INTERVIEW: The Posies (October 2018)

When the history of alternative rock in the 1990s is written, only an idiot would omit The Posies’ second album, Frosting On the Beater, from a list of the decade's absolute finest.

Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow’s improbable story – small-town pals whose home-made demo gets picked up for A-list rotation, leading to major-label near-glory and ignominious implosion (becoming members of their favourite band, Big Star, somewhere along the road) - remains the stuff of legend. And sure enough, if you’d told the teenage me twenty years ago that I’d one day be stood chatting with the duo, you could’ve knocked me down with a feather.

I’m honestly not sure what I expected from meeting The Posies – after having been around for so long and weathered so many ups and down, perhaps that they’d be a little jaded by the whole process. Not a bit of it: the pair are warm, witty and generous to a fault – and I certainly didn’t anticipate them rocking quite so hard onstage (Auer remains an absolute monster guitarist, and their set-closer ‘Burn and Shine’ is a molten stew of tidal-wave grunge). Perhaps it’s the yin-yang dynamic evident in their different demeanours which accounts for the strength and combustibility of that partnership: Auer comes across as the more softly-spoken of the two, while Stringfellow is a ball of energy, flitting in and out to tend to various admin matters during our conversation (it’s no wonder that R.E.M. kept him around as part of their touring line-up for so long - I refrain from asking him to sign a copy of Reveal, on which he apparently came up with the fantastic keyboard solo which punctuates ‘Imitation of Life’).

It remains the great paradox of the duo that whenever they write a love song - or, indeed, a ‘Hate Song’ - it’s destined to be interpreted as being about the other person, and they joke casually onstage about the audience essentially paying to watch “live therapy”. It’s clear from their easy rapport, though, that they still place a high premium on both the friendship and musical partnership which has seen them come through the band’s initial break-up to release an EP, an acoustic album and three new full-length LPs together: Every Kind of Light, Blood/Candy and Solid States.

We’re here celebrating the band’s 30^th Anniversary. When you were recording the songs that’d become the Failure album all those years ago, did you ever think you’d end up at this point – or was it just that you were two kids who were excited to be making and recording music?

JON: I think the latter that you just said! I mean… I’m sure there are bands that think about where they’re gonna end up and they plot their careers more than we did, but we were never that thoughtful about it; it was always just one step at a time. You know, we were just a couple of kids living in a small town – we kind of gravitated towards each other, and I had the good fortune to have a recording studio in my house because my father was a musician… so you can imagine, it was like having this club-house where we got to go do music together. Jeez, I mean, everything we kind of did initially was because we were just incredibly enthusiastic – probably annoyingly so [laughs] when it came to making music! And, ah, never in a bajillion years would I have expected that the songs we recorded would ever have gotten us… you know, any of the things that have come to us.

When you look at a career in hindsight you can see this kind of a trajectory, but when you’re actually in it – in the trenches, or whatever – you’re just kind of moving forward; it’s kinda hard to see where… you can’t predict where it’s going to go, obviously. But no, we weren’t that type – we weren’t, like: “We know what we’re gonna be like in twenty years!”, or whatever… or thirty years!

Obviously the three albums that are being reissued this year are the ones that are most cemented in people’s minds when they think about The Posies, so they’re significant for that reason – but I also think they’re interesting in the sense that they tell a story, to a certain degree: a tale of an alternative band’s commercial fortunes (or lack of!) in the Nineties. From that point of view, when I listen to Dear 23, it sounds a very carefree record to me. Does that reflect your experiences or memories of making it?

JON: ‘Carefree’…! No no no, I disagree with you on that. It’s funny – to me, it has the same attributes that maybe a song like ‘This Charming Man’ by The Smiths has, which is: on the exterior, it sounds very bouncy and catchy, but if you actually delve underneath the surface and get into things like the lyrics, you’re going to discover the darkness that’s being kind of juxtaposed.

[Ken enters]

We were just talking about Dear 23.

KEN: What about it?

JON: Have you ever heard it…?

KEN: [Laughs]

JON: He was saying that he thinks it’s kind of a light, carefree record…

KEN: Really…!

JON: And I was saying that if you actually examine the lyrical content as well, it’s all about, you know, broken relationships and divorce - as Ken likes to point out, things we didn’t really know a lot about first-hand, but we kind of witnessed with my parents, in particular.

KEN: We got like, uh… how d’you call that… you know, ‘innocent bystandered’, in a sense. We got the second-hand smoke of our parents’, uh… the Seventies were not the most healthy time for relationships in general. So we inhaled all their kind of bad marriage vibes, and exhaled it as music.

