Tone Glow 221: Cass McCombs
An interview with the American singer-songwriter about how all press is fake, how New Orleans is the "ultimate music city," and why he hates the recording studio
Cass McCombs (b. 1977) is a singer-songwriter from California. His catalog spans roughly twenty-five years and, likely, just as many places of residence—from demos recorded at home in San Francisco, 1999, to last year’s superb Interior Live Oak, transmitted from New York City. We spoke on April Fools’ Day before his show at Denver’s Bluebird Theater. Historically, published interviews with Cass tend to focus on his perceived evasiveness or mystique, ending up framed in terms of either interviewer frustration or perpetuated myth-making. For my part, I thought he was a pretty normal, quiet guy, more interested in talking about some things than others. It may just be a matter of taking him at his word when he says he doesn’t know something.
Corrigan Blanchfield: You guys drove from Minneapolis?
Cass McCombs: Yeah, we had a day off. We stayed in North Platte, Nebraska.
I was surprised you didn’t have a stop in Omaha or somewhere, but I don’t know shit about tour logistics.
(conspiratorial whisper) I don’t either. I don’t even tour that much, we haven’t done a full US tour since 2019.
Has your appetite for hitting the road shifted over time?
Well, yeah it’s an ever-evolving monst— creature, you know? It’s also, I wanna play with certain people, certain friends, and certain musicians who are the only ones I connect with. I don’t play solo, and I’m not into playing with new people that much. Sometimes, like every few years, I’ll meet someone that I connect with, but it’s really rare. And then Joe, who’s [tour managed] us for almost twenty years, he lives in Edinburgh.
Would you rather do the studio hermit thing?
No, I hate the studio. It feels wrong, like you’re trying to capture an exotic animal that’s on the endangered species list, you know? It’s stuffy, and I don’t find it that creative. People who are good at it, it’s more like aesthetics and style and design—things that I’m not that interested in.
On tour, it’s a different song in a different room each night.
Yeah, every night it’s a different… chaos is your friend, actually.
I thought the credits for those demo records were interesting—you’re doing the songs, your friend has the machine and the kitchen table and whatnot.
Jason [Quever]’s great, he’s really really good. When I started learning to play guitar and write songs and stuff, I had a 4-track, and then I got a quarter-inch 8-track that we ended up using on A (2003). And I had that in high school, but it was almost a sketchpad for me. I don’t really… toil over it.
You’re kinda talking about auteur-ing your own songbook, live. But you’ve never gotten too much into standards, right?
Yeah, I mean I’ve done a lot of covers over the years, here and there, playing in bar bands. When I played with members of the Dead, not only would we play their songs, but they were really inviting of whatever thing that I brought. It could even be a song that you heard on the radio on the way to the gig.
So when it comes to your guys, the players for tonight, you’re thinking more about chemistry on stage than in the recording process.
Yes, I think so. Or at least it’s more enjoyable for me. The show is… it’s just exciting. I love performance, and theater, and circuses. Records aren’t—they technically are a performance, it’s a recording of a performance, or a broken-up simulated performance. Everyone is performing, maybe not at the same time, but it is performance. It’s just not as good of a form of performance as the theater (laughter). And this (gesturing to stage) is theater; I think about this as theater.
Do you have a theatrical or other extramusical arts background?
When I was a kid I did a little acting.
In the Bay? Were you tuned in at all to the rap stuff happening around then?
Oh yeah, that’s required. The first rap stuff I got into was local—Too $hort, Digital Underground. And then from there, I found out about East Coast rap, which is a weird way to do it. Too $hort kinda came first for me and the kids I was around. But then obviously Hieroglyphics, and Saafir, all that stuff that came in the ‘90s was huge as well for us.
How were you keeping up with new music?
