Collin Herring

(June 2005)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Just two albums into his career, Collin Herring already has the press in his native Texas swooning, even though his music is iconoclastic compared to the state’s most popular brand of country music.  Although The Other Side of Kindness is a somber and elegant album, Herring may still be a little too rock-and-roll for country purists  That may make for some uncomfortable gigs in the short-term, but it’s also a problem that’s been faced down over the years by the likes of Jay Farrar, Rhett Miller and Ryan Adams.  While fending off his girlfriend's dog (who apparently doesn't approve of phone interviews), Herring chats about his new record, his father's musical influence (Ben Roi plays the emotive pedal steel in son Collin's band), and his deep-down feelings about Christmas sweaters and neck braces.

You started writing when you were in 8th grade.  So were you performing, too?  Were you one of those kids who had the band that would play at high school events, that sort of thing?

No, no.  I had a good friend of mine who played guitar, and we’d just play together and learn other people’s songs.  But after a while I wasn’t very good at learning other people’s songs – I just wasn’t into it.  Shortly after I learned guitar, I started writing songs.  It was a lot easier.  There was no structure I had to follow.  So somewhere in there, eighth or ninth grade, I wrote my first song.

What do you write about at that age?

I’d write about what was going on at school.  It’s funny because they’re all recorded, and I have this huge box of Tascam tapes.  I’m just thankful it hasn’t been broken into.  If they ever got out, I’d probably be so humiliated.  There are probably 100 songs in there.  They’re all silly, I’m sure, but there might be a couple usable ones in there.  I should dig in.

You blow up and you know those are all going on eBay.

Exactly.  I know, man.

Your father was a key formative influence on you, and he’s in the band with you now.  What’s his background?  Was he playing gigs when you were a kid?

Growing up, he and his friends were always jamming – they’d play out on this ranch.  They were all really into The Band and Neil Young-type stuff.  That got my folk and country thing going at an early age, listening to them.  I started always being around country, without it being Texas country.  I never even knew about the Texas country phenomenon that was happening because I was always doing my own thing or listening to Dad’s records and his bands.  I always had the country in me.  That’s the kind of music I liked.

You never hit that “Everything Dad is into is b.s.” phase?

We’ve always had a relationship where there was no need for me to rebel because he was really liberal with me.  There were never any boundaries set.  I never had any structure to rebel from.  He has incredible taste and I got a lot of that from him.  My mom doesn’t.  (laughs)  She likes what we get into, but she definitely likes the oldie goldies.

When did you put your band together, then?

I went to school in Colorado, and then when I got back in May 2001, I started the process of getting my music material together and getting serious about it.  Three years into [college], I was about to drop out, but then I thought that would be so stupid; there was so much money invested in a good education that I might as well see if I could finish it.  I did it and I’m really proud of that, actually.  Once I finished, I thought then I could finally do what I’d wanted to do for so long.  By late 2002 I had so much material and it was just me and my dad jamming in a bedroom or den or wherever we had space.  Finally, we were like, “We should form a full band.”  We were really snobby about who we wanted to play with; we didn’t want some ratty, Motley Crüe drummer dude coming in.  We wanted percussionists with brushes, we wanted our own little organic sound.  We were able to do that, and that helped us a lot, I think.

It seems like you settled on a stable lineup.  The band on this album is the same as on the last album, right?

Yeah.  It’s funny because Billy, our drummer, wasn’t even with us, but he came back.  He left to do an internship in L.A. and that didn’t work out, so he came back.  I’m really glad he did; he’s a great drummer and he’s a really motivated person.

Speaking of L.A., it looks like L.A. is becoming a second home of sorts for you.

It’s starting to be.  We were so well received the last time we played in L.A.  We played at The Mint and Hotel Café and it was awesome.  We had such a good time, and I got to meet some incredible musicians.  It went so well that it would be stupid not to go back and follow up.  Things are kind of volcanoing and we want to keep the fire burning and keep attacking it—not because we have to do it, but because we want to do it.

Your biography says that one of your “biggest musical frustrations came from the very state he loves.”  Is that what you were talking about earlier, that Jerry Jeff Walker thing?

Man, I can’t… (pauses)  I’ve learned to be more positive in my interviews so I don’t knock people, but that’s a style of music that I can’t really relate to.  It never was a huge part of my life and I don’t see much there.  It does so much for so many people, I think, “Am I crazy for thinking this?”  But that style of music never got to me, it never dug in.  I have to dig into the scene deeper to find people like Billy Joe Shaver.  I like him.  He’s not clean-cut.  He’s dark and dirty—and he can sing.  But there’s a certain style of country that’s popular right now that doesn’t do much for me. 

That’s still big right now?  That’s a scene I don’t know.

