Derek and Mike did a two-part interview. I’ll copy from the email he sent me to describe it, because I’m lazy:
There are 3 parts to this interview (only 2 are up). The first part is general info (noisetrade, new albums…etc) while the other two have to do with questions that were submitted by .com board users. I have no problem with folks listening to those but they may not be as interesting to them. You can download them and upload elsewhere if you prefer, it’s whatever you want. At 32 minutes the first part is a bit long but there is a lot of good info in there. I hope this is OK.
And because it’s funny … Can You Spot Derek Webb? It’s “Where’s Waldo?” but with a short, bald man.
Another Friday, another set of reviews for you to check out. (Maybe we should make this a Friday tradition?)
The first, actually, is currently only available in print form. The June 07 issue of PASTE Magazine, which is in stores now, features a whole lot of Mr. Webb. His name is on the front cover (tucked perfectly under “Wilco” and beside “Nine Inch Nails”), a full-page picture adorns the table of contents on page 4, and their review of The Ringing Bell can be found on page 69.
The review itself is a glowing one, calling The Ringing Bell a “pop masterpiece” and saying that it is “easily one of the year’s best records”. The album is rated 5-stars (out of 5-stars we’re guessing), and “I Want to Marry You All Over Again” is the second song on the Paste Sampler CD that comes with the issue. You can pick up your copy at any good bookstore for $6.
“I just want to sing and write. I just want to make good art. I just wanna be able to get to sleep at night. For me, it’s blue collar work. So that’s it. I wanna make excellent art. I want to do the best that I can. I wanna follow my instincts.”
“I also feel that as I get more liberal with sharing my music and giving away my music for free, which the freederekwebb.com campaign gave away 80,000 copies, I also wanna try to take the burden on to make the physical artifact more compelling. If people want to take the music for free, that’s totally fine. Take it. I’m the copyright owner and the artist, so take it. Do what you want with it. Share it. The FBI is taken out of that equation and the relationship is just the artist and fan. There is an important component to the retail side and getting people to engage with the physical side. But it’s not the fan’s fault. It’s the artists’ fault for not making compelling artifacts. If all we have to offer people is round pieces of plastic, it’s no wonder that people are going online to get it. That’s not compelling.”
Back in late February, I was in Nashville for the weekend, and I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Derek about The Ringing Bell. Understand as you listen that some things may have been revealed since then that make me sound like a complete idiot, but … hey, isn’t that part of the fun? [And yes, I sound like I'm high, sick, and hyper. It's awesome.]
I’ll chop this up later into smaller pieces and put them together so that discussions about individual songs will be available, but … I’m already overdue in getting this to you. Enjoy. If nothing else, you’ll understand “Can’t Be Without You” better after listening to this.
me: We’ll start with song order. I know when you put a record together you put a lot of time into thinking which song goes where. I was wondering if you could talk about that, and especially the first two songs on Mockingbird.
dw: For me, typically, when you get done recording songs, there’s just an order that makes sense. We’ll sequence it a few different ways typically. We’ll sit down and say, “what is the obvious? What just makes sense about the order of these songs?†What do we want to say first, and then how do we want to pace it out. You don’t want to put too much heavy stuff, and you want songs that are similar spread out on the record. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. And, typically, after you work on it for a couple weeks, and you really think about it, there’s just a sequence… there’s typically just a magical sequence that just happens. And once you get that, then you say, okay, I wrote that down, we’ve got that. Now we start over. And you blow that all apart, and try it totally some other way, and see if there’s maybe a cooler approach. But on Mockingbird, there was just a sequence that made sense. It just paced out a certain way, to where I thought people could deal with it little by little.
There has been some misunderstanding even among my closest community, folks whose opinions I care a lot about. They’ve been misunderstanding that with this record is like I’m coming down on everybody: “You have to live like this. You have to do these things.” But that’s not at all what I’m saying.
There’s not enough that we can do. You can’t give enough money. You can’t love the poor enough. You can’t give enough of your possessions away to earn the love of the Father. Only Christ keeping the law on your behalf can do that. But if God does in fact love us that much, we are compelled to value the things that he valued. And Christ really had a special place for the poor. Matthew 25 shows how to judge whether or not you have real faith—faith that can justify you before the Father. When we look at the hardest people in our culture to love, how do we love them? So although the record is about action—no doubt about that—it’s action in the context of liberation in Jesus.
challies.com recently had the opportunity to sit down with derek and discuss some of the issues around his upcoming release, Mockingbird. Check out the links below:
Geof Morris: Derek, it’s been interesting of late to see people on our forum and I guess on yours as well from (the level that I’ve?) looked into it……obviously you come from a theological tradition over the last couple of years that‘s fairly conservative, and people are seeing you appear at a conference [with] Jim Wallis, who’s sort of a hot button with people that are pretty conservative…and I think…and this is my own thinking here…some of it , I just wonder how much they’ve really ever listened to or tried to read of him, and they’ve just sort of prejudged…
Derek Webb: Sure.
GM: …Which is fine…..because people are going to do that….everybody’s got a limited amount of time, so you’re going to go off of what other people say about somebody….
So…are you kinda worried about that controversy, or are you just letting it roll off your back, and going on and doing what you think is important?
DW: Well….yeah. I don’t have…..Here’s the deal. It’s interesting how quickly people who will applaud your singing a song like “Nobody Loves Me†like, : “I don’t give a damn what anybody is saying, its about what I do, and as far as I feel like what I’m doing is the Lord’s business….†they’ll applaud you at one moment….and then at another moment, when whatever you are doing doesn’t happen to line up with what they would like for you to be doing, suddenly they are real bent out of shape about it. Because sometimes the “Nobody†that I’m referring to are different people than other times.
On February 26th, I was lucky enough to get some of Derek’s time and interview him for [derekwebb.net]. I am unbelievably indebted to Steve Talley and David Beuerman for their hard work in transcribing this extremely long interview.
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