Nathan Payne
Preface by Ashlee Elfman
Interview by Christine Dunleavy & Ashlee Elfman

Nathan Payne is a truly independent singer/songwriter, whose honest, and often cynical approach to music is not just appealing, but also has the power to make the listener deliciously uncomfortable. There doesn't seem to be much that Nathan Payne won't tackle; junkies, reckless women, the bowels of Los Angeles, God, death - the state of humanity in general. His lyrics are biting and witty, but the wittiness comes off as a natural element in his music, much like a cough or a flick of the wrist. Although Payne claims not to be a dark person, an enigmatic gloom seems to envelop many of his songs-this is not to say that they are devoid of fun and humor, quite the opposite, in fact Payne seems able to seamlessly blur the lines between the tragic and the mundane, the comical and the misanthropic, and the obscene and the righteous. Both swine and the divine are welcome in Nathan Payne's domain, and it is this dichotomy that makes his music so downright enjoyable. That, and his croonerish vocals that seem rest on the very edge of oblivion.

Hi Nathan, how are you doing today?

it's a beautiful, sunny day, but i'll get through it. (yeah that's a joke)

Let’s get into the questions, shall we? When was it that you first decided you wanted to create music?

it wasn't really a decision. my dad was on the track team in high school so i joined the track team and i was terrible. the slowest guy on the field, and i hated my teammates. i was also in the high school band playing trombone, and i tied for first with a guy in the local arts academy for the All-City band-whatever-it-was. I went to the white-trash school, and we had red uniforms and the academy had black uniforms, and at the All-City concert it was one black uniform, then me in a red uniform, then 10 black uniforms, then all my metalhead friends. We were really into metal in high school. Our band morale was so low our teacher would let us play the halftime show at football games in our Metallica t-shirts. I transcribed 2/3 of "Kill Em All" before the tablature came out in book form. I gave my friends the transcriptions of the tunes and they couldn't make it out. It was like Japanese scrawl but it made sense to me. I didn't party in high school. all I did was hang out with my girlfriend, go to metal shows, and practice guitar. It was just the only thing I ever did as well (sometimes better) than anyone else. If I chose it, I chose it by default, because it didn't hate me as much as sports.

Have you met any other musicians that you relate to? Do you feel a part of any sort of music community?

Yes I have, a lot of people. I can think of a dozen people off the top of my head who are great and should be heard. Andrew Scandal, Matt Pless, Jumbo Smooth, Juggernut, Niall Connolly, Casey Wright, to name just a few. None of them fit into any sort of community. Usually they're solo drifters who are in the same room as the scene, but don't fit into it. They stand apart because they're actually good. "Scenes" and "communities" are a fraud, a way of making insecure wannabes feel important or powerful. LA is really good at that. Using aloofness as a weapon. There’s an open mic in NY that, if you play it and want to promote another show at another club they won't let you promote it because it's not at their venue. You sit there for 5 hours listening to every girl who thinks she's Cat Power (who I like by the way) caterwauling forever about nothing, then you get up for 3 minutes and you can't promote your show because it's not at their bar. Like my tiny little show across town is going to hurt your business, this is NEW YORK CITY, give me a break. And their favorite line is always about "fostering a community," so it seems to me to be a synonym for keeping people down. I have a new lyric about it that if you'll indulge me goes, "don't leave or we'll ostracize you." and it seems to me that that's the axe they're always holding over your head, trying to impose a sense of hipness on you, as if you weren't capable of being your own cool self on your own, without any outside help. Which everybody is. What I always say is HIPNESS IS DEATH TO THE INDIVIDUAL AND ONLY THE INDIVIDUAL IS TRULY HIP.

I was doing some small-time booking for this coffee shop in North Hollywood and this guy wanted a show there and he said "is there a scene there?" and I said, "I'M going to be there. You probably think you're cool, are YOU going to be there?" it's like, just show up man. If you're worried about it that much, do me a favor and leave me alone forever. You’re putting me asleep already. Please don't make me listen to your music too.

Many of your song lyrics utilize dark humor, would you consider yourself a dark person?

