DCist Interview: Joe Pernice

Do you need the same discipline to work on a novel as you do to write songs for a new record?

When I write songs, sometimes I'll work for a few hours on a song, but I never sit down and work for four hours, and it's rare that I'd work every single day like that. I might finish a song in a day and then it's kinda off with it. I'm not always going every single day, but I will pick up a guitar and play every single day. But writing a book, obviously I have to sustain something over a longer length of time. I don't know if you've ever written a book or written a song.

Umm, neither.

Well writing a song is a blast to me, I do love it, it's an instant jolt, a kind of payoff. I love to play guitar, it feels good to play guitar, it feels good to sing, to write melodies. It's very emotional, it's a very visceral kind of response. Writing a book is a little of that for sure, but it's more of like a slow burn. For like a year, really a full year, these characters that I made up have been in my mind constantly, like I had moved to another town, it was really kind of weird. It was a real trip, I really kinda loved it.

What made you want to set the book in 1996?

I stuck with what I knew. When I was going through that age at that period, people who I knew who were going through this Generation X kind of thing, they didn't have a clue. I knew so many people who could not make a decision, who were so indecisive, kind of floundering along, and maybe some of it was fashion - the whole being a slacker was kind of cool, people were just trying it out or whatever. There seemed to be a condition at that time of people who were my peers who had maybe so many choices that they couldn't make one. So I set it in that period because I wanted my main character to be that guy, the kind of guy who was an indecisive fuck-up, but that was not completely bankrupt of any kind of social compassion or cultural currency. He wasn't a complete dick, he was a good-hearted guy, you know, who was just kind of a fuck-up.

One thing that I've been wondering about is how you decided to write the musical taste of this character. You cover a lot of ground from Del Shannon to the Pogues, Todd Rundgren, Lou Barlow.

Well I wanted him to be a person who maybe had some taste and he wasn't just into, you know, whatever was the coolest. He's a guy who has his own compass, whatever that may be, however skewed that compass may be, but his musical taste kinda shows that.

Parts of it felt a lot like a "place" book. There's a lot of detail about Cape Cod. What's your relationship to Cape Cod?

I made that stuff up, first of all. The main reason is that I'm lazy and I didn't feel like doing a lot of research and writing about Newport News or something I didn't know anything about. The relationship though? I love Cape Cod, I'd love to move there. I wanted a place that's a vacation place that's shut down for the season, not like something like a Route 66 stop that's just a place that time forgot. I wanted it to be like Cape Cod is a place that's really happening during the season, and it kinda contracts during the offseason. I wanted to have a kind of place that is at one time a happy place where people like to go and other times can be kind of sad and desolate. Whereas if I just set it in some fictitious bad town, it might have been too heavy-handed I think.

I love bikes, I make no bones about that. I am a bike freak. But I thought, how would this guy get around? I thought, would I do that? If I was stuck in this place and wanted to get around, would I get on this absolutely dilapidated girl's bike and peddle into town? What kind of a guy does that? And I thought it would be kind of funny, but I also wondered what it said about this guy who goes through buying new tires for this beat up old bike so he can get back and forth to ... where? Where the hell is he going anyway? You know? But I guess if you're asking, "Is that me?", you're right, I love bikes, so maybe I worked the bike into it because I love them.

In the book there's an allusion to that legend of George Jones, where he was trying to dry out, so his cohorts put him out on a farm miles from anywhere. And he was so jonesing for booze that he rode a lawnmower into town to get it. There's this sort of genius desperation about that kind of act that I wanted to at least reference a little bit.

Not to give anything away about the ending of the book, but how did you come to decide how the book ended? It seems like that would be a tough process because it's kind of this half coming-of-age story.

I like that, "half coming of age." Well this might give the ending away, you can decide, but I didn't want my book to read like this: here's a guy who realizes he's a screw up and he gets on the path to getting his shit in a pile. The kinds of characters I find interesting are the ones who don't even realize how fucked up they are. I just wanted it kind of coming into his consciousness, you know, not "I'm a big fuck-up." I want his life to be tenuous at best.

But anyway, speaking of the ending, I did write my outline with three distinct endings. But I had a good idea of where it was going from the beginning, and that continued on as the book grew, it just went into one of those directions - the one I chose. But I did have three different ideas, from the beginning, which I think was important because you have to think of an ending so you don't write yourself into a corner from which you might not be able to write yourself out of.

Did having a son recently affect the way you dealt with Roy, the main character's two-year-old cousin?

Like right now, so much has happened so I don't recall all that clearly what it was like to live without a kid. I'm sure if I really think about it I could recreate my life before, but as I was writing this book I was right on the straddling line of being a married guy with every freedom in the world and being, really, very self-centered. I could call my wife and say, "Hey, I'm going to England for the week because I want to do some recording." No problem. So I had one leg in that world and one in the world of complete responsibility having to take care of this kid. I was able to hopefully write the sensitivity toward Roy from the part of my narrator and at the same time really still portray my narrator as a kind of a really self-absorbed person. He's kind of on the cusp of total self-absorption and being a parent.

Your songs tend to get labeled as being very literate or lyrical. How does that compare with writing? How do you think about words in different ways?

I think in both cases you're aware of the power of the words, that your words in sequence are going to hopefully elicit a response, right? What I'm hoping to do is the same thing in both cases, trying to manipulate you, make you feel something. The differences are in songs you have so many crutches, it's so much more than just the words. The melody is something that can either hurt or support what you're trying to say, the chord changes of a song. You might have not picked up every word but you still walk away from a song almost in tears, you know? Think of Sigur Ros or something like that. I don't know what the fuck they're saying but it'll blow your mind because of a whole bunch of different things - production, a singer's voice, chord changes, tempo, all that stuff. So as a songwriter you rely on those things and you know that they're there. I tend to be much more cryptic in my song lyrics, I try to give a few key images that will hopefully make you think about something and then maybe there's a hook that might get in your head.

But writing a book - man, there is nothing but the words. So they have to do what you want because there is no amazing snare drum that can forgive your flat note or a soaring coda that's going to forgive a lame verse. With writing a book, you're on guard the whole way. At least that's how I think of it.

Does your editor serve a similar role as your band or your producer? I know you write all the stuff for the Pernice Brothers.

With the band, it's a lot like that. I write all the songs, but all the guys - I don't tell them what to play. I mean, sometimes I'll say, "Hey, can you play this melody" and then I'll sing it, but I don't tell them what to play. It's a collaborative effort, definitely a collaborative effort. With writing a book, I wrote all of it obviously and my editor was very cool. I probably sent her - I don't know how many words - I probably sent her the first half and then she re-arranged some, made some comments, and then I sent her the entire book and she made comments about the whole book. And I think she saw it probably two times before it was done, before my first draft was done. Then she sent it back and made comments about this and that, and a few lines here. There were ideas she had for changes structurally and a few very specific line changes. That was an easy thing, I have to say. To her credit, she just let me run, 95 percent of the time though, her changes, she was smack on.

What are you expecting out of literary criticism, as opposed to the way your records get covered by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, etc.?

I care about them on this level: I enjoy doing this and I'd like to have a publisher that thinks they can sell a certain number of my books to let me keep writing. In terms of response, I'd like people to enjoy the book, for sure. Do I think I'm like Faulkner and writing the great American novel? God no. I'm doing what I do. I'm not expecting it to be seen as this pivotal work in history.

All that said, I don't give a flying fuck what any critic says about my book. I meant it, I've enjoyed it, it's done, move on. Same as with music. I really do hope that people like it, because I really enjoy the process, but am I getting freaked out because some dude... the way I look at it is, well I don't want to knock critics, but I'm spending my life trying to make a beautiful thing, but critics of music and literature are talking about me. It's a bit of a weird thing.

You put out a companion soundtrack to the book with some passages you read and then some covers. Why did you decide to do that?

A lot of the tunes in the book are songs I just loved. I was paying homage to them by putting into a book. I wasn't thinking about making an album out of them, I think putting the songs into the book was this de facto cover record that I've never made because for whatever reason I've always kinda looked down on people who do cover records - and I'm not saying that's right, I mean, now I've done it. But it seems like whenever someone's doing a cover record, it's someone who ran out of ideas and wants to make a little bread. So I've always kinda felt a little like, 'Oh God,' it always made me feel a little creepy. It always had kind of a negative connotation to me.

But this was my way of doing a cover record without actual doing one. I can't tell you how many times I've sat around and played most of these songs in my living room, just hanging around, playing them on guitar. About halfway through the book, I thought maybe I should record these songs. I'm certainly hiding behind the book a little bit and I still don't feel totally comfortable doing a cover record but I think it still goes along with the book. In the end, it was, why not? Maybe I don't feel spectacular about doing a cover record, I think, maintaining this glimpse into my personality, because I have a record of originals that's going to come out on the heels of this thing... Now I'm going to get hate mail from all my friends saying, "What do you have against cover records?" Rightly so, and rightly so.

Wait, so there's also a new record in the works? Is this going to be a full Pernice Brothers project?

It's probably just going to come out under my name. It's myself, James Walbourne, Ric Menck, and my brother Bob. That's who did this one, too. And then hopefully in 2010, depending on if I'm up to my neck in a book I haven't started yet, we'll hopefully record a Pernice Brothers full band record next year.

What can we expect from the Joe Pernice album?
It reminds me of the Chappaquiddick Skyline record we did, but a little more upbeat. It's not an overdubbed kind of thing. One or two country tunes on it, a lot of guitar, James plays a particularly funky electric guitar on it. As Ric Menck said, "The older I get, the fewer drum fills I want to do." There might be one drum fill on the whole album, and I insisted on no cymbals because I just hate cymbals right now.