Today I’m coming to you with an excellent new Featured Artist, some sweet tunes and Daydream Station’s first ever Artist Interview! If you find yourself getting a little bit excited, there’s a reason for that. I am pretty good-looking, and so is Austin Crane, the man behind the music of Valley Maker. Actually, our interview was audio-only, but who doesn’t love a man that plays the acoustic guitar and writes intelligent lyrics influenced by Flannery O’Connor and Dostoevsky? Highly recommended for fans of any of the following: Neutral Milk Hotel, Bob Dylan, Sufjan Stevens, The Microphones/Mt. Eerie, Pedro the Lion, My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes.
Austin Crane is a nice young man just finishing up his honors thesis in Columbia, South Carolina. Why do I mention this? Well, his thesis comes in the form of ten-song narrative revolving around the Book of Genesis, and it’s a damn good listen. Here’s the totally-not-confusing skinny: Austin has been recording for a couple of years with a four-piece band under his own name, so Austin Crane has a two-LP discography (available through iTunes). Meanwhile, his solo project (with some gorgeous female back-up vocals from Amy Godwin) snagged my attention and just released the aforementioned ten-song album under the name Valley Maker. Head over to their website to download it on a pay-what-you-want basis (love the Radiohead business model).
The album has a wonderfully cohesive and rich feel, with guitar scraping along as Austin‘s surprisingly mature voice narrates and Amy‘s vocals set the gorgeous mood. I can hardly think of more words to do it justice, but it is DEFINITELY worth your while to listen to the samples at the bottom of the post and then head over to the Valley Maker website and plonk down a little dough for their hard work.
Austin gave me about an hour of his Saturday afternoon (squeezed in between release shows and promotional photo shoots) and we had a great conversation about all things musical and beyond. Here are some of the highlights:
DS: You make music in South Carolina. What is the scene like there?
Austin: It’s been exploding recently. I got to Columbia, South Carolina four years ago for college and there’s a lot of stuff going on. Toro y Moi and Washed Out were both in school here at the same time, and chillwave is blowing up. Chaz (Chazwick Bundick, the man behind Toro y Moi) is a good friend of mine. The scene is really flourishing, I really appreciate all of the people here who are involved and creating interesting music.
DS: With Toro y Moi and Washed Out taking off, do you feel that the chillwave sound has become the sound of South Carolina and there will be lots more bands popping up in that vein?
Austin: If you took a cross-section of most of the bands around here, at least those that are making good, independent music, I’d say the majority would still be in the Americana or pop-rock realm. Chaz had another, more typical indie project while he was here that we used to play shows with, and Ernest (Washed Out) was working on music alone while he was here, but didn’t really play any shows. Chillwave has a niche in the music scene and we’re all very excited and supportive of it, but I wouldn’t say it’s what everyone is trying to do.
DS: After listening to the second Austin Crane album, A Place At The Table, as well as the Valley Maker album, there is a very obvious inclusion of religion as a topic in your songwriting. Do you feel like religion is more a part of the experience of music in a Southern state, or is that specifically a personal thing?
Austin: I think this is an area that is traditionally that way, especially in terms of demographics. A lot of people grew up with it in their families, and you have a lot of rhetoric about it in this area. We’re a bit infamous for it. The Valley Maker project is very much a narrative album. I was originally going to tackle the entire Old Testament in song, but that was biting off more than I could chew. I just decided to focus on the narratives and the people in Genesis and try to pull out from that what legacy is left in that, what those first people were like, and not tell the stories from my mouth but from their mouths. If I ask any questions, let it be the questions they would have asked. As for Austin Crane, I read a lot of Flannery O’Connor (Aaron interrupts: Southern Gothic in general? Austin politely concurs) and literature in that vein, and I am studying Russian in school and was reading a lot of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, so you have a lot of that kind of language on the last album. Lots of imagery of the Christ-haunted South – it’s a pretty wild place in that regard. If you drive a couple miles out of Columbia, you see some pretty intense billboards on the churches.
DS: At Oberlin, it felt like everyone who was really into the contemporary music scene moved to Brooklyn afterwards so they could stay connected and have their chance to “make it.” Do you feel as though you are a part of the same musical subculture as the Brooklyn scene?
Austin: That’s a good question (+1 DS!). I definitely listen to a lot of music coming out of that scene, we just played a show with the band Softspot out of Brooklyn last week. I am certainly excited about the music coming out of there, but I am also not trying to hop on that bandwagon. I was pretty conscious of the sound I wanted to get with this record and I’m really happy with how it turned out. If there’s any sound I really wanted to channel, it’s from your area, from the whole K Records scene. I’ve always been a fan of The Microphones and Mt. Eerie (Phil Elvrum‘s projects) and really gotten into them the last four to five years, so that was a much more immediate influence for this album than anything from Brooklyn. I also look to Sufjan Stevens as being more in the vein of what I play, and lots of the stuff on the Asthamatic Kitty label with him.
DS: Who do you think has influenced you the most, musically?