JON: And I think some of what you’re talking about, maybe you’re referring to the way it sounds…

- Right, that was more what I was getting at.

JON: You know, it’s the sonics of that – it doesn’t have as much of a visceral impact as some of our other records, but if you really examine the material, lyrically and whatnot, it’s pretty heavy stuff, actually; especially for 18, 19-year-old kids writing that.

You ended up with a minor hit out of it with ‘Golden Blunders’, which Ringo Starr ended up covering a couple of years later. You were still very young at the time – that must have been a huge vote of confidence as songwriters.

JON: I mean, yeah!

KEN: Yeah, it was remarkable. It’s funny – the song is already a play on The Beatles…

JON: …‘Golden Slumbers’, obviously…

KEN: In fact, there’s an early demo on the bonus tracks that’s a little more Beatles in the lyrics…

JON: …Where I’m actually singing, like: “You’re gonna carry that weight a long time, boy…” – like, “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight”, the reversal of the cliché or whatever. But yeah – it was quite surreal that that occurred, that Ringo actually ended up doing a version of it.

I read the other day that apparently when it came to making Frosting On the Beater, you actually got sent away by the label and told to come back with a bunch of different material. The whole album in its final form hangs together so beautifully that I’ve always assumed it was a really kind of effortless thing where everything just fitted into place. Was that not the case?

JON: God, no, we spent a lot of time making that record, and we did go back to the drawing board a few times. We actually came off the road from Dear 23 and decided we were ready to make a record, and went right into the studio and made what has become known in Posies kind of lore as a thing called ‘The Lost Sessions’ - some of it is actually on the reissues.

Was ‘Flavor of the Month’ one of those new songs that you came back with? Because it sounds like a very pointed comment on record companies’ commercial processes.

JON: That’s one of the things we talk a lot about in the new liner notes, that’s one of the stories. ‘Flavor of the Month’ was a direct reaction to our label requesting us to work on more material – and, you know, I was trying to poke a little fun at the whole process, too. Because it’s a song that sounds like it should be a hit, but it’s also turning your nose up at the whole process, at the same time. For me, I mean, heavily influenced by another song by XTC, actually - a song called ‘Funk Pop a Roll’, which is on the record Mummer; I think it’s the last song on Mummer. There’s a line in there: “Swallowing is easy when it has no taste”, which is where I got the “Getting easier to swallow…” vibe. But, same kind of vibe: the whole disposable nature of it all.

Also in the liner notes, we mention about how as we were requested to go back to the drawing board as far as writing songs, that in the end I felt like it was actually worth it – like, at the time, I maybe felt like: “What’s actually going on here, why do we have to… why are they questioning our artistic integrity, why is the label telling us to keep writing?” But in the end, two of the last songs for Frosting On the Beater were, in fact, ‘Flavor of the Month’, and ‘Dream All Day’ was the last song I brought in. So, had they not requested that we do this…

Right. You wouldn’t have your two singles!

JON: I just think in the end it was good guidance.

KEN: It was justified.

JON: It was good guidance, yeah.

I’m going to ask you a loaded and fairly rhetorical question: do you know how good this album is…?

[Tentative pause from both]

…Because I’m going to tell you, but I’m interested to know what you think!

KEN: Well actually, you know, we’ve had the opportunity to… because we’ve had all the mastering stuff, to listen to all three of these albums – Dear 23, Frosting and Amazing Disgrace -  repeatedly, and I have to say that Amazing Disgrace I probably would’ve picked a few years ago as my favourite, because it’s the furthest along… but I think Dear 23, I’ve really come to accept that we actually did some good there, especially considering how young we were. And Frosting is just a great album to listen to – it’s got an incredible mood. I mean, it’s hard to say that about your own work, but we’re so far away from those people who wrote that music now in terms of age that I can almost look at them as… we have gone through metamorphoses as adults and all of this over the years that I can almost look at those people as different people, in a way. So it’s not me necessarily giving myself or Jon a compliment, like: “Hey, we’re so great!” – it’s more like: “Wow, these kids kind of did some cool stuff!”

I think that album, sonically, is really special – it’s not overdone… You know, there’s this fine line for me, personally, between something that’s lo-fi, and then you go on the other end and have something like Pearl Jam’s Ten and other albums of that era, which are very close in age to Frosting On the Beater, which are almost kind of 80s-slick. And not… it’s a little cheesy. And there’s really nothing cheesy about Frosting – it’s quite… nice! Sonically, the recording is very tasteful and powerful.

