John Vanderslice

John Vanderslice doesn’t approach his songs the way most singer/songwriters do. After all, he’s made as much a name for himself as a producer (Spoon’s Gimme Fiction and the Mountain Goats’ We Shall All Be Healed and Heretic Pride) and studio owner (Tiny Telephone) as he has for his own music. For Vanderslice, the sounds that can be added to a song seem to matter just as much as the song itself. It’s only natural for the man that titled one of his albums The Life And Death of an American Fourtracker and earned some early-career infamy for a song titled “Bill Gates Must Die” to work with instruments and noisemakers that aren't state-of-the-art. He refers to his recording technique as “sloppy hi-fi,” which is a clever way of saying he makes songs sound both well-recorded and well-worn, like a broken-in sweater or a favorite pair of jeans.

Vanderslice’s way with a phrase is equally enviable. Pick a song from any of his albums, from his debut Time Travel Is Lonely to his ruminations on the aftermath of 9/11 in Pixel Revolt and Emerald City, and you’ll quickly discover he’s able to distill idiosyncratic concepts—a militiaman witnessing the attack on the World Trade Center, or a detective pursuing another detective as a possible murder suspect—into their essential elements, telling these stories with tightly wrought turns of phrase. Even when the words veer toward the esoteric or obscure, or the alien sounds dotting the track threaten to alienate or overwhelm, Vanderslice never loses sight of the song’s heart. On this year’s collaboration with the Magik*Magik Orchestra, White Wilderness, Vanderslice proves that he's just as capable of expressing himself through more traditional means. —David Raposa