{"id":31038,"date":"2026-05-19T05:30:47","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T09:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=31038"},"modified":"2026-05-20T07:48:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T11:48:10","slug":"add-it-up-the-violent-femmes-40-plus-years-on-part-2-of-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/19\/add-it-up-the-violent-femmes-40-plus-years-on-part-2-of-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Add it Up: The Violent Femmes, 40-plus Years On (Part 2 of 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n

How does your experience in the arts outside of music color your songwriting?<\/b><\/p>\n

Gordon Gano:<\/b> I think everything in some ways influences everything else; there aren\u2019t these separate categories. But mostly, I don\u2019t think it would be conscious. If I\u2019m seeing an interesting color combination with a painting, and then that makes me think, \u201cWhat if I combine the notes here differently to create an interesting combination?\u201d that might happen.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWhy don\u2019t I take some of these ideas and play around with them, and see if I can come up with another part of this song?\u201d The book is over 200 pages, and on, say, the middle of page 184, there was a little reference to this image. I\u2019m not taking word for word; just some of the ideas and how they can connect. I am not sure if it\u2019s gonna work, but I\u2019ve been playing around with it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve 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\u2019re writing, do you approach it as, \u201cThis one\u2019s going to be for Violent Femmes and this one\u2019s for a solo project\u201d?<\/b><\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t ever specifically written a song to be done with Violent Femmes. When I\u2019m writing it \u2013 or after I\u2019ve written it \u2013 I might think, \u201cOh, this would be interesting.\u201d Or as likely as that, \u201cThis seems like it would be for something else.\u201d And then lately I\u2019ve been thinking, \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll see if [this song] comes together in a way that makes sense for the band.<\/p>\n

But then we\u2019ve done a variety of things through the years, so maybe it seems like [we should] just keep on doing that sort of thing \u2013 the unexpected \u2013 for ourselves.<\/p>\n

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<\/i>]. It was [performed] in Milwaukee, and it went very well. It\u2019s about Laurie \u201cBambi\u201d Bembenek; she was thrown off the police force in Milwaukee, convicted of murder and then ended up escaping from prison.<\/p>\n

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\u2019m 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\u2019t 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\u2019t know when or where a song might be done. Most of the songs I\u2019ve written have never been heard by anybody, anywhere. There must be hundreds.<\/p>\n

I also wrote songs for a film; they\u2019re in the film, but the film was never released. The record label was like, \u201cWe are not putting this in some soundtrack bin, because that\u2019ll get ignored. So that became my solo album, Hitting the Ground<\/i>.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s also the reason why there are all these different people singing all these different songs [obn the album], because I didn\u2019t 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\u2019m just thrilled, because they\u2019re some of my favorite artists. But as a friend very dryly said said at the time, \u201cCongratulations, you finally did a solo album. And you\u2019re hardly on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mostly, I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

Over the years, Violent Femmes have done a lot of festival gigs. Do you approach them differently than hard-ticket shows?<\/b><\/p>\n

Well, we have to. A shorter set would minimize or maybe even eliminate doing new songs nobody\u2019s heard before, or songs that we might want to do but haven\u2019t done in a long time, or are on an album that\u2019s not so popular.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re really there for whoever\u2019s coming on after. So we like to hit it with high energy and keep it there.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a song on our first album, \u201cGood Feeling.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Brian Ritchie plays a lot of instruments. And he calls off the set. It\u2019s extremely rare that we would have a set list. When we go up on stage, we don\u2019t know the first song we\u2019re going to play! And I take some pride in this: we don\u2019t take any longer in between songs than other groups.<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a>\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31041,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,62],"tags":[5898,5897],"class_list":["post-31038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-rawk","tag-gordon-gano","tag-violent-femmes","cat-41-id","cat-62-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31038"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31555,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31038\/revisions\/31555"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}