Well, I’m going to posit something here: it’s one of my favourite albums, without question – but that’s by the by. It’s easily one of the ten best albums of the Nineties. But I’ll go one further: I honestly think that, as far as these things can ever be ‘objectively’ assessed, it’s one of the greatest albums ever made. How do you feel about that…?!

KEN: Wow…!

JON: Well, happy to hear you say it!

But you just see it in context now, in terms of your overall body of work…?

JON: I mean, I hear it now too almost like someone who didn’t make it, in a way. Especially now, too, as Ken was saying – we had to listen to the mastering ad infinitum, and at one point I remember actually driving around recently, and I put on an alternate order of it, because one of the items on our recent Pledge campaign was a copy of the first version that we did for mastering. It was like my personal version of the CD I got when I went to attend the actual mastering of the record originally, and it was a different order – I just put it on to check it out, and I was really quite struck by it; I was really like, “Wow, there’s some ‘X’-factor about that record”. For me, it’s kind of the mood of it, like Ken was saying – there’s some kind of… I dunno, just the combination of all the elements just kind of works for me personally. I do really love Dear 23, and Amazing Disgrace might have some of the most accomplished songwriting on, it in a way – it’s got this great aggressive edge to it - but Frosting overall just has this palpable mood that just runs through the whole thing. It feels like, for me personally, a record like, say – I’m not comparing it to it, but a record like What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye has this mood that runs through the whole piece. That’s the vibe I get from Frosting when I put it on: it’s almost like visiting this little world you want to go to for a while…

It’s complete.

JON: Yeah, it’s complete – you get lost in it.

KEN: And it’s kind of… it’s funny; Dear 23 I could now listen to and be like: “You know what, we could use two more songs on that record”. It’s only ten songs – granted, ‘Flood of Sunshine’ is quite long, and some of the other songs are a little bit longer, but Frosting is, like, an oddly perfect length. And it’s in two distinct halves – we still conceive records as ‘A’ and ‘B’; there’s the night side, and then there’s the day side, as we called it – ‘Day’ and ‘Night’ side. But it’s really… it doesn’t overstay its welcome - it’s oddly… again, like, ‘X’-factor, things falling into place. It’s not like we were… it was well A&R-ed, it was well-produced, blah blah blah, but I think we were just so lucky that things kind of fell into place. And that’s one of those weird things about making art, that your intentions…. you’re kind of in the wind-tunnel of your experience at any one given point. And shit’s flyin’ around, you’re trying to manage your personal life, blah blah blah… but if you put care into your art, somehow your intentions might give you a break, in that the golf ball might fall into the cup – not with that only one hit, but now and then. This one is just… a lot of things are good about it, that I can’t say we’re genius masterminds and made that happen – but I think that by the end of the experience, we were a very cohesive unit. We spent a lot of that record as a three-piece, and feeling very lost. When we were in New York – I remember those New York sessions, which yielded only a couple of tunes for the album…

JON: Three songs for the record : ‘Definite Door’, ‘Love Letter Boxes’ and ‘Earlier Than Expected’.

KEN: …And a lot of stuff that ended up on later records that just didn’t make it to that record. But I remember that we were all in very dark moods; it was just kind of a slog, and we had technical issues… I mean, good grief, we were probably a little too much togetherness: we had that one hotel room for the three of us, and there was just some weird shit going on. Just dark. It was starting to become a little bit, like… almost Jim Morrison-esque at some points with, like, drinking bouts and stuff like that. You know, young people stuff – but still, it was just a weird mood.

JON: A different vibe from our producer, too – it was like: he was at home, and it was sometimes more like he wanted to get home and get off the clock. I mean, not all the time – I wouldn’t accentuate that too much – but the vibe was definitely different from these kind of kamikaze sessions we did in Seattle on our turf, where he was there for, like, three or four days. And, you know, except for ‘Coming Right Along’, which is a demo, the other eight songs we did from these two three or four-day sessions: the first one was like an audition for Don Fleming, and that’s like ‘Solar Sister’, ‘Burn and Shine’, ‘When Mutes Tongues Can Speak’ and ‘Lights Out’, I think. And then we did the stuff in New York – we spent, like, three weeks there in this incredible studio: Sear Sound, one of the greatest studios ever, basically. And again, after all that work, we have three songs. And then we did one more session in Seattle at the same place we did those first four, and that’s ‘Twenty Questions’, ‘How She Lied By Living’, ‘Flavor of the Month’ and ‘Dream All Day’. I mean, it speaks for itself – nothing was laboured over at those sessions, and I think the vibe was very good at those; we had a great time.

