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It’s easy to get distracted by the number 23. Not only are we told it’s everywhere by thinkers as prestigious as Robert Anton Wilson and Jim Carrey, but those two digits look and feel special. How about a 23rd album? Perhaps that’s magical in some way (especially if the KLF ever got there), but to most, it just sounds like a lot of albums. Twenty-two is a lot, too, not to mention twenty-four. But I don’t want to get hung up on the 23rd album because it doesn’t matter to John Andrew Fredrick of The Black Watch. Weird Rooms is the band’s album number twenty-three, but John isn’t counting or accumulating. He’s persisting.
John may be aware of the potential baggage in musical prolificness. Quantity sometimes counterintuitively means stagnation: running in circles, repeating the comforts of an established sound or workflow, or releasing the same record ad infinitum. I can testify that this is not the case with The Black Watch. Not only does John profess an incapability of stopping rather than an effort at ‘building content,’ but also of directly reacting, in a sort of dialogue, with his preceding albums. Changing line-ups, songwriting styles, producers, and, as is the case with Weird Rooms, city locations (Austin, this time) enforce a variety of textures and execution. There’s no sameness here—The Black Watch’s twenty-third record probably sounds as fresh as 1988’s debut.
John and I planned an interview session for a long while, with my delays a glaring (to me) contrast to his musical productivity. Weird Rooms was finally the excuse to get our screens together. John is a delightful conversationalist, an obvious fan of wordplay and language (he’s also an author), and inspiringly enthusiastic about his creative work. We discussed so many things: creating music for personal satisfaction, writing from the subconscious, the unexpected perks of a Lutheran upbringing, what focusing on singles says about your band, and so much more. I tried talking to him about the number 23, but he wasn’t having it.
I mentioned how The Black Watch, and especially Weird Rooms, wears its influences on its sleeve. I likened this to a recipe in that the album’s sound takes things from different, identifiable artists without sounding directly like any of them. I suggested that that recipe includes a heaping tablespoon each of My Bloody Valentine, The Cure, and The Beatles. John agreed, adding Syd Barrett, who is probably floating around like a bay leaf. It’s a great mix of ingredients, making songs like “Gobbledegook,” “Swallowed,” and “Miles & Miles” achieve Michelin-star tastiness.1My metaphors aren’t getting any better.
And though Weird Rooms was the inspiration for our conversation, John was especially excited about The Black Watch’s next record, (tentatively?) titled Bye. “With a pun on saying goodbye and a bye in a tournament,” John explained. While John was understandably bubbling over with thoughts on this 24th effort—to him, it’s the fresh new thing, of course—I’m trying to hide my astonishment that we’re on the heels of Weird Rooms‘ release and the next album is already in the hands of a mastering engineer. At least John admitted it wasn’t a good idea to release it immediately.
But I can’t get over the as-yet-unreleased album’s title, Bye. Does John give it a double meaning because it’s a fork in the road? Is it a goodbye, as Pop Matters recently wondered? Or, as in a tournament, will it mean The Black Watch is ready to advance to the next in a long, long series of rounds? John told me he couldn’t stop, even if he wanted to, so I’m optimistically embracing the sporting option. I doubt 24 is The Black Watch’s idea of a final score.
Here’s the extended audio of my conversation with The Black Watch’s John Andrew Fredrick, with an excerpted text version below the fold. At the bottom, John answers my “What’s something you love?” inquiry with the aplomb worthy of someone with a PhD in the art of words. Dig it!
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How do you differentiate the albums in your mind if you do? I mean, beyond the different people playing on them or the other songs—more so philosophically or conceptually.
You want a more philosophical, esoteric encapsulation of my thinking about the arc of the “career,” quote-unquote?
I guess so. How do the albums mark time for you?
I think that maybe the simplest, if not reductive, look that I peep into from time to time is that each one is a reaction against the one that came before it. I don’t know if that means anything to anybody but me because I write very much from the unconscious. I’m a big proponent of the intentional fallacy—that my interpretation of things, of songs, of a lyric is just another one.
I’m not the authority on that. You must take anything I say about my work with a grain of salt. So I think that for each record, if my feeling about the one that preceded it were that there were heavily catchy up-tempo pop songs and potential singles, then I’d try to pare that back with the dreamier, trippier ones.
I think it would be facile for me to try to encapsulate what each record is other than a reaction to the one that’s gone before. I mean, we just finished yet another one. I guess you can call it album number twenty-four. Misha Bullock, who produced Weird Rooms, worked on it. My son Chandler wasn’t involved in this one because he’s got a proper job as a teacher. So he wasn’t able to come to Austin with me this time. We’ll call this one Bye, with a pun on saying goodbye and a bye in a tournament.
When you say a reaction to the previous one, is that mainly for you?
I think it is. I mean, I write to please myself.
Robert Smith famously said, “When I want to hear a great record, I make one.” I think his tongue might have been in his cheek a touch there because he’s hardly that conceited, but that is closely related to my concept of making a record. I want to create something I like to listen to myself because I always think it’s quite disingenuous for people to say, “Oh, I make a record, and I never hear it again.” Then you’ve denied yourself the pleasure of basking in your creation, I dare say.