I’ve always been hands and knees on some record store floor, and friends have always worked in shops like that. So it was shops, annoying people who worked there to get information, and I guess there was some radio. A lot of it’s really hazy, you know. KALX was always around, KPFA turned me on to Negativland and stuff like that. KPOO, you know K-P-O-O in SF was amazing. Ozcat in Vallejo.
What was your high school like?
I have brain damage, so I’m gonna try my best, you know? It was another century, and it feels like it was another century. It was a normal high school, public high school, whatever. All different types of people, but also I knew kids from all over the Bay because I was with the Unitarian Universalist… that’s how we all met. I met all these musicians from SF, the South Bay, and we were all weirdos. People didn’t fit in, that’s really what it comes down to. We’d have these conferences, subcultures even in that crew. The hippies and the punks, the goths and whatever. Different crews would take over kitchen duties, shopping duties. “Healing,” you know, it was all very Bay Area. I’m very fond of my time with the Unitarians.
Do you have any kind of explicit faith practice going on nowadays?
It’s hard to talk about, it’s not something really that I… I do, but I don’t talk about it. I don’t know how, you know?
You prefer to keep it private, or you find it difficult to even verbalize?
I think both. I’m a private person in general; I’m not a social person, really. I have the best friends (laughs), I have the best people. I love them, but I’m not going out there, you know, socializing. And I just always had a tough time expressing, honestly, things that are meant to be private. There are some things that you’re not supposed to tell other people, that’s just for you.
Preparing for this, I noticed that there was a period in your career where every interview opened with a description of you as this elusive, difficult guy, which the text never really bore out.
(laughs). Yeah. But press or whatever you want to call it, publicity… it’s all fake anyway, you know? Just even being in society, you have your family self and your social self and then a public self. I think people wear different, fake masks. And I don’t begrudge them, it’s a survival thing; people think that they have to be deceptive so they don’t hurt themselves. But yeah, I don’t know where that came from.
Do you think people have a hard time with the idea that you might be out here singing songs but not necessarily, you know, thinking of them as autobiographical statements?
Yeah, right. You know, being a performer is historically a job for extroverts, but there’s many, many exceptions. I just read this biography of Lon Chaney, and he was like that. He’s a top Hollywood actor in the silent era, but he wasn’t out socializing. He liked to go fishing and stuff like that.
How do you balance that relative inwardness with the need to observe and inhabit different perspectives, scenarios, etc. for songs?
I know what you mean. When I was younger, I attempted be a journalist through song, in a way. I loved Woody Guthrie, and I thought that’s what I was getting from him, reading Bound for Glory (1943) or something like that. But then I found that I’m not a reporter, and I realized that I like making characters in my imagination—like imaginary friends or something—and just communicating through my fantasies. And, you know, I’m friends with people from my childhood and stuff. I stay in touch with people, and I’m really interested to hear how they change. It puts my changes into perspective. I have some characters in my life who have become muses for me, and their stories blend with my stories.
With respect to literary influences, does musical inspiration originate in your pleasure reading or does the more explicit research follow the song idea?
I think it’s different for different songs; like “Bum Bum Bum,” I read a bunch of books for that, because I really wanted to get it right. I had a very specific idea, kind of like a painting in my head. So that, I didn’t really feel comfortable filling in the blanks with my imagination. It’s kind of all over the place, and I’m not always reading. I take breaks, you know, and it’s hard to read on tour. Yesterday, I don’t think I read anything. No—I read a little. I read one chapter in a Flann O’Brien book today, in the van. But I can’t read in the van, no one can.
What do you do in the van?
Talk, zone out. Maybe try to nap, but it’s a very restless nap. Because it’s just a van, it’s not a big vehicle.
Right, you’re cargo, it’s a cargo machine (laughter).
Yeah, exactly. We are the cargo.
Talking about touring, it seems like more and more there are these big hubs on the coast and then this wide range of spots that sustains the journey in-between. What makes a place stand out along that route?
