On his MySpace page, Wasif talks about being educated in, among other places, the desert. When I ask him to expand on this, he explains, “I grew up in the desert in California, and at a point when it still was a desert. Now it’s a very different thing. It’s almost disappeared completely. The sprawl has taken over. But in my memory of what it was, there was a lot of space out there.” Much the same thing could be said of the interior terrain Wasif explores in the songs on his album.
As Skip Spence did with Oar, Wasif made his record in Nashville — in this case, with Mark Nevers, an engineer and producer-by-default (and member of the band Lambchop) who has worked wonders with everyone from Bobby Bare and the Silver Jews to Clem Snide and Candi Staton. Nevers’ capacity for empathy, it seems, is the reason Wasif made his album with him, as opposed to somewhere out west, where Wasif grew up (he was born in Vancouver) and still resides.
“I described the songs to him, and how I was feeling, and what I was coming out of at the time,” Wasif says of Nevers, who also has done engineering work, albeit after a more mercenary fashion, on Music Row. “I felt like he understood things that would be difficult for me to articulate. He was just able to understand the songs.”
Wasif cites a far-flung list of influences for his new songs — recordings by Buddy Holly, John Fahey and Joe Meek; writings by Sylvia Plath (Ariel) and Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms); the deeply spiritual work of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. “I sought a lot of beauty and that helped me out of a dark year,” Wasif says. “All of those things gave me great consolation. I tend to lose myself in things. That’s the way I can really get through things in life. A lot of those things have carried me through.”
It might be tempting to place Wasif, particularly given his debt to Fahey and kinship with Spence, among the ranks of neo-psychedelic folkies such as Devendra Banhart and Vetiver. Less trendy, though, than such an association suggests, Wasif’s music not only sounds more enduring, it’s also more substantive, more grounded in tones and ideas that aren’t subject to whims or fashion. For example, apart from his Fahey-inspired guitar work, maybe the most pervasive musical influence on Wasif’s album is the collection of Eastern classical instrumental records he inherited from his father.
“I’ve had this box of records since I was like 10,” he says. “There are no labels on them. These are old records that were destroyed in a flood. It’s all Eastern classical music and I’ve been listening to them my entire life. I’m not even sure who the artists are. It’s kind of an amazing, beautiful thing that I don’t know the origins of any of the music.”
The Eastern modalities that figure into the songwriting and playing on Wasif’s new album certainly are lovely. In fact — and this goes for all the music on his record — it’s almost as if Wasif performed and arranged his songs as sublimely as he did to underscore the beauty that lies at the core of all experience — even, if one plumbs deeply enough, pain and suffering.
“If you hear that in the record, that makes me happy,” Wasif responds when I suggest as much.
This isn’t the only time during our conversation that he is concerned with what I might think of his music — or, maybe more appropriately, given his desire to make people happier through his music, with how it affects me. At another point during our exchange, as I fumble to get a handle on some aspect of his record, he turns the tables and asks, “Does [the music] make you feel happy? That’s my wish.”
On “A World Of Hurt”, the benediction by way of gratitude inventory that closes the Drive-By Truckers’ luminous new album, singer Patterson Hood drawls, “To love is to feel pain, there ain’t no way around it.” As elegiac strains of Wurlitzer and keening steel and lead guitar lines swirl around him, Hood ultimately affirms, “It’s great to be alive,” but not before explaining:
It’s a wonderful world, if you can put aside the sadness
And hang on to every ounce of beauty upon you
Better take the time to know it, there ain’t no way around it
If you feel anything at all
Gonna be a world of hurt.
This, of course, isn’t news to Wasif, who, despite the inevitable suffering, steadfastly ferrets out the beauty of which Hood so movingly sings. “You can’t be careless about emotions,” he insists as our conversation draws to a close. “Emotions are everything.”
And beautiful.
