Words by David C. Obenour
Whether on his own or as a collaborator, working in the structures of avant jazz or indie rock, composer and producer Gabriel Birnbaum brings a focused curiosity to his music. While Patron Saint of Tireless Losers may seem like an odd title for his latest effort, and one that hangs low for the lazy and cynical critic, Gabriel invites the attention both to himself and the explorations found within the songs. While failure and unending effort are societally seen as problems or faults, here Birnbaum celebrates them as worthy experiences through art. Some of the most powerful art often runs deep but spreads thin. What is success? What is failure? What is to be learned by exploring both.
Off Shelf: What does Patron Saint of Tireless Losers mean to you? Where did the title come from?
Gabriel Birnbaum: Here’s something I read in a novel by Peter Handke right after I first saw this question that I relate to, “I have always felt drawn to failures and the down-and-out—as if they were in the right. I see them, from a distance, as positively ennobled, or as if today they alone among us were figures with a destiny…”
Failure is fascinating to me. It is a concept we create and invest with meaning ourselves. It grows into a monstrous thing that repulses and terrifies us, and yet a failure is also something we each privately believe ourselves to be. Failing is one of the most common experiences in the world and also completely taboo to discuss given the compulsion we experience to market ourselves at all times – as artists, as people. Because of this, there is something about moments of defeat that feel exciting to me – if art can speak the unspeakable, I want to acknowledge and even celebrate defeat. I want to approach it with non-judgmental curiosity.
I have also inevitably found myself against the grain culturally in my life – what I like is generally unpopular and popular things often don’t move me at all. This is not a pose, much as other people would like it to be, it’s just my natural taste – I follow what I enjoy. However, it has made me feel a great love for others who, like me, are out of step, and for the parts of each of us that are out of step, even within people who are more aligned. Those parts are interesting and lovable to me.
OS: So do you see yourself that way at all? The Patron Saint of Tireless Losers?
GB: There is a wryness to declaring myself a patron saint of losers for sure, and to the Jesus-y artwork. I don’t see myself that way, though. I have of course felt badly about my standing in the world at times. I think we all have, and most of us will once again. While “loser” used as a pejorative implies a perpetual state of loserdom I see it more as a transitory thing. I think failure can clarify and purify one’s life in the same way that a serious illness or death scare can. When things do not work, one must confront a different kind of reality. After months or years of floating, one finally lands on the ground and feels the world in all its texture and weight. It can be beautiful.
Caveat: I don’t believe suffering to be more real or authentic or interesting than joy. I like to write from both places. However, I think I have veered away from embracing the dark side fully in my work because of my fear of being perceived as a certain kind of archetypal self-absorbed sensitive guitar man. One of my goals here and on the forthcoming Wilder Maker project was to once again do the thing I feared – speak some of the real darkness out into the world that I usually hide out of consideration for others.
Caveat two: that does not mean I am personally the narrator of each of these songs. I am not.
OS: The way you talked about the single, “A Feeling Unbroken” – an amazing title, by the way – being about “someone being left behind, trying to be a dignified loser, feeling love and resentment all jagged and twisted up” feels sort of like an unpacking of that title. Do you see it that way? What more does it say about the album and these songs?
GB: It’s an unpacking of the song, for sure. The title could also be interpreted as being about the feeling of making something, “God is a feeling unbroken.”
As a man – one of my other main themes lately, see: Wilder Maker’s Male Models – the idea of failure and defeat takes on a whole other edge – men are not supposed to fail or lose, it is unmanly to do so. Therefore not only do you have to cope with the pain of the situation at hand but also the fact that it undermines your very identity. This creates a kind of emotional shortcircuit that tends to make people lose their grip. This song tries to wrestle with that double loss. Everything on the record shares the central theme but touches on unique permutations of it.
OS: You referenced James Joyce’s collection of short stories, Dubliners as a sort of inspiration for the songs’ narratives. Can you expound on that? Does it influence your sequencing of the songs as well?