No I wouldn't, but I’ve certainly spent some time in the shadows. I was attracted to the dark side for many years, but I wasn't doing myself any favors. There’s a difference in being a fan of the horror genre and trying to be an actual monster in a horror movie, in real life. I tried to be a monster. It’s not hard. For me, the payoff wasn't worth the cost. I’m a soldier of light, everybody is. I’m still a dusty attic full of cobwebs but I’m cleaning it out. After a while it gets difficult to breathe. Death gets boring after a while, especially if you keep waking up, day after day, year after year, and don't actually die. In case I don't get to die today, I would like to spend this day alive.

In your song "California Hills" you basically expose California, especially LA for all of it's glaring faults. Do you think that there is anything redeemable about LA? Is there any charm in its faults?

"California Hills" is a neurotic love-song for LA. I love LA, but it's a hellhole. I lived in Chicago for 6 years but never wrote any songs about it. I’ve written a million songs about LA. I love the cartoon aspect of LA. It’s like Jetsons people and Jetsons buildings on a Flinstones landscape. Just listening to the traffic reports, it's like Garrison Keillor but from some helicopter over Downey. Always a burning couch in lane 3. Which to me is the perfect symbol of modern 1st-world civilization, a cushiony piece of domestic fat-assery going up in flames on a dehumanized transportation network made of concrete. LA is endlessly fascinating to me. Living there is like living in a state of constant morbid fascination.

What influenced you to write this song? And I advise people who haven’t already, to see the video to this song too.

Me and this junkie chick had tickets to see the Cramps at the Henry Fonda Theater on New Year's Eve, and we were smoking a lot of heroin, and I was taking the bus from Silverlake to Sherman Way/Sepulveda every day to make money, and we smoked my whole paycheck in like 2 days and she turned into this terrible monster and I was like "God please get me out of here," and we fell asleep the day before the show and she woke me up the next day on her way to work. Some kid had slipped a hundred dollars under the door to cop some dope with, and the deal was always of course to get a hundred bucks worth but take half for yourself, and so I saw the money and was like THAT'S MY WAY OUT, that's the answer to my prayers, so I tried to hide my motives of escaping, which I did, miraculously, and she left for work and I took the hundred bucks and got a room at the St. Moritz Hotel on Sunset. It was New Year's Eve, and I spent the night laying there dope-sick with my legs in a terrible ache (I was more of a chipper than a junkie, I wasn't strung-out long enough to get the terrible withdrawal symptoms. alcohol has been infinitely more harmful to me than anything else, even though I OD'd a couple times, but I only OD'd because I was drunk and took too many drugs, you know, pills, speed, mini thins, etc, giant piles of speed for no reason), feeling like a raw nerve, laying there listening to the people at the bar downstairs (it was Raji's at the time) having their little New Year's, me just grateful to be away from the shit. 5 days later I wrote "California Hills."

What’s the song writing process like for you? Your songs seem very thought out and not just something you’d come up with on a whim …but then again they seem to be influenced by a sense of spontaneity.

It’s very spontaneous, the idea is to get out of the way as much as possible, the more thought goes into it the worse it is. At best it's like being a secretary, taking dictation for some outside force. Like a secretary, you might fix the boss's spelling, say, this is better over here, move some words around. You’re filtering things, maybe, but you're not controlling them. If they're not pouring out of you unconsciously, it's not good. I always have a half-dozen or so songs under construction at any given time. Some are 10 years old, some are 10 days old. Some songs have a good ending and the rest is crap, and 6 years later the ending becomes a whole new song that you never could have written back when you actually came up with the part. You just gotta stay loose, and think about nothing. The best puppets are the ones who don't exercise their own will, and you're a puppet to the music & words, and if you try to force yourself on them they will drop you and you will be laying there tangled in the strings. And you can't stand up like that, and you'll never dance.

We very much admire your solo endeavors (just you and your guitar), but we’d like to know when and if you possibly plan on getting a whole band together to add to the complexity of your music?

