kAtE jAcObs
fly me to Hoboken


One of the grooviest places in the world! The car park of The Three Magpies at London's Heathrow Airport and joined by Kate Jacobs...hello.

Hello Bob

So we're at the end of your first UK tour, how did it go?

It went wonderfully, I'm very sad to be leaving.

Your expectations? Did you have many of this tour?

Well I try to keep an open mind. My experience with touring before.. anywhere.. is that you never know...I've toured a lot in the States and I've toured in Europe-  Germany and Belgium - and I expected that there would be good gigs and bad gigs. I'd say that this far exceeded my expectations in that almost all the gigs were good gigs.

And the audiences?

The audiences were wonderful, they were very attentive and seemed really tuned in and easy to communicate with and I enjoyed it very much.

Because you're promoting your new record 'Hydrangea' which is your third album. It differs quite a lot from your first two in so far as the storytelling aspect of the album but I want to talk to you about the first two albums and the inspirations behind those two albums. What were they?

Well my first album really came out of..well I had a band and we'd been -playing a lot and I thought oh we should record this because we were kind of tight so that was a really quickly recorded - almost live - record. That group of songs came out of a typical painful, heartbreak, break-up period for me. I always end up writing about what's going - what I'm obsessed with at the time so that one ended up being a real heartache record and people to this day say that's such a great break-up record to sit around and cry to. I think it's so funny, it's wonderful if I've written something that other people find at all resonant or comforting ..that's great. I didn't intend that it just came out that way. The second one is more ...I started going a little more in the direction that 'Hydrangea' really went in. These narratives and stories and songs based on character sketches and there's a little bit about my family on that album but mostly it's stories that I'd heard from friends and everybody's fair game so I find them all over the place. {laughs}

So it was a natural progression to 'Hydrangea' that second album?

Yeah I think so .'Hydrangea' is really highly  narrative with a number of songs that are old family stories that I've sort of dug up and dug out of the attic old letters and journals and asking relatives to repeat tales that I've heard over the years. So that was a very deliberate approach and there's other characters in there as well.

How long you been making music Kate?

Ten years.

So it's not that long really?

I guess not really in the scheme of things. I started out as a dancer and started doing in the mid eighties in New York City a lot of performance art, multimedia, dance theatre, film stuff and started writing songs within the context of these productions. The songwriting just really was the thing that gave me the most pleasure so I eventually edited out all the other media.

And it was these performance art , these productions that really stung your musical tail.

Yeah I found that I had the most fun when I was standing up and singing songs and I loved writing songs. I've always loved to write verse. When I was little I always wrote down reams and reams of bad poetry but I loved the exercise of fitting words into metre and rhyme. My songwriting is pretty disciplined in that way..concise and it rhymes and it's metred and it's melodic. It's not the rambly, multi-syllabic folk style.

Do you miss dancing?

No I still do it -I take a wonderful professional ballet class in New York and just love it and gives me great happiness and I don't have to worry about falling over on stage in the middle of a double pirouette..

Your major fear now is forgetting the words of a song?

Yeah right..I don't have too much trouble with that..once I'm telling the story..especially storytelling songs ..once you're into the story you kind of know where to go..

How did you find the band? You started writing ten years ago..there must have been a concerted effort to find certain people to play with or did they come to you?

Well it wasn't hard because living in Hoboken, New Jersey which is a small town up the river from Manhattan which is chock full of musicians. A lot of players there and several recording studios. It's got a big-time national club -well it's a small club..but it's on the national touring route for a lot of bands. It's got a record label - Bar None - which my first two records came out on
so it's a pretty concentrated musical town and once I started you know I just made a few friends. All my band members live within a few blocks of my house and they're wonderful players and we get together and rehearse in my bass players living room. We put a big  fire on in the fireplace we sit around in
the winter-time and it's pretty blissful. I've had an easy time and been able to play with people like Dave Schramm who is just a remarkable musician and artist and I've been really lucky, really lucky with players.

Do you want to go through the band members -band-wise - and who they've worked with?

Sure ..Dave is the person ..its been really fun over here in England running into Schramm-fans -they're all over the world and they come out of the woodwork. I think several people I ran into were disappointed that Dave wasn't with me. Anybody who hasn't heard them should go out and get The Scramms recordings because they are just wonderful. Dave also has a couple of solo records out and he has played with a lot of people. He was an early member of Yo La Tengo and he's done session work with The Replacements and Freedy Johnston, Richard Buckner and lots of other people without ever actually being a session guy - he only goes in on projects that he's really into.He's really serious and devotes most of his time to The Schramms.

He's quite choosy?

Choosy? Well yeah that's indirect flattery to myself because I'm lucky that he plays with me. Thats' Dave then there's James who used to own the big recording studio in Hoboken 'Water Music' and he got out of the recording business eventually but he's made a lot of records. He recorded Yo La Tengo records and Freedy Johnston records ..there's a whole slew of indie records and if you look at them ( from the eighties)  you'll see that James MacMillan was the engineer on them. He's a really good engineer and a wonderful player. I have a new drummer in the past year - a guy named Paul Michella(?) who is young and gives a kick of youth in the band -keeps our perspective youthful. He's a Jersey guy, great singer which is really fun because he can really do the background vocals -he can hit a great falsetto - he and James do a wonderful job with the singing which means that the live show is just so much fun. I love it when everyone in the band sings - that feels like you're really playing with people...all four members singing at once...you think 'Oh this is fun' -'this is music'. So we have that now in the band and Paul is in another band called 'Skanatra' which is what you think it is! A Ska band doing Sinatra covers - from Hoboken of course because Sinatra was from Hoboken. They are a wonderfully hilarious outfit of about 17 with a full horn section. He's the drummer for that band as well.

