Califone's Tim Rutili on Technology, Getting Punched in the Face, and the Changing Music Press

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

I've been a big fan of Tim Rutili's work as Califone since picking up Quicksand/Cradlesnakes at Other Music back in 2003, he's one of those artists who's constantly refined what they do in really interesting and engaging ways. I can't say Califone is influential in any way because nobody sounds quite like Califone (especially in regards to Tim's voice), which is the highest compliment I could pay. The project's latest record The Villager's Companion came out near the tail end of next month and I think it's excellent as usual, Tim and I hopped on the phone earlier this year to talk it out and chew the fat about his extensive career and the shit he's seen. Check it out:

Tell me about how this new record connects to the previous one. I know that they share some songs session-wise.
To me, these are the songs that didn't fit on Villagers. I thought they were good, and I wanted them to come out, but they ruined the flow of that album's sequencing. So they got pushed off to the side, and some of the cover songs—the John Prine cover, the Mecca Normal cover—are from right around the COVID days. Recording a cover song sometimes makes you want to write your own, and that's what happened.

Talk to me more about the art of cover songs. Obviously, your cover of "The Orchids" for Roots and Crowns stands out.
I think you have to do it. Every time a cover's felt like the right thing to do, I felt like I was forced in some way—like I needed to do my version. When you're working it through, sometimes it's really easy to play, and that feels good too. It feels natural when it feels sorta like a joke—it's fun to do—but I don't think that's a good way for me to go with recording covers or putting them out.

There's some lyrical themes on this record about how technology encroaches into our daily lives. Expand on that for me.
It's about the feeling of being overwhelmed by it, which finds its way into the music. Even here, I've got a whole setup that's dependent on the computer, a hard drive, and the cloud, which is a corporate monster. It's hard to avoid, and it's also claustrophobic.

I just wish there was a way to live in the world and not be beholden to corporate overlords. We have shows coming up that we have to let people know about, and I don't want to be helping Zuckerberg sell advertising or whatever he does to make money. I don't want to do any of that, and it seems really hard to figure out how to avoid it. When we all take our music off Spotify, it sucks for everybody except for the board of directors and people that own a lot of stock. And, like, why don't we do that? Every time I've tried, I get talked out of it because no one will find our music. That frustration found its way into these songs.

I'd love to hear you reflect more on the technological aspect of making music and how that's changed for you. Thumbing through old Califone reviews, quite a few mentioned how you were always melding electronic aspects with folk aspects on these records.
The way recording technology evolved really did affect how we evolved musically. You can't avoid it. When we started out, we were recording on tape. We rehearsed,
played shows, and would go in the studio and play it live. We'd do maybe an overdub or two, mix it, and record as quickly as possible. But it was tape—we didn't use a computer. The last Red Red Meat record, that's when I didn't know what was going on. I was still like, "Here, I recorded this on my four-track, and we'll dump it onto the two inch tape and work with." That's when I noticed that we got a sampler and using a computer, which I didn't really understand at the time. Brian Deck—who I still work with—and Tim Hurley—who I'd like to work with again—were in Red Red Meat with me, and they were responsible for bringing that stuff in.

After that, we moved into Califone, and it got more and more about, "Okay, what can the sampler do? What can we do with loops?" It felt like a whole new beginning when I started to play with that stuff. We were also listening to Tricky and Portishead records, and Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, and that stuff was influencing what we were doing too—the textures, the music that they were making, the idea of looping and sampling.

You mentioned something interesting earlier that I want to return to—the grim reality of having to give Zuckerberg anything through promoting your own stuff. A lot of musicians, especially people who have been doing this for quite a while, have had to square away with in the last, let's say 10 years, especially the last five years, the act of self-promotion—the notion that you have to be adopting these new platforms. It's no longer enough to just be a musician, but I do I think we're starting to see some pushback against that finally, which is good. Tell me about what you've experienced in terms of getting music heard.
The landscape in the media has changed so much, God. It sounds weird, but I miss smart people. You're a music writer, but now it's sort of like, everybody's a music writer. If enough people forward or share your post, maybe you'll get a little bit of play. It does feel a lot trashier and shittier than being in the weekly paper, where the guy that writes for the weekly paper really does know where music comes from like has got knowledge of the history and some perspective about where we might
come from, so when we get that press people are going to come to the show. I really do miss that instead of, like, "Everybody's a fucking magazine."

I didn't get on Facebook until I had friends that were doing a trip together, and that's how they were communicating. I was like, "Can we just email?" Within years, I was off of it. I use it for band stuff, but it feels so intrusive, and it always did. The need to share...I don't know, I'm not a successful musician. I've never been good at marketing and getting out there with what I do. It's not in me. I'm not a salesman. It always feels weird to be like, "Here we go, I'm posting now. Here's me." I don't feel comfortable with it. I never did. But it's what we're doing now.

Until I die, I hope I'm going to be able to make records and play shows. I want people to be part of that, but...I just don't know, especially right now, what's going to happen. It's going to get weirder.