Austin: I certainly had a phase where I listened to a lot of Bob Dylan. Over the last few years, Sufjan Stevens has been a big influence. The Microphones and Mt. Eerie. Pedro the Lion and David Bazan, also from your area, I’m a huge fan of everything he’s done. A lot of those bands coming out of Brooklyn like The Dirty Projectors.
DS: Neutral Milk Hotel?
Austin: Yeah, I hope this doesn’t make me sound like a total rip-off, but In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is easily my favorite album and I’ve listened to it at least a couple of times a week since 10th grade.
DS: Obviously religion is a HUGE trope in music. Two of the artists you just named, David Bazan (of Pedro the Lion) and Sufjan Stevens, have a lot to say in that regard. Even artists like Kanye West are at their most fascinating when discussing their faith and fallibility. You said you tried to take your own voice out of Valley Maker‘s stories, but what do you view as important to bring to the table in terms of personal faith and religion as a theme in music?
Austin: By far the most important parts to me would be honesty and transparency. As you were saying, the combination of religion and music is an enormous industry in America, and that’s what I’m trying to stay away from. You see a lot of didactic music, and I’m not here to talk down about that, but it’s not what I want to do with my music. Two or three of the songs from A Place At The Table (Austin Crane‘s 2009 album) had Biblical characters in them, but my biggest focus was in finding the ways that they were human, whether it be their weaknesses or just their humanity in general. A lot of people have good reasons to believe or not to believe, but if it’s a big portion of your life and you spend time thinking about it, I think a good way to wrestle with it is through music. The most important thing is to do it honestly.
DS: At what point during the process did you decide to bring in a second vocalist, and what impact did that have?
Austin: I’d always wanted to work on a project with more significant backup vocals. On the Valley Maker record, on all but one of the songs that’s a really big part of what makes them what they are. I think I was conscious of that, both wanting to do a lot of background vocals myself and also getting a female voice in there. We (Austin Crane) played a show in Macon, Georgia where Amy is from and she came in and sang a set and just completely blew us away. We played a few more shows with her and a few months ago it just clicked for me that she needed to sing on this record. She loved the idea, and I’m so glad she did because she’s a vocal performance major at Mercer College and she is just incredibly talented. She hit everything the first time in studio and got all of her stuff laid down in one weekend. There’s certain parts where she’ll do layering in ways that create an eerie mood or really channel an emotion that wouldn’t be present if she wasn’t there. I think one of the moments when I got most excited about this project was when she was in the studio laying down vocals for “Babel” and just created this great, eerie moment that I really wanted to share with people.
DS: Do you have a goal to at some point secure a record label deal for yourself or a band that you’re in?
Austin: I’m certainly open to exploring that. I love music more than I can say. It’s one of the things in my life that brings me the most joy. I’m also going to be very cautious about putting everything else on the sidelines for the sake of just music, because I value being a person that is well-invested in other people and in a community, and I’d really like eventually to engage in some significant non-profit developmental work. I think the next couple of years are a period when it could take a really important place in my life and I want to explore it, so the best way to say it is that I’m going to be cautious, but also continue to play music, explore how to get it out to more people and maybe even play some more shows. We’ll see what happens, I’m going to be in Colorado for the next three months for an internship and hopefully I’ll get involved in the music scene out there, and then Bulgaria for a month, before I’ll be back in Columbia in November or so. That was a big motivation in putting the music up online, so that regardless of their financial situation or whatever, people could get ahold of it. It’s a big motivation for me because I’m excited about this project and I don’t know how many shows I’ll get to play over the next few months, so I really wanted to get it on the internet and out there. Guys like Chaz (Toro y Moi) and Ernest (Washed Out) blew up and part of it was that people got ahold of it online and shared it and if people want to hear it, I want them to be able to.
DS: If you were to get a phone call recruiting you to a record label, which one would you secretly hope that it would be? Who’s got the most cachet in your mind?
Austin: Asthmatic Kitty (with Sufjan and Castanets), that’s a community I really like. I like Merge Records a lot, and like I said earlier K Records.
DS: If you could record an album with any artist in history, who would it be?
Austin: David Bazan.
DS: What is the ideal soundtrack for sitting on a porch on a sunny day, sipping on a cold drink?
Austin: The Toro y Moi album (Causers of This).
DS: What is the most romantic song ever written?
Austin: Jeff Mangum‘s cover of “I Love How You Love Me”. Also the entire album We Walked in Song by The Innocence Mission. Those songs are probably perfect and they make me want to settle down.
DS: Where in the world would you most like to play a show?
Austin: A tour across Europe would be pretty amazing. Also, I attended shows at The Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, NC when I was younger and I always thought if I “made it” that’s one place I would want to play.
A huge thank you to the talented Austin Crane for sitting down with me as he runs the release gauntlet for his new project, Valley Maker. Again, check out the official website to support the music makers and the dreamers of the dreams.
Valley Maker – Jacob
Valley Maker – First
Austin Crane – The First Shall Be
Austin Crane – Teeth In Your Side
Toro y Moi – Thanks Vision
Washed Out – Feel It All Around
Jeff Mangum – I Love How You Love Me (live)
