Fisher’s deeply resonant baritone, along with the band’s tendency toward slow songs impregnated with his folk-poet takes on drunks, wanderers and characters seeking love or God — some kind of deliverance from emptiness and the bruise of loss — have drawn descriptions such as “heartbreaking,” “melancholy” and “dark.” The band has received critical comparisons to Nick Cave and the Tindersticks.
While there is some truth to these observations, Willard Grant Conspiracy is firmly entrenched in the vernacular of American roots music, and their unflinching examination of rather ordinary human damage is ultimately redemptive. WGC makes songs that quietly move beyond catharsis and break way to a window, a way out. Light. Joy.
“It’s easy to pick up on the dark stuff, it’s easy to pick up on the melancholy stuff. It’s easier to go after that,” Fisher says. “It’s a little harder to find a reason to talk about the light stuff.”
Had he not retreated from drinking a couple decades ago, Fisher says he’d not only not be making music, but wouldn’t be alive. Pointedly not advocating sobriety for anyone but himself, he continues matter-of-factly, “It’s kind of an Indian thing: You try to live lightly on the land, and leave as little of a damaging imprint as you can. And try and value the things around you as much as you can. And if you do that, and try to be honest at the same time, then I don’t think you have anything to apologize for in the end. If you’ve been below the curve, once you get back above the curve, you start to take great pleasure in even the smallest things.
“There’s still plenty that frightens me. Most of it’s internal. My own willingness to self-destruct. That would probably be the thing that frightens me most. But ultimately, there are so many things that I try to catalogue and hold on to that say that it’s worth not self-destructing for. It’s sort of my way of arming myself against my own pathology.”
These deep truths, hard-won, are inevitably compelling features of Willard Grant Conspiracy. Yet without the energy and execution to back them up artistically, you might have a good way to live but music no one wants to hear. And when it comes down to it, for WGC it is without a doubt about the music.
Fisher calls what they do folk music. “There’s so much now that’s called folk music that’s really navel-gazing, or worse,” he acknowledges. “When I use it, I use it in what I hope people understand is the more traditional form. Stripped down or not, I think there’s a sense of narrative, a sense of the story itself being about specific things. I think it’s not elitist music. I don’t want to make elitist music.
“When I was younger, I wrote a lot of poetry. And published some really bad books. At any rate, I discovered that the poetry world is sort of this insular thing. You know, poets write for other poets. This is really crude; it’s kind of like a group circle jerk in a way. Very quickly, it sort of disinterested me. It was like, ooh, I don’t want to be part of that. If I’m writing or singing or doing some sort of public expression of creativity, then I want it to be an active communication. I don’t want it to be an ivory tower kind of thing. So from that point of view, the folk music reference hopefully makes sense.”
If Fortune Otto’s was “an accident,” recorded to test out a friend’s home recording studio and issued on Fisher’s tiny Dahlia label in 1996, its successors (all released in the U.S. on Slow River/Ryko) have been deliberate attempts to capture something particular on tape. On Flying Low, WGC expanded on what they had learned on the first outing, recording tracks “backwards” and “wrong,” laying down drum tracks last, a specific and successful choice to retain the free-flow of friends getting together to play in a living room.
Mojave was admittedly an effort to avoid “pigeonholing”. It contains the thrashy punk of “Go Jimmy Go” and the experimental throwaway “Sticky”, in addition to the band’s trademark forlorn ballads such as “Another Lonely Night”. Mojave also includes the uplifting slowcore anthem “The Work Song”.
Each record (and performance) is, as Fisher suggests, a “snapshot” of just where and what the band is at any given point in time. The where and what has been flexible within its skeletal structure. While songwriters Fisher and Austin have remained at the core, their co-conspirators are no less important in shaping the nuances, textures and final arrangements of the songs.
