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Diversions

Shearwater: Visual Music

Jonathan Meiburg works in large concepts. It’s this fact that shapes everything his band, the Austin, Texas-based, orchestrally minded Shearwater, does.

He describes the band’s new album The Golden Archipelago as the last piece in a triptych, the culmination of the themes and styles running through the band’s last two releases. For him, it’s the end of an artistic vision that has lasted almost five years.

Shearwater plays Local 506 tonight as part of its current world tour. Diversions Editor Jordan Lawrence caught up with Meiburg for a long chat about his art, his politics and his plans for the future.

Diversions: How’s the tour going?

Jonathan Meiburg: Tour’s been great. We just got back from Europe the day before yesterday. We played 20 shows in a row. The audiences were bigger than we’d ever had over there. We were playing better and better, so I was really exciting like that.
I’m always looking forward to playing in the U.S. I don’t know why, but it feels a little less like being in a zoo exhibit.

Dive: You’re calling the new record the third panel in a triptych. What’s that about?

JM: I think this album and the two that preceded it have a common emotional thread running through them as well as some common themes — thinking about the natural world and the disappearance of the old version of the natural world and the replacement of it with something that’s been created by us. Us being human beings.
At the same time, I don’t like the idea of this being some kind of eco-rock band. I think it’s much more metaphysical than immediate, these concerns. I’m more concerned with what it means for the world to be changing in such tremendous ways with such speed.

Dive: What do you mean when you say the world is changing in tremendous ways?

JM: In the course of the research I was doing when I was training to be a scientist, I was able to visit some places that are really fragments of the old wild world, you know, before people were everywhere and had transformed everything.

You can take a flight from one place on the globe to another place really far away, and, if you look out the window the entire time, as you look down, you don’t see any landscapes that haven’t been affected by human beings, often pretty profoundly.

But I was able to go to places like Isla de los Estados off the coast of Argentina or the Galapagos or the outermost islands of the Falklands and see little fragments of what the world once was. Places where the animals aren’t afraid of you. Places where the old rules are still in place.

The dissonance between that world and the world that you and I live in most of the time is so great. It’s so ironic because you hardly think of that world anymore even though it’s the world that produced us. It’s sort of in the same way as you don’t know the lives of your great grandparents or certainly the lives of your great-great grandparents. Even though they’re responsible for you being here. That was sort of a general inspiration for a lot of the songs: that dissonance between that world and the one that humans have remade.

Dive: What kind of scientist were you training to be?

JM: I was training to be an ornithologist basically. My first degree was in English literature, but I got this traveling fellowship when I graduated from college. I went all around the world going to some of the most remote places on earth for a year, and I came back from that interested in birds. So I took a master’s degree in geography at the University of Texas, and I studied a particular species of birds that lives in the Tierra del Fuego in the Falklands.

Dive: How did you make a transition from science into creating music?

JM: It all kind of happened at once. I was playing in bands when I was in graduate school. Gradually it started to overwhelm my studies, just in terms of the demands it was making on my time. At a certain point I had to decide, after I finished that one degree, if I was going to go on. I remember turning in my thesis on the same day I left for a European tour. I started to feel like I was being ripped in half, so I decided at least for now to just stick with music.

Dive: Coming back to the records, I was intrigued that you called them a triptych. A triptych is a piece of visual art. How are these three records like visual art?

JM: Certainly, in the packaging, I think they all look a little bit similar. They look related to one another. The first one, Palo Santo is all about the death of the singer Neko, whose grave I actually visited a couple weeks ago in Berlin. She was very much an island dweller. She died on an island. But she was also just a singular person. She was always sort of unlike anyone else. That record explores the isolation that she felt throughout her life.

Rook is much more about the larger natural world itself and that change that I’m talking about from a world of plants and animals to which we’re just a member to a world where we’re the dominant species and are trying to control everything. And then, it takes that even further and is preoccupied with different islands, little fragments of the world. Fragments of the old world and segments of the new one as we project them it onto it.

The visual companion to The Golden Archipelago, the dossier, consists of documents and images that I’ve gathered from traveling to all these places over the years. Have you seen that yet?

Dive: No, I haven’t.

JM: You should definitely, definitely look at it. I’m almost as proud of it as I am of the record. Although the record’s the most important thing. It’s a visual companion to the record, and I think it really helps to illustrate the world that we were trying to create with the album.

I did feel like, though, at the end of this record, that we had reached the end of something, the end of a long project. I’m not sure what the next one will be like. I have a title for it already, but it’s going to be different from what we’ve done in the past. It felt like we were bringing the thing to its conclusion somehow.

Dive: Having finished these three interconnected works, what ideas do you have going forward?

JM: I have a few ideas, but I don't really want to talk about them yet. They're just so basic. I usually start with a title and then let the title guide me starting out from the beginning, and then I'll find some musical and lyrical ideas to take it further. Right now I'm mostly occupied with playing these shows as best I can and to put these records across live in the way they deserve to be played.

Dive: How does your live show compare to your sound on record?

JM: The band is really special right now. We have a huge number of instruments and different textures, and we just keep trading instruments throughout the show. It's as lush as the records even though it's a little different because we don't a string section or woodwinds. But it's really elaborate and detailed and sort of a intricate sound. Sometimes people are surprised that it has a tremendous amount of energy and a sort of a fuzzy, rocky dispiritedness to it as well. I think the combination of those elements is really effective.

Dive: You guys have played shows from all over the spectrum. You've opened for Coldplay, and you play smaller rock clubs.  Do you prefer the larger or smaller venues?

JM: It's funny. The shows that are the best are the shows where you feel that the audience is really there with you and cares about the music. And really it doesn't matter what size the audience is. I've played shows with 50 people there that were just fantastic shows, and I've for 20,000 people that weren't that exciting and everything in between. If you feel that the audience is on your side then it's a wonderful experience.

Dive: You've been in two high-profile indie bands now with the time you spend in Okkervil River. Do you find the association drawn between Shearwater and that band to an asset or an annoyance at this point?

JM: It's annoying. The thing is that once these sort of things get started, especially in Internet land, it is really hard to stamp them out.  You get the feeling that everyone is just reading everyone else's review, and the reviews just become sort of a digest of other reviews, unless the reviewer is especially thoughtful and intelligent and can actually make up their own minds. I'm proud of the work I did with Okkervil, but I think that it's entirely possible and even likely that someone who really loves Okkervil might not like Shearwater, and that it might be true the other way around as well. They're really different bands. A couple of the same people have ben involved with them from time to time. I just think that comparing the two is kind of lazy.
 

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