Shearwater

Interviewed By: Chris DePaul

Date: 2007-08-30

Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater is no stranger to the music industry. Along with being the lead songwriter and vocalist on Shearwater’s latest release, Palo Santo, Jonathan is also a founding member of Okkervil River and keyboardist for Smog’s touring line-up.

In an interview with foundinthemargins, Jonathan speaks about his experience as a lit major in college, how a literary critic is comparable to an indie-band “superfan”, and identifies the books and authors he most loves and hates.

Studying Literary Criticism

“Like a lot of freshly-minted lit majors who’ve learned to take everything too seriously, it took a while for me to enjoy reading again after college. I remember feeling queasy when I left school, having bumbled through the woods of a bunch of survey courses only to peer over the edge of the deep well of literary criticism, which was coyly revealed in the final semester to be the noblest aim of the scholarly arts. I felt sick, not because I wasn’t so enthused about criticism, but because I suddenly saw that I’d tricked myself into thinking that the academic world held the keys to art itself, not art appreciation, and that somehow if I persisted in writing papers and taking classes and pleasing instructors I’d eventually pass through the looking glass and become the things I was studying.

“But it doesn’t really work that way. It seemed like the best you could do, if you aspired to become a critic, was to become (to literature) what my indie-rock pals uneasily refer to as a ‘superfan’. Superfans are incredibly devoted, enthusiastic, and slightly scary admirers of your work, and they usually approach you armed with an alarmingly encyclopaedic knowledge of everything you’ve every released, whatever biographical details you’ve offered up to the internet, and even involved ‘theories’ of what your work ‘means’. I’m not arguing that studying Shakespeare or Joyce and following ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead’s every move are equally worthy pursuits, but they have the same sort of asymptotic quality to their rewards; you can get close to the thing you love, even really close, but it always remains out of reach. You’ll never inhabit the book the way the author did, which was the thrill I was after.”

Rediscovering Literature

“Anyway, if you’re laughing at me by now, you can probably see why it took me a little while to be able to read for pleasure again. Luckily for me, the end of college coincided with a weird travel grant that sent me to some of the most remote places on earth, where the real world kept smacking me in the face until I started to notice. And then, after weeks on boats and in land rovers and tramping around in the wilderness chasing animals instead of ideas, I started to crave books again. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is good rehab for a recovering student, since it was written by a critic (and can be read, if you like, as an allegory for the perils and pitfalls of literary criticism and interpretation), while still being an eerie and entertaining detective yarn. And then, from there, I started to drift into the pleasant lagoon of all kinds of non-canonical stuff. I enjoyed a biography of Kerouac (but not so much Kerouac himself), the M-Z volume of an encyclopaedia from the 1880s, Thomas Pynchon’s V, and, I realized, just about anything that evokes the feelings that I had as a child when my father read The Lord of the Rings to me, a few pages a night, for what seemed like an eternity. I felt shocked and betrayed when it finally ended.

“If the characters or the narrator are involved in a long, circuitous, episodic journey (on earth) with a difficult or even unattainable goal, I’m usually pretty interested. Likewise, if wild creatures and landscapes, which seem to do nothing but vanish these days, take center stage, I’ve got limited patience for cutesy travel narratives which read like a chronicle of inconveniences, though; Bill Bryson’s books annoy the living daylights out of me, but that may just mean that I don’t have much of a sense of humor. Peter Matthiessen’s grand, ambitious, austere, and pleasantly (but not overly) self-aware books, like The Snow Leopard and The Tree Where Man Was Born are more my speed – likewise Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia and The Songlines,of which the latter might be my favorite book of all time. Before that, it was Patrick O’Brian’s whimsical, rich, and really long Aubrey-Maturin series. Lately I’m starting to get on a Graham Greene kick, and I enjoyed Joe Kane’s terrific South American adventures in Running the Amazon and Savages. (“Savages” will make you swear off buying petrol from ConocoPhilips forever). I’ve been trying to start Shelby Foote’s 3-volume history of the American Civil War, but I keep getting distracted. And David Mitchell’s bizarre, epic Cloud Atlas thrilled me from beginning to end (not least because he begins it in the tiny Chatham Islands of New Zealand, where I spent some time when I was out wandering).”

Taking Books on the Road

“It’s gotten to the point where I enjoy reading so much, especially on tour, that I tend to bring more books along than clothes. I have a horror of long drives in the van without something to read. If I run out, I get cranky, and I’ve occasionally resorted to despicable tactics like reading my bandmates’ books before they’ve finished with them, picking them up off the floor and surreptitiously reading a few pages while they’re getting a coke at a truck stop, that sort of thing.”

Shearwater released a re-recorded and re-packaged version of their latest album, Palo Santo, on August 27, 2007 on the Matador label.

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You can purchase the books recommended by Shearwater here.

Links:
http://www.shearwatermusic.com