STREAM: Ben Nichols - The Last Pale Light In The West + Interview
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Ben Nichols has a main gig fronting Southern rock's perpetual underdogs, Lucero--a Memphis group who in the past ten years have put out six consistent long-players of leathery, Mats-inspired Americana; records stuffed with diner ballads and bonfire vignettes that were great largely because of Nichols' knack for imagery and story, his ability to spin tales of soldiers, sailors, waitresses, and bikers into vivid anecdotes you could still smile and cheers to. Despite scattered solo shows and some cameos on other band's records (dude sang back-up on the Hold Steady's recent single, "Sequestered In Memphis") he's just finally put together his first solo release, a spare mini-album project called The Last Pale Light In The West that's based on the Cormac McCarthy novel Blood Meridian. We've got a download of the album's title track below, and after the break you can read a quick chat I had with him about the song and the project at large. Cop one over at Lucero's website.
Sounds like: Deer Tick, Jessica Lee Mayfield, Will Sheff
Stream: Ben Nichols - The Last Pale Light In The West
Can you tell me a little bit about how you wrote "The Last Pale Light In The West"?
Well, it's obviously the title track on the EP. The line is just a random phrase that's actually towards the end of the book; it just caught my attention. It's something that made a really good title. The other songs are character's names and based on characters, but "The Last Pale Light In The West" is a kind of introduction to the EP. There's a lot of death in the novel Blood Meridian and I thought that "The Last Pale Light In The West" was a very tasteful allusion to death without being too morbid. And, I don't know, I guess all of Cormac McCarthy's novels can be pretty bleak at times, but even in something like Blood Meridian or The Road, even in those I think he leaves you with a little bit of light. Or No Country For Old Men even. There's always seems to be some kind of light out there in the distance, some kind of hope to follow. And, so yea, I guess that's why that phrase struck me. It seemed like a good way to open the record.
When was the first time you read the book?
I read the book probably eight years ago, a friend I was working with at the time just introduced me to it, said, "You have to read this." It was written in 1985, but I probably didn't read it till 2000, 2001, something like that. It just made a very big impression on me, and it stuck with me and I re-read it a couple more times actually; there was just so much good imagery and nice phrases and I was just like, "Man, this is a goldmine," for ideas and stuff to steal, basically. So much of it I wanted to steal that i finally decided, "Oh, well I'll just blatantly steal it and write a record based around it." It was also good because I'd wanted to do something acoustic and something that was sort of a solo project, and since all these songs were tied together and were all very specific to the project, it was something that I could do and not feel like I was taking something away from Lucero. So I could still write Lucero songs outside of it and not feel like I was stealing things from my band. So that it became some sort of concept project was convenient for that.
When did you decide to finally put it to tape? Had you been kicking it around for awhile?
Yea, for a couple years actually. It was something that I'd always intended to do, and then after a year of just going through the book and kind of trying to pick out [stuff]...'cause there's a lot in that novel. Finally, I had the idea to do each song based on an individual character, and then once I had that structure, it was just going back and re-reading and re-reading and just trying to find the things from the book that I wanted to use. So, it was probably about a year after I had the idea that songs started really coming together. And really, the last song that I wrote was a song called "Toadvine" and I wrote that the second day in Easley studios, which is where I recorded it, Easley-McCain studios down in Memphis [Jeff Buckley, Sonic Youth, Modest Mouse, Loretta Lynn, and a ton more awesome people have all recorded there. - Ed]. And that was at three in the morning on the last day of recording. So yea, I used up that entire year, up until the very last minute to write the songs. But it worked out.
The instrumentation is pretty spare, was that deliberate or out of necessity?
It was deliberate. I knew I wanted to keep it stripped-down, and I also knew that I wanted to do something different from Lucero, although the songwriting is very similar, obviously, because it's still me. But yea, I wanted to keep it separate from Lucero enough and plus I knew that Todd Bean who plays pedal steel and Rick Steff would just make anything that I wrote sound better, 'cause they're both just excellent musicians. They can work very fast and have a good sense of taste. So I was lucky that they were available to do it at the time, I was under insane time pressure because Lucero had been on tour forever; we'd done a six-week tour that ended in September, then I went into the studio, recorded the record, and then left on this Revival Tour that I'm on on September 20th. But it worked out just fine. [The original] Easley Studios had burned down and Todd's got a new studio and it's not actually open to the public yet, but Rick knows Doug and has worked with him for a long time, so he mentioned to Doug that I wanted to do a short record and he agreed and I was really happy there. It was a good match and a comfortable place to record. I think we did the whole record in 18 hrs.
So this was a lot of one-take stuff?
Yea it was. And since you're only dealing with three instruments really, sometimes four, we pretty much did it track by track. I would play accoustic guitar and sing and then we'd layer everything else over it, which is kind of how I...when I'm doing demos on my own, that's what I'm used to doing. So yea, the process was real familiar for me, and with Todd and Rick they're very used to just going in and working through it. So yea, we were able to work really fast, which was a necessity. But it's a way we were all used to working.