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As I sort of alluded to in the original question about marking moments in your life or time with these different records, like if you listen to the eighth record, it might be a certain moment that wrapped around the record. This twenty-third record might be, “Oh, this was the record I did with my son.” And the experiences around that.
I’m interested in this because we have many pets. Caroline does foster animal stuff, and we end up with many foster fails. We have a minimum of six pets at a time, permanent residents. After being in a relationship for almost twenty years, I’ve started marking different times with different pets. I remember when we had that pet; that was when we were doing this. We were feeling like this and doing this.
It’s funny, now that I think of it, comparing albums to pets, but I wonder if that resonates with you.
I think it does with my notion of time, which, the longer I’m around, the less I believe in it. It seems like an imaginary construct somehow that we use artificially. Your pet example is a great example of how it’s arbitrary to mark epochs or eras or what have you. And again, I think it was interesting for you to try to give it that much trippy, esoteric sort of saying, not the lineups or the various people who played or the producers, but the feel almost of each record.
There’s a clue in there. You’re leading me down, maybe up the garden path or some scary lane or alley. There’s a key, a clue to it—it seems that the record that came out in 2020 called Brilliant Failures says it all because that’s what I consider each of these works to be.
My tongue is often stuck in my cheek. It’s hard to get it out sometimes. I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t thought that what we did was brilliant in some way, shimmering and shining, but simultaneously, it was a failure. Everything I’ve ever done, whether it’s the novels, a poem, or the book I did on Wes Anderson, comes short of the mark.
And in a way, that’s something to celebrate, as that title would have suggested. And the impetus is to try again. I’ve said that each time I go into the studio, I try to make this record [holds up the Beatles’ White Album] all over again, among the greatest and most diverse records ever made. And I fail gloriously each time because I’ll never make a record as good as the Beatles’ White Album, but I’ve tried. So there you go.
I like “brilliant failures.” When I make music, I like to call it “tiny accidents.” So that’s my version of that.
Yeah, they really are. And then sometimes those are happy accidents, the more well-known phrase. By happenstance, this is one of the reasons why interviewers and scribes of all sorts often try to get at the heart of what artists do. And if you are an artist and making things, you don’t necessarily know where much of it comes from other than, again, the unconscious, or you just got lucky and tripped over some stump in your creative path.
It is a wonderful adventure to try to make a record, knowing that it won’t be the White Album, but maybe it’ll come closer with each venture.
I also love the idea of being inspired by an album that you know you can never reach the quality of.
Yeah, and it’s not just because of money. You could throw a major label budget at me, and that doesn’t mean there won’t be magic of a different sort. Do you know David Sylvian? He once said, “I’d be quite happy to be a minor artist.” I thought, gosh, that’s very touching for someone to say that and not, in some Gallagher brothers sort of fashion, say, “We want to be the greatest and the best in the world.” But just to say, “I’d like to be just a nice bold footnote in the annals of music.” I relate to that greatly.
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One thing that attracts me to the idea of the unattainable album or maybe even novel—you may approach it the same way with that as well—leading to inspiration rather than frustration is that I’ve known too many artists who get frustrated when they encounter a piece of artwork that they wish was theirs or they wish they could attain and they know they can’t.
Their names are Legion. Many of my acquaintances have so much talent and have this completion anxiety or know too much. So many artist friends—they’re some of the most brilliant people I know. And you just go, like, “Your stuff is terrific. Why don’t you finish it?” That’s a deep psychological quirk beyond my purview, I think because I’ve got the opposite sort of problem. It’s not a problem per se.
That’s one reason you’ve hit the twenty-third or twenty-fourth album, I guess.
Well, nobody’s stopped me, Michael. (laughter) Life hasn’t stopped me, and nobody’s interceded. This is what I do, and I hope for the best. If I don’t have these ambitions just to be this giant success, I’d love for more people to hear the Black Watch. Of course, maybe you’ll have a chance to turn on a few more people, but I don’t have dreams of world domination. It seems like that’s just not something I can, psychologically or spiritually, if you will, afford somehow.
We closed our conversation with my favorite question: What’s something you love that more people should know about? John delivered a terrific and detailed answer:
I would have to choose a book, which will be very difficult because I could say several books on any given day. They’re my favorite books, but I’m a freak for Dr. Johnson, Samuel Johnson, the most profound essayist in English and the composer of the first solid dictionary in English. I think he was one of the most, if not the most interesting people ever. I’ve read Boswell’s Life of Johnson many times.
I’ve read all the biographies of him and all of his writings. I’m an 18th-century letters guy, and I think we could learn so much, especially his essay The Rambler. These are essays about how to live one’s life and the psychology therein. I urge everybody to look at Johnson’s Rambler essays for more clues on living life to the fullest and most moral. But yeah, I’m a freak for Dr. Johnson. My stack of Johnsonniana is just ridiculous.
❈ The Black Watch’s Weird Rooms is available now on Bandcamp (alongside a massive discography) and your favorite music streaming machine.
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