Interview with Amanda Petrusich, Part One

If you read about music on regular basis, you are no doubt familiar with the work of Amanda Petrusich. She’s written criticism and features for Pitchfork Media, the New York Times, Paste, the Onion AV Club, Spin, and a long list of other well-regarded publications. She’s the author of the book about Nick Drake’s Pink Moon album in the 33 1/3 series, and her latest tome — her feature-length debut, if you will — is It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music. In the book, Amanda travels throughout the United States — primarily the south — pondering the meaning, evolution, and future of “Americana” music. It’s a remarkable book, not simply for its insight into the music and culture, but also for Petrusich’s prose style, which I’ve described to some friends as being like “a friendly Joan Didion.”

Over the course of this week, I’ll be publishing a conversation that I had with Amanda. We begin talking specifically about the book and her subject matter, but as we move along, we go on a number of tangents. Stay tuned — we’ll eventually touch on some thoughts about how digital music has changed the way people collect and respond to music, shifts in the notion of community, the greatness of that Metallica documentary, and the ill effects of schadenfreude, among other things. Along the way, there will be mp3s relating to the conversation, most of which have been selected by Amanda.

Matthew: I’ve been reading your writing for a while now, and though the subject of your book makes sense given your taste, I’m curious about how you came to the project of the book, and finding some kind of definition for the notion of “Americana.” How did that develop?

Amanda: It’s a really slippery descriptor, and that’s part of what excited me about the project — the challenge of trying to dissect this really nebulous, different-things-to-different people notion, and how it applies to both music and culture. The book began as a magazine feature that I wrote for Paste. I was always a huge fan of “Americana” music — which I understood as rural, indigent, early 20th-century southern music, Delta blues, Appalachian folk, that kind of stuff — and I was beginning to hear it reemerging, in interesting ways, from the underground. There have always been Americana revivalists (artists like Gillian Welch and Steve Earle), but this was a different kind of reinvention, and one that felt more contemporary (and more compelling) to me.

Matthew: Was it exciting because it was less about being part of a tradition, and more in finding a more personalized path?

Amanda: Yeah, definitely. And that music also made sense to me in a really literal way. Take a band like Califone — to me, Califone’s music really accurately reflects a new kind American landscape. When I look out my car window in rural Virginia, and I see the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains interrupted by, like, a giant Target sign, it’s a mixing of the organic and the synthesized — which is essentially what Califone does.

Califone “Pink & Sour”

Matthew: Through the book there’s a lot of tension between this sort of revivalism and reverence for authenticity, and this sort of invention that comes out of specific times, specific places, whether it’s delta blues or what you’re saying about Califone. Is that invention and evolution part of how you’d describe Americana?

Amanda: Sure. I really wanted to position the story of Americana music as one single narrative — one sound that’s constantly being reinvented and updated and perverted and tweaked. Ultimately, I was more interested in the ways in which it was changing than the ways in which it was staying the same. You know, is it still functional? Is it still alive?

Matthew: Why do you think some people are inclined not to see that narrative? I find that people can be overly eager to see musical traditions as these things that die or must be preserved, instead of something that lives and adapts to people’s needs over time.

Amanda: I find that kind of thinking problematic, obviously, but I also kind of get it, too — when someone’s holding on to something so tightly, it’s usually because they love it too much, you know? Bluegrass and folk fans can be really militant about the “rules” of those sounds, which to me is counterintuitive and boring. But I think that impulse to preserve “authenticity” comes from reverence, mostly — and you know, that age-old fear of change. People get really wrapped up in false nostalgia for a time when things were “simpler.” The good old days and all that.

Matthew: It’s just like with punk and metal.

Amanda: Absolutely!

Matthew: It seems that even though a lot of people hold on, the culture always seems to move on, and the more traditional things don’t do as well in commercial terms. Like, the whole Nashville/Music Row scene is such a peculiar iteration of this music, and though it’s firmly entrenched as an establishment with its own rules, it’s still not all that strict, they borrow whatever works. So there’s a conflict between that and the alt-country people, and though I think the alt-country people make music more to my taste, I can’t help but feel the Music Row people are being more progressive in their way.

Amanda: Yeah, whether you like it or not, Nashville country is a really interesting example of how a genre can adapt over time. Country music changed enormously in the 1950s with the advent and rise of rock n’roll, and in every decade since then, it’s absorbed changes in its fan base and also changes in the culture itself. Of course, how those changes manifested artistically drives some people bananas. It’s not an artistic value judgment, though — it’s like, I may like Waylon Jennings or Hank Williams way more than, say, Tim McGraw, but Tim McGraw is still real and relevant to zillions of people. Say what you want about Nashville country, but it isn’t stuck.

Matthew: It definitely speaks to a certain American experience, which is what it’s supposed to do. Do you think people in areas of the country that aren’t commonly associated with country, folk, etc, get excluded from a lot of people’s understanding of Americana? You’re from New York, did you ever feel like it wasn’t quite “your” music?

Amanda: I never felt that way, but I’m sure a lot of other people probably thought I was stepping out of bounds, or that I couldn’t or shouldn’t lay any claims to this music. Obviously, people get really proprietary about this stuff, but I never wanted my journey to be exotifying (is that even a word?) in any way — I never felt like an anthropologist, I never felt like John Lomax. I felt like this music was as much mine a

s anyone’s. Dana Jennings, who’s an editor at the New York Times, wrote a really great book about country music called Sing Me Back Home, and it’s about growing up in rural New Hampshire and being in love with country music, with feeling like it spoke to his American experience, even though he was living (way) up north. I do think there’s a cartoonish sense of Americana’s audience being, like, people in overalls, dancing around a moonshine jug in Alabama, but I don’t think it has to be geographically exclusive.

Matthew: Right. I think there’s definitely a sense that certain music speaks to different experiences living in this country. I mean, the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth and the Notorious B.I.G. all speak specifically to New York City, and have a similar sort of role in feeling out the culture and physical space as a lot of the Americana you wrote about in the book, but no one would ever seriously confuse that stuff with Americana, it’s still very rooted in the south and more rural areas. But this is where things get nebulous — do you think there kinda has to be some sense of non-urban space in Americana?

Amanda: Yes. To me, it’s definitely rural music — that’s just part of the definition as I understand it. But just like kids in rural Kansas can be genuinely moved by the Notorious B.I.G., I think this music can be meaningful beyond the farm, as it were. I should say, as I understand it historically — I mean, obviously now, Americana also lives in cities.