Two weeks ago, the Robinson Caruso Organization celebrated the release of their EP Love Debt at the Fine Line Music Cafe. I was able to sit down with James Rone, the band's lead singer and frontman, after the show.
Fine Line Music Café, 08. January 2011
Michelle: So, the band. Do you want to go by Robinson Caruso, can I call you James in the interview?
James: James is fine.
Michelle: James is fine? I wasn’t sure how far the persona of Robinson Caruso goes.
James: It’s pretty much just on stage, and sometimes I even forget it there.
Michelle: How did you come up with that? Because I’ve read your Facebook bio about being frozen somewhere, which is phenomenal – but where does that come from?
James: Well, I – so my sister. It kind of traces back to my sister, who is also a performer. She’s an actor, a singer, and a dancer. She was on tour, in the Broadway tour of Hairspray and it was her first big gig. She came off the tour with a vocal abrasion and so that kind of ended that particular chapter of her life, which was really sad. But her voice changed in a way that I really liked – it went from sounding more like a Broadway singer to more like Dusty Springfield. I loved the way that sounded and I wanted to write some songs to sing like that. My favorite Dusty Springfield album is Dusty in Memphis, which is all Dusty singing – “Son of a Preacher Man” is on that. Anyway, so I wrote a song for her and I liked it a lot, so I kept it and started to write more songs like that. It’d never really occurred to me to write that kind of music – I’ve always loved it. Soul music has been my favorite kind of music ever since I was a little kid, but I didn’t think that James could sing it, you know what I mean? My career – I’ve been a performing artist, and maybe that’s sort of where it came from – the idea of a role. But I was an arts administrator at a children’s theater and it was incumbent upon me, I felt, during that time, to be a rule-following, fairly straight-laced kind of persona. So that was the way I thought of myself and so it felt like I couldn’t perform that kind of music – not the way I felt it should be performed, which is sweaty and loud and brash. So I felt like I needed a character to play and so that’s where Robinson Caruso came from – and that’s why all that outlandish fiction around it, because I wanted it to really be that.
Michelle: I know your first show was in March 2009, but how long have you been working on this project?
James: Well, I was 28, so probably since ’08 or ’07 – something like that. That’s when I started writing all of those songs. Once all the songs were written – I decided I wanted to write all the songs first and then go and find people who wanted to play it. It took me a long to find people to play it. I didn’t know any musicians who were really into that kind of thing. My previous band, which I loved, was just an indie-rock band, like The Shins. So I didn’t know anybody who’d be into this kind of thing – I knew that I needed to find career-type musicians, people who could just pick things up super fast and had a lot of chops and were technically much better than me. I didn’t know anybody like that, so I had an ad in the City Pages and it went unanswered for months. Then Gary, the bassist, got in touch and he was like, “I’ve been looking to do something exactly like this.” He brought Jake [the guitarist] with him, whom he worked with. Those two are – as you saw the other night – they are really idiosyncratic and they have their own little world. But they are incredible players and they are both really super sweet guys, who are very reliable and are, as I say, playing for free basically, because our gigs don’t pay very much – split ten ways is even less.
Michelle: Right – because you have a huge band.
James: Right. So they are really the bedrock of the band. They brought Marc on with them, who is our regular drummer, but Jordan has now probably played with us as much as we’ve played with Marc. That’s how those guys got involved. Then we gradually recruited everyone else – the singers are all from CLIMB Theater, where I used to work. The horn section actually came to us – I’m also an improviser – so Fred Beukema was our original trumpet player and has played every gig with us except for this one. He just had a baby, so he’s going to be out for a little bit. He brought Ben and Brendan with him – he knew Brendan from high school, they used to play in their high school band together. Brendan knew Ben.
Michelle: Yeah, they’ve been friends forever.
James: And Ben is kind of our main horn guy, because that’s his bread and butter. He helps me with the arrangements.
Michelle: The horns add something very special different from a lot of the soul music you hear these days.
James: I agree. I think they bring a lot of energy and people get really excited – “Ooh, a horn section!” Especially when they play their first note, it’s like, “Wow, this is an event.”
Michelle: And it’s a section, instead of just a trumpet.
James: Right, exactly.
Michelle: How does it work with all these interchangeable parts? You mentioned that you have second and third string players. Juggling ten peoples’ schedules must be really busy – how do you deal with constantly having a rotating roster of people playing with you?
