If He Had The Time & Cash: The Hardison Interview

Seattlest wants to introduce you to Hardison. Take a moment. It's worth it. You can find some of their mp3s for download here.

Time & Cash is Jacksonville-native and Seattle-transplant Shawn Hardison’s third album with Dig Records, after Sun Bros. and Dead Comedians. Jon Ervie (Presidents of the United States of America, Ruston Mire, Sir Mix-A-Lot) produced the new album, a collection that includes Hardison’s first fusion song, with Ishmael Butler of Cherrywine (aka Butterfly of Digable Planets). His first video, shot by Tarin Anderson and Brian Udovich, is due for release soon.

Hardison the band (including Adam Hicks on keyboard and Adonis Toro on drums) just returned from a California tour, and has two Seattle club dates coming up: Wednesday December 14th at El Corazon, with Feral Kid, Supermassive and Yam. That 21+ show starts at 9pm, with a cover charge of $6. Monday January 2nd, they’re booked at the Rendezvous. Again, a 9pm start and $6 cover.

Seattlest met up with Hardison at the Hopvine for a hard-hitting, no-holds-barred interview and some really good soup. When we were typing this up, we got bored with the interview style, so after the jump it’s a different format.

You’ve been a solo artist for a while. Why did you start a band?

Because it’s easier to put the music that I record into a live venue. In Jacksonville, you just played with people, that’s just how it happened. Bands just happened. With the music situation here, to form a band, it takes on more serious connotations. I’ve been recording for years on my own because I love being in the studio. But playing it out live, you get a bigger experience. Especially if you can get some of that experience you felt on the record. So that has always been the challenge, how to play the music live and do justice to what’s on the record. Now I’ve got a group of guys who seem to connect more with the music and more with what I’m trying to do, which makes it a lot easier to have a great time and feel that band vibe.

So how long have you been playing? You played in Jacksonville, too, so you’ve been playing for a while.

Music in general? I started playing music when I was a kid.

Always guitar?

No, not guitar. I didn’t start playing guitar until I was older, out of high school. When I was real little I played the piano, piccolo, marimba. I lived overseas—military brat—and we had a great music program. I was seven years old learning all these great instruments. Then we went back to the States. I always loved music, but playing music, you know, my family wasn’t musical, didn’t have any musical friends, it was a very blue-collar environment, so in sixth grade I joined band and played cornet. Of course a cornet in a very small house, you know, doesn’t lend itself to a lot of practicing. So I dropped that, and then in high school, I asked for a keyboard but I got an organ. So I played the organ. Then one day, a couple of years after high school, I had a friend of mine who was a guitar player. I was just amazed watching him play it, so I wanted to play it, and I picked it up so quick, I decided that was it.

But I’d always wanted to be a writer, being a short story writer was the biggest thing I wanted to do. I wanted to be, like, the next Carver, like a Southern version, maybe some Miller thrown into that. So what was happening was I playing music as a way to sort of get my mind off writing for a little bit. Eventually the typewriter was put into the closet and I was writing lyrics on sketchpads. That was a another challenge, besides learning the guitar, trying to make short stories into 2-1/2 minute stories. But I just fell in love with it. I wound up moving to Seattle and interned at a recording studio out in Ballard. That was when the bug really bit me, to record music. I mean, I’d recorded before but this was different, doing it professionally and getting the sound that you loved on those records. So I was hooked.

What was the studio?

It was actually a rehearsal studio, owned by one of the guitar techs from some of the big grunge bands. It was a full rehearsal studio, with rooms with PAs and all the equipment, and it was a great place to meet people and dig on music. There was a whole spectrum: hair bands who never left the ‘80s still doing that stuff in the ‘90s. I didn’t really know that much about Seattle back in those days, too. I wasn’t into the grunge music. I came up here to fish in Alaska and fell in love with the city.

What year did you get to Seattle?

‘96. I fished in Alaska and, that was...great. When I came through Seattle, I just fell in love with the town. Found myself a little hole-in-the-wall apartment and started recording, playing out randomly here and there. And then I’d go back to Jacksonville where I had a whole band, and we’d go play at these shows, it was great. Then I’d come back to Seattle and be a hermit musician.

After the jump: musical influences, the Seattle sound, the new album, the Ishmael Butler track, and what “Little Thing” is all about.

Here's more from the interview, condensed under handy subheadings. Yeah, it's nice, isn't it?

Influences:
That’s the hard thing when someone asks you what your influences are. You know, I know a lot of classical players who when they leave the Symphony Hall they go home and it’s Pantera, Metallica, and Skinny Puppy on their CD player’s rotation. I’ve known many classical, or jazz, players that listen to drum and bass, and that’s pretty much all they listen to at that moment in time. You know musicians will change like that. You’re thinking about one sound, so all of a sudden you’re gravitating towards Latin music for a period of time, and then you wind up going towards this other side of your music to learn this aspect or other part of it. But, you know, “What influences you?” You’re influenced by the people you like, you’re influenced by the people you don’t like. You don’t want to sound like them, so when that note comes out, you’re all, “Oh, that sounds like shit,” or, “I don’t know who it sounds like but I know I don’t like it.”