KEN: I should also mention that, in my memory - and I could be wrong - when we got to New York, Don kind of announced that he was gonna take off and go play, like, a couple of gigs.

JON: Right, stuff like that!

KEN: Like: “Oh, okay…!”

JON: I think, did he tell us right away…? Or he might even have done it a couple of days before it was going to happen, when we were halfway through what we were doing.

KEN: It was definitely not part of the planning, that for two days we would have no producer!

JON: He didn’t mention this when he was selling himself to us, you understand - like: “Hey, you know, I’m gonna take off for a while…!”

Surely there must’ve come a point when you were like: “Hey – we’re paying you for this, motherfucker….!”

JON: Right! So we just spent time working on something else, which is also… we recorded one of his songs, his ‘Velvet Monkey Theme’ and this other instrumental called ‘Fete Le Muzz’. That’s what we did on the day he wasn’t there – we were supposed to be working, and we just had a… oh, we had a lot of fun, actually! It worked wonders for most of the other stuff we were doing!

KEN: But now I remember also that, like, Don is just a… he’s got a certain personality, but underneath it all, he’s kind of a hipster at this time – he’s working with Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, blah blah blah – he’s a really good guy, but he’s also, like: “Yeah, well, whatever…” He’s very chill, basically. And I remember that when he left for these two days, suddenly Jim Waters, the engineer, who’s done a lot of great records., took over – and he’s like this hard-ass New Yorker. He thought, like…

JON: He was being a jerk…! [Laughs]

KEN: He would say stuff like: “That was a fuckin’ vocal take? That’s a fuckin’ faggot vocal take. Fuckin’ sing that shit again, man!” And this is not…

JON: We’re nice West Coast boys.

KEN: This is not the kind of thing you need! Like: “Dude, don’t tough-love us; just record the fucking shit”. I don’t know why he thought that would be beneficial, but when the mood was already kind of weird, you know?

It’s so strange that out of all that comes this record that, like you say, all just fits together. It’s almost kind of perfect - there’s nothing I would change on it.

KEN: It’s a good winnowing, I will say that. We had a lot of songs for Dear 23, but we didn’t really record anything extra – and then Amazing Disgrace, we recorded tons of stuff, and it’s all on there. And this record is one of those things where you record a bunch of stuff and edit it down – like, people say that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re writing: you’re supposed to start big and move it to small. And I think in this case, that actually worked.

JON: It works great – I mean, Jesus, you know, you pick the best stuff. Everything just… Hearing the stuff now, all the extra tracks that are featured on the reissue, it’s so obvious – to me, at least – it feels like as great as some of those songs are… there’s a song that ended up on a record of ours called Success of Ken’s called ‘Fall Song’, which I think is a beautiful song…

One of my favourites, actually.

JON: A great song – and it was, at one point, up for being on Frosting On the Beater. But I can’t imagine it being on that record. As great of a song as I think it is, I don’t think it fits in on that record.

KEN: Yeah, it’s too reflective, even though you have contemplative stuff – but that slot you have for contemplative stuff is already taken by a song on Frosting that fits with the others better. Isn’t that weird? I mean, that’s… basically, Jon and I produce records for all kinds of people, and it’s always about: you have somebody’s demos, and I know that feeling of, like, “Well this song is really cool, but these fit together”. And the band might be really enthusiastic about a song you’re leaving off, which… and you might be wrong, too! You’re going with your gut, like: this is what I think, you know… but I think that those are good choices. We were at times frustrated, but it’s amazing – you know, ‘Throwaway’, that’s a great pop song.

JON: There’s a full band version that we’d forgotten about of ‘Throwaway’ with Mike Musburger on drums that we did at the Sear Sound sessions, and I’d completely forgotten – I mean, it’s done. It’s a slightly different arrangement, but it was like: here’s the song - it just wasn’t considered for inclusion on Frosting On the Beater. It was…

It’s one of your best.

JON: Exactly. It doesn’t fit on Frosting On the Beater, but it did on Amazing Disgrace.

We can’t really talk about Frosting without referencing the ‘g’ word, because it was what was going on in American music at the time. It was very much marketed as a “grunge”-type record…

JON: But it wasn’t at that point, though.