James: Some of it means that you just naturally accept fewer gigs than smaller bands. I feel like if you’re in a four-piece band – I’ve seen the way some bands build up momentum by playing a number of great shows in a row. They just really try to fill their calendar. Chris Koza, for example, who I love, clearly when he first got started in the Cities, he just played tons of shows. Aaron and I would be like, “I want to see Chris Koza tonight,” and we would just check his MySpace and he would probably be playing some place. But we can’t do that. So instead, the alternative has been to make every show feel like a real event. I feel like I learned that from Halloween, Alaska, another local band – love those guys – and they don’t have a big band, but they play infrequently, so every time they play, it feels like it’s a big deal. Everybody who’s there is like, “Cool, glad we got to be here, because we know that they probably won’t be playing again for awhile.” That’s the way I’ve started looking at shows now. We’ll do them infrequently, but we’ll make a big deal about them.
Michelle: It’s seems like nowadays you hear more and more soul music – do you guys see yourselves as part of that?
James: Well, I think that we just kind of are, whether we see ourselves that way or not. It doesn’t matter, because everyone else is going to see us that way. It’s going to sound like a cop-out, but that’s not what inspired me to do it, but it’s true – it was that sort of chain of events I’ve already described that led me up to writing that kind of music and it is a passion of mine. I love soul music. I’m a big collector of it. It’s just a really happy coincidence that happens to be happening at the same time. I just hope that it doesn’t go the same way as the ska revival and swing revival – all those other revivals that have happened and then gone the way of the buffaloes.
Michelle: What do you think of the soul that you are hearing these days?
James: There’s some good stuff. I love Jamie Lidell, I think he’s amazing. What he does is obviously much more than just soul revival, he does really freaky-deaky electronica stuff as well, but I think he’s really talented. I love Cee-Lo, I’ve loved Cee-Lo since he was in Goodie Mob – that’s amazing stuff. There’s this guy named Aloe Blacc – he’s terrific. He’s got this Bill Withers thing going on – super simple, he doesn’t do a lot of reaching for stuff, he’s just a really, really talented songwriter. I like some of that stuff – it’s good. But I really miss D’Angelo – I wish he was back. I feel like he’s the guy who has paved the way for a lot of this and now he’s not around to take part in any of it. It’s really sad.
Michelle: Who would you say are the influences on the sound that you’ve created?
James: Stevie Wonder is a big influence for me. I love Stevie Wonder so hard, he’s just fantastic and I think that my voice is in the same register as his. I don’t have a rich long, vibrato – in fact, I have no vibrato in my voice at all – and so, the reason why I can sing this music is because I have a flexible voice. That’s his voice as well, and so I feel, as a singer, he’s a big influence. In terms of writing stuff, that’s the tough thing about soul music I suppose, is that the performers is always the more key person, the writer is never, unless the writer is the performer, like Smoky Robinson. But Smoky Robinson – all those guys who wrote, like Barrett Strong, who wrote for Motown – those are huge influences for me. Donny Hathaway is my favorite soul music performer at the moment. He’s an inspiration to me – I love the way he writes and sings. The thing is, I’m not a trained musician at all – I don’t know what notes I’m playing, I don’t know what notes I’m singing, and so a lot of what I do has to do with feel and so I have to approximate some things that other musicians, like the people who are in the band, could just hear and intuit. I have to decode and translate.
Michelle: When you’re writing your songs, what do you use as inspiration?
James: I usually start with a rhythm. I’ll hear a drumbeat that I think is really satisfying and then I’ll fake that on a keyboard for a demo. And then once I have the rhythm, then – it’s complicated, because you can’t sing about the same things in soul music that you can sing about in other genres. When I would write music for my last band, I felt like the filter I put things through was the Michael Stipe filter – the R.E.M. filter – which is, “This is really what I want to say, but I’m going to put it through the obtuse filter, so nobody will know what I’m talking about,” which is the indie rock filter. I feel like with soul music, you take what you feel and then you have to run it through the “everyman” filter – you have to try and make it super universal, so everyone knows plainly what you’re talking about in every line, which is a really different and direct way of writing – it’s really liberating in some ways, but it’s also challenging. There are times when what you’re feeling is more complex than something you can put into a jingle. I don’t know. There are times when it really works well – like “Love Debt” works I feel because – that’s something a friend of mine was going through. She was going through a break-up and she was like, “I don’t want to get back together. It’s not working. I just feel like I’m owed something.” I was like – I can write that. Everyone feels that. But on those days when you’re feeling more complex, it’s tough to write a soul song.
Michelle: When people listen to Love Debt [the EP, not the song] – how do you want them to feel when its done? What do you want it to say to them?
James: That’s a really good question. I don’t know – I don’t really know how to answer that. For me, soul music has such a chemical reaction and so it’s not a cerebral reaction. When I listen to Jay Electronica, who is this incredibly intense MC who has a lot of things to say – I listen to that and I process that in a cerebral way. But with soul music, it’s 100% gut, and so I hope that it grabs them. I hope that it moves them to dance or that moves them sing along. I hope that they interpret it in their own way and I hope that they feel like it’s about them.
