Cupid’s Arrow Hits its Mark: The Van Duren and Vicki Loveland Interview

Mention the name Van Duren to a powerpop fanatic and you’ll likely get a reply that’s equal parts gushing enthusiasm and reverent tones. While he’s not well-known among the pop landscape in general, those in the know consider his debut LP Are You Serious? (1977) in the same class as the music some of his more famous friends and fellow Memphians put out. Said friends included Big Star, The Scruffs, Tommy Hoehn and a select few others. In fact Jody Stephens and Chris Bell played with Duren in a post-Big Star band called the Baker Street Regulars (sadly that band never released any recordings). His highly melodic compositional style – stylistic similarities to early Todd Rundgren and Emitt Rhodes can be heard – coupled with his clear, expressive voice makes for some highly appealing music.

Duren has never been the most prolific of artists (eleven albums; on average, one every four years) and much of his back catalog is difficult to locate (used vinyl copies of Are You Serious? fetch upwards of $90, and that assumes you can even find them). His Allmusic discography doesn’t even list all of his output: 2010′s Resonance Road isn’t mentioned, nor is Chronicles, the (undated) “authorized bootleg” anthology of his band Good Question. But any and all of his music warrants the effort required to find it.

And it’s gotten a bit easier of late: his partner in Good Question, in music, and in life is Vicki Loveland. And the pair have just released their first collaborative album (credited to LovelandDuren), Bloody Cupid. Though I was lucky enough to meet Van during a musical pilgrimage of mine in 2011, and remained in touch with him ever since, we didn’t schedule an interview until now. Last week I spoke with Van and Vicki about the new album.

(This interview originally appeared on blog.musoscribe.com)

Bill Kopp: Van, I know a good bit of your musical history. But Vicki, you seem to be coming at things from a different place musically. Tell me a little bit about your background.

Vicki Loveland: If you want to start at the very start, my mom was a big band singer. I was the youngest of four kids, and I was around my mom when she was doing gigs. And my father was a deejay in Jacksonville FL, where we lived when I was very little. So I’d go to the radio station with him, and hear all kinds of music. And we had a very musical family, so as I grew up, we all sang together. We moved to Memphis when I was about five years old.

And my older sister had a band; when I was about 12 years old, she started playing. I’d come along to her rehearsals. By the time I was 14, I was doing gigs with her band when she couldn’t do them. I got the call to have my own band as a result of all that, and so it all sort of organically just happened. I knew that playing music was all I ever wanted to do; I loved it form the time I was able to understand that I could sing.

I started doing session work when I was about 16, and went on the road as soon as I got out of high school; touring, I traveled all over the USA. Van and I met each other doing session work. Later, I went back and got my degree in Music at the University of Memphis; I was in their Recording Technology program, so I got to spend some time on both sides of the glass.

BK: This question is for both of you. Tell me about the songwriting process. Do you sit down together an create songs from the ground up, or do you start individually and then help each polish the songs, or something else?

Van Duren: It happens both ways. Sometimes I’ll bring in a musical idea that I’ve been working on that very day, and we’ll sit down across from each other with a guitar, and take it from there. Sometimes it starts with a lyrical idea that Vicki has; she brings it in, and we do a version of the same thing. It comes from different sources, but every one of those songs [on Bloody Cupid], we sat across form each other and wrote together.

VL: We actually went down to Gulf Shores AL [about a 7-hour drive south of Memphis – ed.] and wrote for an entire week. We came up with five or six songs, and it just kept flowing. So we ended up with the twelve songs that are on the record.

BK: The track “Lines in the Sand” has that timeless quality, that trademark sound, that – for me – means it would have sounded right at home on Are You Serious? But having the male-female lead vocal harmonies takes it to a different place. I know you’re both on all the tracks, but the sequencing of the album reminds me a little bit of John and Yoko‘s Double Fantasy, in that it seems to bounce back and forth between tunes that feature Van a little more, followed by tunes that are a little more Vicki. Is that right, and if so, was it intentional?

VD: You’re absolutely right about that, the variation. Not only the who-sings-what, buy the stylistic variation of the material. First of all, I insisted that we start the record off with something Vicki sang. Because people like yourself who are familiar with what I’ve done in the past, I didn’t want that to be the pattern. I had to talk Vicki in to that, but she finally agreed.

But beyond that, some things are strictly a duet, some with mostly her singing, some mostly me, and all shades in between.

VL: What happened with the songs that we wrote, we didn’t sit down and say, “All right, let’s write a song for you to sing,” and so on. It just sort of happened that way…

VD: We didn’t start out to say, “We need this many Vicki songs and this many Van songs.” It really just ended up that way; and the sequencing was the last thing we did. It was almost serendipitous, if you will.

