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1. Hi Ken, welcome to VENTS! How have you been?
I’ve been good, thanks. Busy, which at this point in my life I consider a pretty good problem to have. I’ve been writing a lot, recording, and splitting my time between San Francisco and Zihuatanejo, Mexico. There are worse ways to spend your days.
2. You came to songwriting after decades of experience as a guitarist and performer. What finally drew you toward writing your own songs, and do you think the years you spent playing music before becoming a songwriter gave you a different perspective on the craft?
Songwriting came to me pretty late.
The first song I wrote was called “Danny, Don’t Go Upstairs.” One of my son’s close friends had committed suicide at 15. About a year after it happened, I woke up with the phrase “Don’t go upstairs” in my head. My son’s friend had gone upstairs to his room and ended his life.
I started writing about that, but somewhere along the way the song began to grow beyond one story. It became suffused with memories of my own childhood and with how deeply I cherish my own son. I think that was one of the first things songwriting taught me: you can begin by thinking you know what a song is about and then discover that it has other ideas.
Not long after that, I was studying guitar with a wonderful San Francisco guitarist named Kit Ruscoe. At one lesson he gave me an assignment: “Write a song using this particular set of chord intervals.” What came out of that eventually became “Away From You,” which, after quite a bit of work, ended up on my album What Am I Afraid Of?
Making that album with Scott Mickelson changed my writing enormously. Scott wasn’t simply a producer. In many ways he was a collaborator and a gifted teacher, and I learned an immeasurable amount from working with him.
And somewhere in all of this I found Jeff Tweedy’s little book How to Write One Song. It has become something of a bible for me. I think it’s one of the best books about the creative process I’ve ever read.
Coming to songwriting after decades of playing probably gave me a different perspective as well. I’d spent a very long time listening to songs — noticing what stayed with me, what didn’t, and when someone seemed to be trying too hard. At this stage of my life I’m not particularly interested in demonstrating how clever I can be. If a simple line tells the story, I’d much rather use the simple line.
3. Your music moves between Americana, folk, rock, and touches of flamenco. With such a varied musical background, how do you decide what sound best serves a particular song rather than trying to fit your writing into one specific genre?
I really don’t think about genre very much while I’m writing. The song usually tells me what it wants to be.
Some songs want an acoustic guitar and almost nothing else. Some want a full band. Some need to get dirty and loud. And occasionally you hear a particular instrument in your head that seems capable of supplying something emotionally that the more obvious choices can’t.
That happened with “Taken.” I knew there needed to be an instrumental voice in the song, and at first I considered violin and then guitar. Somewhere along the way I remembered hearing an oboe in another song — I can’t even remember which song — but I remembered the feeling it created.
We brought Kyle Bruckmann in to play oboe at Hyde Street Studios. His first attempt was beautiful, but it wasn’t quite there. Case Newcomb, who produced the record, wasn’t saying much, but I know Case pretty well, and his expression was essentially telling me, “No. We don’t have it yet.”
I went out of the control room to talk to Kyle, who didn’t look particularly happy either. I said, “Look, I’m not going to tell you what to play or where to play it. Here’s what the song is about. It isn’t necessarily about the death of a lover, friend or family member, or the end of a marriage or a love affair. It’s just about absence and what’s left. Hell, it could be about your kid going off to college.”
Kyle looked at me and said, “OK. I think I got it.”
I went back into the control room. Case gave him the signal, and I don’t think Kyle played more than six notes before I was a mess. So was pretty much everyone else in the room. Katherine put her head down and I could hear her crying. It just knocked us senseless.
When the take was over, I went back out and said, “Yeah, you sure got it that time.”
And Kyle said, “Thank you. You helped. Our daughter is leaving for college in two weeks.”
So, yes. The oboe definitely did its job.
That’s really what I’m looking for. Not an instrument because it’s unusual or because it establishes a genre, but because it gives the song something it couldn’t otherwise have.
4. “Who Are the Bad Guys” explores the complicated territory between innocence, responsibility, and the stories we tell ourselves about right and wrong. What prompted you to tackle those questions, and did writing the song change the way you think about them?
The idea actually came to me in the shower after I’d been listening to the news about the bombing of a school in Iran.
I remember thinking, somewhat bitterly, “Ah yes. We’re the good guys.”
And almost immediately the next thought was: “Then who the hell are the bad guys?”
That was where the song started.
But as I wrote it, it became very important to me that this not simply turn into a song pointing a finger at all those terrible people out there doing terrible things. That’s too easy.
The bridge turns the light around. Suddenly the question becomes: What about me? What responsibility do I have? What does my comfort mean? My ease? My ability to sit safely at a distance and have opinions about suffering that other people actually have to live through?
I didn’t want the song to supply an answer because I don’t have one. Writing it probably made the question more complicated rather than less. I think that’s a good thing.
5. Your songwriting often moves between personal experiences and broader questions about the world around you. How do you find that balance between telling a story that feels intimate and leaving listeners with something they can connect to in their own lives?
I try not to explain everything.
Even when a song begins with something very specific to me, I don’t necessarily want to tell the listener what they’re supposed to take from it. The details are what make a story believable, but you also have to leave some doors unlocked.
