POETRY & EMOTION
(Holds up Carolyn Forché's The Country Between Us) This book, for a long
time, has been probably the most influential thing on my writing as a songwriter.
She's a phenomenal poet. I read that in a poetry class my freshman fall term at
Davis, before I went to Berkeley. I saw her speak, and I was so blown away by
her and by the book in general. She has a way of turning a phrase at the end of a
poem and it's almost like a punch line. It's not funny though. And it's a thing I
learned from her in my writing. There's a real humanity in the writing.
She's very young. This was written in 1981. She didn't write another book after this
until about two years ago. She wrote one called The Angel Of History. And I love
it. (Opens book, turns to poem) The first third of this book is about her
experiences in El Salvador. She lived down there for a while and she wrote a lot of
poems, but they're somewhat political. The second section is about her childhood,
and the third section is just one long poem. This one is called "Because One Is
Always Forgotten." (Reads poem.) Just the ending sums it all up by dropping this
line very nonchalantly on you, like a bomb: "The heart is the toughest part of the
body / The tenderness is in the hands." But we do our damage with our hands,
you know.
A SALTY DOG
My parents always complained that no one knows what to get me, which I think is
so stupid, because my entire house is made up of records, books, and videos. And
so on the one hand you may give me something I already have, but I love these
things so much that it should be obvious what to get me.
(Displays first edition of Patrick O'Brien's Master And Commander) I've read
everything by him, just about. It's an incredible series of books. I read all of them,
and then I started over on the first one again, which that is. I had so much fun with
them. I read all the Hornblower books at one point. Those were so much fun. I
heard these were way better, and they are. They're not as much easy fun, but
they're better.
It's like one long novel. I've read a lot of books and series where the guy gets tired.
I used to really love to read science fiction when I was a kid. And I read all those
Edgar Rice Burroughs books. And any of the series are good at the beginning and
then [decline] towards the end. These don't. They just developed. They're
phenomenal books.
The last one that just came out last year is as good as any of the other ones. As
soon as I was done with it, I read Master And Commander again. And I
considered reading them [all] again at that point.
SOUL PATROL
I really loved [Peter] Guralnick. I've only read two of his books; I'm almost done
with Last Train To Memphis, which is great. But Sweet Soul Music is such a
phenomenal book. Books about music should do one thing: They should make you
want to go out and buy music. I know so much about soul music, because I have all
the records, because I read that book and I went out and got everything. Man, I
know so much about Memphis soul.
The other one that's really great … I read the Jerry Wexler book first. And I met
him. The day I finished the book, I gave it to my dad, and Bonnie [Simmons,
longtime Bay Area radio star] called me and said, "Do you want to go to dinner
with someone tonight?" I'm like, "Who?" She's like, "There's this guy I've known
since I was a kid, and I'm like his daughter." "Oh, who is it?" "He's a producer.
Maybe you've heard of him. Jerry Wexler." I'm like, "I'm coming."
I talked to him that night and he told stories and it was like a Pagemaster thing. He
walked right out of that book, and it was exact … he told me some of the same
stories, and some other ones. It was so cool.
BELLOW FELLOW
I really love Henderson The Rain King; the book was a talisman for me. The song
["Rain King," from August And Everything] has little or nothing to do with the book.
But the book became a totem for me for being a writer. It's about this guy who's
just a big open wound of a person. And it was very much the way I thought … the
way he lived his life, for better and for worse; he just bled all over everyone. He
made a big mess of everything and also did beautiful things. But his life was how I
thought you should be as an artist. You need to let your life flow out, for better or
for worse, and pour out all over everyone. And it was enormously important to me.
There's some William Styron books I really love. Pat Conroy's books are all great.
I started with The Water Is Wide because one of my favorite movies as a kid was
Conrack. That's the book of Conrack, which is his autobiographical one. And then
I read The Lords Of Discipline and The Prince Of Tides, which I think was a
phenomenal book. And then I just read Beach Music — phenomenal book. The
only one I haven't read is The Great Santini.
I read all these books. I like buying them at a faster pace than I can read them.
Walter Mosley. That character [Easy Rawlins] was so interesting to me. I loved
Isabel Allende off and on, in that I read the first book of Love Shadows. And then
I read The House Of Spirits and I thought, "That's a miraculous book."
(Holds up a volume from Shelby Foote's Civil War histories) These are the best
books I've ever read. I read the whole series on the road while in the back of the
tour bus. He's such a good writer, and those books are like a narrative history. It's
like reading The Lord Of The Rings. You know how you lived in that for a long
time, and when it was finally over you were almost sorry? That's what it's like, only
it's longer. It's 3,000 pages long. They're a great companion piece to that series
[Ken Burns' Civil War].
There's a lot of information about being an American in those things. They make
their way into your music, because you can actually read those books and then you
stand in front of the Lincoln Monument and you read the Gettysburg Address. And
the Gettysburg Address will make you cry.
