{"id":28368,"date":"2024-10-28T05:30:10","date_gmt":"2024-10-28T09:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=28368"},"modified":"2024-10-11T14:45:54","modified_gmt":"2024-10-11T18:45:54","slug":"steve-wynn-does-everything-at-once","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/28\/steve-wynn-does-everything-at-once\/","title":{"rendered":"Steve Wynn Does Everything at Once"},"content":{"rendered":"

This feature first appeared in SPIN<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"Influential indie rocker debuts a fascinating memoir and a new album<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Steve Wynn is an alt-rock hero. He launched The Dream Syndicate in 1981, bridging a gap between the exploratory, improvisational music of the late \u201860s and the visceral immediacy of punk rock. Though he was a key figure in the so-called \u201cPaisley Underground\u201d scene of the \u201880s, Wynn successfully avoided getting pigeonholed. Whether with the Dream Syndicate, as a solo artist, composing film soundtracks or helming indie rock supergroup The Baseball Project, again and again the prolific Wynn has channeled his creativity into multiple directions.<\/p>\n

And now he\u2019s done it again. Drawing upon his finely-honed skills as a storyteller and communicator, Wynn has penned a compelling memoir, I Wouldn\u2019t Say It If It Wasn\u2019t True<\/i>. And he\u2019s also crafted a superb new album, Make it Right<\/i>, his first solo release in many years. It\u2019s a companion-of-sorts with the book, and while experiencing one isn\u2019t strictly necessary to understand the other, interested parties will want both.<\/p>\n

Ahead of a limited songs-and-stories solo tour that includes dates in nontraditional venues, Wynn spoke with me about his new book and album.<\/p>\n

Your story is a personal one, but it also captures an era. Was that by design?<\/b><\/p>\n

Yeah. I\u2019ve found that with people of, let\u2019s say, a certain age \u2013 however you want to put it: boomers, whatever \u2013 are reading it and seeing their story in the book as well, which is great. When I wrote the book, I wanted it to be about a lot of things. It\u2019s about my music career, and the early days with The Dream Syndicate. But it\u2019s also about being a music fan growing up at a certain time, how I embraced the \u201860s music explosion and then punk rock, and how that all melded together to lead me to writing a bunch of songs and forming a band.<\/p>\n

As you chronicle in the book, you were a sportswriter for awhile. Do you feel that endeavor used a different part of your brain than songwriting does?<\/b><\/p>\n

They\u2019re obviously different in plenty of ways. I was never an athlete, but I liked all the numbers, the stats, and the history. I liked all the musty, dusty archival tomes sitting on bookshelves, and knowing about what happened in a game in 1913. And that\u2019s the same muscle that makes me want to know about every Charlie Parker recording session or who John Coltrane played with before he played with his quartet. It\u2019s an obsession, and it\u2019s a way of understanding history and finding connection to it.<\/p>\n

So as a songwriter, my initial draw to that wasn\u2019t just, \u201cOh, I want to be a rock star riding in limousines down Sunset Boulevard.\u201d The initial attraction was, \u201cI love music so much, and in a kind of a cocky way, I know what\u2019s good and what\u2019s not good. And I want you<\/i> to know about it, too.\u201d On one hand, The Dream Syndicate was a band that thought we were better than a lot of bands that were around, but also, we were a mouthpiece for the music we loved.<\/p>\n

With your background \u2013 touring and recording musician, author, having worked in a record store, being a radio deejay \u2013 you seem especially well-suited to write a biography of a musician whom you admire. Is that something you\u2019ve ever thought about doing?<\/b><\/p>\n

A little bit. And I think I would like to do that sometime. I think I\u2019ve been thinking about that lately, because having now written a book, my God, I did it<\/i>. So I can imagine doing another one now, and I could see doing that with that same kind of energy or approach that I brought to writing about baseball or forming a band. I\u2019d love to put my own spin on a band that I love.<\/p>\n

\"\"What artist made the biggest impression upon you as a live performer, as someone who gets out in front of people?<\/b><\/p>\n

Bruce Springsteen. The guy is amazing.<\/p>\n

When [my friend and future Dream Syndicate bassist] Kendra Smith and I saw him play in 1978, he had just put out Darkness on the Edge of Town<\/i>. He was big; he was playing the Forum. And I had never seen anybody on stage play in a way that connected so direct and viscerally. \u201cHe\u2019s on stage talking to me like we\u2019re hanging out together in his living room!\u201d Of course that was a well-rehearsed, formulated thing, but it came from a real place.<\/p>\n

If nothing else, Springsteen convinced me that I never wanted to play a subpar show, never wanted to play a show where I didn\u2019t give everything I had. I would be present and aware and take into account what\u2019s happening. Every night, people in the audience are making a choice to be there with their time, with their money, with their clutter of things they have going on in their lives. With all the music they could see, they\u2019ve chosen to come see me. So I want to give a great show.<\/p>\n

I mean, I\u2019m decent guitarist. I can sing a tune pretty well, and I know how to write a set list. But I try to make each night something really special, something that didn\u2019t exist before.<\/p>\n

Make it Right<\/b><\/i> is your first solo album in more than a decade. How has your approach to making a solo record changed in those intervening years?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When The Dream Syndicate broke up, I made\u2026 I forget the number\u2026 maybe 15 solo records over the next 20 years. I had always been in a band; when I went solo it was \u201ckid in a candy store\u201d time. When I started making solo records, I viewed them almost like a casting director. \u201cI\u2019ve got the idea in my head; now who\u2019s gonna play on it?\u201d That was liberating. \u201cThis year, I\u2019m gonna go to Spain and make a record, and next time I\u2019m gonna go to Slovenia, then I\u2019ll make a record in Norway.\u201d I\u2019d just follow the whim of the moment.<\/p>\n

But after about 20 years of doing that, I kind of missed being in a steady band. There\u2019s all the camaraderie that you have; you\u2019re part of a gang. You can all keep in touch and have inside jokes and all that. So I spent the following ten years doing nothing but The Baseball Project and the reunited Dream Syndicate. And that was great. I almost didn\u2019t need solo records anymore.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m kind of missing that<\/i> now. Luckily, in this day and age, now you can be in five different projects at the same time. It wasn\u2019t that way in the \u201880s. Back then, you were kind of expected to do one thing. I get that, but it wasn\u2019t the way I liked working. It was a very frustrating time for me to be a musician, because I just want to crank out a lot of stuff. And so right now it\u2019s nice: I can do everything at once.<\/p>\n

Wynn\u2019s book, I Wouldn\u2019t Say It If It Wasn\u2019t True<\/em>, his new album Make it Right<\/em>, and a full list of tour dates can all be found at stevewynn.net.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This feature first appeared in SPIN. Influential indie rocker debuts a fascinating memoir and a new album Steve Wynn is an alt-rock hero. He launched The Dream Syndicate in 1981, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28369,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,41,45,49,57,59,62],"tags":[718,2058],"class_list":["post-28368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book","category-interview","category-memoir","category-new-release","category-psych","category-punk","category-rawk","tag-dream-syndicate","tag-steve-wynn","cat-10-id","cat-41-id","cat-45-id","cat-49-id","cat-57-id","cat-59-id","cat-62-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28368"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28371,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28368\/revisions\/28371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}