Add it Up: The Violent Femmes, 40-plus Years On (Part 2 of 3)

Continued from Part One…

How does your experience in the arts outside of music color your songwriting?

Gordon Gano: I think everything in some ways influences everything else; there aren’t these separate categories. But mostly, I don’t think it would be conscious. If I’m seeing an interesting color combination with a painting, and then that makes me think, “What if I combine the notes here differently to create an interesting combination?” that might happen.

Recently, I was reading something, some prose. And it just hit me; one little part fit in really well with the theme of a song I was currently working on. And then I thought, “Why don’t I take some of these ideas and play around with them, and see if I can come up with another part of this song?” The book is over 200 pages, and on, say, the middle of page 184, there was a little reference to this image. I’m not taking word for word; just some of the ideas and how they can connect. I am not sure if it’s gonna work, but I’ve been playing around with it.

You’ve written a lot of songs within the context of Violent Femmes, as well as outside of it for solo projects and so forth. When you’re writing, do you approach it as, “This one’s going to be for Violent Femmes and this one’s for a solo project”?

I haven’t ever specifically written a song to be done with Violent Femmes. When I’m writing it – or after I’ve written it – I might think, “Oh, this would be interesting.” Or as likely as that, “This seems like it would be for something else.” And then lately I’ve been thinking, “Maybe I’ll see if [this song] comes together in a way that makes sense for the band.

But then we’ve done a variety of things through the years, so maybe it seems like [we should] just keep on doing that sort of thing – the unexpected – for ourselves.

As far as writing specifically for something else, I have a couple of examples. One would be that I wrote all the songs for a musical [Run Bambi Run]. It was [performed] in Milwaukee, and it went very well. It’s about Laurie “Bambi” Bembenek; she was thrown off the police force in Milwaukee, convicted of murder and then ended up escaping from prison.

Anyway, I wrote all the songs for that; it was a lot of work over a long time. In fact, the very song that I’m thinking of using a little bit of inspiration from this novel is a song that I initially wrote for the musical, but it really didn’t make sense in the musical. I was originally thinking in terms of a character in the musical, and then I expanded on that when I was writing it, because somewhere in my head is always the idea that I don’t know when or where a song might be done. Most of the songs I’ve written have never been heard by anybody, anywhere. There must be hundreds.

I also wrote songs for a film; they’re in the film, but the film was never released. The record label was like, “We are not putting this in some soundtrack bin, because that’ll get ignored. So that became my solo album, Hitting the Ground.

And that’s also the reason why there are all these different people singing all these different songs [obn the album], because I didn’t think it made sense for my voice to be singing nine or ten songs throughout this whole film. So I got a lot of people [to sing], and I’m just thrilled, because they’re some of my favorite artists. But as a friend very dryly said said at the time, “Congratulations, you finally did a solo album. And you’re hardly on it.”

Mostly, I’m writing stuff and not thinking in terms of where it might land. Like that song for the musical; we actually started playing it live with the band on our last tour or two. So things can move around.

Over the years, Violent Femmes have done a lot of festival gigs. Do you approach them differently than hard-ticket shows?

Well, we have to. A shorter set would minimize or maybe even eliminate doing new songs nobody’s heard before, or songs that we might want to do but haven’t done in a long time, or are on an album that’s not so popular.

At a festival, we would want to focus on the songs that we would normally play anyway, which would be the ones that are the most popular. Because so many people at a festival are just waiting through our set; they’re really there for whoever’s coming on after. So we like to hit it with high energy and keep it there.

There’s a song on our first album, “Good Feeling.” We enjoy playing it, and a lot of people really like that song. But at a festival, it would be bringing the tempo down too much. That being said, even at a festival, we could do anything just because we felt like it just made sense to us.

Brian Ritchie plays a lot of instruments. And he calls off the set. It’s extremely rare that we would have a set list. When we go up on stage, we don’t know the first song we’re going to play! And I take some pride in this: we don’t take any longer in between songs than other groups.

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