BK: Not to put words in your mouth, but was it a case of that as the songs would develop, you’d instinctively know who’d sing lead?

VL: Yeah. As we’d put them together, there would be some songs where I’d start singing, and I would look at Van after several times through and say, “Would you try to sing this? I think that you would sound better on it.” And the same thing happened with him. We wanted the best sound, and sometimes it would just naturally lean one way or the other.

BK: What is the connection of the René Magritte painting “The Lovers” to the album?

VL: We came up with the title Bloody Cupid [a lyric from “Birthmarks”] because, y’know, Cupid can be a really lovely thing when you think about it, but love can also be pretty…you can get bruised. And these songs are more for people who’ve been through relationships, who understand that there are very high highs and very bottom-of-the-pit lows. This is a record of love songs, but it’s not all happy. And we liked the Magritte painting “The Lovers” because it has those shrouded faces. It’s kind of dark, sort of disturbing. But at the same time, they’re kissing.

Van Duren: And it’s universal, because you don’t know who’s under the shroud. You wouldn’t believe how many people ask us, “Is that you and Vicki under there?”

BK: Yes, “We commissioned Magritte to come paint that for us!”

VD: [laughs] We’re older than we look [Magritte painted “The Lovers” in 1928, in France.]

VL: It was a visual of what the record represented to us.

BK: The production is really bright and clean, yet not sterile. To what degree did you take an old-fashioned approach to recording – for example, being all set up and playing together — and to what extent did you use modern techniques like ProTools and so forth?

VD: Well, we did use ProTools; Pete Matthews works with it. But in his studio, he uses a lot of vintage microphones, including an RCA from the 1940s. But most of the songs started with me playing guitar, and then we’d build on that, bringing the rhythm section in next. They played live in the room. And we overdubbed on top of that.

VL: It’s a really organic record. Even though we had the capability to use all the bells and whistles and smokescreens that ProTools can offer, we didn’t want that. We wanted it to be more like in the analog days, where what you got is what you got. Instead of using Autotune, we’d…do it again. [laughs]

BK: that’s the thing about Autotune and such: you can use them to “fix” things and make them “perfect,” but they leave fingerprints of their own.

VL: And we didn’t want those kinds of fingerprints; we wanted it to be real: representative of what we are and how we sound. And we wanted to be able to recreate those sounds live.

VD: Everything you hear on Bloody Cupid was played and sung as you hear it. We used real instruments, real drums, real string players. There are no synthesizers of any kind on the entire record.

BK: Speaking of that, I like the way you introduce instrumentation based on the needs of the song, as opposed to limiting yourselves to one set of instruments for the whole album. The best example is the great trumpet part on “I Don’t Want to Need This.” Was that part in your head from the beginning of writing the song, or did the idea develop later?

VL: When we were originally doing that song, it had such a mood to it. And we knew we wanted to keep it mysterious and dark. Mark Franklin was the perfect guy to call in; he’s got great chops, and he’s so good at improvising. So we did have an idea for it, but we weren’t sure initially if it was going to work.

VD: That song is very sparse. It’s one guitar, bass, drums, the trumpet, and vocal. And I wanted to keep it sparse to give it atmosphere. We didn’t have a trumpet part written out; Mark came in and improvised that part. And he did it in no more than an hour.

And that’s true for all of the solos on this record; nothing was worked out ahead of time. Even the drummer and bass player; they came in and learned the tunes “on the floor.” They came up with their parts along with us.

VL: There are some really world-class players on this record, and we wanted their spontaneity. We wanted them to feel it, and play what they felt.

VD: The spontaneity is a big part of it: we provide a framework, but what goes on top of it – the elaborations on that original concept – have got to be spontaneous.

BK: Van, you’ve collaborated with other musicians before. I can guess the answer to this very leading question, but what is different about making music with Vicki?

VD: It’s really, awful, Bill. [laughs]

I’ll tell you the difference. I have written with a few people before, and had a great connection with them. It’s probably been less than five people, total, in my entire career. But this time it’s really different, because we have a connection on a lot of levels, creatively. And it’s just really, really easy. We respect each other so much, and we were big fans of each other before we ever started working together. And it’s really an equal partnership.

VL: There’s not a lot of people with whom you can feel really, really free to express your ideas. We just have a very open exchange. That’s the beauty of it.

VD: [to Vicki] He didn’t ask you! [laughs]

LovelandDuren have live dates scheduled primarily in the Memphis area, but are looking into opportunities beyond the region. Bloody Cupid is available from the band’s website www.lovelandduren.com, and through Amazon, iTunes and other retailers.