IdiotPilot.CO.UK

daniel Anderson interview 23/02/2008

What are you up to these days, no doubt your preparing for tour? Can you give us a sight into an average day for you?
Well I just finished driving around Bellingham tying things up, paying parking tickets and that type of thing before they evolve into huge fines while I am gone. It is my birthday pretty soon as well so I am getting ready for that. Leaving for tour is the kind of thing that seems like it should be easy, but the second you actually start to prepare you realise how many loose ends the average person really has when they leave for months at a time.

As Wolves has just been released, is there any singles/EP in the pipe line?
We have an EP coming out very soon that is going to be really incredible. It's got three of my favorite songs from the entire Wolves recording sessions, including the actual song, Wolves, and an acoustic version of Last Chance that just might rival the full band version. It's pretty incredible.

You mentioned in a recent interview with Absolutepunk.net , "...we (Idiot Pilot) plan on going straight over to the UK..." Are there any plans to take your music to Europe in the near future?
Our plan is generally always to go stright to the UK, but there are things that sometimes hold us up, tour oppurtunitys, video stuff, whatever. But by now it's been so long coming that I doubt anything can stop us this time around. I really miss it over there.

So Ghost and The Grace, can you tell us a little bit about this project you're currently working on?
The Ghost And The Grace is a project that I have had in my head for a really long time. It is essentially a folk revival band but it is also a pop band and it is also somewhat experimental in way that I am putting all those things together.

How did this come about?
Some of it came from my frustration of beginning to write so many Idiot Pilot songs and having so few of them actually become finished products. My musical output is so much more vast than one would ever know based on what we have released in Idiot Pilot, although that is a large amount of music as well. I am just constantly recording songs. I also wanted to do The Ghost And The Grace as a chance to dig deeper into more of the music that I enjoy as a listener. Typically, if I am just hanging out or driving in my car, rock music is probably the last thing that I would put on.

What artists (if any) have influenced you with Ghost and The Grace?
It comes from a lot of places. Rufus Wainwright was a big one in the beginning, specially the song "14th street", which is this big, lush, show-tunes kind of song. It;s just such a gorgeous piece of music and the whole time you are listening to it there is so much going on with all of these different organic instruments; the horn section, the strings. Then when it finally gets to the end of the song everything starts to fade out of the track slowly until all you can hear are these two banjos and suddenly you realize that really those banjos were the whole song, right there, everything else was just icing. Granted, it's damn good icing, but it just makes you see that behind everything there is an amazing song.

Songwriters like that were a big influence from all parts of the musical spectrum. From Bruce Springsteen to Randy Newman to Sufjan Stevens and, of course, Bob Dylan, and everyone in between. I was actually considering for a long time wether I wanted this project to have a band name or to just use my own name, Daniel Anderson, just because so much of it was influenced by the singer songwriter thing.

Your lyrics are quite wonderful; do the lyrics convey a hidden meaning? Such as personal events, etc...
Hey, thanks man. The lyrical style with The Ghost And The Grace is obviously different than anything else that I have previously done. I think that I wanted to make sure that lyrically everything was in the language that people normally speak in and that it was relevant in that way. I think that that is one of the most important things in folk music, to speak in the common tongue, if that makes sense. That isn't to say that there isn't plenty of metaphor and allegory in these songs, because that is a very important tool as well, but I think that it is at the end of the day, in this particular genre, everything comes down to communicating the message and the story. Another way of looking at it is to think that you are going to use the same words that everyone else uses, but the sentences that you make out of them and the way in which they are presented are going to change them into something unique.

At the moment your songs are on MySpace (amongst other sites), so how do you plan to distribute you music, other than streaming via MySpace?
I feel the same way about The Ghost And The Grace that I do about any of the music that I write, which is to say that I want as many people to hear it as I can. This is a project that I am committed to doing for a very long time, in whatever format.

In the immediate sense though, I have a pretty ambitious undertaking ahead of me. I am working on four online EP's that are going to be available in zip files from The Ghost And The Grace dot com. They are going to have cover art and everything, which me and my webmaster and friend Karl are actually working on right now. They are also going to be completely free. Hopefully by the time all this is finished somebody hasn't shut me down and been like, you can't just do that for free, but as of right now that is my plan. There is actually an overall concept to the four EPs, too, and it is going to become very apparent in the next few days when we update the website. There are going to be some downloads online by then too, one demo song from each of the four records. I am really, really excited about it.

You mentioned in a recent interview with Absolutepunk.net , "...I plan on doing as a full on huge band...", so how big would this band be?
Well, so far I have worked it out the be about eleven memebers, but really the great thing about those songs is that I could do it that way, or I could just go myself with a banjo and a guitar. I could do anywhere in between, as well. To do the songs in the way that they were recorded would take about eleven people though, and that would be my prefrence, but that would also cost a lot of money. Fortuanantly I have so very talented friends that probably wouldn't mind the job.

So live shows would surely follow?
Obviously Idiot Pilot is the priority right now, so any tours or live shows that The Ghost And The Grace does are going to have to coincide with Idiot Pilot downtime, which is few and far between at the moment. I plan on doing a lot of recording though, just because I can do that in an evening if I have nothing else to do, and I am very interested in doing a lot of releases online just to get the songs out there.

Any shout outs?
Just to Stu, for caring.

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