Michelle: What’s the most memorable show that you guys have played so far?
James: It might be tonight, this was a blast. There’s one that comes to mind – we played at Honey, I think, and it was a night when it felt like – this is going to sound really pretentious – Sir Ian McKellan talked about when he came to town to do King Lear, he was talking about the different between technique and method. He said that a lot of American actors are 100% method and they try to conjure up this temporary psychosis, actually believing that they are in the role that they are in, whereas if you’re a technique actor, then you’re able, on those nights when the magic isn’t there, you’re still able to approximate a good performance. There was one really good performance fairly recently where it felt like there was no technique involved – it was all right there, completely emotional and everybody was present. It felt like a big revival.
Michelle: So are you guys signed?
James: No.
Michelle: Not yet. What’s your ultimate direction? Where do you want this to go?
James: It is getting where I want it to be. My main ambition is we’ll play regularly to an audience of people, many of whom I know, many of whom I don’t know – all there because they want to feel the same thing in the same room with a big group of people. Soul music is community music. It’s call and response – it’s people going, “I felt that. I feel that. We feel this now. I’m not alone.” That’s what that music is to me. So when there’s a show like tonight when there’s a lot of people in the room so it can feel that way, that’s all I need. For me, recording that music and then getting it out to people is a way of just consistently being able to achieve that.
Michelle: What’s the biggest challenge you guys face right now?
James: Booking is always a big challenge. Coordination of schedules. You know, all the little band-type things you’ve got to deal with – getting people to write you back. Luckily now we have a couple of books who are really loyal and great and they like what we do and so they’re willing to put us on fairly regularly. But it would be nice to have a variety of places that we could play and there are some places I think that, because we’ve gotten off to sort of a slow start with some of the things that we really need in order to be taken seriously, like a really shiny and bright website and a nice-sounding recorded album – that’s been slow. I feel like it will pick up from here, because the website is going to be launched in a couple of weeks.
Michelle: I know you just released your EP – are there plans for a full-length album? Are you still writing?
James: Yeah, I’m always writing. I think that now that could happen, because we have balanced our budget fairly well up to this point. All the money that comes in from the EP is money we can put towards future projects and everybody seems game.
Michelle: I noticed you play covers – I like that, I’m not an anti-cover person at all. When you played “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” I knew I was going to like you guys – it’s one of my favorite songs. What’s your favorite cover to play?
James: That one’s really fun.
Michelle: And what’s your favorite song to play of yours?
James: I kind of like doing “Worth” actually. It’s not one that people call out for a lot, but I really like doing “Worth.” I feel like I can just sink into it.
Michelle: It really worked really well tonight. I remember listening to it in practice and there were a couple of hiccups as you were working through it, and I mentioned to my friend, “Oh, they struggled with this one in practice, but I’m excited to hear it polished in the show,” and it came out really well.
James: That’s these guys all over. That’s the thing that’s amazing to me. When I first started playing with this ensemble, I would worry because things would sound really messy and because our rehearsals are so scattered and there’s so much chatter and all that sort of thing. I would worry that it wouldn’t sound good when we’d get up on stage, but they’re such pros that they always pull it out.
Michelle: What’s the best way to get your music right now? If you’re not at a live show to buy the EP, what’s the best way to get it?
James: It’s going to be on iTunes very soon and I hope that people will get it there. It’s going to be on Band Camp very soon. When the website is launched, obviously that stuff is going to be very clear and plain. I’m going to start putting up links on our Facebook and MySpace and Twitter soon, so people can see where they can get it. There’s a few local stores that I have a relationship with, as a customer, that I hope will be able to put it on the shelves.
Michelle: The last question I like to ask, because I spend all my time writing about it – what was your favorite live show that you’ve ever seen?
James: I’m going to have to pick something fairly arbitrarily because otherwise it would be too hard to pick. When I got to see Morrissey last year or the year before that.
Michelle: That must have been amazing.
James: It was amazing. He played here at one of those historical theaters and I couldn’t believe how great his voice sounded. I couldn’t believe how tight his band was – how hard they rocked. I’m a huge, huge Smiths / Morrissey fan and I also really admire him as a frontman. He’s an absolute, consummate pro.
Michelle: Exactly – sometimes a total jackass, but a brilliant jackass. I would love to see him live.
James: I think he has a hard time dividing – talking about personas – I feel the Morrissey persona was invented, initially I think that was fabricated because he was a really shy kid and now I feel like he has a hard time separating it. He says things that he shouldn’t say and that kind of thing. I think the same thing is true of Kanye West. I think all these personas sort of take over at some point, which is always something you have to be careful about.
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