“Danny, Don’t Go Upstairs” is probably a good example. It began with one very specific, terrible event, but while I was writing it, memories of my own childhood and feelings about my own son began entering the song. It became something larger than the event that started it.
And I think the same thing can happen when somebody listens.
If someone hears one of my songs and connects it to something completely different in their own life, I don’t think that means they misunderstood it. In some ways that’s when the song has actually done its job.
6. Your upcoming single, “Taken,” takes a more intimate approach, exploring the lingering pull of a relationship and the difficulty of knowing when to let go. What was the emotional starting point for the song, and how did you approach capturing those unresolved feelings without forcing a clear conclusion?
I actually think of “Taken” as being broader than a song about the end of a romantic relationship.
It’s about absence — what remains when somebody who mattered deeply is no longer there.
That could be a lover or a spouse. It could be a parent who has died. It could be a friendship that ended. It could even, as I told Kyle when we were recording the oboe part, be your child going away to college.
The circumstances are almost secondary. What interested me was the strange persistence of connection after the person is gone. Intellectually, you can understand that somebody is no longer part of your life. Emotionally, they can continue occupying an enormous amount of space.
I didn’t want to force a resolution onto that because I’m not convinced life supplies one. Sometimes absence simply becomes something you learn to carry.
7. “Taken” features vocals by Katherine Reynolds Brack, making it a duet rather than a solitary reflection. What did her voice bring to the song that you couldn’t have achieved on your own, and how did her interpretation influence the emotional dynamic between the two perspectives?
Interestingly, I didn’t originally write “Taken” as a duet.
I played it by myself for quite a while before I began looking more closely at the structure and realized the song was almost asking for another voice. It occurred to me that what I had written could become a conversation rather than simply one person looking backward.
Katherine changed the emotional architecture of the song. There’s both vulnerability and strength in her voice, and she brought an emotional point of view that obviously I couldn’t have created by simply singing the whole thing myself.
As the song develops, the two voices begin interacting more and eventually trading lines. At that point it no longer feels like one person’s recollection. It becomes two people standing inside the same emotional space, although they may not be experiencing it in exactly the same way.
That was one of those occasions where the arrangement actually taught me something about the song I’d written.
8. You’re based between San Francisco and Zihuatanejo, Mexico, two places with very different environments and rhythms of life. Does moving between those locations affect your songwriting, whether through the stories you encounter, your state of mind, or the music you find yourself drawn to?
Absolutely, although probably not in an obvious “now I’m going to write a Mexico song” kind of way.
San Francisco has been part of my life for a very long time. It has an intensity, history and cultural noise that I love.
Zihuatanejo has a completely different rhythm. Life happens outside more. People talk to one another. Music is everywhere. Time seems to behave differently.
I’ve also been exposed much more directly to music there that wasn’t previously part of my everyday life, particularly Mexican music and flamenco. I don’t necessarily sit down and deliberately incorporate those influences, but they get into your ears.
Moving between the two places changes the way I listen and certainly changes my state of mind. Eventually all of that works its way into the songs whether I invite it in or not.
9. Reviewers have described you as a quintessential storyteller, and your approach seems to prioritize the narrative over unnecessary explanation. When writing a song, how do you know which details to reveal and which ones to leave open for the listener to interpret?
That’s probably one of the hardest parts of writing.
A single detail can make a story suddenly feel completely real. One detail too many can kill it.
I’m constantly taking things out.
I like songs that give me enough information to enter the room but don’t tell me where to sit once I’m there.
If I find myself explaining inside the lyric what the lyric is supposed to mean, that’s usually a pretty good indication that something needs to go.
I trust the listener. Or at least I try to.
10. You perform both with a full band and alone with an acoustic guitar, but your philosophy remains centered on telling the story and trusting the listener. Does the meaning of a song ever change for you depending on the setting in which you perform it?
The meaning may not change, but what you notice certainly does.
With a band, a song can have momentum, drama and texture that you simply can’t create alone. The musicians can underline something in the lyric, push against it, or create an emotional current underneath it.
When it’s just one voice and one guitar, there’s nowhere to hide. Every word is sitting out there naked.
Sometimes stripping a song down reveals something I hadn’t even noticed in the studio version. And sometimes playing it with a band makes me realize that the music itself is saying something the lyric isn’t.
I love both settings for very different reasons.
11. With “Who Are the Bad Guys” examining questions of responsibility and “Taken” turning toward the complexities of love and letting go, these songs reveal different sides of your writing. What themes or ideas are you finding yourself drawn to as you continue developing your next chapter as a songwriter?
I seem to keep coming back to the stories we tell ourselves in order to get through life — stories about who we are, who other people are, what keeps us safe, what we’ve lost, what frightens us, and what we’d rather not look at too closely.
Lately I’ve also found myself writing about walls, both literal and metaphorical — the things people build between themselves and other people, and then eventually forget that they were the ones who built them.
But I don’t consciously sit down and decide, “Here is the theme of the next chapter.”
Usually I write three or four songs and then look at them and realize, somewhat embarrassingly, that apparently I’ve been worrying the same bone from three different directions.
That’s probably as close as I get to having a master plan.