It does feel like it's increasingly a fact that if you're going to operate with a creative pursuit, you have to accept that there'll be a ceiling in terms of visibility. Otherwise, you can hold out for a lucky break.
Yeah, I agree with that—but you never do know what's going to happen. All you can do is try to be true to yourself and do what you're doing. This is for a newsletter, right?

Yeah it's for my newsletter.
So, you do that so that you can have some freedom.

Exactly.
I feel like we're doing the same thing.

While we're on this subject, it's funny—I interviewed Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart last year, and he expressed to me that he was actually quite happy about the death of the music press. I kind of talked him down from that a little bit, because even though I get it, in the end my perspective is, what would you prefer: The occasional bad opinion about your work, or nobody seeing your work at all? I'm curious how you've felt about the music press over the years.
It seems to be all over the map. Everything seems a lot more publicist-driven—but, then again, I'm older. When bands are in their 20s and 30s, that's when you're getting attention, and that's when we got the attention from Pitchfork and from people like that—and it really did help. Sometimes, it was really smart. I like negative criticism, because when it's good and right, it helps me take a look at what I'm doing. Even reading about something else, sometimes a bad review makes me want to hear it. There's mean and snarky, but there's also just, "This is what I hear and I'm being honest."

When that opinion comes from someone with a little bit of substance, and maybe some experience and education—someone that's gone back and listened...I'm pretty sure there's probably people writing about rock music now that never really heard the Velvet Underground, or just heard a song that was on a Spotify. The algorithm sent them "Femme Fatale" or something. That freaks me out, that people who don't know who the Velvet Underground were are writing about music.

How publicist-driven things are—I don't know if that's good for music, because we're not making money. I don't know where the money's going to come from to do everything—even to buy the interface at home so you that you can make your record in your bedroom. Where's that money going to come from? It's similar to the market for guitars. Who's gonna buy a $35,000 Strat? Some rock and roll dentist or rock and roll accountant. It's not necessarily the musicians who are buying the really nice stuff—it's the lawyers who are grabbing all the nice guitars, because they're the only ones that can afford it. I don't know how this is gonna hold. I don't know if it's even holding anymore. I'm gonna probably work at the grocery store up here at some point.

What's your full-time focus right now?
It's the band. Last year, I scored two films. So music is basically it. I occasionally sell some paintings. But I don't know how things are going to go, and I don't know how much the cost of living is. We live within our means, but fire insurance is going to go up. Everything's going to go up. And we're going to have to deal. I'm probably going to have to get some kind of job or just go on tour all the time, which I feel like I don't want to do.

Talk to me more about your relationship with touring over the years. You're doing living room shows for this outing, I assume that's exactly what it sounds like?
That is exactly what it sounds like. Sometimes it's a living room, sometimes it's a little art gallery. One show is in a library. They're shows for the people that really want to see it, and these shows are in places where, if we went with the full band... I don't know if people in Columbus, Mississippi are gonna pack a club to go see Califone, you know? There's gonna be, like, three people there that want to see us. But this is someone's art space, there's 50 people coming, and the tickets are sold. Usually we know what's going to happen before we get there, and it just feels like a nice way to play music.

I love playing live, especially now more than ever—but it hasn't always been like that. Sometimes it's been crazy and rough, and you get yourself into all kinds of mischief out there sure. I feel like I can't tell stories without getting people in trouble, but we were young little assholes out there doing our thing, and we had a lot of fun—but we also fucked some opportunities up and and didn't always make good decisions as far as, "Let's just play songs tonight." We wanted to do what Can did, and we just weren't that good.

Now, I appreciate it more—and I really enjoy the people that I play with. It's really enjoyable to play music these days, more than ever—I just don't think I can do it all the time. On tour, I'm usually not writing, and I feel much better when I'm working on something new—and that's home for me.

Any particularly disastrous gigs from your past that you recall?
I remember a couple of Red Red Meat shows where I actually did get punched in the face by somebody in the audience.

Oh shit.
That happened a couple of times. I might've even deserved it.

Why do you think you deserved it?
Because I was probably saying some stupid shit. Those couple of times stand out as really bad shows—really rough, probably entertaining to somebody, not necessarily good music, but there was an energy there.

There's one I remember, probably 15 years ago, in some small town in England where we didn't sell enough advance tickets. The promoter wouldn't turn on the heat, and it was maybe November or December, and it was freezing. The people who came were very sweet—they wanted to be there—but there weren't many of them. We played the show and did the best we could. Musically, it was probably pretty good. Afterwards, I was sitting at the merch table, freezing and miserable and wanting to get out of there and thinking about how this tour is losing money. A guy walked up, and he was covered in sheep shit. He started talking about working with the sheep and he smelled like actual shit. He was coming from work—maybe in a sheep shit factory or a sheep shit farm. He was like asking about tour and talking about his job and I was like, "Yeah, it's really difficult sometimes"—and he goes, "At least you get to do what you love." He just kept repeating that. I wanted to strangle him.

We still say that when things are not going great—"At least you get to do what you love." It's fucking ridiculous, and in terms of like how capitalism is off the fucking hook, that's the CEO from Spotify going, "At least you get to do what you love." But the reality is, I'm gonna do this anyway even if I make a tape at home and I'm giving it to friends. It's what I love to do.