I would love a band, and I’ve met a few people I’m interested in playing with, but it takes weeks and months to make it really fun, we get so bogged down by our own careers we forget what it's supposed to be, just some people making noise for fun, and everybody has 5 other projects and the wife won't let me do this and I have to work 80 hours a week, and so I don't really make a lot of effort to find a band. I had a band once that was exasperated that I wasn't the "leader," or wasn't acting like the leader. Then I would say something and everybody would second-guess and doubt it. And I’m like, well if you want a leader why don't you follow him? It’s crap like that, you get tired of people's bullshit and lose faith in other musicians. Which goes back to the scene thing, the collective, there's some guys here in Austin who want to start a collective and I’ve heard it all before and I wish them well but I would be lying if I said I wasn't doubtful about it. Because I’ve seen it before. It never goes anywhere. Everybody wants to start the Factory, but nobody really surrenders anything. Whatever, I’m not looking for a band. I meet a lot of people, but it's like the songwriting thing, if it's not TOTALLY natural and effortless, then fuck it.

Photo by Tom Harrell

What initially influenced you to start writing music in the first place? And is this your first musical effort or have there been ones before this?

I think my first song was some metal song called "Shooting Gallery," in like, Slayer-style about a killer or something. Then a song called "Circus of Conformity." total metal titles. We were really into metal. I had a metal jam-band in college called Talisman. We pretty much kicked total ass wherever we went. Then I got married and we moved to Chicago and we sucked. Then I sucked really bad solo for several years, then we got divorced and I went crazy and now I’m here.

There’s such a sardonic narrative to your songs, do you consider yourself a cynical person?

I’m hopelessly optimistic. Which makes you a little cynical sure, because if you're always optimistic, you're always being reminded of why you shouldn't be optimistic. So yeah, I’m cynical, but who isn't? What matters is whether or not you surrender to that cynicism, which I have at certain points but it never lasts. Because I’m an optimist.

What are some of your influences, musical or otherwise?

Well, I don't listen to Nick Cave or the Birthday Party anymore but they're pretty much ingrained in my DNA. You know, Iggy, Ramones, Tom Waits...the Beats, I love the Beat writers, Kerouac, Ginsberg...I loved Carolyn Cassady's book Off The Road. The nihilistic alcoholism that eventually destroyed Kerouac is a bummer, but the upbeat pre-hippy (I like hippies, and I like their spirit and I like their vibe and I hate people who say I hate hippies. if you hate hippies you're a sucker for the new world order, go start a precinct somewhere where all your friends can talk derisively about free spirits while you're sucking down Budweisers. I mean really, please, I’m asking, you're a cop, so why not finish the job already, go get a badge and a heroin habit somewhere and get it over with already) thing is really cool.

Even though I’m an alcoholic and can't drink, sitting by the railroad tracks in any town in the middle of the night drinking beer, watching the freight trains rush by, crazy speed, scary really, fun to get really close and scream at them as they're flying by 3 feet from your face, is one of my favorite things to do. Or has been in the past anyway. Tucson has good railroad tracks. St. Paul, Minnesota. Wherever you see trains I guess.

You produce your own music, which seems to be the way a lot of truly independent artists are going these days. Do you think that there is a sense of honor in trying to make it completely on your own steam? I suppose that you can get away with a lot more artistic expression doing things that way.

I would like to say I feel honored, but it's more just scratching out your name in a gravel parking lot somewhere, hoping someone doesn't peel out all over it before you get finished. Here’s a burrito and a bag of weed, let me use your recording machine for 8 hours. And you get a song. Hopefully. I burned a friendship once because they let me crash at their place and their guest room had ProTools and a $2,000 mic so I blew them off all weekend and got 3 songs done. Which as inhuman as it is, is totally worth it to me. You have to get it done now, so you do it. I recorded an entire album while I was living in my car. I would go to my friend's place, record for an hour, take a shower, smoke some weed with him and take him to work and 7 months later I had a record (his name was Frankie Delmane, another one who needs to be heard). It’s just a broken 4-track and some dollar-store cassette tapes, but if that's all you can do then that's what you have to do. You do whatever you have to to get the music finished and out of your head. It’s like when Rambo took the bullet out of his stomach with a hunting knife. He’s not a hero or anything, he just doesn't want to bleed to death. Anybody would do the same. I think it's more honorable to get up and go to work everyday to raise your kid and take care of your wife, than burn bridges with people to get a few lousy songs recorded.

Is there anything you would like to say to Swampland readers?

Be excellent to each other.

How can we get your albums?

Start a record label and sign me, or go to my Myspace and contact me and I’ll give you the address to send your cash or money order to, and I’ll send you as many copies as you want. Thanks!!!

Nathan Payne Myspace
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