Totally. It’s big, I like this one. But it’s just the day. You can think a town is great, or a venue’s great, and then you can return to that same spot and the spirits or whatever, the mojo isn’t there, you know? It was there last time. And then you arrive at some… even playing like an in-store, like at a record store, doesn’t seem like it’s gonna be fun, and then sometimes it just goes off the chain. I think it’s always the surprising places that create the magical experiences. I mean, essentially we’re just, like, a bar band. I think we’ll always be a bar band; I’ve accepted that, I’ve come to terms that it’s cool to be a bar band.
Was there some higher aspiration you felt like you had to give up? You don’t strike me as, like, a career trajectory, milestone guy.
No, not professionally. I’ve never really given a… whatever about the business. I’ve always been disgusted at the music business. And, just, shocked at how some musicians seemingly enjoy it. But, I talk about this with my old friends, we fully thought back in the day that we were gonna, like… whatever you wanna call it, this indie, DIY, punk, whatever the thing was… For one thing, we never labelled what we did, and I think that made it even more powerful. We were connected not through style of music, but just ethically. Pathologically, you know, it was some spirit that connected us. Totally different bands from all different styles, and we fully thought that we were gonna change things and destroy the music business (laughs), this dragon, defeat this evil monster, you know? We failed. But we failed gloriously (laughter).
You’ve been asked plenty about your songwriting process, which you don’t seem to have a real concrete definition of. I was wondering if, like spirituality, there’s a sort of mystic element there that you kind of want to protect from interrogation.
Right, I mean what’s the Van Morrison line, “Why Must I Always Explain?” My friend Jack Name, the other day, was talking something along those lines, that making music… it’s called “music,” so it’s of the muse. So we have to protect the muse, and the muse loves silence. The muse loves humility, quiet time. So, if you’re out there explaining away, you might lose the muse. It’s dangerous, I think; I guess you could say that I have a mystical faith that there is a thing called the muse, or there’s muses, actually. In antiquity, there’s multiple muses: there’s the muse of sewing, you know, and they’re all here to foster us and guide us to a more enriching experience with our own life.
I don’t know how much you consider the listener, but do you think of your music as having a particular utility to the audience?
“Utility,” that’s a cool word. I mean, entertainment is utility, right? That’s a huge utility. So hopefully we entertain people. We try to play rock and roll music, rock and roll is entertainment music. Guitar riffs, drum beats that move your body, make you move around a little bit. There’s a utility, I’d like to think, to that. Then I think there’s another thing that’s like the antithesis of that (laughs), which is the art side of it. ’Cause art does not have utility, in my… I think I think that. I think art might be something that is essentially worthless to everybody. But then as far as the audience, it’s like, I think the music is actually made by the audience. Or the listener, if you want to say that. The listener, the ears of that person, decides what they consider to be musical or not musical. There’s sounds happening, like what is this? (points to bar). That fan. Is that music? I hear a fan. Someone’s mind would say “that’s beautiful to me,” and another person would say “turn it off.”
What’s your favorite music to dance to?
Do I have a favorite type? Uh, probably New Orleans music. I’ve been down there a bunch of times, and when they’re really swingin’ it’s… there’s something about New Orleans music. All of it—Zydeco, New Orleans funk, the marching band stuff. They’ve got the New Orleans flavor that’s all their own. Every time I got there, I’m astounded—it’s the ultimate music city in human history.
Do you remember how you ended up there for the first time?
Yeah, I remember. I was driving with a friend across the country, I was in my late teens, and we slept in the car. I love it down there, and even deeper… Beaumont, Texas, but like, south of Beaumont. Right on the border of Texas and Louisiana, all down there is really cool.
Do you consider yourself a city guy?
I’ve lived in a lot of cities, but I’m real restless. I get restless, and I have to go. And then when we started this trip, as soon as we hit farmland it felt calm again. But I do love New York, SF, wherever. I guess I love it all, you know?
Do you find it difficult to capture that sense of rural calm in song? I feel like all the actual music of those sorts of areas, bluegrass or whatever, can’t really be exported.