Well, exactly! It’s also unique in The Posies’ catalogue in that it has a distinctively “grungey” overall sound – slightly sludgy, and with a real crackle about it. How much were aware of those factors when you were making it – or was it frustrating that you were being lumped in with that whole movement?

JON: Ah, well, for me, I can say that I never considered things like that – this wasn’t my mindset. I was always more into kind of getting into what I wanted things to sound like, and being happy with that. For real, I’m not that kind of guy – especially at that point, considering its place in whatever. I do think that we stumbled with Frosting finally onto a sound of our own. That’s the first time – we made Dear 23 and Failure, I’m very proud of these records, but they’re still kind of the pastiche vibe on some things; obviously we’d heard of this band called The Beatles before, and we’re trying to ape them… Whereas Frosting, to me, for the first time started sounding like us – it was the first time where I can feel like we hold up as an example for the rest of time and say: this is something we created, which is kind of our own stamp on music in a little way. You know? The guitar sounds, the drum-playing, the way that we started using open-tunings on the record – but also, lyrically it’s really kind of a unique record. If you really delve into the lyrics, there’s some really unusual kind of… seemingly obtuse lyrical content in there that’s very unique. You have this weird mixture of stuff, like… Nicke from The Hellacopters, we know him a little bit, and he was always talking about how much he loved the guitar sound on that record. He was like: “It’s in-between clean, it’s in-between distortion”. And I think that kind of sums up the whole record - it’s like the perfect balance between bitter and sweet.

KEN: I will say that it did feel good… I mean, I think that as we were getting close, especially during the mixing, we had learned so much from Dear 23 and all the touring and all of that, it did feel good to kind of catch up a little bit to the modern world, and not… I mean, we were still unique, but we weren’t off on some kind of nerding-out… or, shall we say, completely unaware of where music was already at. Our influences – you know, we liked Sebadoh, we liked Dinosaur. We liked all those things; it’s not like we wanted to be those bands, by any means, but Dear 23, you would think that we just sat around listening to Beatles records certain ways. That wasn’t the case then, but this record reflected it better.

JON: I grew up as a heavy guitarist – I played heavy guitar, so when people were talking, like: “Well, this must be some sort of calculated attempt”… there were times when people said: “Oh, The Posies have gone grunge”, and I was like: that’s really not fair – in fact, I had to temper a lot of what I did on records like Failure and Dear 23, because I was more into, like, trying to be at the service of the song, I guess. And I maybe thought at that point that, like, loud guitars and guitar solos were kind of indulgent, but that’s a large part of my DNA. And then on Frosting On the Beater, you’ve got guitar solos like ‘Solar Sister’, ‘Love Letter Boxes’, ‘Burn and Shine’, ‘Coming Right Along’… there’s some very distinctive guitar-playing on there.

A lot of it is very melodic.

JON: Well, they’re melodic, but there’s kind of a visceralness there that, again, kind of straddles the fence in this perfect kind of way for me where you’re getting that. And it’s funny, then the record itself reflects the fact that there’s the light and the dark – we’re getting into the whole philosophical aspect of this, but it feels like that all kind of coalesced on that record. We got the balance right, whatever that was.

So when it comes to Amazing Disgrace – I really love that record, and I think it’s got some of the band’s best songs on it. But when I listen to that album, the one thing I hear from it is frustration. Is that a fair analysis?

JON: Oh, yeah. Oh my god, yeah. I mean, we were at our wits’ end at certain points making that record – Ken and mine’s relationship had really kind of deteriorated quite a bit at that point, where we weren’t really the friends that we were at the beginning anymore; it’s really when things started to unravel, I guess you could say. In fact, a lot of that record, when we were in the studio, we spent separate days working on it – that kind of vibe. And you can tell by the lyrical content, too – I mean, some of it is written towards me, some of it is written towards him… but also, to be fair, we were frustrated by being young and trying to navigate things like being on a major label, which… You know, we did pretty well, especially by today’s standards – we did really well, we sold quite a few records, but by the standards of that day, we weren’t really a success in terms of commercial sales. And it was really… you know, we had a personnel change, Mike Musburger left the band, him and Ken had some issues which led to that happening… I was definitely going through some kind of depression at that point too, so coupled with what I witnessed between Ken & Mike and then my depression, I kind of withdrew a little bit – or a lot, even. And Ken got more kind of aggressive, you could say… we kind of acted out in different ways. And that’s the result, is that record. When I hear it now, that’s the first thing when I heard it again recently, I was like: wow. Listen to how pissed off we are. Listen to how angry we are! That’s like our angriest record by far.

