Digit-al Love
Crooked Fingers explores matters of the heart with Dignity and Shame
There are two things: You and the Universe, states journeyman storyteller Eric “Crooked Fingers” Bachmann meditatively by phone from his current home in Seattle. “It’s all about shrinking your ego. And I’m not talking about vanity, I’m talking self-loathing, worrying about your reputation and such.”Such is the impetus behind Dignity and Shame, the fourth Crooked Fingers album since 2000’s self-titled debut, and first on Seattle’s Sub Pop Records (where Bachmann occasionally works in the mailroom). It is an album that features a menagerie of characters in dilemma, and yet it offers more hope and concession than any of Bachmann’s previous works.
Bachmann began his musical career as a guitarist/singer in the N.C.-based, post-Pavement college rock quartet Archers of Loaf, a group that combined jagged hooks and veering verses for nearly eight years. Concurrently, Bachmann indulged in less volatile instrumental composition under the moniker Barry Black, a project that built on Bachmann’s Appalachian State studies in alto saxophone and featured jazz, folk and modern classical motifs. Additionally, Bachmann indulged in more wide-screen composition, doing film scores under his own name.
However, it was with the introduction of Crooked Fingers that established Bachmann the most in his own rite. Drawing on the spirits of Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen and Neil Diamond, Bachmann has described the music as like “an old mountain ... like there wasn’t a time when they made it ... it popped out of the earth one day.”
While Crooked Fingers’ material was initially recorded elsewhere, Bachmann spent much of the project’s early years recording in Athens and living off and on in Atlanta. He worked in a restaurant owned by a friend, who would allow him an open work schedule for touring. He toured almost constantly with Crooked Fingers, whether playing solo backed by loops, as an acoustic duo, or as an unamped jug band-style trio (just three of many permutations booked under the name “Crooked Fingers” over the years).
“I think that I was unknowingly doing the right thing, not being concerned about career decisions, about marketing the band over being creative,” Bachmann says. “I wasn’t questioning, just doing what my spirit was telling me, and since I realized that, I want to keep doing that and never overthink.”
But since Bachmann’s early 2003 move to the West Coast, his music has taken a more thematic direction. With Dignity and Shame, the challenge was to examine the emotions embodied within the title.
“I happened to be reading a lot of [Holocaust survivor and philosopher] Viktor Frankl’s work and decided the concept of dignity and shame would be good central themes to write around,” Bachmann says. “And next I wrote ‘Andalucia,’ after I came across the Spanish legend of doomed romance between [bullfighter] Manolete, gorged by [the bull] Islero, and [actress] Lupe Sino.”
Bachmann feels that, while the new album’s kernel may be in heartbreak, it is also a study in levity, about love and finding a place you belong (a theme that speaks to his own wandering lifestyle).
“I wanted this album to be as unpretentious as possible,” Bachmann says. “And I wanted to see if I could write a song that even people I could hate would love, so I imagined a yuppie and then wrote ‘Call to Love’ as something they would find celebratory.”
With Dignity and Shame, Bachmann reflects the influences of Alan Lomax, Townes van Zant and Hank Williams Sr. by using simpler, “peasant” language that wears more of its sentimental heart on its sleeve. That is a change from previous songs that included lines such as, “Carrion doves cross vultures overhead/Hard mingling as the evening aches/To scavenge empty love.”
Dignity and Shame also features Bachmann’s most “straightforward” musical arrangements, in that Bachmann found a trusted cadre of pop-friendly musicians to back him up. The music is wide-ranging: mariachi-flecked (“Twilight Creeps,” “Islero”), steel guitar-swept (“Weary Arms”), thorny passion play-like (“Andalucia”), and plaintive flare-ups of gruff guitars and vocal croaks (“Destroyer”).
“This tour we’re taking six people and a sound guy, so this album will be played sort of how we recorded it, because we recorded it pretty much live,” Bachmann says. “So we’ll do the show like the record, but all the old records will be more arranged than when we were a three-piece or four-piece. It will be the first time when we don’t have to come up with new arrangements because we don’t have enough people for all parts.”
tony.ware@creativeloafing.com
Bachmann began his musical career as a guitarist/singer in the N.C.-based, post-Pavement college rock quartet Archers of Loaf, a group that combined jagged hooks and veering verses for nearly eight years. Concurrently, Bachmann indulged in less volatile instrumental composition under the moniker Barry Black, a project that built on Bachmann’s Appalachian State studies in alto saxophone and featured jazz, folk and modern classical motifs. Additionally, Bachmann indulged in more wide-screen composition, doing film scores under his own name.
However, it was with the introduction of Crooked Fingers that established Bachmann the most in his own rite. Drawing on the spirits of Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen and Neil Diamond, Bachmann has described the music as like “an old mountain ... like there wasn’t a time when they made it ... it popped out of the earth one day.”
While Crooked Fingers’ material was initially recorded elsewhere, Bachmann spent much of the project’s early years recording in Athens and living off and on in Atlanta. He worked in a restaurant owned by a friend, who would allow him an open work schedule for touring. He toured almost constantly with Crooked Fingers, whether playing solo backed by loops, as an acoustic duo, or as an unamped jug band-style trio (just three of many permutations booked under the name “Crooked Fingers” over the years).
“I think that I was unknowingly doing the right thing, not being concerned about career decisions, about marketing the band over being creative,” Bachmann says. “I wasn’t questioning, just doing what my spirit was telling me, and since I realized that, I want to keep doing that and never overthink.”
But since Bachmann’s early 2003 move to the West Coast, his music has taken a more thematic direction. With Dignity and Shame, the challenge was to examine the emotions embodied within the title.
“I happened to be reading a lot of [Holocaust survivor and philosopher] Viktor Frankl’s work and decided the concept of dignity and shame would be good central themes to write around,” Bachmann says. “And next I wrote ‘Andalucia,’ after I came across the Spanish legend of doomed romance between [bullfighter] Manolete, gorged by [the bull] Islero, and [actress] Lupe Sino.”
Bachmann feels that, while the new album’s kernel may be in heartbreak, it is also a study in levity, about love and finding a place you belong (a theme that speaks to his own wandering lifestyle).
“I wanted this album to be as unpretentious as possible,” Bachmann says. “And I wanted to see if I could write a song that even people I could hate would love, so I imagined a yuppie and then wrote ‘Call to Love’ as something they would find celebratory.”
With Dignity and Shame, Bachmann reflects the influences of Alan Lomax, Townes van Zant and Hank Williams Sr. by using simpler, “peasant” language that wears more of its sentimental heart on its sleeve. That is a change from previous songs that included lines such as, “Carrion doves cross vultures overhead/Hard mingling as the evening aches/To scavenge empty love.”
Dignity and Shame also features Bachmann’s most “straightforward” musical arrangements, in that Bachmann found a trusted cadre of pop-friendly musicians to back him up. The music is wide-ranging: mariachi-flecked (“Twilight Creeps,” “Islero”), steel guitar-swept (“Weary Arms”), thorny passion play-like (“Andalucia”), and plaintive flare-ups of gruff guitars and vocal croaks (“Destroyer”).
“This tour we’re taking six people and a sound guy, so this album will be played sort of how we recorded it, because we recorded it pretty much live,” Bachmann says. “So we’ll do the show like the record, but all the old records will be more arranged than when we were a three-piece or four-piece. It will be the first time when we don’t have to come up with new arrangements because we don’t have enough people for all parts.”
tony.ware@creativeloafing.com