So Joe Strummer had a word with you yesterday - his piece of advice to you was to ( on your final gig) which is in Bridgnorth -to do a Sinatra number!

I didn't know that was Joe Strummer - I just thought that was a guy hanging out in the BBC lounge so I didn't really pay much attention to what he was telling me! I think I can hedge that one by saying I really can't play all the chords -I'm a really basic country orientated player. Also I never take anybody's advice so I'm not gonna take his either.

When it came to recording 'Hydrangea' did you take advice at all or did you just go in with an open mind with you in control of the mixing desk?

My band always plays a huge role in the records. We've never worked with an outside producer. We go in and Dave and James certainly know a lot about making records - technically and musically. I've learned more and i'm considering working with a producer on the next record but I keep backing away from it partly because producing an album is so much fun. Making those decisions and exploring different kinds of sound -we've always had a really good time as a band doing that . On this record we brought in some people. We brought in Peter Holsapple who people might know from REM, Hootie & The Blowfish, The Dbs. He played organ. Susan Cowsill from the Cowsills and Vicki Peterson from The Bangles sang back up vocals. The great pleasure is finding wonderful players and letting them add what they hear. If you find people with really good taste you're gonna end up with a tasteful production.

Who ideally would you want to work with? Who would be the number 1 artist you would feature on your records?

As a producer or as an artist?

Well 90% of the records we've been listening to on this tour seem to have Emmylou Harris on backing vocals - that's kind of a joke -I don't care if I have Emmylou Harris doing background vocals but maybe it's a seal of approval! Record sales would go up if I had her on there!

How about Neil Young?

Neil Young? Yeah you were playing some really acoustic Neil Young track and it was such a wonderful straightforward sound . Yeah I'll take a couple of tracks out to the ranch and see if I can get Neil to play them . Seems like a good idea. -If I can track him down.

On to 'Hydrangea' because you came across this box of letters or diaries. Explain why and how this happened?

Well I come from a family of storytellers and packrats and mythologisers. I always heard that my uncle Edward went to Spain and died in the Spanish Civil War and my Grandfather did this...interesting and exciting tales that have to to do with the Russian Revolution and World War Two , Spain and the Depression. That has always been part of the drama, the family drama and because no-one ever throws anything away in my family I have all the documentation. I guess that they are writers - maybe that's an unusual thing - the fact that there were a lot of good writers -people did keep journals. They did write letters. The collection of letters we have from Eddy in Spain are really beautiful documents of the time. It was great reading material and it was easy to cull the facts in the stories and put them into song form. 

But you had to do a fair bit of cross-referencing didn't you?

I have my own response to the material which is of course what comes out in the songs - which is what hits me emotionally about it - but anyone else in the family is gonna have their opinion about it. Even though I was writing mostly about people who were dead you know -there weren't first-person criticisms but my father objected very much to my first version of the song about his brother and I had to kind of alter it to suit his vision a little more which I thought fair enough because he he was there and he knew him and my mother had comments to make about the facts I had wrong in a song about her -it wasn't this date it was this date- it wasn't this street it was that street -but that's alright -everyone was very forgiving.

Once the album was recorded what was the general feedback from your family? 

I think they were basically moved. It was a real labour of love for me and it was common history. The album art includes some wonderful old photos of my grandparents and great-grandparents and some other people. They had some criticisms. My sister out in California thought that I had not addressed the dark side of the family which is ridiculous because all I talk about is death and revolution. She would have approached it differently but this is my version.

She'd been listening to the first album too much?

Yeah, probably [laughs]

So what now Kate?

Now I'm about to get on a plane at Heathrow and fly back to the States and I've got to get busy on the next record. I've got it mostly written. I'm waiting for it to take some kind of shape. I don't make concept records but I do like to have a sense that the material hangs together and that it will have a focus and I'm hoping the content will suggest the sound as I'm still casting about in my mind for how I want it to sound.

Maybe the way to do it is to start recording it and see how it goes?

Well you can waste a lot of money waiting to see where it goes [laughs].I'd like to have a little bit more of an idea. I'd like some sort of a concept going in there. Almost certainly I'll use my band and I'll use additional people. Maybe I'll have some ..I don't know..chellist or viola ..there are so many string players here in England -seemed like every support act had a violin or a chello -or both in it and they're beautiful -this very English sad, drony tonal kind of sound. I'll certainly add some other people to the mix.

Any children's choirs this time?

You never know. It's funny people have such different reactions. Some people just run screaming from the idea that I had children singing on my record. I didn't realise that was so appalling -I thought it was just another sound. I guess people thought it was 'twee' -that word in England 'twee'..I really didn't intend for it to be that and I don't think it comes across like that. I still love the way children's voices sound.

The Rolling Stones got away with it so why can't you!

Really? When did they have kids on their records?

'You can't always get want you want'

Oh Yeah. Well you see they're boys. Nobody would accuse Mick Jagger of being 'twee'.

KATE JACOBS will be touring again in Autumn 2000 with her band- see gig guide.