MYTH AMERICA
I believe in the myth of America. I'm fascinated by the myth of America. Not the
political aspects of it. We can all talk about that forever, because we are all
disappointed in our nation's [politics]. But America is Henderson. America is a
vast, messy, beautiful, glorious thing with complexities — highs and lows other
countries can only dream of at this point in history. So glorious in its intention. And
we raise up our Christs like every culture does.
Look, the world is really a trashy place. You will never convince me of anything
else. People are horrible. They always have been and they always will be. It's not
worse or better nowadays. There's no New Age Utopia going on. We're not more
enlightened than we were. We're not less enlightened than we were. It's always
been mob rule. There's great things that have happened in our history, but we've
almost always nailed them up to a cross somewhere. The great examples of
humanity are people that were outside humanity, and rarities of humanity. They get
hung up to dry. And we love a good martyr afterwards, to make us feel good about
ourselves. Then we take him and make him belong to us, but he was never ours.
And we kill him and we take his stuff. That's how we do it. It's the way humans are.
You can go all the way back to the Egyptians enslaving the Jews. You can go back
as far as you want to go. And it's always been the same.
THE NAME GAME
[Counting Crows] is named after a nursery rhyme. I call it a divination rhyme. It's
just a nursery rhyme — one for sorrow, two for joy. It's from this movie Signs Of
Life, which was originally called One For Sorrow, Two For Joy. I had already
seen the movie, and I was watching it for the second time on video when it came
out months later. I happened to be trying to find a name for the band, and I had this
list of names—terrible names, horrible names. There was a scene where Vincent
D'Onofrio and Kevin G. O'Connor are standing on this hillside, and they're trying to
figure out what the hell they're going to do with the rest of their lives. A flock of
crows flies up and D'Onofrio says, "What was the nursery rhyme your grandmother
used to tell us about counting crows?" O'Connor said, "No, I think it's counting
dogs." "No, I think it's counting crows." That's the scene. That's where it's from.
THE SPORTING LIFE
What I do with sports is I believe deeply. I'm absorbed by it. I'm completely
enthralled with excellence with anyone. I don't see any difference between what I
do and what Mark McGwire does. You're not born with that. You hone it. You
make it at a certain level. Plenty of people were born with what I was born with. I
got it to where it is now. I got it to a higher level [through] sheer force of will in a lot
of senses.
ACTING OUT
I don't want to act any more. I used to. I can't see the point in it. I've seen my
friends make movies. It's not that much fun. I was a good actor, I think. I think,
actually, I'd probably be pretty good at it, but the thing is I'm not going to be that
good at it. I think, "OK, what's the fun?" The fun isn't actually doing the movie. The
fun is seeing yourself in the movie, and knowing that you're in the movie, and other
people are seeing the movie. Well, I don't need that. It'd be like playing little
moments of the song, or recording songs by only doing tiny little bits of them at a
time.
JUST FRIENDS
All my best friends are actresses. My three best friends in the world are Mary
Louise Parker, Joanna Going, and Samantha Mathis. I try to date independent
women. It's hard for me if the other person doesn't have a life. There's a real
independence in being an artist, not just that they have their own career, which is
really important.
My relationship with Jennifer Aniston, which is a big nothing, [has been
misconstrued], but I wouldn't call that a great misconception about me. I did date
those people. I can't deny that. I wanted to, and I did, and I don't think there's
anything wrong with that.
I don't know what those [tabloid] TV shows did before Friends came along.
Because when I went out with Jennifer … it's not what ruined our relationship at all,
but it was horrible. I have never experienced anything so vile in my life. There were
people chasing me around with their cameras. Going to say goodnight to her
outside the Viper Room, and they're closer to me than you are with their camera in
my face while I'm sitting with her. "You guys get away from me." "Why, what are
you going to do? Got a problem? Go ahead."
Some of them don't [egg you on] but a lot of them do. It's because your video tape
is worth five bucks or it's worth 10,000 bucks. You get someone to hit you, you
get someone to make a scene, you're worth 10,000 bucks.
THOUGHT FOR FOOD
My band jokes that I live to travel the world and eat the weirdest possible shit. I
just think food's great, and I don't care if it's weird, because somebody somewhere
thinks it's a delicacy, so I want that experience too. So if you're serving monkey
brains, OK. I'm not going to cut them out of some monkey's head while it's alive.
But if somebody somewhere who's perfectly intelligent and has a culture that's
3,000 years older than mine thinks monkey brains are good, I'm not going to be the
one who doesn't try it. I've had it all.
The best meal I've ever had was in Paris. When we'd go to Europe we'd have
cooks traveling with us because you can't depend on the food there. And we'd get
different food from different places. We always have a vegetable, a fish, or a meat.
In Paris I asked what's the meat and they said, "Cheval." Now I speak French, so
just try pulling that one by me. Bring it on. And it was so amazing. I think of red
meats, and horse is right in the middle. It was more flavorful than beef without being
quite as gamy as venison, and it was more interesting texturally than beef without
being quite as stringy as venison can be. They had it in this port reduction sauce,
and it was just phenomenal.
