter through creative work. I’ve always thought the character in “Life is Good, Life is Sweet” is some kind of salesman hanging out at Applebees.
I make a pretty good egg-in-a-hole.
LT: You’re publishing a chapbook of lyrics and poems as a companion to this record. Throughout, there are epigraphs from and references to Frank Stanford, Raymond Carver, Stephen Crane, and Kenneth Patchen. There’s a kind of throughline of these very masculine twentieth century American poets. Can you tell me a little bit about your decision to include their work in your chapbook and how their work has influenced yours?
WT: Raymond Carver and Frank Stanford are more enduring influences than Stephen Crane, though I think The Black Riders is just as startling as Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Patchen is a bit more recent — last couple years or so. He’s a fellow Ohio boy and his prose poems are especially good. He just has this way of blending a voice that’s altogether midwestern, modern, and whimsical. He can be just as devastating as he is sweet.
I’ve been reading Carver since I was twenty-one or so; it’s hard to divorce his influence on my writing. The older I get, the more I understand the content of his stories and poems; but the influence is more style than anything else, I think. Having a process of filtering material is one thing, having a style to present it is another.
Stanford, though, was his own kind of revelation: French symbolism, Southern Gothic, Ozark-Zen — it’s really something else. I appreciate how character-driven his poems are. They’re these dark, beautiful dream sequences. The imagery can get so relentless: I dreamed a knife like a song you can’t whistle — or — Death dances a slow boogie./ Even the awkward can follow/ Where he leads.
LT: I love Stanford a lot, too. That slow boogie line always reminds me of “Boogie Disease” by Dr. Ross. What you said about Carver is making me want to loop back to Dylan again… do you feel a similar way about Dylan, re: divorcing influence or attempting to chart influence up to a certain point?
WT: Well, I don’t think anyone who’s written a song since the mid-60’s hasn’t been influenced by Dylan. You really can’t avoid it, even if you don’t care for his songs. Getting into albums like Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times was something of a re-discovery for me, in that the lyrical form is so simple, but not at the loss of interesting and intriguing content. I love those songs like “High Water (for Charley Patton)” and “Nettie Moore,” where he’s stacking verses of varying material and tying them up with a chorus. You’re left to wonder what world the narrator’s telling their story from.
LT: I have to ask you about this, because I’m a big ole Kath Bloom fan. She sang on your song “All the Livelong Day” a few years ago. You guys strike me as similar in that you’re both folk musicians, firmly rooted in that tradition, but open to collaborating or sharing bills within a wide variety of genres along the experimental spectrum (and you’re both releasing on Dear Life Records these days, which is a good example of this collective of like minded musicians across genres). You both have these gorgeous, strange voices that can’t be mistaken. How did you guys meet?
WT: Man, isn’t Kath the coolest? She’s such an old school artist weirdo. I mean that in the sweetest way possible. You just don’t meet many songwriters like her. I crashed with her band in Raleigh a few years ago after a show together, and I had to set her alarm clock on her phone for her.
I started getting really into those albums she did with Loren Connors back in like 2014. I was still reeling from a breakup and those songs just hit the spot and captured just about every emotion I was feeling. I sent her a friend request on Facebook.
She sent me a message at some point asking if we had ever met and that just sent us down a road of trading tracks we’d each been working on. It really blew my mind. I couldn’t hear anybody else singing on “All the Livelong Day,” so I just asked her. She recorded her part at her home in Connecticut. I think I still have those files, mic check and all — pretty sure she was eating a bag of chips.
LT: Thank you so much for talking about your record with me. I’m excited for folks to hear it.
WT: Thank you for taking the time to chat, Lauren — I really appreciate it. Stay safe and healthy.
Midwest Book of the Dead is out 4/30/21 via Dear Life Records. Available on cassette/CD + companion chapbook.
Lauren Turner is a writer and musician (Lou Turner, Styrofoam Winos) in Nashville, TN. She is an MFA candidate at Randolph College and the author of Shape Note Singing, her debut chapbook from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. Turner’s most recent album Songs for John Venn was deemed “some kind of low-key masterpiece” by Aquarium Drunkard. Petal Motel agrees!