GB: Dubliners is a constant touchstone for me, I’ve mentioned it several times on past records as well, for slightly different reasons. A friend once pointed out to me that the Dubliners stories mostly involve a similar form: a slow build of hope for some kind of transcendence followed by a sudden harsh crash back to the roughness of reality. That is one of the poignant experiences of failure that I wanted to explore here. The vision of a new and better world that is then harshly taken away by current reality, and the shame the person experiences for having believed in that better world. The sequencing was done more out of musical considerations than narrative ones, to be honest. Sometimes the concept has to take a backseat to pleasure.
OS: In recording the album, you talked about not sending the demos in advance to your fellow players in order to experience the moment of discovery in studio – creating “an amazing high and a sometimes harrowing challenge.” Can you recall any particular amazing highs when working on Patron Saint of Tireless Losers with the band?
GB: I have long had a theory that there are two perfect moments in a song’s life – the one when it first coheres with the band and the one when, after many repetitions, its corners are knocked off and it becomes streamlined and polished, its final form. This series of solo band recordings attempts to capture the former. In that way, each song has transcendent moments. Here are a few.
“A Drunk” – this is all one live take, aside from the vocals. Three guitars and drums all in the room. In my head, the song had been a more conventional folk rock thing, but I had never been quite happy with it that way, and when everyone stepped in to play, it transformed into something that sounded more like an ECM record. I don’t think I would have ever come up with this arrangement on my own, yet we did it as a band in just a few minutes and it was perfectly suited to the feeling of the song.
“A Feeling Unbroken” – my voice breaks on both vocal takes at the exact same moment, in perfect symmetry, at 28 seconds – it’s wild and beautiful and again, never could have done it on purpose.
“Same As Me” – I knew I wanted the second half of this to take on a kind of careening tumbling feeling, but not how that would work at all. I just kind of hoped the band would naturally do it, and they did. Jason’s drums and Adam’s guitar interjections on the whole second half are one of my favorite things on the whole record. And then the outro where the bass note changes was entirely the idea of someone in the band, Will I think.
OS: Do you like to take that same approach in recording both rock and avante music? Does it produce similar results in execution?
GB: I like to take a different approach on every record for the most part, regardless of genre. The Nightwater stuff is just me alone so it’s a different process – as intuitive as possible, each piece completed in one shot ideally, typically done at night in a kind of hypnotic half-asleep state. The Wilder Maker records have historically been very complex arrangements worked out over time with the band and then recorded at the second peak, when things are streamlined.
I do think similar techniques will produce results with similar qualities. In these settings there will rarely be jarring or intricate changes between sections because those are intentional disruptions to the flow of a song and that kind of thinking is not encouraged in this naturalistic setting, especially with me as the leader presenting the songs. The band is inclined to respect the songs and any other ideas they see as coming from me. This is part of why I like to say as little as possible, to create more freedom for them.
OS: Likewise, and you probably saw this coming, but can you recall any harrowing challenges when working on Patron Saint of Tireless Losers with the band?
GB: Man, we just could not get “Perfect Again” right. Something about the time feel refused to cohere, and it was the only time during the recording session that I was really starting to feel despair. Eventually on what felt like the twentieth take we magically hit it and it was as if the struggle had never happened.
The other challenging moment was for my ego, when the band realized the chorus of “Wild At Heart” had the same chords as a popular Radiohead song – I don’t often listen to Radiohead so I didn’t know – and kept singing the chorus of that one over mine. No artist likes feeling unoriginal and I didn’t handle it particularly well. I got really flustered and it took me a while to calm down.
OS: Knowing that you were already familiar with the demos, did any of how Will Graefe, Adam Brisbin, or Jason Nazary respond to them catch you off-guard? Creating your own sort of amazing high or challenge to meet a song’s new direction or iteration?
