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Daniel Knox Interview: Chasescene, Song by Song Breakdown

BY JORDAN MAINZER

After breaking to make all sorts of music for film and theater, Chicago singer-songwriter Daniel Knox has finally completed his trilogy. Chasescene, preceded by Disaster and Everyman For Himself, is an album about fizzling relationships and barbarism, rife with animal imagery and raw desires. Featuring contributions from Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and Nina Nastasia, the album combines cinematic, baroque instrumentation and Knox’s theatrical baritone with moments equally devastating and hilarious.

Though released Friday in the U.S., Chasescene actually came out last month in the UK and Europe, where there’s more demand for Knox’s music. As such, he’s touring there right now and hoping to book a Chicago release show in March with a bigger band than who he’s been playing with lately (just guitarist Joshua Fitzgerald Klocek). Because Knox self-releases on his own label, H.P. Johnson, he normally does the work of a team of people, so the prospect of other band members (such as France-based drummer Jason Toth, electric bassist Paul Parts, string bassist Jim Cooper, violinist/viola player Andra Kulans, cellist Melissa Bach, and violinist Ronnie Kuller) weathering the load is an attractive one.

This year, Knox, who misses touring, hopes to play as many shows and write and record as much as possible and finish the “first and second steps” of various projects he’s started. (He’s also planning on reissuing the first two albums in the trilogy.) For now, yes, there’s Chasescene, but the album is, as Knox told me last month, “a break from ways of having done things” allowing him to revisit his process moving forward and revisit past projects. In an interview at the Music Box Theatre (where Knox works), he broke down track-by-track the landmark new album.

KETURAHWALTZ

SILY: "Keturahwaltz” seems like a cinematic introduction to the record. Not only do you work at the Music Box, but you’ve also done a lot of music for films. Can you talk about this track in context of both the record and your discography?

Daniel Knox: The first track was originally part of a suite of songs I wrote for a girl I was fond of--it didn’t end well. It also acts as part of a nice overture for everything that follows. In addition, Chasescene is the third part of a trilogy. I like following the last song on Evryman with a kind of post-apocalyptic instrumental. It starts with just me on the piano, and everything builds back up again. But it stats with nothing. I like starting the breakup story at the end of the world but also using it as a true overture in that its introducing most of the instruments on the record at large.

BLIND DEAF AND DUMB

SILY: “Blind Deaf And Dumb” seems to start one of the main themes of the record--animalistic desires--but also human desires and relationships. Is the line, “I tried to hold you with my claws,” or “I tried to hold you with my clause,” like a marriage clause?

DK: It’s “claws,” but I’ll take that if you want to give it that meaning. That works, too. [laughs]

MAN IS AN ANIMAL

SILY: “Man Is an Animal” continues the themes of the previous song, but instrumentally, it’s a little bouncy.

DK: Or as the critics like to say, “jaunty.”

SILY: Then it switches to a maudlin instrumental. Can you talk about that switch?

DK: There was a specific moment that inspired that song, which was that I woke up and walked outside to get the newspaper in my robe. I kicked the newspaper down the stairs, then I kicked it on the sidewalk, and I kept just kicking it. I was so tired. I looked back, and I was two houses away. I had this premonition of myself walking as far as I could into the distance, just wandering the world in a robe. It’s something I think about a lot. If you really wanted, at any point, to just get up and walk away from everything, you can. You have that ability. But people don’t--they get attached to things. There are a lot of ways to think about that, and I hope what I just said doesn’t ruin it. But if I had to associate an image, it would be that. The coda at the end feels like a very necessary thing. The song would feel more like a joke if it didn’t have that. I needed to say, “This is not a joke. This is not a funny song, really.” The two things can be intertwined.

SILY: You wouldn’t call “A Day In The Life” a funny song, but it has Paul McCartney’s bouncy moment. It’s honestly a similar story to yours.

DK: I’ll take it.

CHASESCENE

SILY: The title track seems to be the start of references to a bad relationship.

DK: Uh, yeah. [laughs]

SILY: To say the least.

DK: To say the least.

SILY: “I love you by the neck,” “You’re naked in the ground / You can’t make a sound,” “I love you with a knife”--are these lines referring to desires?

DK: I want to be careful in that my feeling about that song in the general sense is that if you’re looking for something bad there, you’re going to find it. If you’re looking for something good, you might find it. It’s kind of spoken from the eye of the storm, so to speak. Right after the significant event, you just don’t know what’s gonna happen. Your mind goes to the darkest place and paints a picture for you. The picture probably isn’t real, but your mind painted it. I think a lot of people have the tendency to back away from that and bury it.

CUT FROM THE BELLY

SILY: Where does “Cut From the Belly” lie within the record?

DK: In line with what you were talking about before--animalistic desires. In a lot of ways, it continues the progression of “Main Is An Animal”, as far as its title is concerned. It’s hard to talk about that song. To me, it’s more impressionistic. There’s a story, and it’s one of man versus beast. You can see that inwardly or externally. Either way is a fair way to look at it.

CAPITOL

SILY: “Capitol” was you sort of returning the favor to Jarvis Cocker.

DK: Oh yeah. That’s weird when they say “returning the favor” as if he had to do it. He didn’t have to do that. He did it because he liked the song, and we’re cool.

