Stereoboard Speak To Singer-Songwriter Mike Tolan About Latest Album 'Songs For Boats' (Interview)
Saturday, 24 September 2011
Written by Patrick Gormley
Over the past decade singer songwriter Mike Tolan has been nothing if not immensely prolific. Probably most famous for playing guitar with the hugely influential Six Parts Seven, he may also be the finest song smith you have never heard. As well as side projects Moustache Mountain and Trouble Books, Tolan has over the last number of years released albums under the moniker Talons'. The latest 'Songs for Boats' released earlier this year is a heart-wrenching album of love songs at the end of the world. We were genuinely privileged to catch up with him recently to discuss his extremely interesting career to date.
“I took piano lessons as a kid” , Tolan begins, “We were lucky to have a relative’s old Steinway grand in our house for a while when I was growing up but I gave up piano probably at age 10. I then taught myself guitar by playing along with my favourite 90s bands – Radiohead, Pearl Jam, R.E.M. I feel like I spent a lot of time trying to emulate Johnny Greenwood with my shitty Toronado and my DOD multi-effects pedal I’m not really sure how that possibly could be reflected in what I do now but maybe somewhere. I was in bands for as long as I have played guitar.”
His current incarnation with Talons’ may seem a far cry from these earlier influences, with Tolan citing 90’s and early 00’s post rock like Thrill Jockey, Kranky and Drag City and “noise music”, as more of an influence on his kind of “folk” music. “These movements examined traditional pop and rock music formats, structures, instrumentation etc”, he explains, “and took them apart and made new things from them. This is what I have always tried to do with folk music. I am not inventing a new style but I am taking apart traditional folk, trying to distance myself from its conventions and crutches whenever possible, and make something that is an evolution or devolution it.”
Having dabbled with a number of different styles on the different Talons’ albums Tolan feels that while the albums may vary greatly in style and production, they are all expressions of parts of what he does as a musician. “Ideally, I will make an album that will maintain its coherence but it is something that I have not been able to master yet. I don’t know if I am necessarily more or less comfortable with any style, it mostly just depends on what mood I’m in.” He continues “Some days I will want to write a song on acoustic guitar, other days I will want to work with programming or sampling. Some of my musician friends will lecture me for releasing this variety of music under one alias. They say it is “killing my brand”. I don’t really care about that though. I don’t want Talons’ just to be some sad guy singing about his life. It is me, and I am all of these things. I don’t expect anyone to like all of the things or anything that I make. I just have to make them.”
His latest album 'Songs for Boats' with its end of the world concept was written while Tolan was living in Spain and was largely inspired by the financial collapse in the US in 2008, he explains “I was very far from my family and from Sommer (his wife), and pretty detached from what was actually happening in the US. I became very worried (overly so) that everything would fall apart and I would not be able to make it home to my loved ones. The album is about the collapse of our current society or the escape from it. With the 'Boats' album, I tried to see this possibility from a number of angles, both positive (Ferry, Sailboat) and negative (Lost Ships, Catamaran).”
It is impossible not to speak about his five years with Six Parts Seven when conversing with Tolan but it is a subject he is very willing to discuss and reminisces fondly about his time in the band. “It was great just to work with a group of people who were serious enough to practice 2-4 times a week for 4-6 hours and maintain that level of commitment for years. Songs get polished in a way that I can never reach with my other projects. Looking back on it now, I feel like most of the highlights are from touring and mostly not from the shows but from other weird/cool things that happened.”
When asked about stories on the road with the band Tolan smiling broadly, remembers, “Getting stranded in Minneapolis on tour with Richard Buckner and going bowling with him, he is a very good bowler. Terrifying night drives through the Redwoods in northern CA listening to ‘Master of Puppets’. Other terrifying night drives from Connecticut to Rochester, NY because the brakes we almost shot and we had to get to a garage in the early morning listening to ‘Things we lost in the fire’. Recording at Jeff Ament’s B-15 Studio in Seattle on our last album. Blah blah blah. It was a cool time. The music was good too.”
The current state of the music industry is another topic that Tolan speaks about with intensity, “It seems that the major labels are collapsing, which they should be in my opinion. I am much more of a proponent of the working musician than the rock star. I will always make music but I have no aspirations to support myself doing it. I get really uneasy when art intersects with money” , he adds, “once you decide that you want to make a living as a recording artist, I feel like you immediately start compromising, whether you realize it or not. I could not live with that. Music is too important to me to corrupt it with business.” He believes what the internet is doing for music at present is an excellent thing, “While it has opened the floodgates to a constant and sometimes suffocating flow of terrible bands it also takes away the egotism and pretention of record collecting. Now I can hear records that I never could have found or afforded, I can discover great bands that don’t care to pay a publicist or buy ads on Pitchfork. It is anarchic but not in a way that hurts anyone except those who are in it for the dollar.”
Currently resident with his wife in Chicago and working in a bakery which he loves, Tolan has no plans just yet to slow down in any way musically, “I am working on lots of music, playing a few shows locally and hoping to do some touring in 2012 (pre-apocalypse). I just finished an orchestral ambient album that will hopefully be coming out on Slaapwel Records sometime in the future. I started a psych-folk band with Ben (also from Tusco and 6/7) called Sky Burial, which should be pretty sweet. Also, I’m working on a new proper Talons’ album, to be called 'Afterpop'. It is going to take a long time to make it but I think it will be my best record if I can finish it.”
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“I took piano lessons as a kid” , Tolan begins, “We were lucky to have a relative’s old Steinway grand in our house for a while when I was growing up but I gave up piano probably at age 10. I then taught myself guitar by playing along with my favourite 90s bands – Radiohead, Pearl Jam, R.E.M. I feel like I spent a lot of time trying to emulate Johnny Greenwood with my shitty Toronado and my DOD multi-effects pedal I’m not really sure how that possibly could be reflected in what I do now but maybe somewhere. I was in bands for as long as I have played guitar.” 