GB: Part of what works about this process is that my rhythm guitar parts are mostly fixed. I outline the chords or play a specific fingerpicked pattern, and what the band does around that is completely open. I do adjust my parts based on the band’s, for example I don’t think my electric guitar on “See You Happy” wound up in the final mix at all, but for the most part my part is the skeleton around which the band builds the arrangement. So, I can be surprised and often am, but it doesn’t typically force me to shift my own playing. Maybe it should! That might lead to more interesting results.
I mentioned “A Drunk” above but another good example is “A Sleeping Dog, A Heavy Sigh” to that list. I had created the song with a very even eighth-note strumming pattern and I had the verse bass part in mind but really no idea what Jason or Will would play. The part that Jason came up felt perfect for the song in how it simmered and bubbled irregularly while still keeping a groove that made the odd meter feel very natural. Then Will, I believe, came up with that descending synth line at the end that really became part of the core structure. Adam’s slide guitar part in the second verse is also wonderful.
OS: When you’re writing – or even concepting songs – do you have a different approach for rock and avante music? What are you able to do with one that you aren’t the other?
GB: A finished album is often presented as something created in this order: 1) concept, 2) music. The actual process is much more erratic. Most of these songs began as improvisations on the guitar or piano that caught my attention, and when I began the Nightwater album I had no idea what I was making other than that it was satisfying. So in a way the process is the same, flow-state improvisation that is then collected and appraised from a critical/conceptual angle, then more improvisation, then back to the evaluation stage. So, in that sense, the process is the same.
Even the concept of this “discover the song in studio” project was gradual. I did in fact send demos for Not Alone, the first record we made this way, but no one really listened to them. Rather than pester everyone over email I decided to just lay back and wait. I saw that the intense attention everyone brought in the studio was really powerful and focused and surely more brilliant than whatever scattered attention they could give the demos during their busy day to day lives before the session. That, combined with memories of things I read in Shakey, the Neil Young bio, gave me the final idea.
As far as doing different things with different styles, I enjoy the ambiguity of instrumental music. My lyrics are often very specific and it feels good to be able to make something and really have no idea what it means to other people who listen to it. I also like making music that serves different functions. Wilder Maker’s Zion LP was conceived as ideal music to be performed on daytime stages as festivals – rhythmic, propulsive, danceable, energetic. Nightwater ultimately became a project about sleep states. The music is meant as a sleep aid but also as an exploration of dreamlike, half-awake states.
An old friend of mine told me that Dali used to fall asleep in a chair in front of a canvas with a metal ladle in his hand. When he fell asleep he’d drop it and be immediately awakened by the clatter, then he’d paint before he could think. He used to try to replicate this in writing poetry. This is the ideal state for making Nightwater music.
OS: I noticed the song titles for your last album, Nightwater – an instrumental work, were much longer. Do you feel the need to provide more context for music that doesn’t contain lyrics? How do you think the addition of lyrics influences the listener’s experience of your music?
GB: The titles on the most recent Nightwater album were pulled directly from my dream journal, in keeping with the sleep-state theme, so there’s a specific reason for their unwieldiness. In general though, I have passed through several phases with titling. In my early work under a different name I used incredibly long and dense titles for everything, often cribbed from poets. Then as I got further into the industry I was slapped down quite a bit and unfortunately responded by trying to tone down my personality and the things I did that other people might perceive as pretentious. Recently I’ve been working on reactivating those parts of myself that I became ashamed of. The new Wilder Maker will probably also have long, intense titles.
It is also true though, as you say, that lyric songs provide their own context and so the titles for many of mine are simply key phrases from the song, without much elaboration or attempt to be interesting on their own. “A Drunk” is a deceptively interesting title though, because alcohol isn’t mentioned in the song at all. I like the way it changes the context of the story. I’d like to do that more with titles for songs with lyrics, have them add an overlay of meaning beyond the song. A more interesting frame.