SILY: Do you keep in touch with him?

DK: Yeah, I mean I don’t chill at his house for the holidays, but we talk to each other. We’re friends. We kept in touch after I did the vocals on his song, and I asked him to do it for me. When I was on tour with The Handsome Family in England, I was like, “I’ll be there, will you be around?” He came from Paris to do it, and we tracked the vocals in a day.

SILY: It’s a perfect fit over the bossa nova instrumentation.

DK: I wrote that for a song cycle that I had for this that a lot of the music for the self-titled album came from. I knew it wasn’t for me to sing. I knew someone else had to do it. So I asked him. It’s nice to have that there at the end of Side A. It adds some much needed levity after “Chasescene” and “Cut From The Belly”, which are harsh in terms of imagery. And he’s got such a playful delivery, too, that it keeps the edge off. I wanted it to have sort of an old Hollywood feel to it, and he has that quality innately, which I don’t.

ANNA14

SILY: One of my favorite lines on the record is from “Anna14″, when you sing, “back of a car or an old crawl space...joking.” Was that ad-libbed, or did you write that in?

DK: I wrote that in. It’s a love song about moving. Moving is really emotional. It’s like having a kid or a pet dying. But it doesn’t have much representation in art. You have to kind of interface with everything that you own as a sense of measurement of not only space but time, and the space and time between yourself and the place and another person. That’s so under-served in love songs in particular. I wrote it for someone I was in love with who I was trying to say, “Alright, things will be better when we go to this other place,” but still trying to be honest about how shitty it is. That’s the crux of it.

PACK YOUR BAGS

SILY: Which leads into “Pack Your Bags”.

DK: “Pack Your Bags” is about a friend of mine who is no longer a friend of mine. I don’t like necessarily saying it’s a breakup record.

SILY: There’s a breakup with multiple people.

DK: One of my more popular songs is “What Have They Done To You Now”, and a lot of people assume it’s about an ex-girlfriend, but it’s really about a friend. I have a lot of songs like that that people assume are about romantic endeavors. The romantic “I love you, I don’t love you” thing really disinterests me. I don’t care about it. I like songs of devotion, and to an extent songs of worship, but I can’t write them. The traditional “I love you, you used to love me” kind of song doesn’t interest me. People put that on my songs, which is okay with me if it serves them well, but it’s not my intention.

THE POISONER

SILY: For “The Poisoner”, how did you get in touch with Nina Nastasia? Did you know her before?

DK: I had done a show with her many times before, but I wouldn’t say that we knew each other really well. It was one of these “wow” moments for me. It definitely came together at the end. It’s my favorite song on the record. She, to me, is one of the greatest songwriters ever. I admire her in every way. Her performing, her writing, just everything.

LEFTOVERS

SILY: “Leftovers” is sort of a country ballad.

DK: I mean...yeah, it definitely leans on a country sound. Whether or not it’s country again is up for you to decide.

SILY: It also provides one of those great moments of levity you talk about: “I’m getting tired of this music-less dance / Why don’t you put your hand down my pants?”

DK: It’s definitely a case where I was trying to be humorous, but also stay in the ballpark. I think I had written it initially to be mean to somebody, when I thought I might have somebody else sing it. But then I realized, “Oh, this is also about me.” It’s reflected right back at me.

MRS ROTH

SILY: Similar to the title track, “Mrs. Roth” has those very direct dark lines.

DK: It does, but here’s the thing to remember about that song--something that’s missing from the record, which is nobody’s fault but my own. When I set that song up in concert, it’s about a little boy and his teacher. Which is not apparent to people. There’s a much darker inference that can be drawn when I don’t give that context. When it’s about a little boy obsessing over a teacher with whom he was sexually repelled and fascinated at the same time. In the context of the record, I suppose it’s black and white.

SILY: So, “shall I untie you now?” and “I put something in your drink”--those were sort of imagined in the boy’s mind?

DK: Yeah, for sure. It’s a weird thing to talk about the sexuality of a little boy, but when it’s you, you can do that. I had a teacher who was a strange looking creature. I was becoming sexually awake at a very young age, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. It felt unreasonable to me, it felt violent. And I also, of course, was drawn to it. So I tried to illustrate it in a funny and somewhat ugly way, and I guess I did. Like any uncomfortable story, there’s a time and place that’s absolutely wrong for it. A listener might hear it and have that be the case for them, but another might hear it and think it’s really funny and maybe see a little of themselves in it, and that’s alright too.

ME AND MY WIFE

SILY: “Me and My Wife” is one of those heart-stopping narratives. It seems a little more linear, leaving you wanting to hear what’s next.

DK: It’s funny you say that, because it’s somewhat non-linear in terms of its flow of things, but where it’s placed on the record, it creates a focal point for what preceded it. I try not to speak too much on my intentions. I like to leave a lot of space for the listener to find themselves in. For the story to give you as many pieces of the picture as you need to find yourself in it. I definitely like to think of that song as a fractured memory of everything not just on that record, but the two other records. Things ending, but also not ending. If you buy the vinyl, it’s not a perfect loop, but it doesn’t stop.

Chasescene by Daniel Knox

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