Yeah.  There’s a big country scene here, and it’s Texas country.  They don’t leave Texas, literally.  You get a tour bus, drive from one end to the other and it takes two and a half days with all the stops.  It’s an incredible state and I’m proud to be from here.  I’m trying to get more into the younger crowds, the rock scene.  I like that more.

Does that make it harder to get on bills?

That sucks because a lot of people won’t know—they’ll just be like, “We heard Collin’s great, let’s have him open up for Roger Creager.”  So we line up and open for Roger Creager, who draws like 600 people.  We start “Back Of Your Mind” and all these cowboy hats turn and look—they’re like, “What?”  They end up digging it after a while, but when we want to rock out and be loud, we need to be playing with Drive-By Truckers or some of those bands.  I don’t like upsetting people.  If they’re here to have a good honky-tonk country time, I don’t want to burst their bubble.  A lot of times we’ll have to do a slow country set and kind of conform.  

Around the time of the last album, you said in an interview that you wanted to write more happy songs.  The latest record doesn’t seem to be exactly bursting with them.

No, it’s not, really.  I’ll admit that.  I’ll hear a really happy, upbeat song – the ultimate upbeat songwriter right now, in my opinion, is Josh Rouse.  He’s got all these incredibly uplifting songs about traveling – I’d do anything to have one happy song.  I’ll have one happy lyric in the entire song, and then it automatically turns to frustration.  I’m going to do it, though.  Mark my words:  I will do it.

There’s some interesting imagery on the album – one line that jumped out, in particular, was the line about the grocery stores putting out a new display.  That struck me as kind of a sad way of conveying the passage of time.

Yeah, a bunch of stuff changes, but really nothing changes.  It was Halloween at the time I wrote that song, and the grocery stores were putting up their pumpkins.  You don’t really know what season is it, but you stop into a gas station or a grocery store and you see what they have showing and it’s like, “Oh, yeah, it’s Halloween time, I forgot.”

Are you the type who walks around with a notepad stuck in the back pocket?

I keep one of those little spiral ones that you can fit in your pocket – just for random thoughts.  But when you try to decipher that, it’s mind-boggling.  I have pages of awesome little one-liners.  I like putting them all together and maybe you have something and maybe you’ll just confuse the hell out of people. 

Half of this album started as a four-track demo.  Can you talk about that evolution?

I have this system at home that records professional stuff, but I’m not an engineer.  I don’t like learning that stuff—it takes away from the writing process for me.  By the time I’ve figured out how to hook one thing up and make a track, I’ve lost all this energy.  But, yeah, I made this Christmas Sweater demo.  One of the most annoying things on earth to me is Christmas sweaters.  The next most annoying thing to me is neck braces.  People with neck braces look so pitiful—I feel so bad for them, but it looks so horrible.  I was having lunch with some friends during Christmas and we were laughing about this all during lunch.  We walk outside of the restaurant and there’s this woman wearing a Christmas sweater hugging a man with a neck brace.  (laughs)  But, yeah, it was called the Christmas Sweater EP.  I recorded pretty much every song on the album on that little Tascam and I gave it to [producer] Stuart Sikes, and he loved it and was ready to go into the studio. 

What do you look for in a producer?  A producer can be a lot of different things to different songwriters.

Yeah.  A lot of the country acts that I play with, they look for really country, Austin, studio country producers—and that’s exactly what I didn’t want.  I wanted someone with a real rock background.  [Stuart] did The Walkmen, and I love the Walkmen—I think their raw sound is so cool.  I love the White Stripes stuff.  He’d just finished Loretta Lynn’s album with Jack White.  It was exactly what we needed—a producer who understood that we loved country music but didn’t want to be a real country kind of band.  It sounds so alt-country, I know, but that’s what we wanted. 

You mentioned “alt-country” – I loaded your CD into my iTunes and it did the thing where it pulls up all the information, but for genre it came up with “Unclassifiable.”

I’m under Unclassifiable?  Awesome!

So that’s a high compliment from my computer to you.

I’m going to have to start putting that on a sticker on my album. 

In your mind, what’s been the key to starting to build the buzz?  Is it touring?  Is it focusing on good albums?

We’ve been doing this for three and a half years now.  I was so happy to get Avoiding the Circus out of the way and to move on.  This new album is so much closer – it’s still not completely there, and I’m really looking forward to getting back in the studio and doing the next album.  But I think the buzz with this album is kind of about that unclassifiable aspect.  You put it in and it’s not like every other thing, it’s not a certain genre from track one to ten.  Then there are the instrumentals—I had plenty of material with words, but we wanted to go with this theme of traveling and insecurity and vulnerability. 

Yeah, it is rare to hear instrumentals on a record like this.  When did they become instrumentals—from the outset?

I have a song on there called “Flower Mound” and that song has words, but I didn’t want to do them because it sounded so cool.  It was such a cool melody line... a little ditty.  (laughs)  Then we brought in Eleanor, the violin player, and once she started playing, there was no need for words.