Johnathan Rice
Undefined / Undefined
I started playing the guitar when I was very young and joined several bands. While in high school in Washington DC, I began to write what I consider my first proper songs. I gave a tape of these songs to Virginia singer-songwriter Chris Keup, who was also running the DC based indie label Grantham Dispatch Records. Our meeting resulted in my first recording, the six song EP "Heart and Mind."
When I was seventeen, I returned to America from Glasgow to finish high school in DC. Towards the end of the year, I met Chris Keup. He was something of an idol to me and all my friends. He had his own indie label, Grantham Dispatch Records, and used it to put out his own records. He was like a really gentle Tom Waits writing the songs Faulkner might have written if he had chosen a different career. We became very fast friends and I suppose I was like some sort of apprentice songwriter, learning from a cat who was the real deal. I made some recordings in my basement bathroom and sent them to him. We began talking about making a record.
My roommates in my shoebox apartment on the Upper West Side included a gay-porn star and his escort/coke-dealing boyfriend. They rarely left the apartment, they could turn tricks in their bedrooms and the cocaine rendered them completely paranoid. I would get up in the morning for one of the eleven jobs I had over the course of the year (I found very quickly that I'm quite unemployable) and they would have been up all night and give me four-hundred dollars in twenties to buy milk, beer, sandwiches, and smokes. I got to keep the change, and that's the only way I really ever made rent, which happened quite rarely. My jobs included dog-walking, icing cupcakes, Greenpeace, and telemarketing in the darkest heart of Brooklyn.
I was also playing clubs in the Lower East Side, mainly at the Living Room on the corner of Stanton and Allen. The way Steve and Jen had it set up, anyone at all could call up and ask to play. It didn't matter if you drew five people of seventy-five, everyone could get their thirty-minute slot and you were only as good as the tip jar indicated at the end of the show. New York was everything it promised to be. I walked and walked and walked and the soul of the city just came pouring out of the concrete. I could take the subway to Harlem or walk through an empty Midtown at three-am on a Tuesday night. My place was ten minutes from Strawberry Fields in Central Park, which was the first place my father and I went to on my first ever visit to the city when I was fifteen. Some bars would even serve me alcohol, I guess they just figured if I was living there on my own I deserved a drink or three. I walked down Houston one day and saw Patti Smith buying a newspaper. I said: "Excuse me Ms. Smith, I really like your writing and your records, and now I'm gonna go soundcheck at the Mercury Lounge." She said: "Have a good gig." New York fucking City.
I was also writing more and more songs in my tiny little room at night. Living that way in those close quarters changed the way I wrote songs. I had to be quiet enough not to disturb my roommates but loud enough to drown out whatever they were doing in their own rooms. I would write on my own and sometimes Chris Keup would let me write with him. Songs were piling up and money was running out. My bold experiment was failing, and no one was paying any attention. I had no more money and had to go back to my folks' house in defeat. In May of 2002, I played the 14th St tunnel every night until I had enough money for a Greyhound home. By the end of the month, I was waiting tables again in Northern Virginia, filing my applications to college. I was going to surrender.
In July of that same summer, some people in LA got a hold of my indie EP. Three weeks later, Warner Brothers/Reprise Records flew me out to California. I played some tunes for them at their offices in Burbank, and they offered me a deal. I agonized over the prospect in the hotel they put me up in on the Sunset Strip where I never felt cool enough to leave the room. I finally decided to do it, and the signing took place over the next few months. I chose Reprise because they had put out Neil, Joni, Lou Reed, Gram, and Emmylou among others. Sinatra too, by the way. I moved back to New York, to Brooklyn this time.
I began a long process of recording the tunes I had been writing over the past year or so. I knew very little about recording and had an inherent distrust of anyone who I had never worked with. This was gonna be my first full-length record, and I wasn't gonna just spit it out and have to hate myself ten years down the line. I recorded hours of music in Nashville, Montana, Virginia, LA, and New York, and hated it all. I had sounds in my head and could not articulate them to these complete strangers in dark studios. I scrapped everything and began to regroup. At the time, I was listening to a lot of the records coming out of Omaha, Nebraska. Kids from there would come through New York and we became friends through other friends. I told them about the trouble I was having with my record. I realized that every record that I loved coming from that part of the country was produced, engineered, and mixed by Mike Mogis. I asked the kids that knew him if they could give him some of my demos. In September of 2003, Mike and I began to record at Presto! Studio in Lincoln, NE.
When I got there, I had the feeling that this was my last chance. The record company wasn't just gonna let me record and record as much as I wanted. Sooner or later, an artist that doesn't come up with the goods gets dropped. I was hyper-aware of this fact. Mike and I discussed it at length and decided that we had to make a record that explored every musical urge that I had ever felt. If this thing was gonna get me dropped or never come out, I had better make sure I pour everything into it so I can at least have it to listen to and to prove to my kids that I did some cool shit before I went to college.
Over the next eight weeks, we recorded fifteen tracks and called it Trouble Is Real. I wanted to make a record that had very few moments of pause and that existed as a complete listening experience. I wanted to create songs between songs, flowing smoothly into each other and crashing into each other as well. Luckily, Mike with his ability to play about a hundred instruments and a small group of some of my favorite musicians were able to match every sound I had in my head without ever using words like note, chord, or key. Mike and those kids from Nebraska (and some from LA, NYC, and Chicago) saved my songs and helped me make the record I wanted and needed to make.
So now I have this record of my own, all fifty-six minutes of me and my friends having a really good time. I can't describe how good it feels. I don't know how it's going to do or what it means to anyone else, and I don't really care. My whole life has been about finding out about music, and now music is my life. I'm still learning how this whole thing works. I want be a better singer, a better writer, a better guitar player. I want to learn how to play the piano. Those are really the only things that matter to me. I live in this world and there's poison in the air, there's war all the time, shadows are getting longer and longer. I did my best to document those feelings as they stand now. Most of these songs are just love songs anyway.
Johnathan Rice
2/04
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