You mentioned bluegrass—I grew up around bluegrass musicians. Bill Monroe, the inventor of bluegrass, I’ve always loved how jet fuel-powered music it is. So it is kind of like city music, and then later I grew up and started travelling around and meeting musicians that are, maybe, self-described “old-timey” musicians, that’s a whole thing. Some of ’em—you mention Bill Monroe, Stanley Brothers, Osborne Brothers, they spit on the ground and they’re like, “That’s not old-timey, that’s commercial, they whitewashed it. They bulldozed it, it was way more eclectic before.” So there is something kind of modern and atomic about it. And also the blues, the blues is modern music. But I might be getting near to hyperbole, because what is modern? The anxiety of urban over-development, I guess, manifested through Bill Monroe’s mandolin.
“One-hit wonder” is a concept from a completely different realm of music, but is it odd having one of your songs get way, way bigger than the rest?
Which one is that? “County Line”? Yeah, that’s weird. What can you do about it? We play it all the time, we don’t feel obligated to do anything. We almost feel obligated to mess with people (laughs), do the wrong thing. Go the wrong route, bother people a little bit. But you know, “County Line,” it’s a fun song to play. There’s a lot of ways you can do a song like that, it’s evolved. You’ll see tonight, we have a new arrangement. I think a great song does that; to kind of go back to recording, that’s what’s kind of not good about recording. It deceives us into thinking that there is one empirical, correct arrangement of a composition. A great composition should be continuously re-interpreted, each time, with every performance. That’s how you know it’s a good song. By recording music, it’s like you’re stepping on a flower. You’re stopping it from growing. It’s like a spell, an incantation.
Did you ever have a job that completely killed your ability to write songs?
A job? Yeah, hmm. Well, I’m trying to think. Movie theater, that was ok. Construction, that was ok. Demolition, that was good! That actually helped, destroying stuff. Take a sledgehammer to a wall.
What were the different roles on a demo crew?
You know, it’s been a while. As I remember, there was a sledgehammer guy. Person, sorry.
Sister Sledge.
Right, Sister Sledge (laughter). Good, very good! I love that. I don’t remember, someone has to pick it up, put it in a trash bag or something (laughs).
Honestly, I asked just because I was envisioning this whole hierarchy and then at the top of the heap is the guy who gets to push the button. But yeah, that would be good. They have those wreck rooms now, people pay for the privilege of doing that work.
I know! They should be paid, if they were smart. There’s a lot of things that need to be demolished.
What I was getting at, though, is the sort of musical middle class where you’ve got some kind of job with the explicit function of floating your musical pursuits.
A lot of my musician friends in New York are bartenders or something, and they tell me that they love it, and they enjoy thinking about music as their calm or something. They deal with these horrible people at the bar, and then they get music to heal them, and it’s really fulfilling. They say. But you know, we all gotta do something with our hands. We have these hands, and they’re itchy hands, for all of us. It’s not about money, really; I think it’s about your hands (laughter).
Prepping for these always involves seeing about fifty variations of the same press picture. Do you like being photographed?
It depends, you know. Sometimes I really don’t. There’s a few friends and photographers that have made it less painful, but again it’s kind of back to the recorded music thing. Who really wants to be captured in that way? I don’t, you know? I wanna live, I don’t wanna be captured. It’s such a drag to have someone point a machine at you. There’s several of them that I’m totally ok with, but photography… I take pictures, but I refuse to take pictures of people. I won’t do it. I don’t want to take pictures of human beings, it just seems wrong. I’d rather take a picture. There’s one I took the other day: baked beans had, like, spilled out over the concrete somewhere. That’s a good photograph, you know what I’m saying?
Cass McCombs’ Interior Live Oak (2025) is out now. McCombs is currently on tour and dates can be found at his website.
Thank you for reading the 221st issue of Tone Glow. Well, do you?
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Goated interview! Thanks for this.