It’s your Rumors, isn’t it? It’s the one where it seems like you’re communicating with each other solely through the songs.

JON: Well, we always did that, but there’s even more extreme versions of that on Amazing Disgrace. And Ken would say exactly the same thing – we’ve been going over this a lot lately. You know, of course now it’s all water under the bridge, and we’ve still here after thirty years – that obviously must say something. We’re making good money here, but we’re not getting rich off of it - the reason we still do this is because it’s something that we actually get something out of besides finance, as otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it. But at that time, it was really hard to be in that band at that point. I remember when we toured on that and the support wasn’t the same – we weren’t getting the same reactions… we still played great, but the label didn’t… there’s no video for that record, we actually blew off a tour at one point, we started going home one night instead of playing the last few shows… and what occurred on that tour and making the record was kind of the seed that led to the band not being a band anymore for a while.

‘Please Return It’ is the song that really defines that album for me - it sounds so frayed; just total emotional burnout.

JON: Well, that’s Ken writing to me, and he’ll tell you that – it’s all in the liner notes. When you get the liner notes, it’ll tell you all this.

And the two albums that bookended that decade are just so pointedly and beautifully titled: Failure and Success. You’ve gone on to make some great records since then, both individually and under the Posies moniker - do you look at that as a sort of sealed-off “Chapter One” of The Posies’ story?

JON: It was designed to put the nail in the coffin, I guess! And, you know: the noble intention to return to the roots of the independent label, even though – as Ken will point out – there was a lot of money still available to us if we wanted to make another record for Geffen. At that point, I was pretty checked out from the band – I was like: I don’t want to do that; let’s go back and return to our indie roots, and we can actually sell some records and make some money directly from that. Of course, I didn’t really consider looking at the whole big picture of it, I guess - as much as I should have in retrospect, perhaps. But I don’t know – it also wasn’t the same band, or being done for the same reasons for me at that point… but, boy. We could’ve definitely gotten some nice dosh to work with! That’s an understatement.

Looking at the reissues now, I think it’s fascinating that these three classic records by a band of considerable critical standing have been treated with such indifference by the very label who ought to have the biggest commercial stake in them. Over the years, they’ve been in and out of print, they’ll occasionally pop up on Spotify and then disappear, and now you’ve had to try and re-license them yourself. From your point of view, I imagine that must be exasperating - to have your work left in the hands of people who don’t seem to care about it.

KEN: I think it’s left in the hands of no people, is what it is! You know, they don’t have a current interest in our music, and I think it’s just unknown to whoever’s working there at Universal now… there were some cool people working there who were dealing with catalogue stuff at one point, and all those people are gone – like, the guy who put together the Best Of that we did in 2000, all those people are gone. So we don’t really have anyone to go to – you know, even getting this stuff on streaming has been like a nightmare! It’s bizarre – and it costs them nothing, streaming.

So: Lennon and McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel, Jagger and Richards - even Alex Chilton and Chris Bell…

KEN: Carl Barat and Pete Doherty…

Right! Pairs of musicians who found each other at a relatively young age and whose names will always be synonymous with one another, for better or worse. Your relationship has been documented quite publicly in your own work over the years, and yet here you still are – so here’s the million-dollar question: blessing or a curse…?!

KEN: Oh, blessing!

JON: Yeah, at this point, a blessing. I mean, I’m sure at various points that we found it was a curse, but… you know, it can be a challenge to be lumped together. Even though we started out as really good friends and we enjoy each other and doing this, there have been times when it’s been hard. And it’s not always fair to be lumped together with somebody – that’s just life, you know. But in the end, I’m really happy and proud that we’re still doing this, and I enjoy it. I love making music with this guy.

KEN: I think that, for me, as much as I was quite angry at the time and befuddled by Jon’s decisions – because what we didn’t have in the late-90s when we started to go on hiatus et cetera was good communication…?

JON: Right.

KEN: So I didn’t really understand his reasoning – it seemed irrational, it was irrational compared to my idea of doing things, right? And I didn’t have Jon’s explanation to make it rational for me. And I still might’ve thought it was irrational, but I might’ve understood the thinking. Anyway, as much as I was annoyed, pissed off, resentful about us going off the label and all the things that wound us down to zero for a little while, I will say this: from the point that Jon and I started making music together in 1984-5ish when we were still in high school before The Posies, all through high school and all through the first years of The Posies, Jon and I were quite inseparable, and we were really a unit. That had some good things about it, but as far as like you’re a young person trying to discover yourself and find your own identity, you have to go out and be an individual at some point. And we were trying to fight for space inside this basically one person-sized moniker, if you will.