The biggest thing when you’re learning to play music is learning other people’s songs. The first song you ever learn is somebody else’s. If you don’t identify with playing covers, there’s something wrong with you. Or maybe not something wrong, but I find a lot of enjoyment in playing other people’s music. You get inside of where that person was at, it’s genius. It doesn’t matter how widely liked the song is, if you like it and you play it, it brings you right there. When I first started playing guitar, I didn’t think that I could write, myself. I was going to take a stab at it, but I never thought I’d actually do it. I was more interested in playing a Beatles cover and doing it justice.

The Seattle sound:
The fact that I’m a musician in Seattle is somewhat ironic. I hadn’t planned on being here that long. I had planned on being a traveling troubadour. I think the Seattle music scene is awesome in the way that it allows people to cultivate themselves. Does Modest Mouse sound like they’re from Seattle? I don’t think so. They don’t sound like a Seattle band to me at all. Most of the attention in Seattle seems to go to the indie rock bands. Its a cool genre. It's not really what I'm playing. Sometimes genre labels get in the way of groove.

Time & Cash:
I wrote sixteen songs for this album, and eleven of them made it on the record. Four of the tracks I had written right after Sun Bros. was finished in 2002, and those just kind sat on the shelf. I wanted to come back to them later. The rest of the album I wrote when Adam, my keyboardist, started playing last year. I told him I wanted to do this record, I wanted him to record with me, so I wrote the rest of the songs and had him come in and play piano. Actually, this is the first album that I actually wrote some pieces on piano. “She.He.Bullitt,” which is a story about me and girl going to see the movie Bullitt and is actually written from the female perspective, and a song called "Mistake #4026," I wrote on piano, and then had Adam come in and teach it to me on guitar so that he could play it on piano, because he’s a hell of a lot better piano player than I am. So that was really different. The other songs came about through this idea of having all these great plans and having to explain to yourself why they didn’t go down like they should have. But there’s a redeeming quality to it, because you’re still there, if you survived it, you’re still smiling. As the album progressed I had a lot of personal things go on, so that kind of shaped how the album laid itself out. I wanted it to be, you know, sitting in the window of your downtown apartment, it’s raining outside, and you’re about to put on your leather and go out on the town for the day. It’s a daytime, cloudy, rainy record. Urban, like you can hear the bus rolling by. That was the goal, which is why the cover is a gutter with running water: it’s partly like it’s bad now, it’s rainy and nasty, but it’s also like a baptism and tomorrow might be better.

Ishmael Butler:
Ishmael used to come into the cafe I worked at, and not only being the best-dressed dude in there he was just always cool with the music that’d be playing. I didn’t know who he was. We got to talking about music, and we seemed to get along well, saw eye-to-eye on a lot of things. Then when I found out he was a rapper, I remembered his band. When I realized who Ishmael was, I told him, “I’ve been digging you guys for a long time,” and I had been wanting to do a hip hop track for a while. We talked about it, and he was really into my last album, Sun Bros. There was a while I didn’t think we were going to make it for this record, but we wound up doing it. You know this album is, well, the last album the story is about these alien brothers, this was more about a spygame gone wrong. Like how sometimes things in your life don’t go how you think they’re gonna go. And you start looking around to see which person made things go wrong, and you look around, you look around, and there ain’t nobody there. That’s kind of what this album represents. So that was the way we did that song, he came in and we laid the tracks, and it came out great.

“Little Thing”:
That was the last song I wrote for the album. It’s really about a crush that I had on a girl. It was an out-of-the-pocket kind of song, where I come home one day and I’ve had this crush on this girl. Not in a pursuing kind of way, more reflective... My mother has cancer right now, this is a sidenote, but my mother has cancer right now, and it’s not that my mom and I are super close, but we’re close enough. I often think about being a success at what I’m doing, and how does that relate to my mother? What would make her really happy? If I got married, this or that. Then I’ve got this situation where I’ve been very awkward with this one particular person, and the nervousness is driving me nuts, so when I started writing this song—you know, a lot of times when I write a song it’s not about the one thing, it’s a conglomeration of things, all sorts of things going on. So that song was about women in general, looking at making women proud of you, as a man, and realizing that that’s in your own head. They just want you to be you. So we’re not so different, and if all you do is look at lines of difference, it only makes for miscommunication. So the line, “A place where I make you proud, and I still got all my teeth,” you know, it’s about taking care of yourself. You know, I’ve lost a tooth or two from being an artist and not having the money to take care of it. Knowing that I could have had a decent job, but deciding that it would take up too much of my time, you wrestle with that. But what would it change? That’s all in your head. When someone sees the real truth about you, that’s it. Sometimes you trip on things you don’t need to. That’s what that song’s about. The dissolve at the end of the song is that there’s only one thing you can do, which is to talk about it, open up, share something.