Those years from 1997 when we really didn’t do much - we made Success and we played a few shows, but it was mostly hiatus – ’98 when we did tour, but it was the official end; ’99, 2000, blah blah blah… all those years, I had to find my next act, and also find myself: find out who I wanted to be. It’s very easy to say: “I’m in a band – that’s who I am”. Especially if the band is doing well, you know - you can wrap your whole identity into that, but that’s not a completely identity because you’re only in the band when… you can’t be in the bathtub, like: “I’m in The Posies!” Or whatever – you know, in the checkout. You can, but that’s not really a very mature or enlightened kind of existence. Whereas I had to go out and figure who the me was gonna be: I started making solo albums, I started playing with R.E.M., playing with other artists… I started producing a lot more, and in all of that I really blossomed. And I don’t think I would’ve blossomed had the band continued in its forward trajectory. So in a spiritual dimension, it was what we could call crazy wisdom or whatever – it was the right thing to do, ultimately, I think to get us to where we are now… even if there was some material on-the-ground kind of things that were not really logical.

JON: Maybe I was onto something there, right?! [Laughs]

KEN: I mean, really!

It’s interesting though, because those solo records are of such a high standard – whether that’s original material like Touched, or covers like 6½ - and they really feed into the overall sound when The Posies come back. It starts to feel a lot more light and organic.

KEN: Well, I think we get there, yes – because also I think that the production work has a lot to do with that, too. You know, making those records in the 90s, even though Jon was an absolutely qualified engineer and producer at that time, we weren’t making a lot of records. We worked with big-name producers et cetera, and that’s cool – I mean, it was a great experience, but I think actually the music now is… we couldn’t have done it then, I think, for other reasons – but now, being in control of the thing and having the experience we have… we are producers, so I think that is now a plus for the music that we make now. Where I am personally – especially me, who didn’t produce at all, or engineer anything until the mid-90s – I don’t need a translator to get what I want into the recording. I can just get it, which I would’ve been completely incapable of during the time that we were making even Amazing Disgrace - I’d just done my baby steps into engineering at that time; I really didn’t know much. But now, we’ve made a lot of records – and I think having that, we outgrew the need for an outside producer. That could sound like hubris, but it’s just me saying that we have enough experience to leave the nest.

How’s your friendship and musical partnership changed over the years – obviously you’ve had your ups and downs, but has the friendship deepened in a way? Do you find it easier to write together now?

JON: Well, we don’t really write together per se, but I think - more for me, at least – we started as just young kids growing up together and doing so many formative “firsts”; we had so many firsts together. You know, we made what you would consider our first real record, we got signed to a major label together for the first time, we went on our first tour of Europe together, all these things – and we really bonded over music, and art, humour… that’s how we got to know each other. And yeah, there were some real difficult times for us too - but the thing I always fall back on that is, like, we’re still here after all this time, too. If you look at any relationship, whether it’s music or anything – any long-term venture in terms of a relationship, there’s gonna be ups and downs, you know?

Do you think it’s the bad stuff that really helped to shore it up over the long run?

JON: Well, I feel like I’ve learned a lot more about Ken as a result of it - and I think we probably know each other better than most people, because we’ve known each other longer and more consistently. I mean, we’ve had our breaks and whatnot, but here we are now: still able to react and kind of have insight into each other, I think. And that history is something that you can’t… you can’t fake it; it’s something that you either got it, or you don’t. I still surprised even touring with you now, there are times when I look at Ken and go: I feel like I’m starting to get some things about him that I don’t think I ever really got. But now I’m like, I kind of get it: like, “Oh, this is the way he sees things”, and I think maybe he feels the same way. It’s like: “Oh, well that’s Jon”; “Well, that’s Ken”. And I get it, because we’ve been around each other long enough to realise that’s just who we are. That’s a pretty cool place to be too, I think…?

KEN: Yeah.

JON: To be honest, sometimes we’re on stage and we sing together, and you get… there’s like a ‘third voice’ that kind of occurs between the two of us; I think we sing amazingly together, and that can’t be faked, either.

KEN: Yeah – you don’t really get to have… I could go out and find… I’ve had some great duet partners and things like this, blah blah blah, but it’s just not the same as two people who grew up together singing. I mean, really – I don’t want to say that we’re as good as, but it’s something like an Everly Brothers thing; I mean that we’re physically formed, our voices singing together. When we started playing music together, I was 14 and he was 13 – that’s… we weren’t even done yet, we were still growing. So that’s… you only get one of those, I think – if you get one! Most people start later, you know, and then try and find that. It’s something that’s so serendipitous – there’s so many crazy, serendipitous things about this partnership and all the things around it, that it defies the imagination. Just, you know: “Oh, our favourite band is Big Star”… why don’t you join Big Star? “Oh, we love The Beatles”… oh, here’s The Beatles covering our song. I mean, that’s just… things like that happen to, like, people who are really established; that happens all the time, in a way, but there’s other factors involved. We had no ‘grease the wheels’ ability – there’s nobody who’s… people gave us these kind of bones that really… it’s not like we were bringing worldwide fame or payola to the picture, something like that; we really just had these incredible gifts, over and over again.

JON: Right. There’s no strategising these things - they just happened.  

KEN: Failure, the way that it happened as a home-made cassette getting on a commercial radio station – that just does not happen! It simply doesn’t happen. Nowadays with viral things and the internet, yes, but in those days there were much less outlets for those kind of things. And for this commercial station to go day one, two songs-deep into regular rotation… it doesn’t make any sense, and yet it happened. It’s just so weird. Man, there’s so many things like that.

JON: Oh, and the fact that we grew up in this small town together – I was there when I was a toddler, but I moved away… And the fact that I came back at a certain time and he was there – and then the fact that my father decides to build a recording studio in this house; nobody did that back then. And then here we are together in all these little bands – suddenly over the course of time, everyone else just fell by the wayside and the two of us were left standing; we just took the reins and went with it. And that’s pretty fortuitous, I have to say, too – I mean, again, I was talking at the beginning about when you look at it in hindsight you see your career, but when you’re doing these things, you have no idea: you’re just moving forward through it all. But looking back at it, it’s pretty remarkable, actually, the career we’ve had together.

So finally, then, I also ask this of anyone who’s had a really long career in music, as I think it’s really instructive…

KEN: …Circumcised!

Ha! No.

JON: Slightly to the left, or…?

What are your five favourite Posies songs, or what are the five that you’d most like the band to remembered for?

KEN: Oh, wait. Can we… we have four. Four each, or…?

Four, five? However many you like.

KEN: Four each, or four total?

Four each, I guess.

KEN: Oh, fuck!

It’ll be interesting to see if they’re the same, actually.

KEN: Right. Well there’s no way to do a blind test, because we’re in the same room, but… um… well, let’s see here. I think from my point of view, I would give props to ‘Solar Sister’, since I think it’s probably my best contribution and it’s a little bit of an underdog, since it’s was never an official single. But it’s kind of an unofficial fan favourite, so that one should be recognised. I think ‘Apology’ is a really high moment – it’s one of the few real, like, Lennon/McCartney-style collaborations that we did, and I think it resulted in a really great song. Um… I think that… boy, I could pick a few from the last record, but I think that something I’m really proud of from my own writing contribution would be ‘Scattered’ from the last record. I think it’s kind of classic and modern at the same time, it’s got some nice elements. Um… do we have any other good songs…?

JON: …No.

KEN: Let’s see… I’m trying to think of something around Amazing Disgrace that’s…

‘Titanic’ is a really great song off that last album: it’s sort of a lost pop hit.

KEN: Yeah, that’s a really good one… Well, I think ‘Will You Ever Ease Your Mind?’ is a really great, very poignant song of Jon’s. So that’s my kind of democratically-split answer with some of Jon, some of Ken!

Would you agree, Jon…?

JON: I’ll throw ‘Solar Sister’ in there, for sure. I’d also put ‘Coming Right Along’ in there – I think those are, like, complete opposite ends of the spectrum, but also shows how angry it makes me when we people just call us, like, a “power-pop band”. I’m just like: “Have you fucking listened to our music…?!”

KEN: Yeah.

JON: And there’s a song on Every Kind of Light – it’s mostly mine, ‘Conversations’, which I think is a really kind of underrated song; it’s actually really beautiful, and I wish we played that more often. And then one of Ken’s: I think it was actually considered for Amazing Disgrace, but ended up on Success – ‘You’re the Beautiful One’. We play that live, and it’s one of my favourites to play every night… out of the twenty songs, my twenty favourites. I’m just kidding! It’s one of my favourites to play every night, and I think it’s a great song.

Remastered Deluxe Editions of Dear 23, Frosting On the Beater and Amazing Disgrace are